Commentary

Travels with Pa

Finding home again.


 

Some vows are better broken. When my maternal grandfather left Sicily as a 16-year-old boy to journey alone to America, he promised himself he would never return. He had grown up fatherless in a village along the rocky shore, and it held many unpleasant memories that he was eager to escape. He often told me that growing up, he had felt like an outsider, enduring uncles who excused their abuse and ill tempers for the sake of strengthening his character, and that he was happy to “never lay eyes on that place, or those people, again.” He certainly embraced no nostalgic feelings for his hometown, none that he admitted to, at least.

Four years ago, I had the opportunity to invite him to vacation in his small hometown of Castel di Tusa on the northern coast, with me, my husband, and my two sons. I tempted Pa by promising that he would fall asleep to the sound of the same Tyrrhenian surf that had crashed outside his window when he was a boy. I thought it would benefit him to return to the place where he had once felt underprivileged, now that he was a man with a rich life, a large family, and many accomplishments of which to be proud. After his initial knee-jerk refusal, with the help of some tender encouragement from his loved ones, he realized that he would like to see how things had changed after almost 70 years, and agreed to join us.

The bloodlines from both sides of my family tree originated from Castel di Tusa. Its founders were presumed to be refugees from the ancient city of Halaesa, Italy, founded in 403 B.C. by Archonides and later destroyed by the Arabs, and the ruins of previous eras are visible on a hill outside the town limits. Named for the walled 14th century castle, whose grounds the townspeople never saw, Castel di Tusa consisted of only four dozen or so houses which expectantly faced the harbor. The castle’s tower still stands and the nearby buildings in the center of town exude a medieval flavor even in the 21st century. The town itself fans out from the coast, with meandering lanes and alleyways with names like Via del Pesce, or Fish Way, and Strada de Café, or Coffee Street. I had visited in previous summers, when the streets were full with beachgoers, music, and dancing, and was thrilled by introductions made by my father’s sister to cousins, great-aunts, and great-uncles. In those encounters, I met several people who knew my grandfather and sent him their regards. So when we returned together, I brought Pa around to find the folks who had asked about him.

I knocked first on the door of one older woman who had been one of Pa’s close childhood friends. When Maria answered, my grandfather was standing several paces back.

Maria greeted me with enthusiasm, then quickly asked “And how is your nonno?”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” I said, stepping aside to reveal the 85-year-old man behind me.

Maria’s hand flew to her mouth in surprise, and then stayed there for a while, covering her neglected teeth in the face of Pa’s movie star smile. As they began to recall dear friends and old stories, she relaxed and forgot her self-consciousness. They were two young people again, reminiscing.

The town is quiet. Though electric streetlights now lent a soft glow to the evenings and houses currently stood where only trees had before, not too much of the scenery had changed. Pa’s former house was now four stories instead of one, and a low wall had been built between it and the sea. We could smell the fresh tang of the salty air and feel the pebbles on the beach shift under our feet as he undoubtedly had when he had cavorted with his young playmates. His favorite rock, to which he had gone for solace and contemplation, still stood at the water’s edge, and he climbed it with my sons.

 

“This rock used to be a lot cleaner when I lived here,” he joked. “Maybe we should scrub it, huh?”

The streets were now paved, in brick, no less, a result of restitution payments from the United States to Italy after World War II, but the piazzas still lay at the same intersections. Walking with Pa through the very squares he had frequented as a boy, I could picture him perched on a worn seat fashioned out of a log, intent on catching pieces of grown-up conversation. He pointed out to me the sites of his childhood stories: the railroad bridge festooned in red and purple bougainvillea where he had split open his knee while running home to dinner, the sheltered cove where his fishing boat had been anchored, and the dark tunnel where he and his friends once pulled a scandalous prank involving slippery prickly pear leaves and smelly outhouse pails. Sadly, Pa’s best friend had since passed away. However, we met the man’s son, and he recounted stories featuring my grandfather that his father had shared with him, and that made Pa’s eyes fill with tears.

Pa reacquainted himself with several relatives and spent the siesta hours either visiting or just roaming the steep streets on his own. He climbed stairs that at home would give him trouble, but he was reinvigorated there. As my grandfather told me of his afternoon’s adventures each evening, I could see his perceptions shifting, the tight stays of his defenses loosening. The warm reception he was receiving was like balm on the hurts he had held on to for over 60 years, and I was glad he had decided to make the journey.

I’m heading back to Castel di Tusa this fall with my family. Since our last visit, my grandfather has had one knee replaced, and the other, which he hasn’t yet addressed, has deteriorated further. He tires more easily now, and despite his friends’ entreaties to return, he won’t be joining us. I’ve promised to take gifts and good wishes with me, and that I’ll come back with video and photos. In doing so, I’ll be bringing him more than just images; I’ll be letting him find his hometown again.

 

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News

Skilled undocumented workers in New York City

An entire community, invisible in the land it now calls home.


Celestin rocks his six-month-old baby, who is resting on his left shoulder, while shaking a toy rattle with his right hand. The flat screen television in his two-bedroom apartment in north Bronx is muted, showing a match between Liverpool and Eindhoven, two European soccer clubs.

Celestin used to be a journalist on the sports desk of a Cameroonian newspaper. He is now without status in the United States and labors at a recycling company in Brooklyn.

“The job is killing me. But when you don’t have appropriate papers, you can do nothing,” he says.

Stranded

Celestin, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity, is one of more than 650,000 immigrants in New York who are undocumented, according to research by Jeffrey Passel at the Pew Research Center.

Many of them, like Celestin, held skilled professions in their native countries. But in the United States they are often stranded with unskilled jobs and burgeoning responsibilities.

Celestin came to the United States to aid his ailing sister in October 2001.

“With my position as a journalist, it was easy to get a visa,” he says.

But family in Cameroon wanted him to stay in New York and send back money.

So every week he transfers money through Western Union to his mother, sisters, and two daughters. In addition, he supports his family in New York — a wife, son, and three stepchildren.

“Sometimes you have to forget yourself,” he says. “It is hard, but at the same time, it’s like an adventure, where anything can happen, good or bad.”

He wakes up at 4 a.m. to reach his workplace, where he helps pick up paper from around the city on one of the recycling trucks.

Painful separation

Family preferences also forced Sadick to overstay and go out of status after his visit to the United States to take part in a car design competition in 2005.

Sadick, who also requested anonymity, is a mechanical engineering graduate and founder of the Society of Automotive Engineers chapter in Ghana, but worked as a security guard in New York. He is now a member of the United African Congress, and is getting legal representation for his case.

“I want to contribute to both societies,” he says. “Here, I represent the African youth in the [United States]. Back home, I laid the foundation to get the automotive industry in college.”

Similarly, through their community work, other immigrants, like D., who also agreed to be interviewed on the condition of remaining anonymous, have become local leaders fighting for immigration reform, in spite of their own undocumented status.

“I have a son and a daughter, 12 years and 10 years old,” says D., a member of a nonprofit organization that offers services to African immigrants in his neighborhood. “They are living in [Africa], with my mom. I don’t get to see them at all.”

After his visa expired in 2000, D. acquired a taxpayer identification number and opened a store selling traditional African dresses. “My tax I.D. is doing everything for me,” says D. He had to shut his store down in 2006 after being attacked and robbed. He wishes to open a shop again, but can’t get credit without legal papers. Ten percent of the approximate 3,000 Africa-origin individuals living in the local Bronx community are undocumented, estimates Imam Mousa at Masjid Denuye, a mosque that serves the needs of this neighborhood’s Muslims.

Much of this community remains invisible to the city, says Sidique Wai, president of the United African Congress and community relations specialist at the New York Police Department.

“We don’t sell papers. Our issues are very serious, but only we are affected by them,” he says. “The community becomes expendable. We want to build meaningful relationships to get a seat at the decision making table.”

Without the plea of family reunification, however, undocumented single Africans have it even harder.

“You see African faces on the D train in the Bronx and you don’t see happiness,” says D. “They can’t go back to visit their families back home. And they don’t have status.”
   
The blessing of work

Celestin prefers to not seek asylum.

“As a writer, it is better to go to your country from time to time to get a feel of the spirit,” he says.

Cameroon has been under President Paul Biya’s quasi-dictatorship since 1982. Celestin recalls that Mongo Beti, the Cameroonian writer who returned to his homeland in 1991, was distanced from his community after his 32-year self-imposed exile.

“He was disconnected,” he says. “I don’t want to be like him.”

But he knows he is in a bind. He cannot afford legal representation to obtain status, and Cameroon does not offer dual citizenship. According to the U.S. State Department website, 3,659 Cameroonians have registered for the Green Card Lottery, for a chance to enter the United States in fiscal year 2009 with permanent residency.

He hopes his work will help.

“Journalism allows doors to be opened; it is the beginning of a journey,” remarks Celestin.

He writes poems on an online French poetry portal and recently published a book of poems. Celestin is also working on a novel about Cameroonian politics.

“People don’t respect their roots enough,” he says, adding that he still writes for some Cameroonian newspapers. He has a strong interest in U.S. and African politics, and is a supporter of Barack Obama. The president has vouched to make immigration a top priority and work on legalizing the 12 million undocumented residents in the United States.

Wai, who tries to bridge the gap between the African community and the city, feels it is important for the community to be accepted as part of society.

“Don’t forget us,” summarizes Wai. “We are all in this country now, in this strange land we all call home.”

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Fiction & Poetry

Landscapes

Three poems.


etchings

the spears of light between ice-
sheared bark cast long bars
of brilliant yellow upon the
snow-hugged earth.

the roots shiver
beneath
the spindle of branches
shudders with scarce leaves
left from autumn

spread of sky against
the pale blue slate of late-morning
tufts of tears unshed

blades of marsh grass
puncture the ice — needles
reaching and bowing to
the wind’s gentle kiss

and the crows settled on
power lines swivel
their heads as one
eyeing the open.

set on the mooring

          easel
                                set sure
 pastels                                   a crane
                and the ocean

     resemblance
                                    motion from
               the tugboat
                   passing.

        a dry spot
                                   darkening w/
   frustration — aggravated rubbing

       again           breathe

   hopeless               flint gone

             cheeks redden
                                in the wind.

grouse

tufts of fog-laden marsh grass
the ebb tide rushes under
sway in the breeze.

birds alight on the dead trees
poking up through the bog
disingenuous and intrigued.

in mouse holes
and large webs,
bunched together brown
remnants of the fall
in the cool spring air.

ripples dilate
on the marsh stream.
crest of the sand banks
shorn flat with the tide —
a miniscule detail out the corner
of the eye disappears into
a thicket — berries hung low
by raindrops.

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Blog

Joel Derfner takes gay literature to a higher level


Joel Derfner, author of Gay Haiku, has again managed to elevate the genre of gay literature to an ecstatic level of wit and sophistication. Joel's new book, Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended Up Happening Instead, is a personal memoir that goes emotionally and humorously beyond any "coming out" story you may have ever read or heard about.

Joel provocatively reflects on what it means to be gay by exploring several stereotypical activities such as knitting, online dating, and even go-go dancing. According to Joel, he was a "walking stereotype for honest reasons." It wasn't that he set out to do these things to be more gay (if there is such a thing), but because they were natural interests to him at certain points in his life.

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of hanging out with Joel in the West Village in New York. Although I had just read his book, I was still dying to know why he did the crazy things that he did. Swish is similar to Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love in that it is a soul-searching journey, only Joel seemed to know who he was all along, even before moving to the Big Apple. From orgies to evangelical meetings, one thing has remained constant in his quest to be the gayest person ever.

"So what happened instead?" I asked carefully.

"I became the most myself ever." Joel clearly replied.

Joel is graciously open and down to earth. What you read is what you see, and what you see is what you get. He is cute as a button, with wild curly red hair as warm as his Southern hospitality. Most of all, he is fiercely intelligent and incredibly funny, which translates easily into his writing for both literature and musical theatre.

Swish has both a controversial edge and a revealing vulnerability all at once. With keen insight into the gay lifestyle, it is a story that everyone can relate to if they are willing to honestly understand themselves and the points of view of others. Anyone who wants to learn more about gender, identity, and the human condition while laughing out loud should definitely read this book. By the way, Swish also includes a fabulous forward written by beloved, legendary icon Elton John.   

Please look out for Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended Up Happening Instead in hot paperback pink and white from Broadway Books coming into stores this June! 

For more information on Joel Derfer or his books, please visit http://www.joelderfner.com/.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Blog

You and your devilish ways


I'm having an uneventful train ride home. Peaceful, even. I cross the platform at Chambers Street to a waiting 2 train. The doors close and a man from the opposite end of the train car shouts, "REPENT!"

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a subway preacher.

The subway preacher is a unique type of busker. He's not trying to entertain you like the strolling mariachi band or the guy who plays Big Band-Era hits on his horn. Nor is he pleading his sad story in a bold-faced attempt to get donations. No, no. The subway preacher is simply sharing information which is, to be direct about it, that you're going to hell.

On this evening, my subway preacher is a fire-and-brimstone type sporting a thick Jamaican accent. Since it seems that I'm stuck in a traveling pulpit, for the subway preacher does not change cars at each new stop like the musicians, I figure I'll make the best of it.

"The answer is not in your fancy house or your fancy purse or your fancy car. No, mon. The answer is not in any of those things."

He seems to be saying that we place too much importance on material things. That's something I can get on board with, but then he crosses the proverbial line in the sand.

"You think you can listen to the devil all your life and then follow God to the kingdom of heaven? No, mon. It doesn't work like that. Let me tell you how it works. You will all go to hell. You have to break free of your devilish ways. Tell that demon inside you: "You are not welcome here anymore.' Repent, earthly children, REPENT!"

Um…

"God made Eve for Adam. He didn't make Adam for Adam. That's the devil taking up in you."

And because New Yorkers can't keep their mouths shut, a woman protests about this recent comment. The preacher rains a barrage of Bible quotes down upon her. This scene reminds me of a woman affectionately known to F train riders as the Chinese curses lady.

The Chinese curses lady, who eerily resembled Yoko Ono in her giant glasses phase, had one big pet peeve. She did not like anyone to talk on the train. The subject matter wasn't important.

"So, I heard it's going to rain later today."

"One hundred curses on you," said Chinese curses lady. "You call the Chinese name from the devil? One hundred curses!"

Inevitably the offending person would glance her way, realize the lady's elevator was not rising to the top floor, and continue the conversation. "I forgot to bring my umbrella and I have to go way uptown."

"Five hundred curses on you," said Chinese curses lady.

I've seen people move to another part of the train car to get away from her, but she would not be deterred. She would simply follow them, sending curses their way the whole time. For months, I'd traveled unscathed until one day I made the mistake of talking to a friend before I realized she was there. From behind me, her voice boomed, "One thousand curses on you." Whoa. That's a lot of curses. Don't we usually start at 100?

My friend began talking, oblivious to the blight now on our auras.

"One million curses on you." That's some bad ju-ju.

Meanwhile the subway preacher continues railing, having moved deftly from homosexuals to George Bush — the transition easier than one might think. I alight at Grand Army Plaza while he still has the devil on his mind.

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Blog

Justice Souter to retire


 

According to Jeffrey Toobin's book on supreme court justices, Justice Souter is a low-tech person who loves the outdoors. He does not have a television or a cell phone. A bachelor, he was appointed to the court by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. Although President Bush appointed him assured of his conservative leaning, Justice Souter soon stunned everyone by supporting Roe v. Wade, voting to uphold the landmark ruling on abortion rights.

Now he is firmly on the more liberal side of the court. So when President Obama appoints his successor, there will not much change. But since Justice Ginsberg's health is a big concern because of her recent illness, the Obama administration could get lucky and get a chance to turn the court into a more liberal one.

CBS News is saying that the new appointee to the court could possibly be a woman from a minority group. Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina woman, and solicitor general Elena Kagan are mentioned as possible choices.

US News & World Report writes about the calculations going on about the confirmation hearing, citing reports from today's New York Times, Politico, and The Washington Post.

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Blog

Notes from bedlam


By the time you see me in the hospital, you have no place else to go.  The system has failed you: you’ve alienated family and burned through your support systems.  Perhaps you’re in your first all-out psychotic break or stopped the meds that stabilize your moods, thoughts and behavior.  You could be dangerous – to yourself or someone you once knew and loved, or to a total stranger on the street.

Layers of symptoms interfere with negotiating the basics of daily living – shopping, cooking, paying bills, doing laundry, washing your face and brushing your teeth.

Juggling a job, partner, kids – all things being equal, this is hard enough when everything is great, let alone when you’re battling depression or voices that tell you to hurt someone, voices no one else hears.

It’s a major undertaking just to get out of bed and feed yourself.  Going to the pharmacy or market, making a phone call, knocking on a neighbor’s door, reaching out – these are impossible if you have to fend off menacing and terrifying command hallucinations. or believe the CIA is following you.  In full blown mania, patients may be so euphoric that food and clothing are unnecessary accouterments to life.

You’re beset by bizarre and mysterious somatic complaints for which no medical text can account.  Doctors don’t believe you.  You tell them you’re feet are on fire or that you have electrodes in your brain, that there are fingernails in your scrotum.  You believe the CIA is following you, that cameras are hidden in your walls, that the television is giving you orders.  You leave a trail of chaos in your wake for family and friends to clean up.  They don’t fully comprehend your ailment.  They believe that you have some control over your symptoms and that you’ve chosen to behave in ways that deliberately undermine their best intentions and efforts to save you.  They will doubt and deny and when they finally understand you, they’ll understand you’re a stranger with a familiar face.  

It’s shameful – you know that with what’s left of your ability to reason.  It’s shameful that the weakest and most confused among us are left to negotiate a labyrinth that leads inevitably to the emergency room, where you enter the maze, only to learn there isn’t a psychiatric bed for you.  There aren’t enough beds to start with, and you don’t have the right insurance.  

I apologize.  Society’s failings are compounded by our own.  I can name the agencies involved in educating us, but their programs fly in the face of how we feel when we encounter someone like you.  You’re different and we’re afraid.  You frighten us.  The reptilian brain still cowers in the cave or whispers aggressive thoughts.  There isn’t much to it, the oldest smallest region of our most mysterious organ.  Fight or flight is hard-wired into it.  Stigma lives there.  “Not in my backyard,” stigma whispers.

As self-congratulatory as Portland, Oregon may be, homeless schizophrenics are as common as Starbucks’ franchises.  You give off fumes acquired sleeping in doorways, huddled against the rain in clear plastic dry-cleaner bags, picked up from the exhaust of a million cars, from urinating wherever you can.  Your hobo skin is the product of time and layers of grime.  Your wear all that you own, shabby raiments layered on in no particular order. 

Walking down a tony street in Portland, I feel that same moment of panic and indecision as anyone else.  When you approach me yelling at someone I can’t see, do I cross the street?  Would that hurt your feelings?  Would you understand that I avoided you, recognize my rejection?

Our fears are not baseless.  Statistics in the May 19, 2009 issue of JAMA indicate that 28% of schizophrenics who also abuse alcohol and drugs are convicted of violent crimes, compared to 8% of those who do not have substance abuse problems and 5% of the general population. 

There are other statistics: 25% of the mentally ill population benefit substantially from medication; there are another 25% for whom medication does nothing; medication helps the remaining 50%, more or less.

This is mental illness and you are one of my patients.  Faces and names change; your symptoms do not.  I pull you up from the ground or down from the sky, I stand by as your newborn is removed from the delivery room by a social worker from the Department of Human Services.  I try to help you manage your demons.  You know how that goes.  Sometimes the magic works.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  And in any case, this probably won’t be your last visit here.  The ward, 3East, where you come to stay for a night or a fortnight, is shelter from the storm, a bed and a meal – three hots and a cot, an E-ticket ride at Disneyland, the card that fills the inside straight.  You’re with me as long as your insurance lasts and no longer.  Your oddly worded letters of thanks, your strangely drawn sketches take up a wall of my office. 

Rest now. 

I’ll  tell your story.

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Blog

Secular Morals


From CNN:

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it.

Ah, the evangelical mind. God forbid we believe in evolution, but torturing other human beings is A-OK.

Can I get an Amen from my fellow secular liberals?!

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Blog

He’s back


The homeless man who spends his mornings on the platform at Grand Army Plaza is back after a long absence. (See "So easy. You just smile, okay?" post.) He showed up a few days ago, sporting a new knit cap. I found him carefully pouring most of a 5 lb. bag of sugar into a bottle of orange soda. His cart was intact and contained more or less the same things when I last saw him weeks ago.

I was relieved to see him and comforted to know that he had not been victimized while he was away. Every morning that he'd been gone, I'd thrown out some positive vibes for his safe return, but then I realized that instead maybe I should have been hoping to never see him again, that he would find a way out of his current situation and into a better life. Is that egotistical of me to presume that one way of life is better than another? He could be perfectly happy in his current situation, surviving on the kindness of strangers, unencumbered by the traps of society.

Many people might look at my existence and assume something similar — "How does she live in a 600-square-foot apartment in a fifth-floor walk-up? I hope that someday she can move up to a big house with a fenced yard." While that would be very nice, I'm actually happy in my tiny apartment, thank you very much.

I'm starting to rethink the notion that "more" means "better." Maybe instead of hoping that the guy at Grand Army Plaza gets what I want for him, he should get whatever it is he wants for himself.

Later that evening, I was returning home after walking my dog around the neighborhood. An elderly woman came out of her building with a yellow lab. She's partially blind and shows signs of dementia. In fact, the only reason she seems able to live on her own, and not in an assisted living home, is due to the dog.

I've seen her many times before. She never strays from the straight line between her door and the curb so the dog can relieve himself. Occasionally I see her wrap his leash around the fire hydrant so she can brush him. She is not gentle or kind, using the brush as if she were scrubbing a linoleum floor.

Easily more than 80 pounds, the lab remained docile while his owner jerked his collar and whined, "Come on! Why are you doing this to me? Hurry up!" His inky, soulful eyes watched intently as I passed with my dog. They stared at each other and I would swear in a courtroom that this dog was begging to be released from this situation. "I did it, your honor. I stole this dog and drove him upstate to a farm where he can breathe fresh air, sniff another dog's butt, eat gross stuff, and run until his tongue is hanging out."

As I put my key in the door, I glanced once more at the dog, still staring at us as the lady yelled again, "Hurry up!" I felt so sad for him, just as I'd felt sad for the guy at Grand Army Plaza, and I wished the dog a better life — the life I wanted him to lead, the life I thought he should have. But maybe, just maybe, he's fine just where he is. Maybe he doesn't mind the 600-square-foot apartment in the fifth-floor walk-up. Maybe he's actually already happy.

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Blog

You know you’ve been riding the subway too long when…#4


Upon arriving at your destination, your first order of business, before you put your bags down or remove your coat or get a cup of coffee, is to unconsciously make a beeline for the nearest sink to wash your hands.

See "Spring is in the Air" post, April 6, 2009.

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Blog

Texas Grill comes to France


The beaconing white twin longhorns of the aptly named Texas Grill, located half a kilometer from my apartment, could very well be located off any interstate from Oklahoma to New Jersey.

The promise of one-inch-thick steaks and the carved wood totem pole outside in the parking lot remind me of restaurants we used to make pit stops in on the long drives down to Florida from Ohio.

But the Texas Grill I'm referring to is not a highway pit stop for weary travelers. In fact the restaurant in question is approximately a four-minute walk from my local boulangerie in a city called Dieppe. In upper French Normandy. In France.

The extent of proliferation of American culture into others often astounds me. Not that in this day this is all that surprising, but for a culture that is notoriously protective of its traditions, the Americanisms that have wheedled their way into the French periphery are, as many would argue, some of the worst. McDo is a favorite among teenagers, and KFC has become an increasingly popular lunch spot in Paris.

The Texas Grill, with its red roof and painted white bull, claims to offer up hearty American food, fresh from the ranch, in a commercial, outside mega-center complete with the Wal-Mart equivalent, Carrefour, and outlet stores selling everything from electronics to house furniture.

That isn't to say on any level that France is not entitled to partake in the idea of bulk convenience or even in culturally themed cuisine such as the Texas Grill. (The United States is guilty of everything from Don Pablo's to Hunan Express, after all.)

But from a foreign perspective (or I guess my foreign perspective), this side of France, it doesn't tend to register immediately in my cultural constructions. One of the ways we differentiate culture is to do exactly that. Register the differences. How is Spain different from Hungary, or different from Indonesia? And these lines tend to blur once we enter the world of globalized mega-markets and strip malls.

About two months ago, I found myself for the first (and last) time eating lunch in a restaurant called Flunch that is the French take on the infamous buffet.

As I sipped my coffee that mysteriously came from a token machine, my friend Andrea looked up at us mid-conversation, forkful of frites halfway to her mouth and exclaimed,"We could actually be anywhere in the world right now in this restaurant."

And it's true. I swear I've seen the same carpets in the Wendy's across the street from my old high school—the same porcelain coffee cups, the same yellow -wallpapered walls.

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Blog

The virtuous vulture


Last Wednesday, the stakes got higher as my father flew into town. I stressed out for an entire week beforehand on what he would say when he saw me: "Honey, eating too much of that Puerto Rican food again!" or "Honey, you've got a little pimple!"

That morning, I pulled into the parking lot at work with all kinds of insecurities. "What will he say about my monotonous, non-creative day job?" and "What black clothes can I wear to mask these hips?" 

Then, it occurred to me that there was this huge black bird with a red head grazing on the grass in front of me. "What in the world is that?" I thought. "Does someone have a turkey farm here in Northern Jersey?" Only, this was a lawn in a commercial business park. I looked for some colorful peacock feathers, but didn't see any. This bird looked like a peaceful turkey, with a long red neck and head enjoying the sunshine and fresh morning dew. 

As soon as I got in my office, I Googled "wild birds of northern New Jersey," and an article came up about a turkey vulture that had crashed into a woman's windshield. The article expressed that not only was this incident strange, but sighting a vulture in this urban area was even stranger. Apparently, there is a mysterious colony of turkey vultures somewhere around the George Washington Bridge.

My mind immediately began to wander back to the Disney cartoons I've seen as a child where vultures are portrayed as foreshadowing, evil symbols of what a witch was about to do. I have also heard of many enlightening experiences where exotic birds have appeared to people and given them some spiritual message.

So, I Googled "the symbolic meaning of vulture sightings" and found a site that satisfied my "looking for a deeper meaning in life" curiosity. What I took from it was that someone will attract a vulture energy when they need to look beyond the physical realm in their life. A vulture symbolizing death is a cliché. They may eat the carcasses of dead animals, but they are cleaning up the environment. As a vital part of ecology, they are preparing the earth for the new life to come. In fact, seeing a vulture may mean that there will be new life in a relationship that may have been dead for many years.  

What I have taken away from this is that we have to look beyond our physical circumstances. Just because something looks bad and is an obstacle in our path, doesn't really mean that it is. All living things can be used as symbols of hope, peace, and laughter in the midst of some our denser days.

For more information on protecting the turkey vulture, please go to  http://vulturesociety.homestead.com/.

 

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