Orchid

When I was in grad school, years and years ago, I knew a Chinese woman name Yalan. Her name means “Orchid”, she told me, and didn’t let other people call her by it because they always butchered it. The accent is on the first syllable, and the rest should just sort of roll off the tongue. I asked her to teach me how to say it properly, and she did as well as she could with a kid from Tennessee.

I don’t know that I ever got it right, but she appreciated the effort.

One evening, she asked me to share her dinner. It was a small meal of noodles, vegetables and some chicken wings. Very good, in my estimate.

With dinner I got story. She had a husband and child in China. And the two Mongolian Chinese guys who had no interest in English literature or culture who were also enrolled were most likely there to keep an eye on her. “They will not let my husband or my son leave the country,” she told me. “They are hostages to make sure I come back.”

The last time I saw her was during the uprising in the 80’s. She appeared on a TV program in Waco, TX, and said she was going back to China, almost certainly to be arrested for speaking out on American TV about the lack of freedom her fellow citizens suffered.

I don’t know what ever happened to her. I hope she’s back with her husband and son, and that the two Mongolians have quit following her around.

Yalan. My Orchid. Tonight I pray for you and your family. May God hold you close and protect you, keep you safe and give you the strength and courage to fight another day.

Inconvenient Truth

I ran across a picture that starkly contrasts the aftermath of the Jackson tornado.

This is before:


This is after:


It's hard to get a very good idea of what something should look like from piles of rubble. And even though I lived there for 4 years, until I saw the "before" picture, I couldn't quite get an honest estimate of the extent of damage.

Classes started back today, just 14 days after they were suspended. And they've completed the entire demolition of both housing complexes that were hit the hardest (80% of on-campus housing). And that's after they visited each room or what was left of it multiple to time to retrieve any personal items that might still be intact.

I have some long-standing gripes with the University because of its fostering of religious, political and social insularity. In many ways, that's the exact opposite of what I believe to goals of a liberal arts university should be: to expand and engage the mind to see beyond the narrow, homogenous world that most people grow up with.

Still, I'm nostalgic about my time there. Most of us are about our youth on one level or another. And a little part of my past is gone, at least physically. It's not like I have ever had plans to go back and visit. But now I don't have the opportunity to do so if I changed my mind.

Human's are weird, unpredictable and inexplicable. I am no different, and like most people, most of the time I don't really know why one thing moves me while another does not. All I know is that some things do and some things don't.

This one has, and not just because my niece was affected. It goes much deeper than that. Even though my memories of the place tend to lean to the negative, I have a profound sadness about the whole thing.

It is an inconvenient truth for which I have no explanation. So for now, I'm chalking it up to nostalgia for a time when I was younger, a time when I was just beginning to explore life outside of the narrow walls I had grown up in.

And now that I've explored it more thoroughly than I ever planned, maybe I just want a simpler time. Not that the things were simpler back then, but maybe I was.

Baby of Mine

Shannon is about the sweetest thing around. He doesn’t complain that I still haven’t caught up on the laundry from when I was sick a month ago, and then just tired. That I let the dishes sit in the sink a little too long before I get them in the dishwasher. That I’ve been using days off as a vacation I haven’t had in months instead of doing housework.

Instead, he lets me spend hours reading the news and then pursuing other computer projects. Hours napping. Hours putting off everything else because I just need the time.

And when I finally got around to doing the laundry I’ve been putting off, only a small part of it, he gets up and helps me hang and fold it.

Sort of. There’s a reason I do the laundry and he doesn’t. He means well, and I appreciate the effort. And some things come out OK. Others, I just readjust or re-hang in the closet where he can’t see me.

It reminds me of a very surreal lecture from my sophomore English teacher in high school. She told us that a very good friend of hers has just been diagnosed with cancer. Her friend had always been an immaculate house-keeper and had taught home-ec for decades.

When she couldn’t do as much as she could before, she said that she heard her husband vacuuming and hitting every piece of furniture and woodwork in the house.

At first she was upset. She wanted to get up and show him how to do it right. But then she realized that she really couldn’t. And was amazed that her husband who had never touched a vacuum in his life was vacuuming the floors for her.

Furniture and woodwork get dings and dents. It’s the price of living with them. Clothes will come and go.

What is priceless is the effort of those who love us to make our lives a little easier.

And I’ll re-hang the clothes as long as I need to. I’m a sentimental old fool who has learned that what someone does honestly is much more important than whether the clothes hang straight.

In the words of the semi-immortal Bonnie Raitt: “He’s not much, goodness knows/ From his head down to his toes/. But he’s so special to me./ Sweet as can be./ Baby of mine.”

Shannon’s my baby, and always will be.

Out of Africa

The hottest topic in the parts of Africa that President Bush is visiting isn't his admirable support of HIV/AIDS funding for the region, funding that has changed areas where it is available. It isn't al-Quaida. It isn't even the weather, which has been (no surprise here) stiflingly hot.

The hot topic on the hot streets and lanes and dirt roads of that part of Africa is the Democratic primary here in the U.S. Even reporters are asking President Bush and African dignitaries about the question in press conferences usually reserved for the matters at hand: increasing funding for humanitarian causes on the continent.

A short excerpt from a NY Times piece that ran this morning captures the phenomenom best:

Outside of town, at the Mwenge Village market, Theresa Maridadi, 62, was seated with a newspaper in her lap, debating the Democrats with her son, Lucas Kahtoza, who lit up at the mention of Mr. Obama’s name and put his hand to his chest.

“Remember, Obama is from Africa,” he said. “From my heart, it is good.”His mother cut him off. “Why you want to like Obama because he come from Africa?” she demanded. She is for Mrs. Clinton: “Her husband was the president, she has more exposure. She’s mature, she’s a woman. It’s good for a woman to lead that country.”

This election is turning out to be a bigger deal than even I thought. I knew everybody in the country was talking about it and drawing up battle lines like Lee was shelling D.C. I knew that it's shaping up to be a political battle like none we've seen since the South seceded from the Union.

And mothers and sons are the same everywhere.

I didn't realize that families in Africa were having disagreements over the upcoming U.S. election, just like mothers and sons are disagreeing here. I didn't know they cared.

Me and my mama haven't seen eye to eye on politics since, possibly, before I was born. She supported Kennedy, but I wasn't around yet. Since then, Johnson's handling of Vietnam made her a Nixon Republican, something she's been ever since. And we've been disagreeing ever since I had a political conciousness.

This year, we've agreed to disagree. With all we've been through over the last year, it's something to laugh about more than to get mad about. I doubt that either of us will ever understand the other's politics. But I don't think we'll come to blows over our differences.

Mothers send their sons out into to the world with trepidation, I know. Not just concern about their safety, but also about their larger lives, from education to employment to relationships. And ultimately about their moral character.

And it's a mine field these days even more so than when I left home.

But I haven't done so badly. I have a stable life and am giving her advice about what to do with her money. Not that I have a lot of my own, but I can give her the benefit of my knowlege. I don't have any money to speak of, but I deal with a good bit of it every day at work.

Mothers and sons go on debating politics around the world. Mothers trying to impart their wisdom, and sons taking it where they find it. We say, "Yes, Mother," when what we mean is "I'll think about it, but not too much."

So to Lucas Kahtoza in Africa I say this: mothers are mothers are mothers, no matter what continent they come from. They will always be opinionated and think they're right. Go with your heart, and if your mother loves you, she may roll her eyes at your adult opinions, but will be able to agree to disagree.

And one day she will need you, more than she probably expects.