Here's what I am hoping for this weekend: that the baby Cornish games hens in the downstairs bathtub will move to their new home out of doors. Out of the house. Outside where chickens belong. Not inside. But out in the fresh air. That's what I am hoping.

You can never dig in the garden without coming upon broken bits of glass and pottery. Yesterday it was blue and white.
Your grandmother embroidered the seat covers for her dining room chairs with arrangements of flowers never seen in Annam, Belgian flowers that emerge from bulbs after winters of damp grey felt. Then the Japanese army, not so long before a distant threat - like another century's plague - was right outside their city, and their gates. She left the embroidered dining room chairs behind, along with the unbroken pottery and the portraits of the children, in the house at deux cent seize Rue Pelerin. Three weeks later, her friend, Madame Ngu, dined with the Japanese general and set her bottom upon your grandmother’s embroidered hyacinths.
In the camps, a hyacinth bulb could prolong a life by several days. But death came in the end.

World Book Night redux

You have three relatively normal looking people – yes, they do have stickers affixed to their coats, but who can read the small print? – standing outside the train station, approaching strangers and giving them things.

The thing about giving away free books on WORLD BOOK NIGHT is this: anyone in his right mind initially assumes we are religious zealots. And hence to be avoided.
So last night CSB and I went to the Yonkers train station with Meg, bookstore champion, WBN promoter, big reader and dear friend. And as he did so brilliantly last year, CSB stood on the sidewalk and announced in his booming voice that it was WORLD BOOK NIGHT and we were giving away free books - as commuters emerged, rushing, dashing home, tired, cranky and hungry, eager for that chilled martini. Then Meg and I flanked out and approached likely people, and talked as fast as possible (before they could move away) about giving away free books to celebrate and encourage reading & about the merits of our respective books. Mine, My Antonia, about an immigrant family moving to Nebraska, being pioneers, homesteading in the plains. Make it quick!! Meg’s, The Tender Bar, about a young boy who is raised in his uncle’s bar by the patrons of the bar. Stress the bar! Coming of age in unusual circumstances!!
Because the train station is a warm place it is a hangout for homeless men, and so there are always 2 policemen patrolling the area, making the homeless men move away. We tried to give books to the policemen, but were told that they can’t accept anything, not even a book that can only be free. But we told them about WBN anyway. One of them (the “bad cop” of the Good/Bad Cop drill?) told us proudly that he hadn’t read a book since high school. He only reads anything on his “grundle” (sic). The other policemen seemed actually interested and said he was going to tell his son about The Tender Bar, but he couldn’t accept a copy, not even for his son. Later they frisked a man, and after that they questioned a red-faced, red-haired homeless man named “Red”. They asked him how long he had been known as “Red” and he said, Since he was born. Then they asked him for some ID, and he gave them a series of plastic cards, but none had his name on them, or any name at all. They told him to go hang out someplace else.
Since we gave away books last year at the Yonkers RR station, the daylighting of the Saw Mill River has been completed, and so instead of the dreary Larkin Parking lot, what you see when you debouch the red brick 1911 station is the river, banked with boulders, and straddled by an arched pedestrian bridge. It is quite lovely.
One of the challenges of WBN is its mission: to give books to “light or non-readers”. How do you identify a light or non-reader? By the Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts cup in her hand? By the earbuds affixed to his cochlea? By the clothes, shopping bags, race, color, creed or sexual orientation? Obviously, it is close to impossible. Readers come in all colors and shapes, as do non-readers. However, what often happens is that already-readers hear the words FREE BOOKS and became actually interested. (It works for me every time.) And we are so grateful someone is interested, that we happily hand over a book, only to be told that this person read this book last year and loved it, or, as happened yesterday when I was extolling My Antonia, that this man had a daughter named Willa.

After exhausting the book-receiving possibilities of the Yonkers train station, and with books still un-given in our boxes, we headed to the bar in Hastings. There was a man smoking just outside the door, and Meg told him about The Tender Bar. He wasn’t interested, but suggested she give one to his wife, Doreen, who was inside. At the far end of the bar were two young women drinking micro-brews. I gave them the plot line of The Tender Bar (boy, single mother, raised by uncle & bar patrons, comes out well) and one of the women said, “That’s just like me. That’s my life story.” She pulled open a satchel so I could see the paperback novel inside. We determined that the last copy should go to her friend, who was not raised in a bar.

I would like to tell you that after last year, when CSB had to rein me in, I did not chase anyone down the sidewalk brandishing a free book and imploring them to hear my spiel. Because I really was more restrained this year. I did not tug at anyone’s coat tails and I did not physically remove their earbuds to enable them to listen to my paean to reading.

In case you are wondering about the difference between the young growing up and the old getting older, consider this: in the past three days Iggy has learned these words: Suitcase, Scone, Office, Juice-box, Hammer and Ladybug. And countless others. And conjunctions and pronouns.
What have I learned in the past few days? The name of the architect of a famous tall building in Chicago. Something about Chechnya.

That may look good at first glance, but consider this. In six months Iggy will still know his words and will have mastered their usage in a multitude of ways, in sentences, in expletives, in stories and songs. If you mention the skyscraper at 326 Wacker to me in six months I will scratch my head and wonder what you are talking about. If it is a good day, I will know enough to Google the answer.

And where will we put the new chicks?

Swaths of Boston - where we have family, quite a lot of family,friends and memories - are hunkered in basements and behind closed doors, and staying away from windows for fear of a single surviving Chechen brother and the firestorm that surrounds him. Between checking the Internet for the latest terrible news, and listening to NPR interviews of random people who happened to be in Cambridge early this morning, CSB and I are engaging in heated words about the abode for the new chicks (broilers & game hens) that will arrive next week. CSB is suggesting that for their first week at Let it Bee farm, they could live in the downstairs bathtub: lined with newspaper and straw, and with the heat turned on. I feel strongly – I am in fact adamant and immoveable – that never again shall chicks live inside the house. The amount of dust generated by chickens is oceanic and incomprehensible. Are chicks born with an internal and inexhaustible supply of dust in their veins?
I know slightly more about chickens than I do about Chechnya. But that will change.

In classical times, the residents of Chechnya were the Circassians, the Avars and the Zygians. They have fought more or less constantly since the 1400’s.
What do they speak in Chechnya? Chechen and Russian. Chechen uses the Cyrillic alphabet (mostly), which only partly accounts for why I do not understand it. It belongs to the Vaynakh or North-central Caucasian language family, of which Ingush and Batsb are also members.

Currently, the only tourism in Chechnya is “extreme tourism”, a category that includes both bungee jumping and nuclear fallout zones.

Before we depart Nicaragua there remains the mystery of San Benito of Palermo or Saint Benedict the Moor or Saint Benedict the Black.
Having not expired in the earthquake or its aftershocks, we woke the next morning to ride the top of the bus to El Viejo, then to Chinandega, and then we drove back to León, where we couldn’t drive anywhere we thought we needed to go because the streets were all blocked with Passion Carpets and children dressed in white gowns sweeping. Passion carpets (nothing to do with rug-burn) or alfombras pasionarias, are religious images created on the streets with colored sawdust.
You will note that what started, presumably, as families and friends creating street art, has now fallen into the snake pit of corporate sponsorship. Yet another paradigm of life’s disconnects to be found on one dusty street in Nicaragua: the Central Bank of a Sandinista country sponsoring a Christian holiday that features a cruel crucifixion, and a foretold resuscitation, in neon bright colors.
I have not discovered why there was a festival and parade in honor of San Benito in León on the Monday of Semana Santa. It was not the feast of San Benito, which I have since learned is April 4th. (He died of natural causes, nothing gruesome to report in that department.). In order to celebrate San Benito, the folks of León dress in white robes, and by that I mean that all over town, from the supermarkets to the restaurants to insurance agencies, random people wear white robes over their clothes. And they carry brooms and they sweep. There is a lot of sweeping going on with no visible reduction of debris. Several inquiries by me elicited that San Benito was a baker and that is why people carry brooms and sweep. Huh? Sweeping up the flour? No one would explain, though several people clearly thought I was minus a hammer & wrench in the cerebral tool chest. Later in the day there was a parade and San Benito, along with a cohort of other holies, was carried aloft through the streets of León by swaying bearers. Since León’s streets are crisscrossed by webs of electric and telephone wires, the parade is accompanied by men with long crotched wooden sticks to raise the wire over the passing saints. We watched and held our breath, anticipating tangles and sparks, but that never happened. The saints passed through.

The next day we flew out of Sandino International Airport.

Back in Nicaragua

Have I mentioned the heat? It is overwhelming, overpowering, it is overcoming my capacity to come up with adjectival hyperbole; it is too hot to even speculate about what degrees F or C it is. It is so hot that all day long we lie in the hammock or rock in the rocking chair – an iteration of the rocking chairs that are found in every house in the village, the same rocking chairs that are lined up and sold by the sides of the dusty road – and move as little as possible, and only move enough to stay out of the direct sun and watch the mangoes fall from the trees. That’s right: mangoes falling from the trees. But don’t let hammocks and mangoes fool you into paradisaical fantasies. It is too hot to even imagine picking up and peeling the fallen mangoes, mangoes that fall with a thud onto the packed earth and send up a small eruption of dust upon impact. More dust to inhabit every pore and orifice you have, and some you don’t have.

In the morning we learn that last night’s clanging of metal and shouting was a certain drunken man smashing his neighbor’s house with his machete. Drunk and angry about an unspecified insult, he banged his machete against the walls and windows and tin roof of his neighbor’s house and bellowed out threats, and banged even harder when the inhabitants and other neighbors shouted for him to stop. This morning, we are told, he on the other side of the sugar cane field, persona non grata, sleeping it off.

Of course while we are weighing heavily upon the hammock and rocking chair and nodding listlessly in the direction of the plummeting mangoes, men are out in the fields cutting sugar cane, and men and women are harvesting a sweet variety of bananas favored by the inhabitants of Granada, and women are washing clothes and baking in earthen ovens and bathing babies, and children are cranking wells to bring up water and gathering firewood and kicking makeshift soccer balls in the packed dirt. And Rojita is snarfling up food and water.

Later when it is marginally cooler but still stratospherically hot we go visiting with Colby to the house of the lovely Paola with the curly eyelashes, she whose smile disperses even the heat. Earlier she brought fresh tortillas and avocados to Colby, whose name she loves to pronounce, like a magical incantation. Paola’s smile is clearly a direct defendant of her mother’s. Her little brother will do anything to elicit that smile.
Because Doña Pastora is away at cult, we go have dinner at Colby’s neighbor. There is something about Doña Indiana’s demeanor that inspires respect, and a little apprehension. Her ducks wander in and out of the house as we eat. One duck waddles coyly up to CSB, stares at him, and then piddles onto the dirt floor. He will not forget the piddling duck inside the house for a long time. The menu remains the same rice and beans.

That night, lying on the Chinandega bedframe, we are almost asleep when the dogs start their barking obbligato. It is a symphony of canine pipes and reeds and strings. Then our corrugated tin roof rattles and then – or more likely at the exact same moment – the earth trembles. We are jostled in our bed. Everything is making noise now: objects in the house, roosters, pigs, hens and especially the skinny dogs.
I say to CSB: It’s an earthquake.
He shouts outside to Colby: It’s an earthquake. Are you alright?
Colby answers that he is fine.
I say: Shouldn’t we go outside? What if the house falls on us?
CSB says: I don’t think so. There’s not much to fall.
I say: In 1972 most of Managua was reduced to rubble.
CSB says: I think this one is over.
But I stay awake for a very long time awaiting the aftershocks and after-trembles and tremors. I could tell you how many I felt, but I could not promise you that I did not imagine them.