Humid on several continents

Humidity is all I think about sometimes.

In The Seven False Departures, it is November 1942 and my grandfather is flying, via Ferry Command, from Accra, Nigeria past Lagos and on toward Kano. After months of false starts, he is really and truly on his way back to Cairo. He has been traveling for a week now, having flown from New York to Miami to San Juan to British Guyana, to Natal, Brazil to Fisherman Lake, Liberia to Accra. As he flies he describes the climate of Lagos and alludes to the odd trope of calling it an ‘Earthy Paradise’, when in fact it is painfully humid and a malarial mecca. “The heat is overwhelming all year long and the humidity attains extremities unsuspected by us.” Aerial view of Lagos, 1929.
In the current time and place, I have determined that our dehumidifying situation is unacceptable. Our ‘unfinished’ basement, with its stone walls and cobblestone floors, sweats. It sweats like an armor-clad Spanish explorer in the Amazon. It sweats like a Finn in a sauna. I have always enjoyed the term: “finished basement”. Our basement is not finished. Not a single room in the house is finished. I am not finished.
Today it is 90˚ and 99% humidity. I cannot type because my fingers slither across the keyboard and I get distracted by the droplets of sweat that wend their way from my clavicle, down my chest, through my cleavage and into the DMZ of my midsection.
We now have two dehumidifiers in the basement. One is in the marginally more habitable part of the basement with the large hearth, where once, not so long ago in geologic time, the meals were cooked. Now, I am sorry to say, it is stacked full of extra honey frames. The other is in the far back of the basement, where I never venture without shoes because not only do the cobblestones get quite slimy this time of year, but the chance of encountering large insects is excellent. I like to see large insects before I step on them, if I must step on them.
It turns out that these two dehumidifiers are not enough. Maybe two other dehumidifiers would be enough, if they were other, better, more efficient humidifiers. But these do not suffice. The basement is still very very humid. Everything I touch is damp and clammy.
So this morning I go to Home Depot to acquire yet another dehumidifier. Home Depot is enormous and full of useful things, useful and in many cases enigmatic. I ask the first fellow I see in a bright orange apron, emblazoned with the Home Depot logo, where are the dehumidifiers. He tells me to go all the way to the left, then take a right and go all the way to the back. I follow his instructions and find myself surrounded by long planks of wood, planks of woods in many sizes, all of them long. There are no dehumidifiers. My shopping cart and I start our way back towards the front of the store. En route is a woman also wearing the signature orange apron of helpful Home Depot employees, and I ask her where I might find a dehumidifier. She says, authoritatively, “Aisle 26. In the back bay. Up high.” The aisle numbers, I now discover, start at the store entrance with #1 and then go from right to left, Hebrew-style, to the far left end of the store; then they make a U-turn and continue from left to right for the back aisles, starting with 16 and going on up, presumably to 30, but I never got that far. In writing this is called a boustrophedon, from the ancient Greek for ox-turning. But this is not an ancient text, just aisles in Home Depot. I finally arrive at Aisle 26 and proceed to walk up and down. There are many household objects, and at the far end of the aisle there are air purifiers. This seems like a good sign, but there are absolutely no dehumidifiers. I ask a nice young man wearing an orange polo shirt with the Home Depot logo if he knows where I might find a dehumidifier, and he says that it would make sense for them to be up front with the air-conditioners. But he cautions me that he doesn’t work at the store, so he could be wrong. I nod quizzically towards his Home Depot orange polo shirt, because I can’t help myself, and he just shrugs. “It was a free shirt.”
Should I now return all the way to the front, where the air conditioners are, or at least where this non-employee of Home Depot assumes they should be?
Then I notice the woman from yesterday’s altercation at the post office, looking at the very complete array of grab bars. I don’t know her, and she probably doesn’t even recognize me, since I was behind her in line when the man behind me in line started interjecting himself into her transaction with the post office clerk. It is a well-known, if depressing, fact, that our local post office can be very slow, that it will take longer to post a package to Aunt Milly than it took to embroider the cushions and write the letter telling her all the news and why this embroidered cushion is several years later in arriving than you had intended. I say that not to excuse the rudeness of the man behind me in line, but to give a little context. The woman now surveying the daunting selection of grab bars at Home Depot was in the post office yesterday mailing a cardboard box to some foreign destination. She had filed out the required customs form but omitted to assign a value to the items inside the box.
The clerk asked for the value and the woman said, “I don’t know. They’re just old clothes.”
The clerk said, “Well what are they worth?”
The woman said, “I can’t say, because they are used.”
The clerk then said, “Can you just give any value, because we need it for the form?” Under the woman’s tee shirt were the bright blue straps of what I guessed was a bathing suit. I wondered if she was on her way to the town pool, or perhaps she had already been there. I thought about how much I would like to dive into the lake and swim for a very long time away from the shore.
The woman said, “They don’t really have a value. Other than sentimental.”
“Just say $10.00. It’s not that hard,” said the man behind me in line.
The woman at the counter, with bright blue straps peeking out from under her tee shirt, turned and said, “You are a very rude person. And listening to private conversations.”
The man in line said, “I was just trying to move things along.”
She said, “I waited in line, just like you. Please keep your thoughts to yourself.”
The man said, “It wasn’t my intention to be rude.”
She said, “Well you are.”
Naturally, the rest of us waiting in line were completely enthralled by this interaction. But that was the end. The woman told the postal employee that the clothes were worth $20 and she didn’t want to pay for insurance. The postal employee explained that the insurance came with the postage, and did not cost extra.
And this very morning she is in Home Depot looking at grab bars. It is much hotter and more humid than it was yesterday, but today she is not wearing a bathing suit under her shirt. Or if she is, it is well hidden. It feels odd to not acknowledge her in some way, but I don’t, figuring that even if she recognizes me from yesterday in the post office, she would rather forget the whole incident.
I am still unsure about which direction to take when I see another man in the emblematic bright orange Home Depot apron. I ask him about dehumidifiers. He points me to the far end of Aisle 26. I explain that I have already asked three different people and have not yet found a single dehumidifier, so I am a leery about returning to that particular spot.
“Don’t worry. This is my department,” he says, and now I am noticing that he is tall and handsome, and has rather long braids. I have mixed feelings about long hair on men, but he is young, and on him the long braids look damn good. We walk together to the end of the aisle and he sees that there are in fact no dehumidifiers. He asks a fellow employee, “Did anyone move my dehumidifiers?”
“No, man.”
“Stay right here,” he tells me. “I know there are some on the palette out back.”
I have no intention of going anywhere. Just like that, I trust this guy. I feel like we are in this quest together. Minutes pass and I don’t worry. I note that all the signage in the store is in both English and Spanish, so that a language student could come to Home Depot and learn all the vocabulary necessary for construction, and home decoration. I learn that Vanities are called Tocadores in Spanish (not Vanidades, which is what I would have guessed.) Parts for Faucets is Repuestos para Grifos. Wonder Board is, however, Wonder Board in Spanish. Not Tablero de Maravilla.
More minutes pass and I remember that I also need to buy citronella candles because whenever we eat out on the porch my dear friend Gill is bitten by mosquitoes. I do not get bitten by mosquitoes, at least not here in New York, and never when Gill is around. Just last night we were dining on the porch and she asked if we had citronella candles, and I was sad to say that I had none. Citronella is an essential oil extracted from lemongrass. Like ‘finished’ in ‘a finished basement’, ‘essential’ in ‘essential oil’ is a redolent word. According to the EPA, citronella is a non-toxic biopesticide, but in Europe they don’t think citronella works to keep away mosquitoes at all.
My braided friend returns with a dehumidifier in a box. He gently places it in my shopping cart. I thank him sincerely, and within minutes, I am the owner of a new dehumidifier and three tubs of citronella candles.
In Les Sept Faux Departs, as they fly east from Lagos, my grandfather, Bon Papa, waxes eloquent about the Jukun kingdom of Nigeria, whose religion resembled that of the ancient Egyptians.

In-flight Movies with Mom

It is not the kind of thing she forgets. She forgets where she has been, and who lived in Courtrai, but not that he was a lecher who fondled her legs. She forgets where we were yesterday, but she still knows she was born in Belgium and she still knows she never lived in Belgium. She still knows phrases in kitchen Arabic.
Every day requires a redrawing of the mental map of what is recalled and what forgotten, what dimly seen, what achingly looking for.

For those accustomed to large seats and warm towels, it is – I am guessing here - a muscle memory. But in her 60 plus years of traveling the globe with my father, trading cotton waste on 5 continents, she never flew in first class. It would not have occurred to either of them. So she could not forget how it worked because she never knew: the magic seat controls, the hot towels handed over with barbecue tongs, the menu choices, the complimentary headphones and movies on demand.
But last week when we took Mom to Belgium, we took her first class, thanks to a cousin with a multitude of miles.

It turned out she loved first class. As we settled into our pods, she was in awe of the room, the magical seat controls, the food, and the attention. The steward was excessively attentive.
It was getting late, and the next day would be long, and in the long list of available movies, I had noticed they offered this Russian movie called Leviathan. I’d seen posters featuring the carcass of a large whale washed up on a bleak arctic landscape – the sort of thing that instantly appeals to me. Mom was finished with her meal and seemed ready to settle in. I was looking forward to dozing over Siberian melodrama.
I booted up the movie, donned my earphones, and started to watch.
Mom tapped on my arm and asked me what I was doing. I explained about the Russian film. She said she would like to watch a movie also. Would I find her one? I stopped Leviathan, took off my headphones and semi-climbed, semi-kneeled on my seat and leaned awkwardly over into hers so that I could actually see her screen. (The airplane TV screens are rather brilliantly designed to look black from any oblique angle; thus you have to be looking straight at it in order to see what is there, and operate the controls.) I pressed the button for WATCH, which led us to the long list of movies, and I scrolled through them, looking for something that would appeal to my mother. I settled on The Theory of Everything. I told her it was about Stephen Hawking, and she seemed to recognize the name. So I selected that movie and helped her put on the head phones, and adjusted the volume. First it was too low: “I can’t hear anything.” Then it was too loud: “Basta!” Then it was okay. She started watching.
I settled back into my seat, put my headphones back on and restarted Leviathan. The Siberian landscape was indeed bleak, and everyone smoked cigarettes more or less constantly. My mother tapped my arm, and started talking. I stopped Leviathan and took off my headphones.
“Is that Hawking in the big glasses?”
“Yes,” I said, without actually looking. “Are you enjoying it?”
“I’ve seen it before,” she said.
“Really? When?” I said. This was foolish, and if I had thought about it, if I had followed the guidelines for “Habilitation” instead of “Reality Orientation”, as explained in Learning to Speak Alzheimer’s, I would never have asked that question.
“A few years ago,” she said.
“But it only came out last year,” I said. (See above comments.)
“Well I saw it a few years ago, and I don’t want to watch it now.”
“Do you want to see something else?”
“Yes.”
So I turned myself around and leaned over into her seat, again, and took hold of her TV remote control, and we returned to the list of available movies and scrolled through the possibilities. At least 80% I had never heard of; and of those at least 80% looked inappropriate on the grounds of violence or violence or potential violence. I suggested something called Love, Rosie because it appeared to be a romantic comedy. I clicked on it, and helped Mom put the headphones back on. We adjusted the volume as the movie began.
I settled back down in my seat and figured out how to go back to my place in Leviathan, and then I returned to the tundra.
Glancing over at Mom, and she didn’t look happy. Romantic comedies were supposed to be funny, or at any rate, not miserable. She tapped my arm. I removed my headphones and stopped Leviathan.
“I’ve seen this before,” she said. “And I didn’t like it then.”
This time I managed not to contradict her, thus proving that I am still capable of learning.
“What are you watching?” she asked.
“A Russian movie.”
“I like Russian movies,” Mom said and I could almost see Omar Sharif and his balalaika wafting through her brain.
“This one has subtitles, and it’s set in Siberia. It’s kind of depressing,” I said.
“I would like to see it,” she said.
So hoisted myself up and over her seat again, and returned to the movie menu on the screen and picked Leviathan from the list and started it up for her. She put on her headphones and I fiddled again with the volume. I slid back into my seat, and restarted my own Leviathan. The characters were still sitting around a table talking in Russian about something that was making them all unhappy. And they were smoking. Then they went outside, where there was a lot of snow or maybe that was just very pale tundra.
Mom tapped my arm. I took off my headphones. “This make no sense,” she said. “I don’t want to watch a movie.”
“Good idea,” I said.
She slept. I returned to Siberia, and slept too. When we woke up we were almost in Brussels.

Away we go

So tomorrow we are taking Mom to Belgium for what will surely be her last trip abroad, her last visit to the land of her birth, and most likely her last trip in an airplane. We are doing this just in time. (That is what I am hoping. We could also be doing it too late, in which case I can anticipate a meltdown at the junction of Rue de Chêne and Rue de L’Étuve, when Mom does not recognize Manneken Pis.) Her short-term memory is shrinking like wool in the dryer; sometimes her retention can be measured in seconds.
In preparation for this trip she has read a book about Belgian castles (lots of pictures, written in 4 languages, at least two she knows well), and has told me that she is surprised to learn that Belgium is full of old castles (22 times.) She praises my cousin Pascale for having given me this book (19 times.) She tells CSB that he will enjoy the flat countryside (11 times). She informs us (countless times) that although she was born in Belgium, she never lived there, as they moved immediately to Egypt after her birth. She has related (4 times) an apocryphal story of her maternal grandmother urinating in soup she was forced to serve to billeted German officers. (Mom has the wrong war.) Also in preparation Mom has had a massage, will have a facial later today, and tomorrow will get a wash and blow dry. I will take more Sudafed. So we are ready to go.

I am looking forward to finally seeing Geel. For years I have read about this unusual town outside of Antwerp, where for hundreds of years the inhabitants have taken in the mentally ill, and cared for them in their homes. The tradition goes back to the (possibly apocryphal) martyrdom of Saint Dymphna in the 7th century. She was the Christian daughter of a pagan Irish king. Her beautiful mother died when Dymphna was young, and her father the king vowed he would never marry again unless he found someone as beautiful as his beloved dead wife. When Dymphna grew to be her mother’s spitting image, her father conceived an “unlawful passion” for his daughter, and she had to flee from her homeland. She went with her confessor, Gerebernus and they ended up in a forest outside Antwerp. That should have been far enough and remote enough, but it wasn’t, and her father discovered refugees in their sanctuary. Again she refused his incestuous overtures, and the king ordered his soldiers to kill both Dymphna and Gerebernus. But the soldiers refused to decapitate the lovely young girl, in the end her father did the deed himself. (Sounds like mental illness to me.) Their martyred bodies were buried by angels, and over the years the place and the relics were imbued with miraculous healing powers. Pilgrims came from all over, and brought along lunatics, epileptics and sleepwalkers to be cured. The tradition continues, and Dymphna is the patron saint of lunatics, sleepwalkers, epileptics, incest victims, those with neurological disorders, princesses, runaways and therapists. We would be remiss not to make the pilgrimage.

The beheading of St Dymphna by Godfried Maes (1649-1700), a member of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke; he was particularly good at ceiling designs.

Meanwhile, I am reading about new tests one can take to learn if one has the ApoE4 gene that indicates a high likelihood of getting Alzheimer’s. Should I get this test? Having an exit strategy is not a bad idea.

Do woodpeckers get headaches? And if not, why not?

So early this morning I am still under the covers trying to understand why or how it was that in my dream CSB and I have become Native American activists named Coconut and Chickle, and just outside the woodpeckers are busy in the trees. Busy jackhammering at the trunks of black walnut trees and the catalpa tree and the locust trees just outside our window. And because it is still very early, I can ponder what it might be like to perch oneself on the side of a tree and rapidly, very rapidly, hammer away at the wood, using one’s head and beak as the jackhammer. As soon as I consider this, I recognize how pleasant it is to have my head unmoving on the pillow. Poor woodpeckers. Do woodpeckers get headaches? How could they not? They can, and do, repeatedly peck at the tree at the ridiculously high rate of 10,000 pecks/meters per seconds squared. (10,000 m/s2 – I am not really sure what this means.)
Yet they don’t get headaches, or at any rate they don’t complain about headaches, because their physiology has evolved to deal with this very problem.
Evolution has wisely given woodpeckers small brains nestled inside their skulls in such a way as to “maximize area of contact between the brain and skull”. Their eyeballs and nostrils are likewise protected from the potential damage of flying wood chips: the eyeballs with a nictitating membrane, like a transparent third eyelid, that closes mere milliseconds before the impact of beak on bark, and their tiny nostrils with tiny feathers covering the aperture.

If this is not enough about woodpeckers to enliven your day, you may also want to know that they all have zygodactyl feet; this means that of their four toes, the first and last face backward, while the two middle ones face forward. This arrangement is useful for climbing straight up a tree; it also resembles the finger arrangement used in Alternate Nostril Breathing – Nadi Shodhan Pranayama - in my yoga class that is so helpful with meditation.

What passes through the small brain of the woodpecker as he hammers away at that dizzying rate? Or does he meditate?

Pictures: Woodpecker from Audubon.org. ANB sketch from holisticliving.org

More False Departures / Encore les Faux Departs

The project continues, and I am getting to know this grandfather who wrote so lovingly of his family, and especially his wife – and in that matter I trust his judgment because she would later become my own beloved Bonne Maman.

Since you last heard, Bon Papa was en route to the Caltex headquarters in NY, planning to go to Cairo. He and his colleagues are traveling aboard the “Challenger” of the Union Pacific RR. He writes in loving detail of the towns and landscapes they pass through, especially the western vistas he so extravagantly admires: “Several ranches as described by Zane Grey”. Or: “Evanston, Utah = it was here I had my troubles with our Dodge car, 7 months ago, but that turned out well.” Or: “This evening we arrived in Omaha, the capital of Nebraska, the state always “dry”, which did not allow us, all evening, to enjoy our whiskeys. Frigid wind and we didn’t leave the station during our half hour stop.” Or: “From Albany, the capital of NY, we passed the Hudson River, whose banks are covered with ice. It is a beautiful spectacle – seen from our well-heated Pullman. The large factories on the riverbanks that I know: Phelps Dodge, Anaconda Copper Co, Fisher Body, De Lavat Steam engines…and many more. We arrived at the formidable Grand Central Station at 9 am.” (I translated formidable, the French, as formidable, the English. I know that is not properly correct, that it means something more on the lines of wonderful. But I like the word.)
While awaiting his Egyptian visa, Bon Papa worked at the office and toured New York, methodically and enthusiastically, and wrote about it for his wife.

On the 6th of February he learned that the Egyptian authorities had refused to grant him an entry visa. This news shocked my grandfather and shocked his boss at Caltex and even shocked the Egyptian consul. He had lived happily in Alexandria from 1931 to 1939, and had many friends and contacts in Egypt, friends who awaited his return.
That same afternoon, the General Manager asked Bon Papa if he spoke Spanish (he did, quite well). The G-M said (This is all written in French; the shabby translations are mine), “You know, perhaps, that the US is investing nearby to Santiago de Cuba about 20 miles from Guantanamo. $18 million for development of nickel and manganese, 2 metals absolutely necessary for war. And we miss a great deal of that. Time is pushing. The development will not be late in starting. This representation (“un chiffre d’affaire”) of the turnover of an oil field from $3 to 4 million per year, and we want it. You need to arrange that we will get this business. …Besides this, you know that the sugar business of Cuba are the largest in the world. Certain mills produce 15,000 tons of sugar cane per day. They are situated in the eastern provinces. Yours. We have to accept we have no clients; it is not acceptable and you need to correct this situation. There is the Cuban RR, but we have never had anything to do with them, and we would like to take our share of the profits. That would be one of your missions.”
About this new posting to Cuba, Bon Papa wrote: Here is the good American method. Precise, quick and broad. This work pleases me at the outset. I saw right away all the possible risks. There is a director and vice- director already in Havana, who would be the obvious ones to fill this spot. But they haven’t succeeded, it seems, and we have more hope in me.
I didn’t wait to study all that can help me in my new functions. I studied for 8 or 9 hours a day to better know the technical side of the exploitation of the mines, of sugar mills and railroads.
Every day I read aloud about 50 pages from a novel, in the Spanish language. I prepare eagerly.
And he went to movies. He went to a movie almost every day. As I translate, I am compiling a list of the movies he went to, imagining that I will see the same movies and know him better. Movies he saw from mid-January to the end of March, 1942 include but are not limited to: Tobacco Road, The Corsican Brothers, Chocolate Soldiers, Hudson Bay, Design for Scandal, Ruggles of Red Gap, Woman of the Year, Louisiana Purchase, The Mutinies of Elsinore, The Last of the Duanes, White Fang, Mister V, Remember the Day, Two Faced Woman, Riders of Sage Brush, Adventures of Martin Eden, Bedtime Story, Reap the Wild Wind, and Sullivan’s Travels.
He loved the moves, but I think he loved the Rockettes more. I have not kept count of his visits to Radio City Music Hall.
.

Three Things You May Need to Know

Three things I learned today that I simply cannot keep to myself.

1. Bishop, California is the MULE CAPITAL of the world. Since my #1 daughter and her husband and children will be teaching and living at Deep Spring College for the months of May and June, and since Bishop is the only large town, or any town, nearby (It has more feet above sea level, 4150, than it has residents) and not all that nearby, it seemed like a good idea to learn something about Bishop. And I learned that it is the MULE CAPITAL of the WORLD. This seems a bit hubristic on Bishop’s part, given that Mexico has the #1 mule population worldwide, with 3, 280,00 and the USA ranks a lowly #26, with a mere 28,000 mules. But that hasn’t stopped Bishop from hosting the Annual Mule Days.and I dearly hope that my grandchildren will have to opportunity to participate.
2. I also learned today, from Boris the Guatemalan painter, that bananas are considered bad luck on a boat. I never knew this, and now I will be careful never to bring bananas on a boat. I even checked with Snopes.com, and yes, this is a ‘true’ superstition. That is, people believe it, based on absolutely no true facts.
3. The Mayans came as far north as Georgia, USA. (Before it was Georgia, USA.) This was discovered because the Mayans liked to paint themselves blue with a very special blue dye only available at this one spot in Georgia. I was told this item by Boris; but unlike the Mule Days and the Banana Superstition, it is not verifiable or universally agreed upon. Far from it. In northeastern Georgia there is a place with ancient mounds called the Kenimer Site, and one guy, an architect, claims that Mayans once inhabited the site. Another website talks about a petroglyph in Georgia that looks very Mayan. Another website is scathing about the architect's fact-checking. There appears to be no consensus, and absolutely no one mentions the blue dye posited by Boris.

The Seven False Departures or Les Sept Faux Departs

A project is a good thing to have.

A project can keep those demonic lost memories in their demonic cages. And also because I have a tendency to get antsy, and because it seems like a good thing to do before it is too late, I have embarked on the project of translating Les Sept Faux Departs with my mother. French is after all her native tongue. In the past few years, while sorting through the sedimentary memorabilia that buttresses my parents’ home, I found this thick bound volume written by my grandfather in the 1940’s. All 346 pages are handwritten, elegantly and legibly, in French, and the whole is bound in red leather.
I thought that as we translated I would learn the details of the family’s sorrowful wartime separation, along with some French vocabulary.

There are many things we do not know about our parents and grandparents. That is normal and unless one is obsessive and weird, it is also completely desirable. But certain things one does know. For certain.
One thing we all knew for certain was that my grandmother, Bonne Maman, and her children – my mother and uncle – spent the duration of the Second World War in Long Beach, California, while my grandfather, Bon Papa, was in Asia and then Cairo, working for Caltex, managing the oil business in the Middle East and perhaps passing on intelligence to the allies. The family was separated for the duration of the war. That was axiomatic, and of course, sad.
But it’s not true.
The three hundred and forty-six page handwritten book, Les Sept Faux Departs, proves the untruth.
I am not the only one who believed, absolutely, in the truth of their wartime separation. My cousin, a singular Brancart in the new world, was as convinced of that fact as I was. Until I disabused him. On a sunny California Easter while admiring a flock of goats, while noting how much less goats smell than a similar number of pigs would smell, even if they do have disturbing slotted eyes. We admired the goats and agreed that the fact of Bon Papa’s non-presence in Long Beach during the war was a seminal detail we had believed and been told numerous times, and never doubted. Because the point of telling such a story is the sadness of it: to be separated. Except they were not, or not entirely.
I know now the true-truth, as distinct from the story-truth. Bit by bit, garbled sentence by awkward conjugation, I am getting to know Bon Papa. He was delightful, sincere, and he was in California with his family in 1941 and 1942.

Obviously, it would have been useful to have embarked on this project and learned this before….before the great dividing moment, before this, before that, so that I might have asked my mother why she always told us, and why her brother always told his children, and why my grandmother always told all of us, that they were separated for the duration. Now I can’t ask. Now she can’t answer. Whatever the reason, it has been rewritten, retold, and re-forgotten in the implacable landfill of neurofibrillary tangles.

So now I am the one to tell my mother that her father was in California in the summer of 1941, and they all vacationed at Big Bear. I remind her how much they loved Big Bear. Her father writes rapturously about the American West. He devoured Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Even as she translates, I explain to my mother that the first of the Seven False Departures occurred in August of 1941, when his scheduled sailing back to Saigon, via Hong Kong, was cancelled. The second came in November of that year, when he was booked aboard the SS Lurline from San Francisco via Honolulu to Singapore; from there he would cross the peninsula of Malacca by train and somehow get to the Cambodian border. On the morning of November 29th, Bon Papa’s luggage was on board and he was making his fond farewells, when a FBI agent found him and announced that under a new regulation no one, neither American nor alien, was authorized to leave the US after December 1without the personal written approval of the Dept. of State, Washington, DC. My grandfather noted that it was still November. Yes, agreed the FBI agent, but the ship was due in Honolulu on December 4th. Bon Papa debarked, and returned home.
The proper papers were duly acquired, and Bon Papa was then booked on the SS President Polk, sailing out of San Francisco on December 7th. The night of the 6th he and Bonne Maman dined with friends: “Oysters, a shrimp bisque, fried sole, good wines.” At noon the next day, the ship steamed past Alcatraz and Angel Island and ventured into the Pacific. At 1:30 that afternoon, they all learned what we all know, that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor.
The SS President Polk returned to San Francisco. That was the third False Departure, and it meant that my grandfather returned to Long Beach and was able to spend the Christmas holidays back at Big Bear Lake with his family. It meant he could enjoy his children’s enjoyment as they experienced snow for the first time in their lives. (Having lived only in Egypt and Indochina, despite their Belgian passports.)
In January 1941, Caltex beckoned Bon Papa to New York, with the plan that he would depart from there for Cairo. He traveled by train across the US with two good friends, Gordon and Mac. (Years later, traveling with my grandmother, we will stay at Laurie and Ivy Gordon’s Hype Park flat, and I will eat tongue for the first time.)
We will translate some more pages, I will write of the excellent meals they consumed, and of the great sights they saw from that transcontinental train. I will learn how it is that this projected voyage to Cairo became the fourth False Departure.