Winter Solstice 2014

It has been a year of transition, although even saying so sounds cliché. Is there ever a year without transition? 2014 was marked by a false start, to use a running metaphor, apt considering that we were to be in western Kenya this year, one of the world’s running capitals, a place I fell hard for, even as it was almost immediately clear that my job there was all wrong.

The year’s synopsis: I quit a job. I looked for a job. I found a new job. There were growing pains: a farewell to academia; an adjustment to corporate regulations and oversight. My wife left her own business and went back to school. There were growing pains: instructors who didn’t really teach; arbitrary exam questions. Our daughter started her final year of elementary school. There were growing pains: a flight by herself that she was sure she wouldn’t survive; a week of sleepaway camp; plans for middle school. We all survived.

Too often this past year the world itself felt unmoored, like we collectively wouldn’t survive, and I haven’t always been sure, these past months, with gun violence and a literal plague and fear and incivility and racism, how we continue, as a species, to light the candle. 

I just finished Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, a post-apocalyptic novel about how the world forges on after life as we know it has ended, how one can and should find grace and gratitude in everyday life. It is a deeply humane work, and so on this, the longest night, the winter solstice, I want to catalogue some of my many blessings this year. 

  

The homeless man who serenaded me with “Love Me Tender” after a group of us from the Unitarian Church had served dinner to him and his fellow shelter residents. Did we like Elvis? he asked us. Yes, I said. The discovery, last spring, in my regular morning rambles during my months of underemployment, that Northern Flickers had made a nest in a dead tree along the bike path. Finding out I have a Kenyan namesake and knowing that, despite whatever else happened during my long January in Eldoret, I will always be anchored to that place and that little boy.

The botanical gardens at my alma mater, riotous and tropical. The friendly old security guard at the MFA Boston, a Navy vet from WWII, with whom I swapped stories when I sat down to give my blistered feet a break after a job interview. Finding shards of antique pottery on the beach, a robin’s eggshell on a walk. Black raspberry ice cream cones after swimming in the ocean; baby praying mantises hatching in our neglected garden. The wonderful vintage sign I “rescued” from the front yard of a long-abandoned antiques store that now hangs in my den. Meeting my favorite band (Lucero) at the Newport Folk Festival and finding out that they're not just hard-drinking, tattooed womanizers. (Or at least they're really polite ones.) A butterfly bush I “rescued” from a construction site that eventually bloomed in my yard. 

Dahlias. Oh, the dahlias, at the farmers’ market; at our dear ones’ beach house in Weekapaug; for sale, $2 a stem, along a rural road. Stevie Wonder in concert, and singing along to "Sir Duke" with thousands of others. The Georgian doors and fanlights of Dublin. standing on the site where Handel’s “Messiah” was first performed in 1742 and honoring that work by singing a few bars of “O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion,” my favorite piece from that oratorio.

“O Thou...” is in 6/8 time, and those who know me well are aware that I have an unusual affinity for this time signature, that indeed I can pick it out from the merest background Muzak in a store. That “O Thou” is what I willed myself to hear the rhythm of as I was emerging from anesthesia after brain surgery a little over four years ago, and how, when I could still count it in my head, I knew that I would be okay. Blessings then. Blessings now.

Most of all, the blessings of connection this year. The broad and lovely way that I define family, my parents, my wife and daughter and my daughter’s father and his parents and sisters and my sister and her family and my father-in-law and my brother-in-law and his family. The friends so dear that they are aunties and uncles and cousins to my daughter, family in spirit if not law. The pals from my happy childhood in a close-knit town, many of whom I was able to reminisce with at my 25^th high school reunion; my beloved colleagues and students at Brown; my new compatriots at work who crack wise with me; our church communities; the good people at the kung fu studio; the women from Smith who remind me how each one of us is still finding her way; the fellow parents who make us laugh and pinch hit as babysitters and whose families we adore. So many connections, sometimes in person, sometimes epistolary, sometimes only briefly after years, sometimes merely on social media but not, as critics would have it, meaningless. So many beloveds, everyone with their own struggles and moments of clarity. I am grateful for you all.

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year. Keep lighting the candle.

Namaste,

Kelley

Lyman Plant House, Smith College

Baby Mantis

Pottery shard, robin's egg

"Rescued" sign

Dahlia, Green Animals Topiary Garden

Roadside Dahlias

A Dublin Door

         

Parents, nephews, daughter

Me and Sis

Me with Ben Nichols (swoon!) of Lucero at Newport

Dad and the girl

Me and the folks

My girls

Dad and Me on his 75th

The girl and her paternal grandparents

The girls and me

My girls and my father-in-law

The dad, the girl

The girl in Dublin

  

Cooling off

This is the summer when I finally watched “Apocalypse Now.”

Image from "Apocalypse Now."

This is the summer when each day’s news brought another punch to the gut, something more awful than before, and it has sometimes seemed like we’re all on Willard’s boat going up the river, not knowing what terror or madness is around the next bend: Airstrikes in Gaza. A passenger plane shot down. A plague in West Africa.  A journalist beheaded. Another unarmed black teenager shot by a white man, and an American city in chaos.

The horror. The horror.

This is the summer when a lot of good and well-intentioned people – mostly white Americans – made movies of themselves dumping ice on their heads in a show of “awareness” of a devastating and fatal disease.

My wife said last night that it’s almost like something from one of our better fiction writers. Margaret Atwood, maybe, or George Saunders or Karen Russell. What do we do in the face of relentless horror? We film ourselves cooling off? We wink in acknowledgment that the world can be cruel and unjust?

I know, I know – I’ve read the reports over the past couple of weeks about all the money that’s been raised through these ice bucket challenges. And I have acquaintances with ALS and have read the late historian Tony Judt’s heartbreaking essay “Night” about the embodied experience of ALS. It is an ugly and painful disease.

Some of you know that I’ve long been critical of these types of “awareness” campaigns – particularly in the years since my diagnosis with brain cancer. Too often these seem like bandwagons to jump on, a way for (again, mostly white) people to feel less impotent. But at what point do such gestures cease to mean anything? The ice bucket challenges have quickly become a parody of themselves, with humor sites rounding up slapstick videos of "ice bucket fails."

LIVESTRONG bracelets were all the rage for a few years, even after Lance Armstrong’s fall from grace for doping. Pink ribbons are still ubiquitous, despite more knowledge of how suspect some of the breast cancer organizations are. (I’m looking at you, Susan G. Komen Foundation.) When the National Football League – an organization that has repeatedly looked the other way or shrugged when its players have perpetrated violence against women - has a Sunday when players' uniforms feature pink ribbons in a show of breast cancer “awareness” – what, exactly, is the message? 

My problem with such gestures is that they do nothing to engender meaningful change. They put the onus on private citizens to fundraise for healthcare. They demonstrate no collective, visionary thinking about how to reduce disparities in access to resources and education. There’s no larger conversation about inequities, particularly those borne by people of color. Kate Harding has said this far better than I in a recent essay for DAME Magazine. 

In 1999, twenty years after the initial release of "Apocalypse Now," the late, brilliant critic Roger Ebert wrote that the film shows "how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover." 

This is a summer when, more than ever, we need to be recognizing these truths and having those hard conversations. In the face of all of the world's horrors, and especially when an American city becomes militarized and looks more like Coppola's nightmare vision, let's not keep cooling ourselves off. I challenge all of us, myself included, to think about how we can better and more thoughtfully engage. 

Riots in Ferguson, Missouri, August 2014.

Kwaheri Kenya

A Kenyan girl returning from doing washing in the river takes our photo while we take hers,
near Eldoret, Kenya, January 2014

I would like to tell you that on my last morning in Kenya, I ran all the way up the long hill by Testimony School without stopping to walk, that I had so adjusted to the altitude and become so fit in my month there that I didn't need to slow myself. But I was not running like a Kenyan, like the lithe and lean Kalenjins with their endless graceful legs. I never will. 

I did, however, take a different route on that last morning. It seemed an apt metaphor. And a few times, choked up by both emotion and red dust, I paused to admire and bid farewell to certain types of plants and birds that I am not likely to see again for awhile.

That was not how it was supposed to be.

As most of you stateside know by now, I'm writing from Rhode Island. Sadly, my time in Kenya ended nearly as soon as it began. I was gone only a month, and already I've been home a month, our house still not unpacked from all of the work Sam did when she thought she was coming to join me. And already there are days when it feels as though I never left, as if I've been here this whole long slog of a winter, instead of getting a few weeks' reprieve in warm weather. 

I should have known that it wouldn't work out. After all, my first day on the job was terribly inauspicious. Somehow, I locked myself out of my dorm room when I went to use the toilet at about 5:15 am, a full hour before sunrise. I was wearing only thin cotton pajamas and it was cold enough (yes, at altitude it happens) to see my breath. 

After realizing my mistake and quietly but proficiently swearing, I ventured downstairs to the common room, selected a Martin Amis novel from the lending library, and curled up on the loveseat as best as I could under a brittle old sheepskin. Joseph, one of the security guards, came in around 6 to use the restroom, and found the sight of me terribly amusing. He offered to get one of the compound's "team leaders" to let me in, but I said I'd wait until a reasonable hour (around 7) when I knew they'd be awake. Once I was let back into my room, I quickly took what my grandmother used to unceremoniously call a "chorus girl bath," since there was no hot water, dressed for work, and wolfed down some toast and tea.

By dinnertime, word had traveled among the guards about the silly mzungu shivering under the sheepskin, but I took Joseph into my confidence and made him promise NOT to tell my new boss under any circumstances, as I was already unsure of how much she trusted me.

That was it, really. I tried so hard, those first couple of weeks, to make my new boss happy, and in doing so, I quickly began losing parts of myself - the me who slept soundly, who whistled and sang in my idle moments. And as I began to realize that very little would or did make her happy, that I couldn't be the kind of manager she wanted, and that staying there would mean giving up my well-being - indeed, my being - I knew I had to make the hard decision to leave. 

But I have always fallen hard for new places, and Eldoret was no different. The climate and the natural world were unparalleled, as I sensed even on my daily walks to and from the project office. Despite inhaling lorry smoke and risking life and limb as motorcycles, their filthy mudflaps pledging loyalty to Arsenal or other premier league clubs, ignored every basic rule of road safety, I often marveled at black and blue butterflies feeding on weeds in ditches. So much grew so easily, even in adverse conditions. Never before had I seen a volunteer hollyhock literally growing out of a pile of garbage "by the road to the contagious hospital," no less, as William Carlos Williams put it. Walking back into the well-manicured compound in the late afternoons, resplendent sunbirds would be feeding in the trees lining the drive. There was so much for an amateur naturalist everywhere, even more so on my weekend trips to forests and valleys and waterfalls, where I didn't tick off boxes on any life lists but simply marveled, as much as I could, at the country's abundance of beauty.

The town centre itself was gritty and chaotic in a way that growing cities are in places where there's insufficient infrastructure. Still, there's something thrilling about being in a place where one second you see men hauling a skinned cow into a butcher shop and the next you notice a street hawker with a bathroom scale - who, I assume, makes a few shillings by selling the privilege of weighing oneself. And the people watching was endlessly fascinating: young adolescent girls in royal blue taffeta, ankle-length gowns that may have come from prom dress overstock ca.1985 and young men in t-shirts referencing in-jokes from American movies of the same era. Bright young things, all, with so much promise and relatively few opportunities.

I got to know more bright young things - namely, the Kenyan staff on the project, who tolerated my apologetically rudimentary Swahili with grace, humor, and warmth, and the announcement of my very premature departure with sadness and resigned understanding. In the short time we were colleagues, some of us became friends, and it is they whom I will miss most of all. 

What is next for me professionally is uncertain. Right now I'm underemployed, but seeking. I don't regret my month in Eldoret. It was a time of firsts: the first time I quit a job as an adult and the first time I slaughtered a chicken. Most importantly, it resulted in my first namesake, a little Kenyan boy, something I recently learned that moved me deeply and is, I think, the only real legacy I need to leave.

For now, I leave you readers with a few pictures documenting the high points of my month.

Peace,

Kelley

Most exciting African fabric ever - maroon and green porcupines on a gray background!
Made into pajama pants, a shift dress, and an apron.

 
Twiga twins at Kruger Farm, January 2014

Horniman's Swallowtail, Kakamega Forest, January 2014

Willy and Solo look on admiringly after I slaughter my first chicken.
Eldoret, January 2014

Faking it on the road into Iten, where "real" runners train,
January 2014.