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The Beauty of Winter

Posted on December 13, 2010
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It is that time of year again when trees exhibit their nudist fetish. Under the cover of gray, leaden skies, they have profligately shed leaves, covering entire sidewalks, sometimes even a good part of parked cars.

Winter does not officially begin until the 21st, but the temperatures have plummeted already, shattering records set as far back as 1947. Echoing the schizoid behavior of the summer past, Indian summers have not been uncommon either.

For me, the stillness, the dead silence of winters is always entwined with the experience of coming west. The days lie languid, numbed by the cold. Even the playgrounds are ensconced in relative, almost deferential silence.

But the days are not without beauty. The brilliance of a gingko shower can be almost blinding on a bright day.

And when the sun manages to make a gash in the clouds at sunset, the spectacle can be stunning.

Or just iridescent.

As I walk the quiet roads with Maya or a friend, some afternoon or at dusk, I try and capture the beauty. I know I fail, but I try anyway. Maybe when my memory is faint or life seems too full, these pictures will help me remember the beauty I was witness to.

Winter was also when the ache returned, a yearning for home, when home was another continent and love was another country. Now, home is here as is love and the ache is just nostalgia. And with the coming of Maya almost three winters ago, winter is life.

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Thanksgiving 2010

Posted on November 27, 2010
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Shanthala's Thanksgiving Dinner

We hosted dinner for some friends this Thanksgiving, our first such event. We did have invitations to be at the table at some other friends’ houses, but we wanted to stay home, especially after a week away.

This of course entailed a lot of work on Shanthala’s part and she was busy most of the day cooking. We had returned from Hawaii the previous night, but thanks to our friends, our refrigerator was already well stocked with all the things Shanthala needed for the dinner. A friend from India who was staying at our place while we were in Hawaii pitched in with some shopping, but our friend, Brad, armed with Shanthala’s shopping list, did most of the work. The friends who came brought wine and some salad with them.

What a difference this year’s Thanksgiving was, compared to the rather gloomy one two years ago, when Maya was still an infant.

The food menu:

  • Sweet Potato & Brie Phyllo
  • Brie Crostini
  • Sprouted Moong & Cranberry Salad (Sameer/Vaishali made this)
  • CousCous & Mushroom Salad (Sameer/Vaishali)
  • Butternut Squash, Carrot and Ginger Soup
  • Sauteed Brussel Sprouts (with Garlic and Olive Oil)
  • Vegetable Pulao
  • Parathas from Lovely Sweets
  • Chana Dal with Louki
  • Apple Pie

The wine list:

  • Chianti Classico Red Wine, Incanto Riserva 2005
  • Menage a Trois Red Wine
  • Moscato Dessert Wine, Sutter Home

Gratitude is Healthy

The new science of “positive psychology” is demonstrating an increasing amount of evidence that gratefulness is a healthy thing. In 2003, Dr. Robert A. Emmons and his colleague Michael E. McCullough conducted three studies that showed that people who expressed gratitude were demonstrably happier than those who did not. This included even people struck down with chronic illness such as neuromuscular diseases. In a study done by one of the founders of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and his colleagues, in which they followed people up to 6 months after they had started practising gratitude, they concluded that those who were grateful were less depressed than those who were not.

Each year, some major periodical or the other touts further new evidence on the virtues of gratefulness. This year, The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article highlighting the benefits of being grateful. From the article :

“In an upcoming paper in the Journal of Happiness Studies, Dr. [Jeffrey J.] Froh and colleagues surveyed 1,035 high-school students and found that the most grateful had more friends and higher GPAs, while the most materialistic had lower grades, higher levels of envy and less satisfaction with life. ‘One of the best cures for materialism is to make somebody grateful for what they have,’ says Dr. Froh.”

In a country based on the myth of self-reliance, we may find it difficult to practice gratitude because it makes us more aware of the ways we rely on others in our lives, how our lives are enhanced by the actions of countless faceless, nameless people.

How can we practice gratefulness ? One way is to be specific about what we’re grateful for: I’m grateful for my health, for the beautiful crane that glided past me as I ran this morning, for waking up. The WSJ article has a thoughtful piece on how to practice gratefulness:

“A Buddhist exercise, called Naikan self-reflection, asks people to ponder daily: “What have I received from…? What have I given to…? and What trouble have I caused…?” Acknowledging those who touched your life—from the barista who made your coffee to the engineer who drove your train—and reflecting on how you reciprocated reinforces humbleness and interdependence.”

Gratitude In Infants

What about Maya ? Is she old enough to know what gratitude is ? I often wonder about this especially when we seem to insist that as soon as they can speak, children learn to say “please” and “thank you”. We may get them to say the words, but do they know what the feeling is ? Are the words merely social makeup ?

Melanie Klein, an Austrian psychoanalyst theorized that infants understand gratitude thanks to their mother’s breast milk. Many child development experts however postulate that a child can understand gratitude only when it understands empathy, which is around 7 years. But can we cultivate the practice early ? From the WSJ article:

“To help lay the groundwork for gratefulness, Dr. Froh says he asks his 4-year-old son, James, each night what was his favorite thing about the day and what he is looking forward to tomorrow.”

For me, gratitude is also about a lack of entitlement, not viewing the bounty as deserving or not. I’ve had close encounters with lives suffered because of this belief in entitlement and moans over how they have not been given what was their just due.

As I write this article, in the still hours of the morning (it is 4:30 am), this year I want to especially thank the work of hundreds of thousands of people on whose free service so much of what I write rests. My blog runs on WordPress software, a free software. I am writing this article within Firefox, a free browser, running on Ubuntu Linux, another free service.

Most days I wake up with thanks on my lips, grateful for the life I have, for the lives breathing beside me, for the blessing of hearing someone call me “Papa”, for Shanthala who is the source of so much that is good in my life and my parents, who showered me with love and encouragement.

Other Related Links:

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions
...
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is                          - Thanks, W.S. Merwin

P.S: Click on a picture to view a bigger version.

Shanthala's Thanksgiving Dinner



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Hooked On Solar: Part 1

Posted on November 12, 2010
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$4.68.

That was our electricity bill for the whole year.

The story of this electricity bill began incongruously enough. Ever since we purchased this house, we wanted to get rid of the pool. We wanted a more usable backyard. When the previous owner of the house heard about our ideas for the pool, he called us up. He told us how the pool had been a labor of love for him, how he had constructed the pool with the best materials and equipment. He suggested some alternatives to get ourselves a bigger backyard such as extending our fence all the way to the sidewalk.

We were very new to the whole house owning experience and were warned of the dangers of getting poor quality on the pool removal. A bad job could, for example, result in the covered ground rising up like some ghostly swimming pool out for revenge when the rains began. Perturbed by the images that our imagination conjured up and daunted by another rather large expense after the most expensive purchase of our lives, we decided to keep the pool.

But the pool ended up nickel-and-diming us to death. It required some minimal maintenance to look clean and a little more than that to be usable. Based on a friend’s advice, we installed Polaris, a robotic pool cleaner. But that still required emptying the robot’s bag every other day or so, especially in the fall, when the trees stripped themselves bare. The robotic cleaner also didn’t get rid of the dust and grime that accumulated on the steps, which required that I scrub the steps with a brush. Scrubbing around the time the cleaner was on ensured that the dust didn’t just settle down again. Besides cleaning, I had to keep a constant supply of chemicals to keep the pool’s pH level appropriate. Mess up the pH and green algae would take hold, giving the pool a dirty, untended look, a real eyesore. Leave the algae a little longer and they’d become black algae which was even more painful to get rid of. The cleaning chores didn’t end there. The pool filter had to be cleaned, the skimmer had to periodically emptied, and the jacuzzi had to be cleaned separately because it was too small for the robotic cleaner to do an effective job.

In summer, the water evaporated and we had to constantly refill the pool with fresh water. I once forgot to securely shut the water and the water overflowed, out of the pool and into the backyard. Luckily, we caught it before it did any serious damage. And when the rains came, if it rained too hard and too long, the pool would overflow. So, we had to keep a pump handy to drain the water out of the pool if the pool’s water level got too high. The pool required that we filter the entire water at least once a day, which meant running a motor for about 8 hours every day to circulate all the water through the pool’s filters. Shanthala and I disliked the additional burden on water supply and electricity the pool created.

All this trouble would’ve been somewhat bearable if we used the pool regularly. We abhorred wasting electricity to heat the pool which meant the pool was usable only in the summer. The pool itself was not long enough to provide a decent lap distance. And since I was a bit tardy in maintaining the pool, when I wanted to swim, I had to first rid the pool of any detritus that had gathered since the Polaris had done its job, check that the chemical levels were appropriate and then start swimming. The net result was that I used the pool only a few times in the past decade. It got more use when our neighbors stopped by on hot summer days to cool themselves and their kids in the pool.

When Maya was born, the danger the pool posed to her finally tipped the scales in favor of closing the pool once and for all. Shanthala wanted to be able to roam the backyard, do her gardening and have Maya be part of the scene without worrying about the dangers of the pool.

A neighbor was redoing her pool and when we learned what a thorough job she had done in picking the guy for the job, we decided to hire her contractor to help us cover up the pool. It cost us half the amount we had originally thought that it might cost us and a month shy of Maya’s first birthday, the pool was gone.

The next step was covering the space with something. We liked seeing the green of a lawn, but loathed the criminal use of water that was the price of that sight. Shanthala investigated the pros and cons of artificial turf. After ensuring that the one we finally picked was free of any dangerous chemicals (we took the samples of the turf to a HAZMAT lab for analysis), we installed an Astroturf and got ourselves an eye-pleasing green backyard with enough room for Maya to run around and have fun.

Observing our green choices, the contractor asked us if we were interested in installing solar panels. He said that since the coming of Obama, the incentives for installing solar in residences had gone up. He was just getting his license to install solar panels and offered to do the job completely free of labor charges to gain the experience and show a reference to future customers.

Contrary to what many people think, I don’t view solar energy as solving the world’s energy problems. I suspect it will set off a whole different set of problems w.r.t. resource usage. Consider for example what it takes to make a solar panel. What materials are used in making it, what is the environmental impact of its manufacture, how long does it take before the panels produce more power than what it took to manufacture them. How long did the panels last and what was their warranty like ?

My investigations led me to Evergreen panels that were offered by a few solar installation companies. They were manufactured completely in the US and were therefore subject to far more stringent environmental laws than most of the world. Their manufacturing process had the lowest environmental impact compared to the other solar panels. Finally, in 13 months, they overtook the amount of energy it took to manufacture them by producing the equivalent energy; from then on it was a net gain. Fortunately, we live in a part of the world that enjoys gorgeous, sunny weather for most of the year.

Most panels come with two or three kinds of warranties. One covers the period that is labor free support (usually 5 years), one covers the period up to which the panels will produce up to 90% of their rating (usually 10 years) and a final one that covers the period up to which the panels will produce up to 80% of their rating (usually 25 years).

Our contractor meanwhile had teething trouble with his new venture and had to withdraw. But, we were already well down the solar road. We interviewed a few solar installation companies and settled on SolarCity. They were extremely efficient, doing most of the work on the telephone, dispensing with the sales pitch and glossy brochures. Using Google Maps they were even able to ask all relevant questions w.r.t the positioning of the panels on the rooftop and sent us a picture of what the final result would look like. Thanks to Obama, the feds offered a tax credit that was 30% of the total installation price (tax credit meant that we could deduct the amount from the total tax we owed independent of any cutoffs). Further, the local utility company offered us another 10-15% off the purchase price as part of California’s solar incentive program. So, even with the contractor withdrawing his offer of free labor, the difference in price between what he was charging and what we ended up paying was only about $1000 (though he was providing us with a higher wattage setup).

We found an experienced outfitter in SolarCity, one who was fully immersed in the modern world. For example, their initial inspection involved almost an entire day of determining how the cables would get laid out, how they would flow through the attic etc. All this work was photographed and made accessible to us via a password protected website. They also offered a monitoring service which again we could access to see all kinds of interesting statistics about the energy production.

Even before installing solar, our electricity bill was quite low. Despite living in a large 5 bedroom house, our average electricity bill was about $60 per month. Shanthala and I rarely turn on the air conditioner, we air dry our clothes (so almost zero use of the dryer), we never heated our pool and don’t possess many gadgets including any kind of TV. Based on our usage patterns for the past year, SolarCity estimated that we would need to install solar panels capable of producing 2.6kW.

Finally, at the beginning of November last year, the solar panels came on. According to state law, we would get credit for the excess energy that we produced, the credits accumulating up to a year. So, from November 2009 to October 2010, the credits would accumulate and in October, we would get a final bill that told us if we owed the local utility company any money or if we were net producers of energy. If we were net producers, we didn’t get any money back for the excess production. Starting January 2011, the local utility companies will also pay us for the excess production.

Is it financially a sound return on investment ? If you’re talking strictly about how many years is it before the installation cost pays off in savings over the electricity bill, we’re looking at a fairly long period, about 15 or so years, assuming that we made no changes to our lifestyle and that the electricity costs don’t change. This seems a long time for many, even those who are financially well off. But the very same people never question what is the payoff for something like installing granite or marble imported from some distant part of the world, or purchasing expensive furniture. Why is it that we ask a different set of questions about one kind of purchase versus another ? What aspects of our world view does this reflect ? For Shanthala and me, doing what little we can to reduce our carbon footprint so that our children may benefit from a more ecologically sound world (which includes their safety, BTW, because of the dangers of conflict due to resource crunches and effects of global warming) seems a sufficiently satisfactory return for our investment.

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Getting Rid of Open Loops

Posted on October 4, 2010
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“Nothing focuses the mind like a deadline.”

Image courtesy of flickr, picture by vambo25

I’ve lived a significant part of my life on this basis. There are things that I love to do and they get done immediately, regardless of how important or urgent they are. There are other things that get done only because they’ve become urgent. While I suspect it has been true through the ages, the modern world seems to throw up ever increasing numbers of things that we don’t like to do. We even coined a word for them. Chores. The very mention of the word makes one catatonic. Bills, taxes, groceries dishes to load, dishes to unload, trash to take out, groceries again because you forgot some things the first time, servicing the car, getting your tooth drilled and on and on and on. And a single category like bills hides the horror of the sheer number of them: auto insurance, credit card for each spouse, home insurance, land line, cell phone, website annual fee, garbage, electricity, mortgage.  The sheer ennui in just thinking of all of this makes me want to stop writing.

For a long time, I managed the list in my head and usually managed to avoid dropping the ball and forgetting to pay. But, occasionally I did forget to pay the credit card bill on time. When that happened, I’d call and wheedle customer support with statements such as my mostly impeccable payment history, my credit rating, my loyalty with the number of years of being with them to cancel the late fee and finance charges. Usually I won, but I did pay a late fee a couple of times in these past fifteen years or so. And when Maya was born, I forgot to pay the property tax on time and paid a hefty $300 penalty for missing the deadline by a day. I avoided using autopay on things like credit cards because I wanted to stay on top of our expenses and to eyeball the expense list to make sure that there were no fake charges. Overwhelmed eventually, I switched to autopay on most of them  (and I shudder to think of all the stamps I licked in the days before paying via the web).

Every now and then, I’d invest a little time in maintaining a todo list. In the days before laptops became more commonplace, I attempted the task with a notebook. I liked the way people carried notebooks or diaries and wrote in them. They looked important, professional, coherent and what they put down seemed vital. I wanted that. A diary full of vital stuff. But I didn’t carry the notebook or diary with me everywhere and even when I did, I often didn’t write them down because it seemed more work. “How could I forget about them, if they were important ?”, was my thinking.

Then the novelty of computers kicked in and I started using the computer to maintain todo lists. This had to be a superior solution to the paper. The computer could even popup reminders of an impending doom. So, I ran with this for a short time. And by short time, I mean not even a month. Very soon, I found myself ignoring things on my todo list and instead doing whatever it was that pleased me. The main problem seemed to be that I didn’t take my computer everywhere and quickly found myself reprioritizing my tasks based on things that were not present in the computer’s todo list. I didn’t get around to adding them to the list when I got to the computer because I was doing the next thing and it felt cumbersome to type up stuff that I could easily remember anyway.

I scouted for of books on time management and finally purchased the two classics in the genre, Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and Hyrum Smith’s  “10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management“. The only thing I still remember from Smith’s book is that everything comes with an invisible price tag, time. Every time we buy a new thing, be it a book, a CD, a gadget or a house, the thing we don’t seem to realize is that it takes time to deal with this new thing and time is what we seem to lack in this modern world. From the time I read the book, I still mostly remember to account for the time the new stuff will take. What I couldn’t figure out well enough was to get better at predicting accurately my estimate of the time a task would take. From Covey’s book, I took away the classic 4 quadrant method of deciding how to prioritize activities. But even the simple task of deciding what tasks went into what quadrant seemed onerous. I continued to sporadically attempt to use a todo program on the computer (which involved spending time looking at new tools to do the job), but it continued to go nowhere.

Next came the Palm handheld. I even invested some money in a software (called Datebk3) specially designed for the Palm that did a bunch of things that were better than the default diary application that came with the Palm. The Palm seemed to solve the problem of ubiquity. It was small enough to carry everywhere and data entry wasn’t too cumbersome. It could popup reminders and even show me the tasks and appointments in a single page. But a month later, I was back to doing things the old way. The todo list was languishing again.

Disappointed and clueless was I. I tried to analyze why I failed so repeatedly at setting up and maintaining a todo list, but couldn’t come up with a single good reason. Maybe it required practice and I couldn’t devote time to mastering it, maybe the list was for people with poor memory, maybe the list was for people with too many things to do, maybe there was no getting around the fact that these were chores and that I’d never get around to enjoying them. But I also didn’t seem to be doing badly, after all it was a rare occasion that I failed to pay a bill or my taxes.

So, the state remained. Things got dropped, they were not things that punished me for being late such as bills or taxes, or things that nagged or screamed at me, but were nevertheless important things. For example, I forgot to get myself a new Ecopass when the year dawned and had to make time to go collect it from the office instead of having it delivered to me. Before Maya was born, I usually forgot to get a flu shot. I still haven’t managed to schedule an appointment for an annual physical exam, I forget to schedule my eye exam for over six months. Or I’d race to beat the deadline and in the process drop the ball on a few things or blow up on Shanthala or stress myself out in finishing. And the things I thought were really important: a long list of writing ideas that I want to add to the blog but haven’t even started, a list of stuff that I started, but couldn’t get around to constructing a coherent narrative, books that I want to read, websites that I want to visit, news articles that merited a longer time with them. I noted all this in the corner of my mind, tried new tools every year or so and continued to dump them with the speed of a new year resolution.

One day, I came across an article on GTD rather accidentally. What caught my eye was this idea of open loops. According to David Allen, the inventor of GTD, recording the information is vital. Instead of merely remembering that I need to schedule an annual physical exam, if I could record the task in some tool, be it a software or even a piece of paper, I could go on to being more productive and even have a good chance of achieving the goal of scheduling a physical. In other words, scheduling was not as important as capturing the piece of information and eliminating the open loop of distraction that comes from having the thought continuously pop up in our mind like an out of whack alarm.

In that one fundamental idea of capturing information some place safe and outside our brain, I realized that the chief reason no todo list worked for me was that I relied too much on my memory to keep track of things. Internally, I still prided myself for remembering complex pieces of disconnected information (such as all my credit card numbers, the telephone numbers of all my friends, all kinds of trivia about movies and books, pieces of writing ideas and ideas and quotes from books). In India, people honored the ability to recite scripture from memory as much, if not more, than applying that knowledge. I remember Shanthala telling me how surprised she was in her residency program to hear world experts that she worked with claim their ignorance on some detail and look it up in a book without feeling they were somehow lesser mortals for doing so. In India, we almost never saw people who didn’t wince for forgetting some piece of information and needing to look it up. I grew up being patted on my back for my almost photographic memory. I was wedded to that image of myself.

The key to why I forgot to do so many things was not that I needed a system to prioritize and remind me as much as a system to capture the things to do. I had to get rid of the open loops.

N.B: The website 43folders (which may have been where I first encountered this idea) has an interesting speculation on why GTD appeals to geeks so much (I resist labels, but couldn’t help but see the geek in me when I read this list) :

  • geeks are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
  • geeks love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
  • geeks crave actionable items and roll their eyes at “mission statements” and lofty management patois
  • geeks like things that work with technology-agnostic and lofi tools
  • geeks like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
  • geeks are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they’re currently using)
  • geeks like fixing things on their own terms
  • geeks have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff
  • geeks are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
  • geeks love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
  • geeks crave actionable items and roll their eyes at “mission statements” and lofty management patois
  • geeks like things that work with technology-agnostic and lofi tools
  • geeks like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
  • geeks are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they’re currently using)
  • geeks like fixing things on their own terms
  • geeks have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff
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Another Adieu

Posted on September 21, 2010
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The faces in the photograph have started to fade. One by one, the faces will vanish until nothing is left except the empty benches and the memory of what was in the the picture. I am talking of a high school picture, the kind of group portrait taken in the urban schools across India during the 70s and 80s, when I attended such schools. The faded faces are those who are no longer with us. Spirits.

I was woken up on Sunday morning by a call from a high school friend who lives on the East Coast. A high school class mate of ours, living in India, had just collapsed of a massive heart attack and died before he reached the hospital. He was returning from a shopping mall with his wife. They were about to set off when he complained of feeling exhausted, too tired to even drive. He was a doctor, he knew something was wrong and asked his wife to get some help to drive him to a hospital. All this is only hearsay to me, of course. I imagine the face of his wife. Did she comprehend what was coming ? Did he know what was coming ?

He was my age or maybe a year younger. He has a son, studying in a residency school in a nearby town. His father is still alive, living in his home town. I imagine what it must be like to be his father, traveling through the night to bring back his dead son’s body. He is old, living alone, his wife deceased prematurely, just as we were at the threshold of adulthood. Leukemia had cut her stay short. In those days, in that small town, from the time they diagnosed her condition to the end was a horrifyingly short week. I think of the father, having survived all these years, to reach this point. How do you survive this, I wondered.

He was Shanthala’s class mate from kindergarten. She knew him better than I did. (Shanthala’s parents’ knew his family well, they worked together at the same hospital). She called him a sweet soul, who went out of his way to help others. He had mistaken the date of Maya’s first birthday, thus missing her birthday party in India. All we have of him maybe a picture from our wedding.

As she cried at the news, I quizzed my friend who called with the news, trying to ascertain the cause of death. Was he obese, I wanted to know. He had always been a little plump. Was he on any medication, had he run any physical recently that might’ve foretold this end ? Even as I was asking these questions, a part of my mind wondered at the questions we choose to ask at such a time. The causes may hardly stunt the grief of his loved ones. Our parents cried over the injustice of it all. How could someone good be taken by God, when so many bad people continue to live well ? How could someone so young be taken by God, when we old people, the forgotten and the lonely, still live ? It must be his karma. Ahh, the madness of causes, of our minds wanting a coherent narrative, a predictable storyline.

He is not the first amongst us to die. Another class mate died many years back. He committed suicide. He too was married, and if I remember correctly, had children. There may have been others, we don’t know where all our high school mates are.

Shanthala was upset the whole day. I wondered if some – however small – part of the sorrow is for ourselves, our own impending mortality. I had heard a poem, Gerald Manley Hopkins’ famous “Spring and Fall” and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. The poem is about a young girl, grieving over the dead leaves in the fall. The poem goes:

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Fall Over Pichetti Ranch

The day before I had seen a small flock of geese in a sullen sky, honking the impending fall. They were going home, was my first thought, before I corrected myself to say they’re flying south. As our hearts grow older, should we, like the geese, turn east ? For an immigrant like us, for whom home is not a place to seek refuge from, the mind turns over these questions, time and again. Even for people like me, who feels little for a place as home. I wondered if Shanthala’s grief was also about this ? The disconnected lives and abstract deaths of loved ones back in India. I’m reminded of a David McCord poem, a poem I’ve read to Maya, called “Runover Rhyme”:

Even the leaves hang listless,
Lasting through days we lose,
Empty of what is wanted,
Haunted by what we choose.

Not all the news of the past week has been sad. I’ve reconnected with friends from my first grade, friends I had not heard from in thirty years. One of them has managed to track me down, despite my un-Facebookness. One of them is someone I still remember as my first “best friend”. We make plans to meet when we visit India. Maya has started to speak full sentences, making them up in ways that are new to her, new to our ears in her voice. Last night, unable to sleep, she turned to me and said in Kannada, “Dini, Mayange bahala hotte hasdide” (Dini, I’m so hungry). She switches (and translates) between three languages – Kannada, Spanish and English – fluently. After a long time, Maya and I spent a whole day together yesterday. As I write this, Maya is laughing a full throated laugh at something that Shanthala is doing.

As I processed the events of the past two days, my mind settled on a quote that I read in an article about the end of life in this country. Written by a neurosurgeon, the quote is from Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. Approaching the end, the archbishop says to a younger priest, “I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”

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