Little E Turns Three

Inspired by the story, "Curious George and the Dump Truck".

Where in the world?

Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong

Baby C home in Colorado

 

Heading Back to China

We just received our travel authorization from China! Headed out in six weeks to pick up baby sister.  More to come in the next month.  

We're Alive, Baby.

Just wanted y'all to know that we're still alive. Particularly the wonder dog, who turned nine yesterday, thus completing one more speedy ride around the sun.  The little black dog has been cancer free for six months and we are grateful, grateful, grateful.

The Metrics of Cancer

I stare out the bathroom window at the full moon and watch gauzy clouds roll across the dark sky.  Naked cottonwood branches stretch into view, long tendrils hungry for spring, unable to reach a perfect moon.  I try to clear my thoughts, but dirty words - like sarcoma and radiograph and malig-Nancy – jerk in and out of my head uninvited. I am an optimist. But I am a raving, fearful lunatic when faced with the mortality of this pack.

I jog downstairs to do something, anything, to operationalize the ethic of my oldest and best friend, who once said: “fake it til you make it”.  She made it, past death and pain and loss and love and she is still all style and grace.  And so, I straighten papers.  I make notes for tomorrow’s lecture. I send cheerful emails to students with a time stamp of 3 am.  Then I hear her sturdy paws tap tap tap wooden stairs and watch her peer around the corner, pleading dark eyes, awaiting a middle-of-the-night treat.  A low and a slow wag followed by a dramatic drop to the carpet. A groan. I catch a glimpse of her incision, six inches of staples, tiny teeth clamping flesh to flesh.  I wonder if I will ever sleep again.

Earlier tonight the vet tells me the black dog has a poorly differentiated level three sarcoma. For a moment the words sound Icelandic. I imagine each vowel and consonant sliding off a slippery fishing boat, dwelling forever with the Atlantic cod. I scribble the jargon down on a wrinkled gray notepad while the small boy plays with penny racers at my feet. The Engineer is not yet home. Level 3  - like a video game result. Not possible. Not possible. Not possible. Impossible. She is only eight years old.  We had already arranged for her immortality.  She has been folded into sabbatical plans and has yet to swim in the ocean. 

I believe in statistics, the ones that favor the home team. If the odds are against, simply course correct and jettison the metrics in favor of hope and dharma.  

Diagnosis: it’s a jelly side down day, made stickier by a night without sleep, so I  take my cues from the black dog instead.  The sun rises. We gobble down string cheese by the fridge, breaking food rules, and curl up on the floor in a broad sun shaft. She has mastered the art of slowness - in all ways but one. I wonder if Milan Kundera would weep.

Field Trip!

We huddle in the cold around an elderly man who explains the mechanics of landfills while students stand with fists stuffed in stubby pockets gazing up at a mountain of accumulated debris.  Gulls scavenge and reel above our heads. A hungry yellow dozer jerks up and down the trash heap carrying with it an American flag.   The guide shares his intimate knowledge of this place and we gaze in astonishment at the mountain and  all of the s%$# -- the razor scooter, the pea green couch, the squeaky kid toys – that intelligent people throw instead of give away.

I watch the students closely and wonder if they think I’m ramming the anti-consumer lesson down their throats.  But then I remember that I don’t want to be their friend.

A student leans in and whispers to me: “Can we get closer to the mountain?”

“No, sorry, we can’t. We’ve been advised against it. It's a policy designed to keep us safe.”

She grins when I say this. I like her. In fact, I like all of them for showing up here today.

Another student asks the same question. They share the same desire to dig in and peel back of layers of human history and get their hands dirty.  They see the perfectly fixable garden hoses and slightly dented space heaters and scraped up German pint glasses.

We learn from our guide that we’ll be treated to a special visit: the landfill’s toxic and hazardous materials section. Here we’re shown bins of mercury and Agent Orange, ammonia, and enough solvents to fill a suburban bathtub. 

We walk back toward the trash heap and hear about a project in the works to harness the landfill’s methane.  But it is the mountain itself that obsesses these students. Most of them were born and raised climbing Colorado’s 14-ers or racing down slopes on multi-colored boards. They know mountains.

“I could use that tiny blue plastic table”, say a girl majoring in elementary education.

“Did you see that retro refrigerator?” says another.

“This is unbelievable”, says a third.

And then another student cries. 

I put my arm around her shoulder and ask if she’s all right. All she can say is: “It’s just too much”.  Other students nod their heads. They puff cold morning air into tiny discrete clouds and avert their eyes toward the sky. Sobering. The place is like a Target store after an earthquake.

And it is too much. The recent layer of usable ephemera heaped upon that rickety pile. The brazen American flag atop the dozer covering one county’s shame.  The reeling gulls.  What is it about those damn gulls? Each of them scanning the loot while lofting above, anxious and willing to turn our trash into treasure.

La Veta, Colorado

Outside La Veta, Colorado in the beautiful San Luis Valley.

The Pen and the Cheetah

He strides up and down the hall outside my office until he finds the courage to step inside. 

I first spotted him on an airplane at 35,000 feet as we jetted toward Frankfurt. The young man – dark and lean and smallish and nervous - paced up and down the aisles of Lufthansa’s shiny new plane, scratching his head, his eyes wide and scared. A terrorist. A nervous flyer. Anybody’s guess.

Six months later I notice him on campus sitting near a Cottonwood tree with three friends under the hot summer sun. I introduce myself. Here from Saudi Arabia, he remembers well that turbulent flight high up in the clouds. And so we talk.

One year more and he is enrolled in my geography course.

“I have a gift for you”, he says now, standing in my dark office.

“I haven’t submitted grades yet”, I smile.

“You are my fa-vor-ite professor,” he says. “And I want-ed to thank you”.

“I am your only professor”.

“Ac-tu-ally, I am taking two classes.”  He grins and reveals a shiny new set of braces.  The terrorist with the generous heart.

He zips open his backpack to reveal a slender wooden box engraved delicately in Arabic text.  Inside is a steel blue pen as thin as a cinnamon stick.

“It is your name, professor”, he says shyly.

“How do I know that?” I joke.

“You must let me teach you Arabic. Come to Saudi Arabia to visit my family. We can help you get visa. You and your family.”   He says “fam-i-lee” as if speaking of three separate islands linked together by stone.

“Thank you”.

Together we walk to the classroom and the last day of student presentations commences.  His topic is wildlife hunting in southern Arabia.  He stands before the class and in halted English shows slides of sand storms and of close friends in long white dishdashas.  Figures sit in green jeeps and camp under the stars, a faraway sky.

Suddenly, he grabs his ear and abruptly leaves the classroom. Students stare ahead at the vacant front podium and then turn around to meet my gaze.

I stand and walk out into the hallway. I find him leaning against a wall holding his head in one hand. Scared.  I have come to learn that his father owns a skyscraper in Riyadh.  That he knows falconry and how to survive an Arabian sandstorm. He has battled discrimination for being a Saudi here on the prairie. But today, he is frozen in fear.  The classroom is 35,000 feet in the sky.

I signal that we should return and finish. 

“You’re doing fine”, I say, because he is.

And so he completes his presentation the way most of us do in youth. With a halting, screeching stop, an attempt to end a conversation you never wanted to start.

“Ques-tions?” he asks, rhetorically, quietly, to his young audience.

Silence.

And then, from the front of the class:

“I have a comment more than a question”, the student adds, his rigid hand pointing toward the sky.  He is The One With Something To Say.

“In America…..” he begins loudly… a kind of declaration, “we usually add references at the end of the presentation. That’s what we do in America.”

It is an “America” in all caps, singular, final, punctuated, an America in charge of all things Power Point.  

“Thank you,” the speaker says softly. “I am sorry, I understand”.

I pray that he doesn’t.

But then: A tall girl in the back raises her hand, asks a question about peregrine falcons.  The Saudi student warbles his response, still agitated, but a young man in an oversized hoodie blurts out a story about elk hunting in the Rockies. Laughing. More hands rise.  More questions.  More comments.  The One With Something to Say falls silent. The students are a fomenting a revolution against one of their own. Normally quiet, the group brews up a deliberate storm of noise and confusion borne out of compassion for the student at the podium. They are building bridges in the sky for a boy whose father owns a cheetah.