Social Awareness

Sometimes it happens: a situation or a person calls me to sudden clarity and I realize that the "daily grind" I swear off and swear about and swear by is an altered state of reality. I am guilty of being obtuse. I am dutiful and hardworking. I worry that one misstep on my part can cause the whole of my personally constructed universe to fall apart. (Can you see it now, that solar system model made out of paper Mache falling off its wire hanger? Landing on the floor, all of its interplanetary strings a tangled disaster. Saturn's rings broken off. No biggie, nothing a little Elmer's glue can't fix.) But sometimes I can look beyond and realize that there are others out there and I, unsuspecting denizen of Planet Where-Ever, never saw them there. (Maybe being "spacey" isn't such a bad thing.)



Like many busy moms, I sometimes like to unwind by getting a pedicure. One Saturday morning I was looking forward to the relaxation and hour away from my kids this would afford me. As always, I have my iPhone nearby with its ready array of novels loaded to the Kindle app. I begin to read a novel set during an insurgence in Sri Lanka. Where is Sri Lanka? I can't even recall. I read about brutal war time deaths half a world away.



I pause from my reading a moment to glance at my manicurist. I notice that she is a slight woman, but her hands are strong as she massages lotion into my heels and the balls of my feet. The thought occurs to me that if ever I am to be a good writer, I will have to do what Ondatjee, Kingsolver, and Fadiman have already done. I must step outside of my natural, childish shyness and talk to strangers. I have to be aware that they exist. I have to become an interested, therefore interesting, person. A senseless resistant insecurity warns me that I am stepping onto unfamiliar territory, but a stronger force tells me that it is time to grow up.



"Where are you from?" I ask this middle-aged woman who is now tearing at my cuticles with clippers.



She looks up a bit startled, but with a pleasant smile.



"Vietnam." Her accent is thick.



"How long have you lived in Lake Havasu?"



"One year."



"Do you like it here?"



"Yes. I come here with my daughter." She gestures to the girl with the blunt cut bangs and perfect almond eyes crouched in front of the spa chair next to mine. "She is 20."



"She is very beautiful," I reply.



"And that is my brother." She gestures to the man across the salon who is filing a woman's nails. "He's been here nine year. I come here to work for him."



She continues to talk softly in broken English. It is hard to hear over the top of the classic rock station promo truck parked outside. I think she is describing her work day. I understand "5:00 AM exercise" and "9:30 Come to shop." Other than that her words are lost somewhere between my poor audio processing skills (I said I was obtuse) and "Dust in the Wind." She looks satisfied and proud.



As she paints my toenails a vibrant red, I try to imagine this woman leaving her home and traveling to a world every bit as foreign to her as Vietnam is to me. I think of what her first shy days at work must have been like, hunched over working scrupulously at a new trade, trying to pick up a new language. I imagine her avoiding conversations with cutomers- so difficult to understand or to reply in a different tongue. That is as far as I can try to fill in the blanks. And I am struck to think that this woman, crouched at my feet, finishing my nails with a careful filigree has done something much more courageous than will ever be required me.

Pilgrimage

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droughte of March hath perced to the roote And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendered is they flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne, And smale fowles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open eye- (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages); Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages. . .                                      Geoffery Chaucer- The Canterbury Tales Like Chaucer's pilgrims of old, my family and I harkened to the call of spring and took some time off to travel.  Chaucer is right; spring is a great time to leave home and see the countryside. Unfortunately, I did not have the pleasure of traveling with the loquacious Wife of Bath, the jolly cook, or the creative nun's priest, but like Chaucer's pilgrims, there was good company and a lot of  great stoytelling.  The pilgrimage is as archetypical to religion as the snake and the tree, the flood, or the apocalypse.  The Buddists travel to Kapilavastu to see the Buddah's birthplace.  Jews and Christians alike travel to Israel to see where prophets strode.  Many still travel to Greece to make their winding way to Delphi.  Unlike the pilgrims of old or the steadfast Tibetan monks, my family and I boarded a plane.  The location was not particularly exotic: it was no Thebes, Lhasa, or Jerusalem.  In fact, it is a little known place except to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons.)  We spent our spring break in Missouri and Illinois to visit sites only as ancient as the 1840's. Like Chaucer's pilgrims who travled to visit the resting place of the martyr Sir Thomas a' Becket, we travled to sites related to the founding prophet of our religion and martyr, Joseph Smith.  We saw the jail in Liberty, Missouri where Smith and seven of his follwers were held captive for five brutal winter months and where Smith received some of his most hopeful revelation that has now been canonized in modern scripture.  We traveled to (and spent most of our time in) Nauvoo, Illinois built on the banks of the Mississippi River by early Mormon settlers: a testament to their faith and work ethic.  There, we saw the homes and tombs of the martyred prophet and his brother, Hyrum Smith.  One brisk morning, we traveled to Carthage, Illinois to visit the Carthage Jail (ironically a much more hospitable place than Liberty) where Joseph and Hyrum Smith were shot and killed by an senseless mob (the door still bears the bullet holes from that day.) Perhaps my family and I did not have to walk to Mecca and suffer en route (does a turbulent flight count?),  but the purpose of our pilgrimage was much the same for us as it has been for pilgrims throughout time:  to make it real; to explore and examine and reaffirm the roots of our belief. During my time in Illinois, I was able to walk where my ancestors once walked and to see that my life, like theirs, is only one part of a greater work.

Fear and Loathing in Havasu

This weekend, my family vacationed in Sacramento where summer is the finest time of year. The world is a proliferation of green. The trees have burst into floral abundance; the lawns are bright and lush. There are tall maples, shorter flowering trees, fruit trees, weeping willows, tall coniferous wind breakers: more trees than a desert dweller like myself can even imagine. My girls look out the car windows, "Mom, look at all those purple flowers." "Mom, look they have roses in their yard." "Mom, can we pick flowers?"

Sacramento summer days can be hot, but the the nights are mild with soft, fragrant breezes. It's weather that compels a person to sit at on the back porch at dusk and listen to the drowsy chirp of cicadas.

In contrast, summer in Lake Havasu, my home town, is god-forsaken. The months of June, July, and August are so hot and withering few living creatures survive and the ones that do wish they could die. In fact, Havasu claims the distinction of being the hottest city in the 48 contiguous states rivaled only by Death Valley for its overall heat records. Needless to say, instead of lush, green lawns and flowering trees, Havasuvians landscape with gravel. My husband and I have started calling the popular landscaping of the area, "the Havasu lump." This refers to the fact that all yards here consist of the same basic plan: a base layer of neutral colored gravel raked out to cover the entire yard that is then spotted with occassional "lumps" of gravel in a contrasting color. Any variety of objects might be sticking out of/sitting on top of these mounds. It could be a cluster of short palm trees, or a rusty farm implement, or a crafty lawn (or should I say gravel) ornament, or a wooden fence post. . .the possibilities are endless. Strangely enough, due to the overall lack of water and the triple digit temperatures all summer long, people in Havasu do not generally have lawns.

When temperatures reach 115-125 degrees, it is hard for me to not feel slightly envious of my Sacramento relatives. When I see children running through sprinklers on the concrete in their parents' driveways, I do ocassionally question why on god's green earth do I live here? When I describe Havasu to someone who has never visited before, this is how it generally goes, "Havasu is a place with a history that dates back as far as the invention of central air conditioning and then to give the town an air of history and antiquity, they imported the London Bridge."

Despite Havasu's peculiarities, there is a stark beauty to the rugged desert terrain. The land is so unembellished that the beauty of the desert is found in shape and contrast rather than in rich, rolling earth. The lake itself is scintillating in the sunlight and, in the heat of the afternoon, looks vast, deep, bejeweled, and luxuriant. Perhaps the beauty of Havasu can be found in what we don't have. Only in this landscape could the thorny ocotillo or the stately seguaro be considered beautiful.

My relationship with this town is like that of a mother and her ugly child. She can point out his lopsided ears or his too big nose, but if anyone else criticizes, the fight is on.