Half a Million Minus Two

That’s how many people are going to try to stuff themselves into an eight-block by four-block, fragile, historic, abused-and-still-lovely city.

You can guess who the minus two are….

It might have been the empty rum bottle that got launched at Mr. Fernández, that early morning last year. Granted he was screaming, but so were they. (Now that Franny’s not stirring about, can I get away with saying “well, they started it first?” Or will I get a celestial response on the lines of “well, if everybody jumped out the window….”) Or perhaps it’s the sight of body fluids you really don’t want to see or—especially—smell. And there is something nice about sleep.

The half-million will be celebrating Las Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián, a charming and also terrible festival that occurs every year at the end of January.

How can it be both charming and terrible?

It’s really two festivals. The first takes place during the day; families come out, stroll through the streets, buy artisan pieces, enjoy the weather.

After dark, it gets considerably edgier. To me, over-the-edgier. Imagine a crowd of people in which a new form of involuntary locomotion gets invented. I tried it once—I lifted my feet, and was carried by the crowd.

And no, it was not relaxing.

Add into this mix “music” at very high volumes. Then a collective blood alcohol level of at least .25. Plus, some idiot dreamed up this stupid horn (called something like “zarzuela”, but it’s not) that is way loud, and guess who has one outside of my door?

Very good—everyone.

It was all dreamed up quite recently in 1970 by a charming old lady, doña Rafaela Valladares, who thought it would be nice to help the artisans, get the neighbors together, raise a little money, and extend Christmas (which hardly needs it). Well, it took off, since Puerto Ricans never need to be urged to party harder. Party is something we do in Puerto Rico.

And there are good things about the Fiestas. You can see cabezudos like this:

Or how about the vejigantes?

Remember when the teacher left the room? That’s how the evening starts out. As  the night goes on and the drunkenness goes up, it turns into a stampede just about to happen. You definitely have to be young to endure it.

Oh, and by the way—thanks for asking—the bottle missed.

But why stick around for the next one?

Will We?

Well, there’s great news this morning, something to lift the spirits of even the churliest (knew that wasn’t gonna fly) of spirits.

Coca-Cola has joined the fight against obesity!

Yup, they’re getting right into the fight, the brawl, the tumult. Here they are, their gloves taken off and their fists swinging!

"…beating obesity will take action by all of us, based on one simple, common-sense fact: all calories count, no matter where they come from. And if you eat and drink more calories than you burn off, you'll gain weight."

Well, that’s reasonable, isn’t it? And they point out that of their 650 beverages, 180 have no calories. You can always drink that water.

"We've never been more committed to doing our part to help address the issue of obesity," Coca-Cola spokesman Ben Scheidler said in an e-mail, adding that "2013 is going to be a landmark year in terms of expanding partnerships and efforts to educate consumers about energy balance."

Whew. Well, it’s good to know that we’re all on the same page, all moving unitedly (stop it, computer) together, all taking this battle on. Now that Coke is on the team, we can really stamp out that little problem afflicting two out of three Americans…their bellies / thighs / behinds.

Nor is it just Coca-Cola that is exercising corporate responsibility and benevolence—look at the latest effort of our friends in the NRA! Here’s Leslie Horn's lead:

Here is some free PR advice for the National Rifle Association: Now is not the time to release a target practice iOS app—especially one intended for kids. According to the NRA, the app is intended for children as young as age four.

Yup, target practice, and not with just any gun. For an additional buck, you can be practicing with an AK47 or an MK11.

Readers of this blog may not be familiar with these guns. OK—fess up. I didn’t have a glimmer of an idea what these things are. So I looked up what the navy seals had to say.

The US Navy MK11 Mod 0 Sniper Weapon System (SWS) is based on the highly-accurate SR-25 automatic rifle. It was originally conceived and constructed to meet a requirement placed by the Navy SEALs. The MK11 is a highly accurate and durable, precision semiautomatic sniper rifle that operates like an M16 or M4A1, and can deliver a 7.62mm round out to 1,500 yards. Due to its high degree of accuracy, (.5 inch MOA), it is has won acceptance by U.S. Special Operations Forces as one of the finest semiautomatic sniper rifles in the world.

Guys? You’ve designed an app for people who have a very poor sense of what reality and non-reality is. Or maybe I can put it simpler. A kid sees a toy gun. He picks it up. He says, “Bam, you’re dead” to his friend Billy, who promptly falls over dead. Hey, fun!

Second scenario. A kid sees his father’s gun. He picks it up. He says, “Bam, you’re dead” to his friend Billy….

You know the rest of the story. Or maybe you don’t. I’m not a parent, but I do.

So what’s with the NRA? How the hell can they be such morons?

I have a little secret for all you guys out there. Despite all the touting about how business is efficient, how—unlike government—it operates like a well-oiled machine, it doesn’t. Trust me, I know. I worked in the biggest company in the world, and saw insanity on a daily, hourly, almost-minutely basis. So I’m not surprised when Coca-Cola makes its grand gesture—coming out slugging against obesity.

Which yes, can kill. And as senselessly as a gun. So isn’t it inconsistent that I laugh at Coca-Cola yet go crazy on the NRA? Aren’t they both killers?

Is it visual? It’s hard to see a death by diabetes, as opposed to the blood and viscera on the schoolroom wall. And a gunshot wound is more immediate than an elevated blood sugar.

Whatever it is, we’ve got a problem. Every time there’s been a tragedy, we go crazy. We clamor for gun control, we march, we write letters and put flowers on the school door and light candles. Then we go back to our lives.

The NRA knows that. And unlike the sane “us,” the crazy “they” are steadfastly passionate. Their guns are their lives, or a big part of them. All they have to do is wait. We’ll go away, until the next atrocity.

Or will we?

Big Deal

I know the official line, which goes as follows: you don’t out anybody unless they’re advocating against gay rights.

So that means that even though you know Senator Smith (you do know that’s made up, don’t you?) is as queer as a three-dollar bill, and you have the photos to prove it, you keep it quiet. But the moment he bangs the drum for family values and the sanctity of marriage? National Enquirer!

I also think that the progress on LGBT issues made in my lifetime has been remarkable. I’ve gone from being sick / disgusting / going-to-hell to being legally married (at least in Massachusetts) and ho-hum-what-did-you-say-oh-you’re-gay?

And the reason for that change?

I wrote a letter to my brothers. I told them I was gay. They took it as they did—one brother easily, another with more difficulty. But the point is that I did it.

So did a lot of people. So much so that gay characters appeared on sit-coms. It became trendy to have a gay friend. And now we’ve got a president who appears at gay events and speaks out for marriage equality.

I did that. Along, of course, with a hell of a lot of other people….

It wasn’t particularly easy. I remember the real fear that I would crush my parents. Jack had a bad heart, the family legend said; he went to the army to enlist in World War II and flunked his physical. Then went to the Mayo Clinic to get evaluated. So would he get up and have a heart attack if I told him? And how can I tell Mom without telling Dad? How is she supposed to go on, with this big secret between them?

So it took courage, for me and all of the rest of us to do what we did. And face it, there were some people who got told, “don’t come home again—not until you’ve changed.” Just as there are parents even today sending their kids off to therapists and programs “designed” to change sexual orientation.

All of this is leading up to Ricky Martin, who tweeted congratulations yesterday to Jodie Foster for being open about her twenty-year relationship with another woman. “This is your moment,” he said. And went on to say that we all do it at our own rate.

And here is where I get stuck.

“How’s Raf,” said Pete, a neighbor of my mother’s.

Pete is an absolutely completely normal Wisconsin guy. He’s got a business installing gutters. He owns guns, goes hunting, drinks beer, drives a truck. You could call him a redneck, but find me the redneck who completely gets that I’m gay, and congratulates me matter-of-factly when I get married.

OK—would he be that way if Franny hadn’t completely accepted, and spoke openly about my homosexuality? Would my cousin’s wife—the one who speaks to the Lord every day—be chatting with Raf at Franny’s memorial service? Everybody who comes out invites other people to come out, too, and news flash—straight people can be in the closet too. Because if you’re straight and think gay people are going to hell or sick or whatever, you’re in the closet.

The irony of it is that once you’ve done it, the rumors, the suspicions, the dark speculations go away. How many trees died because the tabloids spent twenty years luridly hinting—change that to screaming—that Ricky was gay? Or reporting that a man had been seen entering his home late at night? Or that he was seen on a Caribbean beach with a bunch of guys?

So I don’t know. Ricky doesn’t have to tell everybody the details of what he does in bed. But I wonder—does a public figure have an obligation to speak out, or at least acknowledge he’s gay when asked? Right—he’s a singer / performer, not a sexologist. Why should it matter?

I think Jeanne Manford, the founder of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) would have the answer. Everybody has to come out: the rich and famous; the poor and unknown; prominent or insignificant. Scratch that—nobody is insignificant.

And that’s the point.

She was just a schoolteacher at PS 32 in Queens when she walked down the street in Greenwich Village that summer day in 1972. She was carrying a handmade sign. It was just another day in her life.

No big deal.

Wrong—it was.

Now Then

Well, having dispatched our puppet—La Comay—to wherever it is he went off to, what’s next? We have, as we used to say corporationally (OK, computer, businessly? Companally? Does ANYTHING make you happy?), many opportunities down here. One person in seven is using drugs. Murder rate is over a thousand a year. Forty eight percent of the population is living below poverty level.

‘Well, at least we have absolutely no problems with snow removal,’ I thought on the morning trot, after having glanced at the New Day’s front page. Gobierno irá contra los padres, announced the headline. The Government Is Going After the Parents?

Hunh? Why? What have they done?

It started when our new governor visited a school two days ago, and discovered that very few of the parents had bothered to pick up their children’s report card, much less attend parent / teacher conferences.

How few?

A Department of Education spokesperson says only 30% of parents pick up the grades.

So the government gave the parents un halón de orejas or an ear pulling. It’s a common Puerto Rican chastisement. And now, they’re hitting where it hurts.

It seems that parents get all kinds of benefits from the state—plan 8, that’s the apartment. Tarjeta de salud—free medical care. Departamento de la Familia—money and food. You’ve pretty much got your life taken care of, right there.

But to get all this, the agencies require documents verifying that you do have a kid, and that she or he is in school. So the teachers spend time filling out these documents.

Hunh?

Let me put this car in reverse and tell you that I’m not at my best today. Yes, I did the trot, but it was more instinct / habit than Marc out there. I spent most of yesterday on the only throne I’ll ever own, and when I wasn’t there, I was in bed. I am, to speak frankly, metaphorically and literally flushing out the holidays.

Which may be why this situation, even on an island with a zest for absurdity, seems crazy.

OK—let’s do a list:

1. Teachers teach. They don’t fill out documents, or teach values, or police the school grounds. They just teach, for which they should be paid as much as the governor, easily.
2. Parents parent. Part of which is to say to the kid that the teacher is to be respected, and part of which is to make sure that the teacher is…respectable (OK, but you know what I mean.) Another part of which is to make sure that their kids know—school is work, your education is the most important thing in your life right now, and will be for the rest of your life.
3. Governments govern. Which means that I can drink the water (no), drive the roads without breaking an axle (no), go out on the street at night (what, are you crazy?), or send my kid to a public school (unthinkable).

Right, so now we have all the roles defined. Let’s talk about those public schools.

“Lock your kid in the marquesina!” I was once busily saying—actually repeating—to a student. She had just told me that she had announced to the director of the private school her kids were in, “the only reason I’m paying you ten grand a year is that gate over there!”

(A break for anyone who doesn’t know what a marquesina is. It’s a garage, but much more. It’s also a place where you sit, where you entertain neighbors, where you drink beer and watch fights. Importantly, it’s enclosed and has a gate that can be locked. So it’s safe.)

In the public schools, there are no substitute teachers. So what happens when missis (common nickname for a teacher—a little hangover from the Americans) is missing? The school dumps the kids on the street.

OK—so maybe your child has a cell phone and you’re at home, eating bonbons and reading French novels. You hop in the car and get your kid.

Oh, sorry—forgot. That was the fifties.

If you really would prefer that your child not become a street urchin, then you pay for a private school. The education—with some exceptions, of course—is just as dreadful. But they’ve got a gate and a lock and you know where you kid is gonna be when you drop him or her off at seven in the morning. Now all you gotta do is deal with the boss.

Well, my solution was to lock the kid up in the marquesina every day—with, of course, the 500$ of textbooks you shelled out for him. No, it’s not abuse. You’ll give him food and drink, safety, bathroom, etc. You could, of course, put a closed-circuit monitoring system in the marquesina, and follow him periodically throughout the day. Tremendous idea, if I do say so myself: thinking outside the caja as usual!

Well, I thought it was a good idea.

Predictably, it was shot down.

What I am telling you at obscene length is that the public schools are terrible, for the most part.

It now must be said.

You don’t have a right to have a kid. Not if you’re so damned stupid and lazy and uncaring that you can’t hustle your fat Departamento-de-la-Familia-fed ASS down to the school to pick up a report card. I can’t prevent you from having a kid, but I sure as hell won’t support you, you lazy fat cow who stands in front of me in the supermarket while your kids play tag between my knees, and you’re eating chips and drinking Coca-Cola—too damn busy to fish out your tarjeta de la familia card to pay for all the junk you’re slopping into your kids!

Whew….

Now then, back to bed…. 

Death of a Puppet

We won’t know if it’s a game changer until, well, we see the game change. But it’s looking very much like one.

Readers of this blog in the continental US will know that there is—sorry, that’s was—a character on local TV called La Comay. And La Comay—who in real life was a guy but who donned female clothing and a big foam head, atop of which was an awful wig—dished up just the kind of stew we all love: racy, gossipy, no-holds-barred and take-no-prisoners.

OK—not all of us. Neither Mr. Fernández nor I ever watched the program. My old boss Ofelia actively unwatched the program once in a doctor’s office. The show was on, the dish was flowing, the patients / viewers were sniggering. So Ofelia strode to the head of the room, stood in front of the television, announced that she was sure of the good taste and genteel sensibilities of everyone present, and knew that they must be offended by the program. Therefore she would take the liberty of turning it off. She did, and the room became one of the quietest places ever heard in Puerto Rico.

There was pretty much nowhere she didn’t go, La Comay. A student who had been a news anchor on another television channel once told me that in the middle of a painful divorce, she didn’t need La Comay commenting on her marital problems for all of Puerto Rico—and Orlando, New York, Chicago—to hear. She was having trouble enough.

Readers will also know that La Comay strolled into what was a particularly grisly murder and made insinuations. What was the victim doing on a certain street at night? Did he know his assailants? Wasn’t the street rife with male and female prostitution?

In short, she got right up to if not quite over the cliff of he-had-it-coming.

Standard stuff.

What was unusual was the reaction. Seemingly with the speed of toadstools cropping up after a rain, Ricky Martin and a host of other celebrities were holding signs saying “Todos somos Jose Enrique.” Then a boycott of the show was announced. Facebook and Twitter went onto overdrive.

Corporate sponsors left the show in droves. Here’s a little list:

Triple-S, Coca-Cola, Ford, Chevrolet, WalMart, AT&T, Sprint, Goodyear, Harris Paint, SC Johnson, Dish Puerto Rico, Claro, Kress, Lanco, Borden, Red ATH, Vanilla Gift Card, Enfamil, Ashley Furniture Store, Aqua Fresh, Carolina Herrera, Mon Cheri, Radio Isla 1320, Lenel Restaurant, Designer Shoe Warehouse, ICPR Junior College, PMC Medicare Choice, MMM, Kia, Burlington Coat Factory, MAPFRE, Goya, Corona Extra, Welch’s, Cold Stone Creamery, Plaza del Caribe, Gillette, Hellmann’s, Mayagüez Resort & Casino, Palo Viejo, Asociación de Productos de Puerto Rico y St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.

Well, money talks, but also on occasion screams. The manager of the TV station demanded that the program stop being recorded live, but pre-recorded and—presumably—vetted. La Comay said forget it, and walked.

All of this is surprising. More surprising is that the nemesis of La Comay, who is looking very much like the victor here, is a gay activist born on the island and living currently in New York. Nor did he start the battle recently—he had declared it in 2006, when he said “su más grande castigo, como homofóbico que es, que sea un hombre abierta y orgullosamente gay el que ayude a sacarlo de la televisión”. (Roughly, “his biggest punishment, given the homophobe he is, would be for an openly and proudly gay person to help take him off television.”)

The activist is Pedro Julio Serrano, born in Ponce, raised in Isla Verde, and now the director of communications for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. We are not in Puerto Rico by any means the most macho of Latin countries. But we are a Latin country. And for a gay guy to spearhead the movement to topple an icon—however disagreeable—like La Comay?

Major.

Pedro Julio Serrano (left), with his fiancé, Steven

Interesting Times

Well, we live in interesting times, or maybe it’s just that now, with our technology, we can see just how interesting the times are. Peering into CNN this morning, I saw a guy who was totally carried away. Why? For the first time a giant squid has been seen! And we have footage! Wow! He could barely sit in his chair—by comparison, kids on Christmas morning are blasé.

Well, the giant squid is interesting. I didn’t know that it had been the subjects of myths for centuries—a giant sea creature that swarms up and devours boats. They don’t—apparently—but they are big. Until now, they’ve only been seen when they washed ashore, dead. But they can get to be 60 feet; that’s several school buses.

Have a look—not at a giant squid but at the largest squid of all: the colossal squid.

Something to see, right? You’d remember that day of fishing….

Of course, you’d also remember being in Manila yesterday. That’s because nine million people decided to celebrate the procession of the Black Nazarene.

I can hear the question….

The Black Nazarene is a sculpture made in Mexico in the early 1600’s. It was transported to the Philippines by a galleon that, according to legend, caught fire, blackening but not burning the statue. So three times a year, six to eight million people walk barefoot—in honor of you-know-whom—through the streets of Manila. Well, maybe not walk—“jostle” is the word Wikipedia used. Oh, and “trample” as well, at times resulting in death. The deal? Wiping a white towel on the statue—it’s supposed to bring you good luck.

Listen, everybody, I would hate to antagonize my Philippine readership, and you know that I tiptoe on the topic of religion—but is this rationale? Sorry, forgot that the Philippines is also where they nail people up on crosses every Good Friday. So maybe Manila wasn’t the place to be, yesterday.

Of course, where you REALLY didn’t want to be was with the guy in clip below. But how fascinating to watch someone so fascinated and seemingly so fearless.

There is something compelling about a polar bear…..

104,000 Nuts, All Armed

The great thing about not following popular culture is that it’s so relaxing. I walk by the sea with Bach cantatas soaring into my ears, and drink my orange juice…it’s soothing.

It is, however, a bit isolating. Which is why I had to ask, “who’s Piers Morgan,” when Mr. Fernández told me that over 100,000 people want to deport him.

He explained—a British citizen who has a show on television.

Right—so what had he done?

If you watch the clip below, you’ll know. He wants to ban semi-automatic weapons, force background checks on buyers at gun shows, increase funding for mental health.

And if you watch the clip below, you’ll know something else.

We’re in deep trouble.

If I weren’t an atheist, I’d be on my knees. Why? Because the gentleman—though he seems to prefer the term “bud”—behind the petition is completely insane.

Most people in interviews start off reasonably enough, get challenged, become unnerved, and then unravel. Alex Jones unravels within the first fifteen seconds after being presented the question, “why do you want to deport me?”

A single nut is one thing; 104,000 of them—all armed—is another.

Watching the clip is an invitation to emotional highjacking. The fear, rather the paranoia, is contagious. Worse is the realization—no rational dialogue is possible here.

I know people who have guns. A neighbor of my mother has guns. Actually, at least two neighbors. And they’re good people and I trust them and they’re not crazy. But if they want to keep their guns, they’d better do something quick.

Change—or rather start—the dialogue.

Send this to everyone you know who has a gun. Give them this message.

The NRA is making you look completely ridiculous. And it’s pissing people off. So unless you want the rest of us to get down nasty and fight to ban ALL guns—which many nations have done, by the way—you’re gonna have to be reasonable. Nobody has to have an assault weapon. Not checking background at gun shows while requiring it in gun shops is crazy. Speak up, repudiate the NRA, and start a reasonable dialogue.

Why do I feel that ain’t gonna happen?

Moral Proximity

I came upon it by accident, as I do most things, by trawling through the ever-more-depressing news in search of something to write about. So here it is: 60,000 young Christians from around the world held candles in the Atlanta night and pledged to fight against slavery.

They did more—they put up a bunch of cash by using tablet computers; last year they raised three-and-a-half million dollars.

I’ve written about this before. There is a building in my neighborhood with a Chinese restaurant on the first floor. The upper floors are rooms for rent.

Or are they?

“It’s a whorehouse for Asian guys who work the cruise ships.”

Words a co-worker spoke fifteen years ago.

Was it true?

It was strange, those mornings at five when I was heading for the bus to take to work, that there was frequently loud music coming from the upper floors of the building. Oh, and that the door to those floors which was always closed during the day was flung open. And certainly most houses in Puerto Rico have rejas (security bars or burglar proofing). But almost always they're on the outside, this one appears to have the bars on the inside. Odd, too, that the restaurant on the first floor is so often empty.

Five or six odd things. Which may mean nothing. Or it may mean that there’s a whorehouse in my neighborhood.

In the days when I was walking past the open door to the staircase to the upper floors with the blasting music, I wasn’t alive. I was middle management working at Wal-Mart, a circumstance so extraordinary I still can’t believe I did it. Somebody else had to deal with the world, I was dealing with Wal-Mart.

Now I have time. So I took an hour to read the report from 2010 that the Ricky Martin Foundation sponsored on human trafficking in Puerto Rico.

There is human trafficking here, as opposed to human smuggling. The difference? You’re a Dominican guy who has saved up the thousands of dollars that you will pay a guy with a yola (a small and probably leaking boat) to take you across the deepest and sharkiest (exists now, computer!) waters of the Atlantic to Puerto Rico. Once there, or rather if there, you’re done. Transaction’s finished.

That’s human smuggling.

Now then, you’re a Dominican woman and a Puerto Rican guy meets you at the resort where you’re changing the sheets and cleaning the toilets and he’s got money and you fall in love. And he takes you to Puerto Rico and you wake up in a room and you’re naked and bruised and he’s nowhere in sight. Oh, and he has your passport. And also the key to the lock on the door.

See the difference?

What isn’t known is how much and what kind. But some facts leapt off the screen. Puerto Rico. Starting, for example, on page 1:

 Although specific statistics on cases of human trafficking in Puerto Rico do not exist, the high number of minors living in “upbringing” (crianza) or foster homes (close to 9,000), the nearly half of all families (48 percent) living in poverty and the high levels of immigration to the Island, taken together with gender discrimination, suggest the high potential for trafficking and exploitation in Puerto Rico. These factors, among others, contribute to Puerto Rico’s status as the third highest country in Latin America in which social inequality is most evident, preceded only by Paraguay and Brazil (El Nuevo Día, Nov. 12, 2009).

       1 The terms “human trafficking” and “trafficking in persons” will be used interchangeably throughout the document.2

Wow! But then there’s the statement of a police chief, “fathers having sex with their daughters is a cultural pattern in the rural, mountainous areas.”

Or how about the report on the Dupont Plaza Hotel? Remember that fire, and all those people on the roof, and the helicopter rescues? Well, somebody had to go in there and find all the belongings and give them back to the owners, if possible.

What they found was shocking.

“They found everything, from substantial amounts of money—up to $40,000—to pornographic photos, especially of men having sex with minors. This was in approximately 20 rooms” (Interview with a police officer in Puerto Rico, 2008).  

Right. I’ve read the report. I can give money. I can raise my voice and light a candle and feel good.

What can’t I do?

Get a bunch of people together and march up the stairs of a building in Old San Juan and figure out just what the hell is going on.

Amy and Me

OK—confession time. I have—sort of—a Twitter account.

“Nonsense,” you say. “You do or you don’t. How can you ‘sort of’ have a Twitter account?”

Well, I was willing—actually compelled—to write a book. I also vowed to start a blog to promote it. And I spend an hour or two trying to promote my work—asking people to write reviews, calling people who may be interested in the book.

What did I refuse to do?

The social media. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus.

I’m not stupid. I could do it if I wanted to. But that’s the crux—I have no interest that you ate a six-pound hamburger accompanied by a quart of diet Coke AND you have photographed the monstrosity and put it on your wall. Perhaps it was one too many dead sheep that dulled the senses to it all….

So I gave the thing over to doña Taí, who is capable and also interested. And, periodically, I get messages from people who are “following” me. These I happily ignore—the messages, not the people. OK—both.

Until yesterday, when I got an email notification from Twitter that Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club is now following me.

Yeah? 

A fake, I decided. So I checked it out, going first to her official website, which is quite beautifully done, by the way. From there I clicked on her Twitter page, which looked identical to the page I had received in the email Twitter had sent to me. There was a tweet about her new phone number, with the lucky “88” that’s spurring bill collectors to call daily. (Hmmm, and that’s lucky?) There’s the tweet about Joyce Carol Oates being over at her house.

Well, it’s real or it’s not. At any rate, it seemed a thing to do—find out the real, or at least the presented, dope on Amy Tan.

Born in America, of Chinese immigrants. Her father was an electrical engineer as well as a Baptist minister. But as anyone who has read The Joy Luck Club can tell you, it’s the mother that counts. So much so that the first line in her Wikipedia article runs something like “Amy Tan is an American writer of Chinese descent whose work explores mother / daughter relationships.”  When her brother and father die of brain tumors six months apart, her mother decides logically that there’s a curse—the fifteen-year old Amy is next. So they pack her off to Switzerland, to see the world before Amy leaves it.

In Switzerland, Amy hangs out with the counter-culture—remember that?—and gets arrested for drugs. But then she pulls it together and gets a scholarship to go to Linfield College in Oregon. She does graduate work in linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and later at Berkeley.

She worked as a freelance business writer for a bunch of telecommunication companies, until she wearied of it, and began to write in her spare time. The Joy Luck Club was her first novel—or rather, in her words, a collection of stories.

She’s written five or six other novels, a memoir, a couple of children’s books, and the libretto for an opera based on her novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

An impressive body of work, for which she has received numerous awards. She’s also been translated into 35 languages.

Wow—the lady is major!

Well, well—it was all a hoax, I decided. The world is not always a nice place—sorry you had to read it here, but somebody should tell you—and things are not always what they seem. A hacker, or maybe spoofster, has decided his day would be better off by playing tricks on an aged, unknown writer. It was a mistweet, or maybe a faux tweet.

But it now seems it’s real. Doña Taí writes that she too has gotten a notification from Twitter of a follow from Ms. Tan, and that she had Twitter-messaged Amy some time ago to say how much she—sorry, that’s Taí—had liked her—and that would be Amy’s—work. Especially her love of her dog Bombo. Taí had come across Amy’s blog looking for something, and read through it and saw the videos of Bombo and read Amy’s bio, stories and bloggies, as she calls them. Perhaps Ms. Tan stumbled across my blog through Taí’s tweets reposting links to its posts....

“Compare and contrast” started every essay question on every test I took in high school. (Right, not the math classes, but just about everything else…..) And some forty years later, I’m still doing it. The contrasts are easy—fame, fortune, sex, culture. But the comparisons are interesting—two writers with distinctive mothers, both of whom had Alzheimer’s. A strong love of classical music—she played the piano, I the cello. A total love of animals.

Most, I suppose, the fact that we sit down each day in our varying worlds before a screen of primordial whiteness, and conjure how we are going to cook up other worlds. The cat wags its tail and moves its head when I proclaim him “ridiculous.” Bombo thumps his tail. Somewhere, perhaps, Amy Tan is reading my blog.

I’m totally honored.   

From Cardboard Bicycles to the Voice of God

One of the strange things about being a blogger is that you frequently start out fully intending to write about one thing, and then discover yourself compelled by what seems a better, more interesting affair.

Though the first intention—an Israeli guy who’s making cardboard bikes—is pretty interesting. The cost alone is amazing—he estimated each bike will be less than fifteen US dollars. Most people pay more for a good bike lock than that.

I know all this because the good Taí sent me a link about the bicycles from The Economist. And it seems that the inventor, Izhar Gafni, has done his damnedest to use everything recycled. The hand bars are derived from Coke bottles. The chain is from recycled car rubber, as are the wheels. The frame and most of the rest is made up cardboard, which Gafni has folded, to increase strength. After that, he applies a resin to increase resilience, and waterproofing.

The low cost makes the bike a godsend for poor countries, since transportation is often a critical problem in the lives of poor people. I looked it up, in those days when I was championing everything from green roofs to the Lion’s Club eye glass donation to making an actual windmill be the star in Wal*Mart in the sign outside our stores.

Bicycles for Humanity—an organization starting in 2005, has shipped over 45,000 bikes to Africa. That’s not nothing. For a culture based on cars, the bike is a toy. But here’s what the organization says in its webpage:

A bicycle solves the problem of mobility and helps empower people to change their life. The mobility a bicycle provides allows people to travel greater distances in a shorter length of time and transport much more weight. Mothers can carry containers of water back to their village in a fraction of the time walking required. Students get to school faster saving precious daylight for studies. Parents transport more items to market to sell. Healthcare workers are 3 to 4 times more productive.

It’s estimated that ten million bicycles are dumped in landfills in Europe and North America. But these bikes are critically needed in Africa, and other developing nations.

Well, in those long-gone days of my bearing the standard of sustainability at Wal-Mart, I would have proposed something like this. Wal-Mart donates all its cardboard—or at least that usable for the bikes—to a local factory set up to produce the bikes. Wal-Mart also provides support for marketing, human resources, finance, and logistics. And of course, for every bike purchased at Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart donates a cardboard bike for the kid in Africa who needs one.

In those days, ideas like the one above came as regularly as flies to a picnic. And, like the flies, the ideas were always swatted down. One of the first victims of corporate positivism is the shadow side—a negativism to anything that is new and—especially—not vetted by the boss.

In fact, for all the thinking outside the box that we were always adjured to do, there were people who practiced rote inside the box. Because it’s not only possible to make bicycles from cardboard, you can actually make furniture from paper.

Or at least papier—as in papier mache. It was quite a Victorian thing, like the horsehair upholstery used on couches. And primarily it was tables and decorative objects. But not always—check this out:

Nice, hunh? And since it’s been around since the mid-nineteenth century, pretty durable, as well. The British Victorians, it seems, listen to offbeat ideas at bit corporate America.

What some people listen to, it also turns out, is the voice of God.

I know this because it really seemed unlikely—could I make a post out of a cardboard bicycle? I’m only on page two here, and 639 words. So I was trawling, looking for something with a little more heft than just a bicycle.

CNN came sailing through, as it so often does. And who could not click on a link, “My Take, If you Hear God Speak Audibly, you (Usually) Aren’t Crazy.” Clearly a thing to check out.

Full disclosure—I have had an audible hallucination. By which I mean I perceived a voice that was exactly the same in feeling and experientially as the voice of Mr. Fernández, each night, three feet away from me at the dining room table.

And in fact it was Mr. Fernández’s voice that I though I heard, saying the words that he says every night to his favorite cat, Kitty.

“Yo,” I shouted.

No response.

There was nothing eerie or uncanny about it. He simply wasn’t there.

Nor am I alone. About one in ten Evangelical Christians say they have heard the voice of God, according to T. M. Luhrmann. Gallup, in 1999, reported that 23% of Americans had heard a voice or seen something that was not there in response to prayer.

Nor is it only God we’re hearing. A surprising number of people report hearing the voice of a person they have lost, and are grieving. Twenty-eight percent, according to one study in Wales, over 60 percent, according to Dr. Phil.

In contrast, the rate of schizophrenia—the hallmark of which is hallucination—is only about 1%. And the messages / hallucinations tend to be different—the messages coming through prayer are filled with peace and love. Psychotics tend to hear quite the opposite.

Well, it’s a curious topic—what’s real and what’s not. There are also, by the way, negative hallucinations—when you don’t perceive something that is there. They probably happen a million times a day. How many times, when I was practicing the cello, focusing so intently on the music, did I lost sight of the actual cello—the reddish-brown varnish, the nick on the purfling—that I was playing?

And there are a number of diseases and conditions that can produce hallucinations: epilepsy, migraines, steroids, even too much caffeine.

Come clean. Besides that one hallucination, I’ve come very close to others. It was in my darkest moment on depression, and it felt as if only enormous willpower could keep me from changing my thoughts into voices. I was, I think, at that threshold where thought becomes voice.

Better minds than my mind will figure it out. In fact, one of them—Oliver Sacks—is soon to be out with a new book entitled Hallucinations. So he may prove or disprove my theory: the center for recognition of oral speech (that is, the voice speaking next to you) is very close to and intimately linked to the center that processes words, including the words that form our thinking. Sometimes, with stress, fatigue, varying chemicals and different diseases, the connections are lost, or jangled. A thought becomes a voice.

Well, why not? We live in part in a land of mystery: a thought becomes a voice, or a form, like the vision of Jesus after his death. Oh, and also a more prosaic land, where a cardboard box becomes a bicycle.

Which, for a kid in Africa, might be both a mystery and a miracle.