Naïa Gets an Uncle

Contrary to the calumnies darting from the vicious tongues of asps and vipers, it was never about a slice of pizza.

Naïa, you see, the 12-year-old daughter of Lady and Nico, the owners of the café which I frequent (it’s sort of a stretch to say “where I work”), had offered me a piece of pizza, at the instigation—I later found out—of her mother. “Make sure Marc gets a piece,” said Lady, before tearing off a ten-dollar bill from the wad in her purse. Naïa, fortunately, is still a few steps away from adolescence, so rather than argue, pout, flare, or stalk away, she popped across the gift shop and into the café to offer me the pizza.

“You are now officially my niece,” I told her, on the way to the pizza. She was with Stephen, her tutor, and the two were busy cramming useless information in her head, so that she could take a test before forgetting it all. Remember that?

So I returned to writing what I was writing, and she returned to renting brain space to geography, or whatever The World and Its People is about. Then Lady arrived, and I told her I had adopted Naïa as my niece.

“Wonderful,” said Lady

“Not really,” I said. “I intend to be a completely cranky and querulous uncle. Very exigent. Oh, and she’ll have to take care of me in my declining years….”

So Lady went off to consult with Naïa about all that, and then came back with the news: I had just said what I did because of the offer of pizza.

“That is absolutely untrue,” I erupted. “Dammit, when are people going to stop assuming that random events are causal? I’ve been very seriously pondering adopting Naïa for some time now.”

At this point, Naïa was doing a spelling test—one of the words, by the way, was “serendipity” and that’s a word for a 12-year old?—so I decided to tackle it later, though I did wonder whether putative niecehood (well, computer, what’s YOUR suggestion? It’s bitch, bitch, bitch all day from you!) wasn’t more important than spelling.

I went back to considering the topic of family, since it’s been different, often, for gay people. More than most people, we’ve tended to form our own, informal families, especially in those days when coming out to parents and siblings was impossible, or very difficult.

It was a long time ago, and we’ve all gotten over it, but for some of us it’s happening still, and will never stop. But twenty-five years ago, the phone would ring, there would be silence when I answered, and then a click.

“Your mom called,” I would tell Raf. Eventually, he confronted her: “Mami, Marc knows perfectly well that it’s you…”

There were other things: Raf was barred from seeing his nephew, who was probably four or five at the time. And when we moved to Puerto Rico, I wasn’t welcome in the house.  And so, on one of those early Christmas Eves, I found myself alone in the house: Raf had gone home to his parents, and the other people living in the building were gone as well.

It was a particularly beautiful night, with a gentle fog, and the streets were deserted, hushed. Everybody, it seemed, had gone home to family; in a few hours time, everybody would rush back in to the old city, and the partying would start. But now, it was just me, alone in an empty house.

And then, far away, I heard music approaching, and realized that it was that loveliest of traditions—a group of neighbors gathering with guitars and güiros, walking the streets and singing the old-fashioned Puerto Rican carols, called villancicos or aguinaldos.

Let me explain, this was not the traditional parranda, or maybe, in fact, it was. Because the usual parranda tends to take place a 2 AM, when you are dead asleep, and your friends? Dead drunk!

They then gather outside your house and make enough noise—ostensibly called singing—to rouse you. They then shout “¡ASALTO!”—assault, which is almost literally true. You then have to start making the asopao—a rice and chicken stew, and very tasty—while your “guests” raid your liquor cabinet. The only good thing about it? You can retaliate the next night, when they’ll really be groggy.

But there was none of this about the group singing carols; it was before nine PM, the group was singing almost under their breath, and exchanging greetings with whatever passerby was on the street. Really, the carols seemed part of the fog, and the fog seemed part of a past: a gentle, sweet past that would disappear at any moment. It was spectral.

I stood by the window and listened. And felt, of course, anguishingly alone. I considered going out to join them, but couldn’t—I didn’t speak Spanish.

It feels disloyal even to remember this, much less write about it. Why? Well, I was playing my Bach suites yesterday in the café, next to Naïa; Lady and Craig joined us.

“You know, Naïa, I was utterly serious about being an uncle, which is definitely not good for you, since I’m generally wretched at the business. In fact, we should probably start right now….”

I then put on my crotchety English accent and begin the harangue:

“Naïa, fetch me my shawl. No, not THAT shawl, the other one! How many times do I have to tell you, I never use that shawl at home, only for the opera. And my tea, Naïa, where is my tea? You know that I always have tea with my shawl! Naïa, the tea is too hot. Now it’s too cold!”

Naïa, of course, is completely ignoring me, but that’s fine, because I know what to do about that.

“Naïa, are you ignoring me?”

“I think she is,” I tell her mother. “She completely doesn’t believe I’m serious in my avuncular (you knew that was coming, right?) intentions. Maybe what I should do is write about it, since this blog has an international readership, and people will want to know.”

“That would be good,” said Lady.

“Or we could have a pizza party,” I said.

So I played some Bach, and was just finishing up, when Ilia, Raf’s mother, came strolling in. Well, strolling isn’t quite the term, since both she and Quique, Raf’s father, are now using walkers. So let’s say they came walkering in….

“I can’t stay,” she told me, “because Quique doesn’t want to….”

Quique gives me the half-embrace that guys give each other in Puerto Rico and, surprisingly, sits down. I begin the G major suite and wonder when they will drift off.

They don’t.

So I finish the suite—that’s twenty minutes of Bach—and turn to Ilia.

“Wonderful,” she says, “why don’t you make a recording?”

Then I remember Naïa, still sitting next to me, still absorbed in her iPad.

“Do you know that you have a new granddaughter?” I ask Ilia.

“I had no idea,” she said.

So it was time to get Naïa’s attention, which is done by waving a hand in front of the iPad—the ear buds seem to be an essential part of Naïa’s anatomy.

“You really should meet your new grandparents,” I tell her, and Ilia responds in form.

“Ay, ¡qué linda!”

(For a boy, it’s “¡ay, que guapo!”)

My new niece smiles and waves at her grandmother and returns to the infinitely more interesting world of the iPad.

‘Family,’ I think, ‘gets more important as you get older. When you’re a kid, it’s commonplace and almost annoying. But at Ilia’s age? Wow….”

‘How long will we have them?’ I think. ‘Because it’s precious to have new people come into your life, like Naïa. But it’s ripping everybody apart, knowing that Ilia and Quique… Well, there will be a day…”

‘We’ve all moved on,’ I think. ‘Now I get in trouble if I skip going to family affairs. Can’t win, can you?’

Ah, but I have!

Note to Naïa's Uncles

“Nico told me I should send your blog to Naïa’s uncles,” said Lady, the owner of the café and mother of 12-year old Naïa. “They think I am ruining her….”

“Why,” I asked, ”she seems perfectly fine to me.”

“Well, they say I’m doing a terrible thing by home-schooling her. They say that she needs contact with other kids, and that she won’t get socialized, and I don’t know what all. Anyway, I’m a terrible mother.”

“Naïa’s more normal than I am,” I say. “At least on the face of it. I think kids are tremendous conformists, most of them. Remember that time I spilled something, and we had that argument about the “wet caution floor” sign?”

“Hunh?”

“Maybe you were off painting houses,” I said.

Yes, Lady is also a house painter, but a sensible woman as well. So why get outside and climb ladders in the blazing tropical heat when you can sit at the bar, drink a beer, chat with passersby, and paint little decorative plaster casitas? Lady does good business selling these for sixty bucks or so—given the obvious advantages, you’ve got to be seriously dumb to do the other kind.

“Anyway, I spilled some water, and it was a big thing at Wal-Mart: everyone, even the English teacher, knew that if you spilled water, one person had to stay at the site and warn people, the other person had to get the “wet caution floor” sign.”

“Wet caution floor?”

“What is this, genetic? Or is it a girl thing? Haven’t you ever read your own sign?’

Of course I have to go get the sign—why can’t I back away from a fight?—and we take a look at it. You’ve seen it a zillion times, of course, and if I had Internet—it’s Sunday, so the damn thing is taking the day off—I’d show you a picture of it. But there it was, the yellow collapsible thing that says:

Wet

Caution

Floor

“Caution, wet floor,” says Lady.

Right, Marc is now in complete fight or flight, because guess what? I know the argument, which is that the “caution,” being bigger, means that it goes first. It’s sort of the bully argument.

“Caution, wet floor,” repeats Lady, and you know what? I decide to drop it….

“Anyway, I think Naïa has great social skills,” I say. “Every time someone comes to talk to Neruda, she runs over and gives them an in-service on the bird. Complete strangers, and she’s chatting away. I was seven before I worked up the courage to address my own mother….”

Neruda, at least in the Poet’s Passage, is the green Dominican parrot who, having nothing else to do, squawks at any passerby.

“Yeah?”

“Well, not really, but I was really shy. The point being that Naïa talks to anyone, but she’s also pretty savvy.”

“Well, Nico wants to put her in the Episcopal Cathedral School…”

“WHAT?!”

I see these kids on the bus, and they’re all wearing a little blue uniforms and black Mary Jane shoes. Naïa wearing flowing blouses, pants, and Crocs. If it were the sixties, you’d find her on Haight-Ashbury. The Episcopal Cathedral School is definitely Junior League. 

“Well, she’d get a good traditional education,” says Lady.

“To my mind, she’s already getting a good, traditional education. I’m amazed, really, that nothing seems to have changed in the half-century since I was in school. You know, she has spelling tests—of which I approve, generally—but I really wonder about that. Short of writing thank-you notes to Michelle Obama for a lovely dinner, is she ever going to need traditional spelling? Spell check has done away with that, in a sense.”

“So what would you do?”

“Put a lot more attention on those words like “their / there / they’re” or “adapt / adopt”—words that have to be used correctly, and can’t be detected by spell check. Anyway, it’s incredible, some of the stuff she has to learn.”

“Like what?”

“’Lebanon is a country roughly the size of New Jersey’,” I recite.

“Hunh?”

“It’s one of the sentences I heard her tutor read her, and I thought it was one of the dumbest things I had ever heard.”

“Why?”

“Look, has she ever been to New Jersey? How many kids are reading that sentence and memorizing it, so that they can answer the question: ‘What is the approximate size of Lebanon?’ on the test. Anyway, why don’t they teach her the real dope on Lebanon?”

“And that is?”

“Lebanon was a paradise for centuries, a paradise that is part of the region called the Levant. And it was famous for its civilization, for tolerating all religions, all views, for accepting Jews, Christians, Muslims equally. People walked around, arm in arm, ideological enemies cordially having passionate discourse on the most violence-producing topics, and eating dates!”

“Yeah?” says Lady, who has a good nose for when I go a little off.

“OK, but you know what I mean.”

“So what happened?”

“Exactly.”

“What?”

“You know, that’s exactly the question I would ask Naïa. How, in a remarkably short time, did the country fall into a terrible civil war? What happened? Then I’d go off and write something and she’d research it and come back tell me. But telling Naïa that Lebanon is the size….”

“Hey, why don’t you tutor Naïa?”

“Wouldn’t work,” I said. “First, I’m not good with kids. Second, well, Naïa takes school with all the seriousness it deserves. She wants to be told the approximate size of Lebanon, because it’s perfectly easy to park that fact in her mind just long enough to drive it out onto the test. Remember her answer when I asked her the state capital of Oregon?”

“What?”

“That was last year!”

It’s not just the Levant, I think. How fragile all societies are! How changing one thing would change everything—what if Jorge were not making the coffee and Neruda were not squawking and Lorca, the toy Chihuahua, were not begging for food? Could we have the Poet’s Passage without Naïa, flopped on her tummy, absorbing the fact of the approximate size of Lebanon?

She ain’t going anywhere!

Introduction to my Next Book

It started when I came home from England, where I was cold, and got back to Puerto Rico, where it was hot. And then, they decided on a particularly extreme form of torture: repaving the street. This involved ripping up the asphalt, igniting generators, shouting, dropping chunks of pavement into trucks, more shouting, more generators, more asphalt…you get the picture.

What was the result? Well, we now have a bricked road, vaguely reminiscent of the famous blue adoquines that pave the rest of the old city. When the street was finished, I breathed a sigh of relief, and concluded that the affair was over, that there were no new ways to confound my life.

Ah, innocence!

I hadn’t noticed, you see, that while the street was done, the corner was not—so that meant that that had to be ripped up, that the asphalt had to be dropped, the generators ignited, the greetings shouted. Oh, and there’s a problem—funny how often there is, somebody should really look into it—because while we are nearing completion of the corner to my right, the corner to my left? It still has that dreadful asphalt.

We do many things well in Puerto Rico, but silence? We shatter it, we slaughter it, we massacre it. An example: Puerto Rican children are routinely taken to Old San Juan, to see the adoquines, to look at the colonial architecture, and to scream slogans, such as “Yo soy boricua, ¡pa’ que tú lo sepas!” (Roughly, “I’m Puerto Rican, so that you know it!?”)

This is done at the urging of their teachers.

OK—it was hot, it was loud, and how could I write? I was driven to find an alternative, a place where they would feed me, know my name, and let me watch the characters come and go. There is, for example, Elizabeth, who is mopping the floor of the gift shop she minds on the other side of the café, and whose two children drift in from school around three PM and sleep on the couches or play video games. Then there’s Naïa, who…well, why not check in with her?

“Naïa, are your dragons behaving themselves?”

“Yes,” she replies, from around the corner, where she is sitting making a virtual zoo, which, at the moment, is animal-less.

“All except Screaming Death….”

“So what did he do,” I ask.

“Almost ate a baby dragon…”

She then goes on to show me the dragon that is currently accompanying her, as she munches on pretzel sticks. Called “Toothless,” after a character in How toTrain Your Dragon—“it’s a really good movie,” reports Naïa,—it in fact does have teeth. But the coolest thing is that it also opens its mouth and ejects smoke. 

People can’t do it—at least in the café—but the dragon can. Is that fair? I point this out to Naïa, who gives me a disgusted look.

Well, not really—we move past disgust and into is-he-being-stupid-again, the answer to which is so often “yes.” She returns to the infinitely more interesting world of the virtual zoo.

There’s a woman—probably homeless—who is snoozing in a chair in the gift shop’s open-mic area next door. Why do I think she’s homeless? Well, do you walk around with a backpack stuffed with clothes?

There’s Jorge, the manager of the café, of whom I keep waiting to see: will he ever lose his cool? In the year plus that I’ve been here, he never has. I did get the report, though, that he’s capable of it, since the café, during the mayhem that is the San Sebastián Street Festival, was the object of a dog-knapping. Yup, somebody stole the toy Chihuahua, Lorca, and it was only via the intervention of a customer who spotted Lorca, grabbed him, and brought him back, that we have Lorca today.

“And can you believe the dog-knappers had the gall to insist that Lorca was their dog! That’s when Jorge flew into a fit, and cursed the people in both English and Spanish. He nearly got into a fist fight….”

So reported Lady, the prevailing muse of the place. She comes in and the kissing begins, since she knows everyone and if she doesn’t she soon will, so why not start out on the right foot and give a stranger a kiss? Because of this, she enjoys robust good health, having fortified her immune system by night and day mingling with the microbial world. So she never gets sick, and everybody is her friend.

“I don’t have a college degree, but I have the Poet’s Passage,” she reports. In her early forties, she’s a poet, though she’s decided that seven is enough: she’s not doing any more. She married a Frenchman, who came over to do a project for his MBA program, and who stayed to fall in love, marry, and paint. That, for a Frenchman, seems more fitting than an MBA program.

“In the early days, we were so poor that we were eating—sharing, actually—a can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs,” she once told me. Surprising, Naïa was born with no genetic abnormalities, unless preferring dragons to Barbie counts as one.

“And when we were looking to buy the building, I gathered all the facts and went down to the bank. And there were all these men in suits, and there was me—a poet, answering all their questions. There’s money in poetry….”

Well, the bank went bust a couple years ago (not quite that dramatically—at the insistence of the FDIC, it was “bought” by another bank, but the whole thing fooled nobody). But the Poet’s Passage? Still here!

“Sunshine, what would happen if I stole a cookie?” I ask. Yes, his name is Sunshine—why shouldn’t it be? Do we all have to be Toms and Bills?—and yes, he agreed to look the other way.

It was better as a kid, or maybe it was better when it was more illicit….

“Are you going to play today?” asks Omar. Probably I will, since at about five every day, I start thinking about scotch, which I’m trying not to do. So playing Bach Suites on the cello is a nice alternative. What I need to do now is start playing later and later. I might have a chance at sobriety at last. People come by and throw money in my cello case, and I donate it to four charities in the Third World.

And in the year or so that I’ve worked here, well…what have I created? A blog with 585 posts and over 43,000 page-views.

That’s a year’s work? Shouldn’t I have written the great American novel, or a scholarly treatise on the enriching effect of the Caribbean literary tradition on mainstream American literature? What’s a blog?

The electronic version of a newspaper, and where’s yesterday’s newspaper? Very likely in a corner, under your new puppy….

So I looked back. Was there anything there? Could I put the best of what I had written into a book? Something I could hold, and maybe—wow!—sell. The New York Times, of course, would rave—a major literary voice has been found!—and I would have stalkers, all of whom, of course, I would ignore.

(Time out for an interruption. Sunshine has just informed me that El Barco de Vapor—the Steam Boat—is giving 12,000 bucks to anyone who wins the first prize in the children’s book competition. I instantly remember Naïa.

“Hey, can I use your dragon to power a steam boat?”

“Marc, it’s a toy dragon….”

Ohhhh….)

Now where was I?

Oh yes, a book, which will give me something to do (besides honest work). But is there anything there?

You decide….

On Sisters and Ticks

OK, Dear Readers, we have a serious problem, since what happens to a blogger without Internet? The same thing that happens to surgeons without scalpels…

Right, the son of a newspaperman am I, so, was I going to be defeated by what never existed until the last years of my father’s life? Shouldn’t I be able to find something, anything, to write about?

He would have been 105, three days before that day (Wednesday,) and he died nearly twenty years ago, but here’s today’s secret, Dear Readers: it gets better, yes, but never to the point of best. Which means that, yes, I no longer weep when I see a wok (Jack was an excellent Chinese cook), and I’m glad that he got out of the world as he did: fast and painless, with not too much deterioration. Life makes you philosophical, and the icon giving the option to go on indefinitely can’t be found on the desktop. So you might as well go when you still have most of your faculties, and life isn’t too onerous. But that said, his absence turns up, once in a while, and then I miss him.

Wednesday, for example, he showed up at The Poet’s Passage, the café / craft shop where I work, and where the Internet had decided to take a prolonged cigarette break. I was delivering rice and beans to Naïa, the daughter of the owner, whom I had seen and who was going off to get her child the rice and beans. Since I myself was going for rice and beans, it was no problem to get an extra order.

Naïa, of course, is completely unfazed by Marc arriving with the food instead of her mother. And also completely in character, she has a joke:

“What do you call a mad flea?”

I know it’s going to be bad.

“OK—tell me.”

“A lunatic!”

I’m about to protest that a tick is hardly a flea, but guess what? The damage is done, and Naïa is a girl who has never once ventured down the doll aisle of a toy store. Instead, she heads straight for insects—in which I believe—or dinosaurs—in which I don’t. So that means that not only is she twelve, but she’ll probably win.

“How can you not believe in dinosaurs,” she said, when I presented my belief.

“Never seen one,” I said, and braced myself for the inevitable.

“And have you ever seen a tick, “ I said, hoping to deflect the argument, and she professed that she had—one had been venturing across the inner landscape of Lorca’s ear. (Lorca being the toy Chihuahua…)

So we talked about that, and discussed proper tick-removal schemes: you can’t pull them out if they’re embedded. Then I asked what she had done with the tick.

“Flushed it down the toilet,” she said.

“A singularly uncreative thing to do with a perfectly good tick,” I said.

“Yeah? What would you have done with a tick?”

“In fact, there is a long history of inventive uses of ticks in my family,” I told her, since first it was true, and anyway, there was no Internet.

Eric walks into the café.

“There was my brother Eric, who was engaged to an genteel lady from Pittsburgh: her father was a cardiologist, her mother hung out with the Carnegies and the Mellons. So what happened when Eric found a tick on him, one weekend after having been out in the woods? Well, he went to the jewelry store, got a ring box, deposited the tick on the cotton, and then had them wrap it up. Then he left it on her desk at the Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper where they both worked.”

The marriage ended in divorce.

Naïa, of course, doesn’t see that. Eric definitely picked the wrong girl….

“Then there was my father, who had also been out in the woods, and who had to interview the president of the Bank of Madison.”

Historical note—there was a time, Dear Reader, when banks had perfectly sensible names, before they began to call themselves MadBank, or whatever.

Jack walks into the café.

“Well, the president of the bank was young, and very pompous, and treating Mr. Newhouse with great formality, which generally tended to be wasted on Jack. So the prez left the room, which was a good thing, since Jack had begun to feel that really awful feeling: something strolling across his scalp. So there my father was, holding the tick in his hand. And then he heard footsteps.”

“So what did he do?’ asked Naïa.

“He must had had Mercury blossoming all over his astrological chart,” I told her, “since he knew immediately what to do. He leaned forward and dropped the black tick on a white piece of paper on the president’s desk.”

“Then what happened,” asked Naïa.

“Well, he waited for the situation to evolve. And then he saw the president start, and reach out to grab the paper. But Jack wasn’t having any of that!”

“So what did he do?”

“He leaned forward and said, ‘is that a TICK on your desk?’ So then the president got really nervous and said ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know!’ He should just have laughed, of course, but he got rattled. So Jack leaned farther forward and said, “well, any damn fool can see that that’s a TICK!” And now, Jack couldn’t help it, and began saying things like, ‘do you mean to tell me your bank has TICKS!’ and ‘have you ever had an infestation of TICKS before?!’ So of course the president got completely rattled.”

“So then what happened,” Naïa wants to know.

“Well, Jack finished the interview and went across the street to have a cup of coffee behind the front window of the diner. And guess what happened, twenty minutes later?”

“What?”

“Three trucks from Oliver Exterminating roared up in from of the bank. And the guys came out running, like HazMat guys going after a bomb!”

Naïa is completely unimpressed. Right, I realize it wasn’t much of a story.

Unless, of course, you had known Jack….

Family is funny, I thought. People come in and out, die, turn up unexpectedly, and go away again. And then, sometimes, people just turn up.

“Marc, I don’t know how to say this,” said Lady, Naïa’s mother.

This is rarely a good sentence to hear.

“You’re one of my closest friends,” she says simply.

“You’re my sister,” I say, without thinking. That’s when you know it’s true.

We kiss. Then I head off to the café.

Naïa has to have her rice and beans.