When Mom and Dad retired to Ireland from California in 1988, you can imagine how the weather affected my mother even though she was from Minnesota, that dastardly state of snow and coldfronts. But she soon became weather wise with pert and pungent axioms: “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes”, or “You get eleven weathers in a day here”. The latter usually referred to some version of fog or rainfall: Mist; mist interrupted by blazing, inexplicable sunshine; dense fog; soft rain (don’t even ask); hard rain; rain in buckets; rain and sunshine at the same time from a cloudless sky; grey rain; purple rain; cat-and-dog rain; and my absolute favorite, horizontal rain (I kid you not).
A word about two of the raining listings above: Once my friend Clare was driving in Dublin and came upon a stop sign. As she stopped, she noticed that the front of her car was in the sun while the back was in the rain. Once again, I kid you not.
Then there’s horizontal rain which I’ve never encountered anywhere else in my life but Ireland. This version of rainfall is complemented by wind. Huge, beating, bone-chilling wind. But there you go, looking out over a golf course, and Irish people couldn’t be bothered by the rain, vertical or otherwise; they’re strolling along, climbing out of sandpits, struggling up knolls, skirting newly-established lakes. And, in this particular situation, the wetness PIERCES all your clothing and body parts, even if you’re wearing whale skin, so there’s no escape whatsoever. No wonder they drink so much whiskey there, it’s the only thing that thaws flesh and bone back to a human (and humane) temperature.
But rain in Kenya has its own peculiarities, and we’ve been having a lot of it lately. While last fall the country was suffering gravely from too little rainfall, starving people and cattle, wiping out crops, now the wet of April and May is flooding regions in the south. “When will it stop?” we all ask.
In particular, I’m haunted by the Irish rain as I lived there for six years before moving to East Africa several months ago. There is a saving grace, however; during the daytime, there’s usually a respite of sun and heat. And once again, in a country far from my homeland in the States, I’ve encountered something I’ve never experienced before: rain so thick and steady and committed that it’s as if the sky was ladling it over us, over the red earth and the now-green hills of the Ngong.
It is usually at nighttime that we know to prepare for this full blast of the Kenyan skies. That is a blessing because truly, is there anything more cozy than lying awake at night and hearing that pelting drumbeat of rain on the roof? That’s what my son Tiger and I do. We lie snuggled together in my bed, listening to this drumming instead of our usual orchestra of tree hyrax screeching, monkeys playing, dogs barking. The weather sheets against the house; you can barely hear yourself talking.
I whisper instead to my son, who always seems to be listening, “Cloud soup.” He repeats it back to me in his silvery little voice, and we draw deeper under the covers as the sky weeps, only to smile in the morning with the lure of sunshine.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
20 PERSONS, PLACES & PRODUCTS I LOVE/LOATHE ABOUT KENYA -- Part 2
5. Blonde Bombshells: At KPS, Karen Provision Store, a staple among the ex-pat community set, you can walk in any day of the week, any time of day, and bump up against an entire sea of blondes of every ilk, age and shade. I grew up in California where towheads were the rule, not the exception, but this plethora of Karen blondes is overwhelming. At KPS’ butcher counter, in the deli area, by the bread stall – blondes, blondes and more blondes. Most of whom I seem to know, as if we are Team Blonde, some sort of competitor in an Olympic Games for hair color.
Of course, as only 1% of the population here in Kenya is white – approximately 40,000out of four million – you will often find that you are the only blonde amidst a sea of stunning Africans when you go anywhere else in the Nairobi area. (It’s quite heady and quite wonderful to be the minority for a change.)
6. Bedtime & the Bubble Factory: Tiger, both like and unlike a lot of toddlers, loves his bedtime routine. Around seven o’clock, after supper and gogurt (yogurt) for dessert, you mention lala (Swahili for sleeping, naps and related escapes), and he’s off and running with a whoop upstairs to the bathtub.
Here is where fun really happens for my son, swimming like a frog in the long, deep tub; playing with styrofoam pirates offering plenty of “Ahoy, mateys!”; cleaning his toes and fingers with a small ladybug brush; and, best of all, creating beards and arm animals and face monkeys with bubbles. And I mean TONS of bubbles, soft mountains of percolating white which create a fantasy of clouds, shaped by hand in our wet and wild universe.
When the Bubble Factory has closed for the night, Tiger gets a massage with baby lotion to the tune of some sort of Canadian Mounties song I remember from my own cartoon days. Lots of laughs and much drama as Tiger covers himself with the rosy pink lotion, something he particularly enjoys since discovering his gee gee. (I nearly fell over with guffaws the first time he decided that’s the place for idle hands.)
Within a minute or so, Sir Sleepyhead asks for mama beddy, to go to sleep for the night in my room rather than his own. Sometimes I let him do so, and when I come up a couple hours later to read before bedtime, I then carry my son, who never seems to awaken from where angels love to tread, across the threshold and into his own beddy. And, from the look of him, I can now swear that no one but a child has the sweetest of dreams.
7. Skies for Days: There’s a luxury lodge in the Great Rift Valley, about a 45-minute flight from Nairobi, that I’ve never liked very much; it is quite gorgeous, but hot, hot, hot, bugged by bugs and haunted by a confusing undercurrent of mismanagement. That said, when I was there a couple of months ago, we – Alekis, John-John, Peony, Marcus, Aurelia, myself and our guide Innocent -- all went out onto its grassy plains in the Land Rover for a simple sundowner of white wine and roasted cashews. Moments before, we'd been following a cheetah with her two cubs, but then something started to happen before our very eyes, something none of us had ever quite seen before.
A sunset. But not just any sunset. One that seemed to both terrorize and tenderize the sky with color. Vivid, pure, unadulterated colors. Oranges, pale as a Parisian silk wrap and bright as a tangerine. Shades of black, from silver to steel to soft gray. Fading blues. All of which served to paint the clouds, whether thunderhead, or cumulus, or mist, into a smear of eye candy. And these clouds, in amazing shapes like a mawing mouth licking the horizon to a giraffe face to wings on a prayer, were lit from within -- not from underneath by the sun which had already vanished from the heavens. A place I had never been to before then.
8. Freddy Face Meets the Weebiscuit: In the laws of attraction, nothing compares to four-legged jealousy.
One of the men in my life these days is Freddy. Well, his real name is McFlinty after an Irish pub, and he lives next door to me, but my friend Elise nicknamed him Freddy long before we lived here and it’s stuck. Add to this the fact that he resembles nothing less than a Celtic chap with a whiskery face, an affectionate nature and a twinkle in his eye (all he’s missing is the tweed golf cap), and you’ll understand why I’ve been a goner these past few months.
More and more often, usually around happy hour, Freddy trots over to hang out on our porch, watch the sunset, wrangle a bit with the Ridgeback called Sandy, and enjoy a few treats or two. And more and more often than not, after supper, he sneaks upstairs when I’m not looking to settle in at the foot of my bed for a long night’s cuddle.
If only he didn’t have fleas. In fact, Alekis, my friend from Florida who stayed with us until recently for a couple of months, has alternately dubbed my darling Flea Bag, Death Valley, and Old Man and the Sea. But you have to understand, until very, very recently, Freddy was the one for me. (He still is, but as his adoration of me would now have it, I'm no long riding shotgun, I'm stuck in the back seat like a quarrelsome child.)
Everything changed for Freddy two weeks ago, and now my furry, four-legged beau-friend, a wire-haired Jack Russell terrier without any competition in sight, is facing the music. Because now we have Weebiscuit (Bickie for short), a little girl I got for my son, who, it happens to be, is part Jack Russell (the other half is Westie, so she’s a breed apart, or so I’m finding out). Sandy ADORES Bickie, a four-pound ball of fire who puts the Ridgeback properly in her place. But they have fun. Capital FUN. And it’s a riot to watch Mini-Me having her way with Maxi-She (Sandy is the size of a Shetland pony) on the playground.
Freddy is having none of it. Curiously enough, he’s a fellow who doesn’t have much bark or bite, but whenever Bickie runs up to lavish him with kisses, there’s a low-throttle snarl. He treats our new addition to the family with utter disdain, turning away from Bickie’s advances as if she doesn’t exist. And I swear I can see it written all over him -- an emotion of loss, maybe even grief or condescension or accusation, flickering across that whiskery face I’ve come to know and love, through those chocolate brown, sparkling peepers of his in which the light has now dulled when it comes to me.
Ah, if only Freddy knew: Dogs may be a man’s best friend, but they are a woman’s soulmate.
Of course, as only 1% of the population here in Kenya is white – approximately 40,000out of four million – you will often find that you are the only blonde amidst a sea of stunning Africans when you go anywhere else in the Nairobi area. (It’s quite heady and quite wonderful to be the minority for a change.)
6. Bedtime & the Bubble Factory: Tiger, both like and unlike a lot of toddlers, loves his bedtime routine. Around seven o’clock, after supper and gogurt (yogurt) for dessert, you mention lala (Swahili for sleeping, naps and related escapes), and he’s off and running with a whoop upstairs to the bathtub.
Here is where fun really happens for my son, swimming like a frog in the long, deep tub; playing with styrofoam pirates offering plenty of “Ahoy, mateys!”; cleaning his toes and fingers with a small ladybug brush; and, best of all, creating beards and arm animals and face monkeys with bubbles. And I mean TONS of bubbles, soft mountains of percolating white which create a fantasy of clouds, shaped by hand in our wet and wild universe.
When the Bubble Factory has closed for the night, Tiger gets a massage with baby lotion to the tune of some sort of Canadian Mounties song I remember from my own cartoon days. Lots of laughs and much drama as Tiger covers himself with the rosy pink lotion, something he particularly enjoys since discovering his gee gee. (I nearly fell over with guffaws the first time he decided that’s the place for idle hands.)
Within a minute or so, Sir Sleepyhead asks for mama beddy, to go to sleep for the night in my room rather than his own. Sometimes I let him do so, and when I come up a couple hours later to read before bedtime, I then carry my son, who never seems to awaken from where angels love to tread, across the threshold and into his own beddy. And, from the look of him, I can now swear that no one but a child has the sweetest of dreams.
7. Skies for Days: There’s a luxury lodge in the Great Rift Valley, about a 45-minute flight from Nairobi, that I’ve never liked very much; it is quite gorgeous, but hot, hot, hot, bugged by bugs and haunted by a confusing undercurrent of mismanagement. That said, when I was there a couple of months ago, we – Alekis, John-John, Peony, Marcus, Aurelia, myself and our guide Innocent -- all went out onto its grassy plains in the Land Rover for a simple sundowner of white wine and roasted cashews. Moments before, we'd been following a cheetah with her two cubs, but then something started to happen before our very eyes, something none of us had ever quite seen before.
A sunset. But not just any sunset. One that seemed to both terrorize and tenderize the sky with color. Vivid, pure, unadulterated colors. Oranges, pale as a Parisian silk wrap and bright as a tangerine. Shades of black, from silver to steel to soft gray. Fading blues. All of which served to paint the clouds, whether thunderhead, or cumulus, or mist, into a smear of eye candy. And these clouds, in amazing shapes like a mawing mouth licking the horizon to a giraffe face to wings on a prayer, were lit from within -- not from underneath by the sun which had already vanished from the heavens. A place I had never been to before then.
8. Freddy Face Meets the Weebiscuit: In the laws of attraction, nothing compares to four-legged jealousy.
One of the men in my life these days is Freddy. Well, his real name is McFlinty after an Irish pub, and he lives next door to me, but my friend Elise nicknamed him Freddy long before we lived here and it’s stuck. Add to this the fact that he resembles nothing less than a Celtic chap with a whiskery face, an affectionate nature and a twinkle in his eye (all he’s missing is the tweed golf cap), and you’ll understand why I’ve been a goner these past few months.
More and more often, usually around happy hour, Freddy trots over to hang out on our porch, watch the sunset, wrangle a bit with the Ridgeback called Sandy, and enjoy a few treats or two. And more and more often than not, after supper, he sneaks upstairs when I’m not looking to settle in at the foot of my bed for a long night’s cuddle.
If only he didn’t have fleas. In fact, Alekis, my friend from Florida who stayed with us until recently for a couple of months, has alternately dubbed my darling Flea Bag, Death Valley, and Old Man and the Sea. But you have to understand, until very, very recently, Freddy was the one for me. (He still is, but as his adoration of me would now have it, I'm no long riding shotgun, I'm stuck in the back seat like a quarrelsome child.)
Everything changed for Freddy two weeks ago, and now my furry, four-legged beau-friend, a wire-haired Jack Russell terrier without any competition in sight, is facing the music. Because now we have Weebiscuit (Bickie for short), a little girl I got for my son, who, it happens to be, is part Jack Russell (the other half is Westie, so she’s a breed apart, or so I’m finding out). Sandy ADORES Bickie, a four-pound ball of fire who puts the Ridgeback properly in her place. But they have fun. Capital FUN. And it’s a riot to watch Mini-Me having her way with Maxi-She (Sandy is the size of a Shetland pony) on the playground.
Freddy is having none of it. Curiously enough, he’s a fellow who doesn’t have much bark or bite, but whenever Bickie runs up to lavish him with kisses, there’s a low-throttle snarl. He treats our new addition to the family with utter disdain, turning away from Bickie’s advances as if she doesn’t exist. And I swear I can see it written all over him -- an emotion of loss, maybe even grief or condescension or accusation, flickering across that whiskery face I’ve come to know and love, through those chocolate brown, sparkling peepers of his in which the light has now dulled when it comes to me.
Ah, if only Freddy knew: Dogs may be a man’s best friend, but they are a woman’s soulmate.
Monday, April 5, 2010
FORCES OF NATURE
They say that Danny was driving too fast, that he was inexperienced, that he panicked on the turn of road between Magadi and Kiserian, that barren road that slips out of Lake Magadi, a salt mine that looks more like an oil slick, nesting up against one of the deep clefts of a Rift Valley escarpment, black and shallow. On the road again bordered by rubble and scrub, school children trek home in the middle of it as if no car would ever come to carry them away or toss them, maimed and bleeding, into the dry, toothy brush.
Danny stops for brick fuel for his household, but it is too dear and he pulls the Land Cruiser back onto the route home, gently guiding it away from all the amenities of civilization. Here, hyena laugh in between whoo-oops; scorpions furl their tails; lizards lounge; and an occasional lion scans the flatlands for easy prey, especially at night.
And then something booms; Danny thinks the world has been shaken to its very core while he nurses the Land Cruiser back to the center line. It pulls mightily, shockingly to the right and flips. Twice. The windshield shatters; the vehicle heaves as if alive. Danny is alive, thanking all heavens, shocked in releasing himself from the seatbelt and sliding onto the ground, a searing pain in his left shoulder, a numbing in the back of his skull, a dull non-recognition of all that lies dead and breathless around him.
Maasai come; they have seen the crash from some distance. Please, says Danny, I don’t know the answers to your questions. I can’t answer. They call his brother; they call the lodge at which I’m staying and where he dropped me and my friend for the weekend, an hour and a half away; they call one of Danny’s patrons; and then they call the Kiserian police. Where can help be? What can they do?
They right the truck, change the tire, and manage, despite the fact that only the parking brake works, to stop the car as needed along the way. A herd of camels looms ahead of them in the dark on the road, driven by a small boy with a big, flimsy stick; donkeys stand leaden-eyed in their way in the middle of the road; children flock from tin huts to wave them on as they herk and jerk forward. Danny cannot speak; he seems to be reeling and then, sitting so still that he cannot feel a heartbeat or hear his own breath. God was with me, he tells me later. Thank goodness you were wearing your seatbelt, I say. No, it was God. I felt his hands locked together, tightening against my chest as he held me to Him so I would not die.
The accident happened at 4.45 on Friday afternoon; Danny will not make it home to his wife and girls until 2.30 the following morning, having sequestered the car at the police station, given a report and gone to see a doctor. The people who helped me, he says later, they stole the tire jack and the two back speakers in the car. And Ksh 4,000 that was in my front pocket. I noticed nothing, he adds.
Ah, such is Kenya.
Since Friday night when I heard about what happened to Danny, in a car which I’d borrowed from a very kind friend, I’ve had a knot the size of Texas in my belly. A fist, really, that opens and closes and seizes my gut at random. Somebody twists this knot cleverly so that its presence never quite abates.
When I see Danny the following Tuesday: How did the girls take it? (His’s daughters, Blessed and Faith, are four and nine, respectively.) Your wife? They smiled, but they were very disturbed, you know this was lucky and not so lucky. Elizabeth brought them in and each took a hand and held onto it, and they kept asking me, Are you here? Yes, and I told them very softly, I am home now.
**********
Yes, Shompole, our weekend getaway, is exquisite, a flowing blend of wood and stone and whitewashed, womanly curves, each banda tucked so deftly into the face of the Nguruman Escarpment that you think it could all disappear in a wink. Yes, the heat has been horrific, but the storm last night, what a thundering and magnificent entity to behold. How cool that rain, how fine that wind. Yes, we saw a three brother lions stalking wildebeest and zebra by the river’s edge, yet holding as still as sphinxes in the grassy plains while considering theif possibilities.
Cheetahs – a mother with two yearling cubs – run off with our imaginations. Suddenly, they sprawl across the dirt, long as golden, spotted paragraphs, arranged in such a way as to make one think they have no skeletons. And I think of Danny sprawled across that cusp of Magadi Road, and look for some solace in the purple sky.
Of course, we cannot take our eyes off a journey of giraffes, so called because they are always traveling. Innocent, our tracker-guide, says their saliva is slick and heavy on their tongues so that they can easily eat the thorns of acacia and wait-a-minute bushes. These are Maasai giraffes, less regular in the patterning of their coats than the Reticulated, and more sunny in coloring than the Rothschilds, found only in Nakuru and at Giraffe Manorin Nairobi.
It is the baby giraffes who steal Alekis’s heart. Their long-snouted faces, freckled and tawny. She loves their gray lips, black tongues, curly eyelashes, and the tufted blackness of their horns (which will wear with age on the males). These young ones are kicked out of giraffe kindergarten to fend for themselves at an early age. Abandoned by their mothers, they stick together like pieces of melted toffee, making for perfect portraits.
Yes, I surrender, this is the life. To see such wildlife first hand and so close at times, you could lean over the edge of the Land Rover and pet a lion. We lose all sense of danger here, the bewitching is so potent.
Ah, such is Kenya.
On our last evening game drive that Sunday, we head out into the middle of the Great Rift Valley where the sunset underlights the clouds into sherbert colors of orange and the steely clay of gray, making for magical pillows, thunderheads and streaks of sky. It is the most beautiful sky I have ever seen in my whole, long life. Yes, the new friends we have made, Marcus and Aurelia, embrace us like family as only romantics can do, giddy and governing. We nickname him Black Mamba for his obvious prowess, dressed and undressed (we imagine), and his Russian girlfriend shouts and laughs, The truth, Mark, tell them the truth!
And on our way back to the lodge, the night falls like plantation shutters being tugged downwards, slipping eagerly into place. We’ve just done a casual sundowner, and Innocent insists the darkness is coming too quickly on its feet, although not so for the spring hares who bounce like toy bunnies across the dusty bush roads leading to Shompole.
A present awaits us on our last night, a dinner spread that trumps all the others we’ve enjoyed. A long candlelit table at which all of the guests can sit; napkins shaped like giraffes in our wine glasses; tender lamb or soft white fish for mains; even mousse au chocolat. But the Kennedyesque Peony, the loveliest of friends and Shompole’s general manager, has cooked up a piece de resistance with Chef John. In the spirit of the mighty cheer in the air, they present a beautiful birthday cake with five candles (one for each year that I’ve celebrated my 35th).
My birthday wish? Most of all, I can’t wait to leave. I long to hold my son Tiger up against me, smell his bubble gum neck and baby shampoo hair; those smells that I will make me safe and certain again, certain that all things will not just be taken from us -- by a snap of road, an angry elephant, a strike of lightning, a scorpion underfoot, or a flood that rages.
True enough, we are merely matchsticks compared to such elements. Still, I say no. Danny could not have been killed, not on my watch.
The day before, Sammy, the local Maasai chief’s 21-year-old son, finds me a lift back to Nairobi, applying a strong hand to the bartering; Ksh 15,000 is the price we settle on. A truck arrives, not the Land Cruiser we’d been promised, and so Sammy expertly haggles it down to Ksh 13,000. In the vehicle is Weweru, half Kikiyu, half Maasai, and relaxed as a sofa. Nicknamed Topi after the most beautiful antelope in East Africa (their coats are a burnished combination of copper and red and mahogany, giving off an almost lavender hue), it is he who drives me to Karen where I live. The long-limbed, slightly buck-toothed and handsome Sammy has warned Topi, as only a chief’s son can, that he must make sure I arrive home with no further fuss.
A beautiful, doll-sized dik-dik dashes into our path and narrowly escapes. Do you know about the them? Topi asks, his face wide and dark and joyous as we crash and burn and rub against the rivulets of earth molded by rain and flood. I know, they’re the smallest antelope in Africa. There’s more, he adds. Okay, they mate for life. Yes, that’s some , but you know when one dies, the other must find a lion or leopard or crocodile to go be with its mate. That is the truth! Weweru smiles broadly as he tells me this, and I marvel and shudder aloud: Ah, such is Kenya.
Or, as we would say in my nearly-native Ireland: T’was ever thus.
Danny stops for brick fuel for his household, but it is too dear and he pulls the Land Cruiser back onto the route home, gently guiding it away from all the amenities of civilization. Here, hyena laugh in between whoo-oops; scorpions furl their tails; lizards lounge; and an occasional lion scans the flatlands for easy prey, especially at night.
And then something booms; Danny thinks the world has been shaken to its very core while he nurses the Land Cruiser back to the center line. It pulls mightily, shockingly to the right and flips. Twice. The windshield shatters; the vehicle heaves as if alive. Danny is alive, thanking all heavens, shocked in releasing himself from the seatbelt and sliding onto the ground, a searing pain in his left shoulder, a numbing in the back of his skull, a dull non-recognition of all that lies dead and breathless around him.
Maasai come; they have seen the crash from some distance. Please, says Danny, I don’t know the answers to your questions. I can’t answer. They call his brother; they call the lodge at which I’m staying and where he dropped me and my friend for the weekend, an hour and a half away; they call one of Danny’s patrons; and then they call the Kiserian police. Where can help be? What can they do?
They right the truck, change the tire, and manage, despite the fact that only the parking brake works, to stop the car as needed along the way. A herd of camels looms ahead of them in the dark on the road, driven by a small boy with a big, flimsy stick; donkeys stand leaden-eyed in their way in the middle of the road; children flock from tin huts to wave them on as they herk and jerk forward. Danny cannot speak; he seems to be reeling and then, sitting so still that he cannot feel a heartbeat or hear his own breath. God was with me, he tells me later. Thank goodness you were wearing your seatbelt, I say. No, it was God. I felt his hands locked together, tightening against my chest as he held me to Him so I would not die.
The accident happened at 4.45 on Friday afternoon; Danny will not make it home to his wife and girls until 2.30 the following morning, having sequestered the car at the police station, given a report and gone to see a doctor. The people who helped me, he says later, they stole the tire jack and the two back speakers in the car. And Ksh 4,000 that was in my front pocket. I noticed nothing, he adds.
Ah, such is Kenya.
Since Friday night when I heard about what happened to Danny, in a car which I’d borrowed from a very kind friend, I’ve had a knot the size of Texas in my belly. A fist, really, that opens and closes and seizes my gut at random. Somebody twists this knot cleverly so that its presence never quite abates.
When I see Danny the following Tuesday: How did the girls take it? (His’s daughters, Blessed and Faith, are four and nine, respectively.) Your wife? They smiled, but they were very disturbed, you know this was lucky and not so lucky. Elizabeth brought them in and each took a hand and held onto it, and they kept asking me, Are you here? Yes, and I told them very softly, I am home now.
**********
Yes, Shompole, our weekend getaway, is exquisite, a flowing blend of wood and stone and whitewashed, womanly curves, each banda tucked so deftly into the face of the Nguruman Escarpment that you think it could all disappear in a wink. Yes, the heat has been horrific, but the storm last night, what a thundering and magnificent entity to behold. How cool that rain, how fine that wind. Yes, we saw a three brother lions stalking wildebeest and zebra by the river’s edge, yet holding as still as sphinxes in the grassy plains while considering theif possibilities.
Cheetahs – a mother with two yearling cubs – run off with our imaginations. Suddenly, they sprawl across the dirt, long as golden, spotted paragraphs, arranged in such a way as to make one think they have no skeletons. And I think of Danny sprawled across that cusp of Magadi Road, and look for some solace in the purple sky.
Of course, we cannot take our eyes off a journey of giraffes, so called because they are always traveling. Innocent, our tracker-guide, says their saliva is slick and heavy on their tongues so that they can easily eat the thorns of acacia and wait-a-minute bushes. These are Maasai giraffes, less regular in the patterning of their coats than the Reticulated, and more sunny in coloring than the Rothschilds, found only in Nakuru and at Giraffe Manorin Nairobi.
It is the baby giraffes who steal Alekis’s heart. Their long-snouted faces, freckled and tawny. She loves their gray lips, black tongues, curly eyelashes, and the tufted blackness of their horns (which will wear with age on the males). These young ones are kicked out of giraffe kindergarten to fend for themselves at an early age. Abandoned by their mothers, they stick together like pieces of melted toffee, making for perfect portraits.
Yes, I surrender, this is the life. To see such wildlife first hand and so close at times, you could lean over the edge of the Land Rover and pet a lion. We lose all sense of danger here, the bewitching is so potent.
Ah, such is Kenya.
On our last evening game drive that Sunday, we head out into the middle of the Great Rift Valley where the sunset underlights the clouds into sherbert colors of orange and the steely clay of gray, making for magical pillows, thunderheads and streaks of sky. It is the most beautiful sky I have ever seen in my whole, long life. Yes, the new friends we have made, Marcus and Aurelia, embrace us like family as only romantics can do, giddy and governing. We nickname him Black Mamba for his obvious prowess, dressed and undressed (we imagine), and his Russian girlfriend shouts and laughs, The truth, Mark, tell them the truth!
And on our way back to the lodge, the night falls like plantation shutters being tugged downwards, slipping eagerly into place. We’ve just done a casual sundowner, and Innocent insists the darkness is coming too quickly on its feet, although not so for the spring hares who bounce like toy bunnies across the dusty bush roads leading to Shompole.
A present awaits us on our last night, a dinner spread that trumps all the others we’ve enjoyed. A long candlelit table at which all of the guests can sit; napkins shaped like giraffes in our wine glasses; tender lamb or soft white fish for mains; even mousse au chocolat. But the Kennedyesque Peony, the loveliest of friends and Shompole’s general manager, has cooked up a piece de resistance with Chef John. In the spirit of the mighty cheer in the air, they present a beautiful birthday cake with five candles (one for each year that I’ve celebrated my 35th).
My birthday wish? Most of all, I can’t wait to leave. I long to hold my son Tiger up against me, smell his bubble gum neck and baby shampoo hair; those smells that I will make me safe and certain again, certain that all things will not just be taken from us -- by a snap of road, an angry elephant, a strike of lightning, a scorpion underfoot, or a flood that rages.
True enough, we are merely matchsticks compared to such elements. Still, I say no. Danny could not have been killed, not on my watch.
The day before, Sammy, the local Maasai chief’s 21-year-old son, finds me a lift back to Nairobi, applying a strong hand to the bartering; Ksh 15,000 is the price we settle on. A truck arrives, not the Land Cruiser we’d been promised, and so Sammy expertly haggles it down to Ksh 13,000. In the vehicle is Weweru, half Kikiyu, half Maasai, and relaxed as a sofa. Nicknamed Topi after the most beautiful antelope in East Africa (their coats are a burnished combination of copper and red and mahogany, giving off an almost lavender hue), it is he who drives me to Karen where I live. The long-limbed, slightly buck-toothed and handsome Sammy has warned Topi, as only a chief’s son can, that he must make sure I arrive home with no further fuss.
A beautiful, doll-sized dik-dik dashes into our path and narrowly escapes. Do you know about the them? Topi asks, his face wide and dark and joyous as we crash and burn and rub against the rivulets of earth molded by rain and flood. I know, they’re the smallest antelope in Africa. There’s more, he adds. Okay, they mate for life. Yes, that’s some , but you know when one dies, the other must find a lion or leopard or crocodile to go be with its mate. That is the truth! Weweru smiles broadly as he tells me this, and I marvel and shudder aloud: Ah, such is Kenya.
Or, as we would say in my nearly-native Ireland: T’was ever thus.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
PLEASE DON'T EAT THE DAISIES
They say that until you love yourself, and properly, you’ll never be able to really love someone else. You’ll never know true love in all of its flashing and frequent and formidable forms.
But what’s the point of loving yourself first and foremost when it’s so much more interesting and compelling to love someone else? To spend the love you bank in your heart and soul on others? And who cares if you utterly deplete yourself in the process? Does it really matter if you have nothing else left to give?
Maybe it’s true about me, that I’ve never been able to embrace self-love, a decades-long dry spell that’s felt right as rain. Even now, now that my son has been with me for 17 months, it is something I cannot quite gather and grasp, even though I might hold a bunch of dying daisies as tightly in my fist as I hold him to me now. Flowers that should fall freely from my hand to seed the earth; flowers that might be pressed to hold their color and form between the pages of my old Black Beauty, or lie spread among lines of favorite poems. Flowers that blow along the wind, still alive in the journey they are taking, in a love they knew all to well.
Tonight, getting Tiger ready for his bath, I sat on the edge of the tub undressing him and wept buckets, heatedly and quickly. I didn’t want to cry with such shamelessness in front of him, yet it felt both safe and unsafe. Where did this come from, all of this lack? Why the fear of not being able for love as it comes (as it does every day)? Not feeling it, not feeling yourself. Not pushing the flood of love, the flowerbeds, the simple verses and complicated rhymes out of me, into the sun.
What do I know of love from within, for within? How it holds us and lets us go? How we let it go.
Moments before I’d shown Tiger a picture of one of the great friends of my life who died while I was in Kazakhstan readying to bring him home from the orphanage. I showed my son the picture and said, Who’s that? And then I couldn’t even tell him her name because the tears came on, heavy as harm, closing my throat and heating my skin.
Isn’t heat the temperature of love, in all if its guises, and isn’t it its color as well, the hothouse of flowers?
Tiger’s face. His cracker of a smile softens into something slightly afraid and very knowing. His eyes take on that darkening color of the sea as they do when he is serious about what’s right in front of him. He sweeps the back of his hand down my cheek. He looks up at me with small flowers of tears beginning in the curl of his lashes. He wants to know why I don’t quite reach in for the love he feels for the world, his family and himself.
This I can tell you about my son. He is kind. He is tender hearted above all things, tender as the night in all of it glories and sorrows and starlight. Tiger has a heart the size of the savannahs just south of here outside of Nairobi. A heart like a spinning wheel. Just and true and sweet and full, moving always towards you, for you, alongside you.
He stood in front of me tonight and took my face in his small workman’s hands and I don’t know how he knew, but he pulled me to him so that our necks crooked like commas. I held him fast, tighter and tighter, and I let go, but not of him. I let him love me back. The love I have for him, how cannot it not come back for me, a thief who haunts and dreams his own accords, but has every intention of not letting me be? My son’s fingers are strong and his mind is set. He will push love in and pull it out just as one might a daisy chain, as if he knows I am made for this. Potted tulips, penguin topiaries, hot orange bougainvillea that climbs and climbs.
For those few minutes on a Tuesday evening in February, I let the cleansing of a little boy’s love through all of my locked and aching doors. Mama, he said. No one’s ever so NOT let go of me.
He is 28 months old.
But what’s the point of loving yourself first and foremost when it’s so much more interesting and compelling to love someone else? To spend the love you bank in your heart and soul on others? And who cares if you utterly deplete yourself in the process? Does it really matter if you have nothing else left to give?
Maybe it’s true about me, that I’ve never been able to embrace self-love, a decades-long dry spell that’s felt right as rain. Even now, now that my son has been with me for 17 months, it is something I cannot quite gather and grasp, even though I might hold a bunch of dying daisies as tightly in my fist as I hold him to me now. Flowers that should fall freely from my hand to seed the earth; flowers that might be pressed to hold their color and form between the pages of my old Black Beauty, or lie spread among lines of favorite poems. Flowers that blow along the wind, still alive in the journey they are taking, in a love they knew all to well.
Tonight, getting Tiger ready for his bath, I sat on the edge of the tub undressing him and wept buckets, heatedly and quickly. I didn’t want to cry with such shamelessness in front of him, yet it felt both safe and unsafe. Where did this come from, all of this lack? Why the fear of not being able for love as it comes (as it does every day)? Not feeling it, not feeling yourself. Not pushing the flood of love, the flowerbeds, the simple verses and complicated rhymes out of me, into the sun.
What do I know of love from within, for within? How it holds us and lets us go? How we let it go.
Moments before I’d shown Tiger a picture of one of the great friends of my life who died while I was in Kazakhstan readying to bring him home from the orphanage. I showed my son the picture and said, Who’s that? And then I couldn’t even tell him her name because the tears came on, heavy as harm, closing my throat and heating my skin.
Isn’t heat the temperature of love, in all if its guises, and isn’t it its color as well, the hothouse of flowers?
Tiger’s face. His cracker of a smile softens into something slightly afraid and very knowing. His eyes take on that darkening color of the sea as they do when he is serious about what’s right in front of him. He sweeps the back of his hand down my cheek. He looks up at me with small flowers of tears beginning in the curl of his lashes. He wants to know why I don’t quite reach in for the love he feels for the world, his family and himself.
This I can tell you about my son. He is kind. He is tender hearted above all things, tender as the night in all of it glories and sorrows and starlight. Tiger has a heart the size of the savannahs just south of here outside of Nairobi. A heart like a spinning wheel. Just and true and sweet and full, moving always towards you, for you, alongside you.
He stood in front of me tonight and took my face in his small workman’s hands and I don’t know how he knew, but he pulled me to him so that our necks crooked like commas. I held him fast, tighter and tighter, and I let go, but not of him. I let him love me back. The love I have for him, how cannot it not come back for me, a thief who haunts and dreams his own accords, but has every intention of not letting me be? My son’s fingers are strong and his mind is set. He will push love in and pull it out just as one might a daisy chain, as if he knows I am made for this. Potted tulips, penguin topiaries, hot orange bougainvillea that climbs and climbs.
For those few minutes on a Tuesday evening in February, I let the cleansing of a little boy’s love through all of my locked and aching doors. Mama, he said. No one’s ever so NOT let go of me.
He is 28 months old.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
20 PERSONS, PLACES & PRODUCTS I LOVE/LOATHE ABOUT KENY
Part 1 of 5
Goodbye, Gourmet: Kenya is not for the kitchen-hearted. Okay, I did find Skippy Super Chunky Peanut Butter in KPS (Karen Provision Store, the A-1 market for ex-pats) this week, leagues beyond the usual offering of American-style PB riddled with sugar. But if you’re hankering for Maldon salt, black beans, graham crackers, ancho chilies, Oreos, real dark chocolate and chocolate chips, Ben & Jerry’s, frozen spinach, non-stick cooking spray, Fritos, salt-cured-and-dried capers and flaky coconut for cookies, you are lost in translation. Furthermore, you can forget real maple syrup from Vermont, unless you want to pay $12 for a small, perfume-sized bottle of the good stuff. Some of these goodies are basic fodder for any gourmand, chef, or mad housewife cooking up trouble; some of it’s all-American junk food. But the rest you’re not sure how to live without. I’m currently suffering from Crystal Light relapse.
John Moeller: A one-time big-game hunter (and one of East Africa’s finest), John is now a conservation-minded safari guide who prefers to troll the Maasai Mara and other wildlife venues on foot. Not to fret if you’re trekking along behind him – he carries a very large gun, one that could fell an elephant at not too great a distance. Of course, John has had more than his share of close encounters of the animal kind, nearly being gored to death a few years ago by a Cape buffalo, probably the most dangerous creature on the continent. As you can imagine, the stories he tells over a proper snifter of Glenfiddich – that chui (leopard), this idiot, that bull (elephant) -- rival any you’ve ever heard. And suddenly, you have a glimpse of what it means to be a dreamer who dares.
I first met Mr. Moeller (all cock and balls, as he would say) on my very first safari in 1999, and we’ve remained friends through several adventures in several Kenyan conservation parks. Just recently while staying at Serian, he spotted a lion nesting under brush as thick as any Indonesian jungle (talk about tracking and spotting). Our hearts were beating fast as a hamster’s as we slid up in the Land Rover within feet of the male cat. Suddenly, John realized that our sighting had just pulled a Topi antelope into the bush with him and was growling over the intrusion. We left the lion to his lunch, but soon came upon a single-tusked elephant who was tearing down acacia trees for his lunch. (I thought a guy with only one tusk might be a bit cali, i.e., hot under the collar, but John could tell the elephant was mellowing out by the “relaxed look in his eyes”.)
A lion-hearted man who has a leonine head of silvery blond hair and a leonine look about him from head to toe. Simply put, you couldn’t put your life in better hands. Need I say more?
Oh, I almost forgot. He’s got one of the greatest laughs on the planet.
Mosquito Netting: Sometimes in Kenya, all you can do is pray.
Not infrequently when I sleep, often a muddled sleep, I dream of Ralph Fiennes as Count Almasy, the Hungarian mapmaker, in THE ENGLISH PATIENT. And my heart goes out to him for I too suffer from nightmares of being swaddled and smothered in gauze.
Go ahead, give it a try. Wrap your bed in the ceremonial cloth of mosquito netting and you will find, usually on nights hot as a volcano, you are trapped like a tuna in this shield that is meant to keep the mosquitoes OUT. (In my experience, it keeps more of them IN.) There you are, in the middle of the night, sweating, disgruntled, harried by “no-see-ems” and their infernal buzzing. There you are bursting at the seams to make it to the loo on time, and you are literally reduced to clawing your way out of the teepee-shaped cone of white, innocent-looking layers. Ol Doinyo Lengai (mountain of God in Maasai), please spare me the English patient routine.
Jay-C’s Garage: He is a man of mighty o’ temper with a garage bursting to the seams with business. Of Indian persuasion, Jay-C’s nose is beaked, his face narrow and his eyes, brown as peat and flashing with daggers. This morning, Joseph and I went to discuss a highly-inflated and misguided estimate that he’d given to us the previous day on the phone.
Mr. Jay-C was having none of it; he flared like a Fourth of July rocket slapped by a Molotov cocktail. “You and him, you come in here and say I’ve made a mistake? That I’m not doing on that car of yours what he [Joseph] ordered? You believe him? Get out of here and take your car with you!!” I’ve never seen such a fiery, hilarious display of anger since watching Disney cartoon “baddies” on Saturday mornings when I was a child.
I remained steady as a plank. Mr. Jay-C stormed out of his office, then spun around in the middle of his booming enterprise (go figure), tore up the estimate and threw it in my face. “Just for that, for all this trouble you’ve made, I’m giving you the gaskets and washers for free!” I went to shake his hand, he guffawed and started yelling at the mechanic working on my Land Rover. Joseph shook; I shook with laughter.
The next (second) installment of 20 PERSONS, PLACES & PRODUCTS I LOVE/LOATHE ABOUT KENYA includes Bedtime, Skies for Days, Freddy Face (& Atticus), and Gal Pals.
Goodbye, Gourmet: Kenya is not for the kitchen-hearted. Okay, I did find Skippy Super Chunky Peanut Butter in KPS (Karen Provision Store, the A-1 market for ex-pats) this week, leagues beyond the usual offering of American-style PB riddled with sugar. But if you’re hankering for Maldon salt, black beans, graham crackers, ancho chilies, Oreos, real dark chocolate and chocolate chips, Ben & Jerry’s, frozen spinach, non-stick cooking spray, Fritos, salt-cured-and-dried capers and flaky coconut for cookies, you are lost in translation. Furthermore, you can forget real maple syrup from Vermont, unless you want to pay $12 for a small, perfume-sized bottle of the good stuff. Some of these goodies are basic fodder for any gourmand, chef, or mad housewife cooking up trouble; some of it’s all-American junk food. But the rest you’re not sure how to live without. I’m currently suffering from Crystal Light relapse.
John Moeller: A one-time big-game hunter (and one of East Africa’s finest), John is now a conservation-minded safari guide who prefers to troll the Maasai Mara and other wildlife venues on foot. Not to fret if you’re trekking along behind him – he carries a very large gun, one that could fell an elephant at not too great a distance. Of course, John has had more than his share of close encounters of the animal kind, nearly being gored to death a few years ago by a Cape buffalo, probably the most dangerous creature on the continent. As you can imagine, the stories he tells over a proper snifter of Glenfiddich – that chui (leopard), this idiot, that bull (elephant) -- rival any you’ve ever heard. And suddenly, you have a glimpse of what it means to be a dreamer who dares.
I first met Mr. Moeller (all cock and balls, as he would say) on my very first safari in 1999, and we’ve remained friends through several adventures in several Kenyan conservation parks. Just recently while staying at Serian, he spotted a lion nesting under brush as thick as any Indonesian jungle (talk about tracking and spotting). Our hearts were beating fast as a hamster’s as we slid up in the Land Rover within feet of the male cat. Suddenly, John realized that our sighting had just pulled a Topi antelope into the bush with him and was growling over the intrusion. We left the lion to his lunch, but soon came upon a single-tusked elephant who was tearing down acacia trees for his lunch. (I thought a guy with only one tusk might be a bit cali, i.e., hot under the collar, but John could tell the elephant was mellowing out by the “relaxed look in his eyes”.)
A lion-hearted man who has a leonine head of silvery blond hair and a leonine look about him from head to toe. Simply put, you couldn’t put your life in better hands. Need I say more?
Oh, I almost forgot. He’s got one of the greatest laughs on the planet.
Mosquito Netting: Sometimes in Kenya, all you can do is pray.
Not infrequently when I sleep, often a muddled sleep, I dream of Ralph Fiennes as Count Almasy, the Hungarian mapmaker, in THE ENGLISH PATIENT. And my heart goes out to him for I too suffer from nightmares of being swaddled and smothered in gauze.
Go ahead, give it a try. Wrap your bed in the ceremonial cloth of mosquito netting and you will find, usually on nights hot as a volcano, you are trapped like a tuna in this shield that is meant to keep the mosquitoes OUT. (In my experience, it keeps more of them IN.) There you are, in the middle of the night, sweating, disgruntled, harried by “no-see-ems” and their infernal buzzing. There you are bursting at the seams to make it to the loo on time, and you are literally reduced to clawing your way out of the teepee-shaped cone of white, innocent-looking layers. Ol Doinyo Lengai (mountain of God in Maasai), please spare me the English patient routine.
Jay-C’s Garage: He is a man of mighty o’ temper with a garage bursting to the seams with business. Of Indian persuasion, Jay-C’s nose is beaked, his face narrow and his eyes, brown as peat and flashing with daggers. This morning, Joseph and I went to discuss a highly-inflated and misguided estimate that he’d given to us the previous day on the phone.
Mr. Jay-C was having none of it; he flared like a Fourth of July rocket slapped by a Molotov cocktail. “You and him, you come in here and say I’ve made a mistake? That I’m not doing on that car of yours what he [Joseph] ordered? You believe him? Get out of here and take your car with you!!” I’ve never seen such a fiery, hilarious display of anger since watching Disney cartoon “baddies” on Saturday mornings when I was a child.
I remained steady as a plank. Mr. Jay-C stormed out of his office, then spun around in the middle of his booming enterprise (go figure), tore up the estimate and threw it in my face. “Just for that, for all this trouble you’ve made, I’m giving you the gaskets and washers for free!” I went to shake his hand, he guffawed and started yelling at the mechanic working on my Land Rover. Joseph shook; I shook with laughter.
The next (second) installment of 20 PERSONS, PLACES & PRODUCTS I LOVE/LOATHE ABOUT KENYA includes Bedtime, Skies for Days, Freddy Face (& Atticus), and Gal Pals.
Monday, January 4, 2010
GLADYS' BACONS & CHICKEN PASTA BAKE
[In the past three weeks or so, I’ve started incorporating recipes into the blog, mostly because they represent good eatin’, but also because I love to cook much in the same way that a mad, mad, mad scientist must dicker with test tubes and Bunsen burners. Herewith one of our favorite new dishes from Gladys’ simple yet formidable repertoire. Note that one of her endearing quirks is to always pluralize bacon.]
• Dice and sauté two boneless chicken breasts in a little bit of oil until nicely brown. Add large pinches of salt and mixed herbs, a little bit of soy and 1-1/2 chicken stock cubes (for more tasty, says Gladys). Heat on medium for 5-10 minutes; you want to make sure that the chicken is pretty cooked through and that the flavors have all had time to grab onto one another.
• In a separate pan, fry up four slices of collar or back bacons (you want the stuff that is ham-like, not streaky).
• Saute (fresh pan) two chopped cloves of garlic and a medium-sized yellow onion.
• Pour a can of crushed tomatoes into a saucepan and heat for several minutes until a bit reduced.
• Boil up your macaroni or any other pasta your kids will like.
• You’ve now got every pan and every burner in the house going. Fine Einstein.
• Drain pasta, place in large mixing bowl. Add in your chicken, bacons, garlic and onions, and tomato sauce. Also add 1 cup of sourcream.
• Place pasta bake in a casserole dish, top with cheese of choice (about 1 cup) and bake at 350 for 30 minutes, or until cheese is thoroughly melted.
You will love this and your family will thank you for it.
• Dice and sauté two boneless chicken breasts in a little bit of oil until nicely brown. Add large pinches of salt and mixed herbs, a little bit of soy and 1-1/2 chicken stock cubes (for more tasty, says Gladys). Heat on medium for 5-10 minutes; you want to make sure that the chicken is pretty cooked through and that the flavors have all had time to grab onto one another.
• In a separate pan, fry up four slices of collar or back bacons (you want the stuff that is ham-like, not streaky).
• Saute (fresh pan) two chopped cloves of garlic and a medium-sized yellow onion.
• Pour a can of crushed tomatoes into a saucepan and heat for several minutes until a bit reduced.
• Boil up your macaroni or any other pasta your kids will like.
• You’ve now got every pan and every burner in the house going. Fine Einstein.
• Drain pasta, place in large mixing bowl. Add in your chicken, bacons, garlic and onions, and tomato sauce. Also add 1 cup of sourcream.
• Place pasta bake in a casserole dish, top with cheese of choice (about 1 cup) and bake at 350 for 30 minutes, or until cheese is thoroughly melted.
You will love this and your family will thank you for it.
POACHED EGGS & OTHER PEOPLE
I poached Gladys. My fabulous, full-time, fun-loving nanny who has made my life and that of my son’s simply magnificent. The spice to our cookies, the filet in our tagine, the cheese to our cheese ball. She has brought many gifts to our family of two, countless ones. And I’ve never been so happy to have committed a mortal sin, lapsed Catholic that I am.
Gladys was poached. I poached her from neighbors whom I only recently met. And in this neck of the woods when you supposedly steal staff from a household, you might as well have gone out into the Maasai Mara, the famous savannah of the Serengeti that lies north of the Kenya/Tanzania border, hunting elephant for ivory and zebra for pelts and rhino for horns (an aphrodisiac).
At the time, I didn’t really understand that I was thieving; it felt more like the shoplifting you do in junior high school, a little lipstick here, some mascara there. Nothing TOO bad. But when another neighbor offered a full-time job to a local driver, a very deserving chap, he got into a scuffle of sorts with the current part-time employer and desisted, saying, “I don’t want to be accused of stealing people!”
[I am not unaware that this kind of looting smacks of colonialism and ownership of persons, but that’s not why I was out poaching.]
Before arriving in Kenya from Dublin, I heard through the grapevine that Gladys was looking for a job. She came hugely, highly recommended: “She’s gorgeous,” pronounced my Finnish friend, “I’d trust her with my children’s lives.” Another galpal who’s lived her for a decade concurred, and actually put me in touch with Gladys directly. “But you can’t breathe a word of this, not to anyone. I haven’t even told my husband. It’s just not done. And these people used to be friends, but I had to help her.”
Finally I meet THEM. At a small Christmas Eve party down the road. The wife has beautiful long blond hair with a lean, weathered, attractive look, a horsey kind of gal in matchstick jeans who raises donkeys and llamas. The husband: a good-looking charmer with shaggy dark brown hair and eyes that shine. Both possess a warm manner and seem to fit easily into this ex-pat crowd that has so welcomed me (welcomed me (and Tiger) more and more thoughtfully than anywhere else I’ve ever lived). In fact, this couple is extremely popular and well thought of.
Their six-year-old son tugs at the mother’s hand. “Mama, mama,” he exclaims, “Gladys is here!” “Gladys? What is Gladys doing here?” “Because I poached her and she’s with us now!” I mutter. The mother doesn’t hear me; she is busy shaking off her son and pretending she hasn’t heard him either.
On the way home that night, Gladys and I are laughing about the idiocy of their not even acknowledging her. Dead giveaway. But I realize it must still hurt. “She invited me to come round for coffee, to drop in anytime. Ha!” I tell Gladys with my hand on her shoulder; we are navigating mud puddles the size of Lake Baringo while Tiger sloshes through them. “She did!” Gladys barks. “I’m having nothing to do with those people.” And she laughs again. “This has been a blessing,” Gladys adds. “Hmm, I’m not so sure. Maybe a curse?” I mumble delightedly, delighted that she is delighted with us. We laugh again; Tiger splashes. Except for my family, the night is still and silent and so there for us, a sheath of navy blue.
Who wouldn’t want to leave when, after several years, you’ve making just above half the going rate (which, at $200/month, is a total steal)? When the husband-and-wife team of tossing the ball of blame between one another never gives you a raise or a bonus? When they haven’t paid your dues for several years running (a Department of Labor edict that guarantees a staff person at least two weeks of their annual salary/annum)? When you still have to ask permission to use the microwave because you still have to bring your own lunch? When, having raised their daughter since birth and their son since he was two (five years!), they don’t even acknowledge you at the same holiday party, their eyes glazing past, their hearts as hard as cooling bricks?
My friend Dick Galleher makes the perfect poached eggs. “Here’s How To Poach an Egg,” by R. Galleher: Put pan of water on stove -- crack egg into cup or glass (your choice). When water is boiling, slip egg into water. Watch it. When cooked, but before yolk is hard, take off stove -- move to buttered piece of toast in a slotted spoon -- so you don't have any excess water. Enjoy!
In light of poaching in general, I think it is all about how you treat the egg. How lucky to have taken Gladys in hand without hesitation, gently spooning her from the hot waters and fuss of steam, then placing her atop of our favorite crispy toast, right in the kitchen of our souls. “Gladleth,” says Tiger morning, noon and night, which sounds vaguely like Gladless. Gladmore is more like it.
Gladys was poached. I poached her from neighbors whom I only recently met. And in this neck of the woods when you supposedly steal staff from a household, you might as well have gone out into the Maasai Mara, the famous savannah of the Serengeti that lies north of the Kenya/Tanzania border, hunting elephant for ivory and zebra for pelts and rhino for horns (an aphrodisiac).
At the time, I didn’t really understand that I was thieving; it felt more like the shoplifting you do in junior high school, a little lipstick here, some mascara there. Nothing TOO bad. But when another neighbor offered a full-time job to a local driver, a very deserving chap, he got into a scuffle of sorts with the current part-time employer and desisted, saying, “I don’t want to be accused of stealing people!”
[I am not unaware that this kind of looting smacks of colonialism and ownership of persons, but that’s not why I was out poaching.]
Before arriving in Kenya from Dublin, I heard through the grapevine that Gladys was looking for a job. She came hugely, highly recommended: “She’s gorgeous,” pronounced my Finnish friend, “I’d trust her with my children’s lives.” Another galpal who’s lived her for a decade concurred, and actually put me in touch with Gladys directly. “But you can’t breathe a word of this, not to anyone. I haven’t even told my husband. It’s just not done. And these people used to be friends, but I had to help her.”
Finally I meet THEM. At a small Christmas Eve party down the road. The wife has beautiful long blond hair with a lean, weathered, attractive look, a horsey kind of gal in matchstick jeans who raises donkeys and llamas. The husband: a good-looking charmer with shaggy dark brown hair and eyes that shine. Both possess a warm manner and seem to fit easily into this ex-pat crowd that has so welcomed me (welcomed me (and Tiger) more and more thoughtfully than anywhere else I’ve ever lived). In fact, this couple is extremely popular and well thought of.
Their six-year-old son tugs at the mother’s hand. “Mama, mama,” he exclaims, “Gladys is here!” “Gladys? What is Gladys doing here?” “Because I poached her and she’s with us now!” I mutter. The mother doesn’t hear me; she is busy shaking off her son and pretending she hasn’t heard him either.
On the way home that night, Gladys and I are laughing about the idiocy of their not even acknowledging her. Dead giveaway. But I realize it must still hurt. “She invited me to come round for coffee, to drop in anytime. Ha!” I tell Gladys with my hand on her shoulder; we are navigating mud puddles the size of Lake Baringo while Tiger sloshes through them. “She did!” Gladys barks. “I’m having nothing to do with those people.” And she laughs again. “This has been a blessing,” Gladys adds. “Hmm, I’m not so sure. Maybe a curse?” I mumble delightedly, delighted that she is delighted with us. We laugh again; Tiger splashes. Except for my family, the night is still and silent and so there for us, a sheath of navy blue.
Who wouldn’t want to leave when, after several years, you’ve making just above half the going rate (which, at $200/month, is a total steal)? When the husband-and-wife team of tossing the ball of blame between one another never gives you a raise or a bonus? When they haven’t paid your dues for several years running (a Department of Labor edict that guarantees a staff person at least two weeks of their annual salary/annum)? When you still have to ask permission to use the microwave because you still have to bring your own lunch? When, having raised their daughter since birth and their son since he was two (five years!), they don’t even acknowledge you at the same holiday party, their eyes glazing past, their hearts as hard as cooling bricks?
My friend Dick Galleher makes the perfect poached eggs. “Here’s How To Poach an Egg,” by R. Galleher: Put pan of water on stove -- crack egg into cup or glass (your choice). When water is boiling, slip egg into water. Watch it. When cooked, but before yolk is hard, take off stove -- move to buttered piece of toast in a slotted spoon -- so you don't have any excess water. Enjoy!
In light of poaching in general, I think it is all about how you treat the egg. How lucky to have taken Gladys in hand without hesitation, gently spooning her from the hot waters and fuss of steam, then placing her atop of our favorite crispy toast, right in the kitchen of our souls. “Gladleth,” says Tiger morning, noon and night, which sounds vaguely like Gladless. Gladmore is more like it.
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