Day 163 - Conversations

Three rectangular trellises at the front

Alex loves our house. He really does. He loves the inside, all on one level, no stairs, a view from one window of the mountains around San Diego, and a view of the hummingbirds at the feeder from the other large window. And he loves our yard. He would love it even more if it were large enough to need a riding mower to keep the grass short - his image of the American dream includes a riding mower. He loves the lemon trees in the back yard that provide the fruit to freshen up his gin and tonic in the evening. And he loves the flowers that grow in front of the house.

I like our house a lot, but I will never end up with the same deep emotions as Alex feels. Or maybe it is just that I won't speak the thoughts aloud like he does. You see, Alex is an extrovert, and while I have learned how to behave like one, I am still an introvert. That means that where Alex can't help but tell me what he thinks about everything. I keep my thoughts to myself unless I think it is necessary to speak the words. Our conversations are a combination of things he says and things I don't say.

This week, I did mention something to Alex about how I would like the flowers displayed in the front yard. While I was in Minnesota this spring, Alex spent a lot of time sprucing up the yard, including the purchase of a number of flowers in pots that he set up on the steps and on the table on the porch. He added petunias, hibiscus, and a few other flowers whose names I don't know in both the front and back of the house.

Two of the potted floral plants Alex put out on our steps have small white trellis frames in them. The plants don't seem inclined to climb the trellises, but I like the look of them. I suggested we get similar trellises to put up against the side of the house for the flowering plants that were already in the ground when we bought the place. They are vines, growing along the ground or on bamboo stakes Alex had put in for them. I thought the trellises would look good.

Rectangular trellis

Alex decided he would rather buy wood and make the trellises himself. I wasn't sure if it was the cost of the already made up trellises we found at Dixieline Hardware or his desire to make them himself that was the stronger motivator. But I said nothing. It didn't seem worth the time it would take to discuss it, and it really didn't matter. If he wanted to make the trellis, I didn't want to suggest that I thought it might not be a good idea. And if he thought the cost of the ones already made up was too high, I didn't want him to think I thought he was being cheap. I let him pick out the wood which we got home and added to his stock of wood for future projects. I thought the wood pieces were a little flimsy, but I am not the wood worker, so I kept my thoughts to myself.

Within a couple of hours, he decided himself that the wood wasn't substantial enough. He decided to take them back and pick up two rectangular trellises instead. I was pleased that we would have the trellises sooner than it would take for him to make up two, but what I really wanted were trellises in a different shape - more like a big "Y" than a big rectangle, but again I thought it would be better to get the ready made trellises right away (we had seen them at Dixieline when we bought the wood lengths) instead of having to look around further for the other shape. Alex came back with three rectangular trellises - all they had at that store.

Y-shaped trellis

Later, I heard him pounding the stakes into the ground to anchor the trellises on. While I knew he could do the work himself, and I didn't have to worry that it would put too much strain on his still recovering knee, I knew he would like me to help. He showed me what he was thinking of doing at one end of the house, but there are more plants at the other end, too. The three trellises wouldn't be enough. I was absolutely delighted when he suggested that perhaps we could get the other shape trellis for the end near the porch. I hadn't seen any, but when he realized there were no more of the rectangular ones, he had spied the others. I think he may have been hesitant to suggest that shape to me because they aren't the same as the first set. Inside, I was leaping for joy because that is the shape I had wanted all along.

All six trellises are now in place, with the vines and red flowers held up on the stakes ready for the vines to begin twisting around the boards themselves. Alex is happy. I am happy. And I barely had to say a word. I just needed to keep my thoughts to myself until they were also Alex's thoughts and then I could agree with him that his idea would be perfect. That's how an introvert and an extrovert hold conversations.

Day 162 - Fashion in Moldova

I just finished reading the memoir of a woman of my parents' generation. Venus Smith was married to Chet Smith whose stage name was Val Eddy, a musician with the U.S. Navy during World War II when they met. The book contained excerpts from several of their letters while Venus remained in Washington, D.C., and Chet was aboard ships in the Pacific. Because Venus frequently mentioned how difficult it was to buy certain items, such as meat, butter, and sugar, it reminded me of my experiences in Romania and Moldova, the two countries where I lived through the shortage of basic foods.

Maxi image by vintspiration, via Flickr.com

But food items weren't the only items in short supply in both Romania and Moldova. I was convinced there was also a shortage of fabric. While women's fashions in the west involved calf-length maxi-skirts, in Romania most women were wearing thigh-length mini-skirts. In Moldova, women seemed to wear long sweaters without even the pretense of a skirt under them. I came up with three theories to explain it.

First, there was the "we don't follow your decadent western trends" theory. The Romanian authorities took every opportunity to point out the very worst aspects of western culture. Any Americn TV program or movie that emphasized corruption among police, the military, or federal officials was sure to be big hits there. Most of the TV programs broadcast in Romania were 15 to 20 years old, but when Dallas came out, it was on TV in Romania within a year. There wasn't a better propaganda vehicle for the Romanians to get their negative points across about American culture. So ensuring the clothing available in the country was nothing like American or European styles was another way to make a political statement.

Second, there was the "why waste fabric by making long skirts when short skirts will do" theory. There were plenty of sheep in Romania, so there was plenty of wool available, but Romania also sent nearly everything of quality produced in the country abroad, to earn hard currency. Conserving raw materials by minimizing the amount of fabric needed made good economic sense.

Mini image by fervent-adepte-de-la-mode
via Flickr.com

Third, there was the "we just keep reworking what we already have" theory. With a shortage of fabric, it is inevitable that when something wears out, it will be modified. A long skirt can be remade as a short skirt, but not the other way around.

I didn't spend much time shopping for clothing in Romania, but I did make my way through the one department store in Iași. Later, in Moldova, I spent more time checking out what was available. In both places, I noticed that what was missing in both places was variety. There were clothes, racks and racks of clothes. But just like the aisles of canned tomatoes, entire lengths of aisles filled with just one brand and one size of canned tomatoes, the clothing on the racks were all the same. There were racks of the same style dress in the same purple print fabric, in all the sizes available. And then there were racks of an orange print dress.

Women in Romania turned this lack of variety into a way to make a statement anyway. In contrast to the west, where two women would never want to be seen at the same event wearing the same dress, Romanian women friends would pick out matching dresses, shoes, purses, hats, and anything else that could be seen as they walked down the street together, making a statement about their friendship and also their wealth which allowed them to buy what was newest in the market. Another case of not doing it the way the west does, but still doing what is done in the west - competing with one another.

People really are alike all around the world. It is just the details that differ.

Day 161 - Cats and Dogs

Bunk

I am not really a dog person. I prefer cats. I am allergic to both, but I am somehow less bothered by cat allergies than dog allergies. When I discovered the allergies, I went through desensitization treatment, aka shots, which may explain why I am not so bothered by cats. It can't just be that I like them more than I like dogs.

In spite of my preference for cats, I have recently become somewhat attached to Bunk, Simon and Sarah's boxer. Bunk stayed with us for a week, while both Simon and Sarah were in Ohio. Bunk is such a placid animal, spending most of his time looking for just the right amount of sun or just the right amount of cool tile to lie down comfortably.

I have shared my life with lots of cats. There was Bilbo Baggins, aka Cat, and Karley, aka Kitty, in California. There was Sheikha and then Sharifa in Doha. The two of them made the trip to Barbados to join us and later Pooky joined the family. We lost Sharifa there. She went through all nine of her lives. And when we left for Moldova, we had to find new homes for Sheikha and Pooky because we knew we would be living in a hotel room at least initially. Sheikha stayed behind in Barbados and Pooky went with a

Sheikha

colleague to Iceland.

At that point, I agreed with Alex that we would have no more cats because it was just too hard to let go. But when we were about to leave for Abu Dhabi, a friend who was just about to leave asked if would take their cat, Violet, because they couldn't take her with them. And that opened the door for Fudge, Marmelade, RF, Missy, Eddie, and Missy's six kittens to move in on us. Missy, Eddie, and the kittens never really moved in, but they settled down quite permanently in our back yard where I fed them twice a day.

It was all Violet's fault. She was such a fussy eater. She would only eat from a freshly opened can of food. If the can had been in the refrigerator, Violet wouldn't touch its contents. And they didn't sell small cans of food in Abu Dhabi. She also wouldn't eat dry food, or Tender Vittles. So we ended up with large cans of cat food that Violet wouldn't touch.

Sharifa

 When we threw the cans away, the feral cats in the neighborhood dumped over our cans and ripped apart all the bags to get at the cat food.

That is when we decided we had to pick out a cat or two to feed in order to avoid the cat fights on our front porch. Fudge and Marmelade were just kittens. Fudge was very friendly, so he is the one we decided to feed. The plan was to keep feeding them outside, but they were so small and the bigger cats in the neighborhood harrassed them, loudly, leaving us with one good option - letting them move in for the sake of our sanity.

Violet wasn't happy. She wouldn't share the kitchen with them. She parked herself in the doorway and wouldn't let the two of them pass. So we had to put her food on the top floor to separate them so Fudge and Marmelade could eat in the kitchen.

Fudge and Marmelade

And that is when we noticed Missy, a calico we were pretty certain was their sister. She started hanging around in the back yard, so we would feed her, too. She had two kittens, a male and a female. The female disappeared, but the male, Eddie, kept coming back. In a few months he was bigger than any of the others, twice the size of either Fudge or Marmelade. And Missy had her second litter, this time six kittens. Eddie would settle down among the kittens and suckle from Missy along with his siblings.

Marmelade disappeared after a few weeks. That is when RF appeared. He was a miniature copy of Fudge, so there was no question he would join the family.

We had to leave them all behind in Abu Dhabi.

Bishop

Once again, we agreed no more cats. But we hadn't counted on Bishop appearing. Simon came to live with us and he also loved cats. He was especially interested in getting a black and white cat. He had a name already picked out - Hagrid. But on a stroll through a pet store one Sunday, he saw Bishop. And since Bishop was Simon's nickname where he worked in England before he moved to Virginia, once again, it was clear that there was yet another cat destined for our family.

Bishop, and for a shorter time his sister Ginnie, lived with us for 10 years. But when Alex and I left Virginia for California, Bishop stayed behind with our next door neighbor Carol.

This time there will be no more cats.

And no dogs either.

Say 160 - Independence Day

Independence Day image by Watson
Media, via Flickr.com

Celebrating Independence Day overseas is very important at U.S. embassies. Each country observes a national day. July 4 is ours.

During my 22 years as a Foreign Service Officer, how embassies observed July 4 changed, reflecting the change in security situations around the world.

American citizens overseas seemed to believe they should all be invited to these events, but that isn't the purpose of the funds used to pay for them. They are formal, official, and representational. Many embassies schedule a second, informal and unofficial event for Americans resident in the country to observe July 4.

My first July 4 overseas as a State Department employee was in Germany in 1986 where we celebrated at a reception in the afternoon at the Consul General's home. Most of the guests were Germans or representatives of other diplomatic missions in Stuttgart. All the staff of the embassy or consulate are on duty at these events; they are not entertainment for staff. They are work.

Two years later, in 1988, I was in Doha, Qatar, where we had planned the reception at a hotel on July 4, but then, the day before on July 3, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Gulf that has two names, on the Bandar Abbas-Dubai route. We spent July 3 calling everyone we had invited to let them know the event was being postponed until later in the year. Instead of observing Independence Day as our national day that year, we observed the date in September that was the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution.

The following year, 1989, we observed national day early, in June. Some countries in the Middle East held their national day receptions in February, around Presidents Day, when the weather on the Arabian Penninsula was mild enough for the receptions to be held outside. Temperatures in July were often well above 100 degrees, making an outdoor event dangerous as well as very uncomfortable. June was too late for an outdoor reception, so the reception was again in a hotel. The ambassador couldn't use the explanation that it was too hot to observe national day in July. I always thought the reason we held the event in June was that the ambassador knew he would be leaving Qatar before July 4.  His term was ending on June 30.

In 1990, the U.S. Embassy in Barbados held its official reception on July 4 at the Ambassador's residence. The weekend before, the North American community resident in Barbados observed both Canada Day and July 4 at a hotel on the beach. That event turned out to be memorable for a very different reason. The owner of the hotel was an American who was under indictment for mail fraud. His arrest was scheduled for the following day, postponed because of our event. He had done his research and found there was no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Barbados, so he thought he was safe there. His research wasn't thorough enough, however, since an existant treaty between the U.S. and the U.K., signed before the U.K. granted Barbados its independence in 1966, applies between the U.S. and Barbados. The day after our beach party, a photo of the owner of the hotel, handcuffed, being escorted out of the hotel was on the front page of the newspaper.

In 1993 and 1994, when we were in Moldova, the number of resident Americans was limited to just those of us at the embassy, the staff and the construction workers in the country to ugrade the buildings on the grounds of the embassy compound. We held official events for our Moldovan contacts and other diplomats. And, like in Stuttgart, we held a separate, informal, event for the staff and American workers. At one of those events, the ambassador posed for photos with some of the workers, sitting in the side car of the motorcycle one of them had bought to get around town. She was quite a lady.

July 4, 1996, we were back in Washington, D.C. We observed the fireworks on thr Mall that year from the 8th floor of the State Department building. We not only saw and heard the fireworks from that vantage point; we felt them.

We were in Abu Dhabi from 1996 to 1999. We arrived just after bombings of Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and we lived through the aftermath of the east African bombings. July 4 observations seriously changed after those events. Even the informal, just for Americans residents in the country, events featured walk-through metal detectors at all entrances. Guards were posted everywhere. No one was allowed into the venue without presenting an invitation and identification to prove the invitation was theirs.

My final national day celebration overseas was in Sana'a where we observed the event in a very unorthodox way: we painted a school for children with disabilities. The ambassador had established this pattern previously. She felt that the several hundred dollars needed for food and drinks to be consumed in an evening would be better spent doing something to improve the lives of Yemenis. She received approval to spend the representational funds on paint, brushes, and other supplies and on the day, we staff members who would have had to work at a reception got our hands dirty doing a different type of work.

We didn't need walk-through metal detectors for that one.

Day 159 - What's Going On In the Bathroom?

image by homespot hq,
via Flickr.com

Last week our toilet started talking to us again, gurgling and bubbling, so we called Henry the Plumber to come back to check out the lengths of replacement to our sewer that he put in back in January. We were worried that he might have to do more work, digging up our travertine floor, at high cost. So we were relieved to learn that we are dealing with low-flush technology on top of high-flush-required sewer lines. The solution is as simple as changing our choice of toilet paper and flushing twice. But the solution seems to undo the purpose for the low-flush toilets.

I had always wondered about those toilet paper commercials that started out with a woman saying, "It's time to get real about what goes on in the bathroom." Until that series of commercials came out, I never thought there were any mysteries about what goes on in the bathroom. I have more than 60 years of taking advantage of bathroom facilities and I never found it necessary to wonder about it.

But then we moved to California, the land of environmental movements and ecology organizations. John Muir formed the Sierra Club in San Franciso in 1892, nearly a century and a quarter ago. The first Earth Day was planned during a UNESCO Conference held in San Francisco in 1969. I was introduced to recycling in the early 1970s when I lived in Berkeley.

Image by MyEyeSees, via Flickr

In 1992, then President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act which mandated toilets not use more than1.6 gallons of water per flush, less than half the amount previously used. The reason: to conserve water, of course. But when only the toilets were changed, the sewers didn't always clear up with a single flush. Flushing twice is often necessary. So the reason for mandating the low-flush toilets, to conserve water, ends up being undone. And "what goes on in the bathroom" is about the paper that doesn't always make its way into the main sewers because of the lack of pressure. The biggest offenders - the softest paper.

That is what we have found. In spite of our desire to conserve water, especially since southern California rarely has enough rainfall for its needs, double flushing, wasting water, is necessary, because the alternative of settling for less than soft paper just isn't something we are willing to consider in our household.

Around the same time as our most recent gurgling toilet incident, Alex noticed workmen outside doing something to the sewer lines in the street. Cities in California have found it necessary to send pressurized streams of water through the sewers more often as a result of the increase in the number of low-flush toilets in use. That high pressure through the sewers in the streets can result in water in the lines between the houses and the streets being siphoned out, emptying the traps, allowing sewer gas to escape until the toilets are all flushed again to fill the traps. Clearly, something is going on in the bathrooms in California that my years of living in other states and countries hadn't prepared me for.

Day 158 - The President's Coming To Town

Romania played an interesting role in the international arena during the time I lived there. It was part of the Warsaw Pact, placing it firmly in the red camp of nations, but President Ceauceșcu wasn't above playing his friends off against one another. In contrast to the Soviet Motherland which emphasized comradeship, commonality, the sameness of everyone, Ceauceșcu encouraged regional diversity among Romanians. There weren't just Romanians, there were Oltenians, Transilvanians, Muntenians, Walachians, Dobrogeans, Bucovinans, Moldovans, Maramureșean, Banațean, the regional groupings of Romanians with their distinctive traditional folk music, folk costumes, and village building styles, all of which could be seen in the Village Museum in Bucharest. Where in Moldova 15 years later, we saw all people in villages and walking along the highways all dressed the same, in Romania, the people outside the cities dressed in traditional clothing of the type that had been worn since Vlad Ţepeș resisted both the Turks and the Hungarians who traded opportunities to rule the geographic area that is now Romania. In Moldova those who had the means to ride on the highways were in cars, trucks, or on tractors while in Romania many still made their way between villages in wagons piled high with straw and pulled by horses or cattle.

Ceauceșcu was pleased to see his people differentiated from all his neighbors.

Politically, Ceauceșcu also sought opportunities to thumb his nose at his neighbors. He liked to be seen as making his own way in the world, not kowtowing to the Soviet Union or other larger nations. One example was his hosting, secretly, talks involving President Anwar Sadat of Egypt that led to Sadat's visit to Israel in late 1977. Those talks occurred in Bucharest early in my time in Romania, on a weekend when I traveled Thursday evening by train from Iasi to Bucharest.

Before I left Iași, my Fulbright researcher friend, Paul, asked how I had managed to get a ticket for that evening. He had gone that morning to buy a ticket, but he was told no one from the university was being allowed to travel that weekend. I must have purchased my ticket several days before, so I went to the train station Thursday evening and had no trouble getting a seat.

When I arrived in Bucharest that Friday morning, many of my friends expressed surprise that I had been able to get on the train. At the university in Bucharest, students weren't allowed to leave their dormitory buildings. No one knew why this was so, but there were, as was always the case in Romania, rumors. That weekend, my life went by quite normally. Most of my friends in Bucharest were connected to the embassy or the American School, and there were no restrictions placed on their movements. There may have been a few more Romanian policemen around the embassy, and they may have been a little more aggressive in demanding to see identification of people passing it on the street. But nothing really interfered.

When I returned to Iași, I learned that others had not been so lucky. In addition to my friend Paul not being able to buy a ticket on Thursday, the students in Iasi were also confined to their dormitories for the weekend. And we heard that one of the American Fulbright lecturers in Cluj-Napoca who wasn't able to get a plane or train ticket decided to drive to Bucharest for the weekend, but she was turned back on the highway. Still we had no knowledge of why.

Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat, www.aljazeera.com

When President Sadat finally did travel to Israel for that historic visit in November of 1977, the reason for the clamp down on the students in the country, especially the foreign students, was clear. Romania was one of the only countries in the world to have official representatives of both Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in their capital city. Iran was another. There were large numbers of Arab students in Romania in all university cities. And there were Israeli students, including Israeli Arabs. Given the overwhelmingly negative reaction among the Arab world to President Sadat's visit to Israel, it was clear there were valid security concerns about what would happen in Romania if word got out about President Sadat's presence in Romania and the purpose for his visit.

Four years later, President Sadak was assassinated by one of his people. Eight years later again, Ceauceșcu met a similar fate, though without the same level of surprise.

Day 157 - Disneyland

Disneyland image by photographerglen, via Flickr.com

From the day we kids learned about Disneyland, we began planning for our family trip there. Mom got a big piggy bank for us to put our pennies, nickels, and perhaps a dime or two into as we began saving for that trip. In the years we continued our planning even after we moved from one house on Dudrey Court to another across the street, still on Dudrey Court. The coins kept accumulating, but over time, I grew up and thought myself too old to go to Disneyland.

By the time Mom, Dad, and the younger four of my siblings made it to Disneyland, I was through college, married, and living in northern California, closer to Disneyland than ever before, but still too far away to consider a trip there. Years passed until I finally realized that I hadn't outgrown Disneyland. I had just put the dream aside for awhile.

In December of 1972, I put the few things I owned that were too big to fit into my VW bug into the attic of the church in Berkeley where I had worked for the past three years and packed the rest, along with my cat, into the car and headed south to Los Angeles where I planned to spend Christmas with Dad's sister Irene. It was a round-about way to get back to Minnesota before I moved to San Francisco to begin again as a student, this time in graduate school at California State University at San Francisco, but it made sense to head south first because I then planned to head for Phoenix to spend a few days with Mom's parents where Mom and Dad, Joan, Roger, Bruce, and Brian were spending Christmas. I expected to leave two or three days after Christmas for Phoenix, spend a few days there with the family, and then have Joan join me in my car for the rest of the trip to Moorhead. Because I would be so close to Disneyland, I decided to go there the day after Christmas - fulfilling that childhood dream.

Old City of Sana'a by kgbbristol, via Flickr.com

But Dad had other plans. He knew I would be in Los Angeles, and he knew that I had always wanted to go to Disneyland. But he wasn't sure I would make the trip to Disneyland by myself. So Mom and Dad and my four siblings made the trip from Phoenix to Los Angeles the day after Christmas to make sure that I got to Disneyland. We had a wonderful day.

Disneyland has remained a symbol of a dream for me. There is always something in me that can't wait until I finally get to Disneyland. It's as though the real place was just a hint of what Disneyland is meant to be.

image of Yemeni men by eesti,
via Flickr.com

When I was in Doha, Qatar, I recall a conversation with one of my colleagues, Martin, who mentioned a group of people who were planning to travel from Disneyland to Doha. Martin seemed concerned about the trip, giving me the impression that he thought a trip from Disneyland would be dangerous. It was a curious conversation until Martin finally figured out that I wasn't understanding him at all. He was using Disneyland as a code word for a completely different place, a place that we didn't speak of when in most Middle Eastern countries, certainly not over a telephone line. The group of people Martin spoke of were planning a trip to Doha after a stop in Israel. Such a routing meant complications because an entry stamp indicating a stop in Israel in a passport could mean no entry would be permitted into Qatar. Disneyland was used as a symbol of a forbidden place, a curious twist on my thoughts about Disneyland.

image of Yemeni women by
carpetblogger via Flickr.com

The image of Disneyland was very much on my mind much of the time I spent in Sana'a, Yemen. The old city of Sana'a, with its six-story tall adobe buildings complete with gingerbread icing around the doors, windows, and roof lines, conjured up images of Fantasy Land castles. The people walking in the streets of Sana'a seemed very much like fairy tale characters. The men wore the unlikely combination of skirts, sport coats, wide belts with knives tucked in front, and scarves both around their shoulders and on their heads. Many of the women wore very colorful cloths covering them from head to toe with one type of cloth looking like a tie-dyed mask often topped with a straw hat and a tin tray heaped with bags of rice, flour, sugar, or other foodstuffs. In another part of Yemen, the women wore straw hats with enormously tall and pointed crowns, very much like a traditional witch's hat. Living in Yemen was even better than visiting the Disneyland of Anaheim where all the people being visited were only in costumes, not every day clothing, and were paid for performing, not living side by side with those of us visitors.

image of Yemeni woman and child by IRNI,
via Flickr.com

More than 30 years ago, I left Iran, but brought nightmares of the place with me. It took years before those nightmares stopped and were finally replaced by occasional dreams. Less than 15 years ago, I left Yemen, bringing with me dreams of the place that I didn't want to end. In my dreams, I returned to Sana'a Old City's souq where I enjoyed the fragrance of all the spices, along with a few more earthy scents, where I heard the music from the homes above the shops, the chanting of the muezzin in the mosques, where I saw the bright colors of the Kashmir shawls, the coral, amber, turquoise, gold, and silver of the jewelry merchants. Each night as I dreamed of those sights, sounds, and smells, I worried as the quantities of them shrank, reflecting the distance between the real thing and my memories.

Disneyland remains the symbol of a dream for me. I am fortunate to have experienced such varied experiences that seem part of that dream. And I can't wait until I finally get to Disneyland for real.