Mothers and Their Daughters

There’s a photo of my mom and I...I was about two or three years old. We’re in Little Grass Valley camping for the week; I was dressed in overalls. I’m sitting on her lap with my hands wrapped around her neck and she’s swinging me back to make me smile. In the photo both our mouths are open and we are mid laugh. My dad is in the picture too, he’s cooking breakfast for us all. I think this is one of my favorite photos of all time. Whenever I think about how much I love my mom, I picture this photo. It’s perfect; it explains everything that my mom means to me. Then I picture all the times I wake up in my parent’s house to find my mom in the kitchen or living room, and before I’m awake enough to speak any words, she comes over and just hugs me, and rubs my back. How can one person have the ability to just know everything, and be everything you need?

To be loved by my mom is the best feeling there is. I will never stop needing her. She knows when something is wrong or right before I even dial her number from across the country. The one faith I will always have, there is no substitution for her. None.

Nothing takes the place of a mother-daughter relationship. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I've heard it's not easy, but hands down my mom wins. The amount of love I have for her is completely intangible, owed only to someone who taught me that kind of love herself. To all the mothers out there teaching real love, thank you...for making this world a better place.


Happy Mother’s Day Mommy. Thank you. I love you <3

On the Streets of West 12th

It was four in the morning and they were dancing in the streets. I was confused at first, and watched from my window as she performed some sort of celebratory jig. I couldn’t help but feel a little envious of the fearlessly rogue street crossing that ensued, or how two people were having that much fun walking it out. They probably had really awesome Italian grandparents. Either way, La Esquina still wouldn’t let them go downstairs...so that happened.

It was as if they had been drinking gin and sodas all night, after three wrong orders of gin and tonic...even if it was the best gin behind the bar. They might have even had a dance-off on the d-floor...because when is a dance-off ever bad? He owed her a pedestal, even after he put her on one, and perhaps even a dinner that didn't involve a sports bar...but it didn’t suck. I think it should have been a good sign after the great white shark appeared at Spring Lounge, but apparently the Maritime Hotel has three dance floors, really bad cell phone reception, and mysterious wine-cork curtains. It also has a great meeting spot at the bathrooms, given you’re talking about the same bathrooms. Ariel views wouldn’t have even helped. But all in all, it was worth leaving the bottle he just bought for the night.

It’s as if he had to use a GPS tracker to find her, or maybe even a game of Marco-Polo, but when he did it was like finding an ipod-filled Easter egg in the middle of a fiercely competitive elbow-throwing hunt. This sort of thing would never happen above 14th Street. I kept thinking what type of rubble-rousers would pretend they were at an 8th grade dance formal, but then again who would think to wear a windbreaker jacket to Southside? It was the sort of thing that could even intimidate a girl with a Swiss army knife in her purse. But he had no chance. He should have known from the beginning; the irony of the pet shop next door might have said it all...

Metro Moments

There's something I never could quite understand about airplanes. An enormous piece of machinery, flying thousands of miles up in the air. It just doesn't seem to make any sense to me. But then again, neither does the remake of "We Are the World" with Lil' Wayne signing Bob Dylan's verse...but I still dug it.

The other day I had a love connection on the subway. I was riding the local 6 train downtown from the upper east side. I had just shown the Goodfellas actor, Paul Sorvino, a few $3M properties uptown and was heading back to the office. This stranger was incredibly handsome and after exchanging a few smiles I was certain he was to someday be my husband. As I stood up to leave the train he handed me a page he tore out of the book he was reading, with his name and number hastily scribbled on the corner. I wish I could say the story ends here. Only after we met for coffee did I find out he was only 20 years old, a student at NYU, younger than my little brother. I swore off "love at first sight" immediately in that sobering moment.

At least once per week I see the +254 Kenya country code show up on my cell phone. When I pick it up it's one of my kids asking me to Please Miss Jennifa call for me back! I think of the time some my students walked me 45 minutes home after school, up a dirt road on one of the hottest days of the year. Now I've traded t-shirts for blazers and flip flops for boots, dirt roads for a concrete jungle, but it's still where dreams are made of. And if I close my eyes I can still see my kids there when I look down. It tends to keep me in perspective...I'd have to say.

Happy Anniversary Kenya

 

Haiti

Please
I want to talk about real things
Even when it stings
And your eyes water until they get sore because you want to do more but can’t do more but you could do more if you tried to do more...You ask what for and I say explore like never before I won’t keep score but I will implore you not to ignore to think of the shore where homes hit the floor in a sudden downpour, bodies faced war and a little bit more than spirits were tore, just get down to the core and DO MORE
Please



These things
Are happening a few hundred dollars away make a difference today...
If you can
And solve real live questions to real life problems
Some of us just talk about it while others are out there doing it
Be the verb not the adjective
Someone told me that once
I think he got it from someone else...
But that’s not really the point.

I Remember

He was almost five, and so alive
All alone, but still he’d strive
He could thrive, and survive
On one bowl a day
Of rice and corn
Another baby born
To a mother with AIDS, HIV
To her god I hear her plea
Please, not me
Oh god not me, I won’t be
Here to see
My baby turn three
Just set me free
Don’t take him, please take me
So he set her free, and she left this land
And now instead of hers, he holds my hand
I try to step quick but I’m in quicksand

This boy turns six and tries to change fate
He runs to school, but he’s already late
So we run hand in hand, not too slow
I made him a promise that I wouldn’t let go
But it’s getting harder for him to breathe
He needs a break, too often it seems
He coughs up blood and I hope this doesn’t mean
He’s living with a disease unseen

He tells me it’s his birthday today
But he’s still sick and cannot play
I know I’ll have to take him away
To get the test he tried to delay
So still I sit and hold his hand
As the doctor gives the test we demand
And the result comes back seven years too late
And I hate the world for this moment in fate
I see in his eyes what I won’t let him see in mine
This little boy will die, in time

And I wish instead the energy could leave me
As it left his mother, so swiftly
Anything but this little boy
Why couldn’t death just pick a new ploy
I look at him but do not weep
If he can’t jump I’ll have to leap
Skin so dark and eyes like stars
Wide enough to chase speeding cars

So time it came and time it went
And soon this little boy’s spirit was spent
But I held his hand as he said goodbye
As I promised him, I would not cry
And as the night became so still
I sat and let the quiet fill
All the air and every thought
And all the love this little boy brought
And when I look at my hand I still see his there
I’ve never seen a more beautiful pair


He was almost five
And so alive…



***Do something to help this holiday season. Be the change.

Holidaze

If I’m being honest, I think I owe it to myself and to anyone else reading, to write a few words pertaining to what happened next. There’s always another page, always another story, always a next.

It’s been slightly over one month since my return to the big city. It has blurred by in a mixture of express trains, walk-up buildings, and quite entertaining dates when I can find the time. I'm in real estate, I hear myself casually drop at least three times a day, maybe because I'm proud of it, maybe because I'm prospecting, or perhaps just because I've begun to breathe it every waking moment. You have to, this is New York City. Go hard or go home.

Coming back to New York was a multi-faceted experience. Everything looked different and the same all at once. I was a new me, I had a new perspective, I was better, stronger. But no matter how far I had come, some things were still there, as expected, waiting. They begged to be reckoned with, beckoned my temptation and I fell for it...but only for a second.

More often then not I find myself thinking about my time in Africa. I think about how even though I so strongly wanted everyone to feel it, to learn from it, to understand it...I've come to accept that it really was for no one other than myself. I'm the only one who can truly understand, who can truly learn from it, who can bring to mind in a single heartbeat the kids, the smells, the sound of Kenya. And I keep it with me, every day, along side my grocery list and taxi receipts and weekend plans. Most people don't have the time it takes to truly hear you, but all in all, I realize I don't need them to.

It's true what they say about reciprocity, you know. When you're finally ready, when you're finally done, when you can finally say goodbye...it doesn't matter if the other person is there to hear you, to know it. You won't need them to know either way. Because the only one who ever really needed to say goodbye...was you.

‘Tis the season...Christmas in New York. Coffee burns my tongue as I sit behind a window watching the snow fall; I think about plans to ice skate in Central Park and new romance amidst apple cider and spiced rum. New beginnings, new endings, and an anticipation of the unknown. Love Actually and Miracle on 34th Street play repeatedly on DVD players and TBS specials, the tree lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center is advertised in the New York Times, and once again I know...anything seems possible.

Homecoming

Today, I'm coming home. I will arrive tomorrow at JFK airport, the same place I began this journey, almost eight months later.

I caught a one way flight and moved to Kenya for six months. I slept in the bush next to elephants and rode on the back of a motorbike across the cradle of humankind. I feared for my life in a dodgy Mombasa hostel, and taught school children Math and Science. I worked and lived amidst the street kids of Kibera, and watched my orphan toddlers grow up. I traveled to Rwanda during the genocide anniversary, and saw the churches where thousands were murdered. I went white water rafting down the mighty Nile past Ghandi's ashes, and turned 25 in a cottage in the Ngong Hills. I moved in with a popular artist, then moved to Cape Town, South Africa. I swam with Great White sharks, I climbed mountains, I got a job as a waitress in a cafe bar. And then...it was time to come home.

"...I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us...all the while I will know that you are there. How blessed are we to have each other?"

--Valentino Achak Deng, What is the What

Maybe I inspired you, maybe I entertained you, or maybe I taught you something not about me, but about yourselves. Either way, I thank you for being there with me. And I hope next time you're faced with a decision, you might just think again, and decide you're not afraid to jump.

"Black Taxis"

"So do you know how I get to the beach from here?" I ask the tall woman behind the counter. "Taxis are quite rare, you need your own transportation," she tells me. "Well what about the shared minibus taxis?" I've seen them frequently since my arrival. "Oh..." she pauses, caught off-guard then lowers her voice, "...well, you could take the black taxis...but I wouldn't recommend it." As she feigns a look of pity, I tell her that would be perfectly fine to me, and walk out the door.

South Africans still refer to each other as Blacks, Whites, and Coloureds, and are satisfied with judging each other in this respect. The reminents of apartheid are uncomfortably blatant, and I find it disheartening to be put in such an ostentatious category. White South Africans I've met find it confusing that I'm dying to head into the townships, but to be honest, I feel much more comfortable amidst those surroundings. I haven't heard hardly as many overtly racist remarks from black South Africans as I have from the whites, though I'm sure I'd rather not know what they are thinking. There's a place I like to go in Cape Town. It's a walk-way near the train station void of all white people. There are cheap boxes selling food, vendors hawking anything and everything, and a few benches. I like it because it reminds me of Kenya. At the moment I'm sitting next to a woman smelling of sweat and obnoxious floral perfume, which blends with the odor of garbage and greasy food. I'm reading a book about Zimbabwe and am not in the least bit surprised with how comfortable I feel. I've come to love my moments of being alone.

Last night I shared a dorm room with seven male tour guides from Zimbabwe and Kenya respectively. Though nothing should surprise me anymore, some things still cause me to take a step back and laugh at my circumstances. One morning at my restaurant my dorm mate Ed came in, and out of breath proclaimed, "Jen, I just got out of prison! I was arrested last night for not having my passport on me..." I love my friends. The other week I rented a car with two English mates, and drove around the coast to see penguins, surf and beaches, and picked up a hitchhiker along the way. I went out last weekend and managed to lose just one shoe. I hiked to the top of Table Mountain in one hour and ten minutes, then wanted to roll all the way down due to exhaustion. Life is a funny thing sometimes.

Stories. We all have them. The more living we do the more interesting they become, and the more your eyes carry hints of secrets. All you have to do is ask, and the quiet brown-haired boy with a surf board becomes a British Marine, and the blond girl with glasses next to you in the raft is working with refugees in the mutiny that is Sudan. And today, I'm the girl that would rather take the black taxis...

Cape Town

"Jen?!....JEN!" Wait, you cannot be serious. You're not telling me that within two days of my arrival to Cape Town someone is already yelling my name from across the street. But indeed, it is true. It's my new brunch friends from a couple mornings prior. I think I'm starting to like this place...

Well my friends, it's official. Within five days of my arrival to Cape Town, I got a job at a martini and tapas bar...and it is awesome. It fits right in with the story, I think.

Cape Town is nothing like Kenya...nothing. I had an extremely refined and trendy boutique owner tell me, from behind designer sunglasses and a babydoll dress, that they were very third world. I smiled politely. My first few days here went a little something like this: sitting on the floor in the middle of a hundred rowdy Afrikaans in the upstairs of a smoky pub watching rugby, then illegally scaling the side of a building and dancing on the roof, sitting on the top of a lion statue at midnight, climbing a mountain in the dark, staying out until five in the morning, and getting both an interview and a job offer in the same day. My first roommate in the hostel was a 61 year old woman from New Zealand, who within the first moments of meeting poured me half her bottle of wine. On my second night I spent five hours at a Cuban themed dive called Che Bar where I met people with names like Gideon, Kellen, and Ronelle, and I've been running into them ever since. Today at a shop on Long Street I heard a couple speaking Kiswahili and almost died. I spoke with them a little, mainly because I only know a little, and it reminded me of how much Kenya feels like home, and how much I treasure it.

So much has already happened, and it's only been a week. Cape Town is a mixture of San Francisco, New York, and Africa. The backwards culture shock is strong, but in a good way. I'm looking at everything wide-eyed like that of a child seeing the world for the first time. I wasn't ready to be thrown into this, but I think that's the best way for it to happen. I'm wondering how much longer this is all going to feel like a fairy tale. I mean, I could go home...but then what?

I presently shower daily, just because I can. There are cement sidewalks and real mattresses. I drink tap water, have real flushing toilets, water that doesn't run out and electricity that always works. I get paid for working, I eat tapas. I got my hair cut for the first time in over six months. Is it great? Yes. Is it better than Kenya? Ha...never that, never that...