Love in a Yellow House on a June Afternoon

I spent the entire morning on the sofa, in bed, sick with something that hit so hard they keep telling me I'm pregnant and I give them the evil eye, warding them off with comments like "can computers get your pregnant?" which actually didn't work with this highly educated group.

By noon, I feel better, and sit curled up on the sofa, which means I'm back on Mommy duty.

She stands there staring at me not wanting to cry, but she's 8 and she's shocked, clearly unhappy to be unhappy, and not knowing hot to fix things.

Just two minutes before she proudly patted Lily ( her 3 year old cousin) on the head and then kissed her saying, "Look how cute she is! She won't let me put her down!"

Then came the incident with 4 kids and 2 lunchables and Zoe didn't get one and she can't figure out who to be mad at and even worse she is mad at herself for wanting a Lunchable and not just giving it to the little kids, but dammit she wanted it and now she was as hurt as she was confused.

"Its hard being 8," I whisper to her. "If I can remember it right -- and I remember 8 very well, you know that?" (she nods) 8 is just about the age a persons heart is really growing and they start to love people bigger and bigger, and then they might find out that when you love someone and let them close to you. they can make you happier and sadder. And that's OK, right? Isn't love the whole point of all of this?"

She didn't nod her head, just buried closer next to me, surrounded by aunts and cousins and train tracks in a yellow house on hot rainy June afternoon.

June 30*

There is something about June 30 that makes me want to push "pause" and stand in the noon sun, at the precipice, halfway through the year.

I want to enjoy the view from here - the kids in the pool, nieces and nephews and lizards and floats surrounded by a circus of towels, all of them dry.

Yes, I want to stay here for awhile.

From July on, things go fast.

Time rolls down the mountain to December, faster and faster and then we start again, from the bottom, January, looking up the mountain of time, again.

Apron Tale: Super Zack

I am tired of being sad, I think almost wistfully, almost angrily, while sweeping crumbs and bits of construction paper from under and around the dining room table while he is at the table, singing to himself a wordless song, cheerfully.

I fall back out of my head into the moment, lean against the wall, and stand quietly.

He notices me, stands on his chair, which makes him taller than me, and smiles brightly into my eyes.

"Zackaroni, What is going on the universe that I am standing here, being a mom, in this apron, sweeping? How this happen? Where is this all going?"

He laughs and mimics my shrug.

Maybe he didn't hear me, or maybe he felt my sadness and frustration more than more than my words, because he threw himself off the chair and into my arms in an unabashed love hug dive, pinning me against the wall, his nose against mine.

" There's NOTHING n the whole world better than being a KID with THEIR MOM around," he tells me, wrinkling his five year old freckled face, kissing me on the nose, on the lips, and then on both cheeks.

"Yeah? Its not bad having you around., either. You bring me sunshine....."

"...And I PROTECT you," he adds, sliding off me, standing back on his chair, arms folded across his chest, an imaginary cape waving behind him.

"Protect me? From what?"

"Bad guys!" he says, and I decide to let him believe his own story.

I don't want the conversation to end, so I add, "...and you protect me from sadness and boredom, too."

"Boredom? What's that?" he asks my back, as I lean over sweeping crayons and toast
crumbs and pieces of happy meal toys into the dustpan.

Before an answer can form in my mind, he is already cutting and gluing singing to himself again.

2010

Dear students my favorite movie is pirates of the caribbean set in the colonial era. Not a single student picked it - most students picked the Scarlet Letter or the Patriot.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Amazing Origami Boy

Zack made
this intricate dragon
from cutting and gluing
two sheets of construction paper
while I swept around him.

Western Misconceptions Meet Iranian Reality

(from Stratfor.com)
No, I didn't write this, but it's soooo good I had to share it.

*************

In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.

The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch’s modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years — Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn’t speak Farsi all that well.

The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at liberalizing the country. Their sources were the professionals and academics who supported the uprising — Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn’t think he had much popular support. They thought the revolution would result in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in this group spoke even less Farsi than the those in the first group.

Misreading Sentiment in Iran

Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading — because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy — people Americans didn’t speak to because they couldn’t. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.

Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization — a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook “iPod liberalism,” the idea that anyone who listens to rock ‘n’ roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran — a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.

There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand — but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran.

Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would probably reach people who had phones and lived in Tehran and other urban areas. Among those, Mousavi probably did win. But outside Tehran, and beyond persons easy to poll, the numbers turned out quite different.

Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin. Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people, and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly have spotted this and would have called him on it. Mousavi still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the mechanics of this.

Ahmadinejad’s Popularity

It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.

First, Ahmadinejad speaks of piety. Among vast swathes of Iranian society, the willingness to speak unaffectedly about religion is crucial. Though it may be difficult for Americans and Europeans to believe, there are people in the world to whom economic progress is not of the essence; people who want to maintain their communities as they are and live the way their grandparents lived. These are people who see modernization — whether from the shah or Mousavi — as unattractive. They forgive Ahmadinejad his economic failures.

Second, Ahmadinejad speaks of corruption. There is a sense in the countryside that the ayatollahs — who enjoy enormous wealth and power, and often have lifestyles that reflect this — have corrupted the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad is disliked by many of the religious elite precisely because he has systematically raised the corruption issue, which resonates in the countryside.

Third, Ahmadinejad is a spokesman for Iranian national security, a tremendously popular stance. It must always be remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering, and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made in that war — something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he speaks to the veterans and their families, who want something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in the war.

Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Lower East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.

For a time on Friday, it seemed that Mousavi might be able to call for an uprising in Tehran. But the moment passed when Ahmadinejad’s security forces on motorcycles intervened. And that leaves the West with its worst-case scenario: a democratically elected anti-liberal.

Western democracies assume that publics will elect liberals who will protect their rights. In reality, it’s a more complicated world. Hitler is the classic example of someone who came to power constitutionally, and then preceded to gut the constitution. Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s victory is a triumph of both democracy and repression.

The Road Ahead: More of the Same

The question now is what will happen next. Internally, we can expect Ahmadinejad to consolidate his position under the cover of anti-corruption. He wants to clean up the ayatollahs, many of whom are his enemies. He will need the support of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This election has made Ahmadinejad a powerful president, perhaps the most powerful in Iran since the revolution. Ahmadinejad does not want to challenge Khamenei, and we suspect that Khamenei will not want to challenge Ahmadinejad. A forced marriage is emerging, one which may place many other religious leaders in a difficult position.

Certainly, hopes that a new political leadership would cut back on Iran’s nuclear program have been dashed. The champion of that program has won, in part because he championed the program. We still see Iran as far from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon, but certainly the Obama administration’s hopes that Ahmadinejad would either be replaced — or at least weakened and forced to be more conciliatory — have been crushed. Interestingly, Ahmadinejad sent congratulations to U.S. President Barack Obama on his inauguration. We would expect Obama to reciprocate under his opening policy, which U.S. Vice President Joe Biden appears to have affirmed, assuming he was speaking for Obama. Once the vote fraud issue settles, we will have a better idea of whether Obama’s policies will continue. (We expect they will.)

What we have now are two presidents in a politically secure position, something that normally forms a basis for negotiations. The problem is that it is not clear what the Iranians are prepared to negotiate on, nor is it clear what the Americans are prepared to give the Iranians to induce them to negotiate. Iran wants greater influence in Iraq and its role as a regional leader acknowledged, something the United States doesn’t want to give them. The United States wants an end to the Iranian nuclear program, which Iran doesn’t want to give.

On the surface, this would seem to open the door for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Former U.S. President George W. Bush did not — and Obama does not — have any appetite for such an attack. Both presidents blocked the Israelis from attacking, assuming the Israelis ever actually wanted to attack.

For the moment, the election appears to have frozen the status quo in place. Neither the United States nor Iran seem prepared to move significantly, and there are no third parties that want to get involved in the issue beyond the occasional European diplomatic mission or Russian threat to sell something to Iran. In the end, this shows what we have long known: This game is locked in place, and goes on.

Alone

Monday morning
(early)
I sit alone and quiet
under the fractured moon

repeatedly and impatiently
(harshly)
pushing myself
to be thankful.

PMS Moon (Keep Running)

The sky was not peaceful this morning.

The stars were in their usual places (faintly) while gangs of tobacco-stained clouds annoyed the boastful full moon.

As I ran into the guy walking his dogs who I see at exactly the same time and same spot on the mornings I choose this twisting curvy hilly route, I remember to ask.

"Hey, where do I drop off food for Manna?"

He nods, recognizing the food bank at his church, then describes which entrance to take, which door to look for.

And so while he was explaining something that I now guess I wasn't listening closely to, I announce, "I think 40 is enough. I've done enough, seen enough, been enough, sometimes, I just want to say 'ENOUGH, I'm done, thank you, that was fun, goodbye.' Like I'm done, just DONE, you know?"

Two large dogs circle between us, sniffing and snuffling happily.

He nods, then adds, "I tell myself the worst is over, here comes the good part..."

I shrug, bend over and nuzzle my face into one of the dogs -- the older, calmer one -- "What is it? Where is this coming from? the full moon?"

Then I say mostly to myself, but also to him and to the dogs and to watery choking feeling that, if I let it, will end my run right here. "I guess I'll just keep running until this passes...." Then I squared my shoulders back towards the road and started moving, again, back on the path of familiar circles over hills and around curves.

"Yes, keep running," he agrees, already disappearing into the quiet.