February 25, Saint-Ismier.
It's carnival time, kids at school wore disguises today, and made masks; we made some at home too, and there were clouds on the mountains, but that was the other day.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Carnival.
February 25, Saint-Ismier.
It's carnival time, kids at school wore disguises today, and made masks; we made some at home too, and there were clouds on the mountains, but that was the other day.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
A writer.
February 20, Saint-Ismier.
I am in love.
His name is Philippe Claudel. He's a writer and there is nothing else to say but the poetry of the words and their slashing at my throat, or is it my heart.
I am in love.
His name is Philippe Claudel. He's a writer and there is nothing else to say but the poetry of the words and their slashing at my throat, or is it my heart.
Routines.
February 20, Saint-Ismier.
So many days of illness, the memories of a fresh routine already nostalgia, the routine of school days, the first school days and soon the days filled to the brink and the routine marching in, Wednesdays there is no school but going to hear stories and songs at the library, storming the bookstore, finding one more children's book to savor in its delicacy and enchantment, having lunch at the children's café, our haven, rushing home to enjoy the youth of the afternoon and go walk in the woods, slowly they go first then they're runaway kids and I running behind them, jumping on logs, collecting leaves, breathing in the wonder of the simple wilderness just beyond our house, just within our days, then coming home and the brink of the day, hot bath and a dinner and off to bed, I with them, bedtime stories, one more book, kicking and laughing and not ready for bed, and soon it's the weekend and two days filled with this and the painting and the Legos and the routine of school days freshly found, already lost.
Days going by and I wanted to write about all this, the wonder of days so full there was no time to even think of turning on the television, and I wanted to write but didn't find the words to convey the wonder, days going by and I didn't write at all, the routine of school days just that, a routine, what's there to write, but the wonder, the days, and then illness sets in and there is no more routine but that of doctors' offices and the wishing for what's already lost.
Lessons never to be learned.
So many days of illness, the memories of a fresh routine already nostalgia, the routine of school days, the first school days and soon the days filled to the brink and the routine marching in, Wednesdays there is no school but going to hear stories and songs at the library, storming the bookstore, finding one more children's book to savor in its delicacy and enchantment, having lunch at the children's café, our haven, rushing home to enjoy the youth of the afternoon and go walk in the woods, slowly they go first then they're runaway kids and I running behind them, jumping on logs, collecting leaves, breathing in the wonder of the simple wilderness just beyond our house, just within our days, then coming home and the brink of the day, hot bath and a dinner and off to bed, I with them, bedtime stories, one more book, kicking and laughing and not ready for bed, and soon it's the weekend and two days filled with this and the painting and the Legos and the routine of school days freshly found, already lost.
Days going by and I wanted to write about all this, the wonder of days so full there was no time to even think of turning on the television, and I wanted to write but didn't find the words to convey the wonder, days going by and I didn't write at all, the routine of school days just that, a routine, what's there to write, but the wonder, the days, and then illness sets in and there is no more routine but that of doctors' offices and the wishing for what's already lost.
Lessons never to be learned.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Out-takes (Paris early morning.)
February 15, Saint-Ismier.
It is only now I can open the pictures I took arriving in Paris in November, early one morning as the weekly fresh market workers were unloading their stuff onto the wet melancholy streets.
My camera ran out of battery the day I settled here and I hadn't brought the charger; Fridman just sent it.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Joy and fear.
February 14, Saint-Ismier.
The news from Egypt, so awaited, so very good, fell on a night when something wrong about Dylan or Nicolas was again at the center of my universe, and so the joy went, swallowed by my little world of worry, little world of primal fear, sickness and death against the joy of my children's very life and against the joy of a revolution prevailing, finally, in relative, miraculous peace.
And so it is, of the world of mothers, and that of people, condemned between joy and fear.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
A morning.
February 8, Saint-Ismier.
We are all sick, the kids and I, a virus or another, nothing to be done except wait and try not to worry too much, and sleep at night.
It is hard to work even when nobody's sick and the kids go to school; Nicolas stays home in the afternoon, there is the buying and the cooking, the getting them to and from school, there are the errands, the humdrum of life as a mother, between homes and countries, and so precious little time to work, work at trying to get The Mud Show Diaries published, by anyone, anywhere, in any form, at trying to get started online, proofreading, editing, writing - just to write these miserly words has taken me more than an hour, Mom can I get an apple, Mom can I get more apple, Mom I need help with my painting, drink your juice, Dylan, you need to drink more, Nicolas don't throw that, where was I, yes, an email from that publisher telling me they do not accept manuscript submissions anymore due to budget conditions, yes, but there are still N, O, P all the way to Z in the list of independent publishers, yes, but Dylan wants me to help him with his puzzle, full of dragons and furious unicorns, and I think Nicolas needs a nap.
Me too.
Three emails sent, call it a morning.
We are all sick, the kids and I, a virus or another, nothing to be done except wait and try not to worry too much, and sleep at night.
It is hard to work even when nobody's sick and the kids go to school; Nicolas stays home in the afternoon, there is the buying and the cooking, the getting them to and from school, there are the errands, the humdrum of life as a mother, between homes and countries, and so precious little time to work, work at trying to get The Mud Show Diaries published, by anyone, anywhere, in any form, at trying to get started online, proofreading, editing, writing - just to write these miserly words has taken me more than an hour, Mom can I get an apple, Mom can I get more apple, Mom I need help with my painting, drink your juice, Dylan, you need to drink more, Nicolas don't throw that, where was I, yes, an email from that publisher telling me they do not accept manuscript submissions anymore due to budget conditions, yes, but there are still N, O, P all the way to Z in the list of independent publishers, yes, but Dylan wants me to help him with his puzzle, full of dragons and furious unicorns, and I think Nicolas needs a nap.
Me too.
Three emails sent, call it a morning.
Friday, February 04, 2011
Such grace.
February 4, Saint-Ismier.
The other day I almost wrote "We are all Egyptians" but stopped, balking at the comparison such a phrase would immediately call with such eminent journalists as those from the French venerable daily, Le Monde, who wrote "We are all Americans" after 9/11. Today it was Nicolas Kristoff's privilege to write it in his column from Tahir Square.
He is the best a journalist can be and an honor to our profession; his daily reporting from Cairo has kept me abreast of the situation in Egypt, and added a needed perspective to otherwise confusing reporting.
Exhilaration ceded to anger these past two days as I watched and read about armed thugs that showed many obvious signs of having been sent by the government to attack their brothers, along with journalists of all nationalities trying to do their job and give the world a window into what is really happening on the streets of the Egyptian capital. It is an act of treachery coming from a desperate regime clinging to its power in the face of an overwhelming popular revolt, and I have no doubt that it is the last gasp of a dying beast and for all the barbarity and screeching injustice of its unfolding will only hasten the demise of that regime.
By this last measure of his indignity Mubarak has signed his end, and the Egyptian's population's unfaltering heroism, again and again, as reported by Mr. Kristoff and others, will be remembered all the more fiercely.
I'll keep waiting for his notes from Cairo, the exhilaration I felt already surfacing again in the midst of my dismay - what else in the face of such grace and strength against barbary?
The other day I almost wrote "We are all Egyptians" but stopped, balking at the comparison such a phrase would immediately call with such eminent journalists as those from the French venerable daily, Le Monde, who wrote "We are all Americans" after 9/11. Today it was Nicolas Kristoff's privilege to write it in his column from Tahir Square.
He is the best a journalist can be and an honor to our profession; his daily reporting from Cairo has kept me abreast of the situation in Egypt, and added a needed perspective to otherwise confusing reporting.
Exhilaration ceded to anger these past two days as I watched and read about armed thugs that showed many obvious signs of having been sent by the government to attack their brothers, along with journalists of all nationalities trying to do their job and give the world a window into what is really happening on the streets of the Egyptian capital. It is an act of treachery coming from a desperate regime clinging to its power in the face of an overwhelming popular revolt, and I have no doubt that it is the last gasp of a dying beast and for all the barbarity and screeching injustice of its unfolding will only hasten the demise of that regime.
By this last measure of his indignity Mubarak has signed his end, and the Egyptian's population's unfaltering heroism, again and again, as reported by Mr. Kristoff and others, will be remembered all the more fiercely.
I'll keep waiting for his notes from Cairo, the exhilaration I felt already surfacing again in the midst of my dismay - what else in the face of such grace and strength against barbary?
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
The warm winds of freedom.
February 1, Saint-Ismier.
It is cold here in the French Alps; the mountains in front of my mother's house have disappeared in a mass of grey clouds.
But there is a warm wind blowing on the other side of the Mediterranean.
It is a wind of liberation so sudden and so new that it feels like the dream of a drunken ship. It is a wind so powerful that it sweeps away fear, a fear so old it had become like fate.
Today Egyptians of all walks of life are demonstrating en masse in the streets of Cairo one week after protests started on the wings of the wind of revolution.
It is a warm wind, it was born in Tunisia last month on the ashes of a young man who died in December after setting himself on fire. Mohamed Bouazizi's gesture in a small town lost in central Tunisia ignited what has come to be called the Jasmine Revolution, a revolution that toppled longtime strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali from power in only a few days. Ben Ali came to power in 1987 promising democracy and only strengthened the corruption and despotism that had marked the later years of the first president of the Tunisian republic, Habib Bourguiba.
In 1987 my best friend was Zohra Fetiti, she was a petite young woman who fascinated me with her wild streak, her mystery, and the sweet obscurity of her eyes. She was Tunisian. Ben Ali's ascension then meant a renewed hope for a country she barely knew, she was a child of emigration, the legacy of French colonialism, and I remember her divided between hope and disappointment, there had been no elections, but maybe this was for the best, and anyway it was far away, she was a Tunisian but she did her best to escape her country and her family's assumption of what that meant for a woman.
I wonder what she is thinking today, as the warm winds of freedom are suddenly, fiercely, thanks to her compatriots, spreading all over the Middle East and its assortment of West-backed dictators. The Jasmine Revolution was unthinkable a month ago, the Egyptian uprising even less so. Hosni Mubarak has been in power for longer than most protesters in the streets have been on earth, seated on a bed of fear, the population's fear of his police and his jails, the West's fear of radical Islamism.
It is exhilarating to see what is happening under the world's eyes, the media blackout imposed by the Egyptian regime in a desperate move to try to contain the wave not working in this age of defyingly fast communication technology advances; it is exhilarating to hear people in the Arab world finally speaking up, facing death - and many have died since the wind of revolution began blowing - for a hope they didn't know they could have, proud of shedding that fear; it is simply incredible to hear them voicing their love of country, democracy and freedom in a collective cry that can be felt all around the world - and the cold cold breeze of fear is suddenly in the other camp.
Mubarak could be out before the day is over. I wish I were an Egyptian today, just to feel that wind in my face - but I do.
The winds of my cold winter are warmed by a whole people's awakening, and the gift of dreaming the unthinkable.
It is cold here in the French Alps; the mountains in front of my mother's house have disappeared in a mass of grey clouds.
But there is a warm wind blowing on the other side of the Mediterranean.
It is a wind of liberation so sudden and so new that it feels like the dream of a drunken ship. It is a wind so powerful that it sweeps away fear, a fear so old it had become like fate.
Today Egyptians of all walks of life are demonstrating en masse in the streets of Cairo one week after protests started on the wings of the wind of revolution.
It is a warm wind, it was born in Tunisia last month on the ashes of a young man who died in December after setting himself on fire. Mohamed Bouazizi's gesture in a small town lost in central Tunisia ignited what has come to be called the Jasmine Revolution, a revolution that toppled longtime strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali from power in only a few days. Ben Ali came to power in 1987 promising democracy and only strengthened the corruption and despotism that had marked the later years of the first president of the Tunisian republic, Habib Bourguiba.
In 1987 my best friend was Zohra Fetiti, she was a petite young woman who fascinated me with her wild streak, her mystery, and the sweet obscurity of her eyes. She was Tunisian. Ben Ali's ascension then meant a renewed hope for a country she barely knew, she was a child of emigration, the legacy of French colonialism, and I remember her divided between hope and disappointment, there had been no elections, but maybe this was for the best, and anyway it was far away, she was a Tunisian but she did her best to escape her country and her family's assumption of what that meant for a woman.
I wonder what she is thinking today, as the warm winds of freedom are suddenly, fiercely, thanks to her compatriots, spreading all over the Middle East and its assortment of West-backed dictators. The Jasmine Revolution was unthinkable a month ago, the Egyptian uprising even less so. Hosni Mubarak has been in power for longer than most protesters in the streets have been on earth, seated on a bed of fear, the population's fear of his police and his jails, the West's fear of radical Islamism.
It is exhilarating to see what is happening under the world's eyes, the media blackout imposed by the Egyptian regime in a desperate move to try to contain the wave not working in this age of defyingly fast communication technology advances; it is exhilarating to hear people in the Arab world finally speaking up, facing death - and many have died since the wind of revolution began blowing - for a hope they didn't know they could have, proud of shedding that fear; it is simply incredible to hear them voicing their love of country, democracy and freedom in a collective cry that can be felt all around the world - and the cold cold breeze of fear is suddenly in the other camp.
Mubarak could be out before the day is over. I wish I were an Egyptian today, just to feel that wind in my face - but I do.
The winds of my cold winter are warmed by a whole people's awakening, and the gift of dreaming the unthinkable.
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