New Morning, New Day

It is with great optimism that I greet 2015.  The tumult of 2014 appears to be satisfied with staying in 2014.  Like a dog who nips at your heels until it gets to the end of its territory.   With the filing of divorce papers on January 2, the county clerk's stamp will be the 2015 coda on the slow 2014 funeral march of our marriage.

Soon enough, February 22, 2015 will mark the one-year anniversary of my move from my gracious four-bedroom, three-bath house that I do not miss with even one grain of sentimentality.

That was both a hasty retreat and one that was overdue.  It was with such a sigh of relief to retreat to a modest, one-bedroom apartment in the student ghetto near campus.

My favorite contemporary poet, the deceptively accessible Billy Collins, has a little poem in his volume Ballistics entitled "Divorce":

         Once, two spoons in bed,

         now tined forks

          across a granite table

          and the knives they have hired.

Well, thankfully that does not describe our divorce, at least from my perspective (and I have been reminded of the importance of perspective through all of this).

My lawyer immediately recommended mediation and though it took a long time to set it up, a date was set for us (sporks?) and our lawyers (sheathed knives?) to meet at the mediator's office in one  of those weird office parks designed to look like townhouses and that provide space for a hodgepodge of businesses: soulless suburban places.  No granite table. Rather, me and my knife were in one room stocked with a mini-fridge of drinks and a bowl of Hersey Nuggets (the least the mediator could supply for $275/hour--that's for each of us), and she and her banker-looking knife in another.  The mediator bounced back and forth.  It was all so ordinary for him (a spatula?) and the knives. Extraordinary for me.  Don't know what she thought of it.  Probably never will.

The date of the mediation?  September 4, which just so happened to be our wedding anniversary. Our 21st wedding anniversary.  Divorce mediation scheduled for our last wedding anniversary.  Our marriage was now legal to drink and here we were engaged in its dissipation.  

After that, the divorce was a process of document exchanges.  The most challenging issue was the custody schedule.  Z's choice was two-week cycles with each parent, something my lawyer had never heard of.  The devil is in the details, however, and my lawyer found it impossible to find language that would adequately lay out how the two-week cycle functioned within the complicated framework of holiday visitation that her lawyer put forth.  I offered my lawyer language . . . for free.  In the end, he trusts we will remain sporks.

So 2014 was the year of the divorce.  It started with incredible fireworks over the frigid Pacific waters of Chile seen from the thirteenth floor of our apartment in Viña del Mar on New Year's--January 1.  It saw our departure from Chile on January 2 and our return to the United States on January 3.  February 22's evacuation from the premises.  The sale of our house later that spring for too little money. September 4's mediation.  Full circle to January 2, 2015, submission of papers to an Athens Judge who, as a lowly attorney 12 years ago, helped us adopt Z. A judge in Athens will put asunder what a minister united in Charlotte in 1993.  In the words of Jesus on the cross, "tetelestai."

Travels with Pablo?  You bet.  Because the journey has begun again.  And after a year of traveling in the valley of the shadow of divorce, I see the sun.  And it is warm and bright and beckoning me:  "Look around," it seems to be saying, "isn't it beautiful?"

Stayed tuned for more adventures--on bike and on foot, professional and personal, physical and spiritual, domestic and international.   Carpe fucking diem. 

A Different Kind of Journey

I wrote the following post in April 2014, and it has sat in my dormant blog's draft folder for almost nine months. Given that it has been incubating for almost as long as a gestating fetus, I believe it is time for it to emerge and stand as a post signifying a new threshold for "Travels with Pablo."

"Pull a thread on a 20-year relationship and it's amazing how quickly it unravels":  so wrote Tish Hamilton in the February 2014 issue of Runner's World in an short but trenchant article about how running functions during the breakdown of her marriage. The article is entitled "Untying the Knot."

It is rare indeed to read a sentence that so perfectly describes my life in that instant.  I read it as my own 20-year marriage moved from the ICU to hospice.

Since returning from Chile on January 3, I have been on a very different kind of travel than my 5 1/2 months in Chile, though the latter certainly had something to do with the latter.  The trip has been a swift, unstoppable unraveling of my life but it was not entirely unpredictable.  We are trying to untie the knot as amicably as possible, more along the lines that dear Gwyneth Paltrow has bestowed on us this week with the psychobabble-sounding term "conscious uncoupling."  Chile provided us with a way to see clearly just what our differences were and forced us to stare directly into the face of a reality that we had been palliating with the opiates of routine, obligation, and a long tally of mulligans that we were giving one another.

I am going to use this space to talk about my travels. I am not going to speak of my soon-to-be-ex spouse or our son.  I want to use this space to explore this terrain, which is new to me but all too common for far too many other people.  You will not find blame here (because there is none), you will not find acrimony toward another, you will not find salacious details.  What you will find is a man trying to emerge from the "uncoupling" of a marriage (but not the uncoupling of parenthood for either of us) to learn how to be a better person.  I want to learn from this.  I need to learn from this. I want to be a better parent because of this.  And I want to have better relationships with other people as a result of this.

Having a room of my own, with apologies to Virginia Woolf, has already provided me with insight into the last 20 years of my life  (we had our twentieth anniversary in Chile) and I can say that I am not having to try very hard to focus on and appreciate the high points.  We grew up together and discovered a lot of things over the course of two decades.  The last 20 years were not a mistake. They have been part of the journey.  The latest chapter, living alone in an apartment in a pistachio-green building, has been a kind of a retreat back to a standard of living reminiscent of PQ circa 1990.  With better furniture.  I found some mirth in going to Lowe's to buy cinderblocks, bricks and boards to customize shelving for a very weird space next to my kitchen range, but evidently constructing furniture out of building supplies is like riding a bike.

So, forgive me if this seems self-indulgent, but I do want to share what I am thinking and feeling (in a certain way) to others, perhaps because the one person that I used to share those things with is no longer available.

Valparaíso: Ascensor

"Oda a Valparaíso" by Pablo Neruda

Valparaíso, / qué disparate / eres, / qué loco, / puerto loco, / qué cabeza / con cerros, / desgreñada, / no acabas / de peinarte, / nunca / tuviste / tiempo de vestirte, / siempre te sorprendió / la vida / te despertó la muerte, / en camisa, / en largos calzoncillos / conflecos de colores, / desnudo / con un nombre / tatuado en la barriga, / y con sombrero, / te agarró el terremoto, / corriste / enloquecido, / te quebraste las uñas, / se movieron / las aguas y las piedras, / las veredas, / el mar

Translated by: Laney Sullivan and Lonely Planet

Valparaíso, / how absurd / you are / what a crazy / insane port. / Your disheveled head / you haven't / combed your hair, / you've never / had / time to get dressed, / life / has always / surprised you /  Death woke you up / in your undershirt and long underwear /  fringed in color / naked / with a name / tattooed on  your stomach / and a cap / the earthquake grabbed you / you ran / mad / broke your fingernails / it moved / the waters and the stones / sidewalks / and seas

Pablo Neruda got it right: Valparaíso is disheveled, crazed, chaotic, more dirty than clean (except for the very respectable Cerros Alegre and Concepción), and much poorer than its respectable and manicured sister up the road, Viña del Mar.   I head over from Viña to Valpo every day on the Metro after dropping Z off at school, and I work at PUCV just beyond Muelle Baron,  but I don't spend nearly enough time exploring the city.  

It's a port town.  Before the Panama Canel, it was the port of call for ships after they rounded Tierra del Fuego.   Darwin spent a lot of time here and spoke highly of it, and the British have left an indelible, though fading, mark.   Despite its down-on-its-luck appearance, it is a vibrant place of commerce and art, and it is one of the most intriguing places I've ever visited.  

One of the most original and probably best known features of Valpo are its many ascensors or funiculars--45-degree elevators built in the early twentieth century to get people up the San Francisco-like hills that rise up the Plan. Here's a 30-second video of an ascensor that I took early in my stay. For 100 pesos (20 cents), you can walk through the original turnstiles and board what seem like the original cars operating on the original tracks using, perhaps, the original cables,  not always with the greatest of confidence in the safety of this means of conveyance.

Ascensors are not just quaint relics of the past, though.  Modern buildings in Viña and Reñaca have included ascensors as part of a peculiar-looking buildings along hillsides.

Santiago

Santiago: yes, with smog but also a great public transportation
system, parks, museums, the tallest building in South America,
the Andes towering over all.  From the top of San Cristobal park.

Lots of songs list cities;  immediately (before my wi-fi disappears!) I'm thinking of  "Dancing in the Streets" (I grew up with Van Halen's version) and Melissa Ferrick's "Welcome to my Life,"  but the song I'm thinking of in terms of Santiago is Steve Earle's "Fort Worth Blues," because it has the line "Houston ain't that bad a town."  Well, I don't think Santiago is either.  Ok, I'm not an authority on the capital of six million souls, but I've been back and forth enough to know that it has as many redeeming factors about it as Atlanta or Detroit do (which presupposes that I don't think they are that bad either).

I guess growing up in Detroit then traveling to other cities, and reading about New Urbanism has lead me to experiencing cities and thinking how they function.  I've always liked thinking about the "syntax" of streets--how the different properties and the building/landscaping on them work together or not.  I have come to understand that mixed-used development was the organic pattern of cities until the proliferation of the private automobile.  I have no delusions about cities:  I know they are magnets for the economically disenfranchised as well as the entrepreneurs, and I know that those two groups aren't mutually exclusive, but that great poverty prevails in huge cities.

Santiago has a few major factors working against it besides it being the hub of this ridiculously elongated country.  The first is that it is in a bowl, like L.A.  Sitting in the bottom of a valley between the coastal mountains and the Andes, pollution is generated in Santiago and stays there. And then there are the earthquakes that periodically erase things.  Still, it has the bones of an exceptional place.  The Mapocho River runs through the city and provides for various bridges that cross the admittedly unappealing channel.  The river also has provided for ample boulevards lined with continuous parks.  San Cristobal is an impressive urban park that gives panoramic views of the city and offers the super ascensor/funicular as well as a running and cycling haven.  Santa Lucia is also an incredible park wedged into the most interesting part of the city.

Skirting Santa Lucia is my favorite street in Santiago--Calle Lastarria.  It is short and meandering.  From La Alameda (properly called O'Higgins), it is easy to miss Lastarria as a minor side street across from Pontificia Universidad Católica, but turn the corner and you are in a European-flavored Latin America neighborhood street of shops, restaurants, pedestrians, calm traffic, bikes, and funky buildings.

The cousin-It building on Calle Lastarria

Co-workers speak of Santiago as I speak of Atlanta (I know I contradict myself), but I think that my repeated trips to it have provided me for a case to appreciate a real city that functions in a difficult location and for a country that has very different circumstances than those that are home to the world's great capitals.

San Pedro de Atacama

Atacama

“In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim of precedence.  The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kindships” [my emphasis] (McCarthy, Blood Meridian). 

“The desert says nothing.  Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like a bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation.  In its simplicity and order it suggests the classical, except the desert is a realm beyond the human and in the classicist view only the human is regarded as significant or even recognized as real” (Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire).

"When you are silent and you listen, you can hear the salt cracking in the afternoon sun" (Cristobal, our guide through the Valle de la Luna).

Last week, we headed up north to the Atacama Desert.  We flew into Calama, a mining town about which many uncharitable things have been said, and took a van to San Pedro de Atacama;  with a small commercial district that could easily fit into the space of downtown Athens, San Pedro has the feel of a hippy college town without the college.  This little hamlet exists because of its situation (the Spanish word is "ubicación") at the epicenter of an array of freakish geological phenomena in the driest desert in the world. 

Erica has much better pictures of San Pedro.  In the morning,
the streets are empty and surprisingly serene.

A bus drive away from San Pedro, there are thermal baths of Puritama:

The moonscape of the Valle de la Luna:

The 185-degree waters of El Taito Geysers:

The pre-Columbian ruins at Tulor (accessible by bike):

And all kinds of good restaurants and interesting people to meet.  In fact, on the first night in San Pedro we were walking down the main street and we hear "Zach!  Zach!"  Two boys from St. Paul's--another Paul and older brother Claus--are hailing our son enthusiastically from amidst the Fiestas Patrias crowds.  Their parents, Jensen and Marcela, were incredibly generous to let us tag along on their adventures.

The cliché about the desert is the quality of the light.

The desert is beautiful in its own way.  It is not my landscape; both Erica and I craved green after a short few days.  I felt like an alien in the desert. But there is a reminder of the immensity of time and one's own relation to dust, which is a good thing to be reminded, however humbling.

There's a gringo in the house tonight . . .

Zachary's experience in Chile, I think, has been as rich as mine and Erica's.  He's attending St. Paul's School, a Chilean school with a British connection, an English-Spanish emphasis, and an ecumenical orientation. This is a pretty common combination of attributes for the private schools in this area (and perhaps for Chile in general).  Yes, private.

We were told by almost everyone that we needed to send Zachary to a private school because the public school system is underfunded and lacks "an environment conducive to learning." We took the advice and now we have a son who says he wishes he could transplant his Chilean school back home (Yes, we feel a bit guilty about the decision, and I've met one other Fulbrighter who decided to send his kids to public school.  We erred on the side of caution, thinking that for Zachary the adjustments he was going to face didn't necessarily need the variable of a challenging school environment.  Still . . . ).  

Before Erica and Zachary arrived, I toured St. Paul's and Mackay, a school in Reñaca, the town up the coast a bit but the opposite direction from Valparaíso.  Mackay is prestigious and very British.  The three pillars of the institution are academics, English, and Rugby . . . ok, ok, the website says "deporte" (sport), but adds "especially Rugby.

On the wall at Mackay: the scrummag

Old Mackay in the foreground.  The Cranbrook of Chile?

St. Paul's is on the southern side of the Marca Marca--away from the more tourist/beach section we live in, but an easy commute in the morning.

Colegio St. Paul's, Merced Oriente near Aqua Santa.  Vina del Mar

For a lot of reasons, including the fact that Mackay's is all boys, we chose St. Paul's.  And I think that the fact that St. Paul's is co-ed has been an important part of Zachary's experience because Zachary is very, very popular with las chicas.

Erica tells the tale of them visiting St. Paul's soon after their arrival.

They were sitting on the steps by the covered basketball/soccer/handball/cueca court.  A bell rang and kids swarmed out.  Zachary was instantly surrounded by Chilean school girls asking him a range of questions--"Who are you?" "Where are you from?" "Are you going to attend this school?"  "What grade are you in?"  "Do you know One Direction?" Zachary:  deer in headlights.

So, last night was a fundraiser party.  A dance.  From 8pm-midnight for 6th-12th graders at the school.  Zachary was nervous (in his own "it's cool.  I'm not nervous" way).  He wanted to know how he looked.  He wanted to know exactly what Erica had heard about what kids could and couldn't wear.  He wanted me to smell his face . . . .

Z in his new, self-selected shirt

 When we got to St. Paul's, he chattered away and we heard Iyaz's "Replay." I told him that Erica and I had decided to go to the party too and that we were going to dance in the middle of the room.  He said that wasn't even funny.  Nor was my question of whether he wanted me to sing "Replay."  We started up the stairs with him, but he was greeted by a bouncing young lady who said his name and who was soon joined by other young ladies.  Zachary was enveloped in a ring of lovely Chilean girls and led into the festivities.  He did not look back.  He did not say good-bye.  He was gone.  A picture posted on Instragram shows him as the social animal that he is.

He wanted to have us on-call in case he wanted to bail during the night, but we didn't hear anything.  We headed back up Aqua Santa in time to pick him up at midnight.  When we met him coming down the stairs, he didn't have anything to say.  He was a bit flushed.  He was also wiped out from a long day.  A long, very good day of growing into his own skin.  Of having a life apart from us and somewhat unknown to us, though an innocent enough life given the nature of the school.  He's a kid whom other kids, not just girls but also boys, like and respect.  He's a cool kid.  And I think this experience in Chile will prepare him to face new and unfamiliar situations with a confidence in who he is and how to communicate with others.  That's worth the stay down here all by itself.

Chile's 9/11

This week Chile celebrates independence from Spain with three days of Fiestas Patrias, though there was evidence late last week that lots of folks got an early start.  Chilean flags are everywhere, and activities abound.  There was a little cognitive dissonance the week before because Fiestas Patrias comes right after the commemoration of their own 9/11.  In fact, Chile just commemorated the 40th anniversary of the overthrown of the Allende government by the Chilean military.

Poster for 9/11/13 Demonstration in Valparaíso

What followed was 17 years of the Pinochet dictatorship that was characterized by well-known oppression and less talked-about economic development.  That dichotomy marks the ambivalence that of the 9/11 commemoration.  As explained to me by the one person I go for explaining all thing Chilean, the Allende government was trying to do too much too fast without enough support.  While the overthrow was unjustified, there were serious issues that led to coup, so says my friend.  What happened as a result of the coup was unequivocally horrible: general oppression, detentions, torture, disappearances, and . . .  killings.  Then, in 1989, there was a vote, yes a VOTE ("forced" by  international pressure), which compelled Pinochet to step down even though he stayed in the government.

Photo from an exhibit at PUC-V on 9/10/13 showing
a  demonstration to encourage people tovote "NO"
on whether the Pinochet regime should be
given more years in power.  

Chile went the path of South Africa, and decided not to pursue war crimes perpetrators. Amnesty. And some of those "forgiven" are still in the government.  My friend, with evident pain on his face, asked me to imagine a grandfather sitting with his grandchild at a restaurant and seeing the man who detained and tortured him at the table across the room with his grandchild.  That's the residual pain that is at the heart, it seems to me, of the Chilean commendation of September 11, 1973.

Chileans are confronting their past.  As I have already mentioned, there is a very fine Museum of Memory in Santiago that is dedicated not only to the coup and its aftermath but also, more generally, to the topic of international human rights.  This balance of the general and the particular is just one of the things about the museum that it truly striking.  Another is the use of video from that day showing the coverage of the coup. Most inconceivable, at least to me, is the video of Chilean jets bombing the Chilean presidential building, La Moneda, in the center of Santiago.

Another picture from PUC-V exhibit.  The coup was televised.

At another station, a visitor can hear Salvador Allende's final message to the Chilean people as heard on the radio.  

One small detail from that day that I have since learned is that Allende ultimately shot himself with a gun that was a gift from Fidel Castro.  

Chile has come a long way since those dark days of 9/11/73 and the 17 years of Pinochet's facism, and they have come out the other side with a distinct and palpable national pride.   There seems to be a more clear-eyed and nuanced understanding of their past than we have in the States, but that may be because I admire the hard-working but graciously modest people whom I have encountered since arriving in mid-July.

From PUC-V exhibit, a poster reminding people of
the "disappeared" during Pinochet's reign. I learned
of Pinochet from the Sting song "The Dance Alone"

I hope I have not misrepresented Chile's past in this post, but I have found it very moving to be here during this time.  While the events of 9/11/73 and its aftermath still affect Chile, I find Chileans deeply proud of their country as evidenced by the preponderance of tri-color flags adorning the country.  So I end by saying "¡Vive Chile!"  y "Felices Fiestas Patrias!"