Self called home about an hour ago. She wondered why The Man wasn’t picking up. Suddenly, he got on the line, sounding very harassed: “I can’t skype now,” he said, hurriedly. “I have to hand out candy.”
OMG! Self completely forgot! It is Halloween in the States! Self’s favorite holiday (next to Christmas)! She usually buys pumpkins and sets them on the front steps, and puts lighted witches in the bushes, and strings ghoulish faces across the picture window in the living room.
Last Halloween, a Yeti sprang up from the bushes, and self actually screamed, she was so surprised. Naturally, the kid laughed his head off. But it is all in good fun (For the life of her, she can’t figure out how someone that tall — the kid looked to be about six feet — could crouch behind the bushes without her noticing)
“How many kids have come already?” self asked.
“32,” The Man said.
“You’re going to run out of candy,” self said.
The Man said he thought that would happen.
“You’ve got to turn off the lights when that happens,” self said. A darkened house signals any other trick-or-treaters that it is no use coming to the door; there is no more candy. She was about to say “Hope you don’t get TP’ed,” but decided that it might produce in The Man even more nervousness than he already seemed to be exhibiting.
Self is quite satisfied that The Man has risen to the occasion and done a yeoman’s job of keeping up the Halloween spirit.
Not only that, The Ancient One is still alive.
YAY!
Self decides not to ask about the state of the garden.
The last third of Dreams From My Father, by President Obama (she hopes she can keep referring to him this way, for the next four years) is about a trip Obama took to Kenya, his father’s native land. His observations so closely parallel self’s own, it’s almost eerie. Here’s an excerpt:
It wasn’t simply joy that I felt in each of these moments. Rather, it was a sense that everything I was doing, every touch and breath and word, carried the full weight of my life; that a circle was beginning to close, so that I might finally recognize myself as I was, here, now, in one place. Only once that afternoon would I feel that mood broken, when, on our way back from the market, Auma ran ahead to get her camera, leaving Granny and me alone in the middle of the road. After a long pause, Granny looked at me and smiled. “Halo!” she said. “Muuwa!” I said. Our mutual vocabulary exhausted, we stared ruefully down at the dirt until Auma finally returned. And Granny then turned to Auma and said, in a tone I could understand, that it pained her not to be able to speak to the son of her son.
“Tell her I’d like to learn Luo, but it’s hard to find time in the States,” I said. “Tell her how busy I am.”
“She understands that,” Auma said. “But she also says that a man can never be too busy to know his own people.”
If dear blog readers care to, they can search the archives of this blog for self’s December 2010 and January 2011 postings from Bacolod. You will note that self was reading Jose Saramago’s The Cave, and then Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sepharad. You will find in those posts almost exactly the same tone of wonder, amazement and gratitude that Obama displays, in the passage above.
She is so moved by Obama’s book, so incredibly moved.
Stay tuned.
