No longer a port in any storm

My porting days are over. Translation: I no longer have a chemo-needle-friendly "device" implanted in my chest. It's a far cry from where I was a year ago, at this time -- between rounds 1 and 2 of chemo, with 5 more to go

I've gone, done my time, and walked by the "infusion room" aka chemo lounge at my doctors' office, and finally, had a sigh of relief. No port, no entry. Here's to hoping no one ever wants to appoint me as a Superfund site again. Or make me a one-woman radioactive blip on the sidewalk. The only exception to the latter is, there will be more PET scans, more signs that I am, I hope, home free.

Home, of course, will never be the same again. This season I am snow-bound, but it's better than being the girl in a bubble. Hello, normal white cell count. Hello, immune system. So long, fare well bottles of Purell. Return to regularly scheduled interaction with the public. That is, once I find my snow boots.

I'm all set for sledding, apparel-wise: boots, snow pants, ski mittens, down coat with hood, extra cashmere cap for warmth, all requisite long underwear and thick socks. Only thing I'm missing is the sled, and the assurance of normal bone density. What would it say about me if I took a hill too fast, clipped into a tree, and broke my hip? Age-appropriate? Ha!

For public consumption and to speak the vernacular, I am a survivor. Not at all sure the word is appropriate to describe the experience, but that is what our language, in the world of cancer patients, has labeled appropriate. I have, for the record, survived worse: 40 years of depression vs. less than a year with a cancer diagnosis. By comparison, cancer was a walk in the park. Without snow gear. I'd hardly call it a trek, considering how I've felt in other circumstances.

With lymphoma, the odds were in my favor: 90% "cure" rate is what I'm told. "Cure," not "remission." After two solid years off chemo, "cured" is what they will call me. But what term will I use?

They say you can't go home again, and while that sentence applies to me literally -- my aunt and uncle's hotel in Lake Placid burned to the ground, and Haiti had, well prior to the earthquake, become a politically untenable place to go -- Wonderland, my hometown, looks different as well.

Tourists may like Toys R Us in Time Square, part of the Disneyfication a la Guiliani and Bloomberg; those of us with memories oddly enough prefer the old days, when that was a seedy part of town. We miss the fake ID joints, the peep shows, the 24/7 porn palaces and all the people who frequented them.

What price safety? Total loss of character and place? I'm sure the hookers made a better living than the minimum-wage folk now operating every chain restaurant in the land that's open to reassure tourists that Wonderland is "safe."

Sure, I no longer have to defend my city's crime rate -- in the old days, Detroit's and D.C.'s murder rates made ours look like amateur night -- but I have less of my city to defend. So much has succumbed to another strip of the global village with all of its big-box, made-in-China-but-sold-only-for-export chain stores bleeding our local shops dry that we're losing our personality.

I love New York? We used to lure visitors with a huge advertising campaign. Now busloads enter voluntarily. I would enjoy those who commute much more if they had to pay a percentage of the NY City tax dollars from which they benefit. New York is a city of first-responders, but no one counts how much it costs us and how our neighbors beyond the borough lines have benefited since we stopped collecting income tax from them.

We should have a cover charge for entry, even if it is "congestion pricing" for cars in midtown. We should have neighborhood stickers for cars, so the locals have their place in the street and let the out-of-towners resort to a garage. That is, we should also have temporary windshield-visible signs for residents to lend to those who park here explicitly to see us. That is, for those of us -- most of us, I suspect -- for whom owning a car would be more challenging that learning to speak a new language.

I fall into that category: never have I legally owned a car. As a teen and college kid, I had one that belonged to my parents, but never did I need learn any maintenance skills beyond filling the tank with gas and checking the oil under the hood.

These days I delegate even that little knowledge to those who drive me the most frequently: bus and subway drivers, plus taxi cabs and other car services. For me, maintaining a car simply means I have discount coupons on my refrigerator for whenever I need a ride to the airport.

If you need outdoor camping or related skills, don't call me. If you need urban camping tips, from conserving water to overriding electronic stove ignitions, call me. Inside I have battery-powered lamps, radio and fan; for the great outdoors? Snow boots. If you need a port for an indoor storm, I'll see what I can do. Outdoors? Baby, you're on your own.

Letter and a rant: antisocial media

Dear RC,

My apologies for sending this through FB, but you came up on the side of the page that makes "suggestions." FB today burped up that you have "only 16 friends." I have, by its count, more than 100 -- you can guess which one I think is more realistic.

This whole social media thing is really ludicrous. I miss the old days -- hell, like, last week -- when people, myself included, weren't "sharing"/ broadcasting our 15-word thoughts (or, fewer and not thoughts but "is waiting on line at the store") to the world. I know this is somehow R.'s bread and butter, but no matter what she explains, I don't get it.

Call me old fashioned, but call me -- on the phone - do not text me, IM me or whatever passes for digital communication. I'm sucked in and simultaneously sickened.

Started reading a book on the train yesterday and realized how much I miss just plain reading your basic book. Hard copy, suited to recovering from coffee spills, page-turning books.

I don't care what the digital natives (read the term today and liked it) are trying to say: you can't mourn in cyberspace. Not unless you're working on complete detachment. Is this the wave of the next generation? Do they think they can talk to a shrink by typing? And get any kind of results?

No, when it comes to full-on emotion, I'm not posting it to FB. This whole FB thing makes blogging look positively antiquated, in that when I write in my blog, I'm trying to make a real point. What I say on FB is stuff left over floating when my brain has gone on hiatus.

I may be wintering on FB, due to my housebound status, but if I could go outside and not be afraid a germ might march through my defenseless white blood cell count, I'd be there. With bells on. In person.

Today I had my one outing between chemo cycles: I felt well enough to go talk to people at a safe distance at a Haitian art sale. Fortunately it wasn't crowded, or highly peopled, as The Artist and I say. We prefer lightly peopled or none at all. Odd that we live in New York, but there you have it. We like our conveniences more.

One of my current ones is that the chemo lounge is five minutes by cab from my house. Couldn't find that in a small town. My friend outside of Buffalo has to drive an hour to take her mother to chemo. (Lymphoma is the disease her mom and I share.)

Would I talk about chemo time on FB? Not in this lifetime. I doubt more than six of my so-called friends would even care. FB has its place, especially when communicating with folks a generation younger than I, but it's not anything resembling a face-to-face interaction. Not even resembling an email.

Fifteen words or fewer: I am cranky as I write this. Social media? It seems more antisocial to me.

Minus my thymus; au revoir Haiti

To recap: the thymus gland lies beneath the breastbone in the middle of one's chest. It is considered a lymph gland, not an endocrine one. Meaning, that, for a child and a teenager, this is the go-to spot for generating immune cells.

For the average adult, this gland is vestigial, about as useful as an appendix or tonsils. For me, however, the smoker's lung scan I had in Jan. 2007 -- which insurance/"medical benefits" didn't pay for -- gave a point of comparison with the CAT scan I had in September. Net result? Gland had doubled in size.

Getting to the CAT scan was easy: I went to Dr. Training Bra, aka Baby Doc, my 12-year-old insurance doctor ("in network") for a smoker's cough late last August. She took a chest X-ray and sent me for the CAT scan. And that was as far as she went.

Baby Doc, as you may have recently heard, since the Haiti I know and love was turned on its side last week, was a not-very-bright dictator who ruled that country during many of my years there. Like Training Bra, he was totally incompetent.

But Haiti was relatively calm, and open for business. Given the political structure, as long as you knew who to pay off, you were good to go. Since Baby Doc's forced (U.S. aided) departure in 1986, no one has known who is in charge for more than half a minute or so.

I'm afraid all the well-meaning aid in the world can't fix Haiti's problems. Rebuild? That would assume infrastructure that never existed in the first place.

Forget democracy: start with potable water, food, and shelter. I don't care who is running the show; I just care that the show runner is consistent. Although I'm hoping for a step up from Training Bra, whose consistent mien was inattentive, bordering on awful, and who demonstrated a less than active interest in me, the patient.

Kyona Beach, Haiti: the last place I saw my father alive, some 19 years and 14 days ago. Four days from now will mark 19 full years since my father died.

CAT scan results, September 8: lungs are clear, but thymus growth indicates I may have lymphoma. The word is on the table then, although no one allowed me to ask questions about it -- or, at least, no one would listen and answer me. What I picked up on is, the radiologists' report says, send her for a PET scan.

Thus Catch 22 begins: Insurance won't pay for PET scan unless I have a cancer diagnosis; PET scan is the test that shows the abnormal cell activity indicating cancer is present. Logic here? Not so much. And Training Bra did not, as I explicitly asked her to to, advocate for me to get the insurance company on board with the test.

So I exit the mismanaged nightmare system to return to The Good Doctor, the internist who won't take my insurance but who actually gives a shit about me and my health. TGD sends me to a pulmonologist.

Lung man compares the CAT scan film/disk with the previous smoker's scan. While he does think the gland has to be removed, lymphoma doesn't make it onto his list of concerns.

A few weeks later, I meet the surgeon. He's got the social skills of an 8th grade boy. I'm hoping that his handiwork is on a much higher level. His office, at least, gets the PET scan approved while I am waiting to schedule thymus removal surgery. Like the docs before him, he thinks this thymus thing will be nothing.

I wait seven weeks for the PET scan. December 2, Surgeon removes thymus -- not laparoscopically as advertised, but through a five-inch incision in the middle of my chest. It will be six to eight weeks before the bone knits back together. Meanwhile, I also have small slashes across the edge of one breast: the failed attempt at laparoscopy.

Surgeon thinks thymus will be nothing all the way until the pathology report comes back from the lab December 11. When I go for the post-op checkup, finally someone voices what amplifies the down-the-rabbit-hole feeling I've been experiencing for two-plus months.

Yes, it's lymphoma, Surgeon says, not in the least bit concerned as to what that will mean to me. Oh, and here's an oncologist in the next office. My work is done. Surgeon appears to have no emotion whatsoever about what the pathology tells us. He doesn't even say, I'm sorry.

Nor does he concede in the office that he thought the growth was benign, which is what he told my mom and one of The Three Sisters after finishing my surgery. Post-op, Surgeon doesn't seem the least bit empathic or sympathetic or to have any emotion whatsoever about what the pathology tells us. As my mom would say, "fuck him. Or rather, don't."

Surgeon has no answer for why the water in one of New York's better hospitals is not potable. Nor has he an answer for why the hospital was unable to supply one of my medications and I needed to bring it from home.

Nor does he check to see that the resident who let me go knew how to write a prescription: she wrote for ZERO pills. Were I not astute at proofreading, that would have been an ugly drugstore showdown.

Possibly the worse part of the do-it-yourself hospital experience was that if I hadn't learned to disconnect the monitor that measured the oxygen in my blood, I would have gotten even less sleep than I did. (The monitor, it seems, was not hooked up to the nursing station.)

In Haiti, I grew up brushing my teeth with an inch of bottled water in a glass. In what used to be called the Third World, that is par for the course. To find out that the hospital in upper Manhattan required the same course of action was a surprise. To me, if you can't drink the water, you damn well better have palm trees and a beach.

I return to TGD, diagnosis in hand. Within an hour she has found an oncologist who is well respected as a hematologist and he can see me the next day at 9:20 am. Not my time of day, she knows, but at this point, who cares.

Enter Dr. W., the recommended oncologist I like, in as much as I'm going to like one. I can't bear to go for another opinion; I have had doctors and tests filling my weeks since September.

So: I have non-Hodgkin's large diffuse B cell lymphoma. As cancers go, it is common as dirt, and it is one of the "good" cancers. Sure, like second place in the beauty contest in the yellow Community Chest cards.

What's good is, I'm at stage 2: very curable, with standard chemo protocol. I don't need the specialization of the cancer factory at Sloan Kettering. I can stay with Dr. W. and have my treatments in his office. I don't have to go to a hospital just to get the poisons that will save me "infused" into my body. Infused. One hell of a word choice, one of many in the new lexicon.

I feel like a Vietnamese town during the war: we must destroy the village in order to save it. Didn't make sense when I was 10; doesn't make any more sense now. But there's the metaphor and that is how it applies.

Thus far, I've had round one of chemo. So far, no major nausea or other side effects. However, the toxins have just started to work. I'm told by day 10 or 12, my hair will start to go. That hair I spent two years tending like the back 40.

Sure, it grows back: but still, the idea of lifting my hand to my head and hair just flying through my fingers is an experience I dread. And yes, I bought a wig -- from the store that refers to these items as "she" and "her."

Not having received the memo telling me that English has gendered nouns, I want to say, "IT. IT. IT. It is an object." But wigville is another stop I never anticipated. I am learning a new language every day, one that I hope you, any and all, will never need to learn.

It may help you to know that my mother, after hearing my diagnosis, brought over a box of chicken soup mix for me. She and kitchens are not on good terms, and the last time, probably the only time, she made chicken soup from scratch was the night my father had a fatal heart attack in 1991. Culinary expertise and my mom don't go hand in hand. For us, soup is black comedy, not cure-all.

Discussions in the chemo lounge are fragmented, scary: some tell their entire stories, from diagnosis into X number of rounds of treatment. Exact diagnoses are volunteered; it is rude to ask. Some in the room have no hair. Some may have wigs, though I am not yet expert at distinguishing them.

I know one thing: if you lose (not that misplaced is exactly the proper term here) your hair and get a wig, it must have bangs, because you no longer have a nature hairline. I have not had bangs since I was 6. Right now, I'm just hoping I won't look like a Hasidic woman who has shaved her hair for her husband.

My mom offered to shave her head in solidarity with me, and then to wear a wig. If she cannot go though treatments in my stead, she wants me to know how much she would if she could. I tear up every time I consider the offer, but I have pointed out, Mom, we're not those kind of Jews.

People say, at least you have your sense of humor. I wonder: without it, how would I survive? My illness is drenched in irony, and that is the costume in which I suspect I will navigate the next several months. It is the only one I know. Here's hoping it helps.

Dream a little dream of me...

Over at Dementia Nights, one of my high school friends has been chronicling the experience of his father's Alzheimer's disease. Today, he is transporting his father to a nursing home. It is the hardest thing Alan, an only child, has ever had to face: being the father to his father.

I am dreading the day that I will live that experience first-hand: that day when I will be that parent to my own mother. Regardless of my having a sibling, chances are good I will be called upon the mother to my mother, and that my brother won't.

In our society, when baby boomers have aging parents who need care, unless one is an only son, it is still the daughters who do the heavy lifting. Or perhaps it is the child deemed "the responsible one" vs. "the fuck up" at an early age. We do live up to and down to parental expectations, alas.

My brother may have the best intentions in the world, but when it comes down to who's in charge of mom, that is going to be me. With bells on. Already have power of attorney. Ditto her health care proxy.

Given that both of my mom's parents went gaga, I have to think the genetic odds are unfortunately good that my mom will end up the same way. The Alzheimer's diagnosis wasn't on the radar when Grandpa Abe lost his marbles. Thirty years ago, he was just plain senile.

I have a vague inkling of what Alan is going through -- but from the distance of packing up and transporting my maternal grandmother. I don't think she ever knew what hit her during the senility send-off we gave her.

(Cue up the Mamas and the Papas, "dream a little dream of me," which went through my head while packing up my grandmother's things in 1989 and which seems to be my brain's link to that situation. Don't ask for a logical explanation for that.)

The day we parked my grandmother at what is generically the Jewish Home for the Aged, we discovered Little Haiti, the part of Miami where Granny Lee lived out her last days -- years of them. We know Haiti, the island, intimately.

We also figured that Little Haiti was not exactly in an upscale part of town. Then again, in the seven or more years Granny Lee lived at the Jewish Home, it's hard to say if she ever left the premises for more than some minor grocery shopping -- or dinner, with my brother and me.

She was happy to go to Denny's -- probably would have gone to Taco Bell, if that had been our decision. Over dinner, she informed us that there was too much sex on TV and in the magazines. That was, we think, the only time she ever uttered the word "sex," although she had, when I was a child, made reference to Grandpa Abe "getting amorous."

Grandpa Abe went gaga first. The last time we had dinner as a family, he didn't recognize my mom, his only child. He said, "I used to take my daughter fishing." I doubt he was talking to the waiter. My mom ran into the bathroom and I followed her: did that mark the beginning of my care-taking career?

Or had I always been the care-taker-in-training? I don't know, and it is way too late in the day to figure out how I got that gig. I just know I have my hat and my checklist when, 20 years from now, my mom's inability to provide nouns in her speech will render her incomprehensible. I am not looking forward to it.

Ask Alice? She doesn't know...

It has been a couple of weeks, and Alice is increasingly befuddled by the world. She was, after all, brought up not to discuss politics, religion or sex. Her mother has never revealed her personal voting record to anyone. Secret ballot and Alice's mother are one and the same.

In Haiti, under Baby Doc, Alice's father said: "You don't discuss politics in a dictatorship." While Alice was young, she got the message.

So Alice as political creature has come late to the dance.

Sure, she knew Nixon was a Bad Guy from the ever-so-seditious My Weekly Reader that informed her that Nixon was a Quaker, and Quakers did not believe in wars. This led to great confusion in Alice's pre-pubescent mind when Nixon bombed the hell out of Cambodia, cognitive dissonance that enrolled her as a Democrat long before she could reach the levers in the voting booth.

And given the civil liberties lost to us courtesy of the current administration, as Alice has mourned previously in The Party's Over and Follow the Money, among other rants, Alice has become convinced that you don't have to be paranoid to think Big Brother is watching you.

Last night, Alice was part of the audience for the filming of a Very Well-Known Feminist's talk on fascism in 10 easy steps, the how-to explained in VWKF's most recent book. She left with an acute case of paranoia, and a reminder that free speech is very expensive, a fact not lost on her friend The Misanthrope, who has had part of his blogging experience bite him on the ass.

Alice's take on VWKF is in part personal: they met at a writers' colony many years ago, and she critiqued the manuscript of VWKF's second book; VWKF said Kaddish at Alice's father's grave; Alice danced at VWKF's wedding, and their connection, ironically, was lost after VWKF became part of the asylum-running crowd of married couples, while Alice remained a solo act.

Alice concluded years ago VWKF's most important contribution to the social fabric is how well she popularizes and makes palatable ideas and ideals that most Americans would fail to comprehend in more intellectual terms. She is also not surprised that part of the VWKF's impetus for her latest book was a woman who is the daughter of Holocaust survivers who kept saying as we lost one right to privacy, one civil liberty, after another, "they did this in Germany." Alice had made a similar link years ago.

Remembering a family friend who fled Germany in 1937 and, who, when asked in the 1980s what she did for fun, said sadly "I had all my fun before Hitler," Alice wondered whether the same would be true for her and the Bush administration, or whether Alice was exaggerating. As time has gone by, Alice has come to think she was spot-on. And now she is terrified and not at all convinced that the next election will solve anything.

At the same time, she wonders why her tax dollars are going to monitor citizens' once-Constitutional, political expression at the expense of, say, universal health care or ending hunger and homelessness, in our so-called "first world" country.

If someone on the Fed's dime is reading Alice's blog, he/she might have noticed that Alice doesn't attract much attention, no matter how many times she thinks the so-called War on Terror is as ludicrous as was Nixon's War on Drugs with Elvis Presley its model citizen.

Alice is convinced that the road to ending terrorism has nothing to do with T.S.A. screenings and banning shampoo bottles larger than three ounces on airplanes. All of the hyped security she encounters seems like a full employment act for those who can participate early and often in charades. None of it is real; it is all window dressing.

As the Mexicans have pointed out, while the Feds want to build a wall to keep them out of the U.S. and are funding this absurdity under the guise of border security, no terrorists have entered through the Mexican border, only the Canadian one.

And while Alice is not thrilled about illegal immigration, she can't take seriously the argument that immigrants are depriving Americans of jobs. No, in real life Alice knows these immigrants take the jobs native-born Americans, regardless of aptitude or intelligence levels, will not dream of signing onto.

So Alice doesn't know what the hell is going on, who to believe and who to ignore. Her critical faculties are suffering from synaptic lapses of a monumental proportion, and all that it adds up to is, Alice is tired. She is suffering from TMI overload, and cannot cope with "the news" in any form. Immediate rest is her self-issued prescription.

If you don't hear from Alice for a while, this is why. She welcomes you to Go Ask Alice at alice dot uptown at gmail dot com, where she can be found, but she cannot promise more than intermittent blogging until she catches up with herself in the world.

"Helicopter" parent age

"Helicopter parents," I recently discovered, are those who hover over their offspring long after parents like mine -- those who gave you my generation, the baby boomers, decided to honor the generation gap and leave their offspring, i.e., me, to fend for themselves.

These are scary individuals. Roughly my age and younger, they have what strikes me as an overly extensive interest in their children's care and feeding above the age of majority. I'm sure every one of them wrote the essays for his kid's college applications. (I'm not sure mine even saw what I wrote.)

I would bet they worked on their kids' high-school geometry homework. Personally, I handed in mine in 1975. I suspect if I had asked for parental help, I would have been told, we haven't had to prove two triangles congruent since the early 1950s.

We love you, but you're on your own. Had I needed a tutor, one would have been found. But my parents had long since graduated from high school, thankyouverymuch.

I met several helicopters last weekend, while visiting my alma mater during parents' weekend. This year, like last, I volunteered as a sales girl for the annual Haiti Project art auction and craft sale. A Haitian village needs my support far more than my well-endowed college does.

Last year, since I stayed just one night, I didn't meet any of the parents at the college-owned inn where I sojourned. (The auction is held on parents' weekend because, of course, they have the money.) The college inn is the only ho/mo tel accommodation in walking distance of campus.

This year, I stayed two nights, and the parents I encountered in the inn's TV room made me feel I had stepped back into la vida loca all over again. In this world, parents seems to think having junior graduate from a brand-name college will set him/her up for life.

I didn't have the heart to tell them, 25+ years post-graduation, that a diploma from my college and a MetroCard will get me on the subway, and I don't expect it will take me any farther than the Staten Island Ferry.

Sure, I went to college in the 1970s. So did these parents. Did they forget that all we did was get stoned? My idea of schoolwork in college was to expend the least amount of time needed to get a decent grade.

Brand-name diploma was, for some, a $40,000 bar bill; for others, their parents' receipts; for me, a windshield sticker in the academic domain; for a few, recognition of honest academic achievement.

The last was not mine, nor did I claim it to be. The helicopter parents in the TV room would have had a collective stroke if I had described my college experience, or what I remember of it, to them.

Needless to say the idea that junior might be in it for the four years of freedom, sex, and crystallizing an adult self might does not seem to have permeated their collective consciousness.

These parents are going to get boomerang kids: they've raised their kids to live in a style to which they have all become accustomed, and it's not a style your average 25 year old earns enough to maintain. I would bet these kids are going to look for their parents' blessing in a mate. My generation, not so much.

I don't know anyone who returned to live with their parents or blended families for the prepared dinners, laundry service, and free cable. I could not have born the angst of retreating to that nest, but given the economy and the amenities, I'll bet it's looking a lot more attractive these days.

During my four years in an academic cocoon, I spent 40 hours a week in the college pub, and fewer than 10 in a classroom. I spent close to 60 hours a week in my dorm room, whether sleeping, studying or doing something more entertaining. Toss in hours spent primping, gossiping, flirting, and in hysterics, and you've just about captured my college years.

My memories of those long-ago years reflect the time spent in each area. I wasn't out to save the world, master six disciplines and come out ready to fall into coffee-achiever parents' concept of what a life should be.

My parents, I belatedly realize, let me make my own discoveries, my own mistakes. They would comfort me if I cried, but they did not assume, not being overly invested hoverers, that they were at fault. In the long run, I think that served me best.

Friends who are parents remind me we are living in different times, even those who have come late to the parental party. Nothing is as safe as it once was, and, given that my home was Wonderland in the days of "Ford to New York: Drop Dead," the safely gap has grown into a chasm.

It is one I am grateful to be of an age that I didn't fall in.

La vida es bueno en Cabos San Lucas

Life is good here. It's sunny, laid back, not crowded, and the people are extremely pleasant. I'm not besieged with maternal phone calls.

Bonuses are, I get to ignore the New York State primary election, with Hillary and Obama leaving vote-for-me messages on my answering machine, not to mention the testosterone-fest of Superbowl Sunday.


I'm with a friend for a week, then I'll be here a week by myself. Note to self: learning how to communicate in Spanish was a resonable New Year's Resolution. Alas, I did not achieve it, so I'm glad to be with someone who can utter sentences in Spanish. My default language is French -- and all of that is flooding my brain.


Espanol? Not so much. Not yet. Perhaps next week I'll conjugate verbs, after my friend, who has German, Russian, and some recently reaquired Spanish under her belt, leaves me to my own devices.

We have great plans, places to go, art to see, but most likely, we will stay here by the pool or under the palapas, the Mexican version of Haitian chacoons -- thatched hut roofs made of sisal or banana leaves that shield us from the sun.

It is, I realize, the palapas that attracted me most, attached themselves to my soul when I was here last year, that made me think, this is like the Carribean I knew as a child, the one where my family was intact, where Christmases were merry.

I am older now, and will probably never see another chacoon in my life -- the Haiti I knew has vanished, with all the political upheavals, my father gone (17 years as of last week), all my family's ex-pat friends dead or relocated to safer climes. I have no more ties there, so I am making a Haiti for myself, one for this century.

This one is a land with electricity, telephone, cable TV, hot and cold running water, enough water pressure for a jacuzzi, but still: a beach where, at night, the stars shine through clear skies; I can hear the ocean from my bed; and all we do is eat, drink, play cards and backgammon. We sleep as soundly as children. It is Alice's version of a winter Wonderland.

An 8-year-old walks into a bar...

While I'm on the theme of, how-old-do-you-have-to-be-to-walk-into-a-bar?, I thought of my brother as a child, in Haiti. His third-grade teacher had asked him to keep a diary/journal describing his days at the beach, as my parents had pulled us out of school to extend our? theirs? (you pick) vacation.

To be precise, this was a time and place when, as father's little dividends, we were taxable write-offs to the company business. So dad, at least, was doing some semblance of business (driving into town, Port-au-Prince, a couple of days to meet with the folks who populated our factory/assembly plant). We, on the other hand, were On The Beach, big time.

My brother's diary/journal read: "got up, went to the bar, had breakfast. Went swimming. Went to the bar and had a drink. Played backgammon. Went to the bar and had lunch. Spent the afternoon at the beach. Went to the bar, had a drink. Ate dinner. Stayed at the bar while my parents had a drink. Came back to the room. Slept." Next day, "got up, went to the bar, had breakfast...." and so on.

My parents had a good laugh after they read his teacher's comments on the saga of the 8-year-old who walked into a bar, early and often.

In Haiti, our lives revolved around the bar. Every meal was served there, under the open-air chacoon; every drink we ordered was noted on a scratchpad my dad would sign by kerosene light after dark. He signed off on sticks counted by five, under the titles rum, Coca-Cola, iced tea, and so forth. Who knows how many drinks, of whatever variety, anyone in my family consumed? We weren't much on keeping track. On The Beach, who cared?

In my late 20s, a room On The Beach, plus 3 meals a day (with Caribbean lobster for dinner), cost $50 U.S. This is why I have never understood the concept of paying real money in the Caribbean, much less the idea of asking for I.D. at the bar.

In Lake Placid, my summer home, two toddlers walked into a bar. In Haiti, one 8-year-old. Perhaps I was 12 at the time, or 11. In any case, when I wanted a drink, I, too, went to the bar. Made perfect sense to me, and to my parents. The only part of humanity that didn't belong in a bar, so far as we were concerned, was that bit that was crying and throwing a tantrum. In our book, the only tantrum throwing was permitted in events that involved adultery and the Other Woman.

Superman's fiancee, my father's cousin, excelled at the tantrum. She was ejected from The Stork Club for fisticuffs in the 1940s, a feat no other woman has achieved. And our society considers Paris Hilton's goings-on a big deal on You Tube? I don't think so.

Makes me long for the day when two toddlers walked into a bar....

Feeling Jamesian...

My mind seems stuck on tunes that made me sad 30 years ago, and once again they are exerting a pull toward tears. Responsibility overload, stemming from a myriad of sources, mostly family related and to which I am inextricably tied. Top on my mind's hit parade is Billy Joel's James:

James...we were always friends.
From our childhood days
And we made our plans,
And we had to go our separate ways.
I went on the road --
You pursued an education.
James...do you like your life
Can you find release,
And will you ever change --
Will you ever write your masterpiece?
Are you still in school --
Living up to expectations...James...
You were so relied upon, everybody knows
how hard you tried --
Hey...just look at what a job you've done,
Carrying the weight of family pride.
James....you've been well behaved.
You've been working hard
But will you always stay --
Someone else's dream of who you are.
Do what's good for you, or you're not good for
anybody....James
I went on the road --
You pursued an education...James...
How you gonna know for sure -- everything was
so well organized.
Hey...now everything is so secure,
And everybody else is satisfied.
James...do you like your life,
Can you find release
And will you ever change,
When will you write your masterpiece?

When will I write my masterpiece? That is, as they say, the $64-thousand-dollar question. My friends from college are surprised I haven't managed at least one published volume 25 years out. I start projects -- the most recent being a memoir of my father, Haiti, and our family's careless self-destructiveness -- but it's difficult to maintain my concentration. Life intervenes, day after fucking day.

If you had asked me in 1982, I could not have imagined myself in the position in which I find myself today: putting out all of my family's financial fires, to name one thing that occupies more of my time than I could have guessed. Never seeing my father or Haiti again. Having synaptic lapses made more pronounced by medication I can't change. Knowing my aunt and uncle's hotel in Lake Placid burned to the ground.

They say you can't go home again: between Haitian politics and the demise of where I spend my Adirondack summers, I honestly don't have a childhood place that I could happily call home. My mother sold the house where I grew up 15 years ago, and I was never attached to that house, where I spent a tortured adolescence, then escaped to college, so it hasn't possessed the allure of home that Haiti and Lake Placid have.

My college went on a building spree after I left, so now the campus is strewn with what I presume are considered post-modern architectural gems but which remind me that my architectural aesthetic stops somewhere short of women's suffrage. Any building that has all the charm of an airport lounge and the same amount of character is not one I think of as home.

What no one told me was that as I grew, my brother would grow away from me, from the city where we were both born, that he would marry four times, and with each wife, I would feel he was less and less a part of my life. He has a daughter now, my niece Kayanna, whom I would like to see and get to know. I'm not likely to have another. But this marriage of his is still in its infancy; he lives in Tiny Town, Slow Southern State, and I am old enough to be the mother of his child-bride.

I seem to be more active as Aunt Alice to Clover, my best friend's shitzu puppy. Those of us who don't have children do take out pets rather seriously. Last year, it broke my heart when I had to put the off-White Rabbit to sleep. Clover comforts and entertains even more so than the White Rabbit did, and both pets are considerably more reliable than either of our siblings.

I'm in melancholy mood at the moment. What I have to keep in mind is a lyric from another Billy Joel song, also from the Turnstiles album: "They say that these are not the best of times, but they're the only times I've ever known."

One cappuccino, hold the morality

The coffee I drink, I have learned, is "ethically grown." Who knew? I don't think the beans per se have much of a sense of ethics, and I rather doubt the plantation worker involved in nurturing the beans thought they had developed a moral compass of their own.


No matter what, you can't dress up the fact that growing and harvesting coffee, like most other crops, is a very hard job, and the foodstuff's successful move along the food chain is a result of hours of sweat, put in by someone who may or may not be literate, have access to proper nutrition, health care, and education, or ever dreamed a place like Wonderland existed.


I have visited sugar-cane plantations and rice paddies around the world, and I suspect the closest either came to the topic of ethics was the concept of a fair price for goods produced. Given corporate purchasing mentalities, I rather doubt the subject came up at all. If you are a peasant living at a subsistence level, you do what you have to in order to survive, whether it be earth-friendly, good for the environment, or will just see you through the night.


I grew up smelling charcoal burning in the Haitian countryside, knowing the mountains had been deforested by people who needed wood to cook the food they ate. Soil preservation was was not at the top of their list, and sustainable agriculture remains dream I hope can be fulfilled, although I have my doubts.


But I digress: the morality police have moved from dairy, produce, and meat sections (organic is good; any protein or vegetable with a price tag accessible to middle-income families seems to lack this sanctimonious designation) into my coffee cup. Am I supposed to feel good about the coffee grower's life? Am I immoral if I don't give it much consideration, or simply amoral?


I understand the principles behind the ethical growth concept; I just don't believe they will apply in the fields of the world any more than child labor will cease in sweatshops here and abroad. (You don't have to leave Manhattan to find a garment sweatshop; your airfare to Indonesia would be better spent improving the conditions down the block and determining what the root causes of our own social ills might be.)


I say all this as someone who grew up benefiting from Third-World labor, from so-called emerging markets. My family didn't care about politics so long as business was good. Whatever else you may say, and I can argue either for or against exploitation, our company offered jobs in places where there were damn few opportunities, and a weekly wage was welcomed.


We gave jobs to people living in a dictatorship. We didn't pay first-world wages; the workers, in turn, didn't have first-world expenses. I don't think a credit card was ever used along those shores. If you have no electricity and live in a country where news is controlled or censored, where sustenance is at a premium and school a luxury, chances are your consumption levels are not going to interest anyone selling any product more expensive than beer. Gas and oil were also dear, and personally owned cars the providence of the few elite.


When the 17-year reign of the dictator ended, courtesy of the U.S. government, all hell broke lose. Now, that island has no jobs, no tourism; disease runs rampant, and our state department has a longstanding travel advisory listed for this country to the effect of, go there at your own risk. Diplomats consider the assignment purgatory, and U.S. embassy personnel are required to comply with a very specific curfew.

At the same time as we have revised "give a hoot, don't pollute" for the 21st century to include any recyclable products such as plastics, our manufacturers are wrapping their goods in so many layers and in such child and adult-proof packages that it is hard to care whether my plastic container is labeled 1 or 101.

You want to talk morality? The ethics of coffee growing? Reuse of plastic soda bottles? Spare me. When we create one universal page for the land, the people, and the size of our carbon footprints, give me a call. With contradictions abounding, I won't be waiting by the phone.

Four things about me...

(a) Four jobs I've had in my life:
freelance editor/writer
financial planner
wine glass washer at Adirondack hotel
real estate agent

(b) Four movies I could watch over and over again:
almost anything with Katherine Hepburn or William Powell/Myrna Loy
The Big Chill
Boys on the Side
Rocky Horror Picture Show

(c) Four places you have lived:
In an apartment in Manhattan
In people's homes in Paris
In a dorm in Bennington, VT
In my parents' house in Westchester County, NY

(d) Four TV shows I watch:
Brothers & Sisters
House
Grey's Anatomy
C.S.I. (the original)

(e) Four places I have visited:
Rotorua, New Zealand
Capetown, South Africa
Xian, China
Galapagos Islands, Equador

(f) Four places I visit daily:
My email
The menu drawer
My pill box
My apartment building's lobby

(g) Four of my favorite foods, not in order:
Chocolate souffle
Roast filet mignon with roasted new potatoes
Asparagus with Hollandaise
Wild raspberries

(h) Four places I would rather be right now:
In bed with a lover
In Europe at a great hotel with room service and a spa
On the beach in Haiti, if the political climate weren't an issue
With my niece, Kayanna

(i) Four favorite songs
Mexico -- James Taylor
White Rabbit -- Grace Slick
Summer, Highland Falls -- Billy Joel
Twisted -- sung by Joni Mitchell

The month that was

Alice is finally getting to flex her fingers, thumbs included, at least part-time. The rest of the time her thumbs remain immobilized, which seems to have immobilized her brain as well. All that aside, Alice has been traveling and birthday-ing, and occasionally attempting to work.

So, late September: Florida. Alice goes to see where her brother and his fiancee have ensconced themselves. She is delighted that fiancee, although half her brother's age, seems to have more intelligence, a better sense of humor and appreciation for irony, and preference for financial independence far more than did wives 1, 2, or 3. Fiancee's favorite book is Pride and Prejudice. Previous wives have favored The National Enquirer or TV Guide for reading material.

Alice, brother and fiancee almost fall off the couch watching the local news. It is South Florida, and the weatherman looks like Lurch from The Addams Family. His forecast has been the same since June: hot, humid, chance of showers or thunderstorms. No hurricanes in the vicinity. By the third night, we are mocking him ceaselessly. We equally enjoy the sportscaster, who regales us with tales of high school football.

There is nothing so delightful as high comedy masquerading as news; it distracts us from "national news," which makes all of us want to hurl sharp objects at the TV. Finally, a potential wife who shares Alice's political leanings. Recent previous wives have not even been registered voters.

Fiancee and brother both work in the service industry, she in retail and he in restaurants. Their customers all seem to share a brain. Apparently gray matter is in short supply in Collier County.

They seem good for each other, based on Alice's quick assessment. And on Alice's refrigerator in Wonderland are now posted sonograms of her niece-to-come. She is going to be an aunt. Another generation waits in the wings (well, in the fiancee's womb, to be precise). This is an experience Alice never anticipated.

Alice returns to Wonderland, where The Croquet Player has snagged a room at a posh hotel for his semi-annual visit. Despite previous protests to the contrary, Alice decides to see The Croquet Player again. In this, our 26th year, the sex has been better than Alice remembers since the first five years or so. TCP was Alice's first love, and he will always have a place in her heart.

The purpose of Wonderland's hotels, in Alice's life, is to offer her a place to get away from real life and think of nothing but great sex. It is the perfect set-up for Alice and TCP: secret assignations in lieu of domestic disharmony. The hotel looks out over Central Park and the Hudson River. Alice knows she will never live there, but it's a damn fun place to visit.

A few days go by. Two days before Alice's birthday, her brother calls to invite her to his wedding. It is to be held in the town in Alabama where the fiancee comes from, an $860 round-trip ticket from New York, and it is scheduled for the day after Alice is to return from London. There is no way Alice can return from London at 8 pm Monday night and get on a 6 am flight to Alabama (via Atlanta; no one flies to Alabama directly) the following morning.

This is the first wedding Alice has been invited to since the disastrous wedding #1, when Alice was forced to be a bridesmaid, and her hideous dress lasted longer than the marriage. With wives #2 and #3, her brother called to announce the nuptials a few days after they had taken place in various Southern City Halls.

Alice, sadly, regrets. Later, a friend suggests that missing the wedding might have been a good thing, since her brother's latest in-laws might not be folks with whom Alice could sustain a conversation. Given that Alice is just a year younger than fiancee/wife's mother, and the mother's life is so far removed from Alice's experiences, she has to agree.

Then it is Alice's birthday. She used to adore her birthday, spoiled by a father who made sure a birthday was a BIG DEAL. Now she receives the occasional card, and is treated to dinner by several friends on successive nights. Alice still likes the celebration, the day that is All About Alice, but she remembers her childhood, misses the days of opening presents, albeit she realizes the gifts of time and friendships are far greater than a new toy in a box.

For Alice's birthday, she and a friend have a once-in-a-lifetime experience: they go to hear Barbara Streisand live, at Madison Square Garden. Her voice is phenomenal. She sings the theme from The Way We Were, and Alice is moved to tears: the first time she saw the movie, she was en route to England for the first time, with her entire family. She was 13.

The next morning, Alice leaves for London, to join her mother. Mom is turning 70, and for her birthday, she wanted Alice to spend a week with her in London, a town Alice has known well over the past 30+ years. While Alice is chief entertainment source and itinerary director, it is Alice's mother who insists on waking Alice at 9 am every morning.

Alice's mother is already babbling and expecting Alice to respond, in full sentences. Alice can scarcely manage 9 am, and she does not speak in full sentences until she is well into her second cup of coffee. Therefore, Alice is perceived as a bitch in the morning. She wonders why her mother can't remember that this is the Alice she has raised, that Alice's morning behavior was implanted in her brain and hence, is unlikely to change, no matter the location.

It is then that Alice discovers her mother believes Alice and her brother, as infants, always slept through the night. Alice suspects the truth is closer to the fact that her parents have always been sound sleepers, a tendency Alice has inherited and embellished.

The day after Alice arrives in London, it is 10/11. She and her mother are dressing for dinner, with CNN on the television, when the broadcast is interrupted by breaking news.

At the moment, 3:08 EDT and 8:08 GMT, the live, breaking news was that an airplane had crashed into an apartment building down the block from her mother's apartment. 9/11 happened five miles away from Alice and her mother's respective abodes; 10/11 occurs in the building that holds part of the hospital where Alice's mother volunteers.

Three days a week, Alice's mother has lunch in the building's cafeteria. Nearly every day of the week, Alice's mother walks by the building. The debris, Alice realizes after returning to Wonderland, could have very easily fallen on Alice's mother. However, her family has a history of barely missing violent events: the last time we were in Haiti, for example, our plane took off at 8 pm, and a coup was attempted 30 minutes later.

In London, on the hotel room TV, videos of the tiny plane flying into the apartment building were surreal. When Alice returned to Wonderland, reality entered the picture, and she was far more shaken up than she had been the week before, when the pilot and his flight instructor, filled with hubris, had veered off course and smack into the vicinity of Alice's mother's apartment.

As for the reporting, what didn't get mentioned in the newspapers was that
the one woman who got burned in the building is the same woman upon whom a street lamp fell one year when a helium balloon went out of control at the Thanksgiving day parade. Note to Alice: do not ever cross the street in her vicinity.

After reading all the news reports, Alice has concluded that hubris was the direct cause of the plane's accident. Many years ago, Alice herself flew small planes, leaving from an airport in the suburban county where her parents lived. She had been told where LaGuardia's airspace was, and decided at the time, that it made no sense to fly where the big boys controlled the turf.

The plane lost radio contact 13 blocks from where it crashed. If anyone sounded the Mayday signal, no one was listening. What puzzles Alice still is that the hardest part of piloting an airplane is take-off and landing. Once you are aloft, unless the rudder pedals break, it is so easy to fly in a straight line that even Alice, whose lack of car-driving skills are legendary, could pilot the plane without going off course.

Back in London, Alice and her mother enjoyed delightfully warm (for Alice) unbearably hot (for Alice's mother) weather. They (Alice's mother) breakfasted. They lunched. They had tea at their favorite hotels. They went to theater. They dined in familiar restaurants. They saw the Churchill War Rooms (a first for Alice), and they tramped through well-known territory: the V&A's costume collection, Kensington Palace, Knightsbridge, Bond Street, Green Park and Piccadilly.

In short, everything they did in London they could have done with equal ease in Wonderland, their hometown. But Alice knows that regardless of what her hometown offers, she would never spend a week there acting as a tourist. Life would intervene: the telephone, the e-mail, her attempts at life maintenance and work.

Thus, despite the early awakenings, Alice's mother's solo cocktail hours, and Alice's having to have countless conversations she could have lived without, Alice did leave Wonderland, and the change of venue was appreciated. The trip, which Alice was dreading, went much better than expected. According to friends Alice and her mother have in common, Alice's mother had a great trip. Alice wouldn't go that far, but it was mom's 70th, and if that was her mom's perception, Alice did her job well.

Back in Wonderland, it has been a few days, and Alice is enjoying her solitude. She has been recuperating from her vacation, from her birthday, from The Croquet Player, from her trip to visit her brother and fiancee, and appreciating some time alone, when the only person to whom she must answer is herself. At the moment, herself is calling time-out on use of hands, so Alice will end this lengthy post here.

Transylvania 6-5000

In the city that adopted Mozart and is celebrating his 250th birthday everywhere, the music in the breakfast room lends itself to another era. (Outside of mittel Europa, the song is PEnnsylvania, not Trans-. To be accurate geographically, Transylvania is in Roumania, and Prague is the capital of Bohemia.) Is this what is means to be cosmopolitan?

At dinner, the violinist and pianist serenaded us with renditions of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head." The taxi radio played Elton John from the 1970s and disco music reminding me of Paris in the 1980s. Where's Waldo?

Is he hiding in the Prague Castle? At the National Theater? In the Old Town or over by Wenceslas Square? The Czech Republic makes Disneyland's surrealism appear a prototype for normalcy.

Prague is an ancient city. I can't figure out how Russian tanks rolled through the streets in 1968, as the roads are not wide enough for an American taxi, much less a minivan. Cobblestones predominate, playing havoc with shock absorbers. The buildings are beautiful, with ornate inlays adorning the exterior walls and statues flying from third-story corners.

Angels and cherubim decorate the hall where Mozart first performed, backed by pastel blue boxes trimmed in gold leaf. The craftsmanship is extraordinary, never to be reproduced in today's global village. Yesterday's craftspeople are today's couch potatoes.

I can actually smoke indoors here, inhale my post-prandial cigarette along with my coffee. The wait staff busses ashtrays, a task not performed during my North American travels. I have had to go to Africa, to Australia, and elsewhere to see what used to be de rigeuer, but is no longer. The tobacco police have, however, arrived here: there is a 1000 crown fine ($40) for lighting up at an open-air tram or bus stop.

People-watching in the town square: not a tie or dress in sight. So much for fashion statements. The one blessing is the lack of running shoes. Footwear is practical, but nowhere does it say Nike.

I feel uneasy in the Jewish Quarter: Hitler spared it from destruction to save as a museum to showcase an extinct race. Had my family not departed the Austrian Hapsburg empire in the nineteenth century, I would not be here to describe this sojourn today. The synagogues are the most active imprints of religious observance in Prague, save for St. Vitus' Cathedral up the hill in one of the Castle's many courtyards.

Here the BBC serves as the Comedy Channel. Bush's latest comedy of manners, his meeting with the president of China, aired last night. Or would that be comedy of errors? He can embarrass an American anywhere, but fortunately no one has called us on yesterday's gaffes as yet.

My travel companion and I prefer to pass as French. We are both fluent in the language, and not nearly so reviled for speaking it. Ostensibly, English is the second language of the Czech Republic, or so one would think from museum labels and street signs. The hotel staff, however, didn't get the complete memo. We asked for a lightbulb; they brought another lamp entirely.

Our hotel has a theme -- the art of Adolf Hoffmeister, a cartoonist, surrealism-inspired artist, and bon vivant who died in 1973. His art is reprduced everywhere, a tribute from his son, the ostensible owner of the hotel.

A theme, however, does not a family-run establishment make. There is nowhere near the personality and quirkiness of my aunt and uncle's similarly sized inn on Lake Placid, or of our friend Muriel's beach hotel at Kyona in Haiti, those being my youthful prototypes for hotels that I did not know heralded eccentricity.

Eccentricity is retrospective; what I knew as a child is what I perceived as normal. Only later did I become aware that the world operates on a different plane, and that my perspective was odd. The way I was brought up to view the world, and the world as it exists today have little in common.

Yet it is with the assistance of forms of communications unimaginable in my youth that allow me to tell my stories today. Score one for cyberspace.

Alice does Aruba -- and some other Caribbean islands

If you were wondering where Alice has been, she was on Aruba, an island dedicated to tourism seven miles off the coast of Venezuela. While Alice uses Haiti as a comparison base for all other Caribbean islands, she recognizes development and over-development when she sees it. Alice lives in a high-rise building in New York. She doesn't want to contend with an elevator on vacation, yet the island abounds with high-rise beachfront time-share condos.

Alice is not fond of flying five hours to arrive at a spot that could be beach-condo-anywhere, with activity sheets offered as if she were in summer camp. It amused Alice to participate, for the first time, in water aerobics class. Next to the majority of the group -- mostly age 60 to 70 -- and sufficiently overweight to make Alice look skinny, she looked like Esther Williams.

Apart from that, she swam, sunned, read, ate, strolled along the beach, and watched cable TV. (She found it very odd to watch the local New York channels with their snowy weather predictions when we knew it would be 80+ degrees every day, with perhaps 10 minutes of drizzle and an hour of clouds each day.)

What cable/satellite TV has done to the global village is frightening. On Carriacou, an island off the coast of Grenada that is unspoiled and not developed as a tourist safe-water, water aerobics at 11, blackjack at 1, and bridge at 3 kind of place, before cable TV, there was practically no crime. Now, with the world at their TVs, and 24 hours a day of crime and drug stories, theft has become a serious problem. See what too many episodes of Law & Order will do to an island?

Wherever she goes, Alice welcomes her time in the sun -- she appreciates when it stays light until 7 pm vs. 4:30 pm in New York. The shrink thinks it's a good idea too -- unfortunately he can't write a prescription spelling out how much real sunlight she needs, so there is no way to write off the trip.

The time-share vacation is a curious concept: you purchase an annual week, then go to the same spot, same room, same time next year until you die or sell the share. These time-shares are generally offered on the more developed Caribbean islands and elsewhere.

Many people own the week or weeks they stay; others, like my next-door-neighbor, a former-judge with whom I've previously been to Carriacou, rent a week and invite friends to split the cost. We both prefer the unspoiled, bring-your-own-frozen-meat and other pantry items, scenery in Carriacou to the sameness of Aruba's tourism machine.

What amazes me is that people can plan so far ahead as to know that week 3 is theirs in, say, the Aruba Beach Club, and want to return to the same time, same place -- particularly one devoid of local culture, and with an astonishing resemblance to Miami Beach, minus the beautiful people. Why leave your house if not to explore what's in the world, unless you're running errands like going to the bank or the grocery store?

I ask this as someone who visited Haiti at least 20 times in the last 30 years -- an island practically devoid of food, electricity and drinkable water. Only in the last few years did we have a telephone at the beach. What I wouldn't give now for the time I spent there -- I didn't appreciate the fact that I could truly get away from it all -- no one could call, write, e-mail or otherwise communicate with me, unless in person.

Haiti is the least developed nation in the Western Hemisphere, which is another way of saying it is the poorest country with the most fucked-up political situation you will run across anywhere in the world. One day the president is in; next day he's turned out of office in a coup.

Since Baby Doc was deposed and departed, chaos has reigned. One thing I will say in favor of a dictatorship is that at least you could figure out who to pay off and know the money would serve both your interest and that of the recipient. At the time of Baby Doc's departure, my family had a jojoba plantation that, when ripe, could serve Haitians as food, salable oil and otherwise be completely useful to add to the agriculture that remained in the poor soil there.

However, we never could find out what happened to the plantation, as it was guarded by a Baby Doc operative, and once Duvalier flew the coup, courtesy of the U.S., all bets were off. That was 20 years ago next month, and the only time my family ever discussed current events. I was brought up not to discuss politics in a dictatorship, and what has happened to my beloved Haiti is more than I want to mention here.

It makes me sad, too: the last time I saw my father alive was January 6, 2001, when we were returning from Haiti. I remember him promising me from his first-class airline seat, that he was going to get clean, and stay clean. Less than three weeks later, he was dead, and my world hasn't been the same since.

My father taught me to love travel, and I do. It feels appropriate that I was wearing one of his old sweaters on the plane coming home, and I inadvertently left it on the seat. Whatever else I may think of American Airlines, my trips to the Caribbean remind me that my father's spirit is there, in those planes headed south and on the land below.

Leaving his sweater seems an unconscious talisman so I will never forget what we had there, in Haiti; the love I cling to regardless of the years passing.