.pages, two ways.

As it happens frequently in this part of the world, the summer heat never received the memo that it is passed its expiration date and that it is time for autumn to come out and play.  So the summer heat is giving a great last showing with 100 degree weather as we are nearing the start of October.  

Because of the oppressive heat, last night night Leif and I were sprawled out on the couch watching the first episode of Boardwalk Empire in our underwear.  We were motionless, melting into our couch, afraid to touch one another.  On the television screen men in their woolen suits walked around Atlantic City during January of 1920 -the start of prohibition- and women strolled in heavy dresses while wearing deep hued lipstick.  We tried to think cool thoughts.

One scene was of a sidewalk show of babies in incubators.  White and yellow lettering in the style of art nouveau -or was it art deco- bade the passerby to come and see the babies who weighed less than three pounds.  Tiny babies in metal incubators on the Atlantic City Boardwalk.  Close ups of small infants, wrapped in swaddling, being weighed on ancient contraptions.  Leif grabbed my hand.  Our skin melted together.  I turned to him to say, "I've never seen faker looking babies" only to see his eyes shiny and watering.  I saw an attempt to pull at the heart strings of the viewer and Leif saw our son.  

"You will grieve differently,"  our counselor told us in our first session so many months ago.  "You must understand this and not be judgmental of one another.  Judging each other's grief is often the start of the decline of a relationship."

It is hard to tell when we are on the same page with our grief.  I think it happens more rarely than normally I allow myself to believe.  Most days Leif is the one comforting me.  Holding me close while I sob and repeat the four words that have become my mantra over the last six months.  I Want Him Back.  I Want Him Back.  I Want Him Back.  He feels the loss of George as deeply as I do but the way he processes it is not in the same sobbing-writing-about-it-on-my-blog way as I process it.  

Last night I was unmoved by what I saw on the screen.  Leif was not.  

Different pages.  

And that is fine.

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It was recently -as in this morning- brought to my attention that after the kidnapping and murder or her son in 1932, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote a series of works on grief.  

She writes in Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, 

"One must grieve, and one must go through periods of numbness that are harder to bear than grief...., On the other hand, there is the temptation to self-pity or glorification of grief.  'I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,' Constance cries in a magnificent speech in Shakespeare's King John.  Despite her words, there is not aristocracy of grief. Grief is a great leveler.  There is no highroad out." 

and later,

"Courage is a first step, but simply to bear the blow bravely is not enough. Stoicism is courageous, but it is only a halfway house on the long road. It is a shield, permissible for a short time only. In the end, one has to discard shields and remain open and vulnerable. Otherwise, scar tissue will seal off the wound and no growth will follow. To grow, to be reborn, one must remain vulnerable-- open to love but also hideously open to the possibility of more suffering."

A wise woman wrote to me in an email once how since the death of her child she has imagined that she has joined a long procession of weeping women (and men) who stretch all the way through history and across space.  A sadly beautiful image.  An image that I feel closely attached to.  An image that now includes Anne Morrow Lindbergh in procession as well.  

This morning, for seventy cents plus shipping and handling, I bought a used paperback copy of Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead.  In the description of the book it says that while the condition is good it has dog-eared pages and some highlighting.  I wonder what it is that its previous owner thought important enough to highlight.  I wonder if he or she was just an admirer of a skillful and poetic author of if he or she is, when I see what was highlighted on those pages, someone whom I will recognize as a member of the procession as well.

.one appreciative blogger.

Thanks to Angela, who shares her story and the story of her daughter Charlotte over at Little Bird, I am now the proud owner of this here award.  It says that I have One Lovely Blog.  Pretty sweet.

So thank you Angela, for thinking of my little blog in this tiny corner of the internet.

The rules...

1. Accept the award and post it on your blog with the name of the person who has granted the award and his/her blog link.
2. Pay it forward to 10 other bloggers that you have recently discovered.
3. Contact those blog owners and let them know they have been chosen.

I would like to pass it on to the following corners of the internet and the lovely people that occupy them. Whether or not they know it, by sharing their stories they are helping to keep me sane while I am waiting for the bus to arrive.  

Barbara of burble
Janis of Ferdinand's Gifts
Jenn of Jenn's Den
B of non geordie mum
Sarah of Nerd Nuggets
Mandy of One Good Thing
Catherine of Between the Snow and the Huge Roses

.copan ruinas; the pueblo edition.

We had to wait a few minutes in the lobby of the bus station with the handful of other people who were traveling to Copan Ruinas for the night security man with the blue trousers to shuffle over from his office to unlock the front gate.  As soon as he did we were met with a handful of upturned faces, in the foreground of a wash of red mototaxis, and shouts of "Taxi! Taxi!"  I don't think we chose a particular taxi driver in so much as he chose us by physically corralling us into his golf-cartesque vehicle.

It was dark outside and as we moved along toward our hotel we quickly left the narrow cobblestone streets of the pueblo and found ourselves traveling along a sort of main road out past the ruins.  Our mototaxi's driver was named Daniel (pronounced Dan-yell, like Danielle) but because, I think, we were English speakers he told us to call him Danny.  He was younger than us, but in the dark it was difficult to tell how old he was.  I guessed he was in his late twenties and as I later found out I wasn't too far off; twenty-six.

.L.

.L.

I may have mentioned it before but my Spanish is pretty basic.  I spent a total of five years studying the language in high school and college but I never used it and so much of what I learned was lost like the rest of the information from my early college years.  American History, Anthropology, Calculus, Astronomy, Spanish...were all cleared out to make room for other things and the spaces which they once occupied in my brain now house Causes of Infectious Diarrhea, Blood Pressure Management, How to Perform a Pap Smear, and (my favorite) Who Got Booted From Project Runway on the Most Recent Episode.

Up until three years ago Spanish was almost completely evicted from my brain.  But, because of my graduate program and the fact that pretty much wherever I was at least half of my patients were Spanish speakers, the language has begun to creep back in.  I can, in fact, access the part of my brain that is responsible for How to Perform a Pap Smear While Speaking in Only Spanish without much difficulty at all.  This is all to say that while I can speak fairly decent medical Spanish, my conversational Spanish is somewhat lacking -unless you are one who talks about Pap Smears conversationally, and in that case I am quite an exceptional conversationalist- and so it was a huge relief to have a taxi driver who was sympathetic of my difficulty in the communication department.

He didn't, at least to our faces, ever laugh at anything I may have said that was incorrect or could have been interpreted in a way that was socially unacceptable.  He took my Spanish for what it was -remember, drunk toddler?- and communicated with me on the same level.  And so, we were able to carry on fairly decent conversations in the way only two drunk toddlers can.  So, by the time we reached the hotel Danny and I were already fast friends and we had made a play date for the following morning where he would pick us up and take us to the ruins.

.B.

Over the next two and a half days the three of us spent quite a bit of time together.  Danny drove us around, I was able to practice my Spanish, and Leif took photographs from the inside of the mototaxi.  The second day we were there, after we spent an entire day at the ruins, we arranged with Danny a trip to go up to some natural hot springs some distance away from the pueblo and into the mountains.  It took about an hour to get up to the hot springs but as it turned out the actual drive was the best part of the day.  I don't mean to say that the hot springs weren't great, because they were -all hot, watery and in the jungle, just as advertised- but as we drove up Danny gave us an interesting narration of all the smaller pueblos we passed along the way.

.B.

.L.

.L.

On the way back from the hot springs Danny asked if we wanted to stop at his friend's house for lunch, which we did, and so we had lunch in the back of his friend's house/restaurant.  It happened to be on a coffee plantation and although Danny offered to give us a tour, we were anxious to get back to town before the museum closed (stupid, should have stayed for the tour).  Instead we quickly ate our lunches and talked about last year's coup, Danny's girlfriend, his brothers in America, and how hopefully by the next time we came he would be married with children and he would finally have his American Visa.  Pretty sophisticated Spanish for a waterlogged drunk toddler.

.L.

We spent the last evening before we had to get back on a bus to travel six hours to the port city of La Cieba wandering around the streets of the pueblo.  I wondered what it was like for people growing up in that place.  For me and Leif, coming from a city of nearly five million people and barely being able to recognize our neighbors because no one talks to anyone around here, it seemed very quaint and peaceful.  A place where people not only knew their neighbors but also knew their neighbors' cousins and knew their neighbors' cousins' cousins.  It was that small.  Which made me think that at a certain age kids must grow to despise it, similarly to how I grew to feel about the town I grew up in.  But still the pueblo is, relative to other similarly sized places in Honduras, in a much better situation economically mainly due to tourism and money from archeological grants.

.B.

.L.

.L.

.B.

.L.

.B.

.B.

.L.

Danny was at our hotel the next morning to take us back to the bus stop, the same place we met him a couple of days earlier.  Before we got too far from the hotel he stopped the mototaxi and handed us two small packages wrapped up in newspaper.  They were gifts, he said, for us to take back with us to Los Angeles.  Two statues made of green clay.  The first, a representation of the Mayan God of Health (I had  explained to him earlier that I worked in the health field) for me, and the second, a representation of the first Mayan King of Copan for Leif.  They're great.  Leif and I so rarely buy ourselves mementos from our trips.  Now we have two that have sentimental value to them.

Leif and I joke that if we were to have stayed in Copan for much loner we would have probably ended up spending time with Danny and his family at some point.  The people of that town were so incredibly kind and generous to us.  If we ever do make it back to Honduras I know that I want to spend more time in Copan and I will surely go looking for Danny when we get there.

.B.

.fromage.

This site is very fun when you are stewing over stupid shit that you really shouldn't be letting upset you.  Well, it is also fun when you aren't stewing over stupid shit that you really shouldn't be letting upset you.

And you can practice you're counting skills.  As you can see Leif and I are still having trouble with what comes after "one."  

Looking back at what I wrote yesterday in my fit of frustration I am surprised anyone actually got through it all.  Thank you for letting me vent.

.copan ruinas.

When Leif and I got back from our trip we had taken just over 1200 photographs and 200 videos.  Over the years we have determined that for every good shot we get there are at least five or six that are crap.  It is about that for this trip as well.  I will try to be judicious in what I post up here so as not to overload you with photographs that aren't very interesting to look at.

We had so many great experiences (and one not-so-great-almost-turned-terrible experience) that I will probably write about them in bits and pieces.  But I have to say that even though two weeks is not all that long, we really grew to love Honduras and especially the individuals who lived there.  They are really beautiful and kind people.  We hope to be able to return one day.


So, on to the first of several long (sorry, you can always just skip down to the photographs) posts about our trip.

             ............................................................................................................................................

Surely two days is not enough time to spend in a place like the Mayan city of Copan.  It is huge and breathtaking and intimidating and lovely and sad.  But two days is all we had in what is often referred to as the Paris of the Mayan world.  We were fortunate, however, that the two days we did have turned out to be pretty spectacular.

I don't know much about tourism in Honduras but I am fairly certain that it isn't often that people find themselves to be one of only a handful of visitors to what is considered by many to be the most beautiful of all ancient Mayan cities.  Maybe it was because it was toward the end of their main tourist season but when we arrived to the ruins on our first day we were amazed and counted ourselves to be very lucky in that there was hardly anyone else around.  The day started out with a couple of other groups but as the day pressed on into afternoon we found ourselves, aside from the men working there, to be the only two people wandering around, gaping at the stone edifices.  

Leif and I are admittedly not well versed in the history of the Mayan culture, although I did receive a quick lesson from a friend who lived in Belize for a year helping at a Mayan archeological site.  We decided that without a guide of some sort whatever we saw would make about as much sense to us as if we were to stumble upon an alien spacecraft deep in the jungle.  As it turned out we happened to hire a guide who had been giving tours there for nearly thirty-five years and probably knew just about as much Mayan history as any PhD in Archeology.  Although his formal education was limited, Tony spoke fluent Spanish, English, German, French, Italian, and spoke passable Russian, Japanese, and Mandarin.  He also, as he told us at least three times during the tour, is in the Guinness World Records for being able to give a greeting in the most languages*, has three sons (one of whom died six years ago and one of whom is very fat, according to him), and has met a Japanese princess. 

Our three hours with him were not solely spent discussing his personal life.  He did talk about the site, of course.  But somehow I think it reads as less interesting as Tony's self-proclamations.  For the history of Copan, Wikipedia is more thorough than I can ever hope to be.  The one thing that he did tell us about the Mayans, which I find particularly interesting and will pass on here, is that they held the belief that when one of their warriors died, his soul took the form of a butterfly to make its journey into the afterlife.  This is a concept that isn't too difficult to understand how they came up with if you are able to spend even five minutes there. Simply everywhere you look there are hundreds butterflies of perhaps a dozen or so types.  

Toward late afternoon, long after our tour with Tony ended and not long after a longish conversation in Spanish (I often compare my Spanish to that of a drunken toddler) with a young guy named Nelson in which we talked about how his daughter is named after a red-headed American doctor who relieved his wife of kidney stones so that she was soon after able to become pregnant, we were completely alone and it began to rain heavily.  I found out from Nelson later that when it starts to rain that heavily and the lightening and the thunder begins they all generally clear out for fear of being struck by lightening, which we did not do.  Oops. Instead we ended up climbing to the top of the tallest temple and took photographs until I got scared and forced a retreat back down the slippery stone.  But for those moments, alone atop that stone structure thousands of years old looking out upon an empty courtyard, I felt like we were experiencing something pretty unique and special.

.L.

At the entrance to the site there were maybe ten parrots all perched along the fence, noisily awaiting treats from passersby.  This guy got tired of waiting for someone to feed him but he couldn't fly so he had to walk down the path to where they had their feeding buckets set up.  The soldiers in the background were walking toward the ruins themselves, presumably to do some sort of security rounds, all the while playing with the rifles.  Bizarre. 

.L.

Our linguistically inclined guide, Tony.  He was missing his front two teeth and, by his own declaration, looked strikingly like the old-man statue below.

.L.

.L.

Although the grass is beautifully manicured now, during the time when the city was occupied by its architects, the entire ground was plastered over such that it was completely devoid of vegetation within its boundaries. 

.B.

.L.

These two images are of the ball court where they would play their games and sometimes, depending on the significance, the winning or the losing team members would lose their heads.

.L.

The view from the top of the temple.

.B.

A very well endowed bat sculpture at the onsite museum.  Not a critter you would want to come across alone, for a variety of obvious reasons.

.L.

.B.

.L.

*I have since looked into Tony's claim to fame only to find that the online website is not as thorough about keeping records as one would suppose from an organization that records facts and feats as it's main purpose. Subsequently, I did not find anything that would validate his claim but I tend to believe him anyway. I did find that the most nationalities in a sauna is 57, a record set in 2008 in Japan (where else?).  I also found that the most Ferrero Rocher chocolates to be eaten in one minute is seven.  A number to which I scoff at and think that perhaps I should try to set my own record for eating those little treats.  

.pathologically verbose.

When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine, I had a purple diary -did it have a unicorn on it?- complete with a little brass lock.  I lost the key early on in my journaling career and so I would have to pick the lock every time I wanted to write some piece of information which seemed terribly important to my near-adolescent self.  The added "security" didn't really matter for long though because I lost interest in the thing after perhaps half a dozen half-hearted entries.  Even then I knew that there was more to making something interesting to read, even if just for myself, than chronicling the events of daily living.  Or rather, of my daily living, anyway. 

Fast-forward twenty years and you would find me staring at a white box on a computer screen and a flashing cursor that is patiently awaiting some direction from the keyboard and me, not-so patiently awaiting some inspiration from the world.   Eventually the inspiration came, like it does for many people throughout history, in the form of an impending life-changing event.  That event did come, of course. However it was not the one I had imagined and suddenly inspiration flowed from a place I was unaware existed.  

Just like that I had another diary.  This time with stormy seas on the cover; if ever there was a unicorn on this one it has since been lost to the churning waves.  This time with no brass lock.  This time with the pages laid open on a crowded bus stop for people to flip through as they passed the time.  These last five months I've wrestled with the idea of slapping a brass lock on this diary and squirreling it away.  

I am, in my three-dimensional life, not prone to speaking about things as personal to me as the things that somehow make it from my thoughts to this white box on the computer screen.  There are four, maybe five people with whom I feel completely comfortable speaking about some of the more sensitive subject matter that I write about here.  One of those people being Leif and another, my therapist. I am not even really convinced that they count in the tally seeing as I think of one of them as half of my whole and the other I write out checks to.  

Being aware of the fact that people who know me outside of this place read what I write makes me feel extremely vulnerable.  Not only is my diary laid out on the bus stop but I am doing readings from it while standing there naked, catching occasional glimpses of familiar faces peering out from all the passing buses.  I don't know which is worse, having those people acknowledge what I've written in some way -so that is what she looks like under her clothes?- and thus forcing me to speak more freely about what I feel or having those people never acknowledge what I've written, never acknowledging the elephant in the room, and thus forcing me to address my vulnerability.  Neither situation is comfortable for me.  But my therapist would, and has, told me that being uncomfortable isn't always a bad thing.  Being exposed doesn't always mean dying from hypothermia.

And I am finding that she is right.  

In five months I have felt extremely exposed and on display.  But I haven't yet slammed the book shut, sealed it with a little brass lock and found the nearest leaves with which to cover my nakedness.

By leaving this diary at the bus stop I have met many other people there who are, along with their own diaries, waiting for the same bus as I am.  If we have to be waiting for the bus to come, I am glad that we are not waiting for it alone.

So I will keep writing and hoping that in my nakedness I am not too harshly judged and that I will learn not to care if I am.

.back in the city of angels.

We finally made it home yesterday at around 3 a.m.  It was nice, after nearly a full twenty four hours of traveling without any sleep, to see the familiar unfamiliar Korean characters on all the signage in our little part of Los Angeles.  It is nice to be home.

Honduras was amazing.  More beautiful, peaceful, and relaxing than I thought it would be.  

I spent most of yesterday in a daze thanks to only getting three hours of sleep before we were up and about for the rest of the day.  But I did get to spend a couple hours just catching up on some emails, phone calls, and blogs.  We only had access to the internet a couple of times during the trip, which was great.  But about halfway through our trip I had some time to kill and free wifi so I spent about a half an hour reading random things and sending random email.  So if you see in your blogger stats a little blip from Honduras, that was me! 

I have so many stories and photographs that I am excited to share them with you all.  For now, these are the last two photographs I took (on my cracked iPhone) before we left Honduras (hopefully not for good).