ResidentAlien

Gifts

2012-01-25T22:27:00.002Z

Yesterday was one of those days.

It started very early. All I wanted to do was write, but instead, I got a head-scratchingly complicated last-minute editing job with a pressing deadline, and it took me ages to finish. During the time I was working, the stray cat who is felina non grata all over the neighborhood because of a spraying problem, got into our flat and let loose. Our own cats, worrying that the overpowering smell of cat pee would tempt us into welcoming this incontinent Wandering Tom into the bosom of our home, thus reducing their daily ration of Whiskas, decided a special gift was in order. Unfortunately, we weren't quick enough to claim it. When I went downstairs to get the mail, I found masses of feathers, blood, and a few grisly bits of leftover bird everywhere -- especially in all the hard-to-clean places. Later, to further secure my affection, one of my cats topped this treat up with an entire litter of some kind of rodent, all pink, hairless, and dead as doornails on the porch step. I thought of the mother-rodent coming home to her empty nest and felt like bursting into tears. Until I saw what I'm pretty sure was her a few feet away -- headless.

The cat pee smell would not go away, no matter what I did. The feathers in the hard-to-clean places stayed right where they were; I reasoned it was just a matter of time before they took down another bird, so why bother cleaning it up?

I was feeling bad enough, but when I started skimming the new textbooks I'll be using this term, I felt even worse. There is no key, I have no teacher's manual, and some of the exercises were too hard for me to do. I sat for twenty minutes, staring at a graph and feeling colossally stupid. How can I ask my students to do what I personally find challenging?

I went to bed with a pounding headache, after barely finishing my lesson plans, and the smell of cat pee kept me up. I did not feel one bit like teaching. I did not feel warm, fuzzy feelings towards my cats.

When I got to work, I still had the headache. But hurrying from one class to another, I ran into two students from last term. The minute they saw me, their faces lit up and they shriked my name: they'd passed their exams and they were giddy with joy. Two minutes later, I ran into a few more who had passed too, then three more. I don't know by what miracle I managed not to encounter a single former student who failed today -- I know they're out there -- but I didn't. There is no greater reward than the grinning face of a student who has passed an exam she was positive she'd fail. After that, despite my lack of sleep and cat-pee headache, I was able to understand the new textbooks, and my classes went well.

When I got home and sat down to write, both my cats came into the room. One sat at my feet, the other curled up on my lap. And neither one had a dead rodent or a bird.

Now that is a gift.

Flushed With Pride

2012-01-18T21:58:00.005Z

I grew up with the standard models: white, shiny ceramic, with metal lever flush. But throughout my childhood, another toilet was always on my mind: the one my mother grew up with.

"You have no idea how lucky you kids are, having an indoor toilet that flushes," she would frequently remind us. She never said this in a You spoiled brats! spirit, though I'm sure she was tempted to, just as I am tempted to say the same whenever I hear my kids whining about computer glitches and I remember having to pound out term papers on a dodgy, sticky-keyed secondhand manual typewriter which weighed a ton. On the coldest days in Southern California, whenever we complained about the temperature, my mother would recall the winters of her childhood -- particularly the snowy backyard that had to be crossed to reach the outhouse. A Sears & Roebuck's catalogue always hung from a rusty nail inside, recycling being a necessity of life instead of the virtuous, ecologically-minded practice that it is today. On Halloween night, you had to be on guard for jokers who liked moving outhouses just a few feet beyond the pit. Anyone who wasn't vigilant paid a terrible price in those days before plumbed bathtubs with instant hot water. During the night, foul-smelling chamberpots were kept under beds, although they weren't called that; they were referred to as 'vessels'.

Having heard my mother's stories, my sisters and I realized that we benefited from state-of-the-art, lifestyle-enhancing, modern technology: no emptying and cleaning out of nasty vessels, no traversing dark obstacle-course ridden yards to get to a smelly outhouse; all we had to do was pad down the hallway, do what had to be done, and flush.

A few trips to rural Mexico and Guatemala only increased my sense of gratitude. There's nothing like waking up in the middle of the night out in the middle of nowhere, and having to pay for your last (much regretted) cup of tea with a long, scary tramp through onion fields, past barking dogs to get to the privy, which you could probably locate blindfolded, so horrific is the smell.

In Japan, my first toilet was a standard Asian squat-style number, perfectly easy to get used to, but not for anybody with weak knees or a poor aim. Over my years there, I had a succession of similar toilets, and most of them required squatting, even the ones in posh office buildings. Some of our office toilets were unisex too, and it took me some time to develop the sang-froid necessary to walk past my boss, feigning ignorance of his presence, and casually enter one of the stalls. Some emptied into septic tanks which periodically had to be emptied by a foul-smelling truck that made the rounds of the neighborhood, with a wide, coiled hose attached to the side. But they all flushed.

In Cyprus, we had a modern flush toilet too, but there was not always enough water to flush it with. With three teenage girls in our flat, we always seemed to run out of water quickly, so my husband and I soon learned to fill plastic bottles with water from the nearby swimming pool for emergency situations. My very first day of teaching, I went off to work after a quick, unsatisfactory sponge bath with pool water and I was grateful that our school had a bathroom. But the university toilets used to run out of water occasionally too, so I took to recycling the water from the students' plastic bottles.

In the Netherlands, I lived in an artists' colony for half a year. Every week it was my turn to clean our communal toilet -- an ancient old thing with a chain you pulled, but nevertheless a flush toilet. The first few weeks there, I was puzzled by a jam jar filled with water which was always on the left side of the toilet, on the floor. One day, someone emptied it and threw it away, and I learned its function when another artist, a Dutch-Indonesian woman, protested. "It has a hygienic purpose," she told me. "It does what paper alone cannot, and if it is not there, I feel very uncomfortable." I've adopted this custom, and although I'm sure guests here wonder what a pitcher of water is doing on our bathroom floor, I wouldn't be without it.

That pitcher of water froze the other night. We can only afford to heat two rooms, the kitchen and our living room, and our bathroom is like a freezer. When it's below zero inside, getting up in the middle of the night to do what has to be done is a character-building test that takes great courage and fortitude. But I tell myself that all I have to cross is a carpeted floor, not a cold, dark farmyard, that I'll never have to empty or scrub out a 'vessel', and all I have to do is flush -- with gratitude and pride.

The Treachery Of Things

2012-01-09T14:23:00.002Z

I love soft-boiled eggs with gooey yolks, and I'm generally good at getting them just right. Yes, I know there's a risk of salmonella, but for the pleasure of eating a runny yolk, I'm prepared to live dangerously and take a walk on the wild side. So last week, I boiled four eggs, following my normal soft-boiled protocol: I put the eggs in a small, deep pan filled with cold water which I slowly brought to the boil. Then I turned off the burner and let the eggs sit for a few minutes. To my great disappointment, three of the eggs, when opened, proved to be hard-boiled, the yolks as tough as shoe leather.

My husband and kids ate them. They aren't as fussy as I am when it comes to eggs.

There was no way I was going to eat a hard-boiled egg, so I put my egg, uncracked, back into the refrigerator. The next day, I decided to make egg salad for sandwiches, so I took out my hard-boiled egg. I also boiled two more eggs; if you're going to make egg salad, go whole hog, right? I boiled these two eggs for a full five minutes, even setting the timer. I know that you're supposed to boil them for ten minutes, but all my life, I've settled for five and the eggs have generally come out hard-boiled.

When the timer went off, I pulled out one of the eggs and peeled it, but I could tell that it wasn't properly hard-boiled yet, so I popped it back into the boiling water and boiled both eggs for another three minutes. By which time, the yolks should have been hard enough to bounce off the floor, but no: when I opened them, I found that the yolks were gooey. And even more surreally, the egg which had been in the refrigerator had a gooey yolk too. All of the eggs were the same size: I swear it. The altitude of our house has obviously not changed, and I can't imagine the chemical composition of the water was significantly altered in 24 hours.

When I wanted gooey yolks, I got hard. When I wanted hard-boiled eggs, I got drippy. Call me paranoid, but I put this down to the Treachery of Things.

Have you ever noticed that when you drop something, it quite often skitters out of your range of vision and disappears? Moreover, the distance the dropped item travels and the time and difficulty involved in tracking and retrieving it will be directly proportional to the importance of the item. If, for instance, you drop a paper clip you don't particularly need on a floor that is already cluttered, it will be right there at your feet. If on the other hand, you drop a paperclip you do need, or the back of one of your favorite gold earrings, say, or the cap off a tube of expensive super-glue, or the tiny screw you need to repair the only glasses you have with you on a vacation when you are intending to do a lot of reading -- it's a different story, isn't it? A great deal of time will be spent on all fours, bent over awkwardly, your questing hands coming into unpleasant contact with icky things stuck to the floor as they grope around, vainly, in spider-lurking crevices and corners.

Some people call this Murphy's law, but I call it The Treachery of Things. The laws of physics can be bent, and they are bent by things, quite capriciously. Things know when you want them a certain way -- or when you just plain want them -- and they can't resist toying with you. This is why the needle and thread you always carry in your backpack will mysteriously vanish on the one occasion you need them to tack up a hem that has decided to unravel when you are due to give a speech in front of 200 people, only to be found when you are searching for the missing VCR, under the cushions of your sofa. This is why the magic marker you finally locate on the one day your class is being observed, will turn out to be the indelible sort that cannot be used on white boards -- even though you generally have so many perfectly useable markers that you are spoiled for choice.

Take my word for it: things know what they're doing and they find our panic, our profound irritation, and our utter humiliation very entertaining.

So be forewarned--and take care. You can bet I'll be watching my eggs very carefully.

All Mixed Up

2012-01-02T18:28:00.003Z

A few years back, our oldest daughter came home from school one day and, after dumping her backpack on the floor, slumped into a chair and muttered, "I'm nothing." Before I could open my mouth to protest, she went on. "I mean, I'm not English, I'm not Japanese or... American or Scottish. I'm nothing."

I made her a cup of tea and mulled over all the things I could say. Such as Nonsense -- you've had a good sampling of lots of cultures! But she was actually right. She was born in Wales, to an English father and an American mother, and she was taken to Japan as an infant. Her first words were in Japanese, the language of her nursery school peers. She has read the first two Harry Potter books in Japanese and can still pass for a native -- but only over the telephone. She can pass for an American too, or a Scot, if she feels like it. Is it any wonder she feels alienated now?

When she was two years old, I took my daughter to America for the first time. When we got off the plane, she shrank back from all the non-Asians around us. "Gaijin!" she whispered at one point, meeting her little blonde cousins. "Gaijin means foreigner," I explained to my sister, blushing. I had to interpret for my daughter for the first three days we were in the States; to this day, my relatives all know the Japanese for Pick me up! and I don't want to, not to mention Can I have a snack? I didn't realize how thoroughly out of her realm she felt until we visited Chinatown in San Francisco. My daughter, who had remained guarded, shy and a little suspicious, suddenly burst out laughing, clapped her hands, and began talking non-stop. I had my work cut out for me, explaining why the people around us could not understand her Japanese.

When she was five, our daughter came home from her first school field trip uncharacteristically quiet and thoughtful. "She got picked on," her teachers told us, clearly embarrassed. "Her friends here accept her -- they've known her since before she could walk -- but the other kids took one look at her and all they saw was a foreigner." She'd gotten called gaijin a lot, on this trip. "She's not a gaijin!" her nursery school pals had fired back at the hecklers, "she's our friend!" To this day, my eyes fill with tears when I remember their words.

"People always want to know what I am," my daughter sighed, sipping her tea. "Then they don't believe me when I tell them."

"You're third culture kids," I tell her. "And don't you think it's pretty interesting having had all your experiences? I'd have given my eyeteeth to learn a foreign language when I was your age!" Which is absolutely true: I used to pore over books in Spanish and German. When I was nine, somebody gave us a stack of Japanese magazines and I'd never been so intrigued or fascinated in all my life. I'd have done a lot for the chance to learn Japanese back then.

"At least you fit in!" my daughter protested. "At least you were the same thing as everybody else!" I never know what to say to this. I was socially inept and awkward; I didn't fit in, and I never felt like the same thing as everybody else. But I wonder how much worse it might have been if my nationality had been different from that of my peers.

"It's a unique experience, but not always enjoyable," our youngest daughter said when I asked her to describe how she felt about being a third culture kid. When we first came to Scotland, she used to follow me around. "What are they saying?" she'd whisper urgently in Japanese. "Can you understand?" Now she interprets for me. When we traveled around Turkey, we'd have been lost without her.

"It's weird," my oldest daughter told us last week. "All my friends are all mixed up, like me."

"Even Mena?" Mena is Pakistani and as far as I can tell, thoroughly uncomplicated.

"She's Christian, Mom. That kind of changes her perspective."

She went on to describe half a dozen of her friends, all of them of mixed cultures and/or bilingual. It was fascinating hearing about them: Scottish-sounding kids who can speak Cantonese, Czech nationals raised in Spain, Belgian kids with Turkish roots. My youngest daughter's friends are the same. Here in Scotland, she's pals with a Thai/Chinese girl who swears like a Scot. In Cyprus, she had a Pilipina friend who could write Hebrew and speak Tagalog and Spanish. My daughters' favorite musicians are all mixed up too: a Nigerian/German, a Rwandan/Belgian, and any number of Japanese-born-and-raised Koreans. And the food they like is right off the charts: hummous, sushi, haggis, mabo-dofu, sukiyaki, kabobs, paella, dim sum, pizza, kimchi chige. For Christmas, we had pot stickers, red-cooked Chinese cabbage, sushi, and stuffed grape leaves with filled pitta bread. Dessert was sweet potato pie and tiramisu.

"So," I said to my daughter, "you don't feel like you're one of a kind anymore. Or do you?"

She shrugged and smiled. "I'm used to it now."

The other day, I happened to overhear a conversation between two bilingual women. "You must keep the languages and cultures separate," one of them sniffed. "No mixing up or everything gets very confused, and that is no good for anybody."

She's probably right. But I couldn't disagree more.

Something For Nothing

2011-12-28T19:25:00.000Z

My friend Dina is a shrewd shopper and clever bargain finder. Just as there are people who can wear clothes they have made for themselves without anyone suspecting they sewed them, there are people who can buy their Christmas presents at thrift shops and you'd never be the wiser. (Coincidentally, Dina does sew her own clothes and gets compliments on them; on the one occasion I had the temerity to do this, all I got was pitying glances.)

Dina also supports charities -- not just at Christmas, but throughout the year. But at Christmas, she goes all out. This year, everybody in her family exchanged things like contributions toward clean wells and inoculations for people in poor countries, donations to homeless shelters, and meals for the hungry. But they are also overflowing with holiday cheer: at this time of year, their house is full of heavenly cooking smells, beautifully decorated Christmas trees (Dina never settles for just one), and dozens of brightly-wrapped charity shop presents, all carefully and personally chosen. Their doors are decorated with wreaths that Dina made herself, the table is laden with mouth-watering homemade pies, cakes, and roasts -- and if she wasn't such an all-around generous and decent person, I would seriously envy Dina for the unfair distribution of talents she has been bestowed with.

Just before Christmas, Dina went to the supermarket. After she and her husband had paid for their groceries and were on their way out, she noticed a selection of tapas on special offer. A closer inspection revealed that some, which were close to their sell-by date, were going for almost nothing. Dina has a large extended family and she entertains frequently, so she bagged the lot and went back to pay the grand total of 88 pence for a feast's worth of tapas. Just listening to Dina tell this story made me grit my teeth in envy: I love tapas and I like getting a bargain even better. "But I'm not finished!" she said, when I told her as much.

After the tapas had been rung up and Dina and her husband had dug out a pound to pay, the check-out lady frowned at her register. "Hang on -- you get some money back for buying these in bulk."

And she handed Dina and her husband two pounds and 66 pence -- all for the pleasure of carrying off a feast's worth of olives, marinated peppers, sun dried tomatoes and other delicacies.

Dina immediately put the £2.66 into the charity box. Like I said, she's a hard person to envy.

Dumb And Dumber

2011-12-19T12:11:00.002Z

My youngest daughter is one of the smartest people I know. Whatever genes for intelligence my husband and I had going, she has managed to inherit in abundance. Unfortunately for her, she has also received other traits from us which are not so desirable, including a disproportionate share of my scatterbrainedness and laziness, which I firmly believe is the only reason she hasn't already gotten into a leading university on a generous scholarship, but you can't have everything. And on that point, I remind myself that having above-average smarts doesn't mean that you are incapable of doing stupid things, and that the good thing about doing stupid things is that it keeps you humble.

Last week, it was bitterly cold here. Icy rain turned into sleet and gale-force winds tore branches off our trees and sent garbage cans rolling down the street. My daughter arrived at school, only to find out that it had been cancelled due to extreme weather conditions, including possible 90-mph winds and flood warnings. Just after she called me to say that she was on her way home, I stepped outside to collect our rain-drenched welcome mats. Our front door, slightly warped, blew shut and I could not open it.

I was in a bind: our back door was locked and I know from experience that it is impossible to break in. After pushing, pulling, swearing, and finally giving up, I sat down on our damp front step and waited for my smart teenager to arrive home. If anybody could figure out how to get our door open, it was her!

Five cold, wet minutes later, my daughter came home, soaked to the skin. She had 'forgotten' both her umbrella and coat -- in any school assembly she is always the one child who is not wearing a coat, sweater, knee socks, or any other appropriate winter clothing although at home she is perversely the first person to turn on the heater -- and when I told her what had happened, she did not look pleased.

And then something really weird happened: we fell into a simultaneous twilight zone of idiocy. "Wait there," she said. "I'll go around to the back and let you in."

"But how will you get in?" I asked.

"You'll unlock the door for me," she said, not quite rolling her eyes.

"Of course!" I said -- and wondered why I hadn't thought of that myself.

It took us both thirty seconds to figure out why this would not work.

Fortunately, it took her a mere five seconds to figure out how to unstick our front door and pull it open, and she was laughing so hard by this time, it was a wonder she could do it. We turned the heat on and she spent the next 30 minutes telling me all about endoplasmic reticulum and, I think, various kinds of saturated and unsaturated fats.

My daughter has much to thank me for, especially her well-developed sense of humility.

White Elephants, Orange Plastic Cats

2011-12-08T09:03:00.001Z

My mother had a keen wit, a love of good books, reading, languages, and life-long learning, and a generally impeccable sense of justice. She had a number of faults too of course, and one of them was a perverse talent for unwittingly picking the last thing in the world you would want as a gift. Having grown up in the age before plastics were widely used, my mother never got over her fascination for Mellmac, Tupperware, and just about any other plastic product you could mention. "It never wears out!" she used to say, when I expressed my loathing for polyester. "You can drop it and it won't chip or break," she would say when I longed to eat off china instead of Tupperware. "Termites can't eat it!" was her standard line when I wondered why we couldn't buy more furniture made of wood.Over the years, she never quite learned what I liked, so I accumulated a collection of things I could never use or develop an aesthetic appreciation for. I had pink and white keychain decorated with kittens, a hideous lace-trimmed yellow pantsuit made of double-knit polyester that gives me nightmares to this day ("It was on special offer!"), a woven plastic sewing kit, and any number of horrific accessories I quickly consigned to my bottom drawer.

But the one item that really gave me pause was a clear orange plastic cat she sent me one Christmas. My friends and I puzzled over this piece of schlock for days. We'd never seen anything remotely like it and none of us could figure out what it was. We knew that despite its green rhinestone eyes and glittery ears, the cat's function could not be purely decorative: its paws were raised head-height to form an exaggerated W, suggesting that it was for holding something. But what? Rings or other jewelery would not fit over the plastic paws. When I finally got up the courage to ask my mother, she told me that it was something you rested your glasses on when you weren't using them. "But I don't wear glasses," I reminded her."Well you will someday. And it was on special offer!"

For years, that orange plastic cat rattled around in my bottom drawer. After my mother died, I couldn't bear to part with it; the cat was duly packed into various boxes and moved from flat to flat in San Francisco and New York (though it stayed in Southern California during my second year in Japan where I didn't have room for most of my possessions). During my last year of graduate school, however, I did a major-clean out when my housemates and I had a garage sale, and I decided that the cat had to go.

On the day of the sale, I put out boxes of books, used clothes and bedding, pots and crockery, my seashell collection, some Japanese dolls, and several sticks of furniture. Without much hope, I added the orange plastic cat to this lot, along with other junk I was pretty sure would not sell. The Japanese dolls went first, followed by the seashell collection. The books got snapped up, as did the crockery and furniture, and so did the bedding and clothes. In the end, I was left with an iffy crock-pot and a few threadbare shirts -- and the orange plastic cat.

My housemates and I were just about to pack up our unsold items when a little lady from down the road walked past our house. I'd seen this woman a few times before; a recent Indochinese refugee, she spoke no English and was usually accompanied by a grandchild or two, who interpreted for her. On this occasion she was by herself. She was almost past our house when she suddenly stopped and stared. Her eyes widened, her mouth dropped open, and as she moved towards our table of rejects, I could see the longing in her eyes. I knew it had to be the crock-pot, which worked, but not terribly well. I decided I would let her have it for free; it would be too hard to explain what was wrong with it.The woman stared at my table of rejects and looked up at me shyly. "How much?" she whispered. And I noticed that she was pointing to the orange plastic cat.

"Fifteen cents," I told her.The woman's eyes widened. She fumbled in her purse, pulled out a few coins, and held out her hand. "Okay?" she asked in a breathless whisper.When I nodded, she actually snatched the cat up, as though fearful I would realize my mistake and change my mind. Reaching into a plastic shopping bag, she pulled something out to show me: an identical plastic orange cat.

Selling my neighbor my mother's orange plastic cat was one of the most satisfying experiences I've ever had. There is nothing like pleasing someone else by getting rid of a piece of junk. And it taught me something else: no matter how unwanted something is, no matter how dubious its function or seemingly eclectic its appeal, there is bound to be somebody somewhere who will snap it up and treasure it. Which gives me hope for my manuscripts.

Poker Faces, Wisdom Teeth, and Rip-offs

2011-12-01T07:39:00.003Z

To this day, my face gets hot whenever I hear the expression poker face.

I got asked this question in Japan, by a student in my advanced English class: "Why poker face? Why does that mean not laughing, not smiling?"

I grew up in a non-card-playing household and only learned the difference between a spade and a club after I turned 30. Put on the spot, I told the student what I myself had always imagined was the inspiration behind this term: that poker faces were as straight as pokers, with which one stirred fires. I might have gotten away with it too if Etsuko, the classroom know-it-all, hadn't raised her hand.

"Isn't it poker face because when you are playing poker you should not show your expression?"

There is no horror like the horror of being shown up by a student in front of the entire class. At first, I tried to save face by saying that both origins were possible -- before breaking down and telling the class that Etusko was probably right. When I left the class, I was still blushing. What an idiot!

Ten years later, I was working in another school, this time with a small group of native English speakers and a large number of Japanese language experts. "Why do they call wisdom teeth oyashirazu in Japanese?" one of my American colleagues asked a Japanese coworker one afternoon. I listened attentively to the answer -- I'd long pondered this myself. Oyashirazu means, literally, 'not knowing parents', which seems like a strange thing to call teeth.

"It's because you get your wisdom teeth after your parents are dead," our Japanese colleague said.

My mouth dropped open. My parents had me late in life, but they were still alive when my wisdom teeth came in. "Really?" I said. "I always thought it was because your wisdom teeth never had any other teeth come before them. Your other teeth all have baby teeth that come first, sort of like parents. I thought that was what it meant -- teeth that didn't have any parents."

My Japanese co-worker's mouth dropped open. His eyes glazed over and his cheeks began to flame. "That's--" he started to say. "I mean, I don't know. I never thought about that. You might be right."

To this day, I don't know which one of us had it right, but this was one of the most satisfying moments in my Japanese-learning life.

Yesterday, poker faces and wisdom teeth came back to me when a student asked this question: "Why rip off? Why mean steal?"

"Rip off comes from the Prohibition period in America," I said, with perfect confidence. "Lots of people used to hide alcohol in their houses and they generally kept it under the floorboards of their kitchens. So when thieves broke into houses, they had a pretty good idea where to find it. They would pull the floorboards off, take the forbidden alcohol, and leave. When the owners came back, they would find their floorboards ripped off and the alcohol gone. It became fairly common and after a while people started to call it being ripped off.

Most of the students were satisfied with this explanation, but the smartest girl in the class narrowed her eyes at me. "Really?" she asked. "Is that really true?" She didn't follow this up with any challenge or alternative, but my cheeks began to burn. I heard this interesting story about rip off from uncles who were alive during the Prohibition. Is it possible that they were only teasing me? Might rip off have a completely different etymology?

Last night when I got back from work, I looked up rip off. I cannot find any mention of Prohibition, ripped-off floorboards, or references to rip off that precede 1969.

One thing I've learned from this: just because we're native speakers of a language doesn't mean we're the final authority on every single word, phrase, structure, or idiom.

But I'm never telling her that.

Glasgow Dreamin'

2011-11-24T08:48:00.006Z

It is a rainy, windy day in Scotland. The skies are filled with dense, thick, brooding clouds, and driving along the motorway this morning, we could see the wind turbines rotating with a velocity that was almost worrying. On my way to work, I give up and collapse my umbrella: the wind has rendered it useless and besides, I'm already drenched. The rain seems to be coming at me from every angle.

"Hello teacher," I hear someone mutter as I dodge a frozen puddle. Looking up, I see Gao, a boy I taught last semester.

"Beautiful weather, isn't it?" I say, grinning.

Gao gives me a What? look, then manages a grim smile. "This weather terrible," he says.

Poor Gao: when he arrived back in June, I knew he would have a hard time here. When I'd asked the class what they thought of Scotland so far, his answer gave me pause: "It is too cold and rainy! Everything is grey!" That was back when the roses were in full bloom; when the parks were full of late spring bulbs and flowering trees.

"You don't have rain in China?" I say, teasing him.

But Gao is in no mood to joke. "Not have rain like this," he mutters, gesturing at the glistening pavement, the shivering people huddled against the almost-gale-force winds, the sodden newspapers littering the bus shelters.

A sudden blast of wind knocks water off a telephone line onto the back of my neck. My feet and trouser legs are soaked, my hands are cold, and with my umbrella out of service, I'm pretty sure the books in my bag are getting wet too. But unlike Gao, I'm happy.

Why? Because I love rain. I used to think this was because I grew up in a place where it almost never rains, where the earth is parched and hot and dry. But the other day, I ran into a couple from Southern California who were sightseeing in Glasgow. "This is a great city, but it's awfully wet," the husband said, glancing around disapprovingly even though it was barely drizzling. After five days, they couldn't wait to get back to San Diego.

What's your favorite season here? people in Japan used to ask me. When I said it was the rainy season, they always thought I was joking. When they realized I wasn't, they thought I was crazy. "But it's so damp!" they used to protest. "Everything gets moldy!" And they were right. But mold seemed a small price to pay for the sound of rain drumming on the roof, spattering the lush greenery outside. If I ever got tired of wet laundry, I would remind myself of the misery of a long dry Southern California summer. I would remember flipping longingly through National Geographics as a kid, sighing at the photos of places like Macchu Picchu or the Amazon Rain Forest or rain-lashed rice paddies. What a contrast they made to parched earth and tumbleweed baking under a relentless sun. I think I must have been born with a love of rain: remembering my yearning for rain cured me every time.

Gao shivers and I wonder how he'll cope until February. Even hardcore lovers of Scotland have a tough time in the bitter winter months; even I start to pine for the mildness of a California winter, the sweet smell of orange blossoms and the crunch of eucalyptus leaves. A blast of wind hits us broadside and a bus whooshes past, spattering us with icy water. Winter in Scotland is proof positive that you can get too much of a good thing -- especially when you're walking to work or contemplating a week's worth of backed up laundry and no clothes drier.

But as long as my house doesn't flood, I know I'll keep singing in the rain -- and knowing that I'm living the dream.

Truth Stranger Than Fiction

2011-11-17T21:15:00.003Z

I've been tempted to send this story to the local newspapers, but I fear they won't be interested. They seem to prefer sensational pieces like muggings, car accidents, and smashed windows, or yawn-worthy local news, such as neighborhood building projects and where the site will be for the new school and public amenity. But as far as I'm concerned, this is pretty earth-shattering and I have to share it somewhere.

LOCAL TEENAGER ASKS MOTHER TO WALK HER TO SCHOOL

A local teenager was recently accompanied by her middle-aged mother to school. It should be pointed out that this teenager was not injured, ill, socially awkward, or otherwise incapacitated, yet she held her mother's hand. When passing friends on the street, the teenager greeted them cheerfully, but did not pull away, enjoin her mother to release her hand, or otherwise attempt to distance herself. Moreover, when the pair reached the school gate, the teenager requested a kiss, although in full view of classmates. Her mother, it should be pointed out, was dressed in track suit trousers, an oversize men's fleece, stained raincoat, fuzzy socks, and muddy boots. Her hair was messy and her face was free of make up.

After being treated for mild shock at a local cafe, she was able to walk back home.

Operant Conditioning

2011-11-10T12:07:00.012Z

My cats are neurotic eaters. When I put down their breakfast in the morning (fending off butting heads, leg-tripping body-weaves, last-minute countertop leaps, and non-stop meowing), Maverick will quickly appropriate the first bowl, butting Mitzi out of the way. Mitzi is a slow, fastidious eater. As soon as my back is turned, Maverick, after wolfing down half of his food, will quickly move to Mitzi's dish and gobble up as much as he can. No matter how much more I give him, it is always the same. As poor Mitzi shifts to Maverick's old bowl and takes the first hesitant nibble, Maverick will suddenly decide that the bowl she's eating from is the better one, and he will shove her away. This may happen five or six times until I am almost dizzy from watching Mitzi race from bowl to bowl, frantic to get a mouthful. Although Maverick is generally a shy, gentle cat, when it comes to food, his manners disappear. Maverick had a tough start in life, so for a long time, we put up with his boorish behavior. But as he has gained in strength and confidence, I've decided he has to learn: I bought a squirt gun with a thin, sharp action. I now stand guard over their bowls and as soon as Maverick makes a move toward Mitzi's, I shoot. After a month, my aim has gotten a lot better and Mitzi can finally eat in peace.

The weird thing is that Mitzi doesn't seem to know what to do with herself now that Maverick isn't forcing her into a game of musical bowls. She will take a quick bite of her food, glance nervously around her, then quickly move to the side, as though anxious not to eat too much. Sometimes she will actually wait for him to push her away, standing by her bowl, watching. Years of being shoved away from her own bowl of food have left her emotionally scarred. She doesn't seem to know how to eat without another cat bullying her.

They remind me a little of two people we knew in Japan, Mr and Mrs Ono.

Mr and Mrs Ono were neighbors of ours, a couple in their sixties who ran a small business. I had talked to Mrs Ono on a few occasions before I met her husband and I was always struck by how quickly she spoke and how furtive her speech was, as though she was a political dissident fearful of government spies. I just assumed she was a naturally nervous person with an idiosyncratic way of talking -- until I met Mr Ono.

Mr Ono was a medium-sized man, but his voice was huge and he used it like a blunt instrument. A conversation with Mr Ono generally followed a certain pattern. He would ask you a question which you would then attempt to answer. Before you could get two words out, though, Mr Ono would finish your thought for you, then fire another question before you had time to recover. Around most of the Japanese people we knew I generally felt quite fluent, but around Mr Ono, I quickly turned into a gibbering idiot.

"Cold today, isn't it?" he would bellow. I would open my mouth to agree, but Mr Ono would quickly interrupt, abandoning the weather for a different topic. His garden patch, perhaps? The cold that was going around, and whether my children had caught it? I could never be certain just what he was saying: Mr Ono had a strong regional accent along with his rapid-fire manner of asking questions. He seldom made eye contact, repeated anything he'd said, or waited for a response. Conversations with Mr Ono were surreal -- not conversations at all.

Mrs Ono, a pleasant, sociable woman, got the worst of it. Whenever I ran into them together, a few minutes of 'conversation' with them made me dizzy. "How are your children doing in school?" Mrs Ono might ask, but before I could answer, Mr Ono would come up with one of his thundering non sequiturs. If Mrs Ono wanted to know where my husband and I were going to plant our morning glories this year, say, Mr Ono would begin to talk about the eels in the lake. If Mrs Ono wondered whether our next-door neighbors had come back from Thailand, Mr Ono would suddenly want to know if we were buying our kerosene from the same shop this year. Sometimes, Mrs Ono would begin to ask a question and before she could even get the words out, Mr Ono would bellow out one of his own. I privately began to refer to Mr Ono as Mr Oh No. Mrs Ono's face was always pinched and reflective, and she tended to walk with a slump. I wondered how she coped.

And then, quite suddenly, Mr Ono died. We were away at the time, and I didn't see Mrs Ono for several months. The next time I ran into her in the supermarket, I was astonished at how she had changed. Her furtive way of speaking was gone: she stood up straight and looked you right in the eye. A few times I saw her downtown, usually with friends, but always smiling. "How are those girls of yours?" she would cry merrily, and wait for an answer. We had real, conversations. Years of interruption had not traumatized her: the real Mrs Ono had been released.

I wonder if the squirt gun will eventually work for Mitzi? It's a pity Mrs Ono never had one.

Committed To Memory

2011-11-03T08:24:00.007Z

I don't know how it has happened, but I have a class in which over half a dozen students have the last name Li.

Li, or Lee, is the most common last name in mainland China, like Smith or Jones in the U.S. A lot of people find common names easier to remember than hard ones, but they are the bane of my life. When I was teaching in California many years ago, I had a class with an abundance of Wangs, and one of my colleagues almost burst into tears when the seventh Zhang turned up in her class. Teachers seem to get students in last-name batches, and this semester the Lis are mine.

Chinese first names are mercifully (for me) more varied than Chinese last names, but they can be a bit mystifying at first. Like Chinese surnames, they have tones which I never fail to get wrong, and they include vowels I'm not yet familiar with, plus a lot of puzzling Qs, Zs, Ys and Xs. I'm slowly learning how to pronounce them, but even my students seem to prefer using Western names for each other. The first day of class, they happily give me their 'Christian' names (their term, not mine) and clearly expect me to use them. The names they choose are invariably extraordinary: Frederick, Lionel, Florence, Amelia, Ivy, Belinda, and Reginald. They seem to have been mined from some rich seam that hasn't been tapped in the last fifty years.

Throughout the first week of class, I used my students' Chinese names, stumbling through them gamely, determined to make a go of it. If I thought this might be appreciated, I was wrong. "Priscilla!" Hui Zhong reminded me with a pout, making me applaud the suitability of her choice. "Call me Harold," one boy told me firmly after I'd butchered his name for the third time. So I use the Western names that they have chosen for themselves, but even this isn't foolproof, as I am name-challenged even when the names aren't Chinese. I'm especially name-challenged when I have several names that are almost exactly alike, but my students have not yet grasped that the source of my confusion has more to do with my general name imbecility than my inability to understand Chinese. They can understand me being thrown by half a dozen Lis and a Liu, but they can't for the life of them understand why I get Jonathan, John, and Johnnie mixed up.

For me, the best way to remember names is by association or distinguishing features. I'm always delighted when my students remind me of other people; all I have to do is make a quick note on my roll sheet -- Liu Chengli: Uncle Roy! or Fang: tall, pale Bob de la Rosa -- and in no time at all, the name is fixed in my brain. Distinguishing features are extremely helpful too: taller Zhu, broad nose or Ping,v. thick hair, John Lennon bangs. Best of all is when a student does something to distinguish herself from the pack, and the more memorable, the better: Tripped over handbag is loads better than Asked about relative clauses.

In one class, I happen to have both a Ricky and a Richard, which on top of the Li problem seems a bit unfair, as does the fact that they are roughly the same height, have thick hair, and for all that they look entirely different, don't wear glasses. The other day, after mixing up their names half a dozen times, I started addressing them as Richard-not-Ricky and Ricky-not-Richard. Then something wonderful happened. As I strolled down the aisle, looking at their work, I tripped over something on the floor. Bending down, I picked up a wallet which was fairly bulging. "Whose is this?" I asked. It belonged to Richard, who paled the minute he saw it in my hand. He opened it briefly, checked that all his cards and money were still there, and let out a long sigh of relief. And no wonder: I'd had a quick peek, and I'm guessing he had enough money to pay his rent for the next three months.

What a lucky break for me, too! I'll never get Richard's name wrong again: on my roll sheet, I've underlined the first four letters of his name.

Leftover Magic

2011-10-26T21:42:00.007+01:00

Recycling leftovers is a skill worth developing.

A few years ago, I had a problem: the house was filling up with teenagers and I had nothing to feed them. So I opened my refrigerator and took stock. There was half a pint of milk and a couple of chunks of cheese, hard and stale, but fortunately not moldy. In the vegetable bin I found a cauliflower that was rapidly approaching its use-by date, half a dozen overripe pears, and a ton of leftover mashed potatoes. In one corner nestled a couple of sad-looking onions. I stood there, puzzling it out. And then suddenly I knew what I would make: Soup!

I took a quick look around to make sure there weren't any teenagers in sight. They say laws and sausages are two things you don't want to watch people making, but in this house, soup is another. Once it's made it's perfectly tasty and wholesome, but for an optimal dining experience, it's best not to witness the creative process.

I sauteed the onions until they were brown, then popped them into a kettle of boiling water with the cauliflower. When it was tender, I peeled and cored the pears and dropped them in, then blended the whole thing together in my food processor. After adding some stock, I put in the mashed potatoes and simmered the whole lot with the milk, then grated in the cheese and added some curry powder and white pepper. Perfect: a big pot of soup and no pesky leftovers around to make me feel guilty and wasteful.

Just as I was serving up the soup, ladling it into our best bowls and swanning around the kitchen like Martha Stewart, in came my daughter's pickiest friend. This was a girl who, until she visited our house, had never heard of let alone tasted avocadoes, mangoes, papayas, kiwi fruit, or kidney beans. Who'd had no idea what a tortilla was, or that refried beans were actually tasty. Who actually turned her nose up at tomato sauce made with real tomatoes in it.

I was feeling lucky, so I served her a bowl too. With a flourish.

To my utter amazement, she loved it. Not only did she finish her soup, she wiped the bowl clean with a stale tortilla. Then she asked for seconds. A week later, she asked me for the recipe. A month after that, I ran into her mother in the store and she asked me for the recipe. I felt like an idiot telling them (leaving out certain details, of course), but I learned something from that experience: even junk is acceptable if you arrange it right. If you serve it up well, artfully packaged, with pride. If you select your leftovers with care, spice them up perfectly, and present them with confidence, they aren't junk at all.

I'm rewriting my latest work-in-progress, yet again. It's been hanging around like leftovers for ages, but for the umpteenth time, I'm trimming off bits, tweaking others, rearranging, and discarding. Who knows? Maybe I'll manage to make it so palatable my pickiest readers will lap it right up.

Clint And Me

2011-10-19T13:08:00.005+01:00

Have you ever had a dream so surreal you just can't account for it?

It was bitterly cold and windy here last night. My husband and I got home from work late, bone tired. I fell asleep just before midnight after marking sixteen tests and three compositions.

And in my dreams, I met Clint Eastwood.

I doubt I've spent more than fifteen minutes of my entire life thinking about Clint Eastwood. Although I know he's considered handsome, even if he weren't way too old for even me, he's not my type and I've never been a fan, so why he should have shown up in one of my dreams beats me. But there he was. He'd taken over the vacant lot opposite our flat, where he was planning to start a small farm. As a fellow American, I decided I should go over and welcome him to Scotland.

"Don't go," one of my friends cautioned me. "He'll be full of himself, being so rich and famous."

But I ignored her. I took him a gift of a bag of pine cones and some banana bran muffins made with garam masala, fresh-grated ginger, and extra cinnamon. And you may be interested to know that Clint Eastwood was as friendly and down-to-earth as the next guy. We were having a long chat when my daughter showed up. This worried me: everybody knows that famous movie stars are all born womanizers. But again, Clint surprised me. He was friendly but respectfully distant and showed no untoward interest in my nubile daughter.

As soon as she left us, however, he commented on the fact that her hair appeared to be of different lengths. I owned up to having cut it for her to economize, and Clint (we were on first name terms by this time) shared a new business venture with me: he was opening a string of low-cost hairdresser shops for women and girls of low means. I pointed out that I was not poor, but simply wished to save money; he assured me that my daughter and I would still be welcome at his shops.

After this, we got to talking about teaching. Clint was very interested in my accounts of my students' many strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. He listened attentively as I described their most recent composition attempts and how frustrated I was with them, never once glancing at his watch -- Clint has a proper wristwatch, by the way; he doesn't rely on a cell phone -- and asked pertinent, relevant questions about their progress. What a great guy!

Then we started a new topic of conversation about cows and the advantages and disadvantages of raising Holsteins versus Jerseys. At some point, I realized I had misled Clint, who somehow believed that I knew much more about cattle raising than I do. But before my ignorance could be revealed, my cat took her customary early morning stroll across my face and woke me up.

I was filled with overwhelming regret and relief. Regret because I had never managed to discuss the long, hard business of getting published with Clint, or get one of his hairdresser chain cards with a telephone number on it. Relief because he never found out how next-to-nothing my knowledge about cattle raising happens to be.

Tonight, who knows who'll I meet in my dreams? I hope it's somebody I like this time. Just in case, I'm locking the cat out of our bedroom.

The Good Old Days

2011-10-14T06:45:00.007+01:00

My students are reluctant to buy their textbooks.

"Too expensive!" they wail. And yes, £20 might seem a lot to pay for a book if I didn't know how much had gone into writing it -- the years of close collaboration, the research, the thought. I tell my students about the textbook authors I've met, how hard they work, how little they profit from their labors. Unfortunately, my students are not sympathetic.

When I mention the students' reluctance to buy textbooks to my colleagues, they are not sympathetic either. One of them tells me about a Chinese student in London who illegally photocopied all of her textbooks to save money, adding "It wouldn't have bothered me so much if she hadn't come to class with a Ralph Lauren handbag."

It may be a mark of advancing age that I compare these kids to their parents and find them lacking. Over twenty years ago, I knew their parents' generation, and what a contrast. They were leaner, more intense, and tougher in every way, but more than anything else, they valued books. I know I shouldn't make the comparisons I'm making, and I know that I'm comparing apples with oranges. The overseas Chinese students I knew in the eighties were not just a whole different generation, they were the cream of the cream. Few Chinese students were allowed to study abroad back then, and those who did were generally hand-picked or had won scholarships, having competed with thousands to get them. When they got to Japan, the first thing they did was buy books. They couldn't get over the fact that nothing was censored, and they were staggered by the variety. With the internet just a glimmer in the horizon, you had to get your books the old-fashioned way back then: already published and printed for you.

When I was teaching in northern Japan, I remember two Chinese acquaintances looking around my tiny apartment. "You have many books," they sighed happily. They didn't care that I wasn't wearing designer clothes, that my television was fresh off the junk heap -- or that my books were stacked in piles on the floor and my one small table because I didn't have a bookcase to put them in. The main point was, I had the books: I was rich.

While I appreciate much about China's economic growth, I miss those days. I miss those earnest, make-do-or-do-without bookaholics who burned their candles at both ends. I miss the days when books were precious items you saved up to buy; when you hoarded them, discussed them, and read them over and over. When you wrote your name in them -- neatly, carefully -- only loaning them to friends you could trust to handle them gently. When your wealth was not measured by how fancy your clothes or electronic gadgets were, but how many books you had.

"I don't want other people's things," one girl sniffed when I told her where she could find used books. "I want new things." She has a shiny new mobile phone that looks like it does everything but housework. If I could afford her shoes, I'd treat myself to a whirlwind thrift shop blitz. In my mind's eye, I line this girl up with Yingying, a literature student I knew back in the eighties. Yingying was bilingual in Chinese and Japanese; she could talk knowledgably about modern Japanese writers and the works of Saul Bellow and John Steinbeck. She had a good collection of much-loved books. And she never turned up her nose at used things: she competed with the other foreign students (and me) for good junk heap finds and combed used furniture stores for bargains. Compared to my spoiled princess of a student, Yingying won hands down.

I was wallowing in similar good-old-day musings when one of my students approached me before class the other day. "Teacher," she said, pulling a book out of her bag and putting it on my desk. "I buy used, Amazon." She patted it proudly. "Grammar book too. Almost new, and cheap."

I watched as the other students admired her find, pulling out their mobile phones to record the ISBN of the grammar book. This generation may be vastly different, but a bargain is still a bargain.

Making My Mark

2011-10-06T18:17:00.005+01:00

I have left my mark in Glasgow. Dozens upon dozens of schoolchildren will never forget me.

Glasgow is normally a wet city, but yesterday, the heavens opened up and instead of the usual gentle drizzle, we had torrents of rain, rivers of gutter water, and lakes of puddles. At one point, the wind was blowing so hard, it was impossible to use an umbrella. I pulled my hood over my head, prayed all the books in my bag would stay dry, and sprinted out of the cafe where I had been marking papers. I had to walk a mile in that rain and I cursed silently as I found myself in a huge crowd of small children on some sort of field trip. They were all carrying sports bags, and for all that they had enough energy to scream themselves silly, they walked very slowly.

I was in a hurry and desperate to break free of the crowd, but no matter how I dodged this way and that, I could not seem to get through. A few of the teachers leading the group gave me sympathetic looks, but the sidewalks were crowded with other people too, and it wasn't their fault I had left myself only ten minutes to get to my next class.

"Excuse me," I said several times, to no avail.

For the next two minutes, I trudged along, inwardly fuming, getting wetter and wetter as we moved along at a snail's pace. All around me, children giggled and yakked and horsed around, driving me half wild with impatience. And then suddenly, I saw an expanse of empty sidewalk the kids were, for some silly reason, steering clear of. Gratefully, I leapt into it -- and felt my feet sinking into the cement. Wet cement, and not just from the rain. My feet sunk in a good half inch.

I took two, perhaps three steps, the wet cement sucking at my feet and my face flaming. Too late I saw the ribbon with WET CEMENT, KEEP OFF clearly printed on it.

"But that lady walked on it!" I heard a child's voice pipe behind me. "That one there, in the bright red raincoat!" This was followed by the disapproving rumble of her teacher's voice.

I made myself as small as possible and wished to God my raincoat was any other color.

Next week, I'll be back in Glasgow. If it's dry, I'll try to find where I made my mark. Long after I'm gone, I'll bet my foolish footprints will still be there. And the kids won't forget me in a hurry either.

No, it wasn't the way I wanted to do it. It wasn't the way I've dreamed of doing it. But at least I've made my mark.

Wuthering Lows

2011-09-29T09:22:00.010+01:00

It rained here the other night, and the wind blew fiercely. The leaves in Scotland have already begun to change and there is a chill in the air. So we lit a fire in the fireplace and the girls and I decided to watch Wuthering Heights. With the wind moaning in the chimneys and the rain lashing the trees, it seemed like good Wuthering Heights weather. The house was cozy, we had blankets and snacks and mugs of hot cocoa, and we were all prepared to be enchanted.

I'm not sure when we first started getting irritated with the characters, but it didn't take long.

"Drama queen," one of my three girls murmured after one of Catherine Earnshaw's tantrums. "Spoiled brat," another one muttered under her breath.

I've read Wuthering Heights at least three times. Why didn't I remember how headstrong and volatile Catherine Earnshaw was? Why didn't any of her reckless bursts of rage stay with me?

"What a jerk," my youngest daughter said as Heathcliff threw his weight around, swearing and tormenting everybody in his family.

And Heathcliff really was a jerk, so why didn't I remember that either? As a teenager, I came away from Wuthering Heights as besotted with him as foolish Isabella Linton, his much-abused wife. How could I have been so stupid?

"He's not even handsome," one of the girls muttered. "And even if he was, he's a total dickwit."

As we kept watching, even less flattering, unprintable things were said about him and his true love, Catherine Earnshaw. I listened to their conversation with interest:

They're such losers. They're totally spoiled and selfish. No wonder they're so crazy about each other, and They ought to just shut up and get married to each other. They don't deserve the people they're married to. And even though I've been a Wuthering Heights fan since the first time I read it, I totally agreed with them.

Heathcliff and Catherine should have eloped and lived a life of blissful poverty until the first baby came along and threw them into confusion. Neither of them being the nurturing, selfless type, parenthood would probably have turned them into the kind of ill-tempered, sour-faced people you see snapping at their kids and each other in public places, but at least they'd have only made each other miserable. There would have been no story then, but after an hour of Catherine's tears and fits and Heathcliff's swearing and cruelty, that hardly seemed like a raw deal.

We watched as much of it as we could bear, finally turning it off just before Catherine Earnshaw-Linton died in childbirth (Good riddance to her, too. Prat.) In the end, the only person we could all stand was Nelly Dean, the housekeeper. We all loved Nelly Dean, a woman who was compassionate, intelligent, and useful. Who didn't make the wrong choices and then spend her life making everybody around her miserable, whining and moaning and agonizing over it. Who didn't destroy a perfectly good pillow and leave it for somebody else (Nelly) to clean up.

I still think Wuthering Heights is a great book. But I marvel that I could ever have been moved by Heathcliff's smothering, destructive, obsessive love for Catherine, or that I could ever have thought her emotional dependence on him was romantic.

We put the Wuthering Heights disc away and watched Up instead. I watched the girls laughing and crying, and I said a little prayer of thanks that my girls are a lot smarter than I was.

Got It All

2011-09-23T11:38:00.003+01:00

I stare at our front porch and frown. Someone has dropped a mess of string there, dozens of thin strands of silvery plastic. So I bend down to pick them up, but find myself plucking at thin films of dried slime. Slug tracks. The slugs have been having a field day out here. I meant to put down slug traps last week, but I forgot, and this is the depressing result. The pretty potted flowers I put on the porch a few weeks ago have all been chomped down to the stems. No doubt it's been happening over the past week or so; I've just been too busy to notice. There are dead leaves there too, and weeds growing up through the porch paving, and over a dozen pairs of shoes and boots scattered merrily about, all mud encrusted. When I pass through the kitchen, it helps if I walk fast with my eyes semi-shut. Looking around is risky, though walking without keeping an eye out for obstacles on the floor is even riskier. After all those shoes and boots on the porch, you wouldn't think we'd have any left for the rest of the house, but unfortunately that's not the case.

And of course, that's not all: dirty laundry has piled up waist high. Although we had a good run of dry weather through the week when we were both working, on my day off, the sky is dense with layers of thick grey clouds and rain is pelting down. Our flat has filled up with steaming laundry, on the back of every chair, hanging from every radiator.

I've got four private lessons to plan, all for people of entirely different language levels, with completely different needs. I've got an overworked, stressed-out husband due home from work in a few hours. I've got over a dozen essays to mark; I've already peeked at a few and they don't look like they're going to be smooth sailing. I've got houseguests coming for the weekend, rodent-killing cats that want to eat and play and leave their prey on our filthy floors, and a sick kid coughing upstairs. I've got bulbs to plant in the garden, weeds to hoe, and a tree to dig up. I've got a chapter to translate, two more to edit, and a meeting with my partner to discuss it all. I've got next week's lessons to plan, shopping to do, dinner to cook, and unread library books that need to go back to the library.

And I've got absolutely no time to write.

And it occurs to me: I've got it all, just about, don't I? Well, I don't want it all.

So here's the deal: I'll keep the kid upstairs, and the husband, but leave the cough and the stress -- I don't need them at all. The cats will stay too, but I have no need for their dead mice and voles. The private students will stay as well, but their lessons will be simpler next week, and my students' essays will get a lick and a promise, and my students will learn important self-marking skills. The bulbs I ought to plant can go to a neighbor, the dirty shoes will be swept into one massive pile, and anybody is welcome to my superfluous tree and all my well-fed slugs, as long as they come and collect them. In exchange for all of those things I'm giving up, I'll have a nice publishing contract. Sigh.

Too bad it doesn't work like that, isn't it?

Yes!

2011-09-15T09:40:00.006+01:00

Pancakes are easy. You can whip them up in no time at all with a minimum of ingredients and a little elbow grease, and the response you get is so gratifying.

On Sunday, we had no bread in the house, but we did have a dozen eggs, flour, and a liter of sour milk, courtesy of certain family members who can never remember to put the milk back in the fridge. We also had a house full of teenagers, mainly boys, one of whom was already sitting at the table. Pancakes are always better with sour milk. "Want pancakes?" I asked. He said yes.

What a great word yes is. We don't hear it enough in the right context.

So I cracked half a dozen eggs into a bowl and whipped them into a froth after adding some sugar. I chucked in my sour milk and whipped it into the eggs and sugar, then added a few spoonfuls of oil and whipped that in too. Another boy came into the room and sat down. "I'm making pancakes," I told him. "Want some?"

"Yes."

That wonderful word again!

I chucked in a few cups of flour and half a cup of wheat germ, and I beat all of that in.

"Do you want any help?" one of the boys asked, scraping back his chair.

"Yes," I told him. "Keep me amused with your teenage wit."

The boys obliged me.

I peeled and grated some cooking apples and put them in a saucepan with some blueberries we've had in the fridge for a week or so, still good, but looking a bit neglected. While I shaved lemon peel into the pot and added sugar, more teenagers filled the room. They sat at the table and looked expectant.

"Everybody want pancakes?" I asked.

There was only one no and a whole chorus of yeses. Boy, I love the word yes.

So I warmed a stack of plates and added a dash of cinnamon to my pancake batter. I spooned a dollop of batter into my hot skillet and tilted the pan just so until bubbles formed, then I flipped it over and cooked the other side until it too was golden brown. I stacked up pancakes and poured the blueberry and apple syrup into a pitcher.

I served up plate after plate of pancakes, and every time I asked if anybody wanted any more, I got another yes. It was so beautiful I could have wept. Want some more pancakes? I would ask, or Can anybody manage more blueberry syrup? And the answer would be yes. Not just yes, in fact, but Yes, please! and Yes, I can! or even Me please! I've only had two and he's already had five! When I ran out of pancake batter and blueberry syrup, it was all over, but for a while there, it was pure poetry. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. What a great word. More encouraging than Maybe. And infinitely more inspiring and less discouraging than Sorry, but no.

Cooking pancakes for teenagers is highly gratifying. Writing for them is even more gratifying, you just get fewer yeses.

Gender Confusion

2011-09-06T09:57:00.010+01:00

Maverick pushed the door open with his nose, slunk into the room, then froze. He hadn't realized the lady from over the road was visiting. Before she could put out her hand for him to sniff, he'd shot back out the door.

"Wow," our neighbor said. "She's really shy, isn't she?"

"Actually, that's Maverick," I said. "Our tomcat."

She opened her mouth, then closed it. "Then why is he wearing a pink collar?"

"Because my daughters have a sense of humor. Before he chewed them off, that collar had pink feathers on it too." I didn't mention the fake pearls that had since turned grey.

Mitzi swanned into the room just then, wearing her dark blue collar with black studs. The neighbor frowned.

"So I guess this one is a girl, then."

"Yep."

She shook her head, clearly disapproving.

And yet Mitzi looks very fetching in her black and blue collar. She's not a girly sort of cat anyway. If she were a human, she'd be a tom-boy, scaling the highest trees, climbing the walls, ever curious and generally fearless.

Our neighbor's dog is black and his name is something like Midnight. When we had a white cat, she kept wondering why we didn't name her Snowflake.

"You shouldn't put a tomcat in a pink collar!" our neighbor protested. "Poor thing."

But the pink collar suits Maverick. He's a big cat, and the collar, which was probably intended for a small dog, gives him room to breathe. Plus, he keeps losing his collars, and it's only a matter of time before this one bites the dust too. At least his pink collar was cheap.

"I'm sure he doesn't care as long as we feed him," I said. "The collar shines in the dark and has his name and number on it. That's all he needs."

"What does it matter if people think he's a girl anyway?" my daughter said later.

And she should know.

Although she has since slimmed down, our youngest daughter was a fat, sturdy, spitfire of a toddler with an iron will. We used to imagine her as an adult, a tough, savvy woman who wouldn't take any nonsense. "Margaret Thatcher," one of her teachers said once, horrifying my husband, who is not a Thatcher fan. We dressed our rough-and-tumble baby Margaret Thatcher in easy-to-wash clothes she could get dirty in: dungarees, sturdy overalls, tee shirts in bright colors. When, against our explicit instructions, relatives sent her gifts of pink dresses with lace trim, we quietly gave them away. Nobody ever realized she was a girl, but it didn't really bother us.

When my daughter was almost two, she was at her noisiest, feistiest best. One day, we took a taxi together. The driver was most impressed with her.

"That's a fine looking boy you've got there!" he said, grinning. "He'll be a sportsman for sure!"

I smiled uneasily, praying my daughter wouldn't correct him. It was funny that he assumed she was a boy: she had on a pair of pink corduroy overalls of which she was inordinately proud. For that matter, she was proud of being a girl too; she probably wouldn't mind being called a boy, but she'd certainly set the record straight if she could. "Thank you," I said, wishing we were closer to home.

"You've got yourself a sumo wrestler there, no mistake about that!" the man went on, making my cheeks burn. My daughter would surely say something.

"You're going to be a wrestler, aren't you?" he said, shifting gears and grinning at us in the rear-view mirror.

"Actually," I put in quickly, "she's a girl. But for what it's worth, we think she'll be a wrestler too."

There was a long, embarrassed pause. The driver's face in the rear-view mirror was ashen.

"That's never a girl."

"No, she really is."

"Why is she dressed like a boy then?"

I did my best to explain even though it was hardly his business. When we got out, he mumbled something about dresses and patent leather shoes.

When our daughter was almost three, we borrowed a kimono and took her around the neighborhood one fine November day, as is the custom. In Japan, there is a special day for children known as shichi-go-san, or seven, five, three, when parents used to traditionally register their children at the local shrine at the ages of 3, 5, and 7. Nowadays, children are registered at birth, but the custom remains. People dress their children in their fanciest clothes and take them around the neighborhood to be admired and receive little presents of sweets and money.

Our daughter wasn't crazy about having to put on a kimono, but she liked all the attention as well as the assurances of candy. Once she was fully kitted out, she let us lead her around the neighborhood, teetering a bit in her fancy lacquer geta. There was a middle-aged policeman who lived down our street, a favorite of our daughter, who was in the habit of waving to him every time we passed his house. He was a rough, gruff sort of fellow, a body-builder who lived alone and liked guns. When we led our kimono-clad three-year-old past his house, his jaw dropped.

"Why've you got a boy dressed up in a girl's kimono?" he asked.

We stared at him. "She's a girl," I finally said.

"No!" The man turned to my husband, incredulous.

My husband nodded his confirmation.

We left the man shaking his head, still obviously unconvinced. For the next four years, I could see him eyeing our daughter every time we walked by his house, his face tight with disapproval. He'd thought she was a great kid back when, for all he knew, she was a boy.

I'll bet he wouldn't have liked Maverick's pink collar either.

Leashing The Tiger

2011-08-31T13:57:00.006+01:00

Once, years ago, I saw a group of middle-aged ladies in our neighborhood 'walking' their cats on leashes. Leashes like you'd strap to a dog's collar, but fancier, mostly with rhinestones. The cats, most of whom were the stuck-up pedigreed type I've never been terribly keen on, were nevertheless self-respecting cats: they weren't having a bit of it. If you've ever tried to put a cat on a lead, you'll know what I mean: cats aren't like dogs. Once you've hooked a lead to their collars, they don't yank your arm out of your shoulder socket, desperate to run lickety-split with you chasing merrily behind. In fact, they don't move at all. They allow their legs to buckle under them and they curl up in a ball with a do-with-me-as-you-will look of martyred resignation on their faces. If you want to move them, you have to drag them.

The sight of half a dozen cats curled into balls, clearly on strike was funny enough, but the perplexed looks on their clueless providers' faces was so funny I had to look away fast or I'd have burst out laughing.

I know my cats: they won't be bossed and they won't be led. They won't tolerate being tethered and taken where you want them to go; they are free spirits who will go where they damn well please no matter whether you like it or not.

So imagine my surprise the other day when my daughter and I were out walking. "Mom," she cried, gripping my arm, look at that cat! It's on a lead!"

I looked. She was right. My jaw dropped as I saw that the cat was not only on a leash, he was perfectly happy about it. And even more amazing, he was standing in the midst of a group of dogs. Large typically un-cat-friendly dogs: a German shepherd, a greyhound, and a St Bernard. My daughter and I exchanged a long look.

"I've got to ask," I finally said. And my daughter, who is usually horrified by my American tendency to strike up conversations with strangers, nodded.

The person holding the cat's leash was a teenage boy. When we asked him how he'd managed to get his cat on a lead, he shrugged. "He kept following us when we took the dogs out for a walk. So we just got him his own lead and he's been fine with it."

We pet the cat, just to make sure he wasn't a tiny dog in drag. He did all the typical cat things: he cocked his head to the side to get us to scratch him where he wanted to be scratched, he purred, he pushed his head into our hands. He was 100% cat. And there he was on a leash, happily fraternizing with scary dogs.

"He's okay with these dogs?" we asked.

The boy nodded. "They get on fine. They're pals."

The other day, my husband and I set out on one of our long walks. Our cat Mitzi started to follow us, so I scooped her up and ran back to the house with her. I threw her over the gate and ran back to my husband. We resumed our walk and had gone a few blocks when we heard the sound of a bell tinkling behind us. Sure enough, there was Mitzi again, clearly intent on accompanying us. After five or ten minutes of her slinking along behind us, we worried about her safety, especially when cars whizzed past. So my husband picked her up and stuffed her into his jacket. He zipped her in tight and she seemed quite happy with this arrangement. I'll bet she'd have stayed there too if a tractor hadn't rumbled past and spooked her.

"Next time, we lock that *(&$" cat indoors," my husband fumed after I'd brushed him off, staunched the bleeding, and reassured him about his eye.

"I've got a better idea," I said. "Let's get her a leash."

The last time I was in town, I picked one up. It's black, with white rhinestones. I'll let you know how it works out. I know my cats, but you never know.

Picnic

2011-08-26T20:33:00.007+01:00

I am walking down a country road with two of my teenage daughters when we pass a family with two young children. The mother is pushing the youngest one in a stroller while the older one is skipping, holding her father's hand. I smile at them as we walk by and try not to sigh. Seeing parents with little children always makes me feel so nostalgic.

"You two were once that little," I say.

My daughters smirk and exchange looks. This is the kind of idiotic stating-the-obvious comment they have come to expect from me whenever I see little kids.

"We remember," my youngest daughter says.

My acquired daughter nods and they exchange another look. For a few moments, we listen to birdsong and enjoy the dappled sunlight filtered through branches.

"I'm tired," my youngest daughter says, heaving a deep sigh. "Are we there yet?"

Acquired daughter swings our picnic lunch. "I'm tired too and my feet hurt. I didn't know it was this far!"

Before I can say anything, they trade side-long glances and grin.

"Yeah," says my youngest daughter. "If I'd known it was this far, I'd never have agreed to come."

"This is stupid," they chorus. "All this way for a stupid picnic."

"Yeah. I need to sit down. And did you bring Coke? I hope you brought Coke. I'm going home if you didn't bring Coke."

"Are we there yet?"

"My shoes are pinching my feet! Why didn't you tell me it was so far? And I'm hungry."

"I'm hungry too, and I'm cold! Can we eat our picnic now?"

"Yeah, can we? In fact, I'm so hungry I'm about to be sick. Give me a sandwich!"

"Don't take the cheese and tomato! Don't let her have the cheese and tomato sandwich Mom, it's mine."

"Are we there yet?"

I get the joke, but an older couple passing us on the road look horrified. They stare at my girls and shoot me a look of pure amazement. What spoiled brats of teenagers I have!

"Oy," I whisper, "those people who just passed us thought you were serious. You should have seen their faces!"

For a fleeting moment my girls are obviously embarrassed, but they quickly get over it.

"Are we there yet?" my youngest daughter asks again. "This picnic is so stupid!"

We have a great picnic. We sit in a green grassy spot and stare up at the wispy feathers of clouds that trail through the bright blue skies. "It's going to rain," my younger daughter says through a yawn. "Why did we pick a day when it was going to rain? I want to go home."

"Yeah," my acquired daughter says sleepily, closing her eyes and smiling. "This is horrible. Let's go home."

I feel utterly happy. In fact, I don't feel quite so nostalgic anymore: I remember when my kids were like this for real and what a pain in the neck it was. Anyway, who needs toddlers when teenagers are this much fun?

Mobile Madness

2011-08-18T21:22:00.003+01:00

"All jackets and backpacks on the floor, and turn your mobile phones off," I tell my students, holding up my own so they can see it. "I'm turning mine off right now."

I press the button that turns my phone off and put it on my desk. My students quickly pull their phones out of their bags and pockets and switch them off. I distribute the test papers and the examination begins.

Five minutes later, I am halfway down the aisle distributing extra paper when there is a blast of guitar music and Merle Haggard begins singing California Cotton Fields. This is my ringtone partly because my kids have a sense of humor, but mainly because I happen to love Merle Haggard. I don't love him singing during this examination, though. Cheeks flaming, I race down the aisle and answer my phone, cutting off Merle. It's from my husband. "Mary?" I hear him saying. "Are you all right?"

"Exam!" I whisper angrily. "Can't talk!" I hang up on him and this time manage to turn off my phone properly.

My students grin, but I am incensed. How dare my husband call me during class time? He knows my schedule! He knows I'm giving exams all afternoon today. If I called him when he was giving an exam, he'd have a fit and rightly so.

"Why did you call me this afternoon?" I ask him when we meet up after work. "You knew I was giving an exam!"

My husband gives me a funny look. "I only called to answer the two calls you made to me during my morning class," he says hotly.

I feel my chin drop. I pull out my phone and check my call record. And there they are: two calls I apparently made to my husband this morning. But how can this be? My phone was lying in my backpack all morning; I never even touched it. How could I possibly have called him?

"I didn't call you!" I tell him. "I never went near my phone all morning."

My husband gives me his extremely irritating oh you and your problems with machines! look.

When we get home, I am cooking dinner when Merle Haggard starts to sing again. "Answer that for me!" I beg my husband, but by the time he finds my phone it has stopped ringing.

No sooner do I go back to my pots and pans than it starts up again. My husband groans and picks it up.

"It's from me," he says, wrinkling his forehead as he pulls his mobile phone out of his pocket. "My phone appears to be calling yours..."

Touche.

What They Said

2011-08-12T19:55:00.003+01:00

There is a pretty French girl standing in front of me at the intersection, waiting for the lights to change. She is with a Scottish boy; they have obviously just met and there is some light-hearted flirting going on.

"Have you been to the art museum?" she asks him in charmingly accented English.

"No," he says, grinning down at her foolishly.

The girl smiles and shrugs. "I have not too."

"Either," the boys says. "I have not either."

There is a long pause. I can't see the girl's face, but I can imagine her frown. "Why?" she wants to know.

The boy considers this. "I don't know. That's just the way we say it."

It takes all of my willpower not to butt in here. I'd like to tell her that we use either after negatives, but it isn't my place.

The lights change and we cross the road. Before we part ways, I hear the girl ask the boy about Edinburgh castle. But she pronounces the burgh in 'Edinburgh' like the burg in 'Pittsburgh'.

The boy shakes his head. "Not burgh," he tells her, "it's pronounced burra."

The girl lets out a long sigh. I don't blame her. Cracking the code has been hard enough for me here in Scotland and I'm a native speaker of English.

Two middle-aged women in the market are talking. "That's me done with the messages," one tells the other in broad Glaswegian. This makes me smile. Not so long ago, I wouldn't have had a clue what this meant, but now I know it means she's finished with her shopping. Doing the messages doesn't have anything to do with messages. When we first got here, I wondered why people were so obsessed with passing messages to each other. Couldn't they just email or use the phone? It took me months to puzzle that one out.

In my classroom, the students are full of questions about their coming written presentation. "How long we spend on the bag one?" Michael asks me, raising his hand. Michael is from Beijing, and he has a rather cavalier attitude towards English stress patterns and vowels.

I am completely and utterly thrown by this. "The bag one?" I query, tilting my head.

"Yes, the BAG one," Michael says, nodding. "You tell us we should write BAG one."

Is he trying to say the big one? What big one?

"Do you mean the biggest paragraph?" I say, stalling for time.

Michael shakes his head vigorously. "BACK one!" he almost shouts. "You tell us today. We supposed to write report BACK one, you say."

"Write it down," I sigh, giving up. I really need to work with Michael on his stress and pronunciation.

He pulls out a pencil and scrawls it on the back of his notebook: the word he's been aiming for is background.

Yes, we've definitely got to work more on stress and pronunciation. But all in good time. In the meantime, every day we crack a little more of the code.

Composition From Hell

2011-08-06T11:33:00.003+01:00

A few days ago I brought home a large number of student essays on traumatizing past experiences. I finished marking almost all of them except for Student X's.

In many ways, Student X is a model student. She's a sweet girl: bubbly, conscientious, friendly, and hard-working. If I had a whole class full of Student Xs, I would consider myself very lucky -- except for one thing. Student X is a God-awful writer.

There's really no excuse for it. I went over the procedure in class, in great detail. We did a similar writing activity together and I talked everybody through every single step. Moreover, I made sure they had a model they could follow when they wrote their own compositions. I told them not to worry about plagiarizing just this once, that I wanted them to follow the sample text, subsitituting their own experiences in certain key areas. This may not be a brilliant way to learn how to write, but these students still struggle with grammar -- and it's the way I learned how to write Japanese when I was at their stage.

As luck would have it, when I opened my folder of papers, the first composition I saw was Student X's. It was so bad, my head swam. Forget a topic sentence (which she most certainly had), there was no opening paragraph -- in fact, there were no paragraphs at all. Student X had not double-spaced, she had not used her dictionary to check spellings or her grammar book to check irregular past tenses. She had ruled her own paper, in pencil, and she had written her composition in pencil too -- a pencil which she hadn't bothered to keep sharp. And she must not have had an eraser either: she'd scribbled out her changes. Messily. If you took Faulkner, gave him a pencil, and turned him into a low-level EFL student, you'd have what Student X turned in: long, surreal run-on sentences, bewildering turns of phrase, words whose meanings I could only guess at.

I felt like crying, but I went and read a book instead. Later, I opened up my notebook again, putting Student X's paper on the bottom of the pile. I worked through the entire pile, vastly relieved to find that the rest of the class had gotten the idea and more or less followed my instructions. There were misspellings, of course, subject-verb disagreement, and problems with tenses, word forms, etc., but nothing was as bad as Student X's and I was able to work through the lot. The next day I gave the corrected compositions back to my students. I told Student X that I would soon have hers finished. I explained that she hadn't double-spaced and that I was having difficulty reading her writing.

This morning, I took another look at Student X's composition. It was worse, if anything, than I remembered it. I went outside and mowed the lawn. I trimmed the hedge behind our house and weeded the vegetable beds.

Then I went back into the house and took another look at Student X's composition. It was still horrible.

So I swept under the bed. I put flowers in the bathrooms. I put away the dishes, wiped the crumbs off the counter, and fed the cats again. I translated two paragraphs of the book I'm working on and edited another paragraph of my partner's translations. I read another book. I cleaned the grass out of the lawn mower, scoured the bottom of a copper kettle, and tidied the pile of laundry in our room.

Then I took a deep breath, went back to my pile of papers -- and marked the first ten lines of Student X's so-called composition. In ten lines, there were 33 mispellings, six subject-verb disagreements, and I stopped counting the problems after that because it was too depressing. I could barely understand anything other than the fact that there had been a fire (blasing enfierno?) in her aunt's house. The only thing I didn't have to correct much of was punctuation as she'd used hardly any.

I can't do any more. On Monday, I will have to hand this back to Student X and tell her to try again, in pen, double-spaced, on proper notebook paper, with her dictionary open in front of her. I will say this kindly, but I will be firm.

At least my house is tidy, and I'm caught up on my translating. And if I ever take another Japanese composition class, I've got my traumatic experience all picked out.

A Tale Of Two Writers

2011-07-30T10:42:00.011+01:00

Once upon a time I had a student I will call Chung-ho, an attentive, thoughtful student, if not the brightest, and not shy about speaking up in class. Chung-ho's English language education had been interrupted due to family problems, and he had joined the class late, but he easily managed to catch up with his classmates. In fact, for all that he had missed a lot of classes, he was still one of the best listeners and best readers in the class.

But he was not the best writer.

Because I had many opportunities to hear my students' experiences, I was familiar with Chung-ho's background, so when I sat down with one of his compositions, I already had a pretty good idea what it would be about. Which was a good thing, because at first, his stories were full of muddled, run-on sentences that almost reduced me to head-scratching confusion. Chung-ho left out subjects, verbs, and conclusions, struggled with subordinate clauses, and -- even though he was nagged and constantly reminded -- persisted in using the present when he should have used the past. In fact, he was unwittingly perverse about this: on one occasion, he wrote a long story about how his grandmother chased a snake into the outdoor privy. Throughout this story, his grandmother raced about dizzyingly in the present -- She run outside quickly. She call to the my brother for aid. She tell us keep watch for snake. She strike a snake with using cudgel. But in his last sentence when he should have used the present, here is what he wrote: Everytime we family union I told this story my cousins laughed.

But Chung-ho was a good student, and over the months, his grammar improved remarkably. Eventually it was possible to read his stories without stopping and wondering what the hell was going on. His commitment to learning was incredibly gratifying and inspiring. And yet his stories were real yawners, dry as dust, even the ones I asked him to rewrite, which I knew should have been great. After reading them, I used to feel a combination of irritation and anger: how could anybody screw up a story involving a grandmother, a snake, and an outdoor privy?

In the same class, I had another student, Lu, whose English was considerably less accomplished than Chung-ho's. Lu's problems were manifold: whereas Chung-ho could manage subordinate clauses, however clumsily, Lu could not, and saw no need to change his ways. Lu not only ignored the past tense, he saw no need for it. Auxiliaries struck him as a waste of time. When I gently reminded him once that the correct form was Did you finish? and not You finish? he was all spluttering indignation: "Every people understand You finish? Why need did finish?" My arguments for clarity and consistency did not convince him. Lu breezed through reading exercises, paying little attention to detail or general meaning; he frequently scored zero, but was remarkably blase about this. He did little to add to his vocabulary -- Chung-ho kept long lists of new words he had discovered -- and, when he could not get his point across, was more apt to put this down to his interlocutor's denseness than his own ineptitude.

Lu's writing was, predictably, appalling. But here is the amazing thing: he was a gifted storyteller. Even with his awful grammar, restricted vocabulary, crazy syntax, and ridiculous spelling (he once spelled the word 'apartment' four different ways in a 250-word essay), you could follow what he was saying because his narrative pulled you right along. Unlike Chung-ho, who felt the need to offer a useful moral preamble and ending to every story, Lu would put in a question that led you in and made you want to read more: Why all peoples scare of the darkness? He got right to the point after that, with gripping, fascinating, hilarious stories: about the time he walked through a graveyard drunk with his younger brother, his first visit to an American supermarket, the time he accidentally went into the women's toilet. I read his stories with breathless appreciation, even forgetting the terrible grammar and spelling in my haste to find out what had happened. And his endings never disappointed: American supermarket have many thing some think too much thing, but one thing Chinese market have American market not have: Chinese market interested and exciting. American supermarket not exciting. Also: no bad smell. Chung-ho's ending points got swallowed up in long ramblings about whether snakes were evil or useful, how grandmothers pulled their weight even in this modern age, and why it was best to be on the look-out for snakes even in one's house. (I would give you a sample of Chung-ho's endings, but I do not want to put you to sleep. Also, not enough room.)

It seems so obvious, and yet it's oddly elusive: that the key to telling great stories is learning how to match Chung-ho's diligence and commitment to form with Lu's storytelling genius and pithy prose. Often, the mechanics of writing got in the way of Lu's innate ability to tell a story. As a non-native speaker and writer, he must have felt frustrated when his stories weren't appreciated by people other than his EFL teachers. And all too often, the prosy dullness of Chung-ho's stories must have kept them from entertaining his audience. As a teacher, this drives me crazy. I know how much my students have to offer, and my biggest joy is knowing that they can leave the classroom with enough English to connect with people who aren't English teachers. As a writer, the fact that they could not share their gifts often made me think about my own writing. In fact, it still does. Recently, I revisited an old manuscript of mine and found more of Chung-ho than Lu in the ending. So back to the drawing board until my story pulls readers right in and keeps them gripped. Until it is interesting and exciting. (Also: no bad smell.)

Who's Asian?

2011-07-24T11:15:00.009+01:00

In my class, Samah, from the Middle-east, and Bao, from China, are discussing the word Asian and who it applies to.

"But I am Asian," Samah says. "Of course I am Asian! What else can I be?"

Bao can't get over this. He shakes his head. "I think you are like her," he says, glancing at me. "I think you are--" Words fail him. He lifts his hands and lets them fall.

Samah purses her lips. "I am from Middle- east." She appeals to me. "Middle-eastern is Asian, it is true, isn't it?"

I nod. I'm not sure whether Samah is technically Asian, but the Middle-east is still east, after all. "My Turkish students always said they were Asian," I tell Bao. "Some of them had red hair and green eyes, but they were proud to be descended from Asians."

Samah nods eagerly. "It is true! Turkish, Middle-eastern, Indian -- we are Asian too, like Chinese."

Bao's mouth hangs open as he studies Samah. Her skin is whiter than his -- whiter than mine, in fact -- and although her hair is perfectly covered by her hijab, I'm guessing that it's brown, not black. But she insists that she is Asian -- as Asian as he is -- and we have had a fun time discussing race, skin color, and the concept of identity. Bao, who has spent all of his eighteen years in a small town in China, has learned a lot more than English in this class. For the remainder of the class period, I can see him studying Samah surreptitiously. It is clear that he has never realized what a diverse group he belongs to.

Not all of my students have been so eager to be known as Asians. During my second year teaching in Tokyo, one of my Japanese students took me to task for referring to her and her classmates as Asians. "You call us Asian, but we are Orientals," she corrected me.

"That term is dated," I told her. "The expression everybody uses now is Asian."

She shook her head. "No! When I live in London, Asian people are Indian, Pakistani. We Japanese are Orientals."

"Japanese-Americans never call themselves Orientals," I said. "They call themselves Asian." I felt silly arguing with her over what she chose to call herself, but I couldn't help it. I didn't want her to walk away from my classroom using a dated expression. It also irritated me that she was so anxious to distance herself from Indians and Pakistanis.

"Asian people are dark," she insisted. "Different from us."

We finally had to agree to disagree, though I urged her not to refer to other Asians as Orientals if she ever visited the States. And if you do call yourself Oriental and people correct you, would you please tell them your teacher told you not to? I felt like adding.

"Asian people from Turkey," Samah tells Bao, her dark eyes flashing. "From Jordan, from Syria, from Kazakhstan, from Nepal--" She ticks them off on her fingers, one by one.

Bao is impressed. "I did not know so many Asian," he says, shaking his head.

I wish I'd had Samah around when I was teaching in Tokyo.

A Tale Of Two Chests

2011-07-16T18:37:00.011+01:00

In our hallway, there is a wooden chest with iron fittings and handles. It isn't an especially beautiful piece of furniture, but I prize it greatly. Not only is it useful -- you can put clothes into it and years later they will smell as sweet and fresh as the day you stored them -- but it was a real find: my husband saw it on the local rubbish heap between a rusty refrigerator and a set of broken plywood shelves. When he brought it home, spattered with rain and mud, we had no idea it was anything special.

The chest was relatively light but bulky, composed of three parts which could be neatly stacked on top of each other. I didn't appreciate it at first; it had obviously spent decades in somebody's kitchen, and while the wood wasn't warped, it was a dull, drab color from years of exposure to kerosene and cooking smoke. I wrinkled my nose as I opened the drawers, expecting the stale fug of old, damp furniture, but was pleasantly surprised by the sweet-resin smell of fresh-cut wood. Over the next few weeks, the chest only rose in my estimation: although clothes put into our other chests-of-drawers quickly dampened and furred over with mildewed in Tokyo's humidity, whatever I put in this one stayed fresh and sweet-smelling.

One day, a friend came over. As soon as she saw our new chest, her eyes lit up. "Where did you get the Paulownia chest?" she asked. I told her, and she shook her head in amazement. "You were so lucky! Those cost a bundle nowadays."

"Why would someone throw it away then?"

"It was probably some young person going through the effects of an elderly relative. Somebody who didn't know any better." She ran her hand over the top of our chest. "This is a really good one, too -- at least 60 or 70 years old."

My friend told me that her family's Paulownia chests were sanded down at the end of every year. The iron fittings and handles were removed first. Afterwards, the freshly-sanded chests looked and smelled brand new. "You can keep anything in a Paulownia chest," she said. "Silk kimono, pillows, bedding -- nothing will sour, and the moths won't touch it. Hang onto it." Even if she hadn't admired it so, I was already loathe to part with it. Because if something you pick up for a song is special, something you find on the rubbish heap is even more so: it reminds you of your good luck and your good sense.

We brought another chest-of-drawers back from Japan too, an even larger, heavier one that made us sweat and curse as we heaved it through narrow doorways and up the stairs. We bought it in a used furniture store in Abiko, in the summer of 1998, on a day so hot that the sweat rolled off us as we stood, fanning ourselves in the air-conditioned shop. In fact, the heat made us choose hastily: it was solid and beautifully crafted, but it was far too big for our tiny house. For years, it overwhelmed our cramped little living room.

The clerk who showed us the furniture was a personable young Ghanaian man who spoke English and fluent, unaccented Japanese. "I know he's wasted on us!" the proprietor of the shop told me. "He studies all the time, that's all he does. Up in that little room of his -- you should see all his books! Japanese, law, politics." She fanned herself with a furniture pamphlet. "If he was Japanese, he could be prime minister of Japan in a couple of years, I'm not kidding."

When we left Japan, we brought both chests with us to Scotland. The second year we were back, I took the handles and fittings off the Paulownia chest and sanded it with the finest sandpaper I could find. I like to think about the long life it had before it came to us. I try to imagine it in the kitchen of some Japanese family, where it no doubt saw out the war. I wonder if the family crouched near its bulk during air raids, if the woman who opened the drawers to put things in and take them out was as comforted and cheered by the sweet smell of its wood as I am. And I wonder what she would have thought if she had known the future her chest would have, going off on its own adventure with an an Anglo-American family.

I look at our large, sturdy chest-of-drawers too, and try to remember how hot it was the day we bought it, how freely we sweated, standing in that used furniture shop, running our hands over its wood. I wonder what happened to the young Ghanaian man, whether he is still in Japan, what he managed to achieve. My memory is stretched just trying to conjure up the heat of that day, what a headache it was getting that chest into our house, and how ridiculously oversized it looked in our living room.

And I can't help but wonder: what adventures will my furniture will have after we have parted ways?

Attitude

2011-07-09T21:07:00.008+01:00

I love teaching this class.

Last week, I got my times mixed up and started packing up thirty minutes early. I stacked my books, snapped my CDs back into their plastic cases, and gathered up all my papers. "I'll see you after lunch," I told the class, popping my glasses and pencil case back into my bag. "We'll be finishing the work we were doing on comparisons."

Cheng, sitting in the back row frowns. "Teacher, no. Not time."

I stare back at him, then look up at the clock. "Oh my gosh, I'm sorry, you're right, Cheng! I made a mistake -- we still have another thirty minutes to go!"

Cheng beams at me.

And here is what is truly amazing: after Cheng says this, the rest of the class don't protest. Nobody elbows him in the ribs or even gives him a dirty look. In fact, they all nod happily. "Not time yet, teacher. Thirty more minute."

When I was teaching in Cyprus, barely three minutes into every class I had students checking the clocks on their cell phones, craning their necks to see the classroom clock, and yawning. Ten minutes into the class, they were ready for a break. If I'd ever gotten the time wrong back then and packed up half an hour early, anyone who pointed it out would have been risking her life. I always planned my lessons carefully and worked hard to make them meaningful and entertaining. But staring at a classroom full of yawning, miserable students, I used to feel like the worst teacher in the world. I'm not teaching any better now than I was then, so what's going on?

Here's what's going on: these students I'm teaching now have great attitudes. Even the ones whose attitudes aren't perfect, are way ahead of the game because they all want to learn. Sometimes I look out at their sea of earnest, hungry-for-knowledge faces and I could weep for gratitude. What a huge difference a good attitude makes.

"Okay," I say, "we've got thirty more minutes, so let's carry on with page 81."

Everybody looks back down at their books.

We're studying the difference between contractions and possessives. It's not a thrill a minute, but several people in this class are keen to learn grammar -- they have actually asked for more of it. The only one who actively doesn't like it is Cheng. But even when faced with the prospect of another thirty minutes of loathed grammar, he reminded me that I was jumping the gun, that we had another thirty minutes of class. He may be regretting that now, but he's doing a great job of hiding it, and good for him.

Like I said, I love teaching this class.

Sugiyama-san

2011-07-02T22:24:00.012+01:00

Right from the start, I had trouble with Sugiyama-san. We first crossed swords over my refusal to attend open house day at my daughter's nursery school. My daughter, at the time, was all of fourteen months old.

"We can't have your husband missing work!" Sugiyama-san almost shouted when I suggested he go in place of me. She looked astonished that I could think of such a thing. What kind of wife was I?

"But he wouldn't be missing work," I repeated. "Like I said, Tuesday's his day off, but it's my busiest--"

Sugiyama-san shook her head. "Impossible! On his day off, your husband must relax." She gave me a hard look. "Men need to relax, you know. They work so hard."

I bit back my irritation. We'd already established that I didn't have a day off, but it obviously didn't occur to Sugiyama-san that I might need to relax too. Or that I worked every bit as hard as my husband did.

"You're the mother so you should come," she repeated. "Your employers know that you have a baby. Can't you tell them it's important?"

I opened my mouth, then closed it. "But you just said it wasn't important--"

She gave me an exasperated look. "It's not important enough for your husband to miss his day off."

I stared back at Sugiyama-san, one of the middle-aged women who looked after my daughter all day while I was at work. She seemed to keep contradicting herself. When she'd initially told me about this open house day, she'd claimed it was very important. But as soon as I'd mentioned that my husband had that day off and could come in my stead, she'd decided it wasn't really that important. Or rather that it was, but only for me, the mother. She'd also initially said that the parents wouldn't have to talk much, just observe, but now she felt that my husband's lack of Japanese would be a problem.

"I have a meeting at work that day," I told her. "I'm expected to attend it."

"Perhaps they could find a substitute. If you asked--"

This was the last straw. "Let me get this straight. You want me to miss a day of work to come and observe my one-year-old's class because it's important -- but not important enough for my husband to come even though we live only five minutes away and he isn't working today." I felt like kicking a fence. I'd already missed several days of work over the past month to take my baby to clinic appointments as my husband's Japanese was not up to this. In fact, I'd missed so much work ferrying my daughter (and sometimes my husband) to the doctor that I couldn't afford to take time off when I got sick myself. I went into work half a dozen times when I'd have been better off in bed. And yet as the mother, I was still required to take time off work although my husband's day off was sacrosanct.

The irony of this escaped Sugiyama-san, but my anger didn't. Over the next year, she gave me hell. Every week, parents were required to wash and change the sheets on their children's futon. Every Monday, my daughter's futon would invariably be at the bottom of the pile and impossible to retrieve without maximum effort. As I struggled to put it back in the cupboard, Sugiyama-san would gleefully point out what I was doing wrong. One day I made the mistake of telling another mother there that my husband was better at changing the sheets on our futons as it was a job he didn't mind doing. That was a big mistake: Sugiyama-san overheard this and the story of how good I had it quickly made the rounds of the nursery school. You're so lucky that your husband does your work for you! was something I grew weary of hearing, especially since my husband and I split housework, bread-winning, and childcare 50-50.

Over the next year, I bit back many angry retorts when Sugiyama-san took it upon herself to criticize my mothering skills. My daughter's refusal to take naps had caused me no end of grief, but Sugiyama-san was certain that I was causing this problem. Was I letting her sleep too much at home? No matter how many times I explained that my daughter had always been a poor sleeper, Sugiyama-san remained suspicious ("You working women are so busy with your jobs, you let your babies sleep far too long!"). Likewise, my baby's dislike of leafy greens and her loathing of mushrooms became controversial issues. Didn't we eat spinach and mushrooms at home? Yes, I assured her through gritted teeth, we did, but I could still see the doubt in her eyes. Sugiyama-san also insisted that my daughter's bright red mosquito bites were an infectious skin condition (this required a signed letter from the local dermatologist, stating that Caucasian skin often reacted differently to mosquito bites, after which she was still not satisfied -- "Heh! What does he know?").

Japan is now suffering a decline in the birth rate as more and more young women decide not to marry and have children. Unless Japanese people start having more babies, their population will almost certainly shrink more than 20% by 2050. This will have terrible repercussions on the health and pension systems and the economy of Japan as a whole. Personally, I think people with attitudes like Sugiyama-san's don't help a bit. Her attitude -- that mothers should happily bear the brunt of the labor and responsibilities of parenting -- wore me out. Her strong bias towards men -- she was as kind and considerate towards my husband as she was bitchy and fault-finding with me -- was infuriating. I can see why young women in Japan might want to opt out of motherhood. Given the choice between a life of endless toil and servitude one of relative ease and freedom, who can blame girls for deciding not to marry and have babies? The day Sugiyama-san switched nursery schools was one of the happiest days of my life.

I didn't see her again until almost the last month we were in Japan when my daughter and I ran into her in the park. She looked happy to see us. "You remember your old teacher, don't you?" she said, prodding my daughter. "You're lucky to have girls," she said wistfully. "All I've got is boys and they're all grown up now."

As I waved goodbye, I felt a pang of pity for this woman who had made my life so miserable. But I also felt a wave of sympathy for the daughters-in-law she will one day have.

Writer's Lap Cats

2011-06-23T09:45:00.003+01:00

I'm involved in a difficult project right now -- a project so challenging, I may never succeed in my efforts to bring it to fruition.

I'm not talking about actual writing this time, however challenging it is. And writing is, to be sure, very challenging. I'm making revisions on a novel I've written for adults. I thought I was finished with it two weeks ago. After numerous beta readers had weighed in, after umpteen revisions and rewritings, I even sent it off to my agent. Then I happened to reread one paragraph and found, within it, both unnecessary words and a small plot hole. So, I'm clipping and tweaking yet again, because if I found these infelicities in just one paragraph, there's no telling what horrors lurk in the rest of the manuscript. And yes, it's hard work. But my newest project is harder still.

I'm not talking about teaching either; although I find my small class absorbing, time-consuming, and exhausting. We've been working on graphs lately, and how to write simple sentences comparing statistical data. This ought to be straightforward, but I find breaking down the concepts into understandable chunks quite difficult. My students have also been scratching their heads on the finer points of English idioms, and how you can get something half right, but still manage to fail entirely in getting your ideas across. Consider that machines can break down, but couples can break up; that thieves break in while wars and skin break out. Consider that when you arise in the morning, you get up, but when you alight from a vehicle you get down. Then consider that people sing songs about getting down and getting it on and even, occasionally, tell others to get with it, which is all very mystifying if you are comparatively new to English. If you're already preposition-challenged, English phrasal verbs are hell on earth. Still, teaching them is no match for this latest challenge I have taken on.

I'm not talking about translating either -- which mercifully has been put on hold for a while, and let's hope that it stays that way for as long as possible -- and I'm not even talking about raising teenagers. Teenagers who might want to go to rock concerts in far away cities in the middle of the school week, for instance, when there are no reputable parents prepared to collect them, at midnight. Teenagers who almost certainly have to be nagged about homework assignments, household chores, and putting away their laundry.

No, this challenge is greater than all of these things: I am trying to train my cats to be lap cats. Specifically, a writer's lap cats.

My last cat was the perfect writer's lap cat. She would sit for hours on my lap, occasionally getting her head between my hands and the keyboard, but generally behaving herself and offering me nothing but slavish devotion and love. She had a few tiny bad habits: she drooled (disgusting until I got to know her); she brought me no end of dead rodents (which occasionally interrupted my work, especially when they weren't quite dead and managed to crawl under furniture to die in peace). But by and large, she was a huge help. Whenever I got rejections, she gave me her shrewdest, canniest look: she would stare up at me and in her eyes I would read How can you let this stop you from writing? Don't you realize what a gift you have, oh wondrous one? Her purrs soothed and comforted me.

Sadly, my current cats do not have her writer's lap cat skills. Occasionally, one of them will jump up on my lap. This would be encouraging, if only he or she would sit down, curl up, and start purring. But for some reason, they don't do this. Instead, they remain standing, blocking my view of the keyboard and screen. They then turn their backs to me, tails held high, presenting a view of themselves I would rather not become acquainted with. The male drools; the female meows incessantly. They both scratch furniture to get attention, they both hunt, and they both insist on bringing me their prey. On the rare occasions they have been with me during periods of writer angst, what I read in their eyes is Another rejection, huh? Haven't you figured it out, idiot? Get up and get us some grub!

But I am patient and I am stubborn, because those are skills I have had to hone as a mother, as a teacher, and as a writer. When they jump onto the keyboard, I gentle them off it. When they present their bottoms to me, I turn them around. When they scratch to get attention, I let them know, kindly but firmly, that this is Not the Way. Slowly, I am doing what I can to make sows ears into silk purses.

And who knows? It might just work. Especially now that I've got a 2-kg box of special-offer chicken 'n liver cat treats.

Getting The Joke

2011-06-16T19:52:00.005+01:00

"Very bad news!" Samah confides, her pretty eyes round with surprise. "Did you hear? Prince William already divorce with wife!"

"Prince William is divorced?" I've been busy, pulling my books out of my bag, getting ready to start teaching, but this stops me in my tracks. "That's impossible, he only just got married!"

She shakes her head. "I read in journal. He is divorce already, so soon."

She pulls out her mobile phone, presses a few buttons, and brings it to show me. Intrigued, I put down my books and read.

"I really don't know what I was thinking—we're a terrible match, I don't love her and never have, and, to be honest, I never really had any interest in being married in the first place," announced the now unattached Prince William to a dead-silent British press corps.

I am stunned by this. "I can't believe it!" I splutter. "This is crazy -- they've only been married a month!"

Samah nods gravely. "It is crazy."

The other students, all Chinese, are intrigued now. "What is happen?" We tell them and they crowd around my desk.

"People thought our wedding was some sort of fairy tale," we read, "but I assure you it was all just some ghastly ceremonial farce that got out of hand. I'm just relieved it's over, frankly. And I'm glad I'll never have to see that awful woman again."

"You see?" says Samah, "is true!"

I'm still shaking my head. I can't get over this! "All that fuss! All that money--" But I stop myself. "Hang on, what newspaper published this?" Because on my way to work I passed half a dozen newsstands. All the tabloids headlines were about the sort of dull things nobody wants to read: a football player's illness, city planning. There's no way they wouldn't be having a field day with a story like this.

And scrolling up Samah's mobile, I see that the article we are reading is from The Onion.

I do my best to explain, but it doesn't go down well.

"Why someone write this?" my Chinese students demand. "Why write story not true?"

"It's a joke," I tell them. "The Onion plays little jokes like that."

"Divorce not joke!"

And no, it isn't. But as my father-in-law used to say, some fall on stony ground. Humor doesn't always cross cultures; a lot of it gets lost in translation. Nothing makes a joke less funny than trying to explain it to people who cannot get it. Nothing kills humor deader than repeated attempts to interpret it.

When the class is over, I am finished for the day. I decide to pay a visit to the ladies' room before leaving the building, but the cleaning lady is in the one I normally go to, so I nip into the disabled toilet. There is a long black cord dangling from the ceiling, but I haven't lived in the U.K. all these years without learning a few tricks: generally the flush mechanism here is a lever like we use in the States, but sometimes it's a chain, so why not a cord? I pull on the cord and immediately a high-pitched shriek of an alarm shrills, causing me to jump half a foot. I look for an off-switch, but cannot find it. I open the door. With any luck, the cleaning lady will come and tell me how to turn it off.

Instead, a small, international crowd has formed. The shriek-alarm is so loud, I can barely hear their anxious Are you all rights?, but as soon as they see my able-bodied, shamefaced self, they know exactly what has happened. One of them goes into the toilet and turns off the alarm.

"Please tell me I'm not the only one who has done that," I manage to say, blushing furiously. As I scurry out, they're still laughing.

Yes, the joke is on me. But at least I don't have to explain it.

Technological Breakthrough

2011-06-08T20:42:00.010+01:00

I have a love-hate relationship with technology, heavy on the hate.

My first day on the job, it was all hate. "All the doors have security codes," I was told during my induction. This filled me with trepidation, but when I aired my fears, my husband laughed. The school he works in has security codes on its doors too. "They won't give you any trouble," he assured me. We've been married for decades and he knows me very well, but he obviously lives in hope.

During my whirlwind tour of the school, I was in awe of how many unfamiliar bits of machinery every classroom had. Uneasy awe, that is. "You'll love the visualizer," my husband told me. "You can stick a sheet of paper or a whole book under it, flick a button, and it's projected onto a screen for the whole class to see."

Actually, this sounded great. No more fiddling with Xerox machines, wasting time, paper and energy on handouts! No more endless scribbling on the whiteboard! But best of all, the visualizers stayed in the classroom permanently. In our school in Cyprus, we had to write everything on the white board as photocopying was discouraged. Also, things got stolen, so every piece of equipment that went into the classroom had to be taken out afterwards and locked away; we teachers were loaded down like pack-camels.

Unfortunately, the visualizer turned out to be a crushing disappointment. As soon as I put my carefully prepared handout in the visualizer and turned it on, the image on the screen began to jump and flicker.

My students blinked and frowned and rubbed their eyes. "We are get headache!" one boy complained.

"Leave it a few minutes and it'll settle," a colleague advised me.

I tried this, but it didn't work. The image continued to skitter and jump about, words perfectly focussed one minute, then blurred the next.

My students grimaced and rubbed their heads. "Please turn off!" they begged.

So I gave up. I scribbled some exercises on the board for them to do in my absence, and hurried out to make Xerox copies. The elevator was broken, so I had to take the stairs. When I got to the Xerox room, I punched in the security code, turned the door handle -- and found that it would not open. A few stress-charged minutes later, I'd already had the equivalent of a full day's work-out on the door, which remained unmoved. If a passing colleague hadn't pity on me and unlocked the door, who knows how long I'd have stayed there? But once I'd finally gained entrance, to my endless frustration, I couldn't get the Xerox machine to work. I almost wondered if it had watched me struggling with the door and decided to toy with me.

By the time I located a machine that did work -- after grappling afresh with the security code on the door -- I almost wept with relief. Clutching my copies, I raced back up the stairs.

The rest of the lesson went well enough until it was time to use the CD player. I had been assured that the CD players were straightforward, but there seemed to be half a dozen apertures, none of which seemed inclined to accept my disc. After five minutes of sweaty misery, I threw in the towel and called one of the students to help; I reasoned this was better than inadvertently teaching them words they had no business knowing. My student strutted up to the machine and inserted the CD player into the correct slot within seconds. He walked away, shaking his head. "I come long way from China to show my mother how use CD player," he commented. I could hardly blame him.

For over a dozen years, I taught at a school in Tokyo that was virtually prehistoric in its habits. We had blackboards in all our classrooms. At the end of every lesson, a respectful lackey would scurry in, remove the erasers, and go beat out the chalk dust. We used ancient tape recorders, almost no audiovisual materials, and textbooks with dated material. During that time, a technological revolution was taking place in the world of education, but we were blissfully unaware of smart boards, CD players, or power point presentations. After a week of fighting Xerox machines, grappling with the flickering visualizer, and trying to figure out how to enter my attendance figures online, I began to long for my old school in Tokyo. What good is technology when you have to fight it every inch of the way? Isn't it easier to scrawl something in chalk on a board if the alternative is a temperamental machine that goes AWOL when you need it most?

Then today, several miracles occurred. First, I punched in the security code, turned the handle -- and the door most obligingly clicked open. Next, I managed to use the CD player without any help. So I was in a good mood when one of my students asked for a copy of the homework I'd given the class earlier this week. Unfortunately, I'd left the material I needed downstairs. "I'm sorry," I had to tell her, "I'll run downstairs and make you a copy."

"No need!" she told me, after a brief conference with another student. She touched a button on her phone and showed me a copy of my laboriously written graph her classmate had photographed with his phone. "I make photo," she said simply.

Like I said, I have a love-hate relationship with technology. Today, it was heavy on the love.

Labor Of Love

2011-06-02T20:59:00.006+01:00

Seven years ago, for the first time since I was 14, I could not find a job. I studied the want ads diligently. Every time I saw a position advertised I thought I might be remotely qualified for, I applied to it. I sent out queries to scores of colleges, schools and companies, carefully attaching my C.V. Few replies came back. "It's your American degree," people told me. "It's your age," others said. "It's the field you're in," one woman told me. "Nobody needs English teachers in this area."

Whether it was my age or my degree or my field, it was definitely depressing. All the people who needed to learn EFL lived in the big cities. Nobody wanted to learn Japanese.

But our family needed to eat and my husband was struggling to find work himself, so I did what I could. I signed up with a temporary job placement company and started going on interviews. I was thrilled to get a long-term temporary job doing legal typing, but the man I worked for was hopelessly messy and disorganized; filing cabinets bulged with out-of-date files and piles of current files teetered on top of high shelves. Paralegals would come in, desperate to find missing files for cases soon to be tried. My attempts to put things in order, however, were met with general disapproval. "We've always done it that way," the others told me. "You'll just have to put up with it." Once, in the hallway, a former file clerk told me he'd had a nervous breakdown. "I couldn't take it anymore, d'ye ken?" he whispered, looking over his shoulder. "People screaming for files I couldn't find -- it did my head in! You've got my job now," he added, looking enormously pleased. I was never happier to leave a job in my life.

The next job I got was working for a woman who was wonderfully organized. I was replacing someone who had recently quit. I was thrilled to be working in such a tidy, smoothly-running office, but alas, the woman I was replacing must have realized her mistake: she came back to work.

When I heard the local college was looking for lifelong learning teachers, I quickly put in my name as a Japanese language and culture teacher. I was accepted, and given a short training course. On registration night, my heart fairly raced as I prepared my props: origami paper, sets of chopsticks and crockery samples, a Japanese cook book, my ink, paper and calligraphy brush set, my bag of kimonos and obis.

Only one person signed up to my course, so it could not run. The belly dance instructor had ten students register for her class, the guitar teacher had a dozen, and the upholstery teacher was swamped. As I packed up my things to leave, I bit back tears.

After teaching two years in North Cyprus, we came back to Scotland knowing that the job situation had gotten worse. Then out of the blue, my husband found a job opening in his field. He applied and was immediately hired.

I remained unemployed. "Look on the bright side," friends kept saying. "At least you have plenty of time to write!" I love writing, and yes, it was great having plenty of time. But I wanted to work. "Don't quit your day job," agents and editors tell you. "Very few writers make ends meet on their writing alone." This was painful to hear. I wanted a day job. If only I had a day job!

Then a friend asked me to help her translate a book. No sooner had I started than I got another job, editing manuscripts. Then I met a woman whose son wanted to learn Japanese, followed by a handful of Japanese housewives who wanted to learn English. More editing jobs came my way too, and finally, a formal teaching job at a university.

I'll finish my first week of teaching tomorrow. I've just turned in my first chapter of translating and rewriting, along with my last editing job.

Suddenly I've got so much work to do, I hardly have time to write. But I'm not complaining: I love the work. And oddly enough, I've never written more.

Happy Mother's Day

2011-05-26T16:33:00.008+01:00

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a six-word memoir, asking contributors to sum up their mothers in just six words. You might not realize it, but you can work a lot of pathos, humor, and intrigue into just six words. Reading these memoirs, I roared with laughter, shook my head in admiration, and was moved to tears several times.

I immediately emailed my younger daughter the link. She and I are similar: we like things that make us laugh and cry in equal measures. We wear our hearts on our sleeves.

It took her a while to check it out. "I thought it was just one of those writing things you like," she told me later. Which was silly, because it was a writing thing, and I did like it. But I knew what she meant. She thought it was going to be boring. I send her a lot of links on the importance of getting enough sleep, eating nutritious food, and limiting your alcohol consumption, how valuable exercise is, the need for earplugs at rock concerts, and so on. Strangely enough, she does not find these words of wisdom thrilling; she pretty much deletes them just as fast as she can.

But she read straight through the six-word memoirs and was clearly moved by them.

"Oh my God," she said, "those were great!" And because we'd enjoyed them so much, we read them again, together.

Some impressed us:

Answered my questions. Questioned my answers.
My mother — often moved, seldom swayed.

(Both of those describe my mother perfectly.)

And we both laughed at these:

Her meatloaf was crunchy, with love.
Smart, kind, frugal. Makes great kugel.
There’s love in her green enchiladas.
She didn’t always follow the recipe.
I miss her rice and beans.
Kitchen is closed. Make it yourself.

(My mother was smart, kind, and frugal too, although she probably didn't know what kugel was. Unlike me, she hated cooking, but she made enchiladas occasionally, rarely with a recipe. And I miss her rice and beans.)

These made us laugh:

You’re going out in that?
Let’s play the quiet game now.
Wait ‘til your father gets home.
Just put on a little lipstick.
Get down here, right this minute.
Because I’m your mother, that’s why.
I’m cold. Put on a sweater.
I know how busy you are.
Let me look before you flush.
Now put a real skirt on.
Hello. It’s your mother. Call me.
Dressed to perfection, even in ambulance.

And we howled at these:

The original Google, Wikipedia and eHow.
Thought ‘LOL’ meant ‘lots of love.’
She learned to text for me.
81 years young with an iPad2.
Uh oh. Mom’s on Facebook now.
Mom’s on Facebook. Luckily not Twitter.
She’s my number one Twitter follower.
Expects calls — or e-mails unhappy faces.
Sends me “Thinking of you” texts.
Taught me the best swear words.
Hit her punk phase at 70.
Switched napping dad’s pipe for banana.

And laughed and cried at these:

Six kids. No wonder she drank.
Buried with her books and brandy.
I loved her, drunk or sober.
Kids need moms. Moms need wine.
God loves us through mothers, mostly.

These broke our hearts:

Gone suddenly. Things left to say.
She knew and didn’t stop him.
Alzheimer’s makes me the mom now.
Lost my biggest fan to cancer.
You missed out on absolutely everything.
Some moms should not be moms.
Killed herself when I was 8.
Difficult to love. Impossible to forget.
Escaped communist Albania. She was 19.
Even the Nazis bowed to you.
Loved Jesus, bourbon, cigarettes and me.

By the time we got to the winners, we'd been through the gamut of emotions and thought we were all finished. But we were wrong:

What’s she doing in my mirror?
“Mom, I am gay.” Nothing changed.
[Insert some great advice here], sweetie.
Not entirely happy until completely discontent.
Friends finally. But not on Facebook.

And finally, this one, which I personally loved:

She deserves more than six words.

My mother has been dead for 30 years, but she deserved more than six words too; I could write her a thousand six-word memoirs and she'd still deserve more. So here are a few for my mother: She devoured fruit by the truck-load; She knew I could do better; My best friend. (I wasn't hers.) and finally I'll never meet anybody like her.

Reading those six-word memoirs with my daughter was my Mother's Day present from her this year. But after a little wheedling, I got a good neck rub off her too -- and her very own six-word memoir for me:
Rub my neck, honey, will you?

Dissing Johnny Depp

2011-05-19T08:28:00.016+01:00

The following is a true story. I almost wish it wasn't.

Before I tell it, I want to write about what happened to my cousin a few decades ago. My cousin is a teacher, but once upon a time she was also a Hollywood extra. One day, she was waiting on a set (something Hollywood extras spend 99% their time doing), when a man sat down at her table and tried to chat her up. This happened all the time to my good-looking cousin, but she was a happily married woman, so she didn't even look up from the book she was reading, All the President's Men. She was polite enough to answer yes when the man asked if she liked the book; she just didn't look up and make eye contact.

Until he made a comment about starring in the movie. Then she did look up -- and saw that she had been chatting with Dustin Hoffman. At which point she did what any sensible person would do: she apologized for her inattention, assured him of her great admiration for his work, and asked him to autograph her book. Which he did.

Yesterday, I was in Glasgow for a series of job interviews and to meet my daughter for a late lunch. It was a cold, blustery day and I'd had little sleep the night before after wrestling with a long, taxing translating/editing job. After getting lost half a dozen times and walking several miles, followed by a confusing trip on the train to Glasgow Central Station, I was exhausted, and exasperated to find that my daughter was late.

So I found a Costa coffee shop and nipped in for an espresso, but there was a long line. Too tired to spend even one more minute on my feet, I sat down to wait -- and dozed off. I don't do this often, but every time I do, something weird happens. This time was no exception: somebody rapped on the window. I thought it might be my daughter, so I shook myself awake, and saw a stranger grinning and waving at me. Not just any stranger either, but some guy got up to look like Captain Jack Sparrow in full pirate regalia. The resemblance was quite striking -- whoever they'd picked looked exactly like Johnny Depp -- but I was in a sour mood and very irritated to be woken up; I gave him my dirtiest look, mouthed something Captain Jack Sparrow himself might say, then settled back into my chair to doze off again.

When my daughter finally showed up, I told her the story. After insisting that I must have been dreaming, she thought it was hilarious. So did my husband when he came to pick us up.

Then today, my daughter sent me this.

Would somebody who knows how to do these things please put me out of my misery and find out if Johnny Depp actually was in Glasgow yesterday, near the Buchanan Street Galleries? Never mind that he wasn't Dustin Hoffman; if I actually met Johnny Depp yesterday, even through a window, I really want to know so I can write to my cousin and tell her.

If the man I saw really was Johnny Depp, here is a message for him: There are over six hundred thousand people in Glasgow, and half of them were at that shopping mall yesterday. 80% of that number were women, 100% of whom would give their eyeteeth to chat you up. Why did you have to pick the one person who was sleeping?

Thank You, Liberty

2011-05-17T21:35:00.006+01:00

Two months ago, I lost my mobile phone in Glasgow.

I noticed it was gone just after my first private lesson. I checked both pockets of my coat, emptied out my ratty old backpack, and later, searched through the glove compartment of our car in growing desperation, but the phone was gone. A thorough search of our flat was also futile.

"I must have dropped it," I finally told my husband. "When we got out of the car, I must have had it on my lap and it fell into a pile of leaves or mud."

My husband isn't known for his optimism. "In that case, you'll never see it again," he predicted. "Not in Glasgow."

Now, I'm no fan of mobile phones, but I've learned how useful they can be. On a trip to London to see my cousins, I'd been able to use my mobile as a camera and to stay in touch with my daughters and husband. I'd used it to arrange meetings with private students -- I'd even learned how to text on the damn thing, and I'd just managed to top up its credit all by myself. In fact, I'd been seriously considering letting my daughter show me how to access my email account from it. The more I thought about it, the more I missed it: the little wand thingy I used to punch out messages, the ceramic Korean cat dangling from it, its shiny new touch screen. I could practically feel the heft of it in my hand, the good, connected feeling it gave me when my daughters sent me texts. Losing it just about broke my heart; we could afford to replace it, but only just.

"Maybe someone picked it up," I said. "Maybe they found it, but they haven't figured out how to use it yet, so they can't tell me they have it." Even to me this sounded lame.

Days went by. I wondered what the finder had made of my phone. Obnoxiously pink, in a pink silk bag -- that was bad enough. But my husband and kids have wicked senses of humor: the ring tone they'd chosen for me was Merle Haggard's California Cotton Fields,. Half the names in my address book are Japanese -- my students and translating partner. There was a voice mail message from the mother of the middle school boy who I am teaching Japanese, a screensaver picture of our Turkish rescue kitten baring pointed little teeth in a cross-eyed snarl, and a scrawled message in clumsy cursive from my daughter : I love you mommy! Best of all, on the camera were several pictures of a grotty old vacuum cleaner on the landing in the cheap hotel where I stayed in London, plus a fuzzy shot of the underside of the scarred bedside table, studded with old pieces of chewing gum.

I knew that if I'd found my phone, those vacuum cleaner and chewing gum shots alone would have driven me mad with curiosity: What kind of a weirdo takes pictures of old vacuum cleaners and wads of chewing gum?

Almost a week after I lost it, I got a call from a young woman whose voice I didn't recognize. "I think I've got your phone," she said. "I found it in the street just across from Glasgow University."

I was so happy I forgot to take her number, but we arranged to meet in a few days, when I was next due to go to Glasgow. Her name, she told me, was Liberty.

"You really think she'll show up?" my husband said dubiously as he dropped me off in front of the library.

"She said she would."

"How will she recognize you?"

"I told her I'd have on a green scarf," I said, tweaking my green scarf.

"You'll need some cash," he said, "to give her as a reward."

I'd already thought of that. I had £20 in carefully saved £5-bills.

Liberty turned out to be a stunningly pretty girl who showed up exactly when she said she would. She handed over my phone with a smile and shook her head when I tried to give her the £20.

"Do me another favor," I told her. "Please give whoever raised you my thanks and sincere appreciation." She blushed and smiled and we waved goodbye.

So thank you again, Liberty, for finding my phone and getting it back to me. I'm going to learn how to access my emails on that phone if it's the last thing I ever do. And if we ever meet again, I'll tell you about those vacuum cleaner photos if you tell me how you ended up with that name.

DisOrientAsian

2011-05-10T10:28:00.015+01:00

Years ago, when I was a graduate student fresh back from a year in Japan, one of my housemates pointed out an acquaintance at a party. "You'll be able to talk to Calvin," she said. "He's Japanese."

I wondered about Calvin's name, which certainly didn't sound Japanese. Maybe he'd given up trying to get Americans to pronounce his real name and picked one they could manage. Maybe he'd chosen Calvin because he was an admirer of Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. If so, he was worth getting to know. "Calvin doesn't sound like a Japanese name," I said, watching Calvin pop the top of a beer can. "Are you sure he's Japanese?"

My housemate nodded. "Positive."

Whatever Calvin was, he was definitely good looking, and he didn't look stuck up either. So a few minutes later, I worked up the nerve to talk to him. "Melissa tells me you're Japanese," I said hesitantly. Now that I was standing next to him, I saw that Calvin dressed more like an American. No Japanese person would have been caught dead in jeans with frayed knees, or beat-up trainers with holes in the toes. And for that matter, the heels of his trainers weren't run down. A lot of Japanese kids wear down the heels of their shoes, changing out of them so often.

Calvin made a face. "Yeah? Funny she should say that, because I'm actually American." He took a long drink of beer and looked me in the eye. "Chinese-American. Third generation."

I did what I could to apologize, then hunted down Melissa.

"For your information," I fumed, "Calvin is American, not Japanese. And he's not even of Japanese descent, he's Chinese-American."

I was seething. I'd just embarrassed myself and it was all her fault. And she'd made me blot my copybook with Calvin, who'd been even better looking up close.

Melissa, however, wasn't the least bit embarrassed or apologetic about her gaffe. "Chinese, Japanese, whatever," she said with provoking nonchalance.

I let her have it with both barrels. "You can't just say whatever," I almost cried. "The Japanese and Chinese speak totally different languages. They eat different food, and their cultures are vastly different. And for God's sake, Calvin's a native speaker of English! You can't just blithely call somebody Japanese when he's not and say whatever when you find out you're wrong!"

"You act like it's such a big deal," Melissa said.

"It is a big deal," I told her. "Would you want somebody saying they'd heard you were English?" Melissa was, in fact, of Welsh extraction.

"You act like you know everything about Orientals," she countered.

I sucked my breath in. "You know, the preferred term is now Asian," I told her.

Melissa sipped her beer. "Whatever," she said again.

I gave up and walked away. Correcting ignorance is one thing, but correcting willful ignorance is a tough call. Especially when you're angry, a little tipsy, and wearing your party clothes.

But what Melissa said really stung. I hate being called a know-it-all because in my heart of hearts, I really do want to know everything. What I should have said, though, was You act like it's okay to be ignorant. Because that was just what she had done, and it was wrong.

I should qualify that. In many ways, we're all ignorant -- to begin with. It's okay to be ignorant, and I should know; the older I get, the more overwhelmed I am by the colossal extent of my own ignorance. No matter how much I learn, there will always be a mountain of things I don't know: languages I can't speak, music I can't read, crafts I can't do, concepts I can't grasp. I try hard to be culturally sensitive, but I've confused Ukrainians with Russians, Australians with New Zealanders, and Indians with Pakistanis. But for all that it's okay to be ignorant, that doesn't mean it's right to stay that way. Still, I've got one thing going for me that Melissa didn't: I really want to learn. And when I'm caught out, however embarrassing it is, I've learned to own up to it.

That may be why it drives me wild to find people like Melissa who are blissfully, unashamedly ignorant. Especially nowadays when we have radio, television, the internet, Wikipedia. When, in America, we are blessed with free libraries, cheap books, and a multi-cultural society which includes all sorts of people who can, if we are willing to learn, share so much about themselves and their cultures.

After seventeen years in Japan and many years of teaching a variety of Asian students, I've lost track of how many times I've heard people confuse Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, you name it; if it's Asian, it's all one big muddle in many people's minds. Moreover, whenever I point out -- politely, of course -- that the restaurant we're going to is actually Korean, not Chinese, or that Mr. Tran is Vietnamese, not Korean, or that foot binding was not practiced in Japan, but in China, the responses I've gotten have largely been the same as Melissa's whatever. The same people who think Chinese and Japanese can be treated interchangeably, that Koreans and Vietnamese are pretty much the same because, after all, weren't their countries divided up after wars? - might wince to hear a ship referred to as a boat, the objective confused with the subjective, an Irishman described as an Englishman, Budweiser mixed up with Coors.

So, for what it's worth, Chinese and Japanese are not the same; Koreans and Vietnamese are not the same; Cambodians and Filipinos are not the same. All of these people, their languages, food, and culture, are vibrantly, fascinatingly different, and the generally preferred term for all of them is now Asian.

But most of all, while it's perfectly okay to be ignorant, it's never okay to stay that way.

Growing Pains

2011-05-04T21:47:00.007+01:00

Gardening is loads of fun, but it can be hard on the ego.

Some years ago, a friend of mine stopped short halfway through my garden and pointed. "Are those peonies?" he asked.

I said yes, they were.

"Peonies!" he said, shaking his head. "How did you manage to get peonies to grow?"

"I just planted them," I said. "I stuck them in and they came up."

"Mine didn't," he said, frowning. "And I tried three times."

"Maybe your soil is different."

He grunted. "My soil is exactly the same as yours."

"I use chicken manure," I told him. "And bone meal too. Maybe that's what you need."

"Yeah." He gave me a sour look. "So did I."

I shrugged, but it was hard not to swell with pride. My friend had a much nicer garden than mine, but I'd managed to get peonies to grow and he hadn't! Maybe I was developing a green thumb at long last.

The other week, I visited my friend Dina. Just outside her house, there is a bed filled with periwinkles. They are healthy and vigorous and studded with little blue flowers. They make me feel sick with envy: I can't grow periwinkles.

"How do you get such great periwinkles?" I asked.

Dina gave me a funny look. "Periwinkles? It's not hard to grow periwinkles."

I know this must be true: everybody tells me. Not being able to grow periwinkles is like not being able to grow dandelions.

"They don't work for me," I mumbled.

"Do you break up the soil?"

"Of course."

"Make sure they get enough water?"

"Duh." This is Scotland, after all.

"Then your problem shouldn't be getting them to grow, it should be getting them to stop."

When I went home, I planted the periwinkles Dina dug up from her garden and watered them in. I need them for a weed-riddled patch, but I was kind: I started them off in a relatively weed-free area. A days later I went outside to see how they were doing. They looked wilted and sullen, like teenagers asked to do an unpleasant chore. I watered them anyway. Two weeks later, I came out again and they looked even more pathetic. It was obvious they weren't going anywhere.

"It doesn't look like they've taken," I told Dina the next time I saw her.

"Take some more cuttings," she advised. "Believe me, anybody can grow periwinkles."

"I've got some great peonies, though," I bragged, stuffing my next lot of periwinkles in a plastic bag. "My peonies look fantastic this year."

"Yes," she said. "Mine are doing well too."

I miss my friend who couldn't grow peonies.

Sweet Seventeen

2011-04-28T22:44:00.005+01:00

I can hardly believe it, but I have a daughter who went to the prom.

I can hardly believe this for two reasons. One is the obvious, sunrise-sunset one: Where has the time gone? I look at my daughter and can't get over the young lady she is now. I remember her as a squalling, red-faced infant, a chubby toddler, a headstrong kid, a smart-mouthed pre-teen. And now here she is in high heels and a fancy dress, curling her hair and putting on make-up.

The second reason is, I never went to the prom at my high school and neither did my sisters. Nobody invited us. We didn't really mind so much; we were introverted nerds and it never crossed our mind that anybody would want to go to the prom with us. Which was a very good thing, considering that nobody did.

In my heart of hearts, I'd have liked to be the sort of girl boys invited to the prom. I had an image of a nice boy calling me up and inviting me. On the night of the prom, he'd come to collect me on foot because he wouldn't have a car and it would be embarrassing to be driven by his parents. I could picture us strolling to the prom together, me wearing some kind of nice dress (though God knew what: I had a mother and two sisters with no fashion sense, and the shoes would be a problem since I hated high heels and wondered how I would ever walk in them). I had a vague notion of dancing (which should have panicked me because I could not dance), drinking fruit punch (because I was too much of a goody-goody nerd to imagine alcohol), and whispered pleasantries at the front porch when he dropped me off, perhaps a firm handshake, a kiss on the cheek, and a promise to meet again.

You can see why I never got asked to the prom.

I'm not one of those mothers who relives her youth through her daughters. My own youth is so far behind me, this would be absurd. Also, my daughters are entirely different from my teenage self: they may be nerds, but they're well-adjusted, gregarious nerds. So when our eldest daughter decided that she didn't want to go to her prom, I was fine with that. But a few months ago, I heard our youngest daughter talking on the phone. "No. Seriously. I'm not going," I heard her say. "Ask Heather, she'll go with you."

"What was that all about?" I asked her when she hung up.

She rolled her eyes. "Sam wants to go to the prom."

"He invited you and you said no?"

"Of course I did! I don't want to go to the prom!"

Sam is kind, smart, and good-looking. He plays the cello, is athletic, and has been pals with my daughter for the past ten years. I may not be one of those mothers who relives her youth through her daughters, but the teenager in me felt like crying. You got asked to the prom and you said no? What the hell is wrong with you?

Over the next few weeks, I heard further conversations, all of which went like this: "Well how about Mhairi? Have you asked her? Why not? Okay, then, how about Megan? Ask her!"

"So?" I finally asked. "What did you decide about the prom?"

"I told him I'd go with him if he couldn't get anybody else."

Which is exactly what happened. My daughter didn't let Sam down. She bought the cheapest dress she could find, and thank God I didn't have to help her pick it out. "Only seventeen pounds on sale!" she crowed, twirling around and modeling it for us. She borrowed a pair of high heels from a friend. I watched her in awe: I could never have picked out my own prom dress. I would never have been able to walk around in high heels.

Sam showed up at our house in a kilt, bearing a corsage. His parents drove him and my daughter to the prom. I shook my head as I watched them drive off. I never imagined I'd have a daughter going off to the prom. And definitely not with a boy wearing a kilt.

"How was the prom?" I asked her when she got home.

"It was great," she said, "but my feet are killing me. I hate high heels!"

A Case Of Mistaken Identity

2011-04-21T14:00:00.010+01:00

Our cats, Mitzi and Maverick, are both completely black. When we first got them, the woman who gave them to us pointed out that Mitzi has the tiniest fluff of white on her chest -- so small that you can barely see it. At first we were entirely dependent on that tiny white patch to tell the two cats apart.

After a week, we had no trouble distinguishing them from each other. Mitzi is smaller than Maverick, and more nimble. Her face is flatter and wider, her eyes are cannier, and she is a natural-born climber and jumper. If you walk into our kitchen and there is a cat on top of the highest shelf, it is Mitzi. Maverick has a skittish, skulking, humbled air about him. He's also klutzier and heavier than Mitzi. If you're in the kitchen and a cat takes a flying leap to the top of the table and misses, it is Maverick. Mitzi is noisier and she is a restless spirit: even after she has been fed, she will roam from room to room, meowing plaintively, for all the world as though something vital is missing from her life. The first week she was here, we wore ourselves out supplying her with more water, more food, and attention whenever she yowled. Nothing worked. Now we just tell her to shut up. Maverick, though big and fierce-looking, has a tiny little voice that he saves for emergencies: a hailstorm, a big dog in the garden, a stuck cat flap.

Last month, one of the cats started spraying. We never caught them at it, but the evidence was plain. Even people like me who are passionate about cats hate the smell of cat pee. Cat urine is so awful that even Einstein had something to say about it: A man has to work so hard so that something of his personality stays alive. A tomcat has it so easy, he has only to spray and his presence is there for years on rainy days. Almost all days are rainy days in Scotland. When strangers came by, we didn't need to tell them we had cats.

We shut the cats out. We yelled at them when they sidled up to the furniture, took to feeding them on the porch, and would not allow them into the living room even on the coldest, rainiest days. I scrubbed the smell away (to little avail), sprayed lemon perfume about, and ground pepper into the corners. Then one day it hailed and the wind blew fiercely. We took pity on the cats and let them into the living room where we could keep an eye on them. Mitzi was sitting on my lap, purring away, when all of a sudden she stopped and began to growl. She stood up and her tail inflated to twice its size as she stalked across the room, arching her back and hissing. I followed her out -- and found a well-fed, furry tomcat in the act of spraying our staircase.

I have a very good sense of smell. I can smell the difference between Mitzi (wet fur, spice, and crushed flowers) and Maverick (wet fur, leaf mold, and tuna). But Mitzi had been able to smell a strange cat from a distance of 50 feet.

I felt so guilty, I gave our cats extra food that night and let them both sleep in our bedroom. In no time, the bedspread was covered with bits of black fur.

A few weeks ago, the cats started acting weird. Maverick would come into a room Mitzi was in and she would fly at him, hissing and snarling. Once, she came into the kitchen where he was eating, and flew at him, sending him running. Maverick started to meow more too, and he lost his skulking air. Instead of flattening himself against the wall when somebody walked past him, he strutted proudly.

At first, I put this down to the catnip I'd just planted. Not all cats react to catnip, so we were thrilled to find that Mitzi and Maverick were both susceptible to it, behaving in the kind of outlandish ways it is so entertaining to observe. Just as people react differently to certain drugs, cats react differently to catnip. Could it be that the catnip was making Mitzi paranoid and freeing Maverick from his usual inhibitions? It seemed to be making them hungrier too: both cats, especially Maverick, were suddenly ravenous, begging for food even after they'd been fed.

We scolded Mitzi for being so unkind and Maverick for being so greedy.

Then last week, Maverick followed me into the kitchen. As we walked in, he let out a low growl and backed off, his face a mask of terror. Mitzi was in the kitchen, on top of the refrigerator, glaring down at a black cat who was gobbling up her breakfast. This cat was identical to Maverick in every way. Except, of course, for his smell -- and his personality.

We shooed the extra cat out -- he is well fed and well groomed.

Needless to say, our bedspread is now covered in cat fur.

A Few Things, Lost In Space

2011-04-12T21:28:00.007+01:00

You learn a lot as a teacher. Over the years, I certainly have.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering journey into outer space. I'm relieved that my daughters know this landmark voyage was made by a Soviet; a handful of their peers assume that the first person in space must have been an American.

So did half a dozen of my students, when I taught refugees at a retraining center in San Francisco. On the last day of class, we played a modified game of Trivial Pursuit, and this was one of the questions: What nationality was the first person in space? A man from Guatemala raised his hand to speak, but he was interrupted by a young Vietnamese woman. "American!" she called out, beaming. The Guatemalan frowned, but he nodded. "American," he agreed. "Americans first in everything."

I had the book, so I knew they were wrong. The awful truth is, I'd completely forgotten that the first person in space was Russian.

This class was mainly Chinese, Indochinese, and Hispanic, but as it happened, there were also three refugees from the U.S.S.R. Before I could open my mouth to correct their classmates, they all started talking at once, spluttering in indignation. "Not American, Soviet!" they protested. "Yuri Gagarin, 1961!"

"Not American?" the girl from Vietnam said, tilting her head. "I think American. Americans go to moon."

The former Soviets assured her that she was wrong. I confirmed what they said and blushed to imagine how embarrassed I'd have been if I hadn't had the answer.

Today, I read an article about Gagarin in the Guardian. His daughter mentions that he enjoyed literature and, like almost all Russians, was familiar with Pushkin, widely considered the Shakespeare of Russian literature.

When I was in Cyprus, I had a few classes with Nigerian students. During one break, the subject of literature came up. I had just read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, and was surprised to find that many of my Nigerian students had never heard of it. Then we got to talking about poetry and somebody mentioned Pushkin. "He was part African," one of the Nigerians said, "like Obama." (Obama had just been elected president in America, delighting and impressing every single African student on campus, and dominating most conversations.) "Pushkin's great-grandfather was kidnapped from North Africa and he was sold," my student went on. "He was taken to Russia, to live in the palace."

This sounded pretty far-fetched to me, so I looked it up. When I googled Pushkin, I found that his African genealogy is well known and well documented. In fact, his great-grandfather's life story is so incredible, fiction could hardly do it justice. Ibrahim Petrovich Gannibal, was abducted from Africa, sold to a sultan in Istanbul, then passed on to the Russian court, where he quickly became a favorite and was made a page. Russia's Shakespeare was indeed the great-grandson of a kidnapped African greatly prized by the Russian tsar. How did I manage to miss this? As a child, I watched Bill Cosby's Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed, and if he ever mentioned Pushkin, I never picked it up.

I like to think about Yuri Gagarin, floating up there in space, reciting Pushkin to himself. His daughter says that he loved learning new things too.

Getting It Right

2011-04-06T19:48:00.006+01:00

Teenagers are hard on your ego.

My youngest daughter has a really good ear for tunes. I used to think I did too, especially compared with my mother, who got Oh, Susanna mixed up with Campton Races. My mother didn't let her inability to distinguish one tune from another interfere with her love of singing. If she heard somebody humming Oh Promise Me , she would happily join in with Sweet Genevieve. When it was pointed out to her that the song being hummed was actually Oh Promise Me and not Sweet Genevieve, she was always amazed: Really? They sounded exactly alike! We sang a lot in my family, so this happened with exasperating frequency.

As a teenager, I used to give my mother a hard time for her musical cluelessness. My scorn must have hurt her, but she took it with grace and humor.

I'm nowhere near as good a sport as my mother was.

The other day, I had the temerity to join my daughter in singing Ginza Ondo. This is a popular Japanese folk song beloved of Tokyoites, and it is a challenge to sing it well. My daughters grew up singing Japanese folk songs and they sing Ginza ondo a lot. I knew Ginza Ondo years before my daughters were born, but I've always had a tough time singing the beginning, drawing out that first long hahhh, and knowing just when to launch into the main melody.

But the other day was different. I finished the hahhh right on time and started the main melody, totally in sync. I was thrilled: I actually remembered the words and had a handle on the rhythm! By the time we got to the chorus, I was thoroughly enjoying myself. Then I happened to see my daughter's face. She was scowling and her eyebrows were knitted together. My joy and triumph at nailing the song vanished in a flash.

"Mom!" my daughter fumed. "If you can't do any better than that, why do you bother?"

"What in the world did I do wrong?" I spluttered.

My daughter took a long, exasperated breath and sang the phrase I'd allegedly messed up. It sounded exactly like what I'd just sung.

"Now try it again," she said, rolling her eyes.

I did, with exactly the same results. No matter how hard I tried to repeat my daughter's phrasing, I could not get it right. Einstein's definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results each time. Let me tell you, he was right on the money. I went to bed that night, feeling crazy and delusional; why did I think I could sing? I might not confuse Oh Promise Me with Sweet Genevieve, but my daughter could obviously hear what I could not. How humiliating! How had my mother coped?

The next morning, my daughter was rushing around as she usually does in the morning, looking for things she should have packed the night before. She was at the door, struggling into her shoes when I happened to glance at the calendar: April the first!

"Where's my other shoe?" my daughter cried, looking around frantically.

"It's there somewhere," I said, preoccupied.

April the first, and I hadn't tried my usual April Fool's Day trick! I was really slipping. Even if my daughters had both assured me that this year I wouldn't get away with it. That this year, I'd have to find another lame gag and pull that instead...

"Is it in the hallway?" my daughter called, bending down and looking under the table.

"I'll just check," I said. In her current state, she was off guard. Vulnerable. My much-used lame gag might just work yet again.

"Can you see it in there?" she cried.

Yep, she sounded frantic. I seized my chance.

"Oh crap!" I yelled. "Don't tell me you didn't see this dead mouse in the hallway! Its guts are all over the place You know very well it's your turn to clean it up!"

"Nooo!" my daughter wailed. "Mom, I can't! I'll be late for school!"

I marched back into the kitchen. "Then I'll call the school. But you are going to clean up this dead mouse before you leave this house. Because you promised."

Her reaction was near-apoplectic hysterical rage fading into open-mouthed exasperation when she knew she'd been had. It could hardly have been more satisfying.

Sometimes you do the same thing over and over and get the exact same results. My mother got me a few times with the cat-mess trick, and I got her a few times too.

Now I remember how she coped.

An Embarrassment Of Experiences

2011-03-30T16:03:00.004+01:00

"I once taught for a whole thirty minutes with my blouse unbuttoned," my friend Karen groaned.

Karen is a retired teacher. We'd gotten to talking about teaching and how fraught our classroom experiences were with embarrassing situations. We were vying with each other to find the most blush-inducing, cringe-worthy teaching incident we could recall. "A girl in the first row finally caught my eye and told me," Karen added, wincing. "Naturally the buttons were in the worst possible place."

"The same thing happened to me, but it was my skirt," I said. "And the student who pointed it out was a boy."

Maybe my long-term memory is exceptionally keen, but after Karen had shared more embarrassing experiences -- knocking over a metal wastebasket with half a bottle of Coke in it, forgetting names while being observed, tripping over a student's bag -- I was still going strong. Embarrassment, we both agreed, was one of the occupational hazards of teaching.

For instance: one of my American colleagues in Japan had learned how important it was to teach culturally related body language, especially things like hand shaking. So on her very first day as a teaching assistant in a large high school English class, she asked all her students to introduce themselves and shake her hand. One by one, the students blurted out their names and thrust out their hands for her to shake. As she made her way through the classroom, she became aware of a strange vibe. A few of the girls were trading nervous looks; boys were giggling and beginning to wriggle in their seats. When she approached the last student, she understood why. The boy mumbled his name and, after a bit of good-natured prodding, reluctantly put his hand out. Which is when she noticed that he was missing several fingers. "All that time, the poor kid was dreading having to stick his hand out," she wailed, wiping her eyes. "I felt horrible, putting him through that!"

When I was teaching at a large preparatory school in Tokyo, our classrooms were so large that we had to use microphones. My colleague and team-teacher, Mr. Ito, clipped his to his shirt. One day after a break, we came back to the classroom to find everybody laughing. "Sensei," one of the girls gasped, "you did it again!" Mr. Ito look down at his shirt -- and blanched. He had forgotten to turn off his microphone. He had treated the entire class to the highly amplified sounds of what transpired in the faculty men's toilet.

The very worst thing that happened to me, though, involved Ahmet, a shy Turkish boy who disappeared for a whole month. When Ahmet finally came to class, I asked him to explain his long absence. "Teacher," he said, looking away, "my mother is die."

Now, this sounds hard-hearted, but the horrible truth is, I'd heard this one before. Two boys had already tried the dead/deathly ill mother excuse before, and on both occasions, I found out they were lying. Several colleagues assured me they had fallen for the same trick. The first two times, I heard this, I'd almost burst into tears. This time, I'd gotten savvier: I wasn't buying it.

"I'll need a letter from your mother's doctor," I told him coolly.

"Okay," Ahmet almost whispered, looking ashen. "Next time, I bring."

I stared at him. Was he feeling guilty? He ought to be! How dare anybody tempt fate by using such an excuse? What if something actually happened to his mother? Would he ever be able to forgive himself?

But as I left the classroom, I had a horrible thought. What if Ahmet's mother really had died? It had happened to me. When I was in graduate school, my own mother died, and I'd gone to my Japanese drama teacher to ask if I could retake the final. "You're the fourth person who managed to miss it!" she'd muttered crossly. "Well, what's your excuse?" When I burst into tears, I don't know which one of us felt worse. Had I just done the same thing to Ahmet?

"I've got a student whose mother died," I told our head teacher. He laughed and shook his head. "Not another dead mother! He's lying, I guarantee you."

"All the same, would you mind checking? I'd feel awful if he were telling the truth."

The head teacher gave me an indulgent look, but he went off to check. He came back white-faced and sober. "He's telling the truth. His father says his mother had a heart attack. She was only 40."

The next time I saw Ahmet, I told him he wouldn't need the letter from his mother's doctor. He pressed his lips together and tried to nod, but I saw that his eyes were wet. I promptly burst into tears.

Like I said, embarrassment is one of the occupational hazards of teaching.

Lost In Frustration

2011-03-23T13:34:00.007Z

The minute I waded through the first puddle of the day, I knew I was in trouble. My foot was suddenly cold -- too cold. Icy water oozed between my toes. Of all the days for my shoe to spring a leak! Once the wind picked up and it started to sleet, then snow, my wet foot felt all the wetter. And colder.

I kept wondering if anybody else could hear the squelch-squelch I made as I loped along, gamely leaping over puddles in a vain attempt to keep my foot from getting any wetter. I pulled my hood over my head and cursed myself for leaving my umbrella in the car.

But I couldn't stop to do anything about it. I had a student to meet in the morning, at the University of Glasgow. Running late, I had to sprint across town to meet her on time. As she and I pored over her essay on economics, I surreptitiously flexed the toes of my frozen foot to get some circulation back into them. Then I had to rush back in the opposite direction to get to the library. I'd left home without the lesson plan and teaching materials I needed for my next student, and I needed to cobble something together. Perhaps the library would have simple books for learners.

"Do you have any books for beginning readers?" I asked the librarian, trying to wiggle my toes. I was concerned that I was losing sensation in three of them.

She looked at me over the top of her glasses, taking in my wet hair and clothes. "What do you mean by beginning reader?"

"Someone who can read fairly well, but still struggles a bit with vocabulary," I told her, distracted by my frozen toes.

The librarian studied me a bit, then shook her head. "Perhaps a children's book..."

"But she's not a child," I protested, thinking of Megumi, my smart, quick-learning student, a young, busy housewife. "She's a grown woman and very bright."

Another librarian stepped forward. "There are easy-reading books over on that shelf," she said, pointing.

I squelched my way across the room, leaving muddy footprints on the library floor. A few minutes later, my toes were still numb, but I'd found five good books I thought Megumi might enjoy.

As I waited my turn at the desk, I noticed that an EFL tutorial session was going on. Three women in burkas sat huddled with a middle-aged woman with a heavy Scots accent; a young man with a Spanish accent frowned at the book in front of him, trying to copy his tutor's intonation.

I handed the librarian my five books. "I'd like to check these out."

She took the books from me and eyed me, as though trying to make her mind up about something. "You know," she said slowly, "we run free classes for slow readers." She glanced across the room at the EFL students.

"No," I said, shaking my head. Megumi's level was way over that of the library's EFL students.

"Not just for foreigners," the librarian rushed to add, "but for people such as yourself..."

My chin dropped. She meant me! She thought I was illiterate! I'd just edited a hard paper for a graduate student. I have a Master's degree in English. I had a book in my bag I'm supposed to be translating into English, and another to read, with loads of multi-syllable words in it. I'm all over English, reading, writing, speaking -- I teach it myself, for pity's sake!

"These books aren't for me," I said a little too quickly. "They're for my student."

The librarian smiled and gave me a pitying look as she handed me back my card.

I could feel her eyes on me all the way to the door. It didn't help that I pushed the wrong door either -- the one with the 'No Exit' sign on it.

As I shut the door behind me, I could see both librarians looking after me in concern. Suddenly I saw myself in their eyes: a middle-aged American, a slow reader, but -- poor thing! -- in denial. And on top of it all, frazzled and miserable-looking, shivering and limping, wearing a spectacularly unflattering coat. Which was wet.

They say humility is good for the soul. It's a comforting thought.

Too High A Price

2011-03-15T22:40:00.011Z

In March, 1979, there was a partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I was living in New York City at the time -- much closer to Pennsylvania than I wanted to be. I chewed my fingernails to the quick, listening to the news as thousands of people were evacuated. In May, I went with a group of people to march in front of the White House. In our youthful ignorance, we hoped our presence in Washington D.C. would help convince President Carter to rethink U.S. energy policy. There was a bit of marching, but mainly, we waited around, hoping that Jimmy Carter would come out to talk to us. He didn't. We yawned and stretched and traded naive platitudes, waiting to hear speeches by Bella Abzug and Jerry Brown. We carried placards reading No More Harrisburgs! No More Hiroshimas!

In late April, 1986, I was living in Sendai, Japan. One morning, I woke up to hear there had been a fire at a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, the USSR. It was a beautiful spring day and the late cherry blossoms were still in full flower. Walking with friends through the park, I could hardly believe that halfway around the world, people were being evacuated by the tens of thousands and fire-fighters were sacrificing their lives in a terrible losing battle.

One of my friends at the time was Li, a Chinese PhD student at Sendai's Tohoku University. Li was an engineer who hoped to design nuclear power plants some day. He laughed at my exclamations of dismay when I learned this. "They are designed to be safe!" he assured me. "Only the brightest, most skillful people are chosen for this occupation."

Li was one of the most capable people I've ever known. He was widely read and knew all sorts of things I didn't. He could make great meals from the fewest possible ingredients, his Japanese was formidable, and he was amazingly coordinated. Once, he'd offered to lend another friend a bicycle so that the three of us could cycle around Sendai together. I assumed he'd have to make two trips until I spotted him cycling down the narrow street in front of my apartment, one arm casually balancing another bicycle on his shoulder. When I expressed surprise that he could do this, he blinked and frowned. "You mean you can't?"

Li's confidence was infectious. If a smart guy like him was designing nuclear power plants, I couldn't help think they had to be safe.

Shortly after this, the English school where I taught organized a debate. All of us teachers were strongly encouraged to take part. As a few of our students were nuclear engineers, someone suggested that the safety issues of nuclear power plants would be a good debate topic. One brave man volunteered to argue the 'for' side; I took the 'against'.

This was before the internet was widely used, and I didn't have much to go on. I remembered a handful of details about Three Mile Island -- they went into my speech. I subscribed to the overseas Guardian and they had done a good article on Chernobyl; much of that got dumbed down and written into my debate as well, along with a very good letter to the editor about the Windscale nuclear accident in the U.K., back in 1957. My debate partner knew 99.9% more than I did about nuclear energy, but of course my English was better and I have missionaries in my background -- missionaries who liked rhetoric. I won the debate.

My opponent took it well. He had argued fervently that the design of Chernobyl was old and outdated, that a different type of core was used in Japan, making meltdowns virtually impossible. He insisted that nuclear power was much cheaper and safer than fossil fuel-based energy sources, and much better than iffy new technologies such as solar energy or wind turbines. He made good points, but he got stuck on what to do with spent nuclear fuel; he had good answers, but in the heat of the moment, he could not produce them. I, on the other hand, was in great form that day. When I finished my speech with the line, "It's too high a price," there was a good round of applause and I knew I'd hit pay dirt. "You are a good talker!" my opponent conceded graciously as we shook hands afterwards.

It was obvious that he knew way more than I did, and deep inside, I knew I'd won by default -- that it would have been quite a different story if we'd had the debate in Japanese, not English. But I was still proud of my victory.

I was living with my family in Abiko, Chiba Prefecture, when the Tokaimura nuclear accident occurred on September 30, 1999. On my way home from work in Tokyo, I noticed that the trains were backed up. Fellow passengers began to mutter that someone must have committed suicide by jumping onto the tracks. When we got to the station, we heard the news: that untrained workers had unwittingly caused a chain reaction at a small uranium reprocessing facility in nearby Ibaraki Prefecture. We were encouraged to go straight home and close doors and windows -- but many of us had already been out all day.

When I first heard the news about the devastating earthquake and tsunami, I never once thought about Fukushima's nuclear power plant. Quite honestly, I had forgotten it was there, even though I remember seeing it every time I took the train to Fukushima. I remember driving past it when I was four months pregnant with my youngest daughter too.

When I heard that there were some concerns that the earthquake had damaged the reactors, I felt a twinge of fear, but I tried to reassure myself. Smarter, better educated people than I had said nuclear power was safe. That it was wiser to stick with a proven energy source than to develop new ones. They had said this so forcefully, with so much confidence and obvious conviction, that part of me believed it had to be so. A bigger part believed that nuclear energy was dangerous, short-sighted, and not in the best interests of humanity, but maybe that prejudice was inspired by my own paranoia and lack of real knowledge.

It turns out that I was right. And I wish to God I wasn't.

Ring Of Fire

2011-03-11T17:59:00.005Z

I lived in Sendai for two years, from 1985 to 1987. I taught at a language school in downtown Sendai, but I was also sent to many other places to teach, cycling or walking to get to various schools, factories, and companies.

On Wednesdays, I traveled by shinkansen or bullet train, down to Yonezawa to teach at a girls' junior college, changing trains in Fukushima. I will never forget those train trips. The journey from Sendai to Fukushima was nothing special, but the train ride from Fukushima to Yonezawa, which took precisely 48 minutes,was incredible, especially in the winter. The train wound through a heavily forested valley, a veritable fairyland, where snow lay many feet deep and icycles sparkled in the trees. On Thursdays, I took the shinkansen up to Morioka to teach bored engineers at a large car manufacturing company. Early autumn was my favorite season there: I loved seeing the rice fields full of golden grain, the wind making the paddies wave and ripple.

The students I taught in Sendai were a varied bunch: children, business people, doctors, and housewives. The housewives were my firm favorites. They were quirky and funny and infinitely kind and helpful. One woman, Yoko, the fifty-something wife of a lawyer, used to come to school parties dressed in a Korean kimono, or hanbok. There is a long, complicated history of enmity between Korea and Japan, and this isn't something Japanese people usually do unless they happen to be of Korean ancestry. Yoko wasn't even part Korean. "Aren't you afraid people will mistake you for a Korean?" a classmate once asked her. Yoko raised an eyebrow. "I would be so proud if they did," she said firmly. She kept her hanbok flawlessly clean and got a lot of wear out of it.

Chizuyo, another one of my housewife students had been training to be a math teacher when she got married. She loved her husband and children, but advised all the younger women against getting married. "You have no idea how lucky you are! I am trapped -- trapped!" she used to say gleefully. Chizuyo and her husband went to live in the States for several years. Their first day there, they got picked up by a scam artist at the airport who left them stranded in a remote desert town after relieving them of all their cash. But despite this experience, they had a wonderful time in the States. "I'm finally tutoring math!" Chizuyo wrote in the last letter I got from her. "No more just being a housewife!"

I had many wonderful colleagues in Sendai too, including the head teacher at our school, Brenda, who'd interviewed me at a teachers' conference in the World Trade Center. Brenda intrigued me: a fellow Californian and Japanese-American and she looked exactly like a man I'd studied Japanese with five years earlier, in Tokyo. When I mentioned the uncanny resemblance, it turned out that my fellow student was actually her brother.

My landlord in Sendai was a widower who lived right downstairs from me. I can't get over how lucky I've been with Japanese landlords: three times now I've lived in places where the landlady or landlord lived only feet away from me, but they never caused any trouble. Mr Arisawa was a gentle, kind man -- and a packrat. Every room in his apartment was chock-a-block with the most hideous junk you've ever seen, and he obviously had a penchant for plastic. He had massively chunky plastic clocks, outlandish plastic light fixtures, and a whole selection of worst plastic kitchen items you've ever seen. He somehow lived among all these things, packed in boxes right up to the ceiling. His hoarding must have caused him no end of inconvenience, but he always seemed so happy -- even when I (gently) turned down his offers of plastic light fixtures and chopping boards.

I've lost touch with all of these people. I have no idea how they're doing, or whether they've survived yesterday's terrible earthquake. I was able to contact one friend and find out she and her family were safe, but the rest -- I have no idea. It is so hard to see the images of buildings burning, cars washed off bridges, boats tossed about like Lego toys, and remember that I used to cycle down those streets, buy the fish from those boats, walk past those buildings.

Sendai was one of the calmest, pleasantest towns I've ever lived in. But like all of Japan, it's sitting on a ring of fire.

To donate to Japanese earthquake victims through the Red Cross: http://american.redcross.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ntld_main&s_src=RSG000000000&s_subsrc=RCO_FrontPagePanel

The Way We Were

2011-03-07T10:30:00.003Z

When I was a kid, my family took a trip to Kentucky to visit relatives and see where my mother had grown up. It was like taking a trip back through time, there were so many things my sisters and I had never seen or experienced. We saw our first well and drank the water from it, ice cold even in summer, with a vague taste of machine oil; we traveled by car from the farmhouse where my mother was born and raised to the schoolhouse where she commuted daily, discovering that it really did have only one room and it really was three miles away; we puzzled over the grindstone in her front yard until our mother told us that it was for sharpening tools and knives.

My father was thrilled with the grindstone. He insisted on a posed photograph with it, to give to his boss. I still have a copy of this somewhere: my father is bending over the grindstone, with his nose just touching it. On vacation, but I've still got my nose to the grindstone, he wrote on the back of the original.

My mother kept shaking her head at everything. "Imagine this being an antique," she said, holding up a washboard. "Imagine anyone not knowing what a grindstone was for."

Late last month, my husband's 96-year-old aunt died. As we went through boxes of her old things, I had a surreal flashback. But this time, I wasn't getting a glimpse of a world I'd never seen, I was traveling back in time to a place where I'd once lived. "This'll need a new battery," I said, picking up a watch and holding it to my ear.

My husband took it from me and frowned. "It just needs to be wound," he said.

Of course that was all it needed -- how had I forgotten? There once was a time when all watches were analog, not digital. And they didn't need batteries.

On the way back to Scotland, I made a list of all the things I can remember which are now as outdated as the grindstone in my mother's yard was when I was young. Here it is, for the benefit of the new generation, including my kids:

Mechanical pencil sharpeners -- You stuck your pencil in these and actually had to rotate the handle yourself. Imagine the toil!

Black and white televisions -- I can even remember these when the screen was about four inches square and the cabinets were huge and bulky. And yet, in our primitive daftness, we still thought they were incredible.

Stationery -- This came in boxes with clear plastic lids and twee little ribbons. There were thousands of varieties, from plain stuff for men and floral nonsense for women. The stationery you chose reflected your personality. I veered between botanically correct floral designs to plain ruled notebook paper. I fancied myself an iconoclast even back then.

Twin tub washing machines -- In Japan, the Netherlands, and Wales, these were what I used, and they were all plumbed for cold water only. You pulled your clothes out of one tub, sopping wet, and plugged them into the other, then pressed the 'spin' button -- and hoped for the best. The one my husband and I had in Wales was a hellish, lethal thing that leaked soapy water and oil. Twin tub washing machines may have been inconvenient, but they absolutely developed character.

Milk in bottles, milk deliveries -- Milk used to be one of the few things somebody would deliver to your house. It came in bottles, in a little metal caddy. As soon as you heard the tinkle of bottles on the porch, you had to get out there fast to take it in -- at least you did in Southern California. When I left home in the seventies, they'd stopped delivering milk door to door. When my husband and I moved to Wales, in the early nineties, I learned to my delight that they were 20 years behind the times. In Wales, you could leave your milk out all day if you didn't mind being known as a lazy slob. Sometimes it actually froze out there.

Reel-to-reel tapes -- Imagine cassette tapes (amazingly outdated themselves) without the cassettes. Imagine if the tape inside them was wound onto two separate spools and always in danger of tangling, snagging and getting generally messed up. Imagine these tapes existing in a house filled with cats. Ah, those were the days.

Manual typewriters -- I learned to type on these. You had to whack down HARD with your fingers, which usually resulted in traumatic arthritis a few decades later, but there were advantages too: when you wanted to emphasize something, you just used more physical force. There was a direct, visceral link between your emotional state and the text you produced. I love my laptop, but I adored my old 1933 Frankfurt-au-Main Torpedo.

So much in our lives has changed, I could go on and on. I still haven't covered record players, iceboxes, stoves you had to light, shoes with strings that had to be tied, cloth diapers, cloth napkins that had to be ironed, or cars. But I'll finish here, with these questions: What out-of-date things do you remember? And what are we using now that you think will be passé within the next few decades?

Some day, maybe I'll see that look on my kids' faces. Maybe I'll see them shake their heads and say in wondering tones: Imagine this being an antique! Imagine anyone not knowing what this is for!

That would be so cool.

Strangers In The Night

2011-02-27T22:48:00.009Z

Once, long ago, Orihime, the weaving princess, wove beautiful cloth by the bank of the Milky Way. She was so busy with this important job, she never managed to do anything else, such as meeting interesting men. And then one day, Orihime happened to meet Hikoboshi, the handsome young cow-herder, who worked on the other side of the Milky Way. The two fell instantly in love and married.

Unfortunately, once they were married, they were so happy together, they had no time for anything else. Orihime stopped weaving her beautiful cloth and Hikoboshi stopped tending his cows, letting them wander all over Heaven. This caused so much trouble, that Orihime's father, Tentei, separated the two and forbade them to meet. Orihime was brokenhearted and begged her father to relent. Tentei finally gave in and allowed the two to meet on the 7th day of the 7th month -- if they promised to work hard and do all their work.

And so every year, on the 7th day of the 7th month, Orihime and Hikoboshi meet for a delightful day of sweet togetherness that makes the remaining 364 lonely days somehow bearable.

I tell you this tale because of my two cats, Mitzi and Maverick. When we first heard about them, we were told that they were a pair, that they had been together for a few years and had grown used to each other's company. In fact, it may have been that I wanted to hear this and was actually told something else, but this is what I expected when we got them: two companion cats, rather devoted to each other.

Reality has been such a disappointment.

On the day they arrived, we let them out of their cat boxes and allowed them to wander around the kitchen and hallway. The two belted out of their respective boxes, then did all the usual cat things -- jumping onto chairs, darting under tables and work surfaces, sniffing every single item in the room. Every few minutes, they would come within each other's orbit and briefly touch noses as though to say, "You holding up okay?"

But after these fleeting meetings, they split up -- and remained apart all evening.

Later, they returned to their cat boxes. I've never known cats who were perfectly happy to be in their cat boxes; in fact, I've never known cats who would willingly enter their cat boxes, but never mind. They had many chairs they could have slept on together, but they preferred their own solitary little cubicles.

Over the course of the next week, they continued to do this. Even when we allowed them free access to the entire house, they made sure to return to their cat boxes to sleep. Gradually, they began to find their own special places. Mitzi preferred our bedroom; Maverick's favorite spot was the third step down on the staircase.

But never, not once, did they snuggle up together. In fact, if one of them happened to jump onto a bed or sofa the other was on, entirely by accident, their reaction was exactly what you might expect from a fellow train passenger who had wandered into your sleeper by mistake: embarrassed confusion -- "Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't see you there!"

Even when they join me in the garden, these cats play separately. They do not chase each other, groom each other, bask in the sun together. They lead completely parallel existences. It's like living with a middle-aged feline couple, determined to see their way through a cheerless, though amicable, marriage.

So imagine my shock when last night I walked into our lounge and found Maverick hunched over Mitzi, licking her ear. For almost five minutes I stood there and watched, spellbound, as this took place. Then he jumped off the sofa and found another place to sit, and for the rest of the evening, the two continued their usual let's-ignore-each-other routine.

Who cares if the only reason it happened was because I accidentally dropped tunafish on Mitzi's ear? Who cares if they went against tradition and did this on the 27th day of the 2nd month? For five minutes, Orihime-Mitzi and Hikoboshi-Maverick crossed the skies and met for a romantic rendez-vous and I was there to witness it.

Let us hope the heavens soon get over the shock.

Love Divine

2011-02-21T13:09:00.016Z

I'm crazy about chocolate, and I have a strong sense of justice. So it's probably no surprise that I'm a big fan of Fairtrade chocolate.

A few years ago, when I saw that Divine Chocolate, a Fairtrade chocolate company 45% owned by farmers, was having a poetry contest, I was thrilled. What a great idea! So I wrote a poem and submitted it, but I didn't win. Still, writing the poem was fun. The next year I entered again, but my poem was not picked. Nevertheless, writing that poem was fun too.

Last December, I saw that they were running the competition again, but I was too busy revising a manuscript to enter. And then I saw that Meg Rosoff was judging it and knew that I had to make time. I'd read her book, What I Was, when I was flying to Turkey for the first time. If you haven't read it, I won't spoil it for you, but let me just say that there is a clever twist in it. I'm usually pretty good at anticipating twists, but this one threw a rope around my foot and pulled me right off the deck. Which wouldn't have been enough to make me love the book, but it still amazed me. And the book was great. It was so good that even my husband liked it -- and my husband is notoriously fussy about books.

So I wrote another poem about chocolate and submitted it much the way you write a message on a piece of paper, seal it into a bottle, and chuck it into the sea. I mentally crossed my fingers. And a few weeks ago (after maybe a hundred clicks on the Divine Chocolate poetry competition site, I learned that my poem, I am Divine, was a tied runner up.

And I was overjoyed!

I told my husband I was a tied runner-up and he gave me the sort of look I've grown used to: supportive of my writing efforts, but pitying me in my clueless desperation. Then he looked over my shoulder at the site. "Hey!" he said, "Did you realize Meg Rosoff was the judge?" I told him I did.

"Well done!" he said, shaking his head. Unfortunately, my generally supportive, husband is not a huge fan of poetry in general (or mine in particular).

And although I wouldn't have thought it possible, I was even more overjoyed.

Does that sound just a little pathetic? Five years ago, I'd definitely have thought so. I had big dreams: I wanted first prize and nothing less! After five years of writing and rewriting, and a good, steep learning curve, the honor of being picked tied runner up for anything is sweet. But the honor of being picked by someone who wrote a book I loved is right-off-the-charts sweet. As sweet as justice, and as sweet as the richest, creamiest, most melt-in-your-mouth chocolate, which, as it happens, is what I get for a prize.

Justice, perseverance rewarded, and chocolate. That's not win-win, that's win-win-win.

This is the incredible, wonderful rush you sometimes get, as a writer -- the reward for all the labor, soul-searching, angst, and rejections. And it is very sweet indeed.

Writing The End

2011-02-18T09:04:00.005Z

I've been struggling with an ending for months now. I hate writing endings!

Beginnings always write themselves. I feel like I've just started a journey: flushed with excitement, not yet footsore or weary, not yet dreading the weight of my backpack or tired of the same old clothes packed inside. Later on, my beginnings tend to unravel a bit and need reworking, but they generally stay the same. They take off at a good gallop, pulling the plot merrily behind them.

They pull me right along too, panting in their wake, huffing and puffing as I plan the rest of the story. As I work my way toward the middle, all the major sign posts are there and I can see them clearly ahead, but carving the way to them is everything. Just as in real life, a straight line will seldom get you from point A to point B, in fiction, the way is circuitous and there are rocks and dips and barbwire fences. But I enjoy figuring these out and working my way around them. Yes, beginnings and middles are the part of writing I relish the most: that first heady, dizzying rush, then working my way from signpost to signpost, over all the hurdles and obstacles.

Following a basic formula helps. First of all, what happens has to be at least a little bit funny. Because for pity's sake, what is life -- or fiction -- without humor? Then you have to give your protagonist loads of problems, providing plenty of tension to keep readers from looking at their watches and thinking about what's for lunch, but you also have to let your suffering protagonist have the occasional bit of fun so they don't end up so miserable and overstressed that you hate yourself for causing so much torment.

And then slowly but surely, you pave the way to a satisfying denouement, making sure not to forget the clues, the details that have to be there from the very beginning, woven deftly through your story so that the reader isn't left wondering what the hell just happened and how did that get there? This takes an incredible amount of fine-tuning, as the clues and contextual details have to be significant, but in an unobtrusive way, so that later on, your reader can go back and think to herself, "Ah, so that really WAS a dream, it was her all along!" and marvel that even with such great clues, they never guessed.

Beginnings and middles, I flatter myself, I can do. To be sure, there are many adjustments, hundreds of reworkings, characters dropped, plots restructured, beta readers consulted, and a whole teetering crap-load of angst, but I manage, all the same. But endings are my Waterloo, and this one is driving me wild. I know the outcome, I just don't know how to achieve it in the most incredible-but-believable, satisfying-but-not-predictable way.

Not so long ago, I had an epiphany: endings are hard for me because I don't like getting rid of things. I am a pack-rat by nature: I yearn to hoard and treasure the things I prize. I don't like saying goodbye, leaving places, finishing anything. I was always the kid who ate all the way around the blueberries on my danish, saving them until the very end, the one who made a bar of chocolate last until it had started to melt down my fingers. And once I finish writing something, the story is gone -- over! -- and all other chances for how the story might have ended are gone too. That goes against my grain, and that is why endings cause me so much difficulty.

So I am going to leave this ending for a day or two. I am going to clean out my drawers right now and sort through a few boxes of old shoes. It may not work, and it will be agony to throw out all those old shoes, but I can still use the cupboard space.

Wish me luck!

Words You Remember

2011-02-11T23:13:00.007Z

"Oh honey, you're wishing your life away. I just wish it was Friday."

I heard those words from a fellow employee on an elevator in Miami, a middle-aged divorcee raising three teenagers on a single salary. When we'd gotten on the elevator, she'd sighed and said, "Gee, I wish it was Friday." I was young and callow; right away I went one better, blurting that I wished it was next month. Maybe what she said stayed with me because it was the right time for me to hear it: through her words, I suddenly had a glimpse of how precious time could be.

There are words I've remembered all my life, for a number of different reasons. Sometimes the words are pure poetry, hauntingly beautiful. Sometimes they're memorable because they contain an element of truth I'm ready to hear; sometimes they come at an apt moment or are full of good will, or the speaker's character and personality make them compelling. Some words have stayed with me because they echoed my own sentiments so succinctly. Words have such power.

My cat is graceful, a student of mine once wrote in his journal, when he buds his head against me. My cat moves very silkly.

Those words have stayed in my memory for decades. I doubt they would have if he'd used the right verb; 'bud' might have been technically wrong, but it was strangely, poetically perfect: the idea of a cat's head, hard and round like the bud of a flower, the cat moving with the fluidity of flowing silk.

"You folks take care now. And you have a good trip."

I was twenty years old when I heard those words, in a tiny town in Arizona, on a Greyhound bus. My eyes were half closed when the bus stopped to let out two men who'd been buying sacks of seed. I knew this because they'd been chatting with the driver, a man they obviously knew. For a few hours, I'd heard them making smalltalk: a brother-in-law with a cold, the birthday of a shared acquaintance in Albuquerque. They had shoulder-length black hair and the deeply tanned skin of farmers. When they got off the bus, one of the men addressed those words to us remaining two dozen passengers in a soft, low voice. For the rest of the trip, his words followed me all over America and Canada, like a benediction.

"Every time I see him, I don't know what to do. I don't want to patronize him, but I wish there was a way I could show him how very much I respect him."

My friend and fellow graduate student Cleo said those words. We were standing in the corridor of the English Department at San Francisco State University when another student fell down, a young man suffering from a serious nervous disorder. His legs were in braces; he had trouble controlling his arms and legs and he used crutches on a permanent basis, but whenever he fell down, you knew not to offer help: he always managed to stand up again through his own efforts. I remembered Cleo's words because they were heartfelt and touched me almost as much as this man inspired me. Cleo was a non-native speaker of English, but I can't imagine anyone expressing those sentiments more eloquently.

"Well, it wasn't pleasant!"

My friend Carol told me that when I asked her to describe her experience of childbirth. Carol is so upbeat, so gently understated and calm, that I was taken aback. I can turn a hangnail into a broken leg; Carol can make major surgery sound like a bump on the head. No harrowing tales of agonizing 50-hour labors could have scared me more than her Well it wasn't pleasant.

"There may be people who'll stab you in the back, but it will never stop me having friends. It will never stop me trusting. Because when it comes down to it, I just love people."

I heard those words from a fellow PTA volunteer in Abiko, Japan. We shared afternoon patrol duty and she was telling me about an acquaintance who claimed her dog was her best friend, and that she didn't need people. Those words brought tears to my eyes.

"Yes, we knew what he said was rude, but it was just so classic, so New York! He made our trip there totally special!"

Those words came from my friend Liz, in Wales. She and her husband Brian had gone to New York on their honeymoon. On a trip to see the Statue of Liberty, they had mistakenly pushed ahead in line. A man with a Brooklyn accent had expressed his displeasure: "Oi! Assholes! Wait your turn!" They brought that story home like a precious souvenir: "It was like we were in a movie," Liz sighed, "with Robert deNiro!"

Those are just a few of the words I'll never forget. How about you? What are the words you remember?

Full Circle

2011-02-05T16:03:00.007Z

When my husband and I first met, we were colleagues, teaching in a large British English school in Tokyo. At first, I knew little about him other than his first name and the fact that he got bad sunburns when he played cricket.

One day, I was at my desk, marking papers in our large staffroom when a student came in to ask him a question about her composition. He had marked a phrase incorrect and she wondered why.

"Because it's wrong," he said.

"But my dictionary says it's right," she protested.

"What dictionary is that?"

"Webster's."

"Ha!" he scoffed. "No wonder. That's an American dictionary and an American phrase -- and this is a British school! Next time use a British dictionary." He made a deprecatory little gesture to go with every use of American. I gritted my teeth and turned back to my papers. This wasn't the first time a colleague had dissed my country and I was pretty sure it wouldn't be the last.

After the student left, my husband got up to leave too. His desk was around a corner, out of my sight, but as soon as he saw me sitting there, he froze. "Oh!" he said. "I thought I was the only one here!"

"Mmm," I replied, not looking up.

Later that day, I was walking past his desk when he stopped me. "I want to apologize for what I said earlier," he said. "I was going for a cheap laugh and I'm ashamed you overheard. I'm genuinely sorry; I meant no disrespect."

"That's okay," I told him. "I'm used to it."

"But you shouldn't be!" he said. "It's just wrong -- I was wrong. Anyway, I'm sorry."

I was amazed: after ten years of enduring jokes about stupid, spoiled, fat, over-privileged, filthy rich Americans, it was the first time anybody had apologized for a mere gaffe. And what he'd said hadn't even been all that offensive, considering.

After this incident, we got to know each other. I learned that he was good at putting his foot in his mouth, but almost always contrite afterwards; he learned that I too was prone to speaking first and thinking later. Eventually, I was bowled over by his strong sense of justice and integrity; he liked the fact that I had learned Japanese and marched to the beat of my own drum.

Over twenty years of marriage later, we've had plenty of experiences hearing our respective countries trashed. We both wince when comedy routines open with gratuitous Aren't Americans stupid? jokes; we both bristle when we hear people condemn the British as xenophobic, classist snobs.

My Kazakh students used to complain about Sacha Baron Cohen's fictional Borat and his unfair treatment of their country. It infuriated them that Kazakhstan was made to look like a nation of illiterate, uncultured, anti-Semitic boors. "It is wrong for him to say these things about our country!" they used to protest. "Why doesn't he say them about Kyrgyzstan instead?" I used to tell them that when Kyrgyzstan got as wealthy and popular as Kazakhstan, they would get joked about too. Just like the U.S. and the U.K.

My husband now works with a diverse, cosmopolitan group of teachers from all over the world. The other day, one of his new colleagues began telling the staffroom her opinion of Americans and their accents. "They all sound so foolish!" she said. "Like they're sucking on marbles!" My husband listened for as long as he could stand it, then finally held up his hand. "I guess you don't know that my wife is American," he said.

Let's hope she too meets an American one day. And falls in love...

The African Queen

2011-01-30T23:04:00.013Z

Sarah Jamila Stevenson, a middle grade / young adult writer and former writing group member of mine, has just published her debut novel, The Latte Rebellion I had a few peeks at this when it was in the making and I can vouch for how good it is. The Latte Rebellion is about a handful of high school students in California who get tired of being racially categorized and stereotyped. On a whim and to make some money, one of them decides to start a movement to celebrate people of all different races and mixtures, and she calls it the Latte Rebellion. It succeeds beyond her wildest dreams -- until things begin to spiral out of control. I won't spoil the ending by telling you what happens, but it's lots of fun.

I love the idea of a club that celebrates diversity. I'm largely Caucasian, but I've been a member myself, ever since I got lost on the way home from school in kindergarten and was taken in by a kindly family. While I waited for my mother, their little girl and I played together. She gave me chocolate gold coins. A few old ladies were steaming tamales in their kitchen and they had crucifixes on the wall. But what really fascinated me was the fact that they could all speak Spanish, even Maria, the little girl who played with me. People who cooked their tamales from scratch and spoke a language I could not understand! I'd discovered a whole new world and I was hooked.

When I was in the fourth grade, a girl named Melissa joined our class. Melissa had bouncy golden curls, a posh British accent, and a lot of perfectly ironed cotton dresses with crisp bows that tied at the waist. I was in awe of her. When she introduced herself to the class, I was astounded to hear her announce she'd lived with her parents in Africa. "We had tea with the queen," Melissa added, smiling prettily. My awe turned to speechless adoration.

I pictured a dignified, statuesque, blue-black African queen sitting with Melissa and her parents outside a tall grass hut, sipping tea. I imagined them talking about lions, the Nile, and malaria (Melissa's father was apparently interested in malaria). Afterwards Melissa would wipe her mouth with a lace-trimmed hanky, set her cup down on a polished tree stump, and say thank you very much.

When my best friend invited me over to make cupcakes for open house day, I asked if Melissa could come too. I was determined to get the details of her tea-drinking experience with the African queen.

Sadly, Melissa turned out to be a crashing bore. Not only did she refuse to lick the bowl or spoon after we had filled the cupcake tins -- "It's not sanitary," she scoffed, giving sanitary only three syllables -- but she laughed me to scorn when I asked her about tea with the African queen and whether she'd seen antelopes or elephants. She caught my misunderstanding right away. "Not an African queen, you silly," she said. "We had tea with the British queen!"

Melissa and I only managed to disappoint and confuse each other. I didn't realize that tea in the U.K. was a meal, not a beverage, and the thought of her sitting in a palace with a lot of stodgy old people in fancy clothes was nowhere near as exotic as my picture of her little party with the African queen.

As a child, I couldn't get enough of the exotic. Our school had a fair number of minorities: Latino, African-American, and Asian, and there was even one boy from Egypt, but there were never enough real live foreigners for me -- people with exotic accents who came from countries across the ocean. I worked hard to cultivate any kid who had been abroad or even had a foreign parent; I grilled them about the languages they spoke, the foods they ate, the clothes they wore. On Cinco de Mayo, I wanted to be one of the Mexican girls twirling in their colorful skirts, singing in Spanish. On Japan Day, I envied the Japanese-American kids from the bottom of my heart. They showed up at school in yukata or real kimono and zoris, rolling their eyes -- "My mother made me wear it!" -- but obviously proud, nevertheless. We who had no exotic traditions had to make do with embarrassments: housecoats with colorful patterns and scarves, simulating obis, wrapped around our waists. There was no comparison. Small wonder, then, that I dreamed of African queens.

When I went to live abroad myself, I discovered something interesting: suddenly I was exotic. After a while, the people around me ceased to be exotic to me, but I never stopped being exotic to them.

Many decades later, in Japan, I finally met African royalty when our kids made cameo appearances in a children's cooking show. My daughter and his son bonded over a mutual loathing for one of the presenters. "Kenji's dad is from Ghana!" my daughter told me proudly, "so he's a prince!" When Kenji's father and I finally met, it took me a while to broach the subject, but I was desperate to find out. "My daughter tells me you're a prince," I said. He laughed. "Insofar as such can be said to exist in Ghana, then I suppose that I am," he said in an accent remarkably like Melissa's. Interestingly enough, the prince did not seem particularly exotic: we were both foreign parents in Japan. We spent much of the day talking about childcare, the quality of education, and how our children had settled into Japanese society.

But he was still loads more fun than Melissa.

Ye Banks And Braes

2011-01-24T21:50:00.005Z

When our two cats arrived here, they were shy, skittish indoor cats who preferred carpet to turf. After they'd been here for two weeks, we put reflective collars on them, put their litter box in the garage, and encouraged them to spend time outdoors.

They weren't having a bit of it.

Maverick, the boy, cowered upstairs, his eyes wide and terrified. Mitzi, his female companion, was a little braver: she managed to follow me halfway down the stairs, but as soon as she heard the neighbors' poodle bark, she invariably scurried back indoors, her tail inflated to three times its volume.

Two months later, I was ready to give up on my cats. They would race outdoors, hurriedly do their business, and hot-tail it back upstairs like the hounds of hell were after them. On one hand, I felt irritated with them. What kind of cats skulk and cower and refuse to enjoy the delights of climbing trees and eating grass? Why couldn't they go outside and find hobbies like other cats? But I was partly relieved too: the last cat I had was an efficient and deadly hunter who netted a couple of birds a week and any number of rodents. Our mice and vole population might soar, but at least the birds and my carpets were safe.

Then Maverick brought home his first dead mouse. His face, as he deposited it on our welcome mat, was full of astonished satisfaction. If there'd been a thought bubble over his head, it would have read, "Get a load of what I just did! This thing must weight at least 15 grams!" Two days later, Mitzi brought in a still-wriggling vole. I didn't have my glasses on and thought it was a dead leaf. My screams sent all three of us running, and when she came back in and found it was gone, her look of indignation clearly said, "Hey, I didn't expect you to eat the whole thing!"

Ever since then, they've averaged a kill a day. Each. I thought my last cat was bad, but at least there was only one of her.

Tomorrow, is Burns Night. All over Scotland, people will be celebrating the birthday of Robert Burns by drinking whiskey, eating haggis, and reciting Burns' poetry. I don't drink whiskey or eat haggis, but with apologies to Robert Burns, I offer this ode to all the tiny creatures my Scottish cats are so hard on. It's too bad animals can't read poetry.

Ye Banks And Braes and Tiny Creatures

Ye banks and braes and roses sweet
How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?
How can your birdies chirp and tweet
And never see the danger there?

Ye’ll break my heart, ye mice and birds
That wanton through the flowery hedge;
Ye’ll come to grief, oh heed my words!
When ye nibble the seed upon the ledge.

For in that hedge, oh twitterin’ birds
Two skilled and hungry hunters walk
And never heed my angry words
As they snap the neck of the prey they stalk.

Oft hae I seen on shining floor
(That I have cleaned down on my knee)
Wee sleekit creature’s blood and gore
Abandoned there, a gift for me.

And oft hae I from my humble house
Spotted the hunters a stalkin’ their prey
And screamed to see the bird or mouse
Pulled through yon cat flap and left to stray.

So this I plead, oh tiny critters
Who creep in the thicket and sing in the trees
Stay in your holes—oh, hush your twitters—
—and keep your guts off my carpets, please.

In Praise Of Diversity

2011-01-20T12:37:00.005Z

Some years ago, on a visit to my hometown after years abroad, I accompanied an elderly family friend on an errand. We stopped at a place I hadn't seen in years, a shabby little cluster of shops that sold things like vacuum cleaner bags, typewriter ribbons, and pet supply goods. As soon as we got there, I saw it had changed completely. The stationery store had become a Thai and Vietnamese delicatessen; the appliance store was now a Korean greengrocer where you could buy tofu and kimchee. I stood in the parking lot and almost swooned at the smells of lemon grass, coconut milk, and ginger. I could have cried from frustration too: the people I was staying with had conservative food tastes. I wanted to buy pad thai and egg rolls, to gorge on spicy, smelly, delicious kimchee, but we were going home to a lunch of bologna sandwiches on white bread. What a waste of an opportunity!

When my companion returned from her errand, I gestured at the new, exotic stores. "I can't get over this!" I said. "It's totally different!"

She frowned and shook her head in agreement. "You can say that again. Awful, isn't it?"

I stared at her in amazement: this was a woman whose grandparents had eaten lutefisk, Limburger cheese, and sauerkraut. She was proud of her German, Norwegian, and Scots heritage, and yet she objected to a couple of Asian food stores?

"It's got so you can't even tell this is America anymore," she sighed, looking around us and shaking her head.

As if America had always been a place where only bland foodstuffs were acceptable.

"Not too long ago, this area would have been mainly Hispanic," I said as gently as I could.

"Oh, I know honey," she said. "But they're all American now."

By which she probably meant that they had learned to fit in, presumably by exchanging their diet for bologna sandwiches, Wonder bread, and Campbell's soup.

"Have you ever tried Vietnamese food?" I asked. "Or Thai, or Korean?"

She shook her head. "They don't even speak English!"

"Then why not just point to something that looks interesting? You don't know what you're missing!"

She shivered. "Some of those things they eat, though. I've heard they eat chicken feet!"

"What if they do? What's the difference between eating chicken and chicken feet? It's still chicken."

She gave me a long, worried look.

I had known this woman a long time and she meant a lot to me, but I could not get her to change her narrow-minded views. Most of her ancestors, like most of mine, had arrived in America as foreigners, and with or without English, they had certainly had their own distinctive customs and their own smelly, foreign foods. Many decades later, all of those interesting distinctions had vanished. Their descendants thought of themselves as Americans and feasted on things like hamburgers, deep fried potatoes, and packaged macaroni and cheese.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, I gave a fervent prayer that the people who ran those Asian food stores would be there the next time I passed through, and still immune to the delights of Jello and tuna casserole.

Detail Man

2011-01-13T14:48:00.003Z

My husband is generally not detail-oriented. I see evidence of this almost every day and it drives me half wild: empty beer bottles left on the kitchen table, an overflowing trash basket left in his wake, bits of food left on the side of the skillet after he has washed the dishes. And although he will deny this until he is blue in the face, I know he's largely responsible for the little bits of plastic I've found in the compost.

This past autumn, I turned our gigantic compost heap and picked out hundreds of little bits of junk: pieces of Styrofoam, plastic juice carton pull-tops, and foil seals from milk bottles. Every time I stooped down to pull out another bit of something that didn't belong there, I felt the rage well up afresh.

It's not as though he does this intentionally. I've watched him walk over to the compost bin, chuck a few foil wrappers into it, then move all the way across the room to carefully place used tea bags in the trash -- all the time wearing the expression of a man who has performed a useful service, not one who has put one over on his fussy wife.

When I'm cooking dinner, my husband sometimes comes into the kitchen to chat. We've had a few memorable discussions about this and he will now generally ask what he can do to help if I tell him I'm ready to serve. While I appreciate this, it sometimes drives me wild: there I am, doing a dozen things at once. I'm making a sauce for the fish I've got in the broiler; I'm mashing potatoes and whipping up a custard; I've got a pie baking in the oven, carrots and broccoli in the steamer, and tomatoes and basil ready to chop for a salad. The table has a scattering of breadcrumbs, a smear of jam, a box full of drill bits, and somebody's homework on it. There is a mobile phone in one corner, and a set of headphones tangled up with a scarf. There are two empty beer bottles on the counter; across the room the glass-recycling bag half full of bottles is gaping open, ready to receive them.

Does he really have to ask me what needs to be done? Isn't it as screamingly obvious as a four-arm-alarm fire?

And here is something truly amazing: I can walk into the kitchen when he is cooking and drive him wild precisely by doing the things I wish he would do for me! He doesn't mind (or, in some instances, notice) if I clear the table and set it, but when I clear away vegetable peels or turn the fire down under a pot, he is not grateful. When I get into his way to bundle up trash, he fumes and accuses me of interfering.

But here is something even more amazing: on two occasions, my husband has spotted details that I managed to miss. Important details, too, with possible life-threatening consequences.

On the first occasion, we were walking through the park near our house, deep in conversation. We were passing the lake when I was peripherally aware of a woman running along the bank, calling a name over and over; I assumed she was trying to find her dog. We had passed the woman and were at the busy intersection in front of the park, when we noticed a little girl about four years old. The lights turned green and I started to cross, but my husband stopped in his tracks. "She's too young to be out on her own," he said. "I'll bet that was her mother, looking for her."

"Who?" I asked. "The lady calling her dog?"

He shook his head. "Didn't you see her face? She wasn't calling a dog, she was freaking out." He frowned. "We've got to go tell her we've found her daughter."

This was a problem. My husband's Japanese wasn't 100%, but he didn't think it was appropriate for him to wait with a little girl he didn't know. Quickly I coached him on what to say to the mother, who we could not be certain would know any English. Ojosan wa kooen no iriguchi ni imasu yo. Tsuma to issho desu. My husband went to find the putative mother while I waited with the little girl. "Are you lost?" I asked her. The little girl shrugged and giggled.

A few minutes later, my husband was back with the woman. Until I saw her face, I really hadn't realized just how anxious she was. She threw up her hands, burst into tears, hugged her little girl, then pulled back and slapped her across the face. "Twenty minutes!" she cried. "Do you have any idea how worried I've been?" We left them sobbing, but safe.

Barely a week later, we were in a different park with our daughters. We were watching them playing in the sandbox when all of a sudden my husband yelled, then went racing toward the swing set. A toddler had wandered away from her mother and was directly in the path of a descending swing. Just before the hard plastic swing could crack the child across the face -- as it certainly would have -- I saw my husband swoop down and scoop her up. The momentum sent him flying past the swing set, but he managed to keep his balance. Taking a deep breath of air, he returned the little girl to her astonished, horrified mother who could hardly thank him enough. When we left the park shortly after, we felt like VIPs.

I am all about details. I can walk into a room and spot every single thing that doesn't belong there; I can proofread papers half a dozen people have given a thumbs-up and still find errors. But I did not hear the desperation in that mother's voice, and I did not see the toddler step into the path of the swing.

This doesn't mean that I'm happy about the junk in my compost heap or my husband's infuriating What do you want me to do? when it's as obvious as a cockroach on a wedding cake. But it's also obvious that when he does notice details, they're worth noticing.

Small Mercies

2011-01-08T15:40:00.007Z

Here is the current state of our living room: the Chinese checkers board is still out; the only reason the marbles aren't everywhere is because my husband tidied them away last night. Several blankets are lying in a heap: from under one I can see a cat's paw and a tail. There are ashes and small pieces of coal scattered around our fireplace, and the plastic bucket my husband transfers coals in has a melted edge because one of our daughters forgot it was plastic and left it leaning against the stove. I won't mention which daughter because I am kind. And consider this: she put it against the stove because she was sweeping up the ashes and bits of coal. Small mercies.

Many other things are lying around too: shoes, slippers, socks, newspapers, books, empty cracker boxes, an embroidery hoop, cushions, board games, cat toys, matches, homework notebooks, lap top computers, a fire poker, magazines, scarves, plastic bags, candy wrappers, musical instruments, and more socks. I can't get over how many socks a family of four can generate. Add another person to the mix, and I'm betting we'd barely see the carpet for the socks. Most of the stuff belongs to my kids; a few of the items belong to my husband and me. I won't mention the things he's left lying around, because he is my husband. I won't mention the state of my desk, because this is my blog.

One of the cats has killed another bird, but someone must have locked the cat flap because the feathers are all over the front porch, but not in the kitchen this time. Small mercies. And apart from the feathers and a few drops of blood, there is nothing to clean up: the prey was obviously consumed this time, unlike the large rodent that I found, headless, just outside the front door a few days ago. Small mercies.

It ought to start getting tidier around here: our eldest daughter has gone to visit a friend. She has suffered a huge disappointment: a university friend and she were planning to travel around Europe for a whole month, staying in the homes of other pals and visiting half a dozen countries together. Last night, this much-awaited holiday was canceled: her friend's parents found out about her less than stellar academic record and they nixed her vacation plans at the last minute.

After venting her extreme irritation (tickets were purchased! reservations were made!), our daughter got on the phone and arranged to stay with another friend. I heard her discussing films, shopping excursions, visits to the gym -- and breathed a sigh of relief. Small mercies: her holiday won't be spoiled. And we won't have a miserable teenager sulking around the house for the next month either -- which is really not a small mercy. She stripped her sheets and pillowcases off her bed before she left too: that's another small mercy.

I can't look at this room without wincing, my poor husband has managed to sprain his back again, and it snowed overnight, making the roads treacherously slick and difficult to navigate. I've got rejection letters in my in-box, an oven sorely in need of a good scrub, and the leaking spot in our roof has been joined by another, bigger one. There's a nasty stain on our carpet, a rotten spot near the shower where water has soaked through the wood and boy, is that going to be expensive to fix. But I'm grateful for the small mercies, which surround me in abundance.

And quite apart from the silly trivia of my life, there are people like this woman and this man in the world.

And that's not a small mercy either.

Lifestyles Of The Poor And Obscure

2011-01-02T13:34:00.019Z

When I was a kid, we drank our Tang and Kool-aid out of recycled jelly jars.

"Oh, we did that in my family too!" a friend laughed years later when I confided this. "We used to break glasses all the time, so I guess my Mom got desperate." I smiled and pretended that was why my mother did this too: to keep her nice glasses intact. But the truth was, jelly jars were our nice glasses. Melmac cups and tin mugs were for every day.

I'm not sure how old I was when I realized that our family was vastly different from the ones around us. Of course, all families are different, and I know how privileged my life was: we had indoor plumbing, a roof over our heads, enough food at every meal. We had a t.v., a car, and the standard electric appliances, though I'm told my mother reluctantly agreed to buy a washing machine only after my older sister was born. We also had two parents, both of whom graduated from university, books on our shelves, and religion. But we were the only people I knew who bought Dutch Pride imitation ice milk.

"My Mom buys ice milk sometimes," a friend commiserated when I whined to her about this. "It's gross," she said, shrugging, "but she says she has to lose weight." My sisters and I were all rail thin and so was my father, but my mother was pudgy. What a relief to pretend our weird desserts were for diet purposes! The truth was that real ice milk would have been a treat deemed beyond our means, but admitting that would have been acutely embarrassing. "Imitation ice milk" another friend of mine queried in amazement, studying the label. "I don't even know anybody who eats ice milk!" Whenever my friends stayed for dinner, I learned to dread dessert.

Our clothes were another source of embarrassment: I was over ten years old before I had anything brand-new that wasn't from a mail order catalog, and I'll never forget the weird lack of smell, the exotic rustle of tissue paper, the bizarre smoothness of material that hadn't been washed a hundred times. Occasionally we bought our clothes at thrift shops, but mainly, we got hand-me-downs. When we were little, we got them from our three girl cousins in Florida, the youngest of whom was a year older than my big sister. This fortuitous age difference must have pleased our respective parents as much as the great distance between our homes displeased them: I can imagine how they must have sweated out the postage of a whole box from Florida to California -- how they must have weighed the package (on borrowed scales) again and again until it came to within a fraction of an ounce of the maximum weight.

Our uncle in Florida was a preacher who adhered to the vows of poverty out of sheer necessity; every few years when we received our long-awaited clothes box from Florida, we would pore excitedly over the threadbare dresses, skirts and blouses, smelling of mothballs and already ten years out of fashion. "Those clothes were hand-me-downs when we got them," my cousin told me decades later when we shared an apartment in Miami. "They were donated by people in our church, and don't think their kids didn't point that out when we wore their stuff to school!" It was a great relief to trade stories with our Florida cousins; they were the only people with whom I could share some of our family's more embarrassing economies, like recycled fat used as a sandwich spread, the vast bag of rags my mother kept as dusters, the fact that we recycled Christmas wrapping paper and tinsel year after year. In fact, swapping stories with our Florida cousins, we came out looking recklessly affluent. Their first house was a tar-paper-and-chicken wire shack with a pounded dirt floor. They shared their living space with snakes and small furry animals and dreamed of indoor plumbing. Years later, when we visited them in Pensacola, they had a proper house, but a shopping trip to the local grocery store was obviously still an occasion.

"Do you eat out a lot?" one of my cousins asked us in hushed tones. They had made one trip out to California years earlier in a battered old Winnebago, a vacation that was clearly the adventure of their lives, and I can still remember their admiration and awe on learning that we could actually afford to eat out once a week. It didn't matter that eating out meant a meal at the local taco joint; this still put us in an enviably higher income bracket. "Sometimes we eat at Thrifty's Drug Store," I bragged. "They've got a fountain there and it's really neat." My cousins practically swooned.

I loved eating at the fountain of Thrifty's Drug Store. In our heady pre-vegetarian days, their hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches were delicious, but my favorite meal was a hot roast turkey sandwich swimming in gravy, and a Sprite. We would sit in a battered Naugehyde booth at a Formica table with dozens of wads of spent chewing gum plastered to the bottom (we frequently confirmed this by bending down to look, always marveling at the different colors and sizes), and it always felt special. On very rare occasions, no more than once a year, we would eat at a smorgasbord restaurant called Sir George's where the water glasses were made of real glass and did not have the name of any beverage on them. When I was eleven, my friends and I were making fun of a nasty, ignorant boy in our class. "I'll bet he eats out at Sir George's!" one of my friends snickered. "No!" cried another, "Thrifty's! His Mom and Dad take him to the fountain at Thrifty's!" To this day, I remember my shock and confusion. Did they know my family ate there? Whatever the case, I vowed never to admit to this.

"Those people!" I heard someone scoff at a party a few years ago. "They're so backwards, they don't even know what a fish fork is!" My first impulse was to laugh, as though as I found this funny too -- the idea of not knowing what a fish fork is! But I didn't know there were such things as fish forks until I was over thirty. And up until I was twenty, the only fish I knew came out of a can.

I'm a rich snob now: I buy real ice cream once in a while, and I can scale and gut my own fish if I have to. My rag bag has worn-out scraps from Japan, Mexico, Turkey, and China in it; I may buy my clothes at thrift shops, but they are posh thrift shops, and the clothes are nearly new. But I ate at Thrifty's Drug Store and I loved it. And God smite me if I ever laugh at anybody for not knowing what a fish fork is.

Topping It Up

2010-12-28T18:16:00.013Z

The top-up woman has an unctuous, hyper-friendly voice, and everything she says has an exclamation point on it. "Welcome to the XYZ mobile top up service!" she gushes. "If you wish to top up by voucher or credit card, press one!"

I've asked my daughter to be nearby because I didn't trust myself to do this alone. "Okay," she says from across the room, "what you have to do now is--"

But I've suddenly noticed that my phone's touch screen is blank. "There's no keyboard!" I cry. "How can I press one when there's no keyboard?"

"Please press one!" the lady repeats in her smarmy voice, blocking out what my daughter is trying to say.

"But how!" I yell at the phone and my daughter. "There's no keyboard!"

"Mom! There's no keyboard because they know you'll be holding your phone against your ear and you might accidentally press the wrong number!" She leaps up and takes my phone from me, presses a series of buttons and hands the phone back. "Now, when the lady tells you to press one, you just hit this button first -- are you looking? -- and your keyboard will pop up."

I glare at the phone. "It's intelligently done," my daughter adds. "They've thought of everything."

"Yeah? I didn't hear them saying anything about what buttons to push to make the keyboard return. That would be a lot more intelligent."

"They expect you to know," she says crisply. "It's lower common denominator stuff."

The top up lady is back. "Press one!" she gushes, a smile in her voice. I press one. A one lights up on my screen but nothing else happens.

"Did you press one?" my daughter asks, leaning forward.

"Yes, but it's not doing anything!"

"If you wish to pay by pre-paid voucher, press two!" the lady says. I picture her as a combination of my junior high school science teacher and Betty Crocker. I'll bet she's got polished fingernails, fire engine red lipstick, and ironed skirts.

I press two and my one becomes a twelve. This is so obviously an error, I hang up. "What did you do that for?" my daughter demands.

"My one became a twelve!"

"It wasn't a twelve!" my daughter groans, "it was a two next to a one!" She presses a bunch of buttons and we go through the whole rigmarole all over. "Now press one, then press two, and don't hang up!" she scolds.

This time, I press one, then press two. The woman doesn't react to this. She doesn't seem to know what a monumental thing I'm attempting to do here. Insensitively, she launches into a sales pitch about all the cool things I can do with her top-up service. "What's going on?" I whisper. "Shouldn't she tell me what to do next?"

"Mom, they've got you where they want you. You just have to be patient and hear her out," my daughter advises.

"This is ridiculous! I don't need to know about their stupid services, I need to top up my %$£"!@-ing phone!" I say, ready to launch into a full rant but my daughter holds out her hand to stop me. "Read me out the number NOW!" she shouts.

I read out the number in a stiff, clench-jawed voice. My daughter finishes punching in numbers and hands the phone back to me. "There you are, you've got £20 of credit on your phone now. Congratulations."

"It's so complicated!" I fume, staring at my phone. "I'll never be able to do that on my own!"

"I told Dad not to get you a touch screen," she hisses, throwing back her head and rolling her eyes. "They're not adult friendly!"

I take a deep, sustaining breath. "I changed your diapers," I tell her. "I had to remind you when you needed to blow your nose." My daughter flashes me a brief, pitying smile. "Which was all the time!" I can't resist adding.

"Come on, Mom," she says in her perky, helpful voice. "It's just a matter of practice. Topping up really isn't all that hard. Even Dad's learned how to do it."

"I used to have to take you to the toilet at night!" I say. "You used to beg me to!"

My daughter pats my knee in an infuriating way. "Mom, you're a perfectly competent human being. But you know you're seriously technically challenged."

Somewhere I've got a picture of her in a big, saggy diaper, with pumpkin all over her face. If I ever figure out the technology, I'm putting it on Facebook.

A Merry Whatever!

2010-12-24T11:38:00.004Z

Bits of torn wrapping paper, fir needles, and balled-up Kleenex decorate the carpet. The holiday tang of Vape-o-Rub fills the frosty air of our halls, and the merry echo of deep, bronchial coughs reminds us that it's that time of year again!

Our cats are racing up and down the stairs, excited by all the packages coming in, the crinkle of foil and wadded-up paper, the smells of baking, the crisp tsk-tsk-tsk of scissors, the stressed-out, sometimes panicky voices: "Have you written one to Auntie Freda?" and "Are you sure you wrapped the ones for my cousins?"

This morning, I fished an old used tea bag out of a corner of the kitchen. God knows how it got there, but in the dark room, without my glasses on, it looked exactly like a dead mouse frozen in rigor mortis, deposited there by my cats as a gift. I let out a scream as it flew from my hands. And then I saw that what I'd mistaken for the tail was really the string, and what looked like the body was really the almost-dry clump of leaves -- and that the dead mouse was nothing more than an innocent tea bag.

The mice are all outside, safe for the time being in their little mice beds under piles of leaves in the icy hedges. The birds are nibbling at the seed in the feeder: the cats have left them to it for a change. Small miracles around here. May I now hope for peace on earth, goodwill to men?

Whatever the case, Merry Christmas to all of you and your families, a very Happy Hannukah, and the best of holidays to every single one of you, whatever you believe!

Please join me in praying for a more peaceful and prosperous 2011 for the whole world.

What Are You Like?

2010-12-21T00:08:00.006Z

My first week in Scotland, a woman in a shop asked me where I was from. When I said California, she gestured at the rain spattered windows. "I'll bet you're sorry you traded it for this," she said.

I was new in the U.K. and unfamiliar with the unwritten rule that you have to hate rain, so I shook my head. "Actually, I grew up in a desert where it hardly ever rained. I wouldn't trade this weather for all the sunshine in the world."

The woman tilted her head and stared at me. The look on her face said You're kidding me, aren't you? When she realized I was dead serious, she narrowed her eyes. "Well now. What are you like?" she said. I had no idea what she meant by this so I had no answer for her.

I heard the expression again a few months later when I told a neighbor I used vinegar to clean shower stalls and composted all my cardboard. She thought it was odd to use a foodstuff as a cleaning product and she questioned the wisdom of using cardboard as mulch. By this time, I was beginning to see that What are you like? wasn't entirely complimentary.

The third time I heard this was after I'd told an acquaintance we didn't wear our shoes inside our house. "What does that mean?" I asked her immediately. "You already know what I'm like!"

"It's just an expression," she said, not quite meeting my eyes. "It doesn't really mean anything."

For some reason, it took me years to look this up, but when I did, I got a shock. Used when someone has said or done something silly, I read on the Cambridge Dictionaries Online site. This rhetorical question is asked of someone who has done something stupid or outrageous, offered another reference.

Silly? Stupid? Outrageous? Just reading these definitions made my eyes flash and my jaw clench. Every time somebody asks me this, I feel my smile go all steely and I have to take long, deep breaths.

And ever since learning what this idiom means, I've heard it dozens of times. I've found that it can be used to refer to genuine idiocy, personal idiosyncrasies, small, perfectly understandable linguistic misunderstandings, or even variations in pronunciation.

For example, I heard this when I asked for ground chicken instead of minced at the butcher's, when someone told me he worked at a bookmaker's and I thought this meant he sold books, when I had a senior Japanese moment at the post office and tried to buy a 30-pence stamp with three 2-pence pieces, which suddenly looked a lot like ten-yen coins. I heard this when I accidentally forgot where I was and called our car's bonnet a hood, or referred to the boot as the trunk. I've even had people ask me what I'm like when I've pronounced oregano with the stress on the second syllable, which is the only way I will ever pronounce it because I am an American. And although I may not wave a flag and brag to all and sundry that I come from the Greatest Country in the World, as Popeye said, I yam what I yam.

Recently we had an American student stay at our house and the What are you like? idiom came up. I confided how long it had taken me to find out the meaning, and I whined about how tired I was of hearing it.

The girl's jaw dropped. "Is that what it means?" she whispered. I nodded and she blanched. "Omigod, people say that to me all the time -- I had no idea!"

What are we like?

Ecumenical Christmas

2010-12-14T09:06:00.015Z

About this time last year, my boss came into the teachers' room and frowned. "Where's the Christmas tree?" she wanted to know. "Why isn't it up yet?"

There were only three of us in the staffroom and we were all busy with lesson plans and marking. "Isn't it in the secretary's office?" one of my colleagues mumbled.

But it wasn't. My boss came back and started rummaging around in the cupboards. "It's almost Christmas and we still don't have the tree up!" she lamented. "This just won't do!"

I knew I'd seen it, but I couldn't remember where. "Try the bottom cupboard, just under the dictionaries," I suggested.

There was a triumphant cry and my boss straightened up, clutching a tangle of plastic evergreen. "I knew it was here somewhere!" She gave it a little shake and a cockroach that had been wintering in the branches hit the floor and went scurrying."Okay, let's set it up," my boss said, undeterred by the roach. "And look -- here's a bag of decorations to go on it!"

She dumped everything in the middle of the table, shot us a bright smile, and went off to do more important things. I put down my pen and sighed. One of my colleagues groaned and the other rolled his eyes. Two more colleagues walked into the office, blinked, and smiled. "Oh good, you've got the Christmas tree out!"

As we all started stuffing synthetic branches into slots, I almost burst out laughing. We teachers were a mixed bag of nationalities and faiths. Among us were over half a dozen Christians -- Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox (Russian and Greek) and Syriac -- a Bahai, assorted atheists, and many Muslims, lapsed and practicing. Yet here we were, assembling a plastic replica of a pagan symbol manufactured by Communists in China, at the behest of a Muslim, to celebrate the birth of a Jew. How could you possibly get more ecumenical than that, or more surreal?

But as the week went by, I was glad of that tree. Amazingly, it brought back memories of childhood Christmases, the smell of eucalyptus, crushed fir,and cinnamon, the sparkle of glass ornaments, the thrill of finding this green, glittering thing in the middle of our living room.

The more I thought about it, the weirder it was: historically, Christmas trees have nothing to do with Christ, and yet they have become an international symbol of Christmas -- so much so that even in Muslim-owned shops and businesses in Northern Cyprus where few Christians set foot, you could see them. In Japan, where the population of Christians is about 1%, you can see many Christmas trees at this time of year. We had Christian friends in Tokyo who never bought a Christmas tree, but their largely agnostic neighbors dutifully decorated one every year. For some reason, decorating Christmas trees has become a compelling custom. The whole industrialized world seems to own Christmas.

"It's money," scoffed one of my colleagues in Japan. "Money and cultural imperialism. That's why people put up Christmas trees." And I could see his point: when Christmas trees go up weeks before Halloween, it's impossible not to feel cynical. "It has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity," a friend lamented, shuddering at the abomination of a PVC Christmas tree in a window, glittering with fiber optic decorations. Disco carols boomed raucously from a shop while girls in short red velvet skirts pinned shiny garlands of plastic tinsel to the display window.

But although I can't speak for those who are of other faiths or have no religion at all, I think there is something all human beings can celebrate over Christmas, something that has nothing to do with commercialism, the fundamental idea behind even the plastic replica of a pagan symbol: unselfish giving. Whether or not we believe that Jesus was the son of God, almost all of us have been lucky enough to experience this at some time or other -- a gift offered to us freely, given from the heart, with no strings attached. Yes, it takes a lot to see it there in an aluminum tree festooned with baubles, but have faith: the love is there. And faith and love are what Christmas is all about.

Helping Hands

2010-12-11T11:34:00.010Z

The snow and ice are finally thawing. All around us, there is the sound of dripping water and birdsong. For the past several weeks, our town has been covered in ice and snow, but now you can see grass and green leaves emerging from their mantle of frozen white.

We were lucky here: up in Glasgow, temperatures went as low as -17 C (1.4 F) and the snow and ice were so bad that schools closed down, businesses and shops sent all their employees home, and thousands of commuters were stranded on the motorways for as long as fifteen hours, waiting in endless lines. The snow and ice were so bad in some areas that they broke the blades of the snow ploughs. And the streets were treacherous to walk on too as the wet snow became impacted, then froze over. I've heard stories about people slipping and falling just stepping outside their houses. My husband, the most sure-footed person I've ever known, came home bruised and sore after slipping and falling on ice.

I am not sure-footed. In fact, I am spectacularly uncoordinated when it comes to walking on slippery surfaces. I don't think I could count the times I've slipped and fallen on virtually nothing, so what I can get up to on ice and snow has to be seen to be believed. My kids have inherited their father's So what? attitude to slipping and falling. They happily walk, skip, and even run on icy surfaces. I can't bear to watch them; I can't even watch people ski or ice skate without wincing.

So for the past two weeks, I've stayed inside whenever possible, venturing outside only to throw out the trash -- quite a feat as the lid freezes shut every night -- collect my daughter from school, or make the odd totally necessary trip into town to buy something. When I go out, I'm kitted out like Tenzing Norgay or Edmund Hilary preparing to tackle Everest, wearing many pairs of socks, legwarmers, and mittens, and on my feet, hiking boots with the deepest, sharpest tread I could find. The extra clothes aren't just for warmth, they're for padding. With all the compacted ice and snow, just making my way down the street took me ages and it got harder and harder to work up the courage to go out. Until the other day, when I saw that some wonderful person had decided to grit the road.

Striding confidently along, my feet crunching on fine grit, I wondered who had been out there so early to do this. As I turned a corner, I heard the sound of a shovel biting into sand, and I saw Harold, who lives around the corner from us and is 80 years old if he's a day. Someone once told me that Harold was in WWII. I've never asked him, but I can easily believe it. And there he was, loaded shovel in hand, bending over a wheelbarrow full of grit. "Thank you so much for doing that," I said, thoroughly humbled as I fought the urge to wrest the shovel out of his hands and start shoveling myself. "Well, somebody's got to," he said, shrugging. "Council are supposed to grit the roads, but they just take too long!"

This isn't the first time somebody of Harold's generation has helped me out with slippery surfaces. The first person who did this for me was my mother-in-law. I was pregnant with our first daughter and we were out for a post-Christmas hike in the hills. It had snowed the night before and the ground was icy and treacherous. When we got to a bad patch, I froze, not trusting myself to go on. My mother-in-law has 40 years on me and is half a foot shorter, but she slipped her arm through mine and we navigated the bad patch together. A couple walking towards us shot me an approving look that said Good for you for helping that old lady! I had to look down; my cheeks were burning with shame.

The next time it happened, I was in Tokyo, only 50 meters from my office in Ochanomizu. I had dressed hastily that morning and was wearing cowboy boots with no tread in them. All of a sudden, I realized that a good two meters of black ice lay between me and my office building. People flowed around me as I stood there, utterly frozen in panic. A tiny elderly man dressed in a great coat and a grey fedora was coming from the opposite direction. When he saw me standing there, stricken with fear, a big smile creased his face. He held out his elbow. "Allow me," he said. I struggled briefly with my conscience -- how could I let somebody so old and frail help me? -- but my terror won. I took his arm and did my best not to crush his elbow in my desperation. He walked me baby step by baby step over the black ice, then laughed off my thanks. Over my shoulder, I watched as he walked back over the icy road towards the station. A high school boy only a few feet behind him slipped and fell on the icy patch, then laughed and brushed the snow off his knees as he got up.

The last time it happened was in Cyprus, where there is -- thank God! very little ice during the winter. But unfortunately, whoever designed our university chose a smooth, shiny stone for the entrance. A fine film of dust settled on this overnight and when it rained, the surface became as slippery as oiled glass. On rainy days, most of my colleagues and even a few of my students had to offer me their arms to get me safely across. But early one morning, one of the cleaning ladies, a woman old enough to be my mother, was outside sweeping when I arrived. It had rained and I was stupidly wearing shoes without tread. At first, the woman ignored me, continuing to sweep. At some point, though, she looked up and saw me standing there. She said something that I can only hope was the Turkish for "Go on, you can do it!" I froze until she finally realized that the only way to get rid of me was to give me a hand. As I slipped through the lobby past the great bronze statue of Atatürk, I felt as though he was glaring down at me, disgusted by my klutzy wimpiness.

On the street, I watched Harold fill his shovel with grit from the wheelbarrow and sprinkle it over the icy sidewalk. "We owe a lot to you for taking the initiative to do that," I said lamely. Harold sank his shovel into the grit again, scooped up a good bunch of it, and scattered it over a stretch of compacted snow. "Like I said, somebody's gotta do it. But thank you for noticing!"

A Few Heroes

2010-12-05T15:47:00.009Z

I first heard about Donaldina Cameron in a Chinese history class. The last week of the class was devoted to the topic of overseas Chinese, particularly in San Francisco, and we learned how the Chinese Exclusion Act signed by Chester A. Arthur in 1882, prevented Chinese immigrant workers in the U.S. from sending for their wives and families back in China. It also led to human trafficking, as girls and women were smuggled into the States from China by the thousands, many recruited as domestic servants, but in reality sold to work in brothels. Some of the girls were bought outright from poor families, but many were kidnapped.

In 1895, Cameron went to work as a sewing teacher at San Francisco Chinatown's Occidental Mission Home for Girls, a charitable institution run by the Presbyterian Church. While working there, she began to expand her duties, helping the police rescue women and girls who had been sold into slavery. She had a reputation for fearlessness: she took an axe with her on nighttime raids at cribs and brothels, and she wasn't shy about using it. When she became superintendent of the home in 1900, the girls she rescued began to call her 'Lo Mo', or Old Mother; the people she rescued them from called her 'Fahn Quai', or White Devil. Over the decades she was active, she is credited with saving almost three thousand girls and women, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

Our professor became very emotional talking about her. "Her life was not easy," she told us. "For many years, there was a price on her head." A week after hearing about Cameron, I happened to talk to a woman I knew who had grown up in Chinatown. When I asked her if she'd ever heard of Donaldina Cameron, she laughed and rolled her eyes. "Everybody's heard about Donaldina Cameron!" She assured me that you could walk down a street in Chinatown and find half a dozen people with an ancestor she had liberated.

I learned about Saburo Ienaga when I was studying Japanese in Tokyo. Professor Ienaga was a Japanese historian and former high school history teacher who tirelessly campaigned against the Japanese government's censorship of high school history textbooks. Over the course of thirty years, he filed a number of suits against the Japanese government, arguing that their censorship of his history book was unconstitutional. His books covered subjects that the government hoped would be forgotten: atrocities such as the 1937 Nanjing massacre, in which imperial army troops brutally slaughtered 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians and the horrendous medical experiments carried out by Unit 731, the Japanese army's germ warfare unit, on mainly Chinese prisoners. During the war, Ienaga had been a high school history teacher himself. Although personally against the war, he still toed the party line, teaching imperial divinity myths to students who would soon become soldiers. Like many people in Japan, he did not dare to publicly oppose the war. It is easy to judge him now, but during the war, people could be imprisoned simply for owning books in foreign languages. Habeas corpus had been suspended, and civilians arrested by the Tokko, or 'thought police', might not even know why they were being detained. After the war, Ienaga greatly regretted the role he might have played in sending boys to their deaths. His tireless pursuit of justice helped him appease his sense of guilt. He didn't win all of his legal battles, but he never gave up.

I first heard about Chiune Sugihara from a Japanese friend who lives in Edinburgh. She gave me a biography about him in Japanese, which it took me ages to read. But it was worth it.

In early 1939, Sugihara was sent to Kaunas, the temporary capital of Lithuania, to serve as Consul General. He had barely arrived there when the German army invaded Poland and waves of Jewish refugees surged into Lithuania, bringing terrifying tales of German atrocities against Jews. Many of them had escaped with no possessions, money, or official documents. After the Soviets invaded Lithuania in June, 1940, they asked all foreign embassies to leave. Sugihara managed to get an extension. During that time, he and the Dutch consul, Jan Zwartendijk, worked out a plan. Zwartendijk would stamp Jewish refugees' passports with entrance permits for two Dutch colonial islands; Sugihara would issue them with Japanese transit visas. Over the next three weeks, Sugihara and his wife worked feverishly, writing and signing visas by hand. In those days before word processors, they worked all hours, managing a month's work in one day. They were still throwing visas from the windows of their train when they finally left in September 1940. Sugihara and his wife are credited with saving the lives of six thousand Jews.

I first read about Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish in the Guardian Weekly. Dr. Abu al-Aish is a peace advocate, a Palestinian gynecologist trained in Israel who lived with his family in the Gaza Strip. Having worked at Beersheba's Soroka University Medical Center, Dr. Abu al-Aish had many Jewish friends, acquaintances, and patients, and speaks fluent Hebrew. On January 16, 2009, his house was shelled by the Israeli Defense Force and three of his daughters and a niece were killed instantly; two other daughters were seriously injured. Dr. Abu al-Aish, who regularly reported on the medical crisis on Israel's Channel 10, was able to call an Israeli journalist friend to report what had happened, prompting a huge response from many people who knew and liked him. You might imagine that anyone who had been through such an experience would be filled with thoughts of revenge, but Dr. Abu al-Aish continues to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians. "I had two options," he has said, "the path of darkness or the path of light. The path of darkness is like choosing all the complications with disease and depression, but the path of light is to focus on the future and my children."

You may have watched the television program Heroes, about a group of people who all have special skills such as the ability to fly, to bend time, to start fires by flicking their fingertips. Although skills like that are wonderful to imagine and entertaining to see performed, what I find far more heroic are the sorts of things these four people managed to accomplish. Bravery, dogged persistence through defeat after defeat, the moral courage to break the law and do the right thing, and finding the strength to forgive a terrible wrong -- those are more incredible to me than the ability to lift great weights or soar through the air.

People like that might not make it into a popular television series, but they are the sort of heroes I'm happy to have in my world.

Holding Fast

2010-11-28T23:25:00.007Z

The attendance sheet said there should have been six boys, but I saw right away there were only five. After I took roll, I ran my finger down the attendance sheet. "Where is Yousuf?" I asked.

Five pairs of eyes flicked down, then sideways. Glances were exchanged. One boy, the unofficial spokesperson, shrugged. "Perhaps he will come tomorrow."

It was early September, but fiercely hot outside even in the morning. "Shall we turn the air conditioner on?" I asked them.

Jamal, the spokesperson, shook his head. "No need."

After the first ten minutes of class, my hair stuck to my forehead and sweat beaded up down my back. I was so miserable, I had to take off the blouse I'd put on over my sleeveless dress when I'd learned I would be teaching six very religious Muslim boys.

They averted their eyes from my bare arms while I fanned myself with the roll sheet. "Are you sure you don't want the air conditioner on?" I asked, hoping they would relent.

Wordlessly, they shook their heads. I cracked open another window to let the feeble breeze through, and fanned myself some more. "You don't like air conditioning?" I had to ask.

Jamal spread his hands. "It is Ramadan." His eyes swept from side to side. "Ramadan, Pakistani boys no air conditioner."

I did my best to hide my shock.

"Teacher, you are married?" one of the boys asked during the break. I nodded.

"You have children?" another asked immediately.

"Yes," I said proudly.

"Girl or boy?"

"Girls."

"Only girl?" I nodded and they shook their heads sadly as though sorry for my great misfortune.

"Yousuf is still ill?" I asked to change the subject.

Their eyes flickered away. "Perhaps."

Over the next two weeks, they told me a bit about themselves. They came from a very small, deeply conservative village in Pakistan and had been sent to our university for a month of intensive English. They did not speak Turkish, knew no one but each other, and had not gone anywhere other than to their daily classes. When I asked them if they weren't bored having to study English six hours a day, Jamal quickly shook his head. "It is Ramadan."

I was to hear a lot about Ramadan in the two weeks to come, and I needed a lot of reminding. "Go and get yourselves some water," I thoughtlessly said during the break on the third day. It was blazing hot and we were all sweating freely.

"Teacher, Pakistani boy no water. Ramadan."

"Oh, I'm sorry -- I forgot!"

And only a few minutes later -- "Would you boys like some chewing gum?"

"Teacher, Ramadan!" they all practically chorused.

"Sorry!"

"Teacher," Jamal asked, narrowing his eyes, "you are Christian?"

My mouth dropped open. "Yes," I said, because it was the least complicated answer, and also the closest to the truth.

Jamal must have seen the hesitation in my face. He gave me a long, hard look as though he required proof. "Okay," he finally said.

"Yousuf is still ill?" I asked, tapping the attendance sheet.

Jamal looked away. "Perhaps." He had told me earlier that morning that during Ramadan, lying and bad-mouthing others were prohibited. But his eyes said it all: perhaps a little evasive truth-stretching was permitted.

"Any idea where Yousuf is?" I asked one of my colleagues after class.

She sighed. "He's disappeared. We asked student services to try and track him down, but so far no luck." She shook her head. "Those boys must be so bored. All day long, they do nothing but study English. No food, not even water to drink, and they can't go anywhere. It's hard to blame Yousuf."

On the last day of class, I accidentally pressed the radio button on the CD player and a blast of full-volume arabesque music made us all jump. For a split second, the boys' eyes lit up and two began to clap. One of the shyer boys even leapt to his feet to dance. I was amazed to see the sudden animation in their faces, the obvious joy this tiny break in the routine gave them.

When I left for my morning break, the shy boy asked if they could keep the CD player in the classroom until I got back. This was strictly against the rules -- even the awful CD players we had were occasionally stolen -- but I looked at the boy's eager face and I could not bring myself to say no. "Sure," I said, and there was a chorus of cheers. The shy boy's grin stretched from ear to ear.

I smiled all the way back to the teachers' room, but my happiness in their delight was short-lived. Jamal came into the teachers' room with the CD player almost as soon as I'd sat down. "Is it not working again?" I asked.

He shook his head and frowned. "Pakistani boy no music, teacher. Ramadan." The look on his face made me feel like a snake who'd been pushing an apple in the Garden of Eden.

The truth was, Jamal struck me as rigid and intolerant. Although with his dark looks and foreign accent, he couldn't have looked more different from my Uncle Cyrus, in terms of personality the two were remarkably similar. My Uncle Cyrus was a deeply religious man, but not a spiritual one. His knowledge of the Bible was formidable, but if others did not agree with his particular interpretations, he did not consider them to be Christians. The people he did consider Christians were other members of his church who agreed with his scriptural interpretations. I never heard him say that Catholics and Baptists might as well be atheists, but this was very much his position; people of other faiths, no matter how devout, were absolutely beyond the pale. His family quickly learned to toe the line; I remember one discussion about religion with my cousins: the many things they were not allowed to do featured prominently. Although his religion might have been a source of comfort and joy to Uncle Cyrus, it was mainly a way for him to impose his will on others. Uncle Cyrus was a bitter, angry man whose children hated and feared him.

When I went back to the classroom after the break, the atmosphere was strained and the boys' faces were sullen, as though they had been quarreling. I felt bad -- as though I'd started it all by offering the use of the CD player in the first place. I felt worse still after the class when I offered some of my grapes to a colleague who was also fasting for Ramadan. She smiled and patted my shoulder. "It's easy to forget!" Throughout her fast, she maintained the same radiant good cheer. "It's a good feeling," she said. "As though I'm stronger than my own physical needs. I just wish I could keep it up the rest of the year!" Just listening to her made me want to give fasting another go myself.

Yousuf never did come back to class. When it came time for the boys to go back to Pakistan, he was still missing.

Maybe he ended up like one of my cousins -- recklessly falling in with the wrong people, making the worst sort of friends, indulging in all of the things prohibited to him for so long. Maybe he ended up like others -- finding comfort and peace in his religion in a world torn by intolerance and hatred. Wherever he is, with all my heart I hope he is making the most of his freedom.

Missed Connections

2010-11-21T15:41:00.004Z

The first time I met a French person, I could hardly wait to talk to her about de Maupassant. I'd struggled through Camus's L'Etranger in French and yawned my way through the English translations of a few French novels, but when I discovered de Maupassant's short stories, I couldn't get over how wonderful they were. I was thrilled to finally be able to tell a French person this. I was sure she'd be proud and happy to be from the country that had produced one of my all-time favorite writers.

Boy, was I wrong. "De Maupassant?" she sneered, examining her fingernails. "Yes, I have heard that he is very popular abroad."

At a party in Tokyo, I was delighted to meet a man from Trinidad, the first Trinidadian I'd ever talked to. At the same party, I'd just met a Korean man born and raised in Kamchatka, which had been a huge thrill, but although I don't know of any writers from Kamchatka, I was going through a V. S. Naipual phase and was eager to talk to a native of Trinidad about the man who is arguably the country's most famous author. But at the very mention of Naipual, this man sighed deeply and all but rolled his eyes. "Ah yes, our Vido," he murmured, then "I take it you are a fan?" My jaw dropped, but I admitted that I was. "You aren't?" I asked. His lip curled. "Well, I suppose he has helped to put us on the map," he said grudgingly. After that we discussed the difficulty of finding a good international school in Japan.

One day at work, a Japanese colleague pointed to my copy of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood. "How do you like that?" he asked. I told him I was enjoying it very much. "Hmph," he said, "I guess it's true." I narrowed my eyes. "You guess what's true?" He tapped my book. "Foreigners like this guy's books," he practically snorted.

I've since met plenty of Japanese people who love Murakami's books, but my colleague's snarky comment has stayed with me all these years.

In Cyprus, I reread Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. By coincidence, I had a copy of the book on me when I went with a friend to visit a young Nigerian woman who had just had her first baby. I knew that this woman was an Igbo, like Adichie, so I was sure she'd be happy to know that I was reading this world famous international best-seller written by her countrywoman. While my friend and I were admiring her new baby, I pulled out my book to show her, anticipating a lively conversation about the book and its author.

To my great dismay, she had never heard of the book and she had no idea who Adichie was. In fact, although she glanced at the cover politely, she was far more interested in the episode of Gossip Girls she was watching on T.V.

When I was teaching Turkish students English, it took me over a month to find one person who admitted to reading any of Orhan Pamuk's novels. Likewise, a Chinese woman I met shook her head and smiled when I told her how much I'd enjoyed Jung Chang's Wild Swans. She'd never heard of Jung Chang or Wild Swans, she said. And for what it's worth, my British husband does not like Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, or the Bronte sisters, and he is not a fan of D. H. Lawrence. He has never read anything by Virginia Woolf.

Now, I know that all of these authors are read and loved in their own countries -- I am convinced of it. What drives me half crazy is that I don't seem to meet any of their fans in my travels. It would be wonderful to talk about these famous authors with natives of their countries, but I have seriously begun to think that they all stay in their own countries instead of finding their way to wherever I happen to be. And there is a certain irony in the fact that I keep running into people who are big fans of Hemingway, Thomas Pynchon, and Henry James.

And then one day, one of my colleagues, a Russian woman, asked me if I'd ever read any Russian novels.

I regarded her warily. "I absolutely love Chekhov," I said. "In fact, I don't think it's possible for anyone to write better short stories than his."

Her smile lit up her face. "Oh, I completely agree!"

Finally!

Just Desserts

2010-11-14T21:28:00.007Z

Not long after we moved to this town, I baked five dozen oatmeal, cranberry and walnut cookies, packed them into a clean foil-lined tin, and took them down to the local church where I proudly handed them over to the women running the church bake sale. All profits from the bake sale would be donated to Save the Children. I told myself that my good deed was worth the hassle, and getting my kids to help out with me was a good way for us to meet the local people.

"Where are your cookies, Mom?" my kids kept asking as we set platters of meringues on tables.

"They'll be out soon, I'm sure."

Ten minutes later, my girls frowned as the ladies from the kitchen handed us trays of cupcakes and tray bakes. "They're still not out!"

"Be patient. A lot of people have baked things."

In the kitchen, I heard two women at the sink chatting. "Fancy somebody bringing her failed scones to a bake sale!" one of them huffed. "I'd have thrown those right into the bin, so I would have!"

"Aye, these younger women," her friend agreed. "They take no pride at all."

I took out a platter of rice crispy bakes and handed them to my daughters to distribute. "Your cookies still aren't out?" my older daughter demanded.

"It looks like they haven't gotten to them yet," I said, shrugging.

My eyes scanned the platters for my cookies, but I couldn't see them anywhere.

Thirty minutes later, we'd served dozens of people, but we still hadn't seen my cookies. The kids were especially irritated: I'd promised them a few if any were left over. "I'll bet the people in the kitchen saved the good ones for themselves," my younger daughter said. "Yours are so good they decided to keep them for their own families."

Actually, I was a little disappointed -- and mystified, especially when I went into the kitchen to reclaim my tin and found that it was empty. Could my daughter really be right? Had the kitchen ladies really wolfed down five dozen oatmeal, cranberry and walnut cookies?

If I hadn't gone to get a plastic bag to put my tin in, I wouldn't have passed by the garbage bin. God knows what made me look down.

But when I did, I saw my five dozen freshly-baked cookies lying in the trash.

I stood there, shocked and devastated. Those cookies were made with real butter. They had a shot of decent whiskey in them and several cups of cranberries and walnuts. But more importantly, they were chock full of all the good will in the world.

I took a deep, fortifying breath, then bent over for a better look. The bin liner was new and there was no other garbage in it. In two seconds, I had whipped open my tin, emptied my poor cookies into it, and stuffed it into a plastic bag. If any of the women saw me, they were wise enough to keep their mouths shut.

Walking home, I held my daughters' hands and fought back tears. I remembered the bake sales of my childhood, how the cookies that nobody bought were the ones that stank of cigarette smoke or tasted of hand lotion. The 'failed scones' the church ladies had been dissing were in fact my very own oatmeal cookies. Maybe the ladies who dumped them had problems with their vision, but still, how humiliating!

"Were there any of your cookies left?" my daughters wanted to know. All I could do was nod.

A few months after this, I ran into an acquaintance just outside the church. She was holding a large covered pot and she looked irritated.

"What's in the pot?" I asked.

She curled her lip. "Soup."

"Ooh, what kind?"

"Mushroom," she sighed.

"For the church potluck?"

She nodded, but her face looked grim. "At least I don't have to make dinner tonight."

"You've got a lot left?" I said, trying not to smile. I was beginning to feel better about my oatmeal cookies.

She rolled her eyes. "Yes, I do -- the whole pot, in fact." She sighed. "I got up at five in the morning to make it because the ladies who organize the potluck asked me specifically. And then they didn't even serve it!"

I stared at her, relief beginning to flood through me. I'd eaten at this woman's house and knew that she was a fine cook. "At least they didn't pour it down the sink," I commented. I told her my cookie story and she perked right up.

Not long after this, we were both approached by the church ladies and asked to bring baked goods to the church bake sale. We politely declined.

"Ach, these younger women," I heard one of the ladies commenting to a friend. "They can't be asked to spend time in the kitchen!"

Cat Quirks

2010-11-08T12:06:00.006Z

Years ago, a friend of mine who came from a family of asthmatics achieved a life-long ambition: she got her first cat. While she was thrilled to finally have a cat of her own, she was also aware of how comparatively ignorant she was about cats; all she was really sure of was how pretty they were and how much she liked them. A week or two after getting her cat, she called me up to ask for advice. "How do you keep your cat out of the bathroom?" she wanted to know.

"Just keep the bathroom door shut," I told her.

She sighed. "I try to keep it shut, but it doesn't quite catch. And sometimes I forget."

"Okay," I said, "then just accept that your cat is going to get in."

"But he makes such a mess in there!"

"Does he scratch in there? Crap on the floor?"

My friend was indignant. "No! He sharpens his claws on the scratching post we got him, and he uses his litter box in the patio."

I was impressed about the scratching post. My cats had one too, but they far preferred shredding my furniture -- or my trouser legs. And if her cat wasn't sharpening his claws on her bathroom's wicker furniture or doing his business in the tub, I couldn't see how much of a mess he could make. Was he knocking her shampoo bottles off the shelf maybe, or sleeping on her freshly-laundered towels? "You've got a cat now," I told her, "so the way you live is bound to change a little. But he sounds like a good one."

"Oh, he's a wonderful cat," she said, but she still sounded worried.

"Really," I assured her, thinking of my shredded jeans and splintered kitchen cabinets. "Every cat behaves differently, but yours seems to have great manners. Not all cats use their scratching posts and litter boxes properly right off the bat. Things could be a lot worse."

She sighed. "I guess you're right. But I'm just so worried he's going to drown in there!"

I sat up a little straighter. "You mean he's fallen into the bathtub when it's full? For God's sake, let the water out when you're finished!"

"I always let the water out," she snapped. "I'm talking about when I'm running it."

This made me blink. "You mean your cat climbs into the bathtub when you're running the taps?" I was sure I'd misheard her.

"Yes, and sometimes when I'm actually taking a bath, he pushes the door open and climbs on in." She sighed. "I know they say that cats like to be clean, but I never realized they got in the bath with you. I always thought cats hated water."

"They do," I barely managed to say. "Really."

"Well, mine obviously doesn't. Come over some time and see for yourself."

This woman had never lied to me, but I didn't believe her. When I grew up, we fed and cared for many dozens of cats, and although we did pull a few out of the toilet, soaking wet, angry, and very unhappy about the subsequent bath they always got, not one of them ever climbed in the bathtub when they knew it was full.

On my next visit to her house, I was gobsmacked to see her cat casually stroll into her bathroom and climb right into her full bathtub. "I leave a plastic stool in there so he'll have an easier time getting out," she told me, "and there's always a bath mat on the floor. But he still leaves a big mess. And it takes ages to towel him dry."

Barely a year later, another friend told me she had the exact same problem with her cat. The cat kept climbing into a tub of water in her garden and splashing it about, meaning that she constantly had to keep it topped up, and he was also crazy about the bathtub. Being heavily pregnant at the time, she was not inclined to share her bath with her cat, but he had other ideas.

Not long ago, I had one of the conversations I sometimes have with dog people who are not cat aficionados. "All these people who make a fuss about their cats," he sniffed. "As though cats are special! Dogs have different personalities and intelligences, but all cats are the same. They're so predictable."

You can bet I set him straight.

Coolest Mom In Town

2010-11-01T09:08:00.007Z

Yesterday, my daughter and I carved three pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns. I bought three bags of mini candy bars, two bags of apples, and a mess of plastic skeletons. I spent the afternoon cleaning out the porch and stringing up the skeletons on orange netting. In the evening, I popped corn and put it in bowls. Then I fished out a couple of gorilla masks, some luridly-colored wigs, and my claw fingers. And finally, my daughter and I put candles in the jack-o-lanterns, which was no easy feat: we couldn't find the tea candles, so we improvised by chopping down some dusty old candles we found in the shed and putting them in glass jars. It took us ages to get the wicks lit, but when we went outside to look, the effect was eerie -- totally perfect. Our black cats raced in and out of the house, scattering dead leaves and adding beautifully to the whole tableau. We put the candy in a big wicker basket, put on our masks, and sat down to wait for our first trick-or-treaters.

Only one child showed up, a three-year-old from down the road whose mother I know. He was a very cute Batman, but he was afraid of our gorilla masks and he only wanted a handful of popcorn.

My daughter tried to cheer me up. "We've been gone for two years. Plus, tomorrow is a school day. And nobody my age trick-or-treats anymore."

It's a little sad. I'm the mother of grown-up teenagers now. All the kids who knew that our house was the place to go on Halloween are now in university or high school. What's sadder still is that I'm no longer the coolest Mom in town.

I won my coolest-mom-in-town status partly by default and partly by coincidence. Our first Halloween here, I made popcorn balls to use up some hardened brown sugar. They weren't very good -- I was in a rush and didn't manage to get the syrup past soft-ball stage -- but that didn't matter. To this day, my eldest daughter and her friends, big hulking college kids approaching their twenties, fondly remember the little bags of sweet popcorn I told them were popcorn balls.

Our next winter here, I somehow ended up with twelve bags of cranberries fast approaching their use-by date. Desperate not to waste them, I went on a mad cranberry-cooking rush. I made half a dozen jars of cranberry and apple sauce, three batches of cranberry and walnut cookies, and two large cranberry, almond and sour cream coffee cakes. That afternoon we had our first snowfall. We were running an inn at the time, and as the weather conditions worsened, guests began to call to cancel their reservations. When the last cancellation came through, I got worried. The cranberry sauce would keep, but there I was with three batches of cranberry cookies and enough coffee cake to feed half the town. When half a dozen of my daughters' classmates showed up, wanting permission to go sledding down our sloping driveway, I invited them in for coffee cake and tea. I got rid of a dozen cookies and an entire coffee cake, and my impromptu hospitality, in conjunction with the failed popcorn balls, pushed me over half the way to the coolest Mom title.

The following year, a friend of ours who was running a vending machine business decided that it was too much work and gave us all of his remaining stock. When kids showed up for Halloween, I had two jumbo-size bin bags full of plastic baubles with toys and candy inside, plus another stuffed with lolly pops. Word got around and in no time, our house was Kid Central. After that, my coolest Mom status was in the bag.

It embarrassed me: I knew I'd won the title because of a series of fortuitous coincidences, not because of my imagination or special effort. When I was a kid, there were houses in the neighborhood where the Moms got into costumes and gave out homemade cookies and candy. Their front doorsteps were lined with jack-o-lanterns, their shiny-clean windows were festooned with fake spiders' webs (mine had the real thing), and they would have scorned my pitiful attempts at popcorn balls. And yet here I was, effortlessly the coolest Mom in town. In fact, I was assured that no other contenders came close.

On my way into town this morning, I passed by a house with jack-o-lanterns on the stoop. The hedge was shrouded in cheesecloth with black plastic spiders attached, and a stream of orange crepe paper lay in the driveway. "They had a werewolf there last year," one of my daughters' friends told us last night.

Another Coolest Mom in Town is born. I hope she honors the title.

Happy Birthday, Blog-father

2010-10-25T08:55:00.004+01:00

October 25th is Kim Ayres' birthday. In case you don't know who Kim is, he writes the excellent blog Ramblings of the Bearded One.

Kim has a special place in my heart for many reasons, not the least of which being that he lives within visiting distance so we are actual flesh-and-blood friends who have eaten each other's food and know each other's family members. In addition to being a writer, Kim is a photographer and I can vouch for his skill -- and great patience. The next time he comes to visit, he has offered to take my author photograph for the umpteenth time. This time I won't be planning an international move and I will not lose the CD he gives me.

But what I really owe Kim for is showing me how to start a blog and encouraging me to keep at it. And since the way we met was highly serendipitous, I thought I would use the occasion of his birthday to write about it.

Back in 2006, I entered a few flash fiction pieces in a local writing competition. When I read the other selections, one piece, about a crazy man convinced that he kept the universe in order by believing in it, stood out as obviously the best. We were allowed to vote for our favorite stories, but I couldn't figure out how to do this, so I gave up. The writer was a woman, though -- that much I knew. Her name was Kim.

None of my stories won even third prize. To my surprise, Kim's story didn't win any prizes either. But to my immense delight, I saw that she had voted for my story. I was thrilled and enormously grateful. If I hadn't already read Kim's story, I would have just been mildly pleased, but to have the one person whose work I deemed the best pick my story was almost like winning myself. I wanted to thank Kim, so I googled her name -- something I had only just learned how to do. I pictured a quirky, savvy woman -- Scottish, of course, given that she lived in Scotland and had a name like Ayres. That is how I found Kim's blog.

Imagine my surprise when I saw that Kim was actually a bearded Englishman who was born and raised in Wales.

One of my daughters showed me how to write a comment on Kim's blog, so with great trepidation, I left an anonymous comment. I wrote Kim an email too, thanking him for voting for my story and telling him that I had liked his story more than any of the others and would have voted for it if I'd only figured out how to do this. I knew I sounded sycophantic, but I also knew that I was telling the truth.

Kim wrote back to me, then I wrote back to him. We struck up a correspondence. I learned that Kim had been a web designer and that he was a photographer. I told him that I had written a story for kids which I was hoping to get published, and that I was writing a memoir about learning Japanese and teaching English. "Have you ever considered writing a blog?" he asked me.

It pains me to remember how utterly clueless I was, but the fact is, I had only just found out what a blog was. I imagined that writing a blog must be very mysterious and difficult and, worst of all, expensive. I knew zip-all about the internet, my husband and I were jobless and money was tight; how could I possibly start my own blog? Kim never once laughed at me. He navigated me through the murky waters of blogging and showed me how to start my own blog, step by step. I called my blog ResidentAlien, and wrote my first post in January, 2007. Kim was my very first commenter. A few months later, he dropped by and showed me how to set up a site meter.

Almost four years later, I can hardly remember what it was like not to have a blog.

Through blogging, I have been able to do so much. When I was teaching, I could vent about my students: in the middle of the longest, most awful classes, I gritted my teeth and thought to myself Hey, I can blog about this later! I can vent about my kids: whenever they do or say something outlandish, with a blog, it's grist for my mill. But above all, through my blog I can connect with other writers. I had no idea how much I needed this. Thanks to keeping a blog, I have found a great writing group and an excellent critique partner and any number of beta readers who have given me invaluable help with my various manuscripts.

I owe so much to all the people I have met through my blog. And I never would have started it if it hadn't been for my blog-father Kim Ayres, whose story really was the best. So thank you, Kim -- come around when you can; the French roast is ready and waiting. And HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

The Dog That Talks To Pretty Wives

2010-10-18T09:34:00.016+01:00

I grew up in a parched, hot town in Southern California, which may be why I love rain. As a child, I dreamed of rain. On the rare days it rained, I loved the way the sky marbled over with billowing grey clouds and the air grew heavy with moisture. Storms brought drama, fun, and breaks in the boring everyday routine. Rain always made the world a snugger, cozier, happier place.

In my mind, anti-rain words and lyrics got converted automatically into pro-rain sentiments. For me, the children's jingle Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day became Rain, rain, come and play, come again some other day. In the song 'Home on the Range', where the skies are not cloudy all day, became where the skies are all cloudy all day, because who wanted to sing the praises of a place where there was never any rain? I was puzzled by the title of the hymn Uncloudy Day, which made little sense to me. When I sang it, I automatically changed the lyrics: Oh they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise became Oh they tell me of a home where the storm clouds rise, which sounded a lot more like a place where I wanted to live.

"Why do you always change the lyrics?" my parents used to ask. "Why are you always putting rain into songs?" This confused me: I genuinely didn't realize I was doing it.

Like all children, I tried to make sense of whatever I heard, but I frequently failed. My mother had a metal-framed laundry bag that was called a Save-your-back. When opened, this looked a little like the mangers we would see in nativity scenes. One day my mother caught me placing a doll in it. "It's baby Jesus," I told her, "lying in his Savior Bag."

When our oldest daughter was five, she used to like belting out the lyrics to songs she'd learned in nursery school. To this day, everybody in our family can sing Puff, the Magic Dragon, Here Comes Santa Claus, and My Grandfather's Clock in Japanese. We loved learning these things from her. But there were times she got things wrong too, and we liked that even better.

"I don't understand that song," I told a friend one day as our daughters walked ahead of us singing Hyakupasento Yuuki, or '100% Bravery', a song from a popular children's TV program. We didn't watch TV in Japan; we only knew our daughter's version of the song. One of the lines always threw me with its reference to poteto tamayaki, which sounded to me like 'fried potato eggs'.

My friend stared at me. "Poteto tamayaki? What does that mean?"

"I assumed you knew."

She shook her head. "I have absolutely no idea."

"Well, it's in the song!"

"Where?"

When I sang it for her, she burst out laughing. My daughter had gotten the lyrics addled. Oretachi no moteru kagayaki -- 'our shining zeal' -- had become oretachi no poteto tamayaki -- 'our fried potato eggs'.

Our daughters often did this with English too. When they were still toddlers, someone sent us the DVD of Disney's Pocahantas. Our girls loved 'Savages', a very effective piece in which both Powhatans and the newly arrived English question each other's humanity. The chorus is stirring with its refrain of "Savages, savages -- scarcely even human!" Our daughters would belt this out together with great spirit and feeling, but savages invariably became cabbages. "I don't get it," our oldest daughter mused one day. "Why are they singing about cabbages anyway? And cabbages aren't human!"

When our youngest daughter was ten, we heard her singing the lyrics of one of our favorite songs, the indie group Say Hi to Your Mom's 'Super'.

"Sing that again?" my husband said one day, his eyebrows raised. Our daughter obliged, and we almost fell off our chairs laughing. She had misinterpreted It's just a matter of a little time / before you have the dogs, the tots, the pretty wife as .../ before you have the dog that talks to pretty wives.

"What's so funny about the way I'm singing it?" our daughter demanded. We tried to explain that the song lampooned a self-important boor bent on acquiring a lifestyle to elevate his social status, i.e., a dog, children, and a pretty wife. She strongly felt that her interpretation of the song made sense too. "A dog that could talk to pretty wives would be a great thing for somebody like that to have," she reasoned.

To this day, we've kept her lyrics. And my skies are beautifully cloudy all the time.

Don't Know How Good They've Got It

2010-10-11T19:13:00.012+01:00

There are only half a dozen people in the waiting room when I go in. The receptionist smiles and apologizes. "I'm afraid there'll be a bit of a wait this morning."

"How long?" I ask, surprised.

She glances at her watch. "It might be as long as fifteen minutes."

Fifteen minutes? I feel like laughing out loud. Where I come from, the receptionist wouldn't even bother to tell you if the doctor was running only fifteen minutes late. When I was thirteen, I once waited an hour and a half in the doctor's office, shivering and sweating with a 104-degree fever. A friend in New York once waited over an hour to see a doctor, and she had a dislocated shoulder.

"I can wait fifteen minutes," I tell her. Fortunately I've brought a book and my glasses, but as I open my bag, the elderly woman across from me leans over to her friend and puckers her mouth as she stage whispers, "It never used to take this long!"

Her friend scowls back. "No, it didn't. Ten years ago, you got seen the minute you came in!"

They both shake their heads and give the receptionist a disapproving look. "It's all these new people coming in," the first woman says.

I find myself bristling at this: we've been in this town almost ten years, off and on, but we're definitely some of the new people. We could spend the rest of our lives here and this would still be true. You have to have been born here to be considered one of the town folk, and it helps if your parents and grandparents were too.

"How long have you been here?" the second woman asks. I almost expect the first woman to say We got here before the war, but she huffs and checks her watch. "Twenty minutes!" she says.

The second woman tuts at this and the two of them sigh and settle back for another wait in the clean, cheerful doctor's waiting room with its stacks of relatively new magazines, its comfortable seats, and its tasteful classical music playing in the background. Two minutes later the door whips open and the doctor calls one in. She gets up with an aggrieved look on her face. I'll bet the doctor is in for a chewing out.

My husband and I have lived in quite a few countries now, and we know what we're talking about when we say that the medical service here in our part of Scotland is tops. It drives me wild to hear people complaining about twenty-minute waits at the clinic when they can almost always be seen immediately. In a part of the country where the doctors still go on house calls in emergencies, it irritates me no end to hear people whining about the doctor refusing to come when all they have is a cold.

These people have no idea how the rest of the world lives. My husband spent a week in one of the best hospitals in Sudan and clearly remembers opening a door to a linen closet and seeing a stray cat nursing her kittens on a pile of laundered sheets. The cat, he learned, was a vital member of the hospital: she helped keep down the considerable rodent population. He had to walk 20 minutes to the hospital, shivering and shaking from malaria, because there were no ambulances. Aid worker acquaintances of ours in Uganda once decided to take the bus back to the town where they lived instead of continuing their journey across Africa: they had forgotten their yellow fever vaccination certificates and were told that they would have to be vaccinated. The doctor who would be vaccinating them had only one needle. He knew better; he had been waiting quite desperately for another consignment of needles; but he also knew that yellow fever was a more pressing risk than HIV at that particular point in time.

The United States has a well-deserved reputation for first-rate medical care, but I have never spent less than fifteen minutes waiting to be seen by doctors. Even in Japan, a country with generally excellent medical care, hospital and clinic waiting times are notoriously long and most people resign themselves to losing an entire morning or afternoon when they have a medical appointment. I once spent a miserable four hours in a Tokyo hospital lobby, trying to pacify an infant who was burning up with fever and had, I was virtually positive, German measles. "No problem," sniffed the receptionist when I urged him to give us priority, "we don't have an obstetrics department here." I pointed out that the most vulnerable people were women who might not realize they were pregnant, and that such young women were perfectly likely to visit the hospital for broken bones or head colds, but my arguments did not move him. When we first moved back to Japan with our new baby, our first pediatrician's office was dark, cold, and musty. The floors were filthy, the stuffing of the couch was coming out, and we always had to wait at least an hour. Our local hospital had a water fountain with a single plastic cup which was used by everyone. That has since changed, but I still remember when.

Here in Scotland, when our daughter had a suspected case of the flu, the doctor came directly to our house. A friend of mine had a mammogram which revealed a suspicious lump; within three hours, she'd had an ultrasound and a biopsy -- and a diagnosis of benign. "Sorry you had to wait so long to find out," the doctor actually told her.

The door opens and another elderly woman comes in. "I'm sorry," the receptionist tells her, "there'll be a bit of a wait today."

"No bother!" the woman says cheerfully, picking up a magazine, "I've got plenty of time."

I watch the woman sit down with a sigh of contentment as she pulls out her glasses and opens the magazine.

Perhaps she's one of the new people too. Or maybe she's lived abroad herself.

High Road, Low Road

2010-10-04T20:38:00.008+01:00

I am terribly math challenged.

Please believe me when I say that I am not the least bit proud of this. I have met girls and women who seem to enjoy telling people about their math inability, but I am not one of them. My mother and sisters were straight A math students. Sadly, I take after my father, who was not.

I would like to think that I am secretly capable of doing math. I am not stupid, and I had perfectly decent teachers, including my own mother, who did everything in their power to help me. Friends who were struggling with simultaneous equations or recurrence relations would come over to my house to be taught by my mother. We would sit on either side of her and she would take us both through whatever we were studying step by patient step. "I get it now!" they would say when she had finished, eyes brimming with the light of reason. My mother would then turn to me, at which point I either faked it and pretended to understand or confessed that I hadn't been paying attention.

I squeaked through high school with Cs in algebra and geometry. Much to my mother's distress, but possibly also to her relief, I never went any higher.

My daughters, I am amazed and delighted to say, do not take after me in math cluelessness. They may not be the best students in their math classes, but they are capable and interested. I listen to them telling me about quadratic equations or trigonometry and I marvel that I could have produced children who understand and like math.

The other day, my daughter came home from school with a funny story. A particularly dimwitted girl in her math class was butchering the differentiation of a form of X. (Please don't ask me what that means -- my eyes glazed over just writing it.) The class had been set the task of finding the differentiated form of a function and to do so there were several different stages they had to go through. While everyone was working on the problem at their own rate, they could hear the teacher berating this girl, telling her that her methods were total nonsense.

But the girl insisted that she was right.

Finally, the teacher threw up his hands. "Okay," he spluttered, "I'm going to give you a problem which you are going to solve with your method." His lip curled when he said the word method, but the girl flounced up to the board in her short skirts and waited while he wrote out a particularly nasty problem. She took the marker. In a most inexpert fashion, she shifted numbers around with no apparent logic while the teacher smiled with barely concealed scorn. The teacher, who had not yet worked out the answer himself, then tackled the problem in his own methodical way, step by step. And when he got the answer, his mouth fell open in amazement as the entire class exploded into laughter.

They had both come up with the exact same answer. The teacher claimed that in twenty years of teaching, he had never seen anything like it.

Interestingly enough, I once experienced something very similar. After my disgraceful performance in algebra and geometry, I graduated from high school and went to Florida, flying in a plane for the first time in my life, to visit my cousins in Pensacola. Shortly after we took off, a quiz was distributed inviting passengers to calculate the precise time we would be flying over the Alamo. We were given certain information: the departure time, the plane's average speed, the head winds, the tail winds, and total distance covered.

I took one look at this and felt a little weak in the knees -- I knew math when I saw it! -- but I had stupidly forgotten to bring a book and after all, we weren't being tested on it. So I worked out an equation, marked down my answer, and turned it in to the stewardess.

Twenty minutes later there was an announcement made over the intercom. An accountant from New York City and I had tied for first place. We had each won a bottle of champagne.

The stewardess gave me a bright smile as she handed me my champagne voucher. "You must be one of those math whizzes!" she gushed. I gave her a weak smile back and thanked God that she would never know.

To this day, I will never understand how I did that. "Maybe they made a mistake marking it," my younger sister said when she heard the story. "Even a broken clock is right twice a day," my older sister said. But in my heart of hearts, I want to believe that just like my daughter's classmate, I reached the correct destination -- finally -- my own creative way.

Little Boxes

2010-09-27T20:54:00.007+01:00

The other day I had to get my daughter registered at a new school. We sat together in the deputy headmaster's office and filled out a lengthy form.

"Uh oh," groaned my daughter, pointing to Nationality, "I always hate this one."

"Just put Other British," said the deputy headmaster promptly.

"But I can't," she said. "Because I'm not really British."

I craned my neck to look. The categories for Nationality were Scottish, British (Other), and Other.

"Then British, Other," the deputy headmaster said, raising an eyebrow and looking at her surreptitiously.

"But I'm not only British." She glanced at me meaningfully.

The deputy headmaster took a deep breath. "But you were born here."

My daughter shook her head. "I was born in Japan."

"Put down British (other) and add 'American'," I suggested.

My daughter did this, then she groaned again. "I hate this one too!"

I took a look. Ethnicity was next. I can't even remember all the choices, but there were quite a few: British (Scottish), British (English), British (Black -- Caribbean), British (Black -- African), British (Asian), European, and British (other -- please specify).

"Surely you can find one there that best fits you," the deputy headmaster sighed, looking at his watch.

"A lot of them sort of fit me," my daughter said proudly, "but I'm not only one."

I think we settled for British (other) again, but decided not to specify. The deputy headmaster looked happy to see the back of us.

On our way back home, my daughter was a little quiet. "You're okay about that nationality and ethnicity thing, aren't you?" I asked.

My daughter shrugged. "I envy the people who can say 'I'm Scottish' or 'I'm Chinese'. But sometimes I feel proud that I'm lots of different things."

When I come to think about it, though, very few of my daughter's friends can say they are only one nationality or ethnicity. At her last school, most of my daughter's classmates were Turkish. There, her friends were invariably 'others': a Filipino/Spanish girl who looked Chinese and spoke Hebrew, a Palestinian girl who spoke Arabic but called herself Israeli, a Turkish Cypriot girl born and raised in the U.K. Even at the school she is attending now which at first glance appears to be all white and Scottish, there are a handful of kids who were born in England, who have one or even both parents from Europe or Asia or Africa. This year there are more 'others' than there were two years ago, and when I compare the number to what it was ten years ago, the increase is even more remarkable.

In fact, fewer and fewer people fit neatly into any one category anymore. I'll bet those people who racked their brains to come up with all the different options for Nationality and Ethnicity thought they'd exhausted all the possibilities.

It's getting complicated. Ten years from now, it will be even more so. Twenty years from now, very few people in the U.K. or U.S. will be just one nationality or ethnicity. Thirty years from now -- I hope I live long enough to see it.

And I wonder how they'll modify those forms.

Smokin' Clean

2010-09-20T08:54:00.006+01:00

Way back when, I had a middle-aged student called Mr. Uehara. One day when we were talking about likes and dislikes, I said that I hated the smell of cigarette smoke and Mr. Uehara nodded. "So do I," he said.

I was surprised by this because I'd seen Mr. Uehara smoking in the lobby during the breaks. "Have you quit smoking?" I asked. Mr. Uehara shook his head. "I like smoking clean," he informed me.

I blinked. "What in the world does that mean?"

He spread his hands. "I find clean place, I smoke there. Then, smoking clean."

I found this so mind-boggling I had to sit down. "Smoking clean means smoking in a clean place?"

He smiled and nodded.

"Mr. Uehara, you can't smoke clean. Once you're smoking, the air is not clean."

He shook his head. "Other people smoke, air is dirty. I go to clean place. Smoking clean."

After a few minutes of this, I gave up. Mr. Uehara amazed me. He wholly rejected my idea that smokers should go to special smoking rooms to smoke, that on long-distance trains like the shinkansen, they should not seek out the non-smoking car to light up. He strongly felt that he was a superior smoker because he liked to smoke in clean places. I thought to myself that if I ever caught him pulling out his smokes in the non-smoking car of the shinkansen because the air was purer there, I would not spare him any more than I did the other smokers I told off there on a regular basis.

I mention this because I now have acquired two wonderful cats, Mitzi and Maverick. Their former caretaker (I never use 'owner' when I'm talking about cats) is now in Australia and due to be there for up to two years, so Mitzi and Maverick need a home and we need cats that we know will be claimed in a few years' time when we're ready to go abroad again. They are great cats, but Maverick has a little problem. When he's nervous, he uses the bathtub as a litter box.

Maverick, I should mention, is a very nervous cat.

When they arrived, Mitzi and Maverick came kitted out with more paraphernalia than I have ever seen two cats possess, including their own toys, a month's supply of food and treats, medicines, collars, a scratching post, their own individual cat carriers and beds, and a state-of-the-art covered litter box with a huge bag of environmentally friendly cat litter. I'd been warned about Maverick's little habit, but given this superior litter box and an entire household tiptoeing around with lowered voices, I hoped that he would not need to avail himself of our bathtub after he'd gotten used to us.

This was sadly not the case.

The first morning after they arrived, I found the inevitable in our bathtub. I was both irritated and impressed. I've had cats use the carpet before, but this was my first bathtub experience. I cleaned it up and warned everybody to shut the bathroom door overnight. Unfortunately, our bathroom door doesn't quite close and is easy for a determined feline to push open. The next morning, I had a repeat performance, and this went on all week until my husband fixed the bathroom door.

The next morning, my husband reported that when he'd gone for a shower, he'd found four cat turds in the drain. He fixed the shower room door. I cleaned out the litter box for the umpteenth time, brought Maverick out to the veranda to remind him how it worked, and crossed my fingers.

The next morning, someone left the bathroom door open during the night. I cleaned out the bathtub and filled it with two inches of lavender-scented water. I drizzled a bit of lavender bath oil on the side too, where he has managed to do his business when the bathtub was too wet for his liking.

I shut the shower stall, smeared a little lavender oil in the shower room sink, then went to bed confident that I had finally sealed off Maverick's forbidden toilets.

Maverick got the message. This morning, he'd gone in the corner of the lounge, behind a cabinet. On the nice, clean carpet.

Sigh...

Just as Mr. Uehara liked smoking clean, Maverick likes crapping clean.

Sittin' On The Verge Of The 'Way

2010-09-14T08:50:00.007+01:00

There were five of us in the car when it broke down the first time: my husband, two of our daughters, our friend Güzin, and me. We were on our way to Dina's, tired from a long hike, and ravenously hungry. But it's okay to be exhausted and ravenously hungry when you're on your way to Dina's, because that is the way she likes her guests: tired and famished. At Dina's, I happened to know, we would dine on grilled Portobello mushrooms stuffed with Stilton cheese, wholemeal breadcrumbs and onions. We would eat melon and our choice of vege-burgers or roast chicken, an assortment of steamed vegetables straight from her garden, and apple and blackberry pie with ice cream for dessert -- unless we wanted lemon syllabub instead.

We were all very much looking forward to Dina's. Güzin had heard a lot about Dina and her culinary skills, especially back on the days we were first teaching together and had too short a lunch break.

The car had stalled earlier, worrying my husband. "It hasn't done that in a long time," he murmured, turning the key in the ignition and frowning. The engine caught and we cruised along for a tense five miles or so when there was suddenly that awful, unmistakable smell of an engine beginning to fry accompanied by a telltale death rattle.

"My God," said my husband, "the engine's overheating -- look at the temperature gauge!"

The thin red needle was pointing to maximum, like an accusing finger. We crested a slope with our fingers crossed and prayers on our lips, then my husband eased the car into neutral and steered it onto the verge.

It was cold and windy. I phoned Dina to let her know we would be late and my husband contacted the RAC to explain the problem and our location. Dina said she'd put lunch on hold for us and the RAC said they'd get to us as soon as they could. "They said no longer than an hour and a half," my husband reported.

We tried not to think about our aching knees and thighs or our rumbling bellies. Or, for that matter, stuffed mushrooms, melon, and roast chicken.

It was a long wait. Tales of former breakdowns were related, including the one we'd had on our way back from Christmas shopping in Northern Cyprus, when we discovered the car we had been sold had a cleverly repaired crack through the base of the engine. Japanese proverbs were quoted, and much to Güzin's amusement, two stanzas of the Turkish anthem were sung. My daughters took many photographs, and I told Güzin about all the headaches we've been having with our house and various machines and appliances: our vacuum cleaner, our refrigerator, my husband's computer, the washing machine, the leaky roof and rotting joists. When we had exhausted all other diversions, I pulled out my harmonica and gave everybody spirited renditions of Oh, Susanna, Betsy from Pike, Clementine, and Ali Baba's Farm. We waited more-or-less patiently for an hour and thirty minutes, but once that time had elapsed, so had our patience.

"This is ridiculous!" my eldest daughter cried. And of course she was right: Güzin didn't come all the way from Turkey to sit on the verge of a Scottish highway watching truck drivers leer down at us. But what could we do? "It could be worse," I told them. Everybody groaned as I reminded them that we had shelter and warm clothes. That the country we lived in was not under attack, that we had running water, good nutrition, and no communicable diseases. Oh yes, it could be worse -- it could always be worse.

Ten minutes later the RAC man came along, managed to replace our car's corroded radiator pipe, and we were on our way with shouts of joy.

Dina's mushrooms were succulent, the chicken was perfectly roasted, and the syllabub was so delicious that Güzin and I managed two each. When I drove us home several hours later, the car purred happily along, gallons of fresh coolant coursing through its radiator.

There were five of us in the car when it broke down the second time too, two days later. We were on the motorway, coming home from a day's touring, when we had a repeat performance of death rattle, overheating engine, and stalled car. My husband managed to get the car off the road and we all had to pile out. Güzin wondered why, and we explained that this was the law in the U.K. The RAC told us it might take up to an hour.

We had to make several phone calls, including one to Dina, who had been planning to drop by our house on her way home from Glasgow. We explained our predicament, called our remaining daughter at home to tell her dinner would be late, then lay down on the grass verge and watched the trucks roll past. I wove a braided grass bracelet, chatted with my husband, and played my harmonica. Time passed. Every vehicle was scrutinized for RAC recovery vehicle likeness. More time passed.

"I can't believe these RAC people!" my daughter fumed after an hour. I practiced yoga breathing and tried not to think about the dinner I would now have no time to prepare on Güzin's last night in Scotland. And finally, the last of my patience had dribbled out. When a passing driver beeped at us, I utterly lost it. "I hate it when people do that!" I snapped, making a rude gesture far too late for the offending driver to see it. "Don't they realize we know we look like idiots?"

Güzin shrugged. "Perhaps they were wishing us well," she said mildly.

"Oh no they weren't," I said. "When people beep like that here it's to let you know how stupid you look."

The RAC arrived about ten minutes later. As we were being towed home, weary and worried about the possibility of having to buy a new car, my husband's cell phone rang and I answered it. It was Dina. "I saw you guys," I heard her say through crackling static. "I beeped at you, but you didn't see me!"

No, we didn't see her. And thank God: she didn't see my rude gesture.

The next day, we got a call from the mechanic telling us the car was fixed and perfectly road-worthy: the first mechanic had simply failed to tighten the radiator valve properly. We almost fainted from relief: we don't have to buy a new car after all!

Things could always be worse.

Montbretia From Hell

2010-09-07T12:01:00.012+01:00

I have a lot of montbretia in my garden. I wish I didn't.

This is actually a huge understatement, like saying there are a lot of mosquitoes in West Africa or a lot of landmines in Bosnia and Herzegovina. For someone who seems to spend half her life battling montbretia, it hardly seems fair that I've still got so much of it, but there it is.

Montbretia, in case you don't know, is a pretty flower that grows from corms. The corms make baby corms, which make other corms and so on. If you plant a lot of montbretia corms, you get a whole forest of plants if it rains a lot.

The last people who lived here planted montbretia like it was going out of style. And it rains a lot in Scotland.

"Spray it with a herbicide," Sam the local busybody said when he caught me kneeling in my garden, swearing and digging up corms. "A little glycophosphate will do the trick."

Sam rides around town in a tractor offering to trim people's hedges for extortionate fees, but I suspect that he is a frustrated spy; his main purpose for doing this seems to be keeping track of what everybody is doing. When my husband and I were digging up ground elder in the back garden a few years back, Sam actually walked across the yard to see for himself what we were up to; the fact that we'd already told him cut no ice. His face fell when he saw that the hole contained nothing but stones and ground elder roots -- a hole as big as the one we were digging was big enough to hold one of us. I felt like we'd shattered his hopes.

"I'd prefer not to use herbicides," I mutter as my trowel bites into the earth and a few more embedded corms fly up. Sam's face lights up at this: I know he loves to hear my views on herbicides. It delights him to have me confirm yet again that I'm a latter-day hippie who resists herbicides and pesticides -- I've seen him scrutinizing my slightly wormy apple trees. Sam chugs off in his tractor to tell his cronies in town all about my scruffy apple trees and montbretia daftness, leaving me to my digging.

So far, I've dug all the montbretia corms out of three flower beds, but it flourishes in a dozen more. The worst one was supposed to be done by one of the other tenants here. For years, I've walked past it, wishing it were full of pretty flowers and shrubs instead of weeds, grass and montbretia. It used to have a riot of golden daffodils, scarlet tulips and purple and yellow crocuses in it, but the montbretia grows so vigorously that all of these have been choked out.

Montbretia is beautiful with its fiery orange flowers and lime green leaves, but ours is seriously in-your-face and it does not behave the way it is supposed to. This isn't me dramatizing the issue or being paranoid, it is the honest-to-God-truth.

"Cover the corms long enough and they'll rot," a friend suggested, and her advice is echoed by professional gardeners. Here is what one gardening site has to say about growing montbretia: Find a location where the soil drains well. If there are still water puddles 5-6 hours after a hard rain, scout out another site... Crocosmia will not survive in soils that are water logged.

This is not the case with my montbretia, which could probably grow in a salt marsh on the moon.

Our soil is heavy, with a load of clay in it. When it rains, the puddles are there for a whole day afterwards, but if any of our montbretia plants have rotted, I've seen no evidence. In fact, they seem to thrive in our clay. In that central patch, the flowers spring up endlessly, growing virtually on top of each other, verdantly green, unblemished and vigorous -- I only wish my chrysanthemums looked half as good, or my poor apple trees, for that matter.

We can't imagine gardening without montbretia, the same site enthuses. Can you? And no, I can't. But I'd sure like to.

I picture the things I could grow in that big central montbretia-infested patch, the only place in the garden where there are few trees roots to chop through and almost full sun. Roses! Tulips! Dahlias! Sweet peas!

And one day, I can bear it no longer. I go out to the overgrown montbretia patch with murder on my mind and I pull out every single one. I pile montbretia plants on top of each other until I have a mound five feet high. Sure, it's only a drop in the bucket -- from both sides of my garden, overgrown montbretia patches wink at me, cheekily defiant -- but never mind: this six-foot square will be montbretia-free if it's the last thing I do. I find daffodil, crocus, tulip and bluebell bulbs and carefully preserve them to plant again. The corms left by the uprooted montbretia plants are as thick as fleas on a stray dog and they go down at least three inches. I can barely get my trowel in the ground, they are packed in so densely, but I pull out as many as I can until in no time I have at least a kilogram. These go straight into the trash: I've learned my lesson about trying to compost them. I rake the soil smooth, scatter it with a top dressing of grit, then layer after layer of cardboard and leaf mold. Over this, I stretch a vast roll of polyethylene.

Finally, I wipe the dirt off my hands and stand back to savor the beauty of what I have done. If this doesn't rot them out, I don't know what will! I feel like cackling and throwing up my hands, but before I can, a neighbor walks past our house and pauses. "Oh," she sighs, her face crumpling as she stops to survey my beautiful montbretia-free bed. "What a shame! They were so pretty."

Mom Static

2010-09-01T09:07:00.007+01:00

Do you have Mom static? I'm pretty sure that most mothers get this as part of the whole motherhood package, but I've seen plenty of non-parents suffering from it as well. It's the censorious reaction in you that pops out when you notice something that is not quite right, something -- or someone -- that should be corrected. It is not an attractive thing.

Last Sunday, we took our three teenagers to Edinburgh to hear Modest Mouse, an indie folk rock group. Even before they took our tickets at the door, my Mom static started getting in the way.

"Who's smoking?" I said in a stage whisper as we stood in line outside, freezing cold. The wind kept delivering the offender's smoke to my eyes and nose, making my Mom alarm go off.

My daughters hate cigarette smoke themselves, but being half British, they're not crazy about scenes. So they pretended not to notice the smoke, even when the wind blew it right into their faces. In fact, the wind was making us all miserable, especially my youngest daughter, who was shivering, her arms wrapped around her shoulders. Suddenly I realized that she'd taken off her coat. That all she had on was a pair of tight jeans and a flimsy, sleeveless cotton top with a plunging neckline. My Mom static kicked right in.

"Where's your coat?" I snapped, rubbing my hands over her arms.

"Mom!" she hissed, "This is a rock concert!"

She had put her coat into her sister's capacious bag, which was gaping open. I tried to suppress it, but my Mom static sounded off again.

"Anybody could put their hands into your bag with it open like that," I said almost despite myself. "For pity's sake, do up the snaps, how lazy are you?"

My eldest daughter gave me her famous raised eyebrow. "Dude, there's nothing in there to steal."

"Your mobile phone?" All we need around here is another lost mobile phone.

The eyebrow went up again. "In my pocket."

As we walked into the theatre, my Mom static was suddenly overwhelmed by my sense of being at a rock concert. I didn't go to many of these when I was young, so they still have a special allure all their own. For one brief, fleeting moment, I was with people my age and we were all roughly 19. I was a fetching young thing in a green halter top with zebras on it and a pair of low-hipped bell bottom trousers. And then I realized that almost everybody was 19, but I was one of those staid, mainstream people of a certain age, barely even on the radar anymore. My husband and I might have been invisible as our daughters almost shrieked and ran towards the stage.

As soon as the music started, my Mom static kicked in so hard I could barely stand it. I could barely stand the music either: it was too loud. When Modest Mouse came on, they were over-the-top too loud. They are a great band and I love the songs they play, but the excessive sound made it impossible for my ears to enjoy (or even process) the music. I was miserable because the theatre was packed and I could not make my way down to the stage to urge my daughters to plug their ears with the pieces of Kleenex I had balled up and used to plug mine. Besides, I was pretty sure that if I did show up proffering Kleenex and looking anxious in a motherly way, they might not speak to me for a week. Not that I'd be able to hear them if they did.

The music was great. I know this because I've heard it before and since, on our own modest sound system. In Edinburgh, I might as well have been down at the airport, listening to planes taking off. In the middle of one of the numbers, my Mom static went off again, full blast when one of the drummers lit up a cigarette. I could clearly see him smoking, and so could everyone else. I felt like jumping up and screaming. Did he realize what he was doing? Smoking in front of all those young, impressionable people who could see how cool he was? What kind of a role model was he? It was all that I could do not to rush right down to the stage and snatch the cigarette from his hand.

When it was over and we were all shuffling out of the theatre, my Mom static interfered again. I tried to smother it, but it pushed me over the brink. "Look at all this trash on the floor! Look at all these plastic cups! Who's going to clean all of this up?"

My husband shrugged. "Well, at least you don't have to."

"But somebody does!" I almost shouted. "Look how much beer they've spilled -- that'll stink this place up for the next month!"

We had joined my daughters by this time. "Come on, Mom -- be fair. Can you see waste bins around anywhere?" my eldest asked.

"So you put your trash in your own bag and you take it back to your own house and throw it away!"

A pale, nose-studded youth whose trousers seemed to be falling off his hips slowly turned around to look at me. I struggled not to ask him if he'd dropped his trash on the floor.

My girls sighed and shook their heads. If they ever have Mom static themselves, I know they'll forgive me.