hummingbirds

In the spring of 2008, I had several experiences with hummingbirds.

Back in the eighties, married, pregnant, then a mother, domiciled in suburban red state America, my next door neighbors had several hummingbird feeders. The whole neighborhood talked about the hummingbirds and how those particular neighbors were like hummingbird whispereres. You are so lucky, my neighborhood told me, you will see hummingbirds all the time living next to those eople. They have magic ability to attract hummingbirds.

I only lived in that house a few years but I gardened a lot, sent a lot of time in the yard, a few feet from the hummingbird feeders. I never saw one. I thought hummingbirds were unreal maybe, a myth and they are very rare and if the folks next door really had hummingbird magic, then they got one sighting every few years and it was such a rarity that everyone turned it into a bullshit myth.

Then, in the spring 2008, three times hummingbirds came to me and, I swear, sent me messages. I don't know the messages but they were, I am sure, telling me something.
The first time, there were three. As I walked up to the gate of my pool, arriving a few minutes before it would open, seeing a couple regular guys from the pool standing by to witness what hapened, three humingbirds swooped over to me and all three of them flew close to me, doing thier hummingbird sizzling sarkling humming sparking thing.

If you have never seen a hummingbird up close doing its amazing think, know that it is amazing. It seems sacred and magical.

Three. Jack, a gruff conservative red neck who often bored all us blue neck liberals with his bombast cause he knew it grated on us but he counted on our manners. .. he would say racist things and then pause, make sure he had shocked us, and with timing that suggested he had practiced his act, he would mince a bit (and he is bit and fat and the mincing prance was very funny) he would say, 'there I said it, you know you were thinking it" but we weren't. None of us were sitting there thinking the racist things he said. Typically he made cracks about East Palo Alto, which is where the nearest enclave to our pool was of poor blacks. Mountain View, where I lived and swam in 2008, had plenty of ethnic poor but they are mostly Hispanic. And sure there are blacks of all economic brackets all over Silicon valley. But it seems like there are more poor blacks in East Palo Alto.  EPA is a pocket of our racist culture. The rich folks of Silicon Valley and respected Stanford do a good job of keeping poor blacks out of Palo Alto.

Jack was often a jerk, often spouting very ugly Repugnant thinking.  I have not directly interacted with many people who think like he does. Well, there is my brother chuck the fuck. He talks ike that. Chuck the fuck used to be a judge, even1 But I have not talked to him since our father's funeral in 1988. C-the-F worshipped Rush Limbaugh.

As a public employee (well, now retired) I wonder how Chuck's conservative politics is working out these days as Ohio tries to eliminate benefits for public employees? I wonder if he still worships all things Repuglican?

whatever.

I'm sick of me.  I wish I were traveling.  I long for exotic travel, like a trip down the Nile on a barge or building a library in the Niger Delta of Nigeria or building a house in Burundi.  But today I wish I were in a European city, with lots of spending money, staying in the kind of hotel I have never really stayed in unless my rich mom was paying. Paris would work.  Barcelona would work. Portugal. What the heck, a european tour this summer with lots of money, expensive hotels and good company.

Or Eat Pray Love, a swing to Europe, then India then Bali.

give me two weeks on the beach in Goa India would work. It would seem exotic but it's actually major tourist spot.

Or China. When my sister lived in Korea, she and her family took a tour trip to China. Meals included with the trip price. They toured some remote areas of china on a bus, ate at remote places. China's economy is on the rise but, like everywhere including America, there is poverty and shysters taking money from tourists on travel packages. One evening, in a dumpy hostel with the only available meal the hostel dinner that came with the tour package, dinner was three kinds of rice. That was it. Nothing else. Three kinds of rice. the host, the paid food purveyor was so poor and all he had on hand was three kinds of rice. But that made the tour a real tour of the real China, the tour guide said. In China, a little bit of rice if often all there is for dinner. Nobody had, um, signed up for a slice of real poverty living in rural china. This three-rice dinner feast was presented in a place where there was no choice, no where else to go. My sis said they couldn't go out and just spend more money and buy a restaurant meal. That three kinds of rice dinner was the only option.

I guess it was a memorable meal.  Not the rice.  The memorable part was that it happened, that the tour guide kept a straight, serious composure as he describe the evening's repast, lovingly describing the feast they were about to experience, lovingly describing each kind of rice and telling the suckers, er, the tourists, what to savor to fully appreciate this special meal. It was like he was coaching at a wine tasting.  Sis and her French artist deadbeat husband who freeloads off her still (you have to be pretty desparate if you freeload off a single mom school teacher, am I right?  it's not like my sis, who earned fourteen grand a year in Korea -- but you can live well in Korea, she was assured, when she took the gig and my jerk brother in law . .


this post sucks. Once my brother in law hit me. I had a bruise later. I was standing outside their house, waiting for a cab, my suitcase on the public sidewalk in front of their house but on public property. Being a foreigner, an immigrant, I guess he thought he owned the sidewalk. He told me to get my suitcase off his property while I waited for the cab.  I told him to fuck himself, that it was public property and, I swear, he lifted my large suitcase and threw it into the street. He didn't hurt anything. He was just being an asshole. And, yes, I had said some ugly things to him but I had never imagined he would hit me. When I tried to stop him from throwing my suitcase, which was deifnitely not his property and I cried and talked about how he couldn't throw me off the public sidewalk, he hit me. Just one pop on my left arm.  But it was an assault.

If he hits his sister in law that he has only seen twice in public in front of the neighbors, geez, the asshole must hit people in private. That's how cowards and bullies tend to work, right?

My ex hit me, was physically abusive with some regularity and I did live in a battered women's shelter when I left him, but he controlled himself enough to hit in private.

If a man who beats on women does it in the street, either the French have standards about public violence much different than ours in America or Fred is a way out of control abuser. Since he is adoptive father to my niece and bio dad to my nephew and freeloader to my sister, I would like to believe he has his drinking under control. I bet not.

Once when he was blind drunk, he hit on my gay brother in my sister's basement with sis upstairs waiting for her husband to come to bed.