You get up early at Mathew and Sara’s. The coffee gets made at 5:00.
Sunday, a family new to America (landed in April from Kyrgyzstan) comes over for a broken English dinner. The parents use the word “moonshine.” The kids love the ice cream. All is hilarious.
Home is an engine for taking care of others.
Monday night yoga is taught by a fantastic lunatic who reads poetry as she takes you through poses way too fast to follow or focus. It is borderline maddening until you get what she is doing. The last few cycles are done at half speed and suddenly you know exactly how to relax into what is happening, what will happen next.
Yoga, she says, is all push, reach, yield, grasp, and hold.
Now the whole world makes sense and you want to write a book about school based on a similar model.
From the house you catch the 23 bus to school each day through mostly stable, well-integrated, and alive neighborhoods, neighborhoods famous for fighting redlining and such, neighborhoods that remind you “the system” and “systemic” are not just bogeymen of the left but words that point to things about which we make choices.
That bus, by the way, works well. Always on time. An exception thus far on this return to the USA.
Not surprisingly, the public transport in the Netherlands and America occupy different universes. There the trains and busses go in all directions and getting from city to city, even to small cities, is easy. Here this is closer to impossible. There everyone uses the service. Here it is mostly for poor people. There you learn to rely on what the government provides. Here you learn to resent it.
Nor does the price suddenly double and triple there because a holiday is coming up. When public services are run by businesses, as is more the norm here, the travel days before Thanksgiving are easy to exploit. Happy Holidays, if you can afford them.
What do you do if the engine of the day is money, not care?
Push, reach, yield, grasp, hold . . .