I have had many pleasant surprises
in terms of sustainability and childrearing during our stint back in the US. I was expecting lots of consumerism and
excess and bad influences on my kids, and there is certainly a fair share of
that, but I hadn’t been expecting the ways in which living in Arlington, VA
might be more sustainable, more healthy for my kids, than our life in
Colombia. Perhaps chief among these has
been the possibility of sharing the changing seasons with my boys, and thus
getting to know a particular place in a very special way.
I think I’ve always liked the
seasons of the temperate US, the regular, recurring cycle of change throughout
the year. I grew up with a very fixed
idea and set of feelings I associated with each season. Times spent inside, cozyand secure during the
winter; the hope and ecstasy of spring (which is always pretty precarious and
uncertain in Chicago, sometimes going back to bitter cold pretty late in the
season, but usually skipping straight to stifling heat with little interval of
mild spring); the reckless abandon and freedom of a kid’s summer; and finally
the time of abundance and preparation of cool fall. I’ve always thought that fall is my favorite
season, because it’s the time of harvest and good meals and new school years
and Halloween. But this year, after
another stark, drab winter, I realized that the onset of spring and summer
feels like coming back to life after a collective depression. It reminds me that in many ways, I lived for
the fleeting glory of summer as a child, and the rest of the year was just an
exercise in self-control and patient waiting.
After having lived quite a long time
on the Equator, I had forgotten the yearly drama of the changing seasons. I mean, I remembered in a factual sense that summer was hot, and
winter cold, etc., but I had lost the visceral feeling of actually living
through these seasons. In fact, that
idea of waiting and change that we associate with climate in the temperate
zones is totally alien to the Colombian context. I mean, there’s a dry season and a wet
season, but more present in most people’s lives is that the
temperature changes drastically when you move from one place to another, from
the cool highlands to the moist, mild coffee zones, or down to the sweltering
heat of the Plains and the Coast. And in
each place, the weather is that way year round. So in hot places it’s always hot, in cool
places always cool. There is no crisp,
cleansing freeze, no bursting into life as the warmth returns. It is the total absence of the cyclical way I
had of seeing things growing up, centered as I was on the passage of times and
seasons. Even when we would fly from Colombia to Chicago to visit once a year, there was no sense of seasons or time. We usually would visit in the summer, and it
was like a tropical getaway for us, accustomed as we were to our cool mountain
climate.
I had gotten very used to this in my
Colombian home, and certainly enjoyed the comfort of being able to choose if
you go to a sweltering place or not, and the absence of bitter winter. In Chicago you don't choose these things--they're just thrust on you by the time of year. So it was a funny surprise to move to Washington and experience the
US seasons again after so long, and then to share them, first with Sam, and
then with Paulo (who now has never really known anything other than the temperate
scheme of seasons). Starting with our arrival to
DC in September, Sam and I would walk to school every morning and return
walking every evening (later we rearranged schedules so my wife would take Sam
and Paulo in the mornings, and I’d get them in the afternoon). It is not far, perhaps a half mile, so we would go
with pretty much the same route every day.
Coming back from school, we would pass a
huge red oak tree near a wall Sam likes to balance on, then the mercilessly
pollarded catalpa trees at the corner house where Sam went trick-or-treating
for his first US Halloween, then a mulberry tree that we eat from in summer, the
house where Roxy the dog and her brother lounge in the yard most of the year,
the high wall that Sam fell off of one time and hit his face on the sidewalk,
the cherry blossom tree that blooms two weeks before the one across the street
(because it’s next to a south-facing wall), and after that we go by the lion statue that we greet in
Swahili. Sam has learned the names and
habits of these trees, seeing how the maple gets bright red flowers in spring,
which turn into small red helicopters, then become big green helicopters in
summer and fall down in fall, before the leaves turn bright red and fall down too. He has gathered black walnuts from Roxy’s
yard and opened them with me, only to find that black walnut trees don’t
produce good nuts in Arlington, VA. He
has observed the fallen beard-like flowers on the sidewalk, and known that
there must be an oak tree near. He’s
picked nascent magnolia blossoms to put in water so they’ll open the next
day. And he’s harvested juneberries from
all the trees we’ve scouted in the neighborhood, to make jam and smoothies.
In summer I would arrive at the boys’
preschool sweaty from my bike ride home, and we'd go to a nearby playground with
a water park that we could all cool off in. In
winter we’ve noted which trees stay green, and we’ve made snow castles using a
box to mold the bricks. Paulo has rolled
in the snow and made snow angels, following his brother’s lead. And on tremblingly cold nights we’ve recited
Robert W. Service’s The Cremation of Sam McGee as my father used to, to the
point where Sam can recite entire stanzas from memory.
In short, my older son (and
hopefully my younger son, though he can’t articulate it yet in words) got to know our neighborhood, our little part of the world, in the profound,
visceral way you can only know a place after walking the same paths day after
day. There are variations every day,
either from our slightly altering the path we take, or from the changing
seasons, or the unexpected people we run into on a given day, and these
variations are also a part of our sense of place, and the boys’ learning that
existence and identity are both static and dynamic. The maple tree is the same tree every day we
see it, though it is never exactly the same as the day before.
Aside from enjoying the passage of
seasons with my sons, I have been thrilled to find how easy it is to live
sustainably in the Washington, DC area.
We didn’t have a car while we were there, and never missed one.
This would be impossible for us in Colombia; though we almost never
drive in our own town, we do very frequently go back and forth to other places
to visit family. In DC, the few times
we used a car, we were lucky enough to have a good friend of mine from
Chicago who now lives in Washington. Having grown up in the same
socialist-Catholic-anti-consumerist setting as I did, he thinks nothing of
letting us take his car for days at a time.
I would bike to work every day, and much of our family plans we would undertake on
bike or on foot, as well. We were a half
block from the Metro, so when I felt lazy I could take it to work, and we would usually use
the Metro to do things in central DC with our kids on the weekends.
Oh, and the things we'd do! Our default weekend plan was to go to the
library in our neighborhood, or the massive park around the library. They not only have books, but even toys you
can take out and play with while you’re at the library. But at least once a week we’d do a more
ambitious trek, usually to one of the Smithsonian museums that are an easy
Metro or bike ride away. We’ve gone ice
skating in the winter, and seen high-quality puppet shows. Every Sunday we would walk to a Spanish-language
Mass across from the boys’ preschool, and we'd play in the nearby playgrounds
before or after church. Even going
grocery shopping was a decent, car-free plan that we can make into a special
outing with the boys. For older kids
there are lots of cheap or free summer activities in the DC area (plenty of really expensive
ones too, if you’re into that sort of thing!).
Sometimes I regretted that we’d be leaving Washington before we could
make use of these more structured activities that abound for grammar school-age
kids.
In short, living in Washington, DC
(actually in Arlington, VA, but we were closer to central DC than most of the
city proper!) has been a real treat. I
never imagined that we could find a living situation in the US that would allow
us to do the things we want to do, live simply, and not need a car.
There were certainly drawbacks. I was appalled to see and experience
firsthand the raw, blatant animosity and abuse toward Latinos in the DC
area. My impression is that Washington,
DC and its suburbs still think that the “rightful owners” of the turf are
WASP-y whites and blacks, and all the immigrants (and there are now a lot of
them) are somehow unwelcome guests. This
is in strong contrast to Chicago, where our racism manifests itself as clear,
grudgingly respectful lines drawn between white ethnic and black areas, and
Latinos are sort of a special category that can live in peace in both black and white
areas. Numerous times in our life in the
DC area my wife has been harassed, threatened, and dealt with rudely by
strangers in public places, and even by employees in places like museums and
stores that were supposed to be catering to her! Sometimes it was when I was around, and these
abusive idiots assumed that I too was some docile, scared Latino that’s too
polite to talk back, until I would start yelling at them in English.
In general race is a toxic,
omnipresent obsession in the US. I knew
this before we got here, having grown up in a racially tense Chicago. But after
having lived in other places where race is just one small factor in how people
judge you, it was a jarring experience to enter the fray, especially with my
wife and kids in tow who were at once less aware of the situation coming in,
and more subject to people’s ignorance because of how they look and talk.
It’s been a constant query and
challenge for us to introduce our son to race and teach him what he needs to
know to keep from being either a victim or a victimizer. He’s had kids outright reject him because
he’s from a different country, and also sort of subtly disrespect him in ways
where you’re not sure if it’s because of the color of his skin or his background
or just that some kids get along better than others. He’s also been stuck in between his natural
urge to help other Latino kids in his school that don’t speak English so well,
and his desire to fit in with friends that exclude such kids (and again, it’s
never totally clear if the exclusion is because they’re foreign or just because
they are new or young or don’t like Ninja Turtles or whatever).
And because my elder son’s
appearance is ethnically ambiguous, it complicates things further. Surely he escapes much of the outright
discrimination he’d experience if he looked more clearly black or Indian, but
it also makes it more difficult sometimes to explain things to him. I can’t just say, “You’re white, so don’t
oppress other kids for their race,” or, “You’re black, so make sure no one is
treating you bad because of it.” Our
lessons are always more like, “You’re white, and black, and Indian, and from the
US, and from Colombia, so it doesn’t make sense if you dislike another kid
because he’s one of those things,” or, “If someone tells you they don’t like
people from other countries, tell him then you won’t be friends with him,
because you’re from another country.”
These lessons are always very specific to the situation, because I don’t know how
to teach him larger things about the societal structure of race and class
without either going over his head, or making him think the world is just a
totally unfair shithole. What was I to say when Sam asked if all white
people are bad after I'd read him a passage of Malcolm X?
Sometimes at my
urging we review the skin color of our friends and family one by one, so Sam will be aware
that there are all types of color and appearances in his family, and that it
would be incoherent for him to single out someone for their skin color as a
criterion for his friendship or dislike.
Of course I don’t want him to be hyper-aware of race and think of
each person as white John or black Ed or brown Tommy. But pointing out the diversity of appearances of the people he loves seems like the simplest way to teach him that skin color is just one relatively minor trait to define each person. At the same time, I realize that not everyone’s family is
as racially mixed as Sam’s is, so what is my recommendation for them?
How do parents in all-white families and communities responsibly discuss with their kids
why discrimination is wrong? (The
answer, all too often, is that they don’t).
What should we do when Sam loves a movie called How
to Train your Dragon 2, where the bad guy happens to be the only guy in the whole movie with skin
color like Sam’s or his sister’s, and with a foreign accent? What am I to say when we watch Dumbo, when after maybe 25 years
without having seen it, I was shocked to see a bunch of jive-talking black
crows playing the minstrel role? Or are
these crows in fact the only example of sympathetic, empowered characters that
try to help Dumbo (in addition to the mouse, who also speaks with a specific
ethnic/regional dialect)?
Sample dissertation text for my four-year-old son:
"Sam, you should understand that these cartoon crows, which are decidedly not people, are nevertheless clearly identified with black American humans due to their speech and dance and movement. In some respects their speech is an accurate rendering of one dialect that is native to the US and neither inherently superior nor inferior to any other. However, their antics are offensive due less to the movie itself and more to our long history in the US of undervaluing black culture and life through both media depictions and through real violence visited upon black people.
I mean, the whole thing is sort of ridiculous. (I won’t even get into the whole ten-minute
psychedelic drunken elephant sequence!)
At any rate, we've left Washington behind, both the beautiful, evolving trees and the bilious racial tension. It’s time to
move on, once again back to the tropics. My wife’s and my careers in
international development demand that we move around the world relatively
frequently. This is a life we’ve chosen
and that we love, but we it is still hard to say goodbye to all the things we’ve
come to appreciate about a place. We will miss our walks to school, our changing seasons, our weekend routines and favorite museums. But we will
take with us something we learned in the US:
how to search out fun, free kid activities, wherever you are. Surely few places we'll go will have the rich offerings of the Smithsonian, but every town has parks and museums and streets and playgrounds to discover.
We welcome a return to the tropics, to
the carefree, unstructured way of living when there is no winter frost or
summer swelter. But as we enter what
would be the fall months back in the States, I for one miss the feeling that
comes with hunkering down for a long winter, protecting yourself in the cozy
warmth of a well-insulated house.
No comments:
Post a Comment