India floats in my mind in a cloud created from long-ago readings (and re-readings) of MM Kaye’s steamy historical romance The Far Pavilions, Rohinton Mistry’s brilliant  A Fine Balance, a smattering of Forster, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s yogic enlightenment.  There’s a little “Slumdog Millionaire” thrown in for good measure, and then the whole mishmosh gets wrapped in brightly patterned cloth and tied with sparkly mirrored thread.

In other words, I know pretty much nothing.  Liam and Caleb are all “elephants! Taj Mahal! Red Fort! Elephants! Tigers! Taj Mahal!” So pretty much they don’t know anything either.

We’ve done some homework: my copy of the Lonely Planet guide to Delhi, Agra, and Rajasthan is as well-thumbed as a holy book; indiamike is now bookmarked on my computer. The boys have flipped through a few India books, and they’ve looked at some websites, but nothing more than that.

This trip is the first Big Trip of our Middle East Adventure, so we’re doing what we can to cater to the tastes of the under-eleven set: we’re staying at hotels with pools for post-touring jumping around; we’ve booked a little tiger-spotting safari in Ranthambore National Forest (erase visions of bwana in a tent doing a Hemingway—it’s a jeep that drives through the jungle for a few hours, then dumps us back at our hotel); we’re going to Jaipur to ride an elephant to the Amber Fort.

Actually, who am I kidding? Our itinerary seems perfectly designed for the closer-to-fifty-than-you-want-to-admit set, too.  It’s my first trip to India and I’m not ready for too much “off the beaten path” this time around. Next time, maybe, but at this point, I’m flying Low Expectation Airways.  I want us all to see a glimpse of this amazing part of the world, become a little more aware of the educational and economic privileges we take for granted, check the Taj Mahal at sunrise off my life list, and then…well, after that, I just want to survive nine days, two boys, one husband, shared hotel rooms, and a LOT of trains.

Husband toured around India and Pakistan decades ago, in the post-college haze of youth and energy. He stayed with distant relatives or slept in youth hostels (or youth hostiles—there’s a reason god invented the B&B, and it was to save us from the youth hostel).  Husband wandered through cities, hopping trains whenever and wherever he wanted. He was, you know, Finding Himself.

Finding Yourself is easy (sort of), when you travel alone. I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to have a yogic “aha!” moment on this trip, the way Elizabeth Gilbert did when she stayed at an ashram, in the “Pray” section of Eat, Pray, Love.  Finding enlightenment is a whole hell of a lot more difficult when you’re traveling with emergency jars of Nutella and peanut butter in your suitcase.  If I were to write a book about this trip, I might call it “Please EAT, Love,” and in it I would answer the burning question of whether a seven-year-old boy can survive for a week on nothing but rice and nutella.

I’ll let you know when we get back.

Namaste.

Hey! Look! Over there! A super-cool button that links to lovelinks! Click the button and maybe you’ll find yogic enlightenment. Or at very least some super-cool blogs to read! Click over, read the other writers, then come back on Thursday (or Wednesday night) and vote for your three faves! You don’t have to vote for me, but your chances at reaching a more advanced state of being will be improved if you do!

Husband and I decided on a splurge during our visit to Abu Dhabi – a splurge underwritten by some research monies he has for an article he’s working on (seriously! About Arabian Sands, a book written by an Englishman who wanted to map the part of the Arabian Desert known as Rub Al Khali, or The Empty Quarter.  This section of desert is shared by Saudi, UAE, Yemen, and Oman, and is larger than France, Netherlands, and Belgium put together.  It has more sand than the Sahara, even though in square miles Rub Al Kali is smaller.  More important than any of those facts? It’s stunningly beautiful.  Gobsmackingly, jaw-droppingly, did-you-see-that beautiful).

Underwriting—or as we like to call it, corporate sponsorship—firmly in place, we made a reservation at Qasr Al Sarab.  We reserved a car service to drive us out there—it’s about two hours outside of Abu Dhabi city, and neither of us are equipped, legally or psychically, to drive in the UAE.  First surprise: when you reserve “a car” in New York, you get some version of an over-scented Lincoln Town Car.  Here? We got a beat-up Toyota station wagon with anemic air conditioning.  We also got an upclose and personal introduction to highway driving, Arab style:  drivers pass one another whenever they want, wherever they want, with a simple flash of headlights to indicate their intentions.  The vehicle in front slides over to the right (without slowing down), the driver behind speeds up into the lane of oncoming traffic (regardless of traffic in other lane), goes around the too-slow vehicle in front, and then slips back into the correct lane.  I stopped watching after a while because I didn’t want my panicky gasps to distract the driver and get us all killed before we arrived at the resort.

Wait. “Resort” is TOTALLY the wrong word for where we arrived after our death-defying desert drive.

We arrived at…time out of mind? A place out of time? The corporeal equivalent to you-have-been-reborn-as-Brangelina?

People like us don’t usually find themselves in places like this—and yet there we were.  With our kids. And their noise and their ridiculous diets (“try some mango?” NO! “Try a little homemade yogurt?” NO!  “What about lamb kebab?” BLECH! “Um, excuse me, waitress? Do you have any…plain pasta with butter? Yes, just butter and salt. That would be great. Thanks…” )  But you know what? At hotels like this one, the staff smiles and nods and makes you think that it’s the most reasonable thing in the world that your kids, when faced with the bounty of an impeccably beautiful lunch buffet, would want…plain noodles with butter and salt.

Suddenly Brangelina’d, we were whisked to a free-standing villa bigger than our entire apartment, with a private patio in back, complete with dipping pool, a daybed that could comfortably fit our entire family, an outdoor shower, and a view of the desert. (Husband’s membership in Etihad frequent flyer club got him an upgrade! Let’s hear it for Etihad!) When the boys realized that they would be able to swim whenever they wanted to? They thought they’d died and gone to heaven.

Heaven, however, had more gifts in store for these boys…Because we weren’t paying for the room (or the drive out here or the upgrade), we got ourselves a sunset camel ride. Camels, my friends, are TALL–being up on camelback means being up.  Camels stand up hind legs first, so when you’re on a camel’s back and he stands up, there’s a rather shocking pitch forward, leading to a moment of thinking “holy crap I’m about to pitch right over this thing’s head.”  After we were all safely aboard, we rode out into the empty desert, then dismounted (plunge down and back, again) and climbed up the dunes to watch the sunset.  The boys thought heaven had opened yet again: for two boys who can spend hours and hours digging at the beach, to be presented with an entire universe of sand was almost bewildering in its munificence.

Even the boys felt the power of the landscape; they sat (silent for a few moments!) and stared at the setting sun, before they tried to create an avalanche down the back slope, hoping to send their sneakers into a sandy crevasse. They climbed up, raced down, spun and leaped and laughed, dizzy with the freedom of all that space.

I’ve never been in such deep desert before. I’ve done some Southwestern US deserts but nothing like what we experienced out there.  Being out in the dunes is like being in the middle of the open ocean or one of the Great Lakes: infinite, powerful, implacable.  You are aware of how tiny we are as a race, how insignificant.

Okay, perhaps the whole camel ride thing is a bit hokey – a Disneyfied version of “Bedouin life” – but it felt magical nonetheless, to be  riding through the desert, with no sounds except the susurrus of wind across dunes and the creaking sounds of the camels’ bird-like feet on the hard-packed desert sand.

The dunes surround the hotel; you can swerve off one of the beautiful little paths that criss-cross the hotel property and run up a dune face whenever you’ve a mind to (and the boys always did).  When you sit by the hotel pool, you could almost think you’re in some swanky but standard spot in Vegas or Palm Springs or Scottsdale:

until you turn around and see…this:

Or this:

I suppose if you’re Brangelina, you get used to spending time in amazing places. And maybe that’s (yet another) reason to be glad that you’re not Brangelina—it would be awful to be blasé about a place like Qasr.

Okay, my birthday was last month, it’s true. But for the last few months, I’ve been going in and out of the Village Tannery eyeing (and yes, occasionally fondling) their leather bags because the satchel I use on my teaching days (my “grownup” satchel, as opposed to the ratty old canvas totes I use for crashing around the city)  gave up the ghost in August. The straps simply shredded beyond the point of repair. 

The Tannery has been a village institution for more years than I can remember–and it’s a bit of a vanishing breed: one of the last stores where the designers and craftsmen work right in the shop making things that are one of a kind.  When I was in graduate school, I used to walk past the original store, which is still on Bleeker just off of 6th Avenue, and wish that someday I could replace my beat-up backpack with one of their creations. 

Today “someday” finally came.  Months of wandering in and out of the store, chatting with the shopkeeper and designer, looking at the artisans in the back of the shop, where they make the bags (yes! hand-made by actual hands, in an actual store, in the actual city where I live. amazing); months of thinking “who am I to afford such a bag?”

Well…my birthday came and went, ushering me firmly over the hill into my late forties;  and mom sent me a little  “happy happy” money and so did dad, and then my sweet sister (who doesn’t live in the city) went to the trouble of getting me a Tannery gift certificate for another little chunk, and then Husband and I went to lunch today (discounted because of Restaurant Week)…we were right around the corner from the shop, I’d had two bloody marys with lunch (never  shop after drinking, let that be the lesson) and…

To paraphrase Jane Eyre:  Reader, I bought it.

This photo can’t do it justice. The leather like buttah, baby; the saturated color of the straps; the attention to detail (two slanted zipper pockets on each outside edge, a phone pocket inside, another zipper pocket inside–and did I say that the zippers are dark green?); the fact that if anything goes wrong with it ever,  the owners will fix it free of charge.

It’s enough to make a girl happy about going to work.

It’s not that I dislike the movies. I love going to the movies.  I like the theater, too.  It’s just that on my own private ranking system, very few things measure up.

My ranking system isn’t stars or rotten tomatoes or thumbs up-or-down. Nope, my system is much more crass than that: it’s money. If Husband and I “just” want to go to the movies, for instance, even without getting a bite to eat or a glass of wine beforehand, our evening costs us close to $100:  two movie tickets at $12.50 and approximately three hours of babysitting at about $15 an hour, plus maybe a little extra if we get home late and offer to pay for the sitter to take a cab home.  It’s about 70 bucks.  Now tell me, seriously, are any of the movies on that list worth that much money?  (Husband is fairly sure that “Avatar” is worth all the money in the world but I just can’t bring myself to be excited by a movie that my nephew described as “Dances with Smurfs.”)

As for theater? Don’t even get me started. Given that the cheapest seats for most good theater–on or off Broadway–start somewhere in the realm of $50, we’re looking at about a 200 or 300 dollar evening.  I coughed it up in order to see Cate Blanchett in “Streetcar Named Desire,” which was, granted, an amazing experience. Husband tells me that there are lots of amazing theatrical experiences out there – and I know he’s right–but at two hundred bucks a pop, it’s a drag when a performance is only so-so, or even (as is all too often the case) downright dreadful.

Me? I’d rather spend money on going out to eat. Somehow even a mediocre (probably over-priced) meal in a restaurant makes me happy, for the simplest of reasons: I didn’t cook it, I’m not cleaning up after it, and no one is demanding that I leap up to get him more milk some salt another napkin more ketchup dessert now.. I mean please… as soon as I sit down.  

Sarah, in the LA Mom’s Blog, talks about whether a dinner engagement is “sitter-worthy” and I guess for me, most meals out are sitter worthy.  A dinner out with friends–a dinner without discussions of logistics and homework, a meal without mediating between squabbling siblings–that to me is money well spent.

So you go to the movies and I’ll meet you later for dinner so you can tell me all about it.

And thus do Caleb’s battles commence, every evening after school or after breakfast, or pretty much whenever. The time is always right, it seems, for an adventure, an explosion, or some sort of violent confrontation.

Playmobil figures are a pretty recent addition to this lego-heavy household; Caleb got a few different sets for his birthday in August and now it’s his latest addiction.  But this new love doesn’t mean that legos and star wars have been replaced. Oh no.

What it means is that all the worlds are linked, pretty much seamlessly: light sabers are wielded by Roman centurions riding camels against the medieval siege wagon manned by a police man carrying a double-headed battle ax. These figures are, collectively, known as “guys,” and Caleb adores them all.

Derrida said once that every discourse is bricoleur–from bricolage, a term that originally meant using found objects in ways very different from their original purpose.  In regular person’s terms, think “Killing Me Softly,” from the Fugees or, for that matter, lots of what gets sung on Glee.

Who knew that my five-year-old was such a philosophe, eh, creating his own narratives regardless of what’s pictured on the packages.

Those little bits of molded plastic offer him hours and hours and hours of play-time, almost always on his own (except when Liam deigns to dip a toe back in the world of imagination). I know Caleb is hoping that Santa has a direct line to the Playmobil factory–and I realize that when ‘the guys” get packed away for good, I’m going to be sad to see them go.

(And–toy alert–if you’re a playmobil fan, you might want to look FAST at the Momtrends website, where she’s featuring a Playmobil contest, among other goodies.)

The god Dionysus, as most of us know, is the god of wine. In mythology, he is also the inspirer of ritual madness, ecstasy, and theater, as well as the god of the epiphany. He is sometimes known as “the Liberator” because he frees us from our normal selves.  Dionysus usually plays a flute or other reed-like instrument and his mission is to bring an end to care and worry.

Well, I saw Dionysus last week, right here in Manhattan, but these days, Dionysus plays a Fender guitar, not a flute. The end result is the same, though: for more than three hours, all my worries and woes vanished, swept away by an ocean of sound and energy, a torrent of screaming, clapping, booty-wiggling joy.

Yes. I saw Springsteen at the Garden and it was good, my friends, it was good.

Shuffling through the crowds into the Garden that night, I grumbled and groused at (long-suffering) Husband: we’re too old for an arena show, too tired to be out on a Sunday night, too broke to be spending money on concert tickets and babysitters.  Then the lights went down, the music came up…and it all made sense: of course we were here.  Where else on earth would we rather be? 

Bruce and the band played “The River” in its entirety (only the second time they’ve ever done so, apparently) and sent Husband back in time, to waiting in line all night to buy concert tickets (remember when we waited in line instead of online?). The songs from that album reminded me of high school, bombing around in my mother’s station wagon and bellowing the words to “Cadillac Ranch.”  

Carried along on Little Stevie’s guitar and Clarence’s horn, my youth went zooming through the arena–even my omnipresent cynicism faded away, so that the sight of Pat Riley (gotta love what you can see with binoculars, right?) pumping his fist to “Born to Run” didn’t make me laugh the way it should have.

But hell, we all pumped our fists–me and Husband; the sixty-something couple behind us who’d flown in from Seattle just for the show, having never seen Bruce before; the twenty-something kids sitting next to us, singing along heavily accented English–we all danced and sang and clapped until our hands burned. The spotlights glinted off gold watches and bifocals, and belt buckles cinched tight against the sploogy onset of middle age; graying heads bobbed along with every guitar lick. 

His audience might be aging and he himself is now on the other side of sixty, but Bruce and the band seem ageless: I guess drinking in the adulation of twenty thousand people a night must be a kind of immortality tonic. His joy at making music seemed as great–or greater–than our joy in hearing him play, and for more than three hours, it seemed like our energies might literally blow the roof off the place.

I forget sometimes, in the forward onrushingness of everyday life, that it’s important to stop. Yes, okay, sure, you can stop to smell the roses if that’s all you’ve got handy, but what about jumping up and down and screaming at the top of your lungs because the music has entered your bloodstream and you’ve been liberated from the need to be rational, calm, grownup.

Springsteen does what Whitman wrote about: sing the body electric/the armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them/They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them/And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

It seems fitting, then, that the one of the last songs of the night–an audience request–was “Sweet Soul Music,” and that the very last was “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.” That’s exactly what happened–Bruce and the band lifted us, and we lifted them–higher and higher and higher.

So even though the week that followed the concert was full of the typical logistics and schedules and hurry-up-we’re-lates, it didn’t matter as much–my body might have been shuttling kids around the city, but my soul was still clapping along with the heart-stoppin, booty-shakin, earth-quakin, hard-rockin, history-makin E-Street Band.

concert photo credits: Michael Zorn