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David Brooks wrote an op-ed piece two days ago called “The Great Divorce.” In it, he talks about Coming Apart, a book by Charles Murray, in which Murray argues that the US is increasingly a two-caste society. Brooks concedes that this argument isn’t new but, he says, “Murray provides an incredible amount of data” to illustrate his claims.

Okay, Mr. Brooks, first. Do you really need data to be convinced that the US is a society with a deep, deep fissure running down the middle, a fissure that’s looking more and more like that trench at the bottom of the ocean where various bad movies featuring Jackie Bissett and Ed Harris ended up?

If you’re a New Yorker who lives on 63rd street and the East River, the likelihood of you ever, ever stepping into a Wal-Mart other than on a whimsical Marie-Antoinette-as-milkmaid sort of errand is almost nil. If you’re a New Yorker who lives on Central Park West, perhaps facing the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the chances of your kids going to a school where there aren’t enough math books for everyone in the class is an impossibility.

You don’t need data to know that (although it sounds fancier if you do).

I mean, I applaud Mr. Murray for finding ways to measure the gaping chasm between “have” and “have not,” and his research challenges my own assumptions. Seems it’s the “Have” tribe who goes to church and operates out of a conservative ideology, while the lower tribe goes to church less often and is more likely to live in sin (probably because they don’t go to church).

But Brooks goes on to say that “the members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.”

Hmm.

1950s traditionalist values. That’s a bit tricky, isn’t it, given what those “values” included? Segregation, sexism, homophobia…Middle-class white women didn’t work; lower-class women of color had to work; men of color were called “boy; mixed-race marriages were illegal. Yes, there was perhaps an “arduous work ethic” but what, exactly, does that mean? Other social scientists have shown that people in the late 20th and early 21st century are working longer and longer hours–and are less and less able to “turn off” work, due to all those iDevices that keep us tethered to work even when we’re, you know, relaxing with a martini brought to us by either Betty Draper or our crisply aproned help. (No names needed, just “the help.” After all, isn’t that a 1950s traditionalist practice?)

Okay. Okay, so we’ll let that slide…sort of. For me, actually, the real sticking point is when Brooks calls for National Service (which, actually, I think is a a great idea but mostly because after a year of mandatory services, then when/if kids go to college, they might know why the hell they’re there, instead of just using the next four years to dick around and drink beer).

Brooks calls for a National Service Program “in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement. If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.”

Let’s overlook his assumption that we’re always going to have “the masses.” Let’s instead say to him that actually, the country already has a national program that could, potentially jam the tribes together so that they’d work together, spread out their values, learn from one another.

It’s called public school.

Thats what we want to restore. Not the fucking 1950s, for god’s sake.

Public schools. Public schools with sufficient materials for all children, with teachers who are given creative license to work with the people sitting in front of them instead of being told to treat these people like they’re widgets; public schools that have safe and inviting physical plants, regardless of whether the building is in South Harlem, Tribeca, Illinois, Nebraska, Oregon.  Public schools that haven’t been gutted by the imperious purse strings of Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and others, whose ideas about testing, testing, testing, seem designed to keep “the masses” as precisely that, and whose own educations (and the educations of their children and friends’ children) contradict every single policy they want to institute.

What if a “good” elementary school were free instead of costing upwards of 36K. No, that’s not a typo, Mr. Brooks. Your own paper, in your own city, reported that private school tuitions, for first-grade, frequently starts at thirty-six thousand dollars.  Which is cheap, I guess, because the kids are obviously finger-painting with liquid platinum.

Public education is uniquely suited to building bridges between these “tribes,” but Brooks ignores that fact, perhaps because he’s been one of the cheerleaders for more, more, more testing, and more “teacher accountability” and all the things that are rendering public schools absolutely incapable of doing anything other than…teaching the test.

And you know what?

Test scores make really, really crappy bridges.

Then someone who lives in Abu Dhabi read my blog (imagine! an actual reader who isn’t my mother or my sister!) mentioned Maria to me, and then a friend in my building mentioned Maria, and then someone else mentioned “Maria…” They sounded like maybe they’d found the Grail—a Grail made of masa, chipotle, and black beans.

Maria doesn’t have a website or a restaurant or even one of those New York-style high-end food trucks.  She’s more like having a friend who also happens to be a fabulous chef. To order from Mari, someone has to give you her email address, then she sends you a menu, you  put in your order, and then once a week, you go collect your delicious, home-made Tex-Mex meals.

Maria’s salsa makes even rice cakes taste good

When I went to pick up my order, I had a moment of cultural confusion: sitting at a low table was a dimpled woman wearing bright-red lipstick and wearing full hijab: black abaya, black sheyla. She was checking orders and handling the money while three teen-age boys in dishdashes gathered each customer’s cartons and containers.  The food smelled delicious—but how on earth had an Arab woman learned to cook really authentic Mexican food?You’d think that after almost five months in this part of the world, I would stop leaping to conclusions based on what people are wearing, wouldn’t you? Here’s the secret about Mari: she’s from Texas. Born and raised in El Paso—“you don’t get much more Tex-Mex than that,” she said with a laugh.

Mari took time from her busy cooking and catering schedule to have breakfast with me last week, because I wanted to know more about her story: how does a nice Catholic girl from El Paso end up in Abu Dhabi speaking fluent Arabic?

The beginning of her journey starts, as journeys so often do, with love. She met an Emirati man at Fort Bliss (what a name! what an omen!); they got married and moved to Abu Dhabi in 1989, when the tallest building only rose about ten stories (I live in a fifty-story residential tower, and it’s not the tallest thing on the skyline) and traffic jams were unheard of.

When Mari first moved to Abu Dhabi, she did not wear the hijab, but, she says, she dressed “modestly” out of respect for her in-laws, with whom they were living.  Her long-sleeved shirts and long skirts gradually were replaced by jellabia—long traditional dresses, “like nightgowns,” Mari says, and then, finally, she began wearing the abaya and headscarf.  Her mother-in-law was pleased, she said, when she finally converted to Islam, mostly because it meant that the grandchildren (five boys and two girls) were being raised as Muslims.  The lovely boys who were helping Mari the day I picked up my order are her sons—all of whom have helped out with “mom’s business.”

I asked if her mother-in-law, or anyone in the family, frowned upon her entrepreneurial spirit and she said not at all. Her oldest son, who is now twenty-three and working here in Abu Dhabi, told her “it’s your drum, mom, go ahead and beat it.”  Her mother-in-law supports the work Mari does because that extra income helps provide extras for the kids—and with seven kids, there are a lot of “extras” (not to mention shoes, books, diapers, and all those other kid-related essentials).

During our conversation, I fell victim to yet another assumption: that all Mari’s recipes came with her from El Paso. “Oh no,” she said. “I learned to make tortillas from a Latina woman who was living here but was originally from Seattle.”  Another assumption bites the dust.  It seems that when Mari moved here, she found an entire community of Latina women here, including some from El Paso.  Although Maria now counts herself as an Abu Dhabi “local,” she also says that it’s only in the UAE that she has justify being “American because she doesn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes.”

So how does a Tex-Mex Emirati learn to cook Mexican food?  She reads cookbooks, talks long-distance with her mother, and good-old-fashioned trial and error. Over the years, Maria has developed an entire repertoire of Mexican recipes, so everything on her menu is made by hand in her kitchen—just Maria and her Indonesian maid, Itoh.  They’ve been cooking to order for about nine years and have inspired a devoted following—so much so that when Mari tried to retire last year, due to health reasons, her clientele was willing to drive out to her house, pick up the food, deliver it themselves, and even serve as sous chefs, if she needed.

Thinking about my own futile attempts to find Mexican ingredients in local Abu Dhabi grocery stores, I asked Mari where she got her raw materials.  She smiled and said that sometimes, on her rare trips home, she will bring back chipotles and other spices; but the tortilla chips and a few other things are made by two companies in Sharjah, of all places (Sharjah is a much smaller, less Westernized Emirate).  With the help of Itoh, all the sauces, fillings, salsas, and guacamole are made right in Mari’s own kitchen and stored in one of three refrigerators she’s accumulated over the years.

On Thursday and Friday, Mari processes the orders that have come in through the week, while Itoh does prep work. On Saturday, they do the shopping and more prep work; Sunday they make sauces and tortillas; Monday morning they put together the enchiladas, salsas, guacamoles; pack up all the orders, drive into Abu Dhabi (Mari lives about ½ hour outside the city), and deliver their Mexican deliciousness to their hungry clientele.

In addition to her deliveries to people in the Khalidiya area, Mari delivers to the Emirates College of Applied Education, and—as if that’s not enough—she’s now at the Ripe Food Market every Friday.

Now that I’ve met Mari, I can see why the expats who live here are so protective of her culinary expertise—if she tried to retire again, I’d be one of those people lining up to help her in the kitchen.

if you’re interested ordering from Maria’s Kitchen, please email me or leave a note in comments, and I will get you the ordering information.  Maria is at the Ripe Farmers’ Market in Khalifa Park on Fridays.

Even in the dead of winter, New York manages to have more skin in the game, as it were, than does Abu Dhabi, abayas notwithstanding. Here is an ad that will never ever get plastered on the side of an Abu Dhabi building:

And you know? I can’t say that’s an entirely bad thing. Does a person really need twenty-foot boobs to get herself through the day?

Leaping between two points, just lifting off from where he’d been, not quite touched down on where he’s going. Not a bad metaphor for the year that’s been and the year that’s to come.

What else does this snapshot show me? That I need to learn how to use my new camera so that the kid is in focus, not the house in the background.

Happy New Year, to friends and loved ones in all hemispheres.

We’ve been away from New York for five months and in many respects it’s as if we’ve never left: the same buildings are still under construction, the same sirens scream through the streets; the same lines form at Trader Joe’s during peak times.  I’m reunited with my beloved iPhone (which doesn’t work in Abu Dhabi) and like all the other New Yorkers, I walk through the streets making phone calls—after all, what could be more private than a busy Manhattan street? Our wonderful community of friends has carved out time for us in their hectic holiday schedules and our conversations seem to have picked up exactly where we left off last July.

Everything is just as it was.

And yet. We no longer have an apartment in the city, so we’re bouncing around: hotel, family, friend’s apartment (thank you Carey!).  The boys look wistfully at our old building and Caleb has asked more than once why we’re not going “home.”  I can still do the city-street hustle, but at the end of the day, I’m exhausted—I’m out of practice, I guess: my life in Abu Dhabi moves more slowly than my (former) life in Manhattan.

In lots of good ways, these past ten days have been a compressed version of our old lives—but the same downside still exists: Husband points out that once again, here we are in New York, where there is so much to see and do, and he ended up having to take the boys to see “Chipwrecked,” which he says may quite possibly be the worst, most cynical piece of film-making in the history of cinema.  In New York, there are a gazillion things to do and we used to be able to do about four of them; in Abu Dhabi there are only about twenty things to do, but we can manage twelve.

Hectic schedules and singing chipmunks aside, however, being here makes me homesick…for here. It’s a strange feeling, to be homesick in the place you call home.  Don’t get me wrong –I like our life in Abu Dhabi; I like the warmth and I’m fascinated by the complexities of modern Arabic life.  It’s where I live, but I’m not sure it’s home—so you know what’s happened?

What’s happened is that this entire visit has me channeling Neil Diamond, circa 1971. I’ve got about the same hairdo, actually, and a version of his eyebrows.  Who knows. Maybe I’m actually a Jew from Brooklyn. But in any case, Neil has it pegged: “LA’s fine but it ain’t home, New York’s home but it ain’t mine no more.”  Swap AD for LA, and Neil’s singing my Christmas tune.

photo source: http://www.portclydeme.com

click here to listen to Neil (and go ahead, sing along. You know you want to)

Neil and I are connecting this post to Erica’s lovelinks. You should click over, sing a bit, read around, then come back Wednesday night to vote.

Can New York be my hometown even though I wasn’t born there? Husband (a true born-and-bred New Yorker) insists that I’m Midwestern to the core but my twenty-plus years in New York ought to count for something, don’t you think?  I moved to New York in 1988, intending to leave immediately after I finished my doctorate.  I thought to myself, who in their right mind could actually live in New York?

Apparently, I can. And what’s more, not only did I stay in New York, I had children in New York. On an English professor’s salary. Children who needed food and clothing and shelter and then, eventually, schooling. I’m here to say that basically I lived in New York inside a mathematical impossibility.

I may not be allowed to call myself a New Yorker yet but my kids certainly are. Sometimes I think the best preparation I could have given them for life in Abu Dhabi is life in New York.  Here’s how you know your kids are New Yorkers:

1.  By the age of three, they know how to hail a cab and can shriek “taxi” louder than any Coney Island native.
2.  They learn their alphabet from the subway signs.
3.  Elevators and escalators are not novelties but regular parts of daily life
4.  “Backyards” exist only in New Jersey.
5.  They have favorite exhibits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the armor! the room of weird sculptures! the chariot!)
6.  They accept as a given that their classmates will not necessarily look like them, talk like them, or dress like them.
7.  “Going for a walk” usually means it’s time to do errands.
8.  Nature happens in parks or after a long drive in a rental car.
9.  They don’t stare at the lady pushing her dogs in a baby stroller, the man in the tin-can suit peddling a unicycle, or the woman yelling that the rapture is coming.
10. They know to put a dollar in the bucket of the cellist, the mime, and the man dressed as Boba Fett playing the accordion in Union Square.

photo from Patell and Waterman’s History of New York

We told them yesterday that after the winter break they’re going to switch schools.

Husband and I are calling it a “mid-term correction” but the boys don’t appreciate the humor.

Here’s the thing: the boys are at a school here in Abu Dhabi that to the eyes of jaded New York public-school veterans like us looks like paradise: lots of patios and terraces, lovely playing fields, shaded areas where kids can sit outside and study.  Classes are small (no more than 20), elementary school teachers have classroom assistants five days a week, there are computer labs, and a swimming pool.  Amazing, right? Even more amazing? The school has virtually no poverty–it’s a private school and many people have the tuition paid by their employers. No one gets free lunch because no one needs it; there are no kids bouncing around in foster care programs; no kids come to school without having had breakfast; there are almost no students with IEPs. From my perspective as a former high school teacher, teaching at this place looks like a pretty good gig, like teaching at Patio Central.

The school organized a sixth-grade week-long trip to Turkey (the 7th grade went to Capodocia, the 8th grade to Thailand)–parents had to pay for this adventure, but what an amazing experience, right?

When we started the school, our hopes were high. We knew going in that the school was not perhaps as crazy-rigorous as the Tiger Mom Academy that they went to in New York (and let me be clear: they went to TMA because we couldn’t be sure of getting a variance for Caleb to his brother’s school; Liam was enrolled at this school for 6th grade because the school goes through high school and he would be guaranteed a spot. In other words, public school pragmatism drove our decisions, not a belief that eight thousand hours of homework is a badge of distinction.)

Anyway. Off they went on the first day of school, a bit nervous with the newness of it all and…it was fine.

Fine.

Now, sometimes fine is…fine. And sometimes fine is not fine.

As it turned out, fine at Patio Central turned into dull. Boring. Homework got finished in an eyeblink; classrooms seemed devoid of  “differentiation,” or at least it didn’t happen in any way that our kids seemed to notice. (“Differentiation:” the bureaucratic way of saying give individual kids what they need to feed their minds.) Day after day, week after week…no spark, no “wow.” And we’re not saying we needed teachers to be putting on a song-and-dance revue here. We were just looking for one kid, one day, to come home interested in something other than what happened at recess. We hired a tutor to do extra math with both boys and you’d have thought we were offering to connect Caleb to a chocolate IV drip, he was that excited. When a seven-year-old boy is jonesing for a math tutor, you know that “fine” is not fine.

And yet. The boys started to make friends. Patio Central is close to our apartment. It’s an established school, been around for almost twenty years; it’s got a good reputation. It’s easy and comfortable; a little U.S. oasis in the middle of the Middle East.  Husband and I went round and round: what makes an “education?” Should we limit our definition of education to only what happens in the classroom? So okay, the classrooms weren’t hotbeds of dynamism.  Isn’t the sheer fact of living in another country an education, in and of itself?

I kept asking myself how we could ask the boys to undergo yet another change, after they’d handled this first big change so well.

And yet. We saw Caleb starting to talk about school being “lame” and saying that he didn’t need to concentrate on his handwriting or his punctuation because the teacher “didn’t care.” (And we saw no evidence to the contrary). We saw both boys getting terrific grades without really breaking a sweat, and while we are proud of the fact that despite all the changes in their lives they were able to get such excellent report cards, there’s something a little out of whack if a 6th grader can pull a 4.0 while spending maybe–maybe–30 minutes a night on his school work.

Well, yes, it’s true. My children are geniuses. They’re also magnificent humanitarians, infinitely kind to one another, and deeply concerned about the fate of the planet.

Or at least they would be, if they could stop trying to kill each other over whose turn it is to play “Age of Empires” on the computer.

On a whim last week, Husband and I went to tour the new K-12 British school that opened this fall. It’s very British, albeit housed in a brand-new sprawling faux-Spanish-tiled complex just outside of town. Kids wear uniforms; Prince Andrew visited last week. It’s got a lot to prove (it’s an offshoot of a big-name UK school) and wham, it seemed they had seats available for January; boom! the boys didn’t hate it when they went to visit!; zipzapzoop, they were admitted; and zing! the decision was made.

Because we are toys of the gods, however, on the same day that the boys got letters of admission to Neckerchief Prep, Liam made the soccer football team at Patio.  All he’s talked about from the moment he found out about Patio is making the school team…and now he was on the squad.  Now we’re supposed to say, “um, sweetie? Don’t get too attached to that football uniform…”

Argh.What do you do? What’s “best” in this situation?  People talk at business meetings about “best practices.” So what’s “best practice” here? Choose brand-new Neckerchief Prep because we think the classroom experience will be challenging and creative? Remain at Patio because, eh, it’s fine, and Liam is over the moon about being one of 5 sixth graders chosen for the middle-school squad?

Well, dear reader, Neckerchief won. We told the boys the other night and now…they’re mad. Not furious, but mad. And sad. And nervous about yet another change. Caleb said “mommy, I have a lot of feelings right now.” Fabulous that he can articulate himself but I gotta tell ya, in terms of acting on those feelings?  He might as well be Bette Davis telling us to fasten our seatbelts because it’s going to be a bumpy night.

We reassure the boys that this decision is for the best, that we know this shift will be hard but, in the long run, they will be happier at Neckerchief.

(what if we’re wrong?)

Hey! look at this cool badge! click on it and be introduced to some great writers whose work maybe you’ve missed as you search for cute cat videos and stuff: click over here and read…then come back and vote for your fave three (pick me! pick me! pick me!)

The people who really know how to work this here newfangled internet thing did pinterest and instagram and all that stuff, and others simply posted lovely, wonderful photos, probably culled from their immaculately cataloged digital archives.

Yeah. Well. Yay for them. Me, not so much.

Husband has done an admirable job of cataloging many of our photos but many (most?) are scattered around any number of hard drives, any number of photo file systems.  So some things are right there where they should be but, for instance, most of 2005 is missing.

So I can’t put my hands on my favorite photos, or not all of them anyway, but here are some photos that could be seen as wishes…

1. May your diapers never account for most of your total body weight:

two year old Caleb

2. May you know the joy (mostly) of an older sibling:

boys, City Palace in Jaipur

3. May you know the joy of silly hats (and silly walks, also fart jokes):

4. May you have the gift of imagination and the empty time in which to exercise that gift:

5.  May you have the gift of music:

Washington Square Park, NYC, 2010

6. May you have the gift of art:

sand painting, Union Square Park NYC, 2011

7.  May you have adventures:

8. May you have mysteries…

a screened window, Humayan’s Tomb, Delhi

9. …and beauty…

Rub-al-kali, The Empty Quarter

10. …and peace:

Sedgewood, New York State

Here is one of the only public recycling bins I’ve seen in Abu Dhabi (there is no mandatory recycling program):

Here is what I’ve seen in the water off the Corniche:

The few times I’ve been lucky enough to go paddle-boarding, I’ve scooped so many plastic bags, beer cans, and other detritus out of the water that my board looks like a small garbage scow.

There are a few recycling bins in our building but no one knows whether the carefully sorted bottles and cans actually end up at the recycling plant or are tossed in with the regular trash. We suspect the latter—and, as a result, we’ve kind of given up. We (and many of our neighbors) have given up hope and toss our plastic containers and cereal boxes down the trash chute with the old banana peels and chicken bones.

Old habits die hard, though, so the soda cans and milk bottles find their way into a separate bag, where they wait for…well, sometimes the cleaning lady dumps the bag into the trash, and sometimes I lug the bag out to the Corniche recycle bin and hope for the best.

It’s not even that I’m such a militant recycler. I’ve never put a brick in my toilet tank to displace water and thus create a more water-efficient flusher, for instance.  It’s true that back in New York, I got all excited about composting, but mostly that was to fool myself into thinking I had a garden, or at very least a back yard, when in fact all I had were a few window boxes.  (Plus the community composting bins were only about a block away. If I’d had to lug that stinky bag of rotten food more than a block, I think my composting spirit would’ve died on the vine).

Abu Dhabi wants to be a world-class city and there are glimmers that the people in charge understand that “world class” doesn’t just mean lots of tall glass buildings.  A few years ago, the government drafted the “2030” development plan, which called for investments in infrastructure, cultural centers, and education.  There was some language in this plan about environmental awareness, but from what I can see, right now what the city has is…language: the promise of more recycling plants being built (there is currently one plant in the entire country), a few banners hung around extolling environmental stewardship, ads for new (huge) skyscrapers claiming that they will be “green” when they’re finished, despite no visible evidence of this fact.

Until we got here, I hadn’t realized that recycling has become second nature.  So much so, in fact, that every single time I throw something away that in the States would have gone into a recycling container, I get a little twinge.  A little moment of “you’re not in Kansas any more, sweetie.” And that, in turn, creates a rather ugly little dialogue in my head, about how “We” do it right and “They” don’t get it, so “We” should teach “Them” how to be more responsible about the environment.

It’s an ugly dialogue because, of course, it’s not as if the recycle-happy US has figured out how to care for the environment. (Hello Kyoto protocol anyone? Hello “global warming is just a theory”?)  How do you educate an entire society to stop throwing their crap wherever they want, so that, for instance, when you’re swimming in the Gulf and your kid yells “jellyfish” and runs onto the beach, you’re not confronted with…two used condoms drifting slowly through the water? Lovely.  So glad you had a good time last night, dude. Twice, apparently. Kudos.

Here’s my own little recycling crisis: we have plastic water bottles. We seem to collect them at every turn, despite the fact that we all have our own reusable bottles. I don’t trust the recycling bins and I can’t bring myself to throw the bottles in the garbage.  So I just…keep them.  I’ve got an entire archipelago of plastic bottles on my counter:

I fill them with water and freeze them. I’m hoping that the city will develop some kind of real recycling program before my freezer fills up, because then I’d have to get a new freezer, and I don’t have room in my kitchen.