Standing in front of the machine was a group of about ten laborers, all wearing the bright blue jumpsuits of the street-cleaning crews.  They didn’t notice me as they laughed and chatted and took turns inserting their bank cards into the machine.

I figured it would take at least fifteen minutes for them all to finish their transactions, so I turned back around to ask the desk attendant in our lobby if he knew where I would find the next closest ATM.  He came out to the street–his uniform, of white shirt, black trousers, a jazzy tie, and some sort of epaulet type thing on his shoulders, looked much spiffier than the other men’s grimy blue coveralls.  Instead of pointing me towards the next ATM, he said something in a language I didn’t understand (Urdu? Tagalog? Arabic? Hindi?), jerked his chin at the men, and then waved his hand at me.

The laborers melted away from the ATM like ghosts and stood quietly to one side.

What to do?  I didn’t want to cause the desk attendant to lose face, so I didn’t want to not use the ATM. That would make him look bad in front of men he clearly considered to be his inferiors.  And yet the workers were there first, obviously, which means they should’ve been able to finish their business before I got my turn.

They all stared at me, waiting.  I felt Caleb’s head swiveling, looking at the desk attendant, looking at the laborers, looking at me.

I smiled, muttered my best “shukran” (Arabic for “thank you” — although I have no idea if anyone involved in this situation was a native Arabic speaker), got my money, muttered another thank-you, and darted to the curb with Caleb to hail a cab to his friend’s house.

In the back of the cab, Caleb said “mommy, why’d that man make the other guys let us go first?”

How to answer?  “Well,” I said, “those men were workers, and so the man in our building thought–”

Caleb interrupted: “I know. It’s because that machine is on our building. So it’s like it’s ours. So we get to use it first.”

I stopped. “Yep,” I said. “That’s right. It’s our machine.”

Sometimes it’s easy to forget here, in this city of expats (only about 19% of the population is native Emirati), that we’re living in a culture very different from our own.  You can trot around reveling in the weather and the deep blue sky and imagine you live outside LA, maybe, or Houston.  And then sometimes, whammo, my whiteness and my outsiderness sinks right down into my bones until I spin around in my head like a dervish. I have privilege because I’m a white expat; I have no privilege because I’m a woman; I am deferred to because I am a woman; I am suspect because I am white.

So yes, you’re right. I did bail on the teachable moment. I have a feeling that, unfortunately, there will be plenty more where that one came from.

As if.

But even if people were going to write letters to us, or send us packages of things I can’t find here (what I’ve learned is that what you can’t get in a certain place tells you more about that place than what you can get)…you couldn’t send it to my apartment.

I don’t really have an address. No one does.  There isn’t any home mail delivery in Abu Dhabi and there aren’t what you’d call street addresses, either.

I’m used to hopping in a cab and barking out the address of my destination New York style: 14th between 2nd and 3rd; Houston and Avenue D, south side.

Not here. Here everyone navigates by landmarks because instead of the streets having no name, ala U2, the streets have 2 or 3 names. Our building is on Electra Street. Also Sheikh Zayed the First Street. Also 7th street.  The nearest big cross street is Sheik Rashid Al Bin Maktoum Road. Also Old Airport Road. Also 2nd street.

To add another layer of fun to this larky layout is the fact that behind these multiply named streets, behind the tall buildings that line the wide avenues are honeycombs of shopping districts: tiny shops jammed along crisscrossing little alleys that have no names or numbers at all.

It’s a constant set of triangulations: to find one thing, you need to have one or two other things to orient against: the tailor who hemmed my pants said his shop was “behind Wear Mart and down from Swiss Arabian perfume store.”  The dry cleaner puts this address on the dry cleaning bags:

Not having street addresses creates a disconcerting sense of living in a small town—just turn left at old Mike’s café, drive on past Aunt Tilly’s shop—even though we’re surrounded by skyscrapers and multi-lane highways.

If you want mail, actual mail? You need one of these:

Instead of a post-box, though, many people get their mail delivered to their offices. To get a post-box, you need to fill out an application, turn in copies of your residence visa or passport, two passport photos (I have no idea why), and then of course you need to stand in a bureaucratic line (or two or three). Getting mail at the office means I get my beloved New Yorkers in print, as god intended them to be, but about two weeks after the fact.  You want to know what’s happening in the city in late August? I’m your gal.

What surprises me is how strange it seems not to get mail delivered here, to our apartment. Who knew that “getting the mail” was a ritual important enough that it would be missed?

We’re slowly putting together our routines—boys off to school in the mornings, Husband and I off to work—but I still don’t feel “at home” here.  And as I was roaming around taking pictures of post office boxes, I found a (slightly overstated) metaphor for these early days of expat life: I am an unknown letter…or, rather, a letter that hasn’t yet been addressed.

The flight attendants come through for the “paid food service.”

Passenger in front of me: I’ll have the turkey club please.

Flight attendant rummages in cart: We don’t have any more.

Passenger consults “menu”: Could I have one of these slider sandwiches, then?

Flight attendant rummages in cart: We don’t have any more.

Passenger consults menu: Um…PB&J?

Flight attendant doesn’t even bother to rummage: We’re out of sandwiches.

Passenger, defeated, tentative: Peanuts, please?

Flight attendant, smug: Nope.

Passenger sinks down in seat: Nothing, then.

Flight attendant moves on down the aisle, smiling.

Reverb 10 prompt #12: This year, when did you feel the most integrated with your body? Did you have a moment where there wasn’t mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU, alive and present?

I remember waaay back in the day–high school and early college–when I was a bun-headed dancer. In high school, daily life was pretty miserable but when I walked into the ballet studio, all that misery got swept away by the precision of plié, tendu, plié, relévé. The girl I saw in the mirror controlled her body in a way that she couldn’t control the world outside the studio–and while I was never going to be a prima ballerina, I think having the separate world of the ballet studio helped me survive adolescence.

I’m pushing fifty at this point, so that ballet body ain’t coming back any time soon (okay, ever) and I’ve (sort of) made my peace with that. What I keep searching for, in my exercise life as an adult, is that endorphine-fueled focus, the sweat that puts everything in perspective.  For a while in grad school I ran on a semi-regular basis but ultimately? I run too slowly and it hurts. Knees, back, ankles. Just one big slow ouch.

And now, in this late-mid-forties place where I find myself and my extra five (eight, maybe ten) pounds? I find myself  at the risk of sounding like someone who totally drank the lotus-spiked kool-aid because what I love these days is yoga.  When I’m sweating in the yoga studio (which has no mirrors, a key intervention in the struggle between mind and body), all the crap that I think about all day–  whattocookfordinnerwhoispickingupwhomwhatamIteachingtomorrowdidIcallthedoctordidIcallthebabysitterwhattimeissoccerpracticeareweoutofmilkisthelaundrydone –all that stuff disappears.It’s not the “om-ing” that I like, although I’m getting less cynical about that, it’s the focus on where I’m putting my body, listening to my creaky joints, feeling them de-creak as I stretch, and the distinct pleasure I take in being able to do things now that I couldn’t do two months ago.

So the short answer to this question is, “today, at about 12:40, when for the first time I managed to lift myself for a split second into something that almost resembles crow pose.” Of course, I tipped forward immediately and about cracked my nose on the floor, but I guess that’s all part of it, right?

just for the record – that person in the picture? not me – it’s from dailygoods.wordpress.com

So if you haven’t already, click on that there like button. You’ll make my mother very  happy.

Dubai Mall was a bust as far as the boys were concerned. They liked the aquarium, liked the Burj, but the rest of it? “Stupid and overpriced,” as Liam announced.  What use did they have for Montblanc pens or Gucci shoes or gold-plated memorabilia?

When we finally escaped from the mall, we had to get  to the bus station for our bus back to Abu Dhabi.  We took a slight detour through the Spice Souk, where the boys found what Caleb called real treasures: golden jewel-encrusted elephants, only 15dhr (about 4 bucks); a replica of the Burj, sprinkled with diamonds, for only TWELVE! A golden box with a genuine enamel lid engraved with an image of the Burj…only TEN!

Treasure packed in our bags, we took a dhow—a flat-bottomed wooden boat—across Dubai Creek to the bus station.

And that’s when we found ourselves in an entirely different Dubai—not the bling-bling world of the mall, or the tourist trap of the Souk. Nope, we pretty much found ourselves in the Port Authority of Dubai, with two tired kids in tow, each just on the verge of complete meltdown.

There was nothing picturesque about this bus station; there was no danger of anyone breaking into a sort of Bollywood-esque chorus. There were just lines. Long, long lines of people waiting for busses and bossy men in over-fancy uniforms telling people where to stand, speaking in a fast combination of Arabic and English.

First fancy-uniform guy ushered us to the front of the line because families get priority boarding (nice, eh?). Then second fancy-pants guy said, nope, get to the back of the line. The boys shifted from quiet grumbling to low-level whining, failing to see any humor in the situation whatsoever.

We watched as one bus drove in, filled up, drove away; then watched as all the men traveling alone were herded into a separate line, while we stayed in the “families and ladies” line to wait for the next bus. And when might that next bus arrive? No one seemed able to tell us.

Boys now in full-throttle whine.

I realize we are (eventually) going to take a two-hour bus ride back to Abu Dhabi on a bus with no toilet, so I seize the moment and decide to take the boys in search of the bathroom.   I saw a sign that said “ladies” and walked toward it, only to realize that the sign was pointing me to a ladies-only bus stand, not the loo. I asked yet another fancy-pants official, who gestured us across the parking lot, so off we went, threading our way through the crowds, boys now whining loudly, close to outright rebellion.

We get across the station and—no bathroom, just a greasy-spoon restaurant surrounded by men smoking cigarettes.

Try again: ask another official, who waved in a different direction, so off we go, me trying to make jokes about how confused everyone is. The boys are having none of it, and this time we end up at a ticket kiosk/prayer corner. Men are buying tickets at one window, and several others are saying their prayers, crowded on a green rug.  Interrupting them to ask where the ladies room is seems like a bad idea.

“Forget it,” I say to the boys.  “We don’t want to miss the bus. We’ll just deal somehow.”

“I have to PEE!” Liam buries his face in his hands.  “WHY CAN’T ANY OF THESE PEOPLE SPEAK ENGLISH!” he shrieks. “And why don’t ANY of them know where the bathroom is!”

I decide now is not the time for a discussion of ethnocentrism and cultural arrogance.  (Plus that, almost everyone does speak English. Which is to say, a hell of a lot better than any of us speak Arabic.)

At that precise moment, Caleb saves the day: he points to the sign on the wall that indicates the way to the ladies toilet.

Liam slams open the door to the stall, only to stop short: the “toilets” are holes in the ground, with porcelain ridges on either side—you know, to help prevent slipping while squatting.

The boys aren’t quite sure what they’re supposed to do and when I explain to them, they’re both horrified—and completely unmoved by the fact this whole situation is going to be harder for me than for them.

The toilet holes accomplish one thing—well, okay, we all pee, so really two things—but they’re so awful that we have no choice but to laugh.  It’s not often that you get to say a toilet hole wards off a temper tantrum, right?

And that, friends, was our night in glamorous Dubai.

“The Kids Are All Right” (photo credit: focus/everett/rex features)

Five or six years ago, towards the end of a summer graduate course that I was teaching, a student in the class came to my office.  She said she was going through a very painful breakup and as a result, she wondered if she could have a few extra days to complete her final project–she was moving out, which meant driving back and forth to the house they were selling, several hours outside the city.

Okay, usually I’m a suspicious bitch of a teacher and my standard response is “uh, no,” but it was summer and the student was easily the best in the class, so I said “sure,” and we talked a bit about how hard it was to end a relationship. In the course of our conversation I said, “what does he do,” meaning the other party in the breakup.

There was a pause, the woman looked at me, smiled, and said, “well, I’m gay, so it’s a she, actually, and she’s a lawyer.”

Now, I spend a lot of time in class talking about the need for students to examine the assumptions that they bring to reading and interpretation–I sometimes tell them it’s the “baggage theory” of reading, as in, whatever your own baggage is, it will provide the basis for your interpretations, so you’d better figure out the nature of those spoken and unspoken assumptions.

So right there, in my office, there I was: BAM! Smacked in the face with my own assumptions about heterosexuality–a sort of straight suitcase of assumption, as it were.

I was mortified, apologized profusely, made a (lame) joke about heteronormativity, and that was that.  I doubt the woman has given it a second thought.

Earlier this week, I played hooky from my desk (I think the desk understood) and went to the movies with a friend, who showed up wearing the same shorts I was wearing, so that was also mortifying, but in a slightly different contexts. Sartorially twinned, we hiked to the top floor of the theater to watch “The Kids Are All Right,” the new movie by Lisa Cholodenko about two kids and their lesbian moms, and what happens to the family as a result of the kids finding their sperm donor dad.

I thought the movie was great. Loved the image of an upper-middle-class marriage, those years way after “happily ever after,” when staying married has more to do with an act of will (and inertia?) than all the hot sex and romance of the early years; loved the way in which the kids love their “moms”  and are driven crazy by them on an almost daily basis.  (And okay, yes, the whole Mark Ruffalo with his shirt off thing made me pretty happy too.)

The movie sort of renders moot the whole idea of “gay marriage” by showing that gay marriage exists and is, more or less, a lot like straight marriage, particularly those marriages with kids (who according to New York Magazine,  make us all miserable).  There is a lot of unflashy and unromantic love in this movie; the kind of love that, as Julianne Moore says near the movie’s end, “endures” through the rough patches, even when things look hopeless.  It seemed to me a sometimes funny, sometimes heart-tugging examination of women in mid-life, in mid-marriage, and of the ways that kids do (and do not) understand that their parents are, you know, human.  You could say it’s the cinematic version of that Talking Heads song we all find ourselves humming from time to time: “this is not my beautiful life…how did I get here, anyway?”

I got home and started chatting about this remarkable thing called a “grown-up movie” in an actual movie theater! In July!  A movie where nothing blows up but Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore get nekkid.

Then I started reading around the internet. Never do that, if you want to preserve your own opinion. 

And BAM! It happened again: the hetero baggage whapping me in the face.  Why, as Roxie’s World asks, should a lesbian marriage be “just like” a straight marriage? Why, as Dan Savage asks, shouldn’t a sperm donor (or surrogate mother, in the opposite context) become a part of the family? Why would a lesbian film-maker rely on the age-old plot device of a vaguely dissatisfied lesbian falling into the arms of a man?

Why hadn’t any of those questions occurred to me? I mean, among all my various relatives, you can find just about every permutation of “family” you can imagine, so why wouldn’t it occur to me that there might have been other possiblities available to Cholodenko in creating her story?  Is it because my own marriage is a pretty straight-forward (oh yeah, totally intentional pun) hetero dyad?

Some of the negative commentary about the movie does seem, as Dan Savage points out, along the lines of “gosh why didn’t she make a different movie,” and there have been some vague implications that maybe Cholodenko was doing what she had to do to get the movie financed (greenlight a perfect lesbian family in which there are only happy kids and hot sex? never gonna happen).  I don’t know what the financing politics were–nothing in Hollywood seems to make much sense to me (“Grownups,” “The Expendables,” or  ”Kitty Galore,” anyone?)

But after all was said and done, I remain convinced that it’s a really good movie, even if it’s not perfect. And one of the reasons it’s good, I think, is that it made me  re-realize how easy it is to stay stuck in the ruts of my own assumptions about the world–and thus miss the oppportunity to see the world through the eyes of others.  Would it be nice if the movie re-imagined family in a more capacious, less conservative way? Sure. But that’s not the movie that got written–and I think that, ironically, there may even be something positive about the fact that we live in a moment when we can say that a Hollywood representation of a lesbian marriage is “too conservative.”

Cuz you know, nothing says “I love you” like a face full of cheap cigarillo smoke.

You look at this ad, shake your head, chuckle, and say “god can you believe that?”

Yesterday, walking on 23rd street, I saw an ad on the side of a bus stop:

We’ve come a long way baby, haven’t we?  You’ll want to pay special attention to the little white box in the lower left corner, which tells you how to download the app:

I’m not sure what the app is for: is it for the gambling game? for the hotel? or for a woman with the body of an adolescent boy and the boobs of a nursing mother to sprawl belly-up on the screen of your phone?

Of particular notice here is that the woman is so artfully arranged: is that the ankle strap of her shoe, or strap holding her down? After all, we can’t see her other leg or either wrist. She’s just…sprawled there. Are we (and I think the “we” here is the we of the male persuasion, don’t you?) supposed to be throwing dice on her tummy?

Even if I hadn’t just watched a preview from Jean Kilbourne’s latest documentary about images of women in advertising, this ad would make me wince.  This image isn’t in the pages of a magazine like GQ or Esquire or Playboy, where it would still be problematic but at least reserved for the we-of-the-male-persuasion. This ad is plastered all over the city (taxis, busses, phone booths), which means kids see it and once they see it, they can’t un-see it. I don’t want my sons to think that a woman’s body is the equivalent of a downloadable “app” to be played with and then forgotten about; I don’t want them to think that a woman is a toy or that sex is as meaningless as a crapshoot. And I don’t want my niece or the daughters of my friends to grow up thinking these things either–or thinking that this woman’s body represents any sort of attainable or attractive ideal.

Yes, yes, I know, looking at this ad with my kids could be a “teaching moment,” blah blah blah. But it’s the 21st century, folks. Isn’t this sort of advertising straight out of Don Draper’s portfolio?  Why do so many ads still do the equivalent of blowing smoke in our faces and demanding that we follow them?

The only thing this ad got right, really, is the type of table underneath the woman: a craps table for a crap ad.

Oh I know, it’s because tomatoes that come out of grocery stores taste like cold wet cardboard that’s been briefly whisked through catsup.

So me and my tomatoes began a relationship. I watered and inspected the plants for bugs, wondered if anything could really grow 15 floors up in the midst of a hellish cross-town breeze and summer sun that beats down from dawn until 12:34 precisely, at which point it’s full shade and that damn breeze, which has shredded more flowering plants than I want to admit.  And that’s without the added atmospheric delight of bus exhaust wafting up from the bus stop downstairs, directly in front of our apartment. If the tomatoes actually grew, it crossed my mind that they might have absorbed so much carbon dioxide that they’d be toxic. 

Things went just swimmingly at first and then the leaves started doing some kind of crisping thing: little patches of mold appeared and then the leaves turned brown and shriveled up. I panicked but luckily, my facebook friends have among them a great deal of gardening sense. I separated the plants, decided against organic fertilizing items (when you’re growing edibles just above a bus stop, really at that point, what’s a little Miracle-Gro), invested in some chemicals,  and kept my fingers crossed.

Wouldn’t you know it? They grew! I actually grew tomatoes–about ten, to be exact–right there, above the bus stop and in spite of the breeze. Nature, eh? What a thing.

The leaves still look awful, but the tomatoes are so pretty, just like real tomatoes:

Their leaves look utterly diseased and wretched, though, don’t they? I think it’s sort of the same thing that happens to expectant mothers, in the month or so before they give birth: those staring dark-ringed eyes, the staggering walk, the face clenched with spasms of pain from backache, footache, indigestion…when it’s clear that the little baby-t0-be inside you is literally sucking away your life force.  I figure it’s all just getting us ready for the hit that personal grooming takes, post-partum, a phase that for women like Heidi Klum and Jessica Alba lasts about two weeks and for others of us….um, well, let’s just say that I’m thinking when son #1 hits 11 (he’s 9 now), I will have gotten a handle on the whole post-partum shlubbiness. Damn those celebumommies, making it harder on all the rest of us. I’m not sure what the tomato equivalent of Heidi Klum is, but I’m pretty sure it’s growing in a corporate greenhouse somewhere in Florida.

I picked seven of my tomatoes today; I’m hoping few that are still on the plant will continue to ripen.  Aren’t they beautiful?

I ate some for lunch today. They were still warm from the morning sun and so sweet that I remembered: a tomato is a FRUIT, people! A fruit! The cardboard grocery store kind have had the fruitiness bred right out of them, but these? Summer in your mouth.

And not the slightest hint of bus exhaust.

Next summer, I’m thinking corn.

(These tomatoes look particularly beautiful in their blue bowl, which is one of a set that our friend Nancy made for us.  She (and her beautiful pottery) will be at the Potter’s Market on the green in Watermill on Columbus Day weekend this year. You know you want to go to the East End for Columbus Day–often still warm, no crowds, you know the drill–and even store-bought tomatoes would look pretty in these bowls.)