Friday Fish Wrap: May 7, 2010

What a way to wrap up a Friday: Reno Police with guns drawn at lunchtime, and then went to see the new documentary ‘Babies’. How’s that for a stretch?

Just as Mr. Maven and I walked out the door of Truckee Bar and Grill on Lakeside at Moana, we heard sirens. I looked up toward the car which was next to the street, and just across the street, there stood Reno’s finest - guns drawn, in ‘the stance’.  They were circling two woman and one man, who had their hands up. There were no less than six black and white units on scene.

I didn’t want to get too close on the off chance that bullets might start flying.

In the photo above - from my iPhone - you can see the three suspects laying on the pavement, just prior to being cuffed.

Yikes. This is generally a quiet, upper middle class section of town, too.

‘Babies’ was a far better experience.

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If you’re not sure how much of a difference the environment a baby is brought into makes - consider that somebody has voiced concern that filming the San Francisco baby Hattie, may have broken child labor laws. Hattie, in fact, showed a very early sense of ‘get real’ when she pluckily tried to escape from the goofy Bay Area ‘we’re all babies yoga’ experience that her parents took her too.

Being forced into a great motion picture was preferrable to psycho-babble Bay Area style.

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Friday Fish Wrap: March 12, 2010

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
English novelist (1812 - 1870)

This pretty much describes my week.

I wavered wildly between being an absolute idiot/jackass, and reasonably wise/nice person. I think I may have suffered whiplash of the soul.

The good news: I may be on the road to learning and personal growth.

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Violence against women 'over there' is violence against women here

Reading in this mornings paper, I was horrified to learn that a Liberian eight-year-old innocent, in Phoenix, Arizona had been raped by a group of Liberian boys not much older than she.

And here’s the even more tragic denoument - her father told Child Protective Services that he didn’t want her anymore, since she’d disgraced the family. Yeah, right. The girl is better off without this family.

The only hopeful part of all this is the international outcry that has resulted, including a statement from the new female Liberian president, who herself was a victim of rape:

“I think that family is wrong.

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Bienvenue sur le monde Internet, Monsieur Agbenou

This was a banner day. Natacha’s father, Monsieur Agbenou of Contonou, Benin, Africa installed internet in his house and is emailing us and we are returning with messages about what’s going on here in Reno.

I told him all about

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Friday Fish Wrap: June 19, 2009

What a hectic, but rather nice week actually. My boss told me today that I was the highlight of her day … ontime and underbudget with a job. How cool is that?

Monsieur Agbenou left for Africa on Tuesday, and arrived home safely, having successfully negotiated the airports enroute. I was a little concerned that getting on in Reno would be a problem when the agent looked at his passport and discovered that it only listed as year of birth, no day or month. I explained that in Africa, in 1945 such information was not recorded.

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For richer or poorer: What we choose to share or not.

It’s been a long day, what with getting Monsieur Agbenou on the airplane back to Benin, and then it was ‘one of those days’ at work. Not bad really, just kind of mentally fatiguing.

Papa Huber really amazes me. We sat around the kitchen table at dinner last night, sort of catching up the last few things we all wanted to say. This man might not always have been the perfect husband, father or boss but the words that were coming out of his mouth were straight and true, without a hint of guile or pretense.

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I've eaten my last Mexican food

I’d been avoiding Mexican - as in American style Mexican - food for a few years now due to a gallbladder that is only marginally functional. The grease and lard in refritos is enough to send me into doubled over paroxyisms of pain. It ain’t worth it. But the other day, I thought let’s try the Mexican place that finally moved into the long empty Mahogany Grill.

I had a ceviche tostada … really small and light,

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Just put a breast in that kid's mouth.

You just never know where the conversation is going with a person from a very different culture living with you. For those of you who aren’t regular readers, and those who haven’t been paying attention, we have a wonderful young lady from western Africa living with us for the last two years. Natacha has become a real part of this family - so today, since she had the day off, she decided to tag along with Ron and I to a doctor appointment and some errands. On the way, we stopped off for breakfast.

The booths were full and the joint was jumping, at Pegs Glorified Ham ‘n Eggs in downtown Reno. It’s a very popular place for locals - especially the suited attorney set. You expect a place like this to be pretty noisy, but today it was over the top. I couldn’t figure out which program or volume setting to use on my hearing aid to overcome the screaming from a small baby in a booth a couple places away from us.

I asked Natacha, “in Africa, what do Mom’s do to quiet their babies in a public place like this?” The Mom in question this morning was struggling mightly to sooth the little one quiet but he - it has to be a boy, right? - wasn’t having any of it.

“Well, they would just start to nurse the baby. No, children don’t make noise like that in Africa. They can’t with a breast in their mouth.”

This didn’t surprise me. Natacha won’t drink my skim milk at our house since she says it tastes like her Mothers’ breast milk. The first time I heard this, it caught me pretty unawares. I mean, how would you remember that? I know I wouldn’t. I came from the bottle is more modern generation of the 1950’s. My mother would have rather died than breast feed. Besides, she had a full time job at a daily newspaper.

Like most children where she came from, Natacha breast fed until she was seven or eight years old. I guess you would remember what it tasted like at that age.

Natacha had gone up to Truckee the other day to visit a Swedish girlfriend who has just had a baby. As they were out wandering around town, having coffee and such, it became necessary to comfor the baby and so they hunted around to try and find a private place to breast feed the child. The Swedish lady bemoaned the fact that Americans are so hopelessly parochial about the mere sight of a womans breast engaged in something so normal and natural as to find it titillating - so to speak. They finally had to abandon the search and settle for a darkend corner table and use the napkin over Moms’ delicate activity with baby.

What udder nonsense. I can’t help it. I had to do that.

Will Americans ever grow up and mature past the stage of being silly, embarrassed or offended by natural, normal and beautiful? Can this culture ever move past acting like a bunch of teenage boys?

What really scares me about this whole issue is this - if we can’t get past the trauma of breastfeeding in public, just how will we manage to grapple with the much larger issues that confront our society?

So, believe it or not, the conversation sequed to general attitudes about breasts here and in Africa.

I’ll just bet you didn’t know that having perky tits isn’t a good thing over there. Only self-involved, self-indulgent, selfish prostitutes have those. Whoa!

Real women are willing to let the girls do just what they will after child bearing and breast feeding.

Since I lost one of my girls several years ago, I only have half as much to worry about now.

Whew, that’s a relief. You take the silver lining anywhere you can get it, I always say.

maven

Got a weird looking teen at home? Natacha has the answer.

While walking back to the car from a long day at the Reno Air Races on Friday last, Ron, Natacha (our African ‘daughter’ and student who lives with us ) and I were remarking, a bit snidely, about the get-ups we had seen on some of the air race attendees. You know what I’m talking about: pants hanging down to ‘there’, tattoos, butt cracks on fat women, multiple piercings and the like.

Natacha started to defend the ‘choices’ that young people make. She’s 33 years old now, and in that ‘tween universe of no longer a kid but not a cranky- remember- when middle-ager either. So I asked her, “Well, how would you feel if that were your daughter with the red, yellow and blue hair, nose ring, tongue stud and a tattoo across her bottom that says ‘bite me’ ?”

Ron and I were fairly startled when she said “I’d slap her!”

I responded with “child abuser!” Ron had a bemused grin on his face, waiting for the rest of it.

“I’d slap her and send her back to Africa!” 

Natacha basically has zero tolerance for people who live in the worlds’ richest country and cruise around looking like either extremely low examples of what we used to call ‘carnie workers’ or fat beached whales. It’s a real eye opener, and definitely gets you to reframe your thinking when she responds so strongly about something we’ve all tried real hard to just accept in order to keep our more mature heads from exploding.

She had gone around the air races all day long grabbing my elbow and saying something like “look … look at that man and his stomach.” You have to hear it in the original heavily French accented English to really appreciate it. She kept trying say look at his belly, but I kept hearing ‘bally’ and was getting horribly confused. Maybe it was the heat and Jet-A fuel vapors in the air.

You have to know that Natacha won’t even allow me to photograph her without having one of her ‘weegs’ on, since seeing her in her short cropped ‘natural’ isn’t considered very classy over there…. sort of like going around in your underwear. She’s neat and clean as a shiny new penny, and dresses with more French chic than I could ever muster, even if I could ever be that slender. Natacha can wear Target and look like it was Chanel.

I also got a lecture on how rude it is, in Africa, to call somebody over to you and use the gesture of crooking your index finger. Nice people don’t use that gesture.

But think of it. This could be a gold mine of an opportunity. People could send us their messed up, entitled little darlings and we could ship them off to Congo, where they can sit and try to figure out why people with so very little try their best to look decent. Maybe looking well groomed and like you care is a lot when you know that you don’t have much control over anything else in your life.

I think $10k per kid would be a place to start. I’ll bet they’d come back with a different attitude after a month in Pointe Noir, Congo.

maven