I love living overseas. Especially in countries where I can neither understand nor read the local lingo.
And believe me, that's Georgia.
You see, I don't want to know what's going on back at "home." I just don't want to hear about it.
My ex-wife Chris is doing a temporary stint of duty at the American Embassy here in Tbilisi. Last weekend she invited me and my friend Jason over for dinner. Because she's an American embassy employee (of sorts -- she's retired, but works on contract) she gets all the perks, including AFN. So we sat there before dinner and watched CNN and Fox News.
Talk about depressing! CNN and Fox are precisely two of the things I packed up and left the United States to get away from. Left-wing CNN, right-wing Fox. I pulled the plug on both of them right after the 2008 general election, and I intend for it to stay pulled.
And while we're at it, I've also pulled the plug on CSI, Dancing With The Stars, House, the NFL, rap "music," HGTV, The Simpsons, Lady Gaga, televised poker, professional wrestling, NASCAR, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin and e-mail pitches for cheap mortgages, Christian dating services and erectile dysfunction products.
I don't need, or want, what America is selling.
If there's another 9/11, don't tell me about it. I don't want to know. I couldn't do anything about it, just as I couldn't anything about the first one. I offered to donate blood back then, but everybody was dead. If it happens again, give me a point for having offered to donate blood the first time, and then go away.
Just leave me to my watercolors, my notebooks, my set of Proust and my loneliness. At this stage of the game that's all I ask of anyone.
That's where being in Georgia is such an advantage. If I were say, in Peru for example, and if there were another 9/11, the local newspapers would be shrieking something along the lines of "Ay, Caramba! Un Otro 9/11!"
I would understand that. I know at least that much Spanish.
But the same headline in Georgian would look something like this:
"ოჰ, არა! კიდევ ერთი ცხრა-თერთმეტი!"
Georgian looks to me like something a kid did with a can of Cheez-Wiz. I can't make head nor tail of it.
And as the old song goes, "I like it like that."
I'm not planning to learn Georgian either, not out of any contempt for this country and its wonderful people, but simply because I'm only going to be in this country until next June, which isn't enough time to learn a language, especially one that's only spoken by only four million people in the entire world (and 98 percent of them live here, in a country the size of South Carolina.)
I was sick as a dog through much of October. I have an ex-girlfriend whose son, Mason, is especially vulnerable to upper-respiratory infections. I share that with him. And I think Tbilisi aggravates them, in my case. It's a dirty city, although it's certainly not the dirtiest place I ever lived. It's just that there's a lot of dust here, especially out in the suburbs. I swear, when a taxicab passes me out in Varketili, where I teach school, I can almost see the cloud of dust behind it. And I'm BREATHING that crap. Maybe the locals get used to it, but I haven't. Every moment I'm outdoors in Tbilisi, I'm blowing my nose. There has to be an explanation for that, and I think I found it.
They do have street-sweepers here, not the kind you see in the U.S. with those big metal sweeping discs scouring the sidewalk, but rather, bent little former Soviet babushkas whom you see early in the morning, sweeping the streets with their handmade straw brooms. But it's like fighting a house fire with a squirt gun.
Anyway I think all of the dust here really does aggravate my upper-respiratory problems. At the beginning of October I caught a cold, which became pleurisy, which then flirted with pneumonia. I went to two doctors and ran through two courses of antibiotics. I spent my 56th birthday on October 12 in bed, running a fever, taking antibiotics and coughing up crud. Two of my fellow English teachers came to visit me that night in my horrible old ex-Soviet Kruschchoba, a one-room apartment in a crumbling building whose electricity would not stay on. (I have since moved uptown.) They brought a large jug of cheap Georgian wine. Georgia produces wonderful wines, but that wasn't one of them. I wouldn't wash my feet in that stuff. It was nice of these two guys, Cass and Jason, to come see me on my birthday, even thought I couldn't get out of bed. But when they left I told them, "Don't leave that slop here. Take it out and leave it on the sidewalk for some needy wino."
That's exactly what they did.
I'm feeling somewhat better now, but I'm not 100 percent back yet.
So where will I be after next June?
I have no clue. I have no plan except to look around, come late winter/early spring, for another English-teaching gig in another overseas venue.
I can tell you one place where I will definitely not be, and that is Chula Vista, California, where I come from. At this point I can't see myself ever wanting to go back there.
"Why?" people ask me. "You grew up there. You went to school there. Your family has been there for generations."
All of that is true. But it's also true that nearly all of my family, and the old family homestead in Chula Vista, the house my grandfather bought in 1941, are gone. I have one surviving sister there. My other sister is dead and so are my parents. There is nothing left there for me go "home" to. And you can't be homesick if you don't have a home. And indeed I haven't felt a twinge of homesickness since leaving the states. Loneliness, yes. Tremendous loneliness. But homesickness? No.
I'm about as rootless as a person can be. No wife, no children, no family left except my sister Carla. And since I'm never going to have any money either, I had better get used to living in poor countries.
The only thing that even possibly might get me to return to the United States is expedience: I have a buddy in North Carolina who has said that, provided he isn't sharing his place with a live-in girlfriend when my gig here in Georgia ends next summer, I might move in with him in Pinehurst, NC -- get some kind of a job there and we could be the Felix Unger and Oscar Madison of the Old South.
But that is the only set of circumstances under which I could see myself returning to the U.S.
Korea or Ecuador or some such place is more likely. I hear there are English-teaching jobs in the United Arab Emirates that pay pretty well. Why not? The UAE has more money than God. This job I have in Georgia pays next to nothing, but I took it because I wanted to get some teaching experience, and also because I couldn't stand Chula Vista for one more day.
And here's the kicker: I have found that I love teaching. Wouldn't you know it, when I finally find the thing I love to do (aside from writing, which has always been my first love), it would have to be something that pays next to nothing.
But I love teaching and I love my kids. My third and fourth-graders especially. But for the past two days I've been bribing them with Snickers bars to give me good responses in alphabet drills. Obviously I can't keep that up. My co-teacher, Medea, easily my best Georgian friend, suggested I switch to lollipops because they're cheaper. I might do that. (I know, I should probably stop bribing them altogether. )
The problem is ... well, as Ragueneau the pastry-cook says in the play Cyrano de Bergerac when the title character asks him why he's allowing a ragtag band of bums posing as "poets" to eat everything in his bakery for listening to him recite his verses, "I love a friendly audience."
Actually, I had a friendly audience before I started throwing Snickers around. The kids here in Tbilisi, especially the older ones, make me feel like Justin Timberlake. All I have to do is stand in the hallway wearing my California-Mexico straw "cowboy" hat and they come up to me, all smiles and curiosity, wanting to introduce themselves, learn my name, ask where I come from...and give me updates on soccer and rugby. My fourth-graders get visibly excited when I come into the room. They mob me in the street near the school: "Mr. Kelley! Mr. Kelley! Hello!" (I have trouble getting these kids to pronounce the word, "carrot." There's no way they're going to handle "Dupuis," so I'm "Mr. Kelley." But from the way they act, you'd think Mr. Kelley was Santa Claus. It's the damndest thing I ever saw.)
I think part of it is my playing the "good cop" to their Georgian teachers' "bad cop." Since I don't speak Georgian, I mostly leave discipline to my local colleagues. The kids get yelled at by their Georgian teacher for being noisy, but usually not by me. Oh, I have been exasperated enough to shout "QUIET!" a few times, but it's only the level of my voice that makes them settle down. They don't understand the word "quiet." If I said it without shouting, they'd ignore me. They do. And these kids are so used to being yelled at that it generally just slides right off their backs anyway.
But they're good kids. They're kids. Kids are noisy, boisterous and can't sit still. Hey, it hasn't been THAT long since I was ten. I remember. I was a serious ADD case at that age. School was torture to me because I hated sitting still. So I know how some of these kids feel. (I couldn't keep quiet, either. In junior high school I was always getting thrown out of classrooms for shooting off my mouth, which is why I have a blog now.)
We do have one or two children who are obviously borderline-autistic, and I don't know what to do or suggest. My colleagues don't either. Referring to one especially uncommunicative student who doesn't do his homework, a colleague told me today, "I had his mother as a student years ago, and she was the same way." It was agreed that this boy should be under a doctor's treatment, but "the parents never agree that there is a problem."
"Then the parents should be in jail," I replied.
Where would I go from Georgia if I had a choice? That's a tough one. Do I go for a good-paying job, or one that's in a location where I might want to die?
The UAE sounds like a good money proposition. On the other hand, I'm thinking about dying in Ecuador. Why not just cut to the chase and go there, since I'm 56 anyway?
I told an ex-girlfriend more than three years ago, when she was still infatuated with me and not disillusioned, (as they always become sooner or later) that my final "persona" was going to be "aging surfer dude."
She laughed. We were still at that wonderful, mutual-discovery stage, when she was amused by me rather than enraged by me, which she would become later, as they always do.
But seriously, this is why I'm thinking about Ecuador. My grandfather, who was in the British merchant marine, lived either there or in Peru for a while. He actually met my grandmother on a freighter bound for South America. (Although he died in Chula Vista, in the same house in which both his second wife and his daughter, ((my mother)) had fatal strokes, the same house in which my father died. The same property on which my younger sister died of an overdose of Methadone and booze in 2004.
A good 40 percent of my family died in Chula Vista, most of them croaking at 235 Madrona Street.
Dying in Chula Vista is a fate I will avoid if it's the last thing I do (no irony intended.) Call me contrary; call me a nonconformist. I want to die somewhere else.
Anyway, I figure it would be a familial closing-of-the-circle gesture were I to die in Ecuador. My seafaring grandfather, Bert Winrow, was a habitue of the Pacific coast of South America during the years around World War I. I have some pictures of him walking on the beach there, taken around 1912, when people still wore neckties to the beach. God, did he have big feet!
Ecuador is a poor country, relatively cheap to live in, and by the way has excellent surf.
Am I surfer? No. I took a few surfing lessons back in 2004, but I can't claim to be a surfer. I am, however, determined to become one before I die. I want to be an old surfer. An old poet, an old painter. The stereotype of Americans in the world at large is that we all want to be as rich as Bill Gates. I never gave that a thought in my entire life. I think I wrote it off as impossible at a very early age, considering that my father was poor and I had too much of his DNA ever to be rich. So, now that I'm not so very far from being an old man myself, I ask only to be an old poet, an old painter, an old surfer.
With a reliable supply of food and medicine, of course. We have to be practical.
What more could anyone ask?
I could ask for more, and did. Oh, no, not money. To hell with that. But everything else I ever asked for, basically recognition, love and companionship, was denied. So my last remaining hopes are to be the three things mentioned above, and, at the moment that that Ecuadorian undertow knocks me off my surfboard sucks me under the ocean to my death ... to be at peace.
And believe me, that's Georgia.
 |
| This is Georgia, where I live now. It's sandwiched between Russia, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan. I love its children. |
My ex-wife Chris is doing a temporary stint of duty at the American Embassy here in Tbilisi. Last weekend she invited me and my friend Jason over for dinner. Because she's an American embassy employee (of sorts -- she's retired, but works on contract) she gets all the perks, including AFN. So we sat there before dinner and watched CNN and Fox News.
Talk about depressing! CNN and Fox are precisely two of the things I packed up and left the United States to get away from. Left-wing CNN, right-wing Fox. I pulled the plug on both of them right after the 2008 general election, and I intend for it to stay pulled.
And while we're at it, I've also pulled the plug on CSI, Dancing With The Stars, House, the NFL, rap "music," HGTV, The Simpsons, Lady Gaga, televised poker, professional wrestling, NASCAR, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin and e-mail pitches for cheap mortgages, Christian dating services and erectile dysfunction products.
I don't need, or want, what America is selling.
If there's another 9/11, don't tell me about it. I don't want to know. I couldn't do anything about it, just as I couldn't anything about the first one. I offered to donate blood back then, but everybody was dead. If it happens again, give me a point for having offered to donate blood the first time, and then go away.
Just leave me to my watercolors, my notebooks, my set of Proust and my loneliness. At this stage of the game that's all I ask of anyone.
That's where being in Georgia is such an advantage. If I were say, in Peru for example, and if there were another 9/11, the local newspapers would be shrieking something along the lines of "Ay, Caramba! Un Otro 9/11!"
I would understand that. I know at least that much Spanish.
But the same headline in Georgian would look something like this:
"ოჰ, არა! კიდევ ერთი ცხრა-თერთმეტი!"
Georgian looks to me like something a kid did with a can of Cheez-Wiz. I can't make head nor tail of it.
And as the old song goes, "I like it like that."
I'm not planning to learn Georgian either, not out of any contempt for this country and its wonderful people, but simply because I'm only going to be in this country until next June, which isn't enough time to learn a language, especially one that's only spoken by only four million people in the entire world (and 98 percent of them live here, in a country the size of South Carolina.)
I was sick as a dog through much of October. I have an ex-girlfriend whose son, Mason, is especially vulnerable to upper-respiratory infections. I share that with him. And I think Tbilisi aggravates them, in my case. It's a dirty city, although it's certainly not the dirtiest place I ever lived. It's just that there's a lot of dust here, especially out in the suburbs. I swear, when a taxicab passes me out in Varketili, where I teach school, I can almost see the cloud of dust behind it. And I'm BREATHING that crap. Maybe the locals get used to it, but I haven't. Every moment I'm outdoors in Tbilisi, I'm blowing my nose. There has to be an explanation for that, and I think I found it.
They do have street-sweepers here, not the kind you see in the U.S. with those big metal sweeping discs scouring the sidewalk, but rather, bent little former Soviet babushkas whom you see early in the morning, sweeping the streets with their handmade straw brooms. But it's like fighting a house fire with a squirt gun.
Anyway I think all of the dust here really does aggravate my upper-respiratory problems. At the beginning of October I caught a cold, which became pleurisy, which then flirted with pneumonia. I went to two doctors and ran through two courses of antibiotics. I spent my 56th birthday on October 12 in bed, running a fever, taking antibiotics and coughing up crud. Two of my fellow English teachers came to visit me that night in my horrible old ex-Soviet Kruschchoba, a one-room apartment in a crumbling building whose electricity would not stay on. (I have since moved uptown.) They brought a large jug of cheap Georgian wine. Georgia produces wonderful wines, but that wasn't one of them. I wouldn't wash my feet in that stuff. It was nice of these two guys, Cass and Jason, to come see me on my birthday, even thought I couldn't get out of bed. But when they left I told them, "Don't leave that slop here. Take it out and leave it on the sidewalk for some needy wino."
That's exactly what they did.
I'm feeling somewhat better now, but I'm not 100 percent back yet.
So where will I be after next June?
I have no clue. I have no plan except to look around, come late winter/early spring, for another English-teaching gig in another overseas venue.
I can tell you one place where I will definitely not be, and that is Chula Vista, California, where I come from. At this point I can't see myself ever wanting to go back there.
"Why?" people ask me. "You grew up there. You went to school there. Your family has been there for generations."
 |
Broadway Avenue, Chula Vista, California, which I hope
never to see again.
|
I'm about as rootless as a person can be. No wife, no children, no family left except my sister Carla. And since I'm never going to have any money either, I had better get used to living in poor countries.
The only thing that even possibly might get me to return to the United States is expedience: I have a buddy in North Carolina who has said that, provided he isn't sharing his place with a live-in girlfriend when my gig here in Georgia ends next summer, I might move in with him in Pinehurst, NC -- get some kind of a job there and we could be the Felix Unger and Oscar Madison of the Old South.
But that is the only set of circumstances under which I could see myself returning to the U.S.
Korea or Ecuador or some such place is more likely. I hear there are English-teaching jobs in the United Arab Emirates that pay pretty well. Why not? The UAE has more money than God. This job I have in Georgia pays next to nothing, but I took it because I wanted to get some teaching experience, and also because I couldn't stand Chula Vista for one more day.
And here's the kicker: I have found that I love teaching. Wouldn't you know it, when I finally find the thing I love to do (aside from writing, which has always been my first love), it would have to be something that pays next to nothing.
But I love teaching and I love my kids. My third and fourth-graders especially. But for the past two days I've been bribing them with Snickers bars to give me good responses in alphabet drills. Obviously I can't keep that up. My co-teacher, Medea, easily my best Georgian friend, suggested I switch to lollipops because they're cheaper. I might do that. (I know, I should probably stop bribing them altogether. )
The problem is ... well, as Ragueneau the pastry-cook says in the play Cyrano de Bergerac when the title character asks him why he's allowing a ragtag band of bums posing as "poets" to eat everything in his bakery for listening to him recite his verses, "I love a friendly audience."
Actually, I had a friendly audience before I started throwing Snickers around. The kids here in Tbilisi, especially the older ones, make me feel like Justin Timberlake. All I have to do is stand in the hallway wearing my California-Mexico straw "cowboy" hat and they come up to me, all smiles and curiosity, wanting to introduce themselves, learn my name, ask where I come from...and give me updates on soccer and rugby. My fourth-graders get visibly excited when I come into the room. They mob me in the street near the school: "Mr. Kelley! Mr. Kelley! Hello!" (I have trouble getting these kids to pronounce the word, "carrot." There's no way they're going to handle "Dupuis," so I'm "Mr. Kelley." But from the way they act, you'd think Mr. Kelley was Santa Claus. It's the damndest thing I ever saw.)
I think part of it is my playing the "good cop" to their Georgian teachers' "bad cop." Since I don't speak Georgian, I mostly leave discipline to my local colleagues. The kids get yelled at by their Georgian teacher for being noisy, but usually not by me. Oh, I have been exasperated enough to shout "QUIET!" a few times, but it's only the level of my voice that makes them settle down. They don't understand the word "quiet." If I said it without shouting, they'd ignore me. They do. And these kids are so used to being yelled at that it generally just slides right off their backs anyway.
But they're good kids. They're kids. Kids are noisy, boisterous and can't sit still. Hey, it hasn't been THAT long since I was ten. I remember. I was a serious ADD case at that age. School was torture to me because I hated sitting still. So I know how some of these kids feel. (I couldn't keep quiet, either. In junior high school I was always getting thrown out of classrooms for shooting off my mouth, which is why I have a blog now.)
We do have one or two children who are obviously borderline-autistic, and I don't know what to do or suggest. My colleagues don't either. Referring to one especially uncommunicative student who doesn't do his homework, a colleague told me today, "I had his mother as a student years ago, and she was the same way." It was agreed that this boy should be under a doctor's treatment, but "the parents never agree that there is a problem."
"Then the parents should be in jail," I replied.
Where would I go from Georgia if I had a choice? That's a tough one. Do I go for a good-paying job, or one that's in a location where I might want to die?
The UAE sounds like a good money proposition. On the other hand, I'm thinking about dying in Ecuador. Why not just cut to the chase and go there, since I'm 56 anyway?
I told an ex-girlfriend more than three years ago, when she was still infatuated with me and not disillusioned, (as they always become sooner or later) that my final "persona" was going to be "aging surfer dude."
She laughed. We were still at that wonderful, mutual-discovery stage, when she was amused by me rather than enraged by me, which she would become later, as they always do.
 |
| My dream-final persona: just picture this guy bald. |
But seriously, this is why I'm thinking about Ecuador. My grandfather, who was in the British merchant marine, lived either there or in Peru for a while. He actually met my grandmother on a freighter bound for South America. (Although he died in Chula Vista, in the same house in which both his second wife and his daughter, ((my mother)) had fatal strokes, the same house in which my father died. The same property on which my younger sister died of an overdose of Methadone and booze in 2004.
A good 40 percent of my family died in Chula Vista, most of them croaking at 235 Madrona Street.
Dying in Chula Vista is a fate I will avoid if it's the last thing I do (no irony intended.) Call me contrary; call me a nonconformist. I want to die somewhere else.
Anyway, I figure it would be a familial closing-of-the-circle gesture were I to die in Ecuador. My seafaring grandfather, Bert Winrow, was a habitue of the Pacific coast of South America during the years around World War I. I have some pictures of him walking on the beach there, taken around 1912, when people still wore neckties to the beach. God, did he have big feet!
Ecuador is a poor country, relatively cheap to live in, and by the way has excellent surf.
Am I surfer? No. I took a few surfing lessons back in 2004, but I can't claim to be a surfer. I am, however, determined to become one before I die. I want to be an old surfer. An old poet, an old painter. The stereotype of Americans in the world at large is that we all want to be as rich as Bill Gates. I never gave that a thought in my entire life. I think I wrote it off as impossible at a very early age, considering that my father was poor and I had too much of his DNA ever to be rich. So, now that I'm not so very far from being an old man myself, I ask only to be an old poet, an old painter, an old surfer.
With a reliable supply of food and medicine, of course. We have to be practical.
What more could anyone ask?
I could ask for more, and did. Oh, no, not money. To hell with that. But everything else I ever asked for, basically recognition, love and companionship, was denied. So my last remaining hopes are to be the three things mentioned above, and, at the moment that that Ecuadorian undertow knocks me off my surfboard sucks me under the ocean to my death ... to be at peace.
Thank you for the updates ( Tbilisi )
ReplyDeleteI love reading your Night Thoughts At Noon.