I miss my blog.
There is something about the regular reflection on an intense experience that becomes an important aspect of the experience, an aspect of its narrativizing I guess, that the blog served such an important function for. And while in past trips abroad – aside from a college-year in London, my longest exit before Indonesia had been a seven-week Central American jaunt in the late 1980s – I have been able to shape that experience in the telling, a little, after I return, it’s been harder to do that with a year abroad. I feel like I need an hour or two a week in which I schedule someone to come and listen to me, and my family too, talk about what happened over there. But it’s hard to suggest that, honestly. And the result has become, now, that at the time when I finally want to talk about my year, I don’t really have a venue to talk about it. And by now, I assure you, our return to Bozeman is, for the most part, old news. (“Didn’t you go somewhere last year?” people might ask, when they see me – or – “I haven’t seen you forever – where have you been?”)
So:
There was a toddler – a little girl of about two – the daughter of the couple who ran our favorite sate stand, up the street from where we lived about a kilometer. Once a week or so we’d head up there to pick up a bunch of chicken sate, with lontong (rice compressed in banana leaves with coconut water) and an incredible peanut sauce. Every time I came there, this little girl would fall apart, weeping inconsolably. Her sweet older sister, who was not frightened of me, would do her best to calm her, but ultimately the toddler had to get moved from wherever she was stashed around the sidewalk stand – covered with tarp and canvas for the rain – and lodged on her mother’s hip. Usually I would arrive, place my order, and then disappear somewhere else for five minutes – the Alfamart up the street for a couple of cold Bintang, for example – in order to keep peace at the sate stand, but sometimes I stayed, the entire time striking abject fear into the heart of this young girl, her parents seeming, only to me perhaps, slightly annoyed, more at me than their daughter, more at the hulking bule who arrives unpredictably and upsets the relative order of their work.
With the daughter perched on her hip, the mother would run through the steps of preparing the chicken for grilling – the marinating, the basting, and so forth (all the cutting and skewering had been done off-site, presumably somewhere with the most rigid sanitary standards assuring healthful meat – in any case, best not to create that image) – and then the preparing the finished sate for the customers – putting 10 sate sticks in a laminated paper wrapping with some hot peppers, the sliced lontong, and a scoopful of the sauce (this was a Madurese sate, which was somewhat distinctive and more spicy than the Javanese one). The father had a giant Hibachi-like sate grill, with an electric fan attached to keep the coals hot, and he’d be grilling, fanning, turning, moving, overseeing the process with 50 to 100 sates going at a time. The screaming infant was not a useful addition to their workload.
At the place with the best nasi goreng (fried rice) down the road in the other direction, in a street stall attached to a small store, Graham became fairly good friends with the owner, and, as was his habit in kitchens throughout Indonesia, would perch himself by the cooking space and ask questions about the cooking, the food, and whatever. The couple who ran the place always greeted Graham with enthusiasm and had him, by the time we moved, cooking at the wok the batches of nasi and mei (noodles) that we the specialty there. The man – who became increasingly unhealthy over the time we visited the stand – took a shine to Graham, and together they would hold up ingredients – garlic, peanuts, various vegetables – and learn the Indonesian and English words for them, and he always remembered the English words Graham taught him, which he made sure to use the next time we returned. (He would make jokes to Graham like, “Tidak ada kacang, tapi kami punya peanuts” – which meant “There are no peanuts, but we have peanuts.”) Going to that stand for the 20-30 minutes it would take to get our dinner was always wonderful time spent, sipping a Coke while I watched Graham do his thing. Of course, Graham behind the counter was a great conversation piece in general, and we met a lot of interesting people at that stand.
There was a mie ayam (chicken noodle soup) stand down the street that I finally stopped at about 6 weeks before our year ended there, part of my renewed enjoyment of street food as our trip came to an end. After my bout with some sort of outrageously painful intestinal virus somewhere around last October, I kind of held back on a lot of street food (the two above remained old stand-bys) but my visit from my friend Michael, in early May, turned me again. Michael would eat anything, all day. When he saw something for sale, on the street, he bought it, and ate it, unconcerned by the fact that the cook pulled a bowl out of a bucket of standing water stuck in a cabinet on the rolling soup stand. I think he did, in fact, get sick, but he also brought gin and bourbon from the duty-free in Singapore (inadvertently smuggling in one liter more than he was allowed) so perhaps our regular night-caps, many of them on a rooftop balcony overlooking the city center of Yogyakarta, helped fend off the worst of it. That mie ayam place was amazing, and I got a delicious meal, which I would now consider, in the United States, a small snack, for around 50 cents.
These places became our routines, and the people our touchstones of stability. They were members of the community who recognized us, who knew that our arrival would cause the baby to cry, or bring the sick owner out from the back to talk to Graham, or add extra spice to the soup because he knew I liked that. Most of their names I never learned, but I will find those stands again someday, and say hello, and some of them will remember me (as the father of one of those two kids, I imagine). Something about the routine movements around our neighborhood – the walks to the small store up the street for gum or kecap manis (sweet soy sauce), the tire repair place where I took my motorcycle when it got a flat (this happened all the time, and it cost 50 cents, where ever I went, to get fixed, in an incredible process that involved a large tin can and kerosene – I loved getting flats, actually, because it always meant a good conversation), the place where I would buy the occasional pack of clove cigarettes (which are way better, and much worse for you, than the clove cigarettes you buy here – and I am glad, because I did learn to enjoy them, and I don’t really need them, and if I could buy them here, it’s not inconceivable that I would - but I would like one on occasion – I confess something about the nicotine spurred on many a blog entry…) – this was the mundane part of our life, and when we lived it, it seemed mundane, not the reason we were there, which I would have connected more to the grand adventures we had, or the teaching, or the road trips – but it was those mundane trips and all those people that are the heart of our year abroad. I miss everything about them.
One more note, since I seem not to return here very often and I have been wondering about it. We were woefully unprepared to travel with kids, and there were so many times (as readers of this blog will recall) when I thought, as my son loudly abused me on a public bus, for example, that there was nothing pleasant about this experience, that the whole thing had been a grand mistake, and that I was frankly sorry we had gone to all the trouble and expense and hassle and disruption of doing this. I’ve become curious about the experience of families in situations like this, because the bonding I thought we would do, we did not do – that is, we didn’t become better at solving problems, or not being irritated by our irritating habits (I am told I have one or two as well), we didn’t learn to find our family as a self-contained unit that could face any hardship with goodwill and mutual reliance, full of appreciation for the fates that brought us together. But we did all those things together – we saw so much, and met so many people, and engaged in loud arguments in the most unlikely of places (inside a royal palace, or a train station in Surabaya, or on a Hindu temple overlooking the most extraordinary Central Javanese valley) – and now, in ways I cannot understand, even those times that were genuinely miserable and unpleasant, the times where I wondered if I would ever really like being a father again, are part of a story that ends with me knowing my kids better, and myself better, and my family better. I’m not sure we’re any happier – I still can’t talk to Seamus very well about math, or sex – but I like the three of them a little more, anyway. I’ll have to write a little more about that too perhaps. I’d be curious to hear from other families who traveled abroad for so long like this, unless you had a Brady-Bunch-aren’t-we-special-and-team-like experience, in which case you can save it for someone else.
I don’t know what that year meant, and I won’t know for a while, I suspect, if ever. But it matters that I figure it out more than I have, in part because it looms so large in my mind, a presence in my life that has changed who I am at home, even though I cannot, in any articulate way, say how.
I could go on – but time does not permit, and I have reached the limits of a decent blog entry. I have missed you all, though, whoever you are (hi Roz!) – and I’m glad to say hello again.
