homesweethome --part one

After years on the road, tossed from one shore to another, and at times living without any commitment to any given country or culture, I have lately found myself pondering the idea of settling down.

But it’s not the kind of settling down where one gets a mortgage and a dog but rather it’s about finding a comfortable state of mind.

For one, I don’t think we will ever live in just one place. How could we since everyone in our family has different attachments?

The girls, for instance, still think they are Ticas hailing from the South Caribbean, Matt although being the most adaptable of us is, in his heart of hearts, still mostly American, and I for my part, truly enjoy a handful of European castles around me. Settling down in our case will mean to find a way of living in many places at the same time.

At night, before I fall asleep I like to mind-travel. My imagination creates an image of a place I have known well and I then recreate the sensations that made that particular place so real at the time. Sounds, smells, and even feelings come back to me in their colorful range of hues.

I see the green volcanic slopes, their peeks shrouded in mist. I can smell the rain coming in from the coast on a tropical mid-afternoon and I am back in our home in Costa Rica. A high-pitched twitter of voices rings in my ears. The back patio is filled with life and the children are chasing each other in the yard behind. I wonder whether I need to check on dinner but then decide to linger because I have tired out my Spanish for the day and just want to take in the moment, sniffle the sweetness of the approaching rain. It is that real.

While time moves on mercilessly minds are allowed to linger. Moments of our lives are engraved into the backdrop of our minds just like long gone loves, and so is our notion of home.

Once we have thrown out our anchor and connected, learned the language, followed the local news, made an appearance at the town fair, gathered friends and shared food, a place becomes more than a couple of coordinates.

England will be such a place, I am casting my anchor.

if

Linear thinking is big in the First World. In highly individualized societies, where choices start with birth, failure also is individualized. It is a way of dealing with the ‘losers.’ Since everyone has a choice, nobody is a victim and, hence, no one but oneself can be blamed.

Around us it works somewhat like this:

If you live in the right neighborhood, you can send your children to the right pre-school that will get them into the right primary school. That primary school will then prepare them (i.e., coach and train or, bluntly put, condition them) to pass the selective examinations to get into the right secondary school.

And getting into the right secondary school figures prominently in countries that have privatized education such as the US and Britain.

In those countries state education simply won’t do. It’s a known fact that is rarely questioned. Everyone seems to have accepted the educational chicken ladder as the way to personal success (i.e., Oxbridge and onward into the mills of accounting offices and law firms). The pecking order is harsh and the losers are many and sorrowfully young.

In the late sixties, Britain passed an education reform that introduced the Comprehensive School, a system where every child is admitted and subsequently moves along according to her or his abilities.

But it immediately came under attack and was ultimately undermined by the parents from well-to-do areas who insisted that differences are in fact good. Of course, these same parents are able to make sure that in a soup bowl of inequalities their children will float like oil. Needless to say these children are by no means smarter, just more privileged.

In return that has led the middle class to fear for the well-being of their offspring. After all, no one wants to be stuck with the hoi polloi especially when entrance into Cambridge or Oxford is at stake. So better to take out loans and pay whatever the tuition, tutor, or training sessions may cost to make the grade and get them into one of the cadre academies.

It’s always the same. As soon as education gets tied to income it becomes unpleasant and on average still mediocre. Or have I missed all the fanfare announcing the future generation of geniuses pouring out of the gates of these skewed systems?

At some point, of course, the insanity is exposed. Children who graduate from so-called elite institutions don’t all have successful lives, they aren’t all well off, and they certainly aren’t all happy.

But guess what? They must have made some wrong choices along the way. Maybe if they had networked a little better and if only they had joined the right country club, or...

However, whatever they did or didn’t do, one thing is for sure: you can’t blame their parents.

And maybe that’s what it’s all about.

One Eye Half Shut

There are moments when the glass is actually half full without having to squeeze one eye shut and wrinkle up nose, forehead, and a sizable part of the rear end. Moments when there is silence without absence, when everyone is happily and quietly pursuing the one or other interest, when no temples get slashed by the corner of desks, no arms get pinched by baby fingers, no melodramatic ballads get hurled in the air of a tired after-dinner clean up, and no story problems evoke lengthy vitriolic diatribes.

The other day there was such a moment. Zoë had logged onto Skype for a science jam session with grandpa, Lea had a sea of colors assembled around her, eyes steadied on a beautiful O’Keffe rendition of a poppy, and Jules sat by himself in the back of the yard making mud pies for our new neighbors, an extended family of snails.

Funny enough, I almost missed it. I guess I got a little too busy with squeezing one eye shut.

Cut down

It’s a strange thing with mothers. Even though they are irreplaceable in a person’s biography they are often omitted with a blurb about the author, especially in the classics.

Again and again as I pick up this or the other book from Shelley to Tchechov I find no mention of their mothers.

Yet we may rightfully assume they were born by mortal females who surely had some impact on them and their development. Fathers, on the other hand, are dutifully mentioned regardless of their influence as a parent. Ever noticed this?

I have a friend who patiently listens to my observations and then heaves a sigh and tries to push me back in line. Why do I care? After all it doesn’t really matter.

Why, for instance, do I notice and (what’s almost more reprehensible) mention that children’s plastic toy animals tend to be predominantly male?

I don’t know why I notice these things. But someone should. And someone should also say that it’s just a tiny bit off. So why not me?

Okay, okay, don’t tell me.

Woof !

After four months into this island adventure I have to owe up to my unremitting ignorance concerning the ins and outs of the UK education system. In my defense it should be mentioned, however, that there seem to be more outs than ins.

For one, it is rather unlikely that a first attempt at entering an educational institution in this country will be successful. When trying to place a child, so called catchment areas for state schools must to be considered.

However, living in one of these areas does not automatically grant a child access into one of these schools. In fact, we were told that London parents run off to secure a place for their child on the day of her or his birth. Now that’s a bonding parent!

However, as will be made clear to parent and child, remaining at a decent state school will depend on a series of drawn out tests and examinations starting at the age of seven.

Here is another little island fact: girls take secondary school entrance exams at eleven years of age but not so boys. For some reason only obvious to Brits, boys take the exam at thirteen, which by the way is also the last possible date to get accepted into secondary school it seems. I am not kidding. It’s 11, 13, or tough luck folks.

I virtually was told that moving to England with a child older than 14 at the most is a really bad idea since no ‘reputable’ school would want to ‘run the risk’ of taking in a...well, they didn’t outright say stray dog, but somehow I think that’s what they meant.

“Forget injuries never forget kindness.”
Confucius

Not Bread Enough!

That Brits have the worst food in the world is most certainly a thing of the past. Restaurants, grocery stores, and cook books have adeptly incorporated tastes and dishes from culinary hot spots around the world.

In fact, grocery stores everywhere abound in a large variety of veggies and sauces from Asia. And get this -- and you won’t hear that very often from a German -- they tend to have a larger assortment of breads than one would find in Germany.

Everything from baguette, scones, to whole wheat, potatoe farls, stone-oven baked artisan breads, and focaccia is available, even dark German Vollkorn and Swedish crisp breads.

Yet, despite this variety there is not one kind of bread that is outright pallet meltingly delicious.

I feel truly bad to say this. It’s like a beauty contest, where everything is being done to prove that Dominicans can be blonde, too, and the judges just raise their overly arched eyebrows and say: “Not blonde enough!”