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To avoid having two grandchildren grow up with a Smothers Brothers’ complex, I am heading off to Japan next week to visit the older of my two new–well not so new now– grandchildren. This is my second attempt at the visit. Last time I had to cancel due to our neighbors and their shenanigans here in Costa Rica and only made it as far as Australia to see the one. Hopefully the land wars here will remain calm this time around and I can complete the trip.

Sam and his wife, Yuka, have been very understanding, but it is time for me to introduce myself to their first child and my first grandchild, little Hannah Oba, before she graduates from college. I gather she is already crawling and has a tooth(!) so I better hurry up and get there.

I love Japan, so this will be fun. I look forward to visiting my all time favorite temple, Mt Tanigumisan Kegonji Temple at (get this) Tokuzumi Tanigumi-mura Ibi-gun, Gifu. I can’t pronounce a thing in Japanese and always try to answer them in Spanish, which is patently ridiculous. I tend to bow a lot and say “yes” and “thank you.” Thankfully my son speaks the language and, of course, Yuka does, otherwise I would be entering banks thinking they were bathrooms and vice versa.

So I will be in good hands. I plan to take photos this time and hopefully can send in a post or two to the blog while I’m there.

I’m off to San José tomorrow and fly to the good old US of A on Tuesday morning. I will spend some time with my parents and coincidentally, my daughter Meraiah and her little boy, Morgan– my second grandchild– will be there at the same time.

I am very excited.

Our lawyer’s assistant, Eugenio, came yesterday to meet with a new topographer who came to measure the land and our boundaries… again. I swear to the real estate gods this property will be worn out before we ever get this case settled. Our lawyer is in Florida for the weekend talking to someone about another client and HER problems.

Eugenio arrived at about 9 AM. The topographer finally arrived at 2:30PM. To say we had some time to kill would be an understatement. The whole notion of time and whether you can kill it, waste it, bide it, or anything else was covered in a previous post. Suffice it to say that we had time and used it.

We started with café con leche, as that is what every good Costa Rican wife offers a guest, and proceeded on with small talk. Coincidentally our cleaning lady, Marta, was here that day and I think she put about four years of wear and tear on the front porch, cleaning it, so she could overhear the conversation.

One thing about Costa Ricans, they are not shy about talking in front of anyone, and those whose business it isn’t are not shy about listening. I have come to understand, in the twenty years of living here, that things are accomplished by the word in the street. Never tell anyone directly what you think, tell your neighbor or a friend who you know will tell someone who will tell someone who will tell the person you wanted to say something to. They don’t like confrontation.

I was aware that Marta was loitering about on the front porch, but it was when Eugenio told us about the Tortugas of Ostinal that she became blatantly apparent.

I asked Eugenio what kind of turtles they were as I had seen an article in the paper that showed thousands upon thousands of them on the beaches. It is that time of year.

“No lo recuerdo,” he said.

“I know they aren’t the same ones we have on this side of the country,” I said in my best Spanish, which isn’t very good but I get by.

Eugenio started in to answer, “No. Yo no se exactamente, pero yo lo pienso…

“LORA!” interrupted Marta from outside, but not out of earshot.

That wasn’t the only thing she got to hear during our six-hour conversation. She now knows as much and probably more–Spanish being her native language– about our current legal case, the Supreme Court decisions relating to the land issues here, and politics in general.

The topographer came after lunch, walked to boundaries and agreed to meet with Paola on Sunday and come back Monday, which will probably be Wednesday or Thursday or Friday.

Well, it served me right. There I was poking around in other people’s blogs yesterday. I visited my writer friend Ruth Douilette’s blog and discovered I’d been asked to publicly respond to a writing challenge:

Write a meme about my strengths as a writer. Hmmm…… what’s meme, I thought? I looked in my trusty Oxford American online dictionary:

meme |mēm| |mim| |miːm|
Noun Biology
an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, esp. imitation.

That didn’t explain very much to me, so I went to the lazy woman’s dictionary, Wikipedia, who said:

Richard Dawkins coined the term meme, which first came into popular use with the publication of his book The Selfish Gene in 1976. Dawkins based the word on a shortening of the Greek “mimeme” (something imitated), making it sound similar to “gene”.

I still didn’t understand what this was all about, but then I found this online site, The Daily Meme:

In the context of web logs / ‘blogs / blogging and other kinds of personal web sites it’s some kind of list of questions that you saw somewhere else and you decided to answer the questions. Then someone else sees them and does them and so on and so on. (what color you are most like, what cartoon character are you, what 80s movie are you).

Ah. Here was the answer to my question. What an interesting assignment and an interesting thing to try to do for ourselves as writers. I actually had to go to critiques I’ve received from other writers to begin to see what they see when they read my work.

I find it curious; when I get these critiques I tend to focus on the portions of my work that need work and not the wonderful things they say.

Like Ruth, I find it hard to sing my own praises. Call it modest, or hard working–there, that’s the one. It sounds better to me, anyway. It’s a bit the way we see ourselves in the mirror and the way others see us, isn’t it?

So I sat down and copied off what people have said about my work over the past several months. Here are a few:

You have this ability to take readers into your space.

The language is telling, delicate and reflective

Wow! Who is that writer? I always see myself tripping over language, editing relentlessly to get the clutter out of the way.

But that hasn’t answered the question: what are my strengths as a writer?

When I write memoir I try to put myself back in the situation I am writing about, to enter the brain space of the experience. I think I’m honest when I write. I try to look hard at what I’m writing about; not just the surface details, but what lies beneath things. I have a gift for observation–my mother has always told me this–and I think I capture nature when I write about it. Other writers have told me that.

There! That didn’t hurt, and I feel ever so slightly better about myself after that exercise. Oh, and I research things I don’t know about– likes memes, for instance.

So thank you, Ruth, for the assignment.

Thank you, Mridu Khullar, for originating the task.

Here is my challenge extended: Write a meme about your strengths as a writer

Tim Elhajj

Ross Eldridge- you will have to send emails or, better yet, start a blog. This could be your first entry!

I recently had a discussion with a writer friend of mine about being separate. I told him that I grew up in a political family, which meant we moved a lot. And I mean we moved a lot; I went to eight grade schools in eight years. I was always the new kid, always arriving late in the school year. It gives one a certain perspective on life, I think. It certainly did me.

So I have always felt separate.

This conversation led me to think about separateness and the effects that emigrating to another country has on a person. Several months ago an editor asked me to write an article about what every ex-pat should know before moving to another country. I’m sure what she had in mind was a cheerful essay on how inconvenient it is to encounter things like siesta hour in the middle of the afternoon when your plans include shopping during those hours. I wasn’t very interested in the topic– I still haven’t written it– but I have begun to think about it.

What should every ex-pat remember?

The elementary answer is: It’s not your country, and the reason people, more often than not, forget this simple fact is buried in their cultural past.

At home we understand the circuitous routes we have to take in order to get things done. When we go to the DMV, for example, we might hate it, but we also understand the rules of the game and how to maneuver ourselves through the system. We understand our country’s laws and what is acceptable in our culture. We blend in and find our way through life without really thinking about how we do it.

Anyone who moves to a foreign country loses this ability to cope in an environment they are accustomed to. This is true no matter what level of sophistication the immigrant has. Most neophyte ex-pats enter a phase in which they are totally enchanted with everything about the place they have chosen to call home. Even the inconveniences are quaint. Call this: The Novelty Period.

It is in this phase that people write home and tell of the many wonderful things they are doing: the festivals and markets they have frequented, the funny episodes of waiting in line for a cell phone all day, and the charming neighbors they have encountered in their unconventional and enviable new lifestyle.

This phase could last for years or be very short depending on the individual and the place they have chosen to live.

At some point, though, the ex-pat will be startled out of the Novelty Phase to discover that some of those quaint customs they enjoyed at first are actually created to take advantage of them, and then anger almost always replaces infatuation. Enter the: That’s Not The Way We Do It At Home phase.

Our English speaking newspaper here in Costa Rica, The Tico Times, is filled to overflowing with these bitchy letters, all telling Costa Ricans how to run their country. The authors of these instructional diatribes are insufferable, and I always find myself thinking, but it’s not your country! And, If you wanted it like it was at home, why did you move here in the first place?

This is also the period when many ex-pats begin hanging out with each other in order to gain strength in numbers as if to say, “We are separate but equal. We belong to a group within your culture.” I have never understood this. If I wanted to remain with my own ilk I could have moved too, oh, maybe Miami, or Hawaii, or las Vegas.

If the ex-pat is lucky he eventually discovers that the system is workable, that some of it is good and some of it is bad– just like “home.” Only then, I would say, does a person begin to feel a semblence of assimilation in their new home.

I know I will never feel completely Costa Rican. On the other hand, I never felt fully assimilated in my own culture, so for me it is okay.

My mother tells the story of meeting a Mexican man, living in her hometown in Oregon. She asked him how he dealt with being an immigrant. “I dissemble,” he said.

It is how many of us survive in other cultures, and some of us in our own.

This essay of mine has rattled around in the offices of editors from The New York Times to AARP. It needed a home and finally found one at Notre Dame magazine under the encouraging hand of Carol Schaal, their editor.

This is my first sale, so for me it is momentous, significant, historic, noteworthy, and consequential. Hey, can you say Red Letter?

A special thank you has to go to my friend, Gary Presley, for his steadfast opinion that the piece was worth that oh-so-sought-after commodity: money. He consistently recommended that I not settle for “the lights” when I could be paid. I feel honored and humbled to share space with him in such a
prestigious publication.

You can find both of our essays at Notre Dame magazine’s summer issue on the web. Look for us under Perspectives.

I have touted IWW to anyone who would listen since I joined last fall sometime. The exact date escapes me, but the feeling of community support remains. Any writer will find a wealth of constructive help through the Lists, but beginning writers, especially, will find it instructive. Look at the link in this blog under the IWW (Internet Writing Workshop) logo.