Apr 4, 2017 Ramblings and Musings
The Hod and I
(About my Standard Poodle, Holly, and her propensity for sticks and branches)
April 4th, 2017
ByVijaya Sundaram
So, The Hod and I went for a walk, despite the soggy evening.
As is her wont, she sought, and found a long, twiggy branch littering the damp ground, and wouldn’t budge, until I let her pick it up in her mouth. Then, she proceeded, stick in mouth, chin up, ears back, tail high, stepping with pride on the sidewalk, as she walked me up the street. The people in their cars at the intersection looked amused, and one woman, rolling down her window, said, “You’ve put a smile on ALL our faces!”
That’s our Holly – the Original Medfordian Stick-Hound (also, a Banana-Hound, but that’s not relevant to this story, is it?!).
Jan 7, 2017 Daily Life, Ramblings and Musings
My D.C. Adventure With My Daughter
(While Prez. Obama is Still Our President)
As posted a few days ago on FB
©January 3rd-4th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
(Note: On our first full day (January 2nd), we’d spent a very long period of time at the National Gallery of Art, West and East Wings, plus the Sculpture Garden, as well as at the Museum of Natural History, both of which places were utterly absorbing and fascinating. I didn’t write about anything at the end of the first day, though, because I forgot to do so. The thing that stayed with me from the National Gallery of Art was the transcendental, translucent painting of the Last Supper by Salvador Dali. S and I stood there for a while, transfixed, spellbound. The thing that made S happy at the Museum of Natural History was, of course, the Dinosaur section, though S enjoyed all of it. Oh, and it drizzled on and off all day, but we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, despite the weather.)
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Tuesday, January 3rd, 2017, our second full day in D.C.:
We had a damp, but fun day today (our second full day in DC.). LOTS of walking. My daughter is an uncomplaining trooper! So proud of her!
We took the S2 bus into D.C. from the place where we’re staying. Oh, and we saw the White House first thing this morning (upon reaching Lafayette Place), albeit from a short distance. Alas, we hadn’t booked a tour, because one has to do it six months in advance, acc. to the nice young police cop.
Then, we walked from Lafayette Place to the Museum of Natural History, where we spent a LOT of time today (because it’s S’s favourite). It’s an amazing place. And we saw the much-celebrated Hope Diamond, mostly out of a sense of duty. Once there, though, we were captured by it, and everything else in the gemology and rock section. S was delighted by the Dino section, of course. Plenty of beautiful, and sometimes sad, things to see there. The stuffed African elephant killed in 1955 by some hunter made me angry.
Some frustration before we finally got the Hop-on Hop-off DC Trails bus, (which I’d booked the night before), because my phone had died. A kindly woman allowed me to charge it up by allowing me to use her computer in the cafe at the east wing of the National Gallery of Art (where S and I ended up for forty minutes to take a much needed rest, with coffee for me and chocolate croissant for her).
After charging my phone, we tried to find the tour bus, while we walked up and down Constitution Ave, plus parts of Pennsylvania Ave., getting thoroughly confused.
I’m amazed at how my sense of direction (normally very good) vanished so completely. And I got rid of Google Maps, because it didn’t help. Plus, it drained my mobile. Anyway, I felt rather stupid.
It was great once I finally stopped going around in circles, and located the stop to board that danged bus. The tour bus itself is comfortable, and our guide was good. We passed various landmarks and got some good history on them.
Got off at Jefferson, spent a quiet time there. It’s a powerful and peaceful place to be. We loved it. I think it’s always been one of my special favorites. S loved it too. We talked about how Jefferson lived books, and she asked me, “Mom, do you think I’m a nerd?”
I considered her question, and answered, “Yes. We both are.”
She said, “Do you think I need some accessories to be a nerd?”
“Like glasses?”
“Yes,” she answered eagerly.
“No,” was my firm reply, “Thank your stars you have good vision. There’ll be plenty of time for glasses in your middle age.”
She pouted good-naturedly.
(She really, really wants to wear glasses. I love my tween!)
We saw various buildings from the outside, incl. the Washington Monument. No time to go up, alas!
There is so much to explore here, and any one museum takes hours!
Tomorrow, the Washington Zoo awaits (S is very keen and excited to go). Then, the Hop-on Hop-off DC Trails bus. Hoping to catch three or four monuments incl. Lincoln, FDR and the Vietnam Memorial, plus the American History Museum. Also, I really want to go to the Hirschhorn, which I used to haunt back in my time as a chaperone on school trips to D.C.
I might also perhaps try the Holocaust Museum lower level, if we can get in. Not sure if we can do all of this, but am going to give it a go!
Ambitious? You bet!
If I get to half what I want S to be able to see tomorrow, though, I’ll be content.
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Wednesday, January 4th, 2017 – our last full day in D.C.:
What a day!
First the Smithsonian Washington Zoo at 9:14 a.m. My delightful and gracious sister-in-law had introduced us a couple of days ago to the convenience of Uber (which I’d hitherto avoided), and we availed of this to get to the Zoo. And it was a damp, drizzly morning with only die-hard animal-lovers like us up and about there. S was in seventh heaven. We loved the pandas, of course (four of them, one of whom is the one year old Bei-Bei) and adored the elephants – named Suvarna, Maharani, and Kamala. They were sweet attentive and wonderful. We got their back-stories (Suvarna and Kamala, friends, not sisters, had both been orphaned at 1.5 years of age, then wound up in Calgary, Canada. Kamala had her baby, Maharani, who now is a bit of a spoiled, pushy youngling at 21 or 22 years of age, compared with the lofty 41 years that her mother and “aunty” share).
I sang to the elephants (my mother’s favorite song, “Kurai Ondrum Illai”), and they came close to listen!
Then, there were all the other marvelous animals –the wolves, the oryxes, the gazelles, the cranes, the flamingoes, the caracal, various smaller mammals, great apes (my favorites), beautiful sand cats and fennec foxes and more. We were at the zoo for almost four hours.
Finally, we tore ourselves away, and by means of our local Uber-Hermes, winged our way to the place where we’d take our tour bus. We wound up at the Air and Space Museum, where we spent a goodly period of time, and took off in a flight simulator whose destination was the outer edge of a local black hole. We saw supernovae and almost got sucked into the black hole, but made off just before that. We needed to get back to earth quickly, and a convenient worm hole showed up. We swept through it à la something that resembled the opening credits of Doctor Who, and then, Earth swam into view – except that it was an Earth several centuries in the future. We were stopped by the local flying police cars, and then, the simulator ended our ride. Mucho fun!
We took the tour bus again, and this time ended up at the American History Museum. We saw just a few sections of it, but it was all good stuff, including transportation and the history of electricity here. We also saw the original Star Spangled Banner. COOL!
My phone had, of course, predictably died a few times today, but each time I was prepared with my charger, and managed to juice it just enough to either get the Hop On Hop Off Bus, or an Uber. We went back to where we were staying, had supper and then got back into D.C. proper. We were all set to catch our Night-Sights, via the Hop-On, Hop-Off DC Trails Night Tour bus, on which I had secured seats for the Night Tour
We waited at the rendezvous point at the second stop where they said they could pick us up at 7:10 p.m. It was COLD by now, and we were reasonably dressed for D.C., but not for the bitter wind that swept around in eddies like an avenging god, and decided to adopt us as its pet victims, biting and vindictive in its affections.
The bus did not show up. I waited, then telephoned them. Despite my calling them every ten minutes, and getting assurances that the bus was “on its way,” and “almost there,” the bus never materialized at 15th and New York. By now, it was 7:38 p.m. Then, the dispatcher told me to go get the bus at 15th and Pennsylvania. So, our teeth chattering with cold, we half-ran, half-walked to that place.
And the bus wasn’t there!
Did I mention that I have a Stoic for a daughter? Not a word of complaint about how tired she was (We’d already walked five or six miles by that point in the day). No moaning and groaning. No grumpiness. She’s an example to us all.
(And did I mention that my phone gave out AGAIN? Too many damned APPS! I turned with relief to my daughter’s phone, which she’s careful to keep turned off and charged for just such situations. I raise a toast to my good child!)
Using her phone, I waxed wroth, gave the dispatcher a mild earful, and said I would like my money back. He said, in a faint voice, that I should call tomorrow morning about that.
I turned to S, and said, “Let’s forget about the Night Bus Tour, and let’s do it on foot!”
My tween-trooper said, “Yes, Mom!” in cheerful agreement, clearly relieved that my half hour of mild distress followed by five minutes of ire at the DC Trails Bus-folk had magically transformed into a giddy determination to DO this thing ourselves.
So, we walked all the way from Pennsylvania Ave and 15th Street (passing the Washington Monument) all the way down the Washington Mall towards Lincoln Memorial. We paused to photograph ourselves sitting on Einstein’s lovely, wrinkly, bronze statue, and rubbed him affectionately on the nose.
Then we walked and walked till we reached the majestic Lincoln Memorial. It was quite beautiful and brightly lit, and there were clearly determined people like ourselves out there.
A crescent moon hung like a silver fingernail in the sky and added mystery to the setting. Bright white lights glittered along the way and were reflected like hard diamonds in tremulous water in the Tidal Basin. We were happy, although our feet felt broken.
Then, we went down, and found ourselves at the Vietnam Memorial. It is, as many might remember, a sobering and moving and beautiful Memorial. Even into the dark, it held us in thrall. We shone a light on the names as we went past. I told her about how Maya Lin’s simple, but arresting, design for the wall had won the public design competition for the Memorial, and that she was just a young woman in her early twenties.
In silence, we looked at the names marching past us.
S wanted to know more about the war.
I told her a little bit about the Vietnam War, and added that for so many American victims , there must have many more Vietnamese ones.
She asked, “Who won?”
When I answered, “No one,” she grew thoughtful, and we were both silent.
The Nurses’ Memorial after that is one of my favorite set of statues – always affects me deeply. We walked around it, marveling at the pathos, the suffering and the courage clearly portrayed there.
We walked along the Tidal Basin in the dark, along the lit path. There were scores of ducks holding a solemn conclave in the water and discussing philosophical matters, and we didn’t intrude.
Oddly, we felt quite safe, until I realized that we were two females walking along a path in the dark, and decided abruptly to get into the sidewalk along Constitution Ave. I have to say, it really is safe there at night, or so it seems! Perhaps, we were just lucky.
So, we saw quite a lot this evening. We were satisfied. It was time to go home – but how?
Well, we walked and walked and walked – almost all the way back the way we’d come. Poor S! By now, she was lurching. I cursed myself for being a hard, heartless mother, making my child walk so far all day. I kept apologizing to her, but she reassured me she loved it, but was just very tired.
It was now 9:11 p.m. Not a cafe in sight! We turned down Constitution Ave into 17th Street. We kept up our spirits, and I promised S that I’d find a cafe to plug my phone in and call an Uber. Alas, not one single cafe was to be found.
Then, praise be! A McDonald’s loomed into view along our right!
And turning to S (who knows my rather disapproving attitude to McDonald’s), I said: “I never thought I’d ever say that I’m happy to see a McDonald’s, of all things, but I’m SO happy to see one!”
She laughed. So did I.
With relief, we lurched in, asked for an outlet, were directed to one close to the ceiling – an odd place to have it! A courteous young African-American man helped me plug it in, and within minutes, I had enough power in it to turn it on, call an Uber, and have it arrive in two minutes!
Clutching our lemonades, S and I tumbled with gratitude into the car, and reached home by a minute before 10:00. Our lovely hosts had hot chocolate with vanilla and cinnamon waiting for us, and cookies and brownies, as well.
We were grateful for a life where we *could* have such things at the end of a beautiful, long, exhausting, varied, magical, occasionally frustrating, and wonderfully satisfying and adventurous day.
S tumbled into sleep after a shower and a leg-foot massage by her doting and somewhat guilt-ridden, Mom. Said Mom is now here, sitting in a comfortable chair in the beautiful home of our kind relatives-in-law, revisiting her long day, and feeling oddly pleased with how a setback turned into an adventure.
Thanks for reading!
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Tags: #mother-daughter-trip-to-Washington-D.C.., #Ramblings, A Tourist in the Nation's Capital, Symbolic Visit
Dec 9, 2016 Daily Life, Ramblings and Musings
Nightmare-Dream-Nightmare
(What I Wrote Before Going to Sleep Last Night)
©December 8th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
I’m dreaming about an alternate world, a parallel reality.
In this world, The Drmpfster flickers like an image in a hazy, half-remembered nightmare, the kind from which you awake, your mouth open in a soundless scream. You look around and drink in all the peace and beauty that you know exists in this world. Then, you notice your mouth is dry and you go downstairs to get a drink of water. Sipping slowly, you stand – while your heart stops hammering and goes on to its more measured rhythm – gazing out your kitchen window, to see a landscape flooded in moonlight, and the promise of a glorious tomorrow.
You know that when this morrow comes, you will not be wasting time on FB and news articles, scanning madly like a crazed thing for any kind of news that’s good. When this morrow comes, the trees will glow brightly. Birds will sing, and bees will go about their bee-business.
In this world, when the morrow comes, the voices of cheerful children and parents and grandparents and other grown-ups of all races will be part of the air you breathe.
In this parallel world, there are no oil-spills, no pipelines, no dying seas, no loss of ocean life, no species disappearing, no earthquakes caused by human activity, no lack of rich, organic food.
In this world people will help those who fall, or are hurting, and songs will be sung while the usual scenes of living and striving play out, but without that sense of hideous malevolence that looms over us like the blooming of a darkness that cannot be understood.
You stand and envision this world, and smile when you remember what the morrow will bring. Your certainty in the parallel universe is diamond-bright.
And then, the dream fades, and the flickering nightmare world rushes back in like a loathsome, disease-flecked tide, bearing on its crest the Destroyer Of Worlds.
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Tags: #Dream, #Nightmare, #originaldreamvignette
Sep 28, 2016 Daily Life, Ramblings and Musings
Sum Total
©Sept. 28th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
There are days like these (actually, for me, it’s pretty much all the time), when the sensation of living in several parallel dimensions of reality seem heightened:
There’s pleasure in sitting with a steaming cup of Madras filter-coffee, watching squirrels and other small critters racing around in the backyard, watching the muted light filtering through the fir tree in the backyard, letting my eyes rest upon the discs of colored class on my window ledge.
There’s some distress in hearing my daughter in the other room sniffling with a cold (for which I’ve made her several, but several, cups of turmeric-honey-fresh-lemon-fennel-cumin-pepper tea), but knowing she’s just got a cold is reassuring. It will pass.
There’s happiness in knowing that Holly is recovering from her dog-bite wound (which caused her and all of us great distress and many tense days of going back and forth to the Emergency Vet Hospital), and seems to be perfectly well now.
There’s joy in knowing my husband’s back from being away in Toronto for four days, and we’re all home together.
There’s happiness in knowing my daughter and I will soon be seeing my mother and other family members in India (traveling by Emirates tomorrow).
And there’s great sorrow in knowing that people around the world are suffering in ways I cannot even imagine.
There’s grief and anger that tens of thousands of species of animals and insects are disappearing each year, and that WE are the direct (and indirect) cause of this catastrophe.
And there’s great frustration and fear in knowing that the CO2 levels in our atmosphere have passed 400 ppm.
And still, I can dance on this side of the edge of happiness.
We need to raise the sum total of happiness in the world.
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Tags: #ClimateChangeisReal, #personal, #PleasureInDailyLife, #Species Extinction
Aug 29, 2016 Ramblings and Musings, The Daily Post
Speak Out
August 29th, 2016
Vijaya Sundaram
Bear witness to injustice.
Hold the mirror up to the haters and the corrupt.
Tell the story.
Speak out.
Support.
Help.
It’s the least we can do in a world riddled with those who possess power, and who hurt others intentionally, because they can.
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Tags: #DailyPrompt, #Postaday, #TheDailyPost, #Witness
Aug 29, 2016 Ramblings and Musings, The Daily Post
Small
©August 29th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
I’ve always loved small things.
I loved the little plastic animals that came with Binaca Flouride Toothpaste when I was growing up, a wonder-struck child, in India. I was entranced by little glass animals as a child, and even now as an adult, I cannot resist getting them for my daughter if I go to the local zoo. I gazed at stones and seashells and saw worlds.
I loved the tiny bronze Buddhist monks and other figurines that a friend gave me. They have pride of place at the window display in my room, as they solemnly stare into endless space.
When I get a small object for a present, I am happier than when I get an embarrassment of riches.
I love small marbles, small semi-precious stones, the broken opal from a ring I still have, the cracked ceramic swan the size of my thumb.
I wish I were small.
Small wonder it is, then, that I love this song by Suzanne Vega. It speaks to me like no other song has spoken to me in recent years.
I wish I were a small, blue thing, forever falling, never hitting ground.
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Tags: #DailyPrompt, #miniature, #Postaday, #SmallBlueThing, #Suzanne Vega, #TheDailyPost
Aug 15, 2016 Ramblings and Musings, The Daily Post
I’m confused, confounded, bewildered, addled, puzzled, perplexed, mystified, bemused, stupefied, baffled, bamboozled, muddled and nonplussed by:
- Practically ANY government form I have to fill out.
- Trump and his followers
- People who don’t know what irony means
- People who don’t know what sarcasm means
- My vacillating about whether to do this one thing I love to do, or the other thing I love to do, or the third thing I like to do. (And thus, I while away the hours contemplating what might have been.)
- People who would judge me by my shoes.
Or feet.
Or nose.
Or my being
As Confucius (or his Internet Persona) says, “To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.” Alas, this baffled me. (Hasty parenthetical remark added later: Of course, it didn’t! I suddenly wanted to pretend to feel what it felt like to be a supporter of You-know-Who.)
I need to change the entire course of history right now.
Or, perhaps, after I’ve had my watermelon popsicle.
That’s all.
See you tomorrow – if I still exist in fact, as opposed to existing in
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: #Confused, #DailyPrompt, #Postaday, #Ramblingsandmusings, #TheDailyPost
Jun 18, 2016 Daily Life, Ramblings and Musings
On June 17th (that is, earlier today, since I count post-midnight posts as still being TODAY!):
And I had a GREAT time! The audience was VERY small (I guess I should have promoted it a lot more). However, the people who were there were wonderful poets and artists themselves, and I loved how they listened.
It was lovely to sing for them, play guitar, read my poems and stories, and accompany myself in my readings on my slit drum, my wooden fish-scraper, my clay bongos, and the pear-shaped shaker.
My daughter said she loved it, and my husband had sweet words to say, as well.
I was happy.
It’s been eighteen years since I did a solo gig that lasted an hour.
I am slowly easing back into performance, and I loved tonight’s gentle entry into it!
Tags: #Easing back into the world of performance, #PoetryPerformance, #SongsandGuitar
Jun 10, 2016 Daily Life, Ramblings and Musings
Yearning for the Past
©June 10th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
Usually, I live in the present. Some days, however, a deep nostalgia, akin to grief, grabs hold of me and doesn’t let go. This surprises me, because I like to think of myself as being free from all that. I’m not.
I yearn for every single minute of my life, every moment, whether good or bad. I want to relive everything with a double sense of self– my younger self in that moment in time, and my present self, watching over me.
I yearn for the indefinable newness of everything when I was young. Yes, there’s newness now, as well, but I want to go to that first sense of wonder at experiencing the world through childhood, teenagehood, young adulthood, even my entry into motherhood. I could list all those memories, sensations, emotions and thoughts, but this is not about listing.
One cannot step in the same river twice. I know that. There is one place where the shadow of a shadow of a shadow of my lived life can be captured – in my mind, and through that, into words on paper, or the screen, where it undergoes another transformation.
Reality is Supreme, and Life is supremely indifferent.
I know every fold in my brain contains those first impressions, and all the minutes, the hours, the days of my life. I still remember some things so vividly, it’s almost as if I were there – they’re not so much memories that one can share as much as sensations of things.
In the end, all of this will be dust. Where will all those memories go? Will my daughter’s cells carry the memories of her parents’ cells? And do we all carry not just our own, but also our ancestral memories?
Perhaps, those memories will join the ether, and transmit themselves through dreams.
Or, perhaps, those memories will form themselves into new people. And when those people meet, they will feel kin, and wonder why.
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Tags: #déjà vu, #Memories, #Musings, #Reliving the past
Jun 8, 2016 Ramblings and Musings, The Daily Post
Mostly, I don’t get embarrassed.
When I do, I shrug it off.
So what if you’re wearing mismatched clothes, or your shirt is inside out?
I’ve done it too many times in my youth and middle age to care one whit.
So what if you order vegetables au gratin at age 16, because you could pronounce it, liked the sound of it, and (perhaps) wanted to impress the rich and stylish college students you’re with, at the posh restaurant in Madras to which you’d been only once or twice before, and then literally blanch when they bring you a horrible-looking creamy stew with some dead vegetables floating in it?
Well, I saw them exchange sly glances at each other, and said to myself, “These are not my people,” then suffered my way through the awful food, and the awful evening, and fled home in relief to my loving parents.
So what if you’re standing there on stage, solo, without your rock group (which couldn’t make it for that Inter-Collegiate competition, due to schedule issues) guitar in hand, earnestly two-plaited, and you’re the only female there, and they boo, because it’s a male chauvinist crowd at an engineering college?
I simply held up my hand, and waited. When they stopped, I sang. Then, they cheered themselves hoarse. One simply has to wait out the bullies in such public cases. I think back now, and wonder how I wasn’t petrified with fright. I must have been completely immune to fear at that moment. Also, I didn’t care about the outcome. I knew they were being pigs. I didn’t get embarrassed being the only female to perform on that stage. It helped that I won the Best Vocalist prize.
So what if you’re standing in front of a crowd of two thousand, all rooting for you and your band, and you forget the words to the song just after you, as band leader, finished the count off?
Well, I simply grinned and said, “Oops … hang on, I’ve forgotten how it starts,” and they hung on silently, and I waited until the words floated back into my head. (Oh, and they cheered themselves hoarse, and we won the first prize).
So what if you the play for which you (as a first year, totally new, 8th Grade teacher) composed the music, did the directing, and for which the students from the last period class worked hard, fell apart because the main actor, brilliant but thoroughly spoiled, ill-prepared and bratty, forgot his lines, ran off stage, ran back in again, then sat on the bed, which fell down, whereupon he ran off again, and had to be persuaded to return?
My students and I simply ploughed on. At least our little music section did well. And the play’s message got through. We even got a few nice words and emails from students and teachers, despite the main actor’s disastrous entries and exits onto and off stage. And that was that.
But then, my embarrassing moments have been few and far between. Sometimes I wish I’d had a few more, then I could make a nice after-dinner story out of them! My husband does, and his stories are brilliant.
The older I get, the more I find that embarrassment is pointless. If a situation is a social disaster, turn it into a story, or, at the very least, embrace the embarrassment caused by it.
In any case, once enough time has passed, no one will know.
And then, in a few billennia, we shall all turn into pieces of explosive space-dust floating about, unembarrassed about being a few hydrogen or helium atoms short of a full-fledged star.
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Embarrassing
Tags: #DailyPrompt, #Embarrassing, #TheDailyPost