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July 11th, 2009
Yesterday was my second birthday in South America ( the 2nd time I celebrated a birthday, I'm noticeably not 2) and I passed it quietly at home relaxing with Jimmy and preparing for our first visit home since moving here a little over a year ago.
It’s funny, because we’ve been known to say that “we came here to open and yoga and art studio” but obviously we could have done that somewhere in the States. We came here to have a cultural experience, which we both very much wanted. The realities of it have been overwhelming at times and along with the ever shifting economy led us to choose a simpler life here with an apartment but no brick and mortar business. We know a couple who arrived five months before we did with a plan to open a studio and seventeen months and many thousands of dollars later - not to mention the work! - they are not open (sending powerful positive eyeball rays in general direction of studio) and while we have admired their persistence and determination we have also often said, “glad it’s not us”. I’m glad someone is doing it because this city needs a Bikram Yoga Studio, but I’m glad it’s not me.
Jimmy’s art though was not something that would wait, it pulls on him too hard and calls too loudly for his attention, and he has steadily continued to work toward being in a place logistically where he can take full advantage of the artistic culture here and do the work he loves, let world begin to see his stuff. Last Friday night we passed a major milestone on that path.
Photo by Beatrice Murch
We prepped, planned, sweated and worked to create an opening night for Jimmy’s work in South America which coincided with the completion of his website and the 1st official Jimmy Danko t-shirt and a limited edition print of Changin’ Times, his portrait of Bob Dylan. We put the word out (in English & Spanish) and were flooded with support from some of the amazing people we’ve met since we came here. We found ourselves at 7:00 pm anxiously awaiting the crowds. Sure enough at 7:05 the doorbell buzzed and the 1st of over 100 people started the one minute elevator ride to the 24th floor (where you get off and walk up one more...) to our art gallery in the sky, Gallery 24B.
Photo by Beatrice MurchThere were locals and expats, artists and professors, the very young, musicians and business people, the somewhat older and more. We poured cases of wine (almost ran out but a back up order arrived in a flash!) and passed trays of home made love courtesy of a really good friend. There were people we knew and many we didn’t and they spent the evening talking to Jimmy, to each other, about art, about life, about living in another culture.
Photo by Beatrice MurchI asked everyone I spoke to which piece was their favorite and got answers as varied and interesting as Jimmy’s art. As I raced around, energy high, bottle of wine in one hand and dirty glasses (headed for the kitchen) in the other I stopped for just a moment to notice the buzz of the voices, the energy, the evening, all buzzing around me. I felt a sense of accomplishment. We did it. We moved to another country, bought and remodeled a home, created something to share and blended the local culture with our own in sharing it. We did it.
The next morning as I washed the floors and put everything to rights I felt a calm satisfaction. My Spanish isn’t perfect and I don’t have a yoga studio but we have done an amazing thing and we have learned and grown and stretched our understanding of the world in the process.
The day after tomorrow we’ll board a fourteen hour flight back to California for a visit and I am curious to see how my year in Buenos Aires will have changed the way I interact with the place I lived for most of my life. I hear from other expats to expect some interesting stuff to happen in the experience. I look forward to that. I don’t know what doors life will open for us next and I don’t know if they will open onto America when we leave here, or when that will be, but I do know I got what I came for. We have had a cultural awakening in this big, loud, dirty, spunky city and we are stronger, more flexible and more open to what will come next because of it.
Stay tuned...
June 30th, 2009
It is winter here in the Southern Hemisphere and that fact continues to separate me on some fundamental level from the place of my birth. Lately, when I think of home I don’t just think of the area of the planet that is north of the equator. I think of the part of the United States of America where I was born, where I spent my childhood, where much of what is left of my family still lives. I grew up in the Deep South and I miss being there right now. I have been told by other expats that this is normal. It is an unfamiliar hunger to me. I have never been a particularly sentimental person, I didn't think.
My mother died this year and my sister Maggie has since bridged a gap with my brother, father, and half sister Diana, their husband and wives. It is important to note that for reasons varied and antiquated none of these people speaks to me unless there is some emergency and have not for many years. In the past few days my sisters have both posted photographs from an impromptu family reunion, and from my mother’s funeral - which I could not attend - on their FaceBook pages. It is one of the ironies of modern life that my sisters don't have a relationship with me but we are "FaceBook friends". I find that these pictures awaken a longing in me I did not know was there.
After years of estrangement I realize I do not know the people they have become, but I remember who they are to me and I miss them. I see my brother smile in the picture and I miss him. I see the wives and husband of my father, brother and half sister and I wish I knew them better, or even at all. I see my sister smiling and hugging them, being comforted by them, laughing with them and I miss her and wish I were there to hear her laugh, to see her smile, to comfort her. Somehow they have all forgiven one another and learned to grow closer as they grow older. I wonder what has changed and softened in them that makes this possible. I wonder why it does not extend to me.
clockwise from far left, my father, my younger sister Maggie, my older brother Tony, my much younger half sister Diana
My son too, in the photos from my mother’s funeral, stands close to his uncle so that I can see the nose, mouth, even facial expression they share. My brother Tony was never much of an uncle so they have spent very little time together, but I’ve always seen my brother in my son. That way they both hold a forefinger near the corner of their mouths when they think hard. The way they each have of dismissing conversation they find absurd with absolute sarcasm. That extremely opinionated way of telling you exactly what they think - wait, I do that too. Alex didn’t learn that from anyone. He was born to do those things. It’s in his blood. I didn’t know that when he was born. I learned it as I watched him grow into a man who, remarkably, looked just like my big brother, except shorter and with blond hair. And just like my brother I both love him and wish he were different. I wish they were gentler with people. I wish they both would take better care of themselves. I adore them both. I think they are both incredibly funny. I am moved beyond reason by any expression of love from either of them and I am deeply heart broken because they don’t talk to me. No matter what, I love them.
My Brother Tony and my Son Alex at my Mother's Funeral
Jimmy asked me tonight why I care. He doesn’t know my family, except for my son Alex, because it was long before I met him that they stopped talking to me. He does know old stories though and he wonders why I would want a relationship with such people. When he asked me that I could not answer except to ask him to consider why he cares about the connections he has to family members, some of whom he never even knew and some of whom he has struggled to like. I think he understood some. It’s family, that’s why. It doesn't matter how many years and miles and life changes and choices come between us. What matters is that we share a connection that is indescribably deep. I haven't lived with my brother since I was 13 and my son never has, yet I can look at my brother, who looks so much like my father, and see the face of my son. I can't explain it any better than that.
In one image my brother, who used to catch catfish for our supper when he was a little boy, is sitting near a shallow Southern river, weeds sprouting through the grass that covers the moist, rich soil at his feet. I can taste the humid summer day in that picture. I can feel the heat of the deep American South in summertime on my skin. I can hear the mosquitoes hum and taste the cold beer and smell the hot oil those catfish are cooked in. In that moment I don’t care what kind of man my brother has grown into, whether we vote the same way or believe in the same things. In that moment, him sitting there in the Southern heat on a picnic table bench in the June afternoon, everyone he loves nearby, I just want to be there with him and to feel his beautiful smile on me. I want my brother to love me. I want my sister to laugh with me about some sisterly secret. I want my dad to look over and find all four of his children drinking beer together and talking about the mundane things people talk about. I don’t know why I want this. But I do.
A shallow river near my brother's home in Nashville, TN in June, 2009Living here, in the Southern Hemisphere where the days are very cold now and the air is crisp, the sky gray, I feel so very far away from them, my family. It is not coming here that created that distance, yet it feels as though it makes it harder to bridge. I am glad we came here, and I hope to learn many things from this journey. One thing I have learned that I did not expect to, is that this is not my land. I have a homeland very far from here and no matter far I go it will always own a piece of me.
