The Fourth Thursday of November

I thought I would write this post tomorrow. Our Santiago-style Thanksgiving celebration will be after the fact so it only seemed apt that the post would then follow.

Family holiday photos of past… My beautiful Mama.

Well, it’s almost 10 pm here in Santiago, on Thursday, November 24, Thanksgiving 2011, and I’m compelled to write now. I got home from work a little while ago after spending the day with 6.7 million people for whom it was pretty much just like any other day of the week. I just warmed up dinner and talked to my mom and sat down on the couch with my husband, who is also still in his work clothes and reaching for his guitar, just like any other day of the week. I’m on my laptop, checking in on how my friends and family are doing near and far, yep, just like any other day of the week.

My mom and her mom, my aunts, my uncle, my cousins.

Except that Thanksgiving has been on my mind since my mom arrived last week. I’m thankful she’s here and that she is thankful that she finally gets to see exactly where it is her daughter and son-in-law have set up married life. I debated how best to celebrate, but with teaching so late on Thursdays it didn’t make sense to cook a big dinner or try to squeeze into one of the gringo-centric prix fixe meals happening around the city. So we’ve decided to officially celebrate tomorrow… at an Italian restaurant, which only seems fitting given our respective heritage.

Italians!

Still, we have spent decades gathering with family on the fourth Thursday of November to feast on autumn’s bounty. This is the day. I may be able to move myself from country to country, but I can’t seem to be able to move this day.

It was in the 80s today. I woke up, went to work, met up with my mom, and went to work again. The routine was in place, but something was different–this feeling that somehow it should be cold out and there should be certain aromas coming from the kitchen and I should be trading text messages with friends and family around the country on my nationwide, unlimited-text calling plan. I’ve thought so much about how it should be this way that I woke up yesterday convinced it was, in fact, Thanksgiving. I posted a status to that affect, wished a healthy holiday to all those I emailed with and was well onto my second cup of coffee before I was notified of my error. It was only, in fact, Wednesday, just like any other day of the week.

Winter, as it is for my family back home.

But we count our blessings no matter where we are, no matter the temperature or the continent or the time of year. And that is what I’ve sat down here to do as I used to do in journals in high school, as I’m used to doing around a large, family- and friend-packed table spotted with the colorful, traditional delicacies I can almost taste now if I really concentrate. We go around and say what we are thankful for this moment, this year, this lifetime. So I subject you, dear reader, to my gratitude list, if only to know that I have uttered in on the real day, on the Thursday that I didn’t realize mattered so much to me until it felt almost like any other day.

Carols.

I am grateful for the love of family, of my husband, of dear friends.

… for Skype so I could wish my best friend Happy Birthday (and so she could inform me that yesterday was not, in fact, Thanksgiving).

… for the Chilean mail system so one of the most stunning hand-made gifts of all time could be delivered from one of the most stunning friends of all time on a day post offices are usually closed and no such beautiful gifts pass from hand to hand.

Mama’s mad holiday style!

… for words. For the technological ease with which they form here. For the pain-staking skill with which they were laid down hundreds of years ago. For the beauty they lift like a film from the pages of my favorite books. For the ability to have been able to make a living organizing them into sets of three and six and twelve. For the way writers like Joan Didion, Lorrie Moore, Jennifer Egan, Ian McEwan, Ann Patchett, and Jonathan Franzen have organized them. For their meaning in and across languages. For the questions people ask and answer. For pen pals.

… for health. For the ability to get out of bed and walk to work. For the will to learn. For the impetus to laugh. For the involuntary wisdom of the body. For the health of my husband and our families.

… for surprise. For the look on my mom’s face when she turned the corner at the airport.

The whole family’s mad holiday style!

… for chance. For meeting my husband at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco on the fourth Friday of April, 2009.

… for the opportunity to be living abroad in Chile and to be starting a marriage in this most unusual and wonderful and challenging and inspiring of ways.

… for the moments my students understand something they didn’t a minute before.

… for the novel I need to keep writing and for the advice of Francis Ford Coppola, who says he writes in the mornings, before his feelings have been hurt, and who doesn’t look at what he’s written until he’s 80 pages in and assures that if you just keep doing it, you will get better.

Luca’s first Christmas!
(and three generations
of Massoni Men!)

… for the beautiful babies of my girlfriends. For the chance to watch them become wonderful mothers. For my wonderful mother. For my husband’s wonderful mother.

… for music and light and sound and the salt of a tear and the salt of the sea and the blaze of the sun and the rush of wind past my ears on a bike as we speed down a hill and the bodies of water my body has floated in.

… for memory and mis-memory.

… for Friday Night Lights. Clear eyes, full hearts.

… for teachers.

… for open windows and waves and wonder.

At least I know Easter won’t be just like any other day.
But how could it ever get better than this?!

Happy Thanksgiving whenever, however you celebrate.

The View from the Bike

As my astute husband pointed out,
the lines in the clouds nearly match the lines of the vines.

The great thing about visitors is that they inspire you to explore. Sure, Ryan and I have been pro-active about seeking out the inspiring corners, peaks, and valleys in this here new home country of ours. We’ve surfed Punta de Lobos (okay, fair enough, Ryan surfed it, but I did my best on a boogie board), we’ve joined in on Chile’s dieciocho celebrations, and we’ve been spoiled by a positively divine winery in the Colchagua Valley that I’m eager to tell all of you about in print in the new year. For now, thanks to a November visit from my mom and a dear family friend, we set our sights on another of Chile’s famed wine regions: the Maipo Valley.

A Sunday at Viña Perez Cruz.
I was quite content to travel down this road on a bike with family and friends.

When I am lucky enough to get to mountain bike through a vineyard, I realize that I am in fact living in another country. It’s not that the wineries didn’t remind me of the wine regions I’ve visited in California–Napa, Sonoma, Santa Barbara. It’s not that I didn’t have familiar faces alongside me (who are also our fist official visitors in Santiago). It’s that, well, I was mountain biking through a vineyard, something I never took it upon myself to do back in California.

The view from inside one of the vineyard’s many almond orchards, whose
proximity is supposed to enhance the flavor of the wine.
We couldn’t believe we had never seen almond pods up close.
They were green and fuzzy and ready to crack open and eat!

We were all in for a sensational Sunday treat thanks to La Bicicleta Verde‘s bike and wine tour and knowledgable guide, Jose Miguel, who showed off a part of the country new to all of us. We rode through the luscious, bounding greenery of Viña Perez Cruz, where we also wove through the Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Carmenere vines, over a pond, past almond orchards and blooming cactus flowers, through industrial-reach sprinklers, alongside grazing horses…

I mean, seriously?! 

down a rocky backroad and then the highway…

Me and Mace, a touch of the vineyards, the open road, and the bikes!

…until we arrived at Viña Huelquen in a township of the same name. My mom was particularly pleased that the latter vineyard, owned and operated by the Ravenna family, had Italian roots of its own, but the day was certifiably Chilean.

My kind of pour, in the great outdoors.

Mario, the owner of Viña Huelquen let us taste his next batch of Riesling and Cabernet Sauvignon directly from the stainless steel spicket in a room without walls or solid doors but sheltered by an aluminum roof. It may take extra work for Mario to maintain the temperature of the wine during the fermentation process, but as the breeze off the vines filtered through, as did the occasional howl of one of the vineyard’s 25 dogs, I relished the divine freedom that must be working (and tasting) in the outdoors.

It’s easy to check for color, when natural light filters through the ceiling.

Our tour group retired to the shade of one of the property’s overarching trees and gathered (both spent and energized) to taste, laugh, and translate, as snippets of English, Spanish, French, and Italian floated across the table. My favorite was an incredible organic 2009 Cab, appropriately named Amicus (latin for “friend”) and labeled with the footprint of one of the vineyard’s aforementioned four-footed friends.

Cactus flowers in bloom at Viña Huelquen.

Then it was onto lunch at a roadside restaurant/bird sanctuary, where I could finally break bread over the Chilean dishes I’ve been talking about with those back home, including pastel de choclo, a corn-crusted, clay-potted pot-pie of sorts, and mote con huesillo, a traditional peach dessert that’s been more and more intriguing since the warmer weather has kicked in.

I think Chile is altering my taste buds.
Not sure I ever would have gone for this back home, but here I can’t get enough.

We have much to explore yet… Bicentennial Park, coastal towns due west, some places Ryan and I have already seen and loved and are eager to share, and others that will be just as brand new to us as they are to our visitors. That dual exploration is just one of the pleasures of getting to welcome family and friends who literally traveled for days in order to reach across the equator, descend from late fall into early summer, and take a look around our new home. And we’re grateful.

Operation Home-Made Hummus

Sunday… 11/13/11… 14:00…

  • Your mission: Make as much hummus as humanly possible in one sitting.
  • Your partner: Fellow expat blogger and hummus lover, Sarah Friedlander.
  • Your code name: Team Hummus

All stocked and ready to walk to a neighbor’s
to finally cook up some hummus!!!
Last week, my students and I talked about what we were going to do this weekend. Some were moving, visiting with family, or driving out to the coast. I, on the other hand, informed them that I would be making hummus. The blank stares abounded, so I did my best to explain this Mediterranean delicacy, this luscious combination of flavor and texture, this perfect topping for crackers, carrots, pita bread, tortilla chips, you name it.
This would be a full bag of dried garbanzo beans,
soaked for a solid six hours, and then left to simmer for
another hour and a half.

Yes, it’s true. After months of pining for it, talking about pining for it, being taunted by it when it’s at that specialty food store one day but not the very next, gorging on it during those rare meals it adorns in my life these days, yours truly has finally gotten down to the business of home-made hummus.

And after Sarah’s food processor had at it.

Thanks to finally crossing paths with culinary soulmate, Sarah Friedlander, we made a date (and a verifiable TON of hummus). She had the food processor (key), I had the dried beans, so I soaked and simmered, she oven-roasted some gorgeous red bell peppers (this is how we do), we threw in some garden-grown and seriously spicy red peppers from my and Ryan’s recent trip to the Colchagua Valley, and improvised the rest when it came to ratios of olive oil, water, salt, garlic, and, of course, tahini (or I should now say, “Tahina”).
Why not add some of Sarah’s oven-roasted
red bell peppers?!
Considering her food processor was industrial strength (routed through a 500-or-some-odd-watt power converter), our collective elbow grease consisted largely of chopping and measuring and… finally… tasting. We made three varieties: Classic, Roasted Red Pepper, and I suppose what I will christen Spicy Chilean Peppy Pepper. All three are stacked high in my fridge at present and getting ready to be divvied out to friends and students and today’s lunch (I know better than to spend all this loot in one place).
Favorite snack actualized.
So, thank you to Sarah for hosting this long-awaited chickpea endeavor (dare I say we were very hummus-fied with the results?!). Thank you to Chile for challenging me to think outside the ready-made hummus containers I can find at every grocery store and corner store and organic market back home in California. Thank you to Ryan for not thinking me crazy to walk the neighborhood with a pot of garbanzo beans in my bag.
All stacked up
(and this is only half of the results!).
And, of course, thank you, dear reader, for indulging this craving-turned-weekend-pastime that all amounted to a few hours in hummus heaven. I wish I could share the wealth with all of you!

Ya.

I’m thinking about a lot of things today. First, that it’s Veterans Day and we have troops on the ground in more than one country. That there are many men and women who don’t get to stand as Veterans with us today. That we are without them. 
Sometimes I marvel that when I look down from the
window where I write, I see this.
I’m also realizing like most everyone else online today, that it’s 11.11.11. I realize that the date is something to marvel at, but I marvel that more people (including esteemed news outlets) are marveling at 11.11.11 more than at what else this day means — every year. 
I do get it, as today’s date is a rare palindrome, which comes around once every one hundred years. Not only that, it’s a binary number. And in that clever way the universe works, it’s the only one of its kind we’ll ever have. But that’s of course true of every single grain of sand we get to experience as it passes through the thin neck of the hourglass. 
For a recent lesson, I asked my students for a date, place, and person that was important to each of them (so we could practice using our question words, such as “Who is such-and-such?” and”Why is that important to you?” as well as the simple past tense, such as “What happened on 8.12.2002?” and “What did you do in Miami?”)
So what does this day… Veterans Day… 11.11.11… a unique grain of sand… mean to me? 
Well, I had a Spanish lesson. Currently, we are learning some of the crucial fundamentals I missed during my sporadic bursts of Spanish instruction, often at too advanced a level for my comprehension. These fundamentals (colors, numbers, asking about things) are only part of what I miss each day when I try to understand the words around me, but learning them gives me a little more surface area (er, life rafts) to meander in what is now a daunting and uncharted lose liquid of language. I have faith that one day I will finally skip along, happily comprehending just like Liesl from The Sound of Music when she’s dancing with Rolfe in the gazebo and leaping from stone bench to stone bench. 
Ya, ya, ya!
Brief, tangental peek into my seven-year-old, only-child, self-soothing childhood: I used to rearrange the furniture in the TV room–breaking apart the sections of the sofa, spinning the ottoman just so, and flinging a few cushions to the floor in order to form a perfect ring–and skip and leap in time with Liesl when she’s sixteen going on seventeen. I know, between this and my Anne of Green Gables obsession, you’re probably starting to wonder about how I turned out all right. Well, I haven’t even told you about the games I invented around Mary Poppins (or how old I was before I realized Julie Andrews also played Fraulein Maria), but I’ll save that for another day.
Ya.
The way I say “ya” here means “OK.” I asked my teacher about it, as I hear it everywhere I go: when I’m squeezed close to cell-phone conversations on the metro, when my Spanish teacher gets ready to turn to a new page, when my students are filing into class, when a waitress takes my lunch order.
As my teacher comedically acted out for me today, its meaning is nearly all-encompassing.
There’s the “ya” when you mean “sí.” The “ya” when you mean “ok.” The “ya” when you mean “bueno.” The “ya” when you mean “terminamos” (“the end.”) The “ya” when you mean “already.” 
But then! Ah, then! There’s all the emotion you can put behind it:
“Ya!” as in “Cut it out!”
“Ya!” as in “Way to go!”
“Ya!” as in “Ready?”
“Ya!” as in “Ah! Yeah, okay.”
“Ya!” and in “Enough!”
Accordingly to “How to Survive in the Chilean Jungle: An English Lexicon of Chilean Slang and Spanish Sayings,” there’s also “Ya po,” as in  “Yes!” or “Yes, let’s do it!”
And then, my favorite, the “ya” that really means “no,” as in “Ya, no,” as in “Sí, pero no más” (“Yes, but no more.”)
You may be thinking of the many ways we use “yeah” in the States, and you’re certainly right. Some of the meanings overlap without leaving much of a margin. After all, we do use “yeah” to express agreement, excitement, and sometimes to be corrected by our mothers who would prefer we enunciate “yes.”

And when I look up, I see this.
But the Chilean “ya” doesn’t have any of that nasally “yEEEAAAhhh” sound we North Americans have mastered, some of us better so than others depending on our geographic location. Sure, “ya” can also pack a whiney punch if you want it to, but most of the time (to my gringa ear anyway) it sounds fluid and firm, definitive and enthusiastic, encouraging and accepting, confident and sure.
Ya.

So, what does this day mean to you?

When Your Husband Doesn’t Facebook

Happily offline at the stunning Lapostolle winery in Chile’s
Colchagua Valley. More details coming soon (in print :)!

Let me give you a quick peek into a recent conversation between me and my husband:

The scene: We’re watching the Rip Curl Pro Search Somewhere in San Francisco. If we still lived at Ocean Beach, we’d be watching live, but, alas, we have had to settle for a livestream.

The event: Kelly Slater wins (and then officially wins) his 11th ASP World Title. Because I’m a dork, I’m now following Mr. Slater on Twitter, and I’m tempted to congratulate him along with the masses even though the time I’ve clocked actually, technically “surfing” pales in comparison to my husband, who has no such inclination to give an online shout-out.

The conclusion: I think it’s fair to say I’m conducting more and more of my life online, at least when it comes to tweeting my mind, photo sharing, and blogging about our expat adventures and adjustments here in Chile. So, I’m finding it more and more interesting that my husband does not. He doesn’t have a Facebook profile or a Twitter account. He doesn’t tumblr or flickr. He doesn’t hop on a smart phone to check his email or scroll through his friends’ status updates. He might not check his personal email for an entire day at a time!

That isn’t to say he isn’t “techy.” He figured out things on a Mac in a few weeks that I haven’t stumbled upon in all the years I’ve been loyal to the brand. He is also slowly but surely accumulating the gadgetry for an impressive at-home recording studio. And he’s smart about it. He spent a good year researching what speakers to add to the mix, and he can wax poetic about MIDI controllers thanks to his forum trolling. (It should be noted he contributes to several online forums related to his interests, as in his words, “online is mostly about information for me.”)

So, I suppose the key distinction concerns what he projects (or doesn’t rather) in his own image. While there are rumors of a now-defunt MySpace profile, in terms of social media, he just doesn’t feel the need to broadcast in the ways that many of us do. I love this quality of his. Plus, he has me to take care of all that. Poor guy… here he is maintaining a scant-to-low online profile, and I come along and start facebooking and tweeting and blogging all about our lives. While I hope I maintain at least an illusion of privacy when it comes to the nitty-gritty, it’s safe to say his (in)visibility may be a casualty, all be it a willing one, of my propensity to share… and share… and share our goings-on.

So far, this has never caused a scuffle between us. He is supportive of the blog and appreciative when I update our families with pics and posts (and not just because it gives him more time to devote to the MIDI manual :). But it’s completely within his right to veto something I might post (and I ran this one by him before it went live).

One day, we’ll be starting a family, and I wonder how the kid will feel about first- and/or second-hand exposure. He or she won’t even have language for the first few years of these postings, so vetoing won’t be an option. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE seeing all the baby pictures that my friends post online and I have no doubt I’ll be doing the exact same. But if Facebook gets its way, we’ll all be posting our entire lives (and everyone else in them) via their Timeline profile. Who should really make the call on what goes up and when/how it can come down?

Personally, I’m nothing but grateful that Facebook wasn’t around when I was 13 and 16 and 23. Welcoming the global exposure that is social networking into my life around my mid-to-late 20s was just fine, thank you. By then, I had a handle on my relationships and my career. While I trust there are folks much younger than I who are perfectly mature and capable of managing their image, I think we’ve all seen or read those cases where folks (regardless of age) have compromised jobs, friends, and dignity because they just couldn’t keep something to themselves. There have also been those truly tragic cases related to online bullying that make the news with alarming regularity. You can’t see stories like those and think that an “online” life isn’t also a “real” life.

So, I’ll be curious to see what happens to the ratio and overlap of our collective off-and-online lives over the next 5, 10, 15 years. Will we have to worry about and/or edit our profiles as we outgrow various incarnations of our self-image? Will we have to roll our virtual eyes at our parents because they posted those awkward pics of us as we grew up (for the whole world to see!)? Or will we simply not care as much? Will embarrassment and retroactive caution no longer apply in the same ways? Instead, will we treasure this start-to-finish visual history and textual evidence of our existence as modern-day Descartes-ians?

After all, “I Tweet, Therefore I Am,” right? I suppose we’ll have to ask these questions of the next few generations. For now, it’s time to sign off for a little while.