Off to Falmouth!

A woman I worked with many years ago told me something I’ve always liked and never forgotten:  “There’s a lid for every pot.”  Now, knowing how I grew up on my mom and dad’s sayings, it shouldn’t come as any sort of surprise that I liked the idea of relationships wrapped up neatly in a six word package.  Seven, if you don’t like abbreviations.   I told Nick that story and he said there’s a Jamaican saying that means exactly the same thing, but in patois.  It involves a hoe and a bush, and I’m not sure exactly how it goes, but isn’t it nice to know that it’s a common idea around the world?  Finding your true love is something to which we all can relate, is what I mean. 

What does being in “pot and lid” love look like?  Well, I can tell you what it doesn’t look like.  It doesn’t look like arguments and sneers and shrugs and backs being turned on one another.  It doesn’t consist of meanness and spite and petty silliness.  It doesn’t sound angry all the time.  It doesn’t leave you feeling diminished every single day of your life.  It doesn’t disappoint you every bloody time you turn around, or feeling like a fool for believing in it.  It doesn’t make you think that maybe loving is just another mistake you’ve made in your life.  One that you have to keep making, day after day, despite knowing in your gut that your desperation for love is never going to get you loved in return.  At least, not by this person. 

You know what love looked like to me when I was growing up?  Love looked like laughter.  It was teasing and flirting and silliness.  A good kind of silliness.  It was hugs and kisses and giggles and affection.  It was a pot of tea made every day at four o’clock.  It was an effort made for one another.  It was my mom putting a comb through her hair and putting on lipstick right before my dad got home, just to make sure she looked pretty for him.  Not because she had to, but because she wanted to.  Little efforts made to make each other’s existence a tiny bit more pleasant, a little easier.  Notes left on the kitchen counter about where they were, when they’d be home.  Every single one of them signed with x’s and o’s.  Waving from the picture window every time someone went out somewhere, because “you never know what might happen”.  They wanted each other’s last glimpse of them to be of a smiling face, blowing kisses.  THAT is what love looked like to me.

I was privileged to watch that emotion in action for twenty-four years.  I watched two imperfect people try very hard to make sure that each knew how much the other loved them.  It was by no means perfect.  As much as a child can comprehend how their parents’ wrangle their marriage, I knew that there were days when one or the other (or sometimes both) were not doing well.  Migraines played a part.  Silences sometimes did, too.  There were little things, frustrations that came out as sighs or cupboard doors banged shut.  The one thing I never heard was yelling.  Hard to believe, maybe, but it was true.  When I was in elementary school, I went over to play at a friends’ house.  We overheard her parents yelling at each other.  I was scared, because I’d never heard adults yell at each other.  My friend shrugged it off.  She’d heard it before, obviously, and I guess it wasn’t as shocking to her anymore.  I still remember standing in her basement, listening to those angry grown-ups, wanting to leave and yet too scared to go upstairs to get my coat. 

When I met Nick, I thought he was handsome, charming and very, very kind.  He was what people call “a nice guy”.  I think what impressed me about him the most was how he listened to me when I spoke.  Actively listened to me, which felt like the freshest breath of air I’d taken in years.  Actually, it took me a while to figure out why I enjoyed talking to him so much:  he didn’t make me feel like talking to me was a chore, some horrible burden that he was desperate to put down the first chance he got.  That was (and continues to be) a gift, plain and simple.  You never know how nice it is be listened to, until you don’t have someone like that in your life.  Your mother doesn’t count (sorry, Momma).  She is obligated in a purely biological way to listen to you, even if the only thing driving her is guilt.  You know how most moms are, I think.  My mother is a dear, kind woman.  My running joke is that if I told my mom I was thinking of setting my hair on fire, she’d say “Oh!  I always thought you’d look wonderful with your hair on fire!”  She is a sweetie, that’s for sure.  More on that good woman later. 

No, the nicest thing about Nick wasn’t his singing (I hadn’t known him long enough for that!) or his encyclopedic knowledge of fishing.  It was the simple fact that he was a good listener.  He laughed at my jokes and asked lots of questions.  He wanted to know what I liked, what was important to me, what wasn’t.  It was so nice to have fun with someone.  To laugh and laugh and not be told I was laughing too loud and other people were looking.  And that was all in the first meal at the Fish Hut. 

The next day, Mr. Wrong told me to wake up because he was going to work.  He informed me that his cousin (Nick) would be “taking care of me” for the day.  How kind.  Being pawned off on a near-stranger on my first full day in Jamaica.  Just the kind of special treatment that I’d left home to get away from.  Sigh… Luckily, Nick seemed happy enough to be my guide for the morning.  We walked up to the highway to wait for a cab, which didn’t take more than a few minutes to arrive.  Since I needed to get to town to exchange my U.S. cash for JA dollars, our first stop was a little town further down the coast called Falmouth. 

You know how it feels when you open the oven door to bake something?  Well, that was what it felt like getting out of the taxi in Falmouth at 8 o’clock in the morning.  I felt like a cheeseburger under a heat lamp at McDonald’s.  In next to no time, sweat was running down my face (and everywhere else), which was already a nice shade of crimson.  There were school kids everywhere, all done up in full school uniforms.  Business men and women in suits.  I felt ill just looking at them, thinking how much hotter it would be to have to wear dress clothes in this temperature.   The funny thing was:  no one seemed to notice the heat.  Sort of like no one here notices the snow.  It is what it is, but it’s not like people’s lives come to a grinding halt because of it.  I just wish I could ignore the heat the way they do. 

As for my tour guide?   Well, Nick was busy keeping an eye on me, making sure I didn’t step in front of any oncoming traffic.  Meanwhile, I was suddenly shy, and wondering what exactly to talk about with this guy in the clear light of day.  All I could think about was that this probably wasn’t how he wanted to spend his day:  trailing around after some goofy white lady with a bad case of verbal diarrhea.  I exchanged some cash, and then decided to buy some groceries for the house. 

Grocery shopping in Falmouth was an exercise in extreme patience for this spoiled Canadian, considering there wasn’t one big store where we could buy everything we needed.  Nope.  We had to go to a butcher and stand in line and then hope they had what we wanted.  For vegetables, we had to go to the stalls in the open-air market.  Need some rice? Well, off to another shop we went.  No matter where you went, air-conditioning was almost non-existent.  When there was an oscillating fan bolted to a wall somewhere, I was so grateful, it was crazy.  The few stores that did have air conditioning felt so cold, they gave me chills.   When we finally had everything we wanted, I looked at the few bags and thought what had taken us hours to get in Falmouth would have taken about twenty minutes at any Canadian grocery store.  Forget the fact that now we had to walk all the way back to the taxi area and wait around in the heat for enough people who wanted to go back the way we’d come.

Next entry:  The Lid & The Pot Jump Over the Moon

 

Judging A Book By Its Cover

Every time I mention I have a Jamaican boyfriend, I hear the same thing:  “No worries, mon!”  And if they think they “know” anything about Jamaica, it’s that A) Jamaicans are laid back to the point of being comatose; B) everyone smokes a lot of weed, and C) everyone and everything moves at a snails’ pace.  These are about as true as the stereotypes that all Canadians live in igloos and say “eh” at the end of every sentence.  It kills me that so many people I meet seem to think that Jamaicans don’t care about things getting done and/or are a bunch of con artists.  I can tell you that the Jamaicans I’ve gotten to know are kind, generous, good-humored, hard-working people who put up with WAY more than we would ever dream of in our pampered end of the pool.  They get things done in spite of the way things run there. 

For instance, Jamaica does not have any such thing as unemployment insurance.  When you lose your job there, you have absolutely nothing to fall back on.  Watching the news there one night, I saw a story about a resort that was looking to fill twenty positions.  I think they said that it was three or four THOUSAND people that lined up all day long in the heat to apply for these same jobs.  Unemployment runs around nineteen percent there.  Nineteen percent!  Can you imagine what would happen if our government allowed that here?  People would be setting fire to Parliament Hill, or at least stringing up politicians by their toes…  That’s why you see so many people at the intersections there, selling everything from fruit to bottled water to sugar cane.   And the people you see chopping sugar cane or working construction sites in the blazing sun?  These are not lazy people.  The fact is that most Jamaicans have more than one job because there is no other way to survive in Jamaica.  Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise:  Jamaicans are extremely hard workers, and tough as nails.

And patient?  You don’t know patient until you’ve tried getting from one place to another in Jamaica without your own vehicle.  There is a bus system, but from what I hear from Nick, locals usually stick to taxis.  Everywhere you go on the main highway, you’ll see people on the side of the road with their arms stuck out sideways.  Basically, the driver will cram as many people as possible in the car/minibus to make it worth his while.  Likewise, if you take a minibus from its’ starting point (in Montego Bay, for instance), you’ll have to wait until it’s full before the driver will even think of leaving.  Which inevitably means you have to sit inside a roasting hot vehicle for half an hour, cheek by jowl with a variety of equally sweaty strangers.  Fun times.   The last time I was there, we shared a cab with a fisherman, who stuffed his catch and his fishing gear in the trunk.  Would we Canadians dream of putting up with this?  I think the answer to that is:  When pigs fly.  Jamaicans live with this baloney every single day and not once in all my time there did I ever hear someone being rude or abusive or anything but polite.  I wish I could say the same of Winnipeg Transit.

As for the whole “white lady tourist/Jamaican con man” thing:  Yes, there are plenty of white women of a “certain age” who end up in Jamaica, looking to hook up with some gorgeous young(er) Jamaican man.  Likewise, there are indeed Jamaican men who are only interested in finding a First World sugar momma.  Just like here in Canada, there are players out there.  When I started talking with Mr. Wrong, I knew that logically, there was no way he was interested in me for anything but money.  I have a mirror, folks.  So it was a given that when I went to visit, I would have to pay for most of the meals, the transportation, the entertainment.  He had nothing, and I was willing to save whatever I had to go there and have a good time.  I wasn’t under any illusions about that.  I just didn’t expect that by the end of the second day that I would have written him off completely and found the love of my life. 

No worries, mon.

Logic: Not Over-rated at All

You know how sometimes you think you know what you’re doing, and then all of a sudden, you get that sick feeling that what you thought is completely wrong?  If not, then congratulations.  I envy you your certainty.  No doubt your life is far more organized than mine.  Probably not more surprising, but certainly more restful.  To tell the truth, I sometimes wonder if I’m missing some crucial switch in my brain that would let me plan carefully and weigh the consequences.  I really do.  I can’t figure it any other way.  It’s probably the same switch that would allow me to drive around this city (where I’ve lived since 1986) and not get lost, or predict the ending of any mystery, no matter how formulaic.  -It’s not that I set out to do things without thinking first.  It’s just that I never manage to think of every potential outcome beforehand, which tends to get me in trouble.  Let's just say that premeditation is not something of which I could easily be accused. 

And so here I was in Jamaica, not even half a day into my trip and having serious doubts about the whole thing.  After a year of phone calls and texting, I had convinced myself that this was a viable alternative to my increasingly unhappy marriage.  I was going to come through the doors and there would be this amazing person, with whom I was destined to live happily ever after.  As usually happens, real life didn’t live up to my whacked out expectations.  “Mr. Wrong” didn’t seem very excited to see me at all, while his cousin was charming and friendly as all get-out, asking me all kinds of questions.  Was I confused?  Yes.  Yes, I was.  I’d come to Jamaica for one man with whom I thought I had a promising beginning , and I was already attracted to another.  I sat in the car on the way to Greenwood, babbling about nothing in particular, wondering what the heck I was going to do about this mess.

That evening, all three of us went to dinner at The Fish Hut, the kind of place where you go in the back and pick out the fish you want from a blue Coleman cooler.  Having never been interested in looking my dinner in the eye beforehand, I let the guys choose one for me.  Nick and I were still talking about anything and everything while “Mr. Wrong” sat quietly.   It looked very much like I had gotten things wrong again.  Only I wasn’t due to leave for another nine days…Yikes. 

Next time:  Hot, hot, hot!

The Family That Rants Together...

When I was a teenager, my dad and I spent a lot of time talking.  Just sitting and talking.  Now, you have to know something about my family, and about my father in particular.  There was never an occasion on which he (any of us, really) wouldn’t hop up on a soapbox and start ranting.  We did not make small talk in my home.  Not really.  Everything was worth a speech.  Looking back, it was like living with Rick Mercer.  Sit down to dinner, and the next thing you know, the salt and pepper and HP sauce were being used to illustrate how we needed to work together as a family to achieve our goals.  Sound odd?  Well, it wasn’t to me, because that’s what I was raised on. On any given evening, the salt could be my dad, and my mom could be the pepper.  My brother might have been the HP, and I could have been the tub of margarine.  It’s hard to remember that far back, but you get what I mean.  We were all condiments in the Game of Life.  Daddy would push the salt halfway down the dinner table and say something to the effect that it was no good for him to be way ahead of Momma (the salt shaker that was lagging behind) or for my brother to be way at the other end of the table.  If we wanted to succeed as a family, all of us needed to cross the finish line (whatever that might be) together.  Ta-da!

Imagine:  that was dinnertime conversation in my house growing up.  Nothing was ever trivial.  Everything needed to be analyzed and discussed and justified.  It was slightly mystifying when I was little, but as I got older, I began to enjoy all of it.  Talking was fun at my house.  Some of my absolute favourite memories are just the four of us, sitting in the kitchen, just talking.  For HOURS.  Laughing and talking.  I have to say that one of the most painful things when my dad died was realizing that we would never be able to do that again.  That was the only club I ever wanted to belong to, and without wanting it to be, the whole thing got cancelled on me.  Which sucked, to say the least. 

However, to return to my point (see what I mean?  Always ranting!):  my dad and I spent a lot of time talking.  During the course of these talks, a lot of old (sometimes made-up) sayings would get used.   One I remember in particular was “When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.”  Which brings me to the moment I decided to go back to Jamaica.  I have to say that if I hadn’t been at the end of my rope, hanging on to a fraying knot, I would never have landed there.  I was going back to see a man I had met a year previously, when a group of friends and I had stopped in Montego Bay for a day trip during a Caribbean cruise.  Which sounds awfully glamorous, but was more a testament to my friends’ determination to celebrate our 40^th birthday in style than anything else.  More on “Mr. Wrong” later.

After struggling for years with an unhappy, unsupportive, unfulfilling marriage, I was pretty much convinced that no matter how much I overlooked and endured my current situation, the truth of the matter was that it was affecting my kids more and more as they got older and more aware of the atmosphere in our home.   I was terrified I was messing them up permanently, letting them think that the bitterness and sarcasm that passed for conversation between their dad and I was what a marriage should be.  In short, I was miserable, and I was looking for a light at the end of the tunnel, hoping it wasn’t an oncoming train. 

When I got off the plane at Wyman Sangster International, I saw two men looking at me:  one was smiling and one was not.  As it turns out, the one that was smiling at me just happened to be the cousin of the one I had come to see.  He was extremely handsome, extremely friendly and extremely…short.  Five foot four, to be exact, but who’s counting?  Certainly not five foot eleven old ME.  *sigh*  That was another of my dad’s sayings (or was it my mom’s?):  Man plans, God laughs. 

Next time:  Off to Greenwood we go!! 

Where To Begin?

Where to begin with this blog?  I want to tell a story.  It's supposed to have a happy ending, but it's been going on for quite a while now, and (like my title implies), I've hit quite a few snags along the way.  To be clear, this isn't going to be one big online pity party.  No, I save those for Sunday nights at home.  This blog is going to be about finding the humour in the hard stuff.  The stuff that sneaks up on you, whacks you about the head and kicks you in the shins, then pushes you to the ground and runs off laughing. 

I never intended to do a Caucasian remake of "How Stella Got Her Groove Back".  Truly.  Besides, I just read the book (Terry McMillan is a brilliant author, but I just wasn't loving the runningadjectivesdescriptivesadverbstogether thing.  No offense, Ms McMillan.) two weeks ago, and I've never seen the Angela Bassett movie.  I just happened to go to Jamaica, just happened to meet a Jamaican man, just happened to be in a loveless marriage.  Everything happened at a particularly weird juncture in my life, as most things in my life tend to do.  Fact is, it wasn't until I went BACK to Jamaica that things got really interesting...

But that's an entry for another day.  Stay tuned.  Please.

Jo