And how I ended up at Miss World

I have, as it turns out now that I am writing this, enough memories of televised beauty pageants, watching young women walk sure-footed in high heels across a stage, listening to them in the ‘question round’ straining to transmit the obvious – that they have fine minds and interested hearts, doh mind the swimsuit.

Beauty pageants are cringe-inducing  on many levels. Yet even when we are quite uninterested, they will commandeer  attention as when Jennifer Hosten won Miss World in 1970. I mean, from that tiny island of Grenada? And what about Penny, Giselle, Wendy and Lisa? Those ‘crownings’  had  some political significance, in the sense of experiences that transcend the person involved. They were moments when other people might get to know that we exist, in a world, as David Rudder puts it, “that don’t need islands no more”. And there is no denying the politics of race and ethnicity in the definition of beauty. Our Caribbean women winning affirmed especally in the 70’s and 80’s for those who needed it, that black is beautiful.

If you had asked me, well even up to August this year, whether I would be attending Miss World, I would have been bemused. A joke perhaps? But there I was on Saturday, two rows from the stage in a hall in Bali, sandwiched between two beautifully clad women, both waving a huge Dominican flag. I think you saw me on TV? I was sitting directly in front the mother of the person who eventually won, Miss Philippines.

Can I say that I had an experience, one that I will remember for several reasons? For watching Lassa, composed, seeing dimensions of her young womanhood, some absolutely consistent with the 10-year-old Lassa – her certainty,  her ease with people,  her clarity on the beauty of her naturalness.

I was sitting in front the support contingent from the Philippines and participated in their utter delight, observed the mother’s tension and her release. I shared in those seconds of contagious pure maternal satisfaction. The families around, those supporting Miss Dominica and Miss Botswana, would have felt some disappointment for their daughters, nieces, god-daughter, but they were proud and taking pictures.   

The show, the concept, is a curiosity, out of time, yet it resonates,  springing to  life oddly.  Like for Dominica, having a contestant for the first time in 35 years, one who has in the last year, won four other competitions in the Caribbean. Someone who represents a country so tiny, so often confused with Dominican Republic, giving an opportunity for others to see the country’s specialness, its natural grace.

The feminist critique of the beauty competition is for the smallness of its vision of femininity, for its reinforcement and validation of male attention to young women’s sexuality, whether or not men even watch the shows.  They exploit the dominant gender culture’s preoccupation with the compare and contrast of women’s bodies.

We lament the constructed idealization of beauty – thin, fair, straight hair. There is something fundamentally disquieting and reductive about judging young women for how they look. It mirrors our daily reality as women across the life cycle, that we are first of all, the sum of what we look like. Whatever our feminist gains, the profitability of the cosmetics industry reminds of the durability of the notion of beauty as a woman’s primary attribute and asset.

We tell young women that they are entitled to the range of life’s opportunities without discriminatory barriers. And indeed depending on the country and depending on socio-economic factors, more women have and are breaking ceilings, pushing back walls, constructing reservoirs of self-reliance, designing whole edifices to integrated life.

So these beauty competitions  try to refresh and reinvent themselves, promoting beauty with a purpose, beauty with brains, beauty with muscle, beauty with talent.  I wonder about this, about this promotion of Superwoman.  Now these young women must be purposeful, strong, smart and beautiful.  More fields of judgement.

Still, this is what the social scientists call a negotiated space  and we see young women (and those who support them) seek ways to use this experience to make common cause on issues that they care about.

Leslassa has started an NGO through which she advocates for holistic education. Over this last year, she used her platform to speak about domestic violence and child abuse. and she will continue to do so.  Her world has opened up and in that opening she is telling young women to stay true.  Her fabulous head of unprocessed natural African hair such a thing of beauty.

Others in the competition used their professions to bring services to the excluded as dentists, as midwives. Miss Barbados contributes to  an organization that brings happy experiences to children who are terminally ill.

I judged them all to have won. And yes I was happy to be there with Team Lassa.

 

Read Full Post »

Got Lucky

Noel Charles died recently. I do not recall having ever seen him. But he was the owner of Alexandra’s Disco right there on the opposite bend in the road to the official residence of the Archbishop of the Anglican Church.

I got to be thinking again about Alexandra’s when  I came across the tune “Get Lucky’ via Alex. Like a time machine, I whirled back in times to the dancing hours spent in that darkened, light place with too cool danseur Beverley, Dawn, Linda and Wendy. I Will Survive, We Are Family, To Be Real, Donna Summer, Sister Sledge, Ain’t No Stopping Us and Ring My Bell with everyone doing the Rock for months. And then the rent-a-tile croonings of Teddy Pendergrass. Ah, for “Come on and Go With Me”. Except you would not want to be stuck in that song with the man with the flashing disco lights embedded in his T-Shirt, trying to impress his sweaty self into your chest. You are NOT going to electrocute me tonight. Battle for the sexes.

Described by one, as “one of the most sophisticated discotheques in the world”, Alexandra’s was the place for the hip, for us too and then for men lounging like lizards on velveteened chairs on the outskirts of the dance floor playing backgammon, smug as lions in the Serengeti. There was an upstairs and also side cubicles. Truth is, there was sense of the seedy about the place. What else, in the heady period of cocaine’s kaleidoscopic light?

We saw and even met celebrities. Richard Pryor, on to whose boat we were invited for a week-long cruising across the Caribbean. By the bodyguard.

But mostly it was a place for joyous dancing, all night long. We did get lucky, us dancing sisters, with life long memories of each other at our most carefree, interested in young men but not too much so in those moments on the circular floor, disco balls overhead, blinking UV lights capturing us in illuminating fragments, exuberant, more in thrall with our freedom, our sense of possibilities and Good Times.

We laughed a lot. And how we smoked!

Here is the time machine:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5NV6Rdv1a3I

Read Full Post »

For Bobby

Last week I called Bobby about something but he was distracted, thinking about those Bajan fishermen charged with entering the Tobago waters pursuing the Bajan flying fish dem. He wanted to contact the Trinidad comrades to discuss the free movement of Caribbean fisher folk- an infinity mile mark within the Caribbean Sea. It can be a challenge casually happening upon Bobby, in the gas station, for example, where he would pin you to the wall on your position on, let’s say, the small matter of fixing the education system.

Bobby, who is my father, turns 80 this week. He still works doing, in his words, not law about which he is contemptuous, but rather justice.  I think that means that he has given up on reading the books. And, in the other theme in his life, he knows that he is as sexy now as at any other sexy stage in his life.

It is  not so straight forward writing about Bobby given the turbulent harshness of his fathering. The question which came up recently at the book club is how to write about a parent in a complete way, in a frame that moves beyond the unblinking child gaze of expectations and disappointments to a nuanced adult consideration of the inherent complexities of human character. That you can be one thing here and something else entirely there and that the multiple personas can be authentic.

Bobby was a reluctant father (not to mention husband). Yet, while he is unable to resist that judgment, he does chafe at it because he himself was terribly fathered. And no, he was not his father whom still he did not forsake or reject, taking care of him right down to the end, honouring his son duties. “So what’s your problem?” he silently impugns me for continuous judgment of him.

And now in my conversations with Caribbean people, I see how many others grow up surviving fathership that is strangely indifferent, disengaged, irresponsible, often emotionally oppressive, even violent. Men who prefer the sexual company of multiples of women and of the men in the rum shop over the interior lives of their developing children.

In some ways, then, there was nothing too exceptional about Bobby’s parenting. But he is an exceptional person, an excessive person, a big and disturbing character. Coming from the volatile Miller clan, he is a contrarian by instinct. It is all masculine bravado and braggadocio. His mother was a strong woman, capable even after diabetic comas and surgeries, to go on a roof in her seventies to patch something.

That sense of kiss-me-ass independence is a dominant streak in his character. Despite his fair skin, ‘nice’ hair and ‘pretty’ eyes, he rejected Caribbean colour privilege, an early actor in the black power movement. Power to the People!

Scathing of the negrocrats and bourgeoisie (isn’t that a delicious word?), his circle of daily man friends were rough and tumble sorts- Naga, Crazy Horse, Critch the Bitch, Son. Way out on the left, banned from entering here, there and everywhere for being a communist, starting with his deportation from Dominica, he adores Fidel, is an ardent regionalist, is reflexively anti-Northern, anti-capitalist, his distrusting rule of thumb being that there is always another truth than the one from Reuters, CNN, BCC etc.

He dreamed for the revo which spectacularly, actually happened for a tragically curtailed moment.

And so, his influence on me is undeniable. From him, I was schooled in skepticism, in distaste for class and race inequality, abuse of authority and power. But yes, observing his certain disregard for the completeness of womanity, the dissonance  between his fervently voiced values on social justice in the public sphere and his actions in the private spaces as father and partner, I found my way to feminism, to the injunction that the personal is political.

 

Read Full Post »

Something learnt: A New Word- Palilalia

Every now and again, a picture of the most gorgeous looking baby ever, Baby Z (except for Aschille, of course and for every other child whose parent thinks it the most adorable (Aschille being the code word for all my babies, girls!) hits the Facebook page.

Baby Z IS objectively beautiful and looking at him one is reminded that it is apparently in nature’s tool box to make its young present most preciously as a survival mechanism.

The glowing, plump, dewy, innocent cuteness ensures that babies get the care, the cuddles, all the love and attention needed to thrive and not be eaten alive. Though with Baby Z, one does feel to consume him whole. So sweetilicious.

Whenever his picture hits Facebook, people aplenty (and mostly women) jump right in with the baby babbling commentary.

And just last night I learnt a new word that is close to describing this almost involuntary impulse to verbalise repetitively this warm feeling that babies induce: palilalia. It comes from two greek words- palin again + lalein to babble.

There you have it. Baby Z activates in us all palilalia.

Read Full Post »

Taking the Long Way Home

I have just finished reading a memoir about a friendship between two women, authors both.  The title “Let’s Take the Long Way Home” tells something of the nature of that friendship and perhaps the majority of friendships between women. How we talk and talk. As with my friend Hyacinth, after hours of gabbing, parting reluctantly, we would say ‘you know, this talk has no beginning and no end”.

Women friendships are intense in that way, a surfeit of sharing goes on. Confidences ever more and because of that, perhaps there is an unspoken expectation of unconditional liking and toleration that comes with baring one’s soul and thoughts endlessly to another. The wonder is that we do get to that point over a lifetime despite  misbehavior, distance, resentment and yes, misunderstandings. Women friendships are immensely satisfying.

The quality of my men friendships is rather different, less intense and generally just lighter hearted.

My men friends talk yes. But they also laugh more. Not unlike the sisterhood, intimacies are shared, parsed out, judged. But usually the sharing has an objective. None of that endless gnashing that women folk get into, turning a subject inside out in a 3 dimensional way, just for its own sake.

I do have the distinct feeling that men can forget, at least the level of significance of what is shared, compartmentalize and give more latitude generally . There are other women in their lives and the space you occupy as friend is meant to be uncomplicated. Complications are for lovers, partners, family.

Writings on cross sex friendships often look into the inevitability of sexual tension, how the friendship has a high likelihood of crossing the intimacy boundary. That for me has not been the experience. Sure flirtatiousness, in the easy Caribbean mamaguy way, but this is less an issue when the friends also have core partnerships.

Rather I have been wondering if the issue in men/women friendships is that they are less psychologically intricate and therefore perhaps less strong.

My man friends are big characters, literally too. And with them I have ferocious arguments, over all sorts of things, political and personal. But the fights have no particular edge. The friendships are happy, happy ones. And they endure perhaps because they are so fraught-free and blithe.

When the rough times come, as they do, maybe it is all that past history of effortless interaction that allows ease and comfort.

With my man friends, I too want to take the long way home.

Read Full Post »

Living to be a ripe old age

My mother turns 79 today. I think that she would accept that she is chronologically into advanced aging. But I rather doubt that she feels that way, that she feels ‘elderly’ (such an old word). Rather, as she puts on her eyebrows even to go for a short vep to the grocery, she is claiming her space as full person, not defined by numbers.

She. like so many parents of my friends, ran/is running the aging body gauntlet this year. My mother did so with admirable aplomb made possible in part by her belief in a benign, no, highly salutary after-life reunion with her parents and brothers as well as by early medical intervention and high quality care and follow up. Not to mention dedicated daughter care. Thanks Ann and Cheryl. 

It is that time of our lives, we of our middle aged years say to each other. The time when we look closely for signs, when we feel a bit of constriction of the heart with each doctor visit.

And then we celebrate each day. Look on in appreciation and enjoy.

Happy birthday Mom.

Read Full Post »

This is not a speech Liane

Our niece Liane, number 5 of the Dozen Clarke Cousins and number 2 in the Christians, turned 21 on Wednesday. She decreed no speech making and so only her father got in a few words. But she did not say anything about  blogging. So I am free and clear here.

To say, happy birthday Liane. Turning 21  has lost most if not all of its significance cache. But perhaps it is still a milestone of adulthood, still symbolic.  A moment of pause and thought about where one is on the road to becoming.

In Liane’s case, her personality has always been somewhat definite though I have to admit to being surprised from time to time.  With her quiet aura, she is determined and yet uncomplicated. A person who knows who she is and what she wants. And with an independent spirit.

Like her father noted, she was/is a high performer in school, hitting the books, knowing when to focus and on what. But so the girl like to fete. I mean really like to fete.  Where does that come from?

Liane is responsible, reliable and thoughtful and it is with anticipation that we wait to see where she takes that joyful, love of life determination.

Read Full Post »

So long Leonard

The last three weeks, watching from the side and from distances, both geographic and emotional, I saw Douglas and his siblings struggle real hard with the idea of losing Leonard. Molly, their mother having died in 1999, they closed ranks around Leonard, loving and caring for him with devotion.

Not that he needed much caring in any everyday sense. Rather, until three weeks ago, at the age of 85, he lived fiercely independently, driving his car, dwiveeing with Kerry, his brother-in-law, making ole talk with all along his travels, going to daily mass, feeding his birds, watering the plants, following his routine of children visits.

And then abruptly, he fell out of wellness. He may have been ready for the next stage, believing, no, knowing and expecting that he would see Molly again. But his children were not. They held on tight, willing him back to equilibrium and to more days, months and years with them. It was not to be. But what a gift of time of family love.

I still have my parents, both. So I am not qualified to say too much about the nature of this loss. Yet it seems that where there has been expressed love, connection, fulfilment and of course many years of living well, the loss is less pained, even though acutely felt. And so it was with Leonard who was deeply enveloped in family. From his own siblings, to his children, with his Corbie in laws and many nieces and nephews. He was a family man and a wife lover.

Parenting when done with wise dedication gives children a huge sense of security, a platform for future achievement. With Leonard, his children had the sense that he could fix things. And even though life’s problems become more complex, overtake the range of parental competencies, that feeling of someone who can make things better endures.

Very loyal, he let us his daughters and sons in law know that we had struck real good luck to be in the lives of his children. It was a running joke. Except this was truly how he  felt. His children were special and precious to him, but more so, as a matter of general fact. And we better take care of them.

 This is how life is structured, with death at the end of the one way road. There is no retreating, retracing of steps, re-living of life. Just the inexorable march of time and bodily decline. How to live out this allotment with minimal angst and regret is the challenge. Leonard knew what mattered to him. And he gave and received graciously, expressed love and appreciation for others.  He was quietly self-assured, not one for insecurities, for preening, bragging, or denigrating others.

He enjoyed his time of life. And the people around him experienced that joy.

Read Full Post »

Family and the Politician

Yesterday Barbados said its farewell to the late Prime Minister David Thompson at a most moving state funeral. Ten days of mourning allowed time aplenty for people from all spaces of Barbadian life to reflect on David both in his personal life as well as on his political influence.

A  consistent picture emerged from the recollections and from Brian Clarke’s poignant and affecting eulogy- someone who from an early age had a sense of himself as a leader, had a wide range of interests, was deeply engaged with people, with a facility for easy and honest connection, a dry wit and a modern and pragmatic approach to governing. He shared that deeply rooted Barbadian aspiration for social equality and believed in the state’s role for creating the conditions for mobility.

The pictures showed someone devoted to his family, loving and respecting his life partner, nurturing children who seem so natural and at ease with the public.

And I am left wondering how come it is that many of us knew so little about these things that should matter at least as much as socio-economic ideology or leadership style; about his relationships with family, friends and community.  These give insight into character. And character, after all, may be the most of what counts when faced with decisions that affect the multitudes.

You may have noticed that I do not comment on current, small ‘p’ politics. It is a daily exercise in self-restraint and discipline, especially since I have a Double PHD in psychology with post-doctoral specialization in political psychology. Yes, I was home schooled.  And you can keep your snobbish thoughts about unrecognized tertiary institutions.  By the way, Douglas also has similar certification in meteorology, more precisely in early forecasting of storms. Praises.

Anyways, about politics, I think I will say, like Bill Maher: New Rule! We ought to demand from our political actors a base of decent family relationships, in whatever diverse ways that family is defined and lived. If they are in unions, we expect that they love their partners well or otherwise (and people do fall out of love) that partners are honoured with honesty and respect. Politicians must be in their children’s lives in meaningful and visible ways.

The personal is political. Surely we will be better served by political actors for whom respectful and equal partnerships matter and who care about family. It is a good starting point.

Read Full Post »

Sisters

My sister Cheryl had clothes for so. So much that none of her drawers or cupboards could properly close. She has great taste, but believe me when I say, self-interest had nothing to do with my encouragement that she should get rid of stuff.

We all, most of us, have way too much going on in our spaces and modern-day consumer life makes it hard to look away. After all there is a cornucopia of interesting gadgets and ware out there to peak one’s interest and a lot of it promising to make life just that easier, more interesting and pleasing to the eye. And then thanks to the Chinese brand of capitalism (same as the old western style reliance on low paid labour) a lot of the stuff comes cheap, well cheap enough. “Twenty dollars for this? You can hardly lose”. Except that twenty dollars of course.

We turned poor Cheryl’s wardrobe upside down for two days, she looking on variously nervously and annoyed as we all meddled in her business, insisting that she had enough of this or that. What? Five brown pants? Surely not! Eventually, she got into the spirit of de-cluttering, breezily separating herself from long loved, waiting-for-the-right-time-never-to-be-worn items.  That’s the thing about stuff, it feels as good to acquire as to release. For some people, not including the hoarders.

At the end of it, her drawers and cupboards closed flush and yes, it is true that  all of us  (Ann, Mom, Wavell, me) in Cheryl’s mall, walked away jauntily with hand bags, white shirts ever more and lovely black pants. Getting others to de-clutter can be so rewarding.

The whole exercise was high entertainment, full of jokes and laughter. And it was such a sisterly time, in the way sisters can be plain speaking, humourously knowing, intrusive, giving opinions, unasked but usually not resented. Perhaps Ann and Cheryl would say, speak for yourself.

Looking on at the three of us sisters, I remembered how as small children, we had the unspoken  night-time support code. I do not know who was afraid of the dark, probably all three of us. But no matter how deep into sleep you were, receiving the bathroom wake up tap, there was nothing else to do but stumble wordlessly down the hall  as sentry against the night demons.

And that is the thing about the collection of sisters, whether by biology or bonding. Uninvited incursions into your life are balanced out by the security that comes with knowing that they can be relied on to accompany you through the dark times.

Read Full Post »

Happy Birthday Mom

I spent the last five days with my sisters, Ann and Cheryl and with my mother and her sister, Wavell. Wavell is some nine years younger than my mother, and resistant to being golden girled.  Precious metals, then. Still we had a good time assigning the characters. And whoever else we could not agree on, Wavell is definitely in the Blanche category. My mother is neither brusque Dorothy nor clueless Rose though she is practically wise  like the former and a bit innocent like the latter. “Really? What you telling me there?”

My mother’s birthday was yesterday. She comes from a gene pool of long livers.

Perhaps not too unusually, she married someone who it turned out was not interested in either the convention or spirit of marriage and who  did not have the constitution for home making. As an aside, just today I was reading that Margaret Mead thought that marriage was a matter of practice- “fake it, to make it”. The idea being that it is in the habit of home making that marriages gel. Sounds so dry and prosaic.

Alone as active parent, my mother was, typically for her generation, relaxed with the supervision. This in sharp contrast to the helicoptering parenting in which we  now engage, all that hovering. My mother was more in the free range styling as by nature she is a non-interventionist. So we came and went except, except for when she got that bad feeling. And then there were no words of logic to move her from the lockdown position.

She was open with her life and like her father, she is a storyteller. And so we knew of her emotional struggles and the whys of the decisions that she made along life’s way. What I did not fully appreciate until recently was the nature of self-denial that went into her parenting. Not a dramatic sacrifice but that kind of daily give up needed to keep some semblance of stability, shepherding children towards adulthood despite the tensions endured. Yet, she is not one for regret.  This has been her life and that’s that. Like many Caribbean women, she would no doubt say, “I  have my children”, that being the touchstone of satisfaction, notwithstanding.

Now Valli is care-free, literally. She greets routine life absurdities with deeply felt laughs. She is well-loved by her grandchildren. And that surely must be the karmic return for living well.

 

 

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

Meandering through Marriage

“A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance and tenacity.  The order varies for any given year”.  Paul Sweeney

Everybody loves Raymond, for those who have not seen it, is a sitcom about the travails and trivia of marriage. Mostly, marriage is characterised as one long cantankerous compromise. 

I got married at 22, (27 years ago yesterday) a fact which surprises me still, almost as if I was not there in City Hall, Toronto, doing it. And if one of my children came to me with that news now or in the near future, I would be thinking and no doubt asking ‘have you gone nuts?’

Yet against the odds of personality and ideology, it has and is working. But that is the thing. Marriage is a daily work from which there is normally no vacation, no leave. If there is, probably akin to no pay leave. Not something that one is sure to want except if you have lots of reserve in the bank. Marriage is more like a staycation. You remain put, enjoying the comforts with which you are well familiar, from time to time, taking a long drive or going to a different beach.

The road in a long union is predictably rocky, as rocky and uneven as the characters involved. People change over time and change in different directions and with hormonal fluctuations, not to mention. I heard Douglas tell the children last night that marriage, despite the challenges, obstacles and problems is… I did not hear the positive part because I was taking in the string of hard sounding nouns.   And Douglas is a genuine romantic person.

The children are quite curious about marriage now, asking questions like, do you get bored with each other? They cannot fathom how this is done, this relentless living together.

The big give in conventional marriage is space, physical and psychic space. Children long, yearn for their own individuality expressed in wanting that actual and metaphoric room of one’s own. Yet marriage is predicated on the communalistion of space. (“What you thinking?” “Why you making that left turn?” “You don’t think it is time to wake up?”) It is a convention upon which many marriages flounder and it is a convention now quite at odds with the atomisation and individuation of comtemporary times.

While I would advise my children that this extreme giving up of space which defines a conventional marriage, should be resisted, the fact is that it is the lure of reliable, intimate companionship that is the attraction of marriage. To have someone to share passion, life, thoughts, anxieties, satisfactions, angers, laughter, gossip. The sense of security that comes from giving and receiving love, appreciation, care, despite bad behaviours, is profound. As Iris Murdoch noted:  “there is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for granted relationship.”

Still, maintaining the integrity of self in the union is the struggle. I watch young  women still not fully comprehend the meaning of  decades of feminist activism. Playing dolly house from another century, giving up their  identity, tending children and house solitarily even though working full-time. While completely capable, acting as if they need protection offered up by benign masculinity, not grasping how thin that line is between protection and control. And young men still comfortable in confining gender privilege.

Equality, fairness and autonomy are always worth the struggle. And especially so in a marriage unless one wants to settle for a life of diminishment. So like Phyllis Diller famously said: “Never go to bed mad.  Stay up and fight”. 

Would I do it again? Get married that young? Probably not, except with this particular man, it would be hard to say no, and not at all wise. As it turns out, everyday.

 

Read Full Post »

With highest honours

Many years ago when I was still in practice, I was asked who I thought were effective advocates. Back in the day before case management and scheduled court dates, lawyers awaited their turn. And that’s observation time. Notwithstanding the terrible clichés about lawyers, they do come in all shapes and consciences. Not just the blow hard of that oft-told joke: Lawyer, motioning to man who has entered office to sit, he being on the phone “No I cannot see you until next week, I have a part-heard in San Fernando and then I appear in the Court of Appeal before going to London in that Privy Council Case.” Turning to man, “How can I help you?” “Oh, I’m from the telephone company and I’ve come to re-connect your phone.”

There are those lawyers who are short on authorities but long on words; those always seeking an adjournment; those sweet-talking the other side into an untenable compromise; those afraid of judges; those so comfortable in their advocate skin that you sit back in awe at their confident competence. Is it now just folklore or did I really see a lawyer open a briefcase in which there was nothing but a tomato?

 Anyways, I gave my list and this included Douglas. My questioner muttered something like, ‘well, that’s immodest”. Immodest? Really?

 From where comes this unspoken but widely shared rule that while you can be publically fulsome in your positive assessment, appreciation and praise of strangers and acquaintances, with family members, it should be all reserve? Is it a superstitious concern?

I got to thinking about this recently because my first niece Jamille, the oldest of the Clarke Dozen cousins graduated from Carleton University with ‘highest honours’. She has been an exemplary student, an all-round hard worker. The authoritative biggest cousin.

Highest honours Ann and Jeewan? How great! You not sending out an email?????

  CONGRATULATIONS Jamille. There is so much ahead for you!

Read Full Post »

Ronnie, my brother

My earliest memories are physical – Ronnie without a shirt, bare foot, with a side of boys on Federation Drive, Dominica. This person never changed the whole time we were growing up. In Grazettes, he was an itinerant presence, leaving home in the morning, dwiveeing until nightfall, with his crew of neighbourhood boys. We never knew where he went. His was a true, true Caribbean boyhood, one time making and flying kites, climbing trees, another time playing marbles or road tennis, then catching pigeons for a crude road side barbeque, and eating it too. Or liming a rabbit tail for luck (!) He had a pet goat called Bellyful. Why?

Childhood Ronnie evokes for me the Paul Keens Douglas character Vibert; the boy whose sense of freedom cannot be repressed; the boy who makes his own happiness though really there are things about which to feel somewhat badly. The boy for whom mischief represents control over a world which can be battering to his sense of self.

He had the adventures allowed Caribbean boy children. There was the time that he wanted to shave his head. No Ronnie, please, please do not do it! Weeks I begged him. One night, we got home and there he was bald as Kojak and Isaac Hayes combined. David Straughan who had driven me home from UWI collapsed to the ground in hysterics. Ronnie ahead as ever of the style curve.

He walked the length and breadth of Barbados to catch up with his friends. I am frequently reminded of this conviviality, meeting men who tell me that they went to Ellerslie School with Ronnie, were his friends, spent time at home. Up to yesterday, the caretaker in Erdiston School, Mark, stopped me to introduce himself as Ronnie’s friend.

Because of his understanding of his own learning challenges, he raised two lovely, lovely girl children in an easy going and accepting way. Unconditionally. And he has gone through the rough waters of life with his boat more or less upright. He has some kind of special essence.

Today I did an interview with him. It is his birthday and so here goes:

Favourite Childhood Memory: Going to the river in Dominica with friends- the Davis boys and Peck

Not so good memory: School was a tense time for me. I felt all along I had the ability but I needed more support.

One thing I know now about parenting: Be loving

What drives me crazy: Things I cannot accomplish

What I now know about love: You need to communicate; your partner needs to know you.

My big regret: Not being open enough about my feelings. I have a tough time doing that. Also I regret leaving Barbados. I left too early and left behind my support.

Lessons for partnership: I never wanted to have affairs. I looked at what was happening and promised that I would never do that to any woman. And I did not.

My hope for the future: To regain my happiness, my connection with another.

My most joyful times: Being with my family

About Asia (daughter No. 1): Both my girls are amazing. Asia is mature beyond her age. She has that strength. She can take matters in her own hands and deal with it. She really protects Mecha (her sister). That comes from her strength. She is responsible.

About Mecha (daughter no. 2):  She is a happy, loving person. She is open, her feelings are open.

About my mother: She is gorgeous

 Happy Birthday Ronnie

Read Full Post »

You’re a good man Charlie Brown

My friend Angela assures me that all birthdays can be acknowledged and celebrated in the octave. Meaning that you have eight days within which to rectify greetings and good wishes ommissions.

Perhaps this is a case of closer to church, further from God or the shoe maker’s children always wear laughing shoes. I can see how one can think this. Douglas’ birthday was on Tuesday, but no blog. Frentic life my only excuse.

Earlier this year at a staff retreat, we had to write down in  quick time, 100 things for which we are grateful. Douglas was my chart topper (and I had my mother, children and siblings to contend with).

He is a marvellous, marvellous, kind, full of integrity person. And I shall say no more. Except, that he has fabulous legs.

His feminist politics, sometimes  I have to wonder. Like a few weeks ago, when he turned to me, full of concern, ‘this gender equality thing, the women’s movement taking so long to achieve it, perhaps you need a man to lead?”

That’s the other thing, he has come to fancy himself a teller of jokes. And he always cracks me up, if only because he enjoys his own so much.

I only wish he would live more consistently by his mother’s credo- It’s the answer that brings the row. Can I get the last word please?

Read Full Post »