First, I’m allergic to them. But it’s not just that – I’m allergic to other things too, after all. Dust mites, or whatever you call them. If we’re watching a movie in somebody’s basement, I’m that guy who suddenly starts blowing his nose, following by clawing at my face to try to get through to my sinuses, and ending with a crescendo of hacking, which, to be fair, I try to synchronize with loud scenes from whatever DVD we’re watching. (Like the rocket launch in Apollo 13, or when that Decepticon that looks like a lobster was eating an army base.)

I’m also not completely convinced that cats were ever intended for men, in the same way that, say, pick-up trucks and rottweilers seem to be. I’m not trying to be sexist here – I’m not saying that a woman can’t own a pick-up truck or a rottweiler. It’s just that when you see it you’re kind of like “Huh! I would have expected a man to be driving that pick up truck!” or “I would have expected that human who is currently trying to outrun their own dog to have been a man.”

Having said that, I grew up with cats, not just in Poughkeepsie but in Jersey City as well. After two spectacular failures at keeping watch dogs in Jersey City that doubled as pets (they failed for completely different but equally damning reasons), we decided we were open to cats.

Thus, when a stray cat showed up at our door one day in Jersey City I decided I was going to take it in. Not because I liked it, mind you, but because I had thought of a clever name for her: Alley. Like an alley cat!

“You promise you’ll feed it? You’ll take care of it?” asked my mother.

“Of course!! Jeez!”

“Wow. Naming an alley cat ‘Alley.’ How original,” my sister said. Which was tough because this was the moment I had been looking forward to. It was all pretty much downhill with the cat from there, and it lived, like, another ten years. Also, it turned out to be a male.

The point was, I had made a decision that day: I would be a cat person.

It was not a well-thought out decision, but you would have admired my loyalty to it. It was reminiscent of the time in 3rd grade that I received a rubber stamp as a prize for doing well on a grammar test. It had an animal on it.

“What kind of animal is that?” I asked the teacher.

The teacher studied it for a second, and clearly not having a solid idea but also knowing that she could say just about anything and I would buy it.

“It’s an elk,” she said.

That’s how The Elk became my all time favorite animal. I made my father buy a video made by national geographic about Yellowstone, because there was an elk on the cover of it. My mother had to hunt through every K-Mart in New York State looking for puffy elk stickers that I could put on my trapper keeper. (I’m not sure they were really elk, either. In retrospect, I think they were Saint Bernards.)

When my allergies to cats began to kick in just a few months later, I decided I was not a cat person any more, and I bequeathed Alley to my mother, who made all kinds of unreasonable objections. I had avoided cats ever since.

Until now.

We had an amazing opportunity to housesit these past two weeks for, of all people, our real estate broker in Darien, CT, a super cool woman named Keiley.

Keiley and her family have this super cool house and she was all like “Come stay at our place! We’re going to Maine!”

She was on speakerphone with Liz and me when she said it, and it came after about 45 minutes of me openly lamenting the fact that we had nowhere to stay in Connecticut even though we totally loved Darien so much and her house was so great and how come she got to have that house and how was that fair? It wasn’t fair, that’s how!

It was pretty dreamy, her house. But there was also the issue of Ray.

Ray is a cat. Now, for some reason, miracle of miracles, I was not allergic to Ray. Maybe Ray was a Selsun Blue user. Maybe he was genetically engineered to not have dander. But I’ll tell you what, even if I had been allergic to him, it would have been worth it to see Finn and Ray together.

Any parent will tell you that when you have a 17 month old boy you are constantly looking for new activities. The best activity, I’ve found, is to allow him to chase a cat for 16 hours per day.

Ray was pretty cool with it. Maybe because Keiley had three kids, I don’t know. But all Ray wanted was to be around people. He would jump up in my lap, which was nice. But then he would start to inch his head closer and closer to my face, until he was pressing so hard that if I didn’t keep my lips pursed together he would have ended up inside my mouth. I don’t know where that instinct came from.

Ray and I got along just fine. So much so that when Liz and I were getting ready for bed that first night, we were commenting on how awesome Ray was. And how for the first time we thought that it wasn’t inconceivable that we might get a cat someday.

We forgot, though, that cats were nocturnal.

If you’re not used to being woken up in the middle of the night by a cat jumping onto your neck, it can be alarming. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to shout out that somebody was trying to kill you. Or so I tried to convince Liz the next morning.

“Yeah, but Ray jumped on my head too, and I didn’t scream that somebody was trying to kill me,” Liz argued. To which I could only speculate aloud that perhaps she didn’t place a high enough value on human life.

I used to have a difficult time with Emma, our fat Labrador, sleeping on the bed, but at least she slept. Ray spent our second night together trying to use my head as some kind of rowing machine. When I pushed him off he simply slid over to Liz and attempted to braid her hair – which he clearly did not know how to do. So I took him back on my side, where he climbed up on my shoulder (I was on my side by then) and practiced log-rolling, but he kept slipping off and bonking his big cat head on my chin.

I put Ray outside the room and shut the door, so he went to Finn’s room – Keiley’s son’s room – and started scratching at the door and wailing like a banshee.

“He’s gonna wake Finn,” Liz whispered, still untangling her hair.

So I went to get Ray because a cat climbing over you is still better than hearing your boy crying in the middle of the night. Ray rejoined us, and set to work trying to squeeze between Liz’s head and her pillow.

But in the end, we all got used to each others’ sleeping habits. We loved the suburbs and ended up finding a place to rent in New Canaan, one town over, near our church. Finn continued to chase Ray around, yelling “Ray! Ray! Ray!” which now I think that he thinks means “Cat! I am coming for you! I will make you love me as I love you!”

Now we’re back in Jersey City for the week, then our Connecticut adventure begins. With a dog, though. We’re not getting a cat. Don’t tell Finn.

————
Friends, don’t forget to check out Next Generation Nepal. And the book, Little Princes, comes out in January - the story of how NGN started. (It’s more exciting than that. I hope.)

The fact is that Liz, since I have known her and long before that, feels something akin to physical pain when she believes she is putting somebody out, making them uncomfortable in some way.

I, on the other hand, have no problem at all with putting people out if I can somehow gain from it. Which may be how we ended up in a ridiculously beautiful house in Brooklyn Heights this week. So I think we can all agree to go ahead and score that one for me.

Three weeks ago we arrived home from South Africa. We’d given up our apartment in NYC before we left, so we had to move from house to house, looking for people to take us in. We have Finn with us who is very portable and wonderful, but our dog Emma is far away in North Carolina. That is fortunate, since most of our friends are acquainted with Emma and would be more likely to open their doors to us if I was pump firing a 12 gauge shotgun than if I had Emma on a leash.

I mentioned our homelessness in passing when talking to my literary agent and friend, Trena, on the phone. She and Liz are great friends and Trena didn’t hesitate to offer up her house, which is in a beautiful Brooklyn neighborhood and is kid friendly, as she and her husband David are parents to three little boys.

“Listen, it would be a favor to me,” she said graciously. “You can feed the fish and water the plants for the week. Talk to Liz, see if she wants to do that, and just give me a call back.”

“No need!” I sang. “I’m positive she’ll agree!”

Liz was less enthusiastic.

“Of course I want to stay there. But are you sure it’s ok?”

“She said she it would be a favor!”

“Yes, because she’s Trena, and that’s what Trena would say to make us feel comfortable.”

Which was of course accurate, and which was precisely why I had purposefully not asked the requisite “Are you sure?” questions to Trena for fear she might give me some piece of information that I would be bound to pass onto my wife, and which would, inevitably, torpedo the whole deal.

“She can’t find anyone to take care of her fish. We can stay there, or we can let her fish die. Whichever. I don’t care.”

Liz rolled her eyes.

As I was in Brooklyn anyway the next morning, I stopped by her house – the day before they left – to get the lowdown on fish and plant responsibilities.

Trena’s house, a tall brownstone not far from the water, is staggeringly well appointed. It has the kinds of things in it that you would never think to put in your house, then you see it in somebody else’s house, somebody with true style, and you realize how painfully far you are from ever having that. In one room on the second floor, the back wall looks over the garden. It is filled with comfortable chairs and the walls are painted purple. On an otherwise bare purple wall hangs something that can be best described as a round shield made entirely of white feathers, or like an ostrich that’s been dropped from about 30,000 feet. And somehow, it’s perfect.

David, an attorney, was still at work, so while the kids played upstairs Trena walked me through the house to give me an idea of which plants to water at which frequency. I had expected perhaps a half dozen house plants, but discovered instead that there were about thirty five plants in the whole place, each with its own prescriptive diet.

“So, not just, like, a lot of water every day?” I said about halfway through the arboretum.

She gave me a funny look, as if I was a new babysitter who had entered her house, looked around a roomful of furniture and said “Okay, which one of you is the baby?”

“Nooooo,” she said slowly. Then: “Is that what you do with your plants, out of curiosity?”

“Yeah, but they all died pretty quickly, so I might have missed a few days.”

“So you just water-board them.”

“I’m not really a plant guy.”

But secretly I was pretty sure I was right. It’s not like plants were created to be indoors. What did they do in the Stone Age when it started raining? Run into caves?

When we finished the grand tour I realized that I’d already forgotten what to do with the earlier plants I’d seen on the tour. I could either look like an idiot right now or I could welcome her home to a house full of dead flora. So I took out a notebook and asked her to do the whole thing again, which actually seemed to comfort her. But secretly I kept thinking, how did she know how much each plant needs? What was she, a botany minor? I don’t get it.

We went back downstairs after our second house plant tour, and into the kitchen where a tank held a good number of tropical fish.

“So what’s the deal with the fish?”

“Well, there’s an assortment,” she sighed, as one might who was not eager to explain her fish. Clearly she was about to let an outsider in on some family secrets. She leaned against the counter and we stared together into the fish tank.

“Alright. The tricky one is the anemone. You have to hand feed him so that the lobster shrimp doesn’t try to get its food, which it totally will. There are two clown fish that should live in the anemone but they were tank-raised, not raised in the wild, so they don’t know they’re supposed to live in the anemone – they have no idea what’s going on. They’re supposed to do the whole Finding Nemo thing. I’d trade them in for wild clown fish but that would make it even sadder, you know? Also, I have this sea urchin that’s a total asshole.”

She tapped the glass where the sea urchin, a deep black porcupine of a creature, sat. It was clinging to a piece of coral near the anemone.

“The blue ones I got because they’re supposed to school, but they never do. And I got four of them, so it’s not like they haven’t had their chance.”

“Where would they school to?”

“Yeah, right. Where would they school to? I need a bigger tank. I’d bet they’d school everywhere if I had a bigger tank. It’s what they do. School. And we have, like, 20 hermit crabs, but they hide. Ok, let’s feed the anemone. You take this tiny piece of krill, like this, rinse it, and gently lower it down and kind of put it in its mouth.”

“Where’s its mouth?” The anemone looked like an orange loofa.

“You just have to kind of push it into the middle. It’ll take it, see – see it taking it? That’s how you know…oh, look – look! The sea urchin totally just tried to stab me – you see that? Such a dick!”

I learned that I needed to alternate fish food between red and green frozen individually wrapped cubes in the freezer. “To alter their diet, right?” she said, with just a wisp of self-consciousness.

Trena grew up on a farm but because of their circumstances they can’t have animals. So this is her new farm.

“It’s a big tank,” I said.

“Oh, this is only the beginning.”

*

On our first night, Liz and Finn and I slept in the guest room on the third floor. Or rather, that’s where Liz and I slept. Finn was having none of that.

We knew David would be coming home late that evening for a day or two because of work, and his bedroom was directly below ours. Finn woke up around 11:30 p.m., an hour after we’d gone to bed, screaming. Liz scooped him up and brought him into the bed with us, which usually works, but Finn was, unusually, absolutely inconsolable. I took him and started walking him around. We tried every game, we gave him every piece of contraband we had – cell phones, small coins, fragile pieces of jewelry – nothing would distract him. He moved onto piercing shrieks. I kept walking him around, willing him to stop crying.

“He’s going to wake David,” Liz said in a loud, panicked whisper, taking him and bouncing him around the room. “David is going to be lying there awake all night and he doesn’t even want to be here – his whole family is on vacation and he has to work and he had to come home to this!”

“It might be soothing for him. He has three boys. Maybe he misses them,” I whispered back over the shrieks.

“It’s not soothing! The only person this is soothing is the Devil in Hell!”

“Finn! Finn! Buddy, we need you to stop and we love you but you gotta stop!”

For ten more minutes we tried everything. It was like he was trying to win some kind of contest.

“That’s it,” Liz said, taking him from me. “I’m just going to leave with him. We need to just get in the car and drive away with him.”

“Drive away? Drive away where? We’ll lose our parking space!”

“We need to drive away and never come back. We need to drive until we run out of gas. We need to get him out of here – David’s probably pulling his hair out right now.”

I had filled the tank that morning so driving until we ran out of gas would probably put us in New Hampshire, where we knew nobody.

“Let’s take him upstairs,” I said.

We ran him upstairs to the boy’s room on the top floor, which was at least another floor away from David. If they had a ladder leading up to the roof I imagine we would have taken him up there.

Somehow, in that room Finn immediately calmed down. We pushed the two boys’ beds together and Liz and I boxed him in. He closed his eyes long enough for Liz to escape back downstairs. Liz is usually the one up with him at night, so I ended up staying with him until he fell asleep at 3 a.m., then again when he woke up at 5:30, ready to get the day started.

As I was unable to entertain him in my half dead state, I gave him the box of Wet Wipes to play with, instructing him so that he would only go as far as to open and close the top but not take any out. He got this – he’s a smart boy. He opened and closed the box a few times, saying “Opa!” and “Clo!” in this incredibly cute little voice. Then I must have closed my eyes for a minute because I woke up to find that Finn had TP’ed the room and was standing on the bed so that he was nearly eye-level with the photo of their five year old son Teddy saying “Bye bye!” and waving with his little paw, which would have been cute if it hadn’t been kind of sinister.

*

Liz emailed David the next day to apologize for Finn’s crying.

“No worries - I only heard him when I was up working. With what I’ve become accustomed to in that house, he’ll have to do a lot better than that,” David wrote.

Still, Liz and I decided I should also call Trena, just to let her know that everything was okay, and to say sorry that David had to listen to that.

“Oh please, David’s fine. How’s everything else?”

“We love, love, love this place. Finn loves it. He’s been hanging out in Teddy and Wilder’s room. I hope it’s ok, I let me him play with that one-eyed cow under the bed.”

“One eyed?”

Crap!

“Uhhhhhh….I think it had one eye. Maybe it had two. I might be thinking of something else.”

“It’s fine, I haven’t seen that cow in years. If it has an eye left after those three got done with it, it’s doing better than I thought.”

*

The week, as it draws to an end, has been perfect. The plants and fish are all alive, which is a victory. The tomatoes in the back garden are ready for plucking when Trena and David return. Finn hasn’t torn the last eye from the cow, and that’s another victory. Liz and I have relaxed and cooked and read and written and barely left the house. It has been, in the end, like a little heavenly vacation in a time of instability, and for that we are just so grateful.

Yet there we were, feeling the dirt and sand beneath our feet and walking among a disorganized array of huts, most built with rusting slabs of discarded corrugated metal, others built with wooden slats which, after weather or pressure, had caused them to lean at impossible angles, like a cartoon house in a book of German folktales.

Liz and I must have looked painfully out of place in that community, but nobody seemed even surprised by our presence there. They must have been quite used to volunteers and white staff members of Thembalitsha. That’s not to say it would have been even the least bit safe to venture into those communities alone – our colleague Adrian proved that when he was robbed at gunpoint a year ago – but in the company of the Thembacare health care workers, we were never made to feel unwelcome.

Our project, as I mentioned earlier in this blog (and as Liz spoke about in her blog), was taking a survey of the patients of Thembacare. Thembacare is the 7 bed hospice serving a community of 30,000. The patients the careworkers visited were afflicted with HIV and TB, and the workers were ensuring they were taking their medication properly. The survey was an effort to get more information about the conditions under which these people live – how much money the live on, whether they had access to running water in their homes, whether they’d been affected by crime.

I call them shanty towns but I don’t think that’s politically correct – I think the proper term is townships. Like anywhere else there were marked differences between homes, and like anywhere else, those economic differences tended to be geographic– the “nicer” homes clustered near nicer homes, shacks clustered near shacks.

There were homes made of concrete blocks – single rooms or with a bedroom off the tiny main room – that looked as if they had been hit by both fire and flood, furniture looking like it had been pulled from a dump (which it probably had), a single bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling, sometimes an ancient TV blaring static-filled programming out of tinny speakers, dirt and grime everywhere.

Those were the wealthier homes.

A quarter mile from a home like that would be a home of corrugated tin and a tarp roof held down by tires and stones. Inside would be almost completely black, half the size of a New York City bedroom. The walls would be covered with cardboard for insulation, with nails hammered through discarded bottle caps to help fasten the cardboard to the tin. The ceiling would be a patchwork of sturdy sticks, above which was old cardboard and above that, the tarp to keep out the rain. The floor would be mud covered with another tarp. The furniture would be a small single bed and sometimes a bench that they had cobbled together with wood they’d found.

Often the resident of the home would have taken colorful newspaper circulars, advertising sales on dog food or trampolines, and plastered them against the cardboard, lined perfectly, creating perfect patterns of smiling little pale-skinned models, showing off the latest in department store fashion in front of a Christmas tree. You’ve never noticed how incredibly clean those models are, how well groomed and perfect their clothes are, until you’ve seen them contrasted against this other setting.

To get into these areas, we pile into the car Liz and I rented for our time here, a 1997 Mercedes, which was from an era before the cup holder and when cars were constructed from four-inch thick cast iron. We drive as close to the neighborhood as we can, then walk.

Sometimes we’re able to drive right up to the house, in the areas with actual roads, but in the shanty towns the only ways in are through the paths that snake between the shacks. The land is littered with rocks and boulders and the dirt is almost sandy, and if it wasn’t for the rising and falling landscape that offers glimpses of forests and orchards in the distance you could mistake it for a moon colony.

In the fruit picking season, Grabouw is a packed community, with migrant workers coming from around the region to stay with family and relatives for three or four months. But it’s winter here and quiet. When the care workers from Thembacare start their rounds at 8:30 a.m., the neighborhood feels deserted. We would follow them through these winding paths to the first stop, a house of one of their patients. There were no addresses to speak of, or none that we could detect, and few recognizable landmarks. The whole area was a labyrinth created by the random placement of shacks.

“How do you find your way around?” I asked one of our care workers, Cynthia, on the first morning. “How do you not get completely lost?”

Cynthia waved her hand at the sprawling impoverished landscape. “We live here,” she said, and I was taken aback by the note of pride in her voice.

Had I known she had lived here I never would have brought it up, thinking it would be a source for embarrassment for her; now I only felt ashamed that I thought she should be embarrassed.

As the day went on and people emerged from their houses, Cynthia seemed to know them all. The women teased her and the men called to her, she played with the children as if they were all of them her own nieces and nephews. We take pride in what is ours, really ours, and it was never lost of us that we would never have been able to even enter this community without her or one of her colleagues at our side. The workers were respected for their work, but they were also part of this family of survivors at the edge of society.

Cynthia, like so many of the other care workers (we ended up going out on rounds with perhaps a dozen of them, always in pairs, always with one who spoke Afrikaans and the other who spoke Xhosa) had started off working as a volunteer in Thembacare. She had volunteered, she told us, because their community had desperate needs and the government and non-profit world was unable to meet those needs completely.

So she and most of her colleagues had come from these astonishingly impoverished communities to give their time freely to those who needed care more than they did – those afflicted with TB and HIV. Those patients had often passed the disease onto their babies. Many were unable to work and were too weak to walk all the way to the clinic unaided. The care workers helped first of their own volition, then were offered employment by Thembalitsha Foundation to work in Thembacare and turn their passion into their full time work.

Before we entered any house, Cynthia and her colleague Nadia would ask permission, but it was a formality – nobody ever refused. The trust of the people inside these tiny dark rooms was almost unnerving. We might find an elderly woman still in bed if it was before 9:30 a.m. or so, and she would sit up and pull up their legs and offer us a place to sit down on a mattress that seemed on the verge of disintegration. Cynthia would pull up a tiny three legged stool as if it were her own living room and plunk herself down to examine the patient’s pillbox to see if they had been taking their meds correctly.

Because this patient spoke Xhosa, the language where you hear the clicks of the tongue in mid-sentence (or, as I thought of it, the language of Boba Fett), Nadia would speak to her while Cynthia was dealing with the medication. The woman would listen and then nod once, and Nadia would turn back to us.

“She says it is ok to pray for her.”

Thembalitsha Foundation is a Christian organization, and they wear it on their sleeve. When the Thembacare workers go from house to house they do not evangelize in any way, but as volunteers we asked if they might let us pray for them before we began the survey. We always asked permission, and we also knew that the overwhelming majority were Christian, many with small pictures of Jesus pasted somewhere in the room. I watched carefully for any hesistation on the part of the patient at the idea of praying for them, and found nothing but eagerness.

We would explain to them that this survey was our attempt to help the government better understand the needs of the community, and while we could make no promises of further funding, it would at least contribute to the information on file for a community that – like so many other slums and squatter villages in South Africa – were something of a mystery to the local governments responsible for them.

The questionnaire took perhaps ten minutes. We asked about their income, their expenses, if their children went to school, if they were affected by crime, if they were eating three meals per day, etc. On average, because those we visited were infected with a terminal or chronic disease, they subsisted on a government grant of about $125 per month, on which they provided for perhaps three or four family members.

As I took down the details of the woman lying in bed, using her ID card, I noticed (as I would notice time and time again) that this “elderly” woman was a year younger than me.

Liz and I always went together. In the earlier part of our time here we went with our friend Jillian Dunham from New York, whom we originally met back in 2007 when we were all volunteering together in Nepal. We worried that three of us together would be intimidating in some way, but the people who welcomed us into their homes, many of which could barely even fit the five of us standing up, seemed intimidated by very little, least of all three pale white Americans wearing big smiles and making faces at their half-naked infants.

When Jillian went back to New York, Debbi, our friend and Finn’s Godmother, joined us on our trips to Grabouw.

Our son Finn will flat out refuse certain foods, shocked that we would even offer them when he knows darn well we’re holding out on him because he’s seen the mac and cheese in the fridge. It’s not that the peas and carrots taste bad, it’s just that he knows he’ll probably get what he wants if he is adamant enough, and depending on our level of resolve that day, he just might be right. After all, it’s not such a big deal whether he eats pasta or peas at a given meal.

On an early morning last week, though, I found myself holding the head of an eighteen month old girl as Cynthia attempted to spoon-feed her a vile red substance that looked like ketchup but which was TB medication. She spit and spewed and shook her head in the near darkness, her mother shouting at her and Cynthia cajoling her, all in a language that was utterly foreign. Debbi held her hand and I held her temples and we eventually got almost all of it in and swallowed.

Just moments earlier the little girl couldn’t have been happier, eating large mouthfuls of instant noodles brought by Cynthia and Nadia, steam rising off the Tupperware bowl, through the acute angle of bright sunshine slipping in through a gap in the corrugated metal wall and disappearing against a smoke-blacked cardboard ceiling. The noodles were more than a meal, they were a means – the medicine could not be taken on an empty stomach, and the mother could provide only what was brought to her. Cynthia had known this and cooked the noodles at Thembacare before visiting, and made sure we came to this home first so they would still be warm for the little girl.

We left the child substantially unhappier than when we arrived but the mother much happier, and it made me wonder what medicine God might be trying to feed me right now that I’m struggling against and shaking my head and pressing my lips together so that the very thing that can save my life won’t enter my system, simply because it won’t give me any immediate pleasure.

Liz had stayed home that particular day, working on some of the stories and files about the school where we had been volunteering, called Graceland. She wanted to have it done the next day to give to our friends at Thembalitsha. She was spending the morning working on that while Debbi and I went around with Cynthia and Nadia through the communities of Grabouw.

We visited a section of the shanty town that we’d never been to before. More chickens, for one thing. And long wire clotheslines crisscrossing the area, so you had to keep your head up and not get too deep into conversation lest you get clotheslined (literally) across the neck.

The first home we came to was occupied by a single woman in her early fifties, who looked like she was in her late sixties. Nadia asked if Debbi and I could come inside, and when she said yes, we stepped up and out of the sunshine into her dark area.

Normally, the first thing the care workers do is tell the person who we are and how we are trying to help, then politely ask if we might be able to pray for them. This is usually greeted with a humble nod of the head and a sweet, small smile.

This woman, though, merely eyed us suspiciously and barked something.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She says it smells in here,” Cynthia translated.

“Oh – that’s ok, please tell her that we really don’t mind at all,” I said. It did smell a bit strange, but it was the kind of thing that I could quite easily put aside.

The woman barked at the care workers again.

“No,” Cynthia said, slightly embarrassed now, “She is saying that it smells bad in here now. Since we entered. As if there were droppings inside her house.”

I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. I looked at Debbi to check with her, but Debbi was making a dramatic show of looking at the bottom of her shoes.

“Oh no,” Debbi said loudly. “I wonder if maybe I tracked in something!” She made another dramatic show of looking at the bottom of her feet. “No, it certainly appears that I don’t have anything on the bottom of my shoes….hmmmm…”

I realized that suddenly Debbi and Cynthia and Nadia were all looking down, not making eye-contact with me. And I just knew. I looked at the bottom of my shoe, and there, terribly, was the telltale mark. I looked at the floor next to the door. An identical spot. I looked up at the woman, horrified.

“Uhhhh…”

She had already taken her laundry bucket, one of her few possessions, which still had a little bit of dirty water in it, and marched up to me. The home was barely large enough to fit the five of us, and she couldn’t even get past me. She put the bucket down and this tiny woman physically moved me, shoving me into this alcove in the wall about the width of a crouton, made of sticks that held up the walls. Then she got down on the floor and started scrubbing and shouting.

“Is she really angry do you think?” Debbi asked in a hoarse whisper.

Cynthia winced. “She says she does not want you to destroy any more of her home.”

Debbi turned to me. “We gotta get this stuff off our shoes!” she said in the same panicky hoarse whisper, and we squeezed out the door, having to physically step over this woman down on her knees, her feet actually hanging out the doorway.

I got outside and immediately started wiping my feet on a tiny tuft of grass, but that seemed to only spread it around. So I did what Debbi was doing, which was to try to scrape it off on the old wooden pallet that served as a step leading into her door.

“You have to scrape pretty hard I think,” Debbi whispered.

I pressed and scraped as hard as I could and suddenly there was a loud crack and I felt my foot bust right through the pallet, smashing it into pieces.

“Oh no!” Debbi whispered. “You broke her stoop!”

This was not lost on the woman, who spun her head around and said something like “Araargh!”

I held my hands up and shouted “It’s not broken!” and bent down to magically solder the wood splinters back together with my bare hands. “I think it’s ok!” I shouted. Cynthia and Nadia were craning their heads out the door to see what had happened.

It pretty much went downhill from there. I tried to improve the situation by standing in the doorway and swinging my hips around to block the woman’s view of her stoop while Debbi prayed for the woman and did the survey quickly. Then I tried to work out a way to slip some money into some little crevice in her house which, let’s just say, ended badly.

By the end there was a small crowd gathered outside, which had arrived in time to see me walk back outside, watching each footfall carefully now, and within a couple of steps take clothesline right to the face.

So, can’t win ‘em all, I guess. And I suppose that particular woman wishes I’d never stepped foot in South Africa in the first place.

But I hope we were able to do some good – you never really know, maybe. I can say, with complete certainty, that it was a privilege to be allowed into those homes, to meet those people, and that it would not have been possible without the phenomenal work of Thembacare and their staff.

It’s been an amazing experience.

“How far are we from People of the Hippo?” I’d ask.

“Maybe an hour,” Kelly would say. “Not much traffic from here on out.”

“Was it hard to get a room? At People of the Hippo?”

“I think we got the last one – lots of fans up there.”

The entire journey from Jo’burg to People of the Hippo, we were keeping an eye out for a bar or restaurant that might show the opening match of the World Cup, South Africa vs. Mexico. Missing the match was simply not an option. South Africa had been counting down the months, weeks, days, and now hours to the kickoff, and we absolutely had to be part of the celebration in whatever form it would take, even if we had to stop in some roadside kiosk to watch on a portable black and white TV while some dude spent the ninety minutes trying to get us to buy his carved elephant heads.

But we couldn’t even find a kiosk. This new road we were on, rebuilt especially for the World Cup, seemed to take us far from any towns, and we were whipping past the landscape at just under a hundred miles per hour.

Then we saw a sign for something called Sun City.

“That’s where we’re watching the match,” Kelly said, pointing at the sign.

“What, Sun City?”

“Sun City, baby!”

“What is it?”

“No idea. But it’s called Sun City. It’s gotta be a casino.”

“Why does it have to be a casino?”

“It’s called Sun City! What else would it be?”

Astonishingly, Kelly was right, it was a casino. Or part of it was, anyway – it was a Disneyworld type complex. It included not one but two golf courses; one a new swanky one called the Gary Player Course, and the other was a bit older. They tried to mask that fact by renaming the older one the Lost City Golf Course and including at the 13th hole – and I quote from their brochure – “a water hazard full of live Nile crocodiles.” Because what the hell, right?

There seemed to be nobody in the casino. We asked if they were showing the match somewhere inside, and the woman behind the golden bars nodded.

“They will show it on the Big TV,” she said. I noticed she had a small TV on the desk with her. “Straight down there. You will see, it is like an auditorium. It is a Big TV so you will have no problem seeing it.”

We hurried down the open corridor, past more slot machines, and came to an enormous TV, usually used for betting on sports matches, which had a small amphitheater of maybe eighty seats around it, about a quarter full.

“Awesome,” I said.

“This works,” said Kelly. “I’m gonna hit the bathroom, meet you back here.”

I was just sitting down when Kelly came back.

“Follow me,” he said.

I followed him to the other side of the amphitheatre, figuring he’d found comfy chairs or something. But he kept on walking down the hallway, and stopped in front of a fairly nondescript door on the left hand side of the hall. He opened the door for me to step through.

Have you ever seen the first movie in the Narnia series? When the kids open the closet door and inside there’s this entire world? This was that. Inside led into a cavernous, dimly lit auditorium that held, conservatively, a thousand people. And those people were bouncing up and down and blowing vuvuzelas at a screen that, if laid flat, would just about cover Atlanta.

It was quite the introduction to the World Cup. When South Africa scored the first goal, the hall exploded. Kelly and I, who were on the floor level, were suddenly caught in an avalanche of South Africans, pouring down from the seats to celebrate on the floor.

At halftime, I left for a moment to use the bathroom, and when I came back, African music was shaking the auditorium and I found myself separated from Kelly by the single largest conga line I’ve ever seen – four people wide, packed together so tightly that I couldn’t actually find a gap through. I finally cut into the line and somebody grabbed my hips and shouted “Ayoba!” and next thing I know I’m on the other side of the auditorium. I got back to Kelly, clothes practically torn from my body, to find him standing on a chair taking photos.

“You see that freakin’ conga line?” he shouted happily over the din. “That things outta control! It almost took that table with it!”

The conga line, like a snake curling in on itself, had now morphed into this enormous dance party in front of the twenty foot wide screen, so utterly euphoric that nobody actually noticed the game had resumed until it was a couple of minutes in and Mexico hit the crossbar.

The World Cup had officially begun.

Twenty four hours later, we were arriving at the real stadium for the 8:30 pm US-England match. We had spent a relaxing morning driving through the game park, spotting rhinos and elephants and the rest, and returned to the lodge to find the English fans drunk and taking about four hundred photos of the warthog that had wandered up to the electric fence.

“Iss a f’ckin’ warthog, mate!” one was slurring at his friend, who wore the English flag as a cape. “Iss not a f’ckin’ cheetah killin’ a gazelle, iss it? How many f’ckin’ photas of it are ye gonna git?”

The guy with the camera studied the back of it for a moment. “Fine – memory caad’s full up anyways,” he slurred back. “The photos of the match we’ll have te take with our minds.”

The crowd, both outside and inside the stadium, may or may not have been less drunk – it was difficult to distinguish between intoxication and vigorous enthusiasm. Fans were in bright, colorful costumes, people dressed as Uncle Sam and human flags and the Queen and everybody shouting with glee and high fiving and drinking. Combine that with the fact that Kelly and I were practically linking arms and wearing matching USA shirts and you could mistake the whole thing for a gay pride parade.

The stadium was ringed with the St. George’s Cross hanging from the upper deck, but in our own corner of the stadium, the US corner, a huge American flag was unveiled, unrolled up and over 20 rows of fans, and quickly collapsed in the minutes leading up to kickoff. The volume in the stadium was at a feverish pitch, the steady eardrum bursting drone at these events where you are not quite sure if you are even shouting.

A few rows ahead I could see two guys trying out their vuvuzelas for the first time. I couldn’t hear over the crowd noise, so it was like a silent movie, in which each of the two people – one dressed as Abe Lincoln – would blow into his vuvuzela, then look curiously at it, trying to figure out how to make the noise. Then the other would try it, and they would puzzle over it together, making exaggerated lip movements to show the other what they are doing wrong. They would point the business end of the vuvuzela at each other’s face as if it was nothing more than a child’s birthday kazoo.

The moment one of them finally stumbled upon the proper technique, I knew it not from the sound but rather because the reaction of Abe Lincoln, who’s big bearded face was a few inches from the mouth of the vuvuzela when it went off. He clutched his ears and opened his mouth in a silent scream and fell sideways into the row ahead of him, stovepipe hat spinning into the air.

The match started and the English side scored five minutes in, and continued to pressure for the rest of the game. The US side scored on a goal keeper error by England, though our celebration was no less raucous for it. Mostly, though, I just spent the game so nervous I wanted to throw up and wishing it would just end.

When it was all over we had tied. The NY Post headline the next day read: US beats England, 1-1.

Since that day, I’ve probably watched seventy five percent of the World Cup matches. For those who are less than crazy about watching international soccer, it might seem odd that one would be glued to a Chile-Honduras match, shouting at the TV, unable to leave the house, especially if one is neither Chilean nor Honduran.

But I’m telling you, there’s something about the World Cup. I get it why it’s not huge in the States. No scoring, right? What’s up with that? But it means that when they do score, man, you know it. The entire team, the entire country, flies into hysteria, even if it’s two minutes into the match.

So let’s compare to another insane tournament: the NCAA Tournament. Love that tournament. Alumni get together and go nutso in the bars. The students, forget about it – camping out for tickets and gathered in enormous halls screaming for their team. If they lose, it’s a huge bummer, yes, but they have the entire season starting next year, plus three or four other sports to hold them over until then.

In South Africa and elsewhere, digital clocks have had a countdown on for months to the start of the World Cup. It happens once every four years. Only 32 qualify. If you lose on a bad call, you’re out. That country has to wait four more years to even compete. For most South American teams, for example, this is it, this is THE sport. They play soccer. Everybody plays soccer. It’s all they care about. It’s not just your fellow alumni – it’s every father and mother and son and librarian and housekeeper and bus driver for thousands of miles in every direction, all praying that you beat that country on the other side of the world. And in that other country, there are millions of people who are praying just as hard that you lose.

As a bonus, you get play by play from an excitable commentator, who knows every player on the Brazilian side and refers to them fluently, but when they play North Korea, he says, in his proper English accent: “North Korea is trying to substitute in Pak Nam Chok. And…….oh dear…… it seems there’s already a Pak Nam Chok on the field. Oh my, this will be confusing.”

And I was glued to the TV, shouting and praying and jumping around for both of them.

Even a few weeks ago, before the World Cup officially began, you could see it in every city here. Stores that had no reason to have mannequins – bathroom tiling stores, for example, or Popeye’s Fried Chicken – suddenly found an excuse to put mannequins in their windows, then proceeded to dress them from head to toe as members of the South African National Soccer Team. Or as they are known here: Bafana Bafana.

The closest explanation I got for what Bafana Bafana means was from a local friend of ours named Leigh, who said: “I’m not really sure.” Nevertheless, Bafana Bafana is everywhere and there seems to be no shortening of the name – you have to say it two times, or people will just wait, as if you’d started a conversation with “Guess where I just saw a lit stick of dynamite?” or “You know what animal I’m thinking about marrying?”

Thirty two teams qualified for the World Cup, and their national flags are everywhere. On most cars people have the South African flag sticking up out of their back window on tiny plastic poles, or covering their side view mirrors like a glove. Those items are available for purchase by any one of the several rabidly enthusiastic peddlers at most major intersections.

“I’m not South African! I’m not South African!” I find myself shouting on a daily basis through the rolled up window. “I’m not South African!!!”

But they pretend not to hear me and continue to wave their wares at me with the urgency of a mother begging me to take her baby out of wartime Cambodia.

“I’m American!” I shout as the light turns green and I begin driving slowly, hoping at some point they will leap out of my way. They usually do, but not before my admission has driven up the price considerably.

If you could feel the excitement in the air in the weeks leading up to Friday June 11th, on that particular day you could feel it bumping up against you, shouting and wearing a funny costume and blowing on one of those long horns called vuvuzelas. That’s because last Friday was the morning of the opening game, South Africa vs. Mexico.

The game would take place in Jo’burg (sorry – Johannesburg. I keep forgetting I’m not talking to my fellow locals) in Soccer City Stadium. The welcoming party, however, was at the new Jo’burg airport, where all the fans were flying in. As it happened, I was also flying into Jo’burg that morning to meet my old college buddy, Kelly. The following day Kelly and I would be attending the first round, divinely-paired match up of the USA vs. England, one of the most anticipated matches in US soccer history.

Liz dropped me off at the Cape Town airport at 7 a.m. I was bleary eyed, in a crowd of probably two dozen Mexican fans. There was no mistaking them – without exception they were decked out entirely in green, official jerseys, faces painted, wearing Mexican flags as capes. Together with maybe a hundred South African fans, we boarded the bus that would take us to the plane as the sun was rising, usually an uneventful little trip.

That morning, though, all the airport baggage handlers were in a tight group, dressed in the Bafana Bafana yellow jerseys and blowing vuvuzelas. They came running up to the bus and pounded on the windows with excitement as if we were the national team itself. On board the plane the stewards and stewardesses were all wearing team jerseys with “Staff” on the back, just as the news casters had been wearing when I caught a view of the TV back in the airport.

I arrived in Jo’burg two hours later and was quickly out into the arrivals area. The sliding doors marked “No Re-Entry” slid open, and I saw they had painted the floor of the arrivals area like a soccer pitch and built mock stadium seating for those waiting for passengers, so as you walked through the doors with your luggage it felt as if you were entering a stadium as a player. Combine that with the fact that there were huge crowds blowing vuvuzelas and singing in a highly acoustic area and you have an atmosphere was electric with anticipation.

Kelly and I picked up our tickets from a nearby kiosk – FIFA has pretty much taken over South Africa – and the tickets came out enormous and golden with some crazy hologram stuff on it, like an unforge-able pass to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. And then we were off, two hours northwest, to Rustenburg, where the US game would be played in just over 36 hours.

The highways leading north out of Jo’burg were clearly recently constructed – you could drive about 90 miles an hour on them and not know you were even moving. South Africa spent – ready for this? – $4 billion on infrastructure in preparation for World Cup. A lot of that went into roads. So we were on this beautiful eight lane highway, and after maybe 30 minutes out the city you noticed that on each side of the highway were just long piles of dirt, as if they had finished the day before.

I remembered hearing that the country was having difficulty getting the infrastructure finished in time for the Event. They were freaking out, as I understand. It’s one thing not to have the roads perfect, but if the actual stadiums weren’t done, well, the 700 million people watching on TV have a way of noticing that kind of thing. It was clear that the construction crew had thrown dirt out of the way, tossed down asphalt 50 yards wide, flattened it, and called it a wrap.

“Don’t drive on it for half an hour!” the foreman would shout. “Everybody to the stadium! Grab the tools!”

We had a road map that we had picked up in the airport, though with the new infrastructure, it seemed to be worse than useless. We were trying to use it to take the N4 northwest, avoiding the capital city of Pretoria.

“This is right, I think,” I said, studying the map where it looked like a roundabout would bypass the city.

Kelly glanced at it. “Yep, that’s the one,” he said. “Good – we really don’t want to get caught in Pretoria right now, it’ll slow us down like crazy.”

A few minutes later we were driving in downtown Pretoria.

“Man, this map sucks,” I said.

“I hate this map,” Kelly said.

We drove along one of the main roads of Pretoria. Judging from the euphoria in the streets you would have thought you were a block from the stadium where South Africa had just netted a game winning goal in overtime, not in a town an hour from the stadium, three hours before kick-off of a first round match.

At one of the last intersections before we got to the highway, one of the ubiquitous flag sellers leapt in front of our car as we were stopped at a red light.

“Hey!” he shouted, pointing at our license plate. “You’re from my home town! I give you a flag for free! For free, man!!”

He ran to Kelly, who was driving (on the right hand side). Kelly kept his window rolled up. “No thanks!” he shouted. “It’s ok! No thanks! No flags needed! We’re Americans! Thank you!”

“My home town!” he shouted again.

“It’s a rental!” Kelly shouted through the front window. “We are not from where you are from!”

“It’s a free flag, dude,” I said. “Roll down the window.”

“I don’t like this. I don’t like this one bit,” Kelly said, rolling down the window. The man tossed in a flag, and also one of those covers for the rear view mirrors.

“My home town!” he shouted.

“Yes, okay!” said Kelly. The light had turned green, and there was a long line of cars behind us.

I put 5 rand in the guy’s hand as a tip, which is just under a dollar. “Thanks!” I yelled. “Thanks for the flags and stuff!”

He was now practically inside our car. “These cost 100 rand!” he shouted.

“Wait – what? You said free!”

“No, 100 rand each!!”

“Right – just throw it back to him,” I said. But he wouldn’t take it.

“100 rand! Come on! South Africa! Yah man!”

“Holy crap – drive!”

“No way – I’m gettin’ our 5 rand back!” Kelly is not one to get taken advantage of.

Kelly started to drive, demanding the five rand. This guy, who, from the waist up was now essentially a passenger in our car, was working on a.) trying to convince us to purchase his cheap ass flag, b.) trying to get 100 rand from me, c.) trying to get the 5 rand out of his pocket, in case it came to that, and d.) pumping his legs like steam pistons trying to keep up with our car.

Kelly, on the other hand, was just trying to negotiate for our 5 rand while simultaneously trying to gauge how fast he could drive – he had just shifted into second gear – without taking this dude off his feet. I was a few inches away from all this holding my hands over my face and screaming “Oh my God!” right into this guy’s ear drum.

How this looked to the car behind us, I’m not sure.

When I looked up again Kelly was driving normally, there was no man in our car, and Kelly was holding my five rand coin out to me.

“You’re the money guy for the trip,” he said.

The second thing that held us up on our journey was the disappearance of the highway.

Though really, it was the cars that disappeared first.

“There aren’t really a lot of cars on this road,” Kelly noted. I had been busy testing him, and myself, on the various teams in each group. I had gotten up to Group H and was pointing out the strengths, according to Sports Illustrated, of the Spanish team, when he said it.

I looked up to see a highway that stretched straight for miles both ahead of us and behind us, and not a single car to be seen in either direction. “Maybe because it’s a toll road? Is everybody avoiding it?” Indeed, even the toll operators seemed somewhat surprised to see us.

A detour took us up to the left (they drive on the left), onto a bridge that looped around and crossed back over the highway we were on. We looked left off the bridge to the highway, expecting to see a bit of construction that we would have to avoid.

Instead, we saw a highway covered in hundreds of old tires, with high grass coming up through the concrete. It looked like a scene from Mad Max.

“I guess that’s why nobody was on this road,” I said.

“Because it ends in a post-apocalyptic slab of concrete, you mean?”

“This map is terrible.”

“Worst map EVER,” Kelly agreed.

It was 1:30 p.m. We were asking directions now, and being told that we needed to drive over a single lane dam and through a tunnel. But we would be back on track. The real issue now was finding a place to watch the epic opening South Africa game, ideally with a few other people around, to get some of the atmosphere, and a place to eat. With nothing on the road so far, it seemed like a dim prospect.

That was before we heard of Sun City.

This is getting long. To be continued!

Liz has worked with Thembalitsha before but this is my first time, and I’m finding that they are a tremendous organization. We have a couple of projects that we are working on.

The first involves spending time at a local pre-school started by Thembalitsha. The pre-school sits on a wine farm; the land for the school was donated by the farm. (Farms in this part of the world are often owned by the wealthy gentlemen farmers.) The children in the pre-school are the children of the workers who live on the farm, many of whom can work only seasonally, and many of whom are alcoholics. Our project here – which happens to be right up our alley – involves getting to know the kids and collecting stories from the teachers. The organization will hopefully be able to use these stories for fundraising purposes.

The second project is working with Thembacare, which is a seven bed hospice facility in the community of Grabouw. To get to Grabouw you drive away from the sea, up the switch backs and past the lumbering 18 wheelers and the families of baboons by the road until you get over the mountain, where you find yourself an environment much different than the endless vineyards near the sea. In Grabouw the land is a galaxy of rocks and stones, making farming difficult. It’s away from the prosperity near the waterfront, a poor community, large swaths of which are covered by slums and shanty towns.

Thembacare is the only facility of its kind, servicing a 30,000 person community, the majority of whom are afflicted with terrible chronic illnesses, mostly HIV and TB. Each week we travel into the shanty towns with the local care workers as they administer medicine to their patients – a group of more than 400. The fact that we can travel in safely to these communities is a mark of how well-respected, and critical, these care workers are.

When the Thembacare staff has administered the medicine we tell them that we are from the church (Thembalitsha is a Christian organization connected to our church), and we ask if we might ask them some questions about their living conditions. The purpose is to collect hard data that we can then aggregate and provide to the government with the evidence they need to provide better services to this community. Each session begins with us asking if we can pray for them. They always seem to deeply appreciate this, and it goes a long way toward softening our own hearts toward the people we meet and speak to in their own homes.

My wife Liz wrote a wonderful blog entry about our first time visiting Grabouw, capturing the scene perfectly, in her ongoing blog A Warm Summer Winter. I couldn’t say it better myself.

We do that a couple of days a week, spend time besides those two days writing up what we find out, and spend the other days visiting vineyards and writing and exploring the area and hanging out with our main man Finn, trying to ensure that his first words are not “Hectic!” and “Sho!” and other South African sayings, because he’d sound completely ridiculous and with oatmeal all over his face he doesn’t need any help looking a bit ridiculous. (Unlike his parents, who remain Sophisticate Incarnate.) He sure is a great little boy.

It’s a pretty great lifestyle. We are here until July 6th.

Ok, so let me tell you something about the pre-school, which they call Graceland.

As you can imagine, the kids are incredibly sweet. How could they not be? It would be like having a litter of mean puppies. But there’s sweet and then there’s effusive and sweet. When we came walking down the path for the first time they all came running up to us, kids of 3, 4, and 5 years old, as if they were running to greet their long lost twins but when they got close they realized it wasn’t their cousins at all but human knees and by then it was too late and they just barreled into us.

The kids were all chattering away in Afrikaans. Not that it really mattered. There’s very little in the way of communication barriers with kids, and anyway Lizzie and I got over that long ago in Nepal. Those kids could be speaking…well, Afrikaans, I guess, for all it mattered. We understood each other just fine. That little boy wants to go on the slide. That one wants to be picked up.

And that girl wants to hand me the sand cake that she just “baked” but which, from a structural integrity point of view, didn’t look particularly stable.

Now, when I was first working with kids back in 2004, I would have been petrified of making them cry so I would have pretended to be incredibly grateful and taken the sand cake. And of course that sand cake would have disintegrated in my hands and all over my clothes. Well, no more.

“No thanks!” I said heartily. “Too much sand cake today!” I patted my stomach and made a low moan, like this: “Ooooh!”

She insisted.

So I said: “If you make me eat that sand cake my intestines will burst. I’ll be bleeding internally for days, and I don’t know if my insurance covers that. You want that on your conscience? Because I wouldn’t.”

This last part was hard to mime. I got the bursting intestine down pretty good (the boom noise attracted the attention of a couple of the little boys who came over to check whether I had swallowed a grenade whose pin had unexpectedly slipped out) but the insurance document (miming dismay at a complex legal document) and indicating that it would be on her conscience (a firm, yet gentle, gripping of her wee shoulders followed by a wiping away of her tears) didn’t seem to communicate so well across language, culture, gender, age, or sense of humor.

Still, she got the message, and she brought the sand cake to a couple of other boys who briefly argued over who would get it. It occurred to me that I didn’t really know what sand cake tasted like and I may have been too quick to assume that it would not be delicious. Must remember to try new things down here in South Africa.

Sand cakes aside, Lizzie and I and our close friend Jillian Dunham from NYC, who is visiting for a couple of weeks, had a ball with the kids. How can you not? We all spent enough time in Nepal to know that the key to hanging out with young children is understanding that you do not have to be their sole source of entertainment for hours on end. Once you’re just hanging out with them, it’s actually quite relaxing.

For the most part, it was clear that they were just starved for attention. Many of these kids were being raised by single mothers. Too many of the parents drank too much, too many of them would become abusive, and too many of them were drinking even when they were pregnant. Too many of them simply neglected the children for most of their young lives. So as we gathered stories of the children we found that they mostly just needed attention and affection, and that’s a very easy thing to give children of that age, since they bound like baby animals and who doesn’t love baby animals?

Our first day we just hung out a bit with the kiddies, and we even brought Finn.

The little ones were over the moon to see Finn. They kept pointing at him and cooing “Baba!” which is my first Afrikaans word (it means Son of the Pale Adonis) and patting him gently on the head. Finn handled the paparazzi quite well. His excitement really kicked in when he saw one of the three teachers, a woman named Angeline, who is about the complexion and size and general shape of our nanny Pamela. He went nearly mad with joy, crawling toward her as fast as he could, never questioning how she had managed to follow us thousands of miles and pop by, seemingly, by coincidence.

That time we only stayed a couple of hours. Liz sat with Elizabeth, one of the three teachers and also the founder of the school. I heard Liz ask “So how are you doing, Elizabeth?” – a question that Americans are obligated to answer “Fine, thanks!” even if their hair is caught in a turbine – and Elizabeth talked for about an hour straight. Liz came out of the classroom, blinking in the sun like a baby bird emerging from an egg.

“I think she needed to have some good girl chat time,” Liz said.

The second time we went back we got to know the kids a bit better, but as it was with the children in Nepal, they were most easily identifiable by their clothing. Woldino was one of the smaller boys, and even though I spent a lot of time with him – or he with me, maybe – I was praying that he wouldn’t take off his Technicolor hat or, God forbid, switch clothes with one of the others, because then he’d be gone for good.

While Woldino was hanging around me, a handful of girls were hanging around Liz – a few distracting her by doing some dancing or whatever so that the others could try to braid her hair, then they would switch.

There’s something about Liz’s long golden locks, so completely different from their own hair, that makes them want to get in there and just play. Though I suppose they might have been saying the same thing about me. I have quite a few African American friends and I went to high school in a predominantly black neighborhood but it’s not like any of them let me really get my fingers in their hair and play around with it. I’ve got this thick unruly shag on my head that gets static clingy when I walk on carpet – I loved the feel of their hair, short and tough and manageable and – let’s just say it – objectively cool.

At the end of the day the teachers would pack as many children as they could into their cars and drive them back to their homes on the farm, where their parents lived. If there wasn’t enough room they would jump onto one of the passing tractors which nobody minds, least of all the tractor drivers. They go home to their families and those conditions, whatever they might be – and there was great variation.

We would go home to our comfortable living with dinner and a bottle of wine from one of the vineyards. The children, meanwhile, would be picked up the next morning for more education and love. Not necessarily in that order.

————–
You know what this reminds me of? Next Generation Nepal! Check it out, peeps.

(I totally panic every time I have to write that word – Fahrenheit. Every time. I see it coming a mile away, and I’m never even close. That damn red ziggy line appear under it, but Word doesn’t even have any suggestions for me. That’s how far off I am. I add h’s and e’s, and take out the half dozen r’s I jammed into it but Word still gives me that prissy “No suggestions,” like that Parisian waiter who pretends to have no idea what I’m saying until I’ve said “un croissant” for the sixteen time and then he goes, “Ah, un croissant!” and turns away laughing heartily at your pronunciation until you stand up and give him an wedgy that he won’t ever forget in his life, I promise you that, though you’ll probably have to go elsewhere for your croissant.)

We landed, zombies with luggage, and were met by Liz’s old friend Ilza and a guy my age named Adrian, who helps coordinate the volunteer program at Thembalitsha. Thembalitsha is the organization we’re volunteering part time at – a Christian organization affiliated with the church that we attended in New York.

As we sped out of Cape Town, toward the town where we’d be staying, with the enormous Table Mountain in the rearview mirror, Adrian directed my attention to the shanty towns on the right side of the highway. Thembalitsha has projects scattered around the region. Though we wouldn’t be working in that particular neighborhood, Adrian gave me the background. Thembalitsha had set up a health clinic and school, both for the very poor underclass of that area.

“It’s not dangerous for us, since we’ve known the community for so many years,” he told me in his South African lilt. “I was only attacked once, and that was because I found myself deep in the slums in a part that was unfamiliar to us, and a guy pulled a nine-milli on us and demanded our car keys and my wallet and my phone, and he looked ready to shoot, since that wouldn’t be uncommon, and I told him ‘God bless you, Jesus loves you,’ and he suddenly looked like a ghost and ran off. So I suppose we were protected that day.”

Now, I’m a church going Christian myself, but I had some difficulty imagining my first instinct, when a gun was held to my head, would be to tell my would-be murderer that Jesus loved him. That’s some serious faith. Though I also can’t imagine God would love me any less for shrieking and peeing my pants. And it pretty much ensures that I’ll be inheriting the Earth, which is gonna be totally sweet. First order of business: renaming the Duke Blue Devils “The Poo Town Crapazoids.” (Go Hoos!!)

We settled quickly into our new home, 40 minutes or so outside of Cape Town in a region called Stellenbosch. When you see wines from South Africa, that’s where they come from: Stellenbosch. It’s ridiculously beautiful, all vineyards and mountains.

From our glassy stares and the way we answered “guuugh” to most questions, Ilza decided that we could use some coffee. She took us to a nearby place called Mugg and Bean which has the feel of a Starbucks or a Cosi but with real food that tastes delicious.

It was a nice rest, and it was also a good opportunity to start making some snap judgments about the people and the country of South Africa, because frankly it’s never too early to start stereotyping.

“Have you noticed that everybody here is a giant?” Liz observed.

I stared at her vacantly for a few seconds.

“A giant what?”

“No – a giant. Period. Tall. Super tall. Giants. Have you noticed that?”

I looked around. It was true. Even the waiters who served us seemed awfully tall. In fact, that may have contributed to the fact that when we asked for a high chair, they brought us a kind of play swing thing for Finn, who is, if anything, slightly above average height, but here he must look like a tadpole compared to their own enormous children who are probably the size of Big Bird, stumbling around and accidentally tipping over vehicles.

This swing thing they brought was really meant for a small baby, and the moment we got Finn into it we realized we were going to have a hell of a time getting him out. It was like a Chinese finger trap. So I began looking at side orders to see if they had anything like Crisco that we could use to get him out while Liz and Ilsa began sliding out one of his legs with surgical precision. By the time we succeed our food was cold, though Finn had managed to reach over his mother’s shoulder and eat most of her oatmeal while we were trying to get him free. Resourceful lad!

It was late afternoon and we were fading fast, and we went to bed as early as we could get away with. Because Finn was bouncing around, believing it was about ten in the morning, we let him sleep in bed with us, which we’ve only done maybe four times ever. He loved that. I watched Liz holding him and singing him to sleep, and watched with rare glee as she managed to sing herself asleep while Finn was wide awake. He poked her face a couple of times. When that failed, he turned his attention to me. I quickly feigned sleep. Finn’s no dummy though and he crawled over Liz’s head and started pinching my face to see if I was really asleep. When I didn’t move, he got up on his knees for leverage and used his palm to slap at my head a bit.

Then, convinced that I was asleep, and checking to make sure nobody was looking, he stuck his finger up my nose – something I had expressly forbade on more than one occasion. He gave a sigh of contentment and laid down.

That’s how our first day ended, with Finn’s foot in Lizzie’s slightly agape mouth and his finger in my nose, and all of us dead to the world.

We had a few days before we would start volunteering, so the following day, refreshed, we drove around the Stellenbosch area. We had lunch in a place called Fairview, a wineland (their notably unsophisticated name for a vin-yaaahd) about twenty minutes away.

Fairview had goats. And not just in the back in a barn eating their hay and being all goaty but right up front, the centerpiece, in an enclosure with a low wall and a tower right in the middle where the goats could climb up, because if you were a goat and you’ve already eaten a bunch of hay, what else were you gonna do all day?

Liz and I were really excited to show Finn the goats, so we held him up to peer over the wall. The thing is, at 15 months old, I don’t think he understood that the goats were interesting, even though they were the awesome kind of goats with beards and horns. (Those are goats, right? They looked like goats. Are those goats? The horns and the beards? Like a sheep but with really nice facial structure and no sheep fur?) Inside we did wine tasting, and delicious food eating, and cheese tasting. The price of that stuff is pretty reasonable which is good because we’re trying to watch our spending and bad because I start to calculate how a.) how high my credit limit is and b.) how much cheese I think my gullet could reasonably handle in a short space of time.

We ended the day in the town of Stellenbosch, a university town, which turned out to be one of the loveliest towns ever, small tree-lined streets with a feel like a tiny town in Northern California.

Except it wasn’t California. If we hadn’t already picked that up by the fact that people were speaking what sounded like Dutch but was actually Afrikaans (which sounds, to the untrained ear, a little like the language we may speak in ten thousand years when we evolve into the Bird People), we learned it by looking at the local street signs.

My favorite of these signs was on the streets. It was written on the road itself, where you might see “Ped X-ing” or “Fire Lane.” It read “Robots Ahead.”

I didn’t know what that meant and I knew Liz wouldn’t either. But it was too good an opportunity to speak in a robot voice to pass up, so I started saying in my loud robot voice “Ro-bots Ah-head! Ro-bots Ah-head!” which Liz allowed me to do six times (I noticed her counting to herself) before she said that it was probably enough of the robot voice for the time being.

Then she saw a red and white sign that said “No hooting” and she started to go “Hoot Hoot! Hoot Hoot!” like an owl and then she would say “Those coppers will never catch me! Hoot Hoot!” because Hooting was illegal, even though we weren’t sure what hooting was, and even less sure what robots were because we never saw any robots or anything that hooted.

It was a fine first day indeed.

—–
You’ll want to check out Liz’s awesome and more up-to-date blog about our time in South Africa, A Warm Summer Winter. Even the title kicks ass.

And don’t forget to visit Next Generation Nepal!

Muscular young men – ninety percent of whom are former Israeli army with rhomboids like flying buttresses, enter your front door – sideways, usually, since their upper bodies are the shape of hand gliders – then catwalk into your home in single file, bearing a stack of cardboard boxes and a single dolly the size of a handbag. They wave their arms a bit and shout “Hoofa!” and “Lechem!” or whatever they are saying in Hebrew and suddenly your nine-foot tall, six-foot wide mirror is in the truck, and you find yourself examining the two-by-seven foot front doorframe for trick paneling.

[I once watched an illusionist at a live show grab a parrot out of thin air – really, out of nothing at all. And not one of those small parrots either but a huge one, the size of a king penguin, one that you later find out is something like hundred and forty years old. Before we could even applaud he was swinging the parrot downwards in one smooth sweep as if he was scything hay, which the parrot was clearly not expecting because it was like “Squawk?” and you could tell that the parrot thought it’s work for the day was over and he was about to get his can of tuna fish or whatever and not get swung like a jungle machete. The illusionist appeared to slap the parrot against his thigh and suddenly there he was, holding two identical parrots, one in each hand. That was a cool show.]

Anyhoo, we were packing up our entire house because we were moving out, giving up our apartment. When the head moving man asked us where they should take the stuff, Liz and I looked at each other. The fact was that we didn’t really have a plan.

“Storage?” Liz said. It was more a question than anything else, as if it was something that we should all discuss together.

“I think storage too,” I offered.

“Do you have some storage?” she asked.

“Maybe where it’s cheaper, like in Jersey City? Storage?” I added.

The guy was looking back and forth between us, and finally shrugged. “It’s your stuff,” he said, and went to talk to the driver.

“Oh good,” said Liz, turning to me. “For a second I was like – Wait, whose stuff is this?? Good thing he confirmed that it was our stuff.”

“You know, I had a feeling all along that this was our stuff. But I admit I wasn’t positive until he said ‘It’s your stuff.’ That’s when I knew it for sure, that all this stuff really belonged to us,” I said.

We have no idea how long everything will go into storage. Certainly it will only come out when we return to the US and have the wherewithal to rent an apartment or a house, and that will require a little something that we in the industry call “income.” Until then, we say goodbye to the enormous mirror and our TV and our poofy ottoman (meaning soft, rather than attracted to ottomen of the same sex) and our lamps and Finn’s crib.

It’s a strange thing knowing we won’t see that apartment again, up on 92nd St between Park and Lex, the apartment where we made our first nursery, spending so much time choosing the right color for it and the right type of cream colored wall-to-wall carpeting, and where we hung the paintings of a happy monkey swinging through the trees and where we placed the F is for Finn painting over Finn’s first crib, even before he was born.

We often walked into that room before Finn came into the world, and looked into the empty crib and tried to imagine seeing a little boy there, our little boy, and what it would feel like to pick him up when he cried and hold him against us. We sometimes left our house untidy but never that room – nothing went in that room because it was perfect, it was peaceful, and we wanted more than anything to give Finn, a boy we hadn’t met yet, a sanctuary in the middle of New York City. And when we did finally bring him home he was so small and we had no idea what to do, and I was so worried about him that I slept down on the cream wall-to-wall carpeting, right next to the crib that first night, just in case.

The apartment is just an apartment but it is Finn’s first apartment, his first home and when people ask where he was born he’ll always say New York City, where he lived on the Upper East Side for the first year of his life. I think he’ll be proud of that.

Now the three of us are untethered, but we’re untethered together, as a family. Liz and I talked about it over Chinese food that afternoon on 3rd Ave. Finn was with my mom in Jersey City, where we would spend the night. We were packing up and leaving the hemisphere without knowing where we will come back to. That’s where faith comes in, I suppose.

The next morning, Thursday May 20th, we loaded up Finn and the bags and headed to the airport.

We had packed light but there’s no easy way to travel with a toddler for seven weeks. You need stuff. We transported Finn in this Kelty backpack in which he sits just behind my head, swinging along with my gait and holding my hair and laughing that rich laugh that you only hear in movies starring the King of Siam and generally treating me like a trained elephant. In our carry on were laptops and Kindles and cameras and as you are going through the security checkpoint you realize that you’re one of those families that people dread being stuck behind, taking up about forty of those grey buckets and trying to explain the mysterious shapes in your bags.

We would be flying from NYC to Jo’burg, which would be a fifteen hour flight. (I always thought that was totally pretentious, shortening Johannesburg to Jo’burg like that, like oooh, look at you, so tight with South Africa! But I’m not writing out that whole word every time I have to say it. You want to, be my guest. But I got places to be, friend.) The flight was on South African Airways which is a pleasant enough airline, but frankly Liz and I were thinking a lot less about the in-flight juice selection and a lot more about whether or not Finn would have an atomic meltdown.

Not that we were unprepared: long ago, when we bought a new car seat as Finn expanded from baby to toddler, we purposefully bought one that claimed to be airplane friendly. That was months ago – that’s how long we’ve been nervous about this trip.

Upon entering the aircraft with the chair it occurred to me that maybe the car seat company didn’t really know what airplane friendly meant – or maybe they were asked by the FAA “Is this seat airplane friendly?” and they were all like “Yes?” because bringing it through the aisles it felt about as convenient as carrying a rocking chair, except that with a rocking chair you at least had somewhere to grip it. This thing had nowhere to grip it, so I carried it as one might carry a pumpkin you find at the state fair, the one with the blue ribbon that people are lined up to take their photo next to, the one that is secured to a wooden platform, lest it roll off and crush a school bus. Lugging that behemoth slowly down the aisle, I passed the time by trying to think of objects that would be less airplane friendly. I came up with three good ones: 1.) A garage door. 2.) A canister that piped out poison gas. 3.) The moon.

We had three seats next to each other in the middle of the plane. I put the car seat between Liz and me and that was pretty much the last we saw of each other for the next 15 hours. From time to time I saw Liz’s graceful long arms lowering Finn into the chair and I knew it was my turn to take over.

Following all the advice our friends had given us, we had brought along a huge zip lock bag of new toys, toys that would hold his interest for a set length of time. That was the hope anyway. When he lost interest in that particular toy, we would dole out another toy, and so on.

As it turned out, he was into none of these toys. Not a one. He was mildly into the air sickness bag and the laminated safety card, which he sent zinging into the head of the gentleman next to Liz, so we went ahead and took that away. I went back to the zip lock bag and opened it up to let him dig around in there himself, since that activity on its own promised to keep him busy for at least twenty seconds. My spirits rose when a he gave a little cheer and he pulled something out of the bag.

“Whatcha got there buddy?”

He held up a purple crayon like Excalibur.

“Yaaa!” Finn said.

“Oooh, a crayon! That’s great! Now be careful with that, buddy, you don’t…” and then Finn gave one broad swoop and swiped a long purple gash across the movie screen.

“Whoa! Ok, that’s coming back…” and he swooped again to make almost a perfect X on the screen before I could pry it out of his hands. He hollered, which was embarrassing, so I finally relented and decided maybe it was best to give him what he wanted, which was to go down on the floor.

I craned my neck to check this plan with Liz, but she was getting her first sleep of the flight, and I didn’t want to wake her. No matter – this was a decision I could make on my own, since I had a 50% stake in the boy and figured I knew a thing or two about him after 15 months.

So I put him down there, and almost immediately the woman in front of him put her seat all the way back, which practically touched the car seat. It was like a cave-in – Finn was gone. Why hadn’t I woken up Liz?? I wasn’t supposed to be making these decisions!

I had to find him before Liz woke up. I quickly undid my seatbelt and got on the floor after him, which was a tight squeeze because the guy in front of me had his seat down as well and I’m not the most sinewy guy in the world. I felt around madly for Finn and finally got a hold of his foot – he had crawled under the seat in front of him and was just starting to poke his head out the other side, between some woman’s legs. I managed to pull him out and got him back in his seat before I noticed that he had a shoe in his mouth and another one in his hand, and they were two different shoes, and I didn’t know who either of them belonged to, so I quickly pried them away and tossed each one under the seat of the person that I thought it might belong to and let God sort it out.

Since he had clearly decided that he’d had enough of the car seat, I decided to take Finn for a walk the length of the airplane. The lights were out, dimmed into that deep blue which make you feel like you should be moving in slow motion leaps in a space suit. In the near darkness we would be less conspicuous, or so I thought until I started tripping over people’s feet.

We had been told by the ticketing agent that the plane was completely full. It wasn’t true, there were empty seats. A funny thing happens when a passenger is next to an empty seat on an overnight flight. That passenger will count him or herself blessed beyond their wildest dreams, as if they now had access, not to two tiny seats that together were the size a magazine, but rather to a luxurious chasm of space. That passenger will cover themselves in a blanket and put their pillow down and stretch out like they were in a California King.

Except it wasn’t a California King. It was the size of a small cat bed. So all along the aisle, instead of seeing the occasional stray foot or protruding elbow, you’ll have legs hanging out from thigh down, with fitful snores comes from the dark row. I whispered to Finn that we were entering a forest and we were going to have to rely completely on each other, which actually made him stop fidgeting, as if he had somehow understood the import of what I was talking about.

From then on, with each pass through the aisle, he would point at random body parts and grunt softly in my ear “UH!” as if to warm me of a stray leg or blanket-concealed feet. That went on for about thirty minutes, until Finn seemed to realize that we weren’t, as I had promised him, going “the long way around” to the “ice cream store.”

In the end our boy slept for a bunch of hours at the end, though the half teaspoon of Benedryl we gave him to help him sleep (doctor approved, folks!) only seemed to make him hyper, the exact opposite effect we were hoping for, like trying to fight off Gremlins with a water cannon. He finally did fall asleep in the most comfortable position he knows: his mother’s lap. It reminded me of the position he used to collapse into when he was just a few weeks old. By that point I was awake but somewhat brain dead, so I watched Wolverine because, like the rest of you, I can’t really ever get enough X-Men.

As we deboarded the plane in Jo’burg, the women behind us cooed about what a wonderful little boy he was, how he hadn’t made a peep. I made sure that I said “Oh, thanks!” quite loudly so that they would immediately attribute those good genes to me instead of Liz, then let her walk him out while I set to work on extricating the car seat for the long journey back up the aisle and out into South Africa.
————

Hi everybody! Don’t forget to check out the Next Generation Nepal website, and definitely, definitely visit Liz’s blog on South Africa, which is always going to be more up-to-date and awesomer than mine. You’ll dig it.

By then I would have had a few peaceful days off after finals, then a short graduation ceremony, then Liz and Finn and I would relax in our living room as we supped fresh papaya and did family jigsaw puzzles together, and maybe Finn would put a piece in his mouth and we would all laugh, because jigsaw puzzles aren’t for eating!

Then we would take our time packing for South Africa, over the course of several days, all the while making up songs about boats and zebras while Finn cooed quietly in the corner, drawing seascapes.

It turned out a bit differently.

The last week of school I stayed up for several nights cramming to finish my final papers almost a full week before they were due so that Liz and Finn and I could catch a Friday morning flight to Minneapolis, where we rented a car and drove three hours north to Wisconsin through the snow (!!!) until we arrived at this gynormous renovated barn on Lake Superior where we spent five days with my UVA buddies and wives – plus no less than seven boys, all under the age of five.

The boys would explode out of their bedrooms at around six thirty a.m. on cue and generally go berserk, so it was like having breakfast each morning in one of those Lotto ball machines. It was a wonderful holiday.

Liz and Finn and I got back to New York on Tuesday night, May 11th, just in time for the first of two NYU graduation ceremonies.

The first was the all-NYU graduation at Yankee Stadium. I had the honor of carrying the Stern School of Business banner onto the field. I had known about this duty for quite some time, and I had imagined myself parading into Yankee Stadium along with the other banner bearers, marching in to the roar of my fellow graduates, my banner being cheered even by non-Sternies because of the transcendent dignity with which I carried it.

“See that young man?” mothers in the crowd would say to their children, nudging them and pointing to me. “See the grace in each step he takes? The precise angle at which he carries his banner? Let me tell you something: That man is going to be President one day. I shall stake your life on it - your very life! Who shall take my wager?” and the mother would roar this last sentence to the neighboring spectators to show that she was deadly serious.

I strode out of the tunnel, onto the warning track in right field, and, alas, straight into the cold rain and high swirling winds of Yankee Stadium.

The banner, which I had practiced with whilst indoors one week earlier, now turned out to be an alarmingly effective airfoil, to the point that it was actually almost yanking me off my feet. Worse, my mortar board hat immediately slipped in front of my eyes, so I was walking before fifty thousand people, half blind and getting pulled straight up into the air by this stupid freakin’ banner.

If you’ve seen these kinds of banners, you will have noticed that they also are adorned with a giant golden spike at the top of the pole, to which this enormous sail of a banner is attached. Let me tell you something: One would have difficulty concocting a more deadly piece of equipment to carry into gale force winds. Yet there I was, staggering around like I’d just hooked a white marlin.

So I’m hanging onto this banner like my life depends on it, knowing that if it was torn from my hands it would go one of two ways – either high up and into the crowd where it would come down like a giant lawn dart into the crowded upper deck, or straight backwards where it would harpoon our new Dean of Students in front of about 50,000 people.

I finished out my procession by wrapping my arms around the entire thing, so in the photos that my friends took of me as I passed you could just see my feet shuffling in the wet dirt, my arms wrapped in a most undignified manner around the Stern banner.

Then Alec Baldwin spoke, and that was really cool.

The next day, Thursday, May 13th, was the Stern-only graduation, which was held at Radio City Music Hall. I was speaking at the event so I got to be up on stage, which was really cool – that’s one big ass stage.

There were two problems, however.

The first problem was that of my conical head. You of the smooth-headed peoples take for granted that you have that gorgeous Bruce Willis-y cranium on your shoulders. My head, if felt by a blind man, might be mistaken for a fire hydrant in a Monkees wig, or perhaps a young brachiosaurus. Which is fine on most days, I suppose, except for those rare moments where I’ve been forced to wear the most ridiculous of graduation attire pieces: the mortar board hat.

On most people, this hat may be but a slight inconvenience; on me it feels like trying to balance an atlas on my head. I was terrified that the hat would come flying off when I was speaking, so I took the rather bold step of attaching it to my hair with bobby pins, after getting assurances from about forty people backstage that it would not be visible to the audience and that I was in no danger of being mistaken for a woman.

So we marched up, the line of faculty and me, bound for the stage, through the crowd and up the stairs, where we lined up proudly in front of thousands. Then, over the loudspeaker, came the announcement that we would be singing the national anthem. And about two thousand mortar board hats were taken off and placed over hearts. And one, front and center under the white hot lights in front of about six thousand people, was conspicuously not.

This was bad news.

I tried to give the facial expression of someone who was fiercely patriotic, but was so caught up in the moment of the flag appearing that he had forgotten that he had a foot-square piece of cardboard balanced on his head.

I put my hand over my heart and raised my head dramatically so that nobody could mistake me for looking anywhere but at the giant screen where the flag was waving. My eyes locked on hard, projecting vivid remembrance of the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air, and the proof that it offered that, yes, the flag was indeed still there. And when it came to “oh say does that star…” I lip-synched so dramatically that it must have looked like I was trying to catch a grapefruit in my mouth, and I blinked quickly so that people might notice, not the awkwardly-still-in-place headgear, but the fact that I was regularly moved to tears at the sight of the red white and blue.

The second problem was that I was stuck on stage for two hours following the speeches while diplomas were handed out, and because of my placement I was directly in the background for each student’s handshake with the Dean, and thus perfectly positioned in the middle of the giant screen. For two hours. Now, just for fun, next time you’re sitting in a metal folding chair in heavy robes under hot lights, count how many times in two hours you have to itch your butt. Because I’m just sayin’.

We had a celebratory dinner with the family that night at Blue Smoke where we chowed down on primo barbeque (where, upon learning that “marbled” was a euphemism for “wicked fatty,” I went ahead and ordered as much marbled short ribs as the wait staff could fit on the table), then we called it a night quite early so I could prepare for the early morning meeting at HarperCollins.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this in this blog before – did I mention the book? I think I did. If I didn’t, and even if I did, here’s the deal (again). Do you guys remember the whole Nepal thing? You may not, since looking back it seems I haven’t mentioned it in the last few sentences.

Back in February 2009, the same week that Finn was born, I signed a book contract with HarperCollins (or more specifically, their imprint William Morrow) to write a book about my experiences in Nepal. It begins with first volunteering at the Little Princes Children’s Home in Nepal and goes all the way up to meeting and marrying Liz.

The title of the book is Little Princes and it is due out in January 2011.

This is exciting for a whole slew of reasons, firstly and foremostly because it will hopefully bring a lot of attention to our organization Next Generation Nepal (NGN) and our efforts to reconnect trafficked children with their families. HarperCollins is planning a serious marketing campaign for the book, and it will be published in several countries in several languages.

The other reason this is exciting (does two count as a slew?) is that it has allowed me time to write a lot more, which is good news for me and rather poorly news for everybody else, who will now hopefully feel obligated to buy this 300 page book come January, lest you hear your doorbell ring early next year and find that Conor was “just in the neighborhood” and has “invited himself in for a tea” and is now “scouring your property for evidence that you’ve actually bought the book” because if you haven’t he may find himself accidentally “breaking some of the good china.”

I stayed up late preparing the presentation for the HarperCollins sales team, a slide show which consisted of about five photos and the stories behind those photos. At the last minute, I received an email from our NGN Executive Director, Hallie Tamez, with this story out of Nepal wherein our team rescued this two-and-a-half year old little girl and brought her to our new children’s home that we opened a couple of months ago in Humla, the region where the kids come from, up on the border with Tibet.

Which would make a great story, right? Exactly the kind of thing you’d want to share with the sales team at HarperCollins, who were eager for updates on our work in Nepal.

The problem for me – and bear with me here – is that we have this country director in Nepal named Julien Lovera. He’s a French guy in his mid-twenties. He’s an awesome, awesome guy, been with us for about a year and a half, cares deeply for the kids, incredibly capable, and has just committed to NGN for another year.

That’s not the problem – that’s the good part.

The problem is this: Julien is very, very good looking. The women I know, including my wife, my agent, our Executive Director, and my mother, absolutely swoon over this guy. It’s his damned George Clooney eyebrows. In the photo I showed the sales team, Julien is looking all rugged, carrying this little girl through the hills back to our children’s home.

You getting this? Because suddenly nobody cares about the book and everybody cares about who that handsome man in the photo is. So I mention that he’s our country director and that he’s a really nice guy and in a fake under-my-breath quick falsetto I remark how badly he smel-ellls! and that I once saw him wash his hands for less than twenty-five seconds which everybody knows is a real good way to spread germs but apparently he just doesn’t care about other humans, only himself. And trafficked children and orphans I guess but whatever – didn’t he read The Hot Zone? The guy could be carrying the plague for all we know. He could be giving you the plague right now! Not so sexy anymore, is he? Is he??

Needless to say I moved expeditiously past that photo.

I went from there to recording two videos for them, an author video and a video for students or something, and I think I may have looked a little goofy in them, but I guess they can superimpose Monsieur Clooney-Brows over my face if they love him so damn much.

I got home late that afternoon and passed out for about five hours. Then it was time for the real work to begin: Liz and I still needed to pack up our entire apartment and pack for South Africa and move out. But that could wait for the weekend.

——
Ok, THREE reminders: first of all, visit us at Next Generation Nepal! We want you to sign up for our newsletters, and we love to hear from you.

Second, Liz has started a blog about South Africa that is much more real time and totally awesome (I’ve been begging her to write for about a year now). Come take a look! It’s called A Warm Summer Winter. Much better title than mine, too. Damn.

Lastly, this book is coming out in January, but it’s never too early to get excited. So, like, now is not to early. I’ll start: wooo hooooo! Boooooookkkk!!!

Thanks everybody!

Thankfully, this turned out to be an AT&T issue rather than a Google issue, which shouldn’t really have been all that surprising considering AT&T is about as reliable as a junkie. With directions in hand and my vent about AT&T out of the way, we were ready to go.

We gathered at our apartment on the Upper East Side. Our car was dominated by Emma (our dog) and Nya (the dog of Itay and Orit, our Israeli friends), two enormous retrievers that took up most of the cargo area. JC pulled up in a red Ford Explorer with his own wife Liz Rich, Gianna, and Ryan. He offered to put most of the luggage in his car, since anything we tried to put into the space with Emma and Nya would come out covered in a thick golden shag.

“What about Gianna’s dog?” I asked him, peering into the back of the Explorer.

“Who, Gizmo?”

“Yeah – where’s she going to sit?”

There was a pause. “Have you seen Gizmo?”

I had not. At least, I thought I hadn’t. In fact, I had unwittingly seen her out of the corner of my eye just seconds earlier when I had given Gianna a hug hello, and had mistaken the dog for a stylish coin purse tucked inside Gianna’s handbag.

It was, I think, the smallest dog I’ve ever seen, and really did look a little bit like Gizmo from Gremlins. Gianna kept her in a purse-sized carrier, less for fear that she would run than that a strong up draught would catch her and blow her through an 18th floor window.

Gizmo was also the only member of the group who seemed less than thrilled about our little road trip. (The eight of us were all friends, and Emma and Nya were so excited about getting out of the city that I worried they might pop straight out the sun roof.) It was not surprising, perhaps; she didn’t really know anybody. She wasn’t even Gianna’s dog – Gianna was only dog-sitting this wee creature. Gianna’s roommate, another friend of ours, was away for the weekend, and had no doubt promised her sweet little Gizmo that she would be safe and sound in their downtown apartment, able to luxuriate in the double bed, maybe watch a little TV.

Gizmo had long since realized this was not how the weekend was going to go – not by a damn sight. Instead of TV and cushions, Gizmo was hooded and tossed in the back of an SUV, only to be taken out several hours later when we reached a farmhouse in the middle of the country. It was like being babysat by Hamas. And that’s before she caught wind of the two other quadrupeds who outweighed her by a factor of about fifty and who tore through the house like rabbits at a dog track.

“Don’t you want to play with the other doggies?” Gianna asked, without much hope, because it was like asking if you wanted to play with out-of-control subway cars. Gizmo just wanted to hide.

Gizmo would eventually keep to her bedroom and become friends with a tiny ceramic dog and a local wiffle ball, and she would be, as JC pointed out, that token antisocial member of the group – every group has one –who would keep to their room, read, and periodically check in to see if dinner was ready.

But that would come later.

We left NYC in the early afternoon, stopping for lunch in a place that had taken what you might call a short-cut in marketing by deciding it just would be famous for making pancakes the size of unpacked tents. We arrived in Jeffersonville, at the farmhouse, our home for the weekend.

“She’s an old lady” the owner had told me when she described the house to me over the phone, the previous evening. The comments made me feel, if not exactly nervous, at least alert, in the way you become if a real estate agent is driving you to a place she has just described as “a fun fixer-upper” or “just needing a little TLC” and you just know you’re going to find a recently foreclosed rendering plant with the owner at that very moment out shopping for premium fire insurance and a several pounds of accelerant.

This place, though, turned out to be beautiful. It was on a tiny road that looked like maybe three cars a day passed by, on about 80 acres. The owner had boasted that she owned the adjacent mountain, or hill, really, and as we walked toward the house, I told our group that the owner had indicated we could do what we liked with it.

“Like start construction on a secret missile silo,” I announced, pretty confident that this would be the unanimous choice of the group.

“More like shoot potato guns at it,” JC said. I started to poo poo this idea, but Ryan interjected.

“I know how to make one of those – my brother taught me,” he said helpfully. He launched into an impressively detailed description of both the structure and the physics of the aforementioned gun. “The force of the explosion has nowhere to go but straight through the potato,” he concluded.

“Couldn’t that, like, kill a person?”

“It already did kill a person,” Liz pointed out. “We learned about it, first year law school, torts class. We learned about a case of a potato gun. Guy shot it 300 yards, killed another guy driving a car. Involuntary manslaughter, or maybe negligent homicide, I think, but then you’ve also got a civil suit for wrongful death in tort.”

So we decided not to make potato guns, because of the thing with the torts. I made a mental note to ask Liz later what torts were, since everybody else seemed to already know and why embarrass myself?

Inside the house, back in the kitchen, we found Ramona. Ramona was not the caretaker but rather a local antiques dealer who helped with the house when the caretaker was out of town. When we came in she was trying to drill a hole with a power screwdriver, which seemed like quite a chore for a stand-in caretaker, but it wasn’t really my business.

It gave us a chance to look around. The stove was an ancient gas stove, and the sink looked like an original piece. The fridge had recently conked out, I was told, and a new one was in the pantry. One look at the original fridge gave the impression that the appliance may have simply died of natural causes – old age, probably. It was from a different era, when fridges were grand, rounded on the edges, puffed out slightly like a shiny new Chevy from the late 1950s, almost voluptuous. And also completely dead. “Please don’t close this door,” read a note nearby, as if the door was a coffin lid and they were not giving up now, or ever, on this proud centerpiece.

Ramona hacked away for another minute, pressing rotating steel against old wood, and we politely interrupted to let her know that we would need to buy food. We had heard that the local market closed in thirty minutes, at 7 p.m. She put away her power drill and offered to drive back to town, where she lived, leading us just about all the way back to the market.

Taking off to get dinner, Itay drove, with Orit beside him. They had gotten maybe half a mile when Ramona screeched to a halt in front of them, right in the middle of the (thankfully empty) road, and hopped out and scurried back to them, indicating that Itay should roll down his window. The only likely explanation was that she had just received a tornado warning up ahead, or perhaps had just noticed that our friends had unwittingly impaled some local fauna on their grill.

“We’re now entering Jeffersonville,” she said, slightly out of breath. She paused as it if this should mean something to them.

“The Jeffersonville,” she said, pronouncing it “Theee.” Itay squinted at her slightly and nodded his head, as if to say yes, yes, it was all coming back to him now.

“Some people call it the new Hamptons?” she said, lifting her voice at the end as if to prompt their memory, in much the same way one might name their Midwestern alma mater, pause, and then follow it with “Some people call it the Harvard of the Midwest?”

“Ah yes,” Itay was now nodding to his wife, sitting next to him. “Yes, we know the Hamptons.” Orit met his eyes, and then leaned forward to peer out at Ramona, and joined in the nodding.

“Yes, the Hamptons,” Orit added helpfully. “They are very nice, the Hamptons,” she said, encouraging, then leaned back, satisfied that she had contributed all she could to the conversation, and left Itay to stare into the abyss that was Ramona’s wild-eyed grin.

“Ok then!” Ramona said after several painful seconds, clearly disappointed that the four of them hadn’t busted out of the car to rub their faces in the sweet, sweet soil of the new Hamptons. “I’ll just take you to the t-junction, then I’ll point the way to town, which is only about thirty seconds past that. You head that way – to the left – because I’m going the other way. So don’t follow me!” she laughed even though it wasn’t really a joke, unless it was some kind of Jeffersonville situational humor.

Ramona got back in her van and led them the rest of the way to the t-junction. At the stop sign, her hand flew out the window as if it was making a desperate lunge for freedom, and her finger wagged off to the left. The side of her head followed her arm out and she yelled something inaudible, and her van sped off the right. Our friends turned left and drove for about fifteen minutes through the woods, until Itay convinced the rest of the group that Ramona was in fact utterly insane and they really needed to go back, so they drove back, past the t-junction, where they found the town and the store about fifty yards past the junction, where we should have turned right.

It was impossible that Ramona would have gotten this kind of direction wrong, as she had lived there her whole life, and Gianna speculated that they may have been heading for some kind of enormous bear trap where they’d join the skeletons of previous guests at the farm.

While the shopping trip was an eventual success, dinner proved more difficult when the gas from the stove, an ancient piece of equipment, suddenly gave out. I immediately called the owner, who was back in NYC, and who at first insisted that this couldn’t have happened. Was I sure the gas was out?

Ryan and Itay were standing next to me. I turned to ask them if we were sure the gas was out, only to see them huddled around the burner, turned on to full blast, with Ryan breathing in deeply through his nose and Itay passing a lit match across the entire surface of the burner.

“Yes, I’m sure,” I told her. I also started hoping that it really was off, lest it come roaring back on and Ryan’s disembodied head end up somewhere several miles south.

The owner informed me that she would have somebody call me back to help. And true to her word, I soon got a call from a man named Richard, who, with great authority, instructed me to try such things as “turning it on” and “try holding a match to it” as if I hadn’t yet understood the connection between gas and flame, and that up to this point I had been trying to turn on the oven by clicking my heels together or eating magic crackers.

In the meantime, Itay had come in from outside to report that the propane tank was empty; he had been able to move it easily. This made sense. I passed this along to Richard, who responded with both distain and incredulity, as one who was now positive he was talking to an imbecile.

“Of course he could move the tank,” he practically shouted. “It’s filled with propane! It’s gas! You know, weightless? You can never tell if it’s full or empty!”

“That doesn’t sound right to me, Richard.”

“It’s gas! How can gas weigh anything? Trust me, that tank is full, I know it. Ok, I’m guessing something is clogging the pipe, like a leaf or an animal.”

“An animal?”

“I can’t really help you, I’m afraid.” He didn’t sound very afraid, though. He sounded like a retard.

We hung up, and I relayed to Ryan and Itay what he had said about the gas being weightless.

“Weightless?” Ryan stopped lighting matches. “How can it be weightless? It’s still matter, for God’s sake – it can’t be weightless. It’s compressed gas. I had to move these things for my old job, you need two people.”

Ryan seemed pretty sure of himself. Many minutes later he was still shaking his head and examining the inside of the oven, and when he came out again I realized he was still talking.

“So propane just defeats all laws of physics? It weighs the same whether it’s there or not?” He turned to Itay. “I gotta get into the propane business. I’ll fill tanks to infinity. Drive shipping costs down to zero.”

“You can sell it to Richard,” Itay offered.

“Yeah, I’ll sell infinity propane to Richard. Tell him he can resell it, we’ll split the profits.”

Luckily JC had made a roaring fire in the dining room fireplace, and soon Itay was cooking a rather sophisticated pasta dish with the heavy iron skillet resting on a flaming log, straining to keep it level, calling out the ingredients he needed while the team scrambled to get them to him. JC came out of the kitchen bearing spices, and held one of them up.

“This one says ‘oregano’ with quotes around it. Should we just dump it in the sauce? Think she’d be cool with that?”

We woke up to a beautiful sunny day the next morning. It was a wonderful thing to have such a group of friends for many reasons, of course, but this weekend it meant that the Grennan family was kept constantly entertained. Liz and I were reading on the couch while Orit was playing with Finn, trying to get him to walk. Through the French doors leading out onto the wrap around porch, we watched JC and his wife Liz Rich keeping the two enormous retrievers entertained by playing fetch. (Gizmo was upstairs, likely shivering in the chilly 80 degree heat. I can’t imagine her not shivering unless you keep her in a sauna with one of those emergency blankets they used for crap fishermen after they’re pulled out of the North Atlantic.) An hour later, I noticed Gianna outside with Finn, sitting by the pond, Finn as happy as could be. I also noticed Liz Rich standing staring into the pond. My Lizzie and I went outside to see what was going on.

“Sorry dude, we lost two kongs and the wiffle ball,” JC called to us. Apparently while playing fetch, a stone-cold obsession for her, Emma would periodically leap into the pond to cool off, like a marathon runner snatching cups of water without slowing down. Unfortunately, sometimes she let go of whatever she had been holding.

“In her defense, she is actually looking for them…” JC continued. I noticed Emma was indeed scratching around in the water. Liz Rich was standing over her, hands on her hips. Emma tried to come out to play more fetch, but Liz pointed a finger at her. “No. You find those toys,” she scolded, and Emma continued to scratch around.

My Liz turned to me. “Probably not such a bad thing we lost the kongs, right? Emma could probably stand to play a little less fetch?”

“She’ll just find something else,” I pointed out. “Besides, searching the pond keeps her from playing fetch for a little while. That’s gotta be a good thing?”

Liz looked back to the pond where Emma continued to flail around, apparently hoping the kong might suddenly spring up and land on dry land. “Yeah, good point…. Good dog, Emma! Keep looking! Find the kong!” she called, then turned back to me. “We should get a pond.”

All the playing by JC and his Liz had convinced the dogs that they had a new best friend in JC. While Nya had chased Itay and Orit’s car as they drove off, maybe 200 yards down the road, Emma would gladly follow anybody home who spent an hour throwing something to her. When JC and Liz finally came inside, the dogs waited outside the French doors for them. A while later, JC went out the front door to make a phone call, and I watched the dogs run past the French doors, around the wrap around porch, and drop the salvaged wiffle ball in front of JC.

“Oh, come on! Hang on, Dad – lemme just – oh man, Emma!” Because Emma, believing JC was just being a diva, had picked up the chewed up pond-watery ball and dropped it in his lap. She had designated JC as Ball Thrower for the weekend, and once you are tagged with that distinction the only way out of it is for Emma to be physically present as they lower your coffin into the earth.

That evening we had a superb dinner prepared by the two Liz’s – the propane tank had finally been changed – seated around the long dining room table next to the open fire. Finn was fast asleep upstairs, as were the dogs, all of whom had had a day of non-stop action and entertainment. Then, with beers in hands and more empty bottles than I’d seen in a long time, we ended the night with an extended version of charades.

Even when I knew the answer I would purposefully not say it in hopes that Liz Rich would guess it first, because there was no more entertaining charades player in all of the new Hamptons than Liz Rich. Her Kenny Rogers imitation defies the written word, but it was her portrayal of an unnamed TV show that really captured our imagination. She disappeared for a moment behind a door, and she busted out into what I can only describe as a kind of cross between a flapper from the musical Chicago and Steamboat Willy. (The answer turned out to be “CSI New York.” She would later tell us that she was trying to faithfully represent the kind of “If I can make it there I can make it anywhere” enthusiasm of the big city, combined with walking to the subway.)

We would leave the next day, a rainy morning when Liz and I sat on the porch with Finn, sipping coffee and greeting the others as they came down, one by one. We started a fire and gorged ourselves on the ridiculously delicious Ryan-and-Gianna-made huevos rancheros for eight, followed by s’mores, because what the hell, right? and gathered on the porch for one final photo, just as Emma, so recently dried and clean, made a break for the pond. (This was happening out of my line of sight, and learned of it only because I heard JC yelling “Emma! Emma! No! No no no! [huge splash] …oh, you asshole!!”)

We left the way we had come in, back to New York, with two smellier dogs and sleeping band of passengers, all except for Finn, who was leaning forward and keeping me awake by singing and humming as I drove steadily but safely through the rain, several lengths away from all the other cars, protecting, as best I could, our little ark.