The Expats: Visiting the World of Large "T" Thrills

The Expats, the newest book we're discussing at the From Left to Write bookclub is a thriller from first time novelist Chris Pavone.

Protagonist Kate Moore has left the dangerous CIA job she hid from her husband Dexter to move with him and their two young boys to Luxembourg. After years of international travel and thrilling casework, Kate finds adjusting to a new culture less work than staying engaged with being a full-time mom. A sudden friendship with another expat American couple brings up the threat of revealed secrets from Kate's past, and worse.

Reading Pavone's book offered the pleasures of working a literary Rubik's cube. The story jumps back and forth in time, each switch offering a new revelation from what the reader knew before. Suspicions and sympathies are confirmed, swapped, rearranged. I loved the journeys through the European countryside and capitals and through the workings of Kate's analytic mind.

Our bookclub usually discusses how the literature touches our own lives but Kate reminded me more of a jet-setting mom like Angelina Jolie than myself. The closest connection came when I was reading about Kate's family ski trip to the mountains above Geneva, Switzerland while Randy and the girls and I were enjoying New Year's in the Colorado Rockies. But Kate's slopes were black diamonds, while mine were bunnies and greens. Her fears were of treachery, assassination, betrayal; mine were of landing on my bum.

In many ways, it was the perfect book to tuck into my carry-on bag. Next to an adrenaline-filled week of performing on stage in our grade school Variety Show in March, Colorado will be, I am nearly certain, one of the biggest adventures of my year. And that is fine for me right now. Kate Moore's story added a little extra vicarious zing to an experience I wanted to leave with intact knees and memories of thrills with small "t"s.

We saw my brother in Fort Collins before we headed for the slopes. Mia is only a few months older than he was when we lost our parents. "Right now your job is staying alive," he told me, and I nodded with complete understanding. For the two of us, that is normal conversation.

If Kate's story of international manhunts and cyber-crime touched me at this point in my life, it was through a realization about safety.

It's not news that stories like Kate's reinvention of her life appeal to women like me for whom routine, stability and safety are precious gifts we want to sustain. Nor is it any surprise that fantasy is our means to temporarily sink into an alternate reality. We giggle through Magic Mike and then go home to take a shower and wash off the temporary sweaty indulgence. We watch Downton Abby and commiserate with the British noblewoman or man of our choice. Girls makes us feel again young, hungry, searching and clueless in our twenties before we feel again old enough to be glad we will never go through such hell again.

Kate brings risk and intrigue back into her world by the end of the book; it's lovely to watch another woman make that choice.

Read more posts about The Expats at From Left to Write. I received a copy of the book with no obligation.

A New Year

"It's dark. Who are you?" was the almost eight year old's contribution to our New Year's Eve dinner game of Jokes and Riddles We Make Up.

"That's scary," said her big sister.

"That's deep," said her mom, who approved the question on this most reflective of long nights.

My own products of that reflection (Life is various and wonderful, constantly new and ever-ending; 2012 was both the year I turned 47 and apparently the last time I will be able to fool the mirror into believing otherwise; no matter -- when I don't like what I see, I smile and it improves the view; this clean and quiet time in deep winter may be the perfect season for the year to begin again as well as to end....) will need to wait for another post to be compiled, (or not, since this living business takes up so much of my time these days.)

But I really do want to tell you another of the homemade jokes from the last night of the year that we spent together at the fancy mountaintop restaurant where I was working it as Camp Counselor Mom ("Let's play Jeopardy! First category, Beetlejuice!") to stave off the electronics option that was keeping our neighboring table quietly engrossed in their laps.

This joke takes some effort; say it outloud for the full effect.

Here's the original, a family favorite from dear friend Brent:

Two monkeys are sitting in a tree and one asks the other, (jut your lower jaw forward as far as it will go) "Do you ever get water in your mouth when it rains?"

(Now pull your jaw back and give yourself an enormous overbite to be the other monkey) "No, why do you ask?"

Mia's variation: Two bats are hanging from a tree and one asks, (do the underbite again) "Do you ever get water in your mouth when it rains?

(Pull the overbite and say) "Oh yeah, all the time! And you?

Third variation:

Two camels are walking through the desert and one asks... Etc.

The second one says, "We live in the desert. It never rains here."

Here's hoping you have some silliness and shared laughter of your own this 2013.

Happy Holidays!

Sandy Hook

Last Saturday I took the girls to the Evanston Ecology Center to make nature Christmas tree ornaments, one of the ecology center's No Child Left Inside programs. Nora's initial reluctance was blown away by the first sight to greet us as we came in the room: a tortoise, the size of an inverted punch bowl, lumbering around the room. 

 "Look out! He's chasing us down!" I said and feigned a cartoony slow-motion escape. The girls petted a huge black rabbit and comparison-shopped a degu's double decker cage for his cousin, our Little Prince.

Our program guide Tim took us on a walk through the Ladd Arboretum where we collected leaves and pine needles, dried flowers and pine cones. Back in the warm program room, glitter flew, paint splashed and melted wax dripped until we had an egg carton full of wet and wonderful ornaments for the tree (and our winter coats were dappled with yellow acrylic.)

On Sunday, Nora had a birthday party, Mia played hide-n-seek with our neighbor girl and both practiced their instruments and sporadically helped Mommy with my afternoon of cookie baking. Peppermint bark, Martha Stewart's pistachio-almond-apricot-dried cherry confections and sugar cookies that we decorated later in the week, once I figure out how to make royal icing, once I figured out that melted white chocolate makes an awesome icing.

"The Year Without a Santa Claus" wrapped up our weekend, but somewhere between the innocence and the sweetness, beyond the drifts of glitter and sparkling sugar, there had to be The Talk. I picked Saturday night dinner at the new little steak house in town. We were comfy in our seats under a giant wreath, we were together, we were eating bread and butter and I asked the girls if they had heard anything at school on Friday.

"No."

Telling the girls an abbreviated version of what happened in Connecticut felt wrong enough - words that no parent should need to say. Yet rushing to tell them next that what happened was very far away from us seemed even more wrong: an imperfect way to reassure them of their safety. I would rather nurture their belief that we are one world and the children of another town, another state, another country are our neighbors and our friends. But this moment I was flying by the seat of my pants and on advice I'd found online.

"Was he drunk?" asked little Nora.

"How did he...?" asked Mia and I had to say, "He had a gun." My voice wavered. I rushed to add, "But the good thing is that now we are going to change laws so that people can't get guns to hurt kids."

Nora was ready to move back to the Dav Pilkey books she had brought along, but Mia sat limp in her chair, lost. I moved to her side and we hugged. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, honey, but we knew people would be talking about this at school and we wanted you to know you are safe and loved."

A horrible conversation. And I had thought Columbine was the worst we would ever see.

Something happened to me two Fridays ago. I was on the phone, in the middle of a sentence when I saw the headline "28 dead" and I stopped short, my throat closed, sick, unable to speak to the oblivious woman on the other end.

Every morning since then, I wake up to the awful reality again.

My sister and brother did not die from an act of violence, only a sad, sad error, but the reports of twenty tiny coffins brings back the acute agony of the year they died and the lingering pain of every year after. They were gone and realizing this fact again every morning was a plunge down a slope of jagged rocks. The world was wrong. The world was gone wrong. The pain was many and various. The regrets of not caring for them enough in the short time we had together. The horror of imaging their last moments. The soul-sucking loneliness of their absence. The terrible ache of seeing the future holidays and normal days and special days and every day without them. My heart goes out to the Sandy Hook families. I have tasted a sip of their grief.

There was a horrific perfection to the numbers (20 children, 1st grade, 6 and 7 years old, 11 days before Christmas) and the place (the sacred ground of an elementary school) that crystallized and made absolute the gun-control necessity in my belief system. The numbers and their names and faces cut through the haze of defense mechanism ambiguity with which I had viewed previous shootings. These were the ugly lies I told myself before December 14: They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That child should not have been in a midnight movie. A grad of Columbine once told me "something was wrong with that school," that it was a place full of bullies. Lies I told myself to make the deaths tolerable. I am sorry, I am so so sorry for my blindness, for my lack of compassion and connection.

Yesterday we took the girls to see War Horse on stage at the Cadillac Theater and what I had half expected did happen: Mia was enthralled with the show while Nora felt better out in the lobby with me during the second act. The surprise I felt was not that the older girl would appreciate the show and the younger would need a break, but rather at my revulsion to a show I had read much about and had been looking forward to for weeks.

I knew the stories of the naively honorable and foolishly brave World War One cavalries decimated by the tanks; I expected the pathos of a vulnerable animal in danger and an unlikely reunion between the boy and his horse. Still, the character of Billy, the cousin of the War Horse's young owner, convulsing in panic and fear before a charge into the machine guns shook me out of engagement with the story. I hated this play. I wanted to leave.

It was a perfect story for this moment in America: innocents destroyed by weapons beyond the control of those who unleashed them upon the world. We are engaged in a cold war all over again, only this time, the opponents are ourselves. Weapons of mass destruction are pointed at our children and our only solution to the threat is disarmament.

Please use this link to donate to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Please write the President and Vice-President to show your support for gun control, and to your Senators and Representatives at the state and federal level to urge them to vote for reasonable and rationale firearms policy. Keep writing them.

Please call your money person if you have one and tell him or her to transfer your savings to socially responsible funds that do not invest in gun manufacturers.

Please refuse to give in to cynicism and hopelessness. Our president, on the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, told us, "Dr. King once said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. It bends towards justice, but here is the thing: it does not bend on its own. It bends because each of us in our own ways put our hand on that arc and we bend it in the direction of justice...."

To Be Jolly!

Tim Gearan's "Winter Wonderland." Enjoy!

'Tis The Season

For some sweet Swedish harmonies and yogurt cup percussion! Enjoy.