Jiggety-Jog

As in, "Home again, home again".

What a long, strange trip it was. You know about the first leg - down to Virginny, and then onward. The "onward" portion is what I shall herewith relate.

Our second nine-hour driving day was a long one. I mean, it was exactly as long as the other one, but it felt longer. We were pretty darn punchy by the time we actually rolled into Alabama. The geography was very interesting to observe, by the way - there is a clear geologic distinction between "middle-south", Virginia, and "deep south", or Georgia-Alabama. I can't totally put my finger on it, but things felt very different as we rolled out of the Virginia mountains and into the Georgia mountains.

The cities took on a very different, more-industrial tinge. And the highway that cuts across the far north-west corner of Georgia, basically serving only people who want to get from Virginia to Alabama, is downright post-apocalyptic. Grass that's been allowed to get two and three feet high in all the medians and on the shoulders, oddly purplish-grayish pavement, which, while not terribly bad to drive on, just plain seems unfriendly. And blown tire parts everywhere. That's another line you cross going south: The "nobody-picks-up-the-blowouts" line. Could be that they don't pick them up, could be that they have a hundred times more of them and the boys from the highway department just can't keep up. Either way. You expect every 18-wheeler to be sporting barbed wire and turrets manned by men in shoulderpads, firing crossbows.

Had me some goobers in Georgia. Boiled, salted peanuts in the shell, sold out of a crock pot in a gas station where I damn near bought me a twelve-dollar cowboy hat. I thought the goobers were kind of good, though Janneke thought they looked like cigarette butts floating in a piss-soaked toilet. It is a testament to my manhood that I kept right on eating after that observation.

Before I get to the family business that took place (there was much, and it was grand), I'll give you some general observations about my first trip to the Deep South. Alabama: It is hotter, and humider, but very strangely, it suffers from far fewer mosquitoes. The geography of northern Alabama is very mountainous - I say "very" because I expected it to be flat. Which shows my level of ignorance. Birmingham: Every building there, except the plain on which the city center sits, and in the flattish "village" centers that surround the heart of the city, is very, very hilly. So hilly that almost no one seemed to have a proper yard. They've kept their houses from washing away by leaving practically all the trees standing - it seemed we never saw a house that wasn't deeply shaded and protected by gorgeous stands of lush, full trees. It feels like a jungle sometimes, except that the roads are gorgeously maintained - honestly, I don't think I saw a pothole in all of Birmingham (not that I saw all of it) - my sister-and-brother-in-law do quite well, so it was a better part of Birmingham that I mostly got to see, but even so, no matter where we went, things seemed to be well-taken-care-of.

"Why did this surprise you?", my deep-south friends might well ask me with indignation. That is, they might, if I had any deep-south friends. Well, I'll tell you why: It's by far the poorest region of the US. It regularly outdoes the rest of the country in obesity, ignorance, racism, and hyper-religiosity. (I hereby declare. Though I'm sure I could back those assertions up with some numbers, if I had the inclination.) I expected that to color the whole place to some extent, and in Birmingham, it absolutely did not. You couldn't tell you were anywhere other than a prosperous, tastefully-laid-out upper-class neighborhood or suburban center. Where people talked in ridiculous accents.

(OK, I said that for comic effect. I absolutely do not consider their accents to be ridiculous. They are just as valid and historically justified as any accent, be it the flatness of the midwest, the broadness of the upper east coast, or the drabness and reservation of an English toff.)

(But they do sound funny.)

I also noticed some things with regard to race. We went at one point to a baseball game (the Birmingham Barons, the same minor-league team where Michael Jordan stank it up), and I had a good amount of crowd-watching. There were pee-lenty of African-Americans around - probably close to half the attendees. And I never saw one interracial couple. Not once. In Berkshire County, I truly think it would not be possible to walk through the mall, or go to a high school sporting event, or go to one of the miserable county fairs they have here for random reasons in the summer, without seeing one. None there at all.

Not that they don't interact - my nieces and nephews there appear to have a host of black friends from school. But it was peculiar, this race thing, at least in the eyes of a Northerner, in a lot of other ways - for example, in the Piggly Wiggly, I noticed that apart from the manager, absolutely all the checkers and bag boys and shelf-stockers were black. On my first trip - and, you know, it wasn't even true then. There was one white woman working there on my first trip. So, probably 13 out of 14 employees were black. On subsequent trips, I noticed a few more white employees. But easily 85% were black. Interesting - go to a situation where there will be big groups of people earning little money in Alabama, and the vast majority of them will be black. Go to places where you'll see big groups of wealthier people, and most of them will be white.

"Why should this surprise you? That's true in a larger sense in the rest of the US as well." I don't know - Maybe it shouldn't surprise me. Maybe. But it was different there, I think. Could be that it wasn't really - maybe I'm projecting. But I don't think so. In Berkshire County, for example, you get waited on in the fast-food restaurants by people of any color. Granted, there are far fewer blacks in Berkshire County, but that almost makes the observation more interesting. The argument would go that we have fewer blacks in our low-paying jobs in western Massachusetts, not because blacks are more prosperous here, but because there are fewer blacks. Thus implying, I suppose, that wherever you find lots of black people, they will be doing low-paying jobs, and ergo, it's logical that the checkout staff in Piggly-Wiggly in Alabama should be black? That doesn't square with me either. I mean, it may mathematically be true, but I still find it objectionable that it be so. And so maybe the truth is objectionable...? Perhaps it's just the numbers that struck me. No more prosperous in the South than here, but far more of them. Which made it that much more evident to me that the economic state of African-Americans in this country is by and large very bad.

Surprising? No. But what it points to is the way in which it is possible for me, given where I live, to sail through my day without being consciously aware of that. It isn't something I'm reminded of at every turn. Maybe I'd be better off, in terms of my awareness of the state of my nation, if I were more aware of it. And maybe as a nation we'd be better off if everybody had the sort of tiny, daily "Katrina" moments that would bring this into sharper focus. By that I mean the shock - Shock! - that so many of us, including me, felt when we saw the images of the Katrina destruction and saw that 97% of the victims were black. And we said to ourselves, "What the hey?" Unlike most Republicans, I don't feel that seeing this fact is racism. To paraphrase Dennis Miller, "Pointing out that the victims were almost all black is not being racist. It's being minimally observant." And there's a lot of useful information we can glean from that. "Hey," we should say. "How come, when we evacuate, we leave all the black people behind?" Shouldn't that merit some conversation, at least? I mean, if they had all been wearing cowboy hats, I would have expected someone to say, "Hey, let's try to sort out this cowboy-hat-equals-left-behind phenomenon."

If, every day, dopes like me were forced to observe, "Goodness, look at that. Just about all the lowest-paying jobs are taken up by black people. What's the deal there?", maybe we'd be voting differently.

Anyway...Lots to think about.

So much for Alabama. The family: Octavio and Dominique were as generous as hosts can possibly be. We had the downstairs...um...south...west...?...corner of the house to ourselves. We could close off two doors and have a hallway with our bedrooms and the kids' room, as well as our bathroom, in isolation from the rest of the bunch, or could open it up and let the sunshine in. We had our own door to the back yard, where the swimming pool beckoned.

And Q and T answered the call. Daily. Several times, for hours at a time. T, by the way, learned to swim on this trip! She had been using a life vest for a while now, but at one point, she asked if we could try without it, and then she was managing to stay afloat for a few seconds, then she was lunging from the side of the pool out toward us, and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she was dogpaddling her way across the whole pool. It happened really, really fast, and the fact that every time she did it she got thunderous ovations from her gorgeous, beaming, cool-as-can-be teenage cousins can't have hurt in the motivation department.

Gorgeous and cool they all were, too. Flavia in particular, as far as T was concerned - the two of them just click. Flavia wasn't just resigning herself to be the babysitter, either - she genuinely enjoys T's company, and the two of them were impossible to separate. Not bad, considering the nine-year age gap. We kept on trying to rescue Flavia from having to spend too much time with her, but every time we did she'd look at us like we were crazy.

Q, meanwhile, played a lot of video games with the Alabama boys, Stefan and Adrian, and did a lot of pool time with them as well. But I think the biggest revelation of the trip was Oscar and Oliver, the Belgian cousins. (though they will insist that they're Dutch, as that's what their passports say. But they're from Brussels.) We'd only met them once before, also at Octavio and Dominique's, but it was in Florida that time, and it was in 2004. Now Oscar is 21 and Oliver is 19, and they've matured into some fantastically sound, bright young men - with a lot of "chispa", as they say in Spanish. Spark -- Creativity, a knack for finding the fun in any given situation. I've never seen people who can think of so many things to do with pool toys. There was this basketball hoop that floats on the water - basically an inner tube about 20 inches in diameter, and another one about 14 inches in diameter, separated and held together by three inflated rods, making for an overall shape between a cone and a pyramid. It floats in the water and you throw things into it. But Oscar and Oliver put it on as if it were a vest, their heads poking out the little inner tube, the larger one around their waists, and dove off the diving board with it on. Hilarity ensues - they don't quite get their feet completely into the water before the buoyancy of the thing shoots them back up and they land, sputtering, on their stomachs. And then Oliver decides to see if he can swim to the bottom while wearing it, starting from a standstill on the surface. He drives and pulls and pushes himself downward, but his legs, trying desperately to get some purchase, kicking in perfect swimming motions, simply wave and flail in the air above the surface. I have not laughed that hard in years.

Oscar and I took a couple of jogs on a lovely walking path in Birmingham while we were there. It's a mile or two from the house, and we would drive there in the morning. Just about every single foot of it is shaded (due to Birmingham's aforementioned love of trees), and it's probably two miles long. So we would go the length of it and back. He's 21, remember, and quite the field hockey sensation back home, as his his brother. So even out of shape, as he claimed to be, he kept me going a little faster than I probably would have otherwise. Besides which, we talked the whole time every day we went, about careers and family and the legal system in both countries. So I didn't get quite the distance I usually would, but it was easily as much of a workout.

Their Mum, Megs, was there as well, and it was great to get to know her better. We went to Six Flags at one point, near Atlanta, and I drove Dominique's suburban back from there with Megs in the front seat, and we had a great two-hour conversation. About her boys, about child rearing, about everything. (By the way, the exploded-tires-littering-the-highway phenomenon is much more pronounced in Georgia than in Alabama. At one point Megs asked if we had crossed into Alabama yet. I pointed to three or four tire husks and said "Not yet." Tongue-in-cheek, of course - but I turned out to be right.) It was the best chance I've gotten to know her since we met, and I feel much more connected now. It's hard when your extended family is spread across a couple of continents. Of all the sisters, she's the one I've known the least well, and it was a lot of fun to catch glimpses of each of the other three in her mannerisms, turns of phrase, sense of humor. Amazing how well you get to know the in-law side of your family after eleven years of marriage.

I also got to know Octavio a lot better. Driving around Birmingham with him to pick up Stefan from a drum lesson (Stefan has added the drums to his list of instruments he plays - it's now guitar, piano, drums; Adrian, meanwhile, played saxophone with Stefan's band at a party while we were there), Octavio showed me "the view", which refers to a short stretch of street atop Birmingham's probably-highest ridgeline, a gated-at-night-time community that has an unbelievable view of the city center and the hills beyond. There's a lot to be learned about Birmingham - its civil rights history, its industrial history (it still has active coal mines), all kinds of things. They really have found a great niche for themselves there. Octavio gave me some of the inside scoop on what it's like to essentially have two jobs - one teaching and researching at the university, and the other performing surgeries at the hospital. He was called out two or three nights in a row for emergency surgeries while we were there - transplants and such. When we got home Janneke and I started wondering if you could put a number on the lives he's saved over his career. It's got to be in the thousands.

I, meanwhile, had my status as the family "animal guy" cemented more fully. A while ago, a bird crashed into their window and lay there, stunned; they Skyped us to show us the bird and ask what I thought, having just gone through the incident with the falcon that crashed into our window. I turn out to have the reputation of being the guy who knows the most about animals in the family. (The bird eventually just recovered and flew away.) So when someone called out in dismay, "There's a dead animal in the pool filter!", someone else responded, quick as a flash: "Get Uncle Joe!" So I would come running and examine the creature.

Every time it happened (three times - once, with two bobbing there at the same time), the animal in question was a shrew. (I misidentified it as a vole at first. I had the labels mixed up in my head. I knew what it was - insectivorous, voracious, tiny ears and eyes, related to moles - but said the wrong name at first. Voles are to mice what hares are to rabbits.) The pool filter slurps out floating, dead insects and spins them lazily in a basket just outside the edge of the pool; the chamber this occurs in is covered over by a piece of stone with a hole drilled in the center to facilitate the lifting-out of the stone, followed by the basket, which can then be emptied. What appears to happen is that at night, the shrews stray near, and the scent of many accumulated, large, fleshy insects wafts out of the finger-hole. They love holes, particularly holes filled with insects, so they crawl in - and plop!, into the water and the basket, where they eventually drown.

So Octavio gets called out in the middle of the night to harvest and transplant hearts. I get called from my seat at the patio table to walk into the woods and shake dead shrews out of a plastic basket.

We both do what we can to make the world a better place.

Here's some evidence:



WIndow of the information center at the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Which appears to have fallen on hard times - 80% of the complex is unoccupied.



Inside, though, lots of fun to be had.



By kids of all ages.



Kids at the first rest stop we found on the Blue Ridge Parkway. You absolutely must go see this place.



Coppa...cubbuh...cummumma....



Friendlier denizens of the Virginia woods, also on the way up Humpback Mountain.



Q at the summit of Humpback Mountain.



Kids in the rocks. They love rocks.



There are a lot of them up there.



Birmingham: Guess who thought of lifting Q up to do this? ...Oscar and Oliver.



Here's T and Oscar. Not sure why, but we weren't so into picture-taking on this trip. "Enjoying" more than "documenting" the moments, I guess. Though I understand we got some great pics from Dominique.



Who at one point was attacked by a koala.



T and Megs, talking South African politics.



Dominique and the kids at Six Flags, about to ride the log flume.



T about to eat the log from the log flume at Six Flags.



Uncaptionable.