Vietnam 33: Reunification Palace

One way I know I am almost at my hotel--home--when I ride in from Tan Son Nhat Airport at midnight happens when I see the Reunification Palace on my right as my taxi goes down Nam Ky Khoi Nghia. Reunification Palace was the home of the President of South Vietnam during the American War.

There is a roof with a helicopter, of course, and in the basement  is a command bunker featuring original maps and an old General Electric (American-made) radio. There's a conference room, a banquet room, a kitchen big enough to feed a crowd.  More than one room of gifts to the various occupants. Time has stood still, as they say, with all its year-appropriate Naugahyde, although the building is still used for, say, meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings.

Before tourists are allowed on the organized tour, they must watch a fifteen minute grainy black and white video on the history of the building.

And the view outside from the fourth floor could be of Paris.

Vietnam 32: A Cemetary

A cemetery next to a major road, next to a field. 

Just as a wedding is held on a day that the soothsayer says is a good day for a wedding, so too are the gravestones arranged as the soothsayer suggests. Symmetry is not the issue.

And why not?

Vitenam 31: Thien Hau Pagoda

Before the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City got exponentially worse, I used to try to visit the Thien Hau Pagoda in Cholon, Chinatown, early in the morning, usually toward the end of the visit. 

Why? Thien Hau is the saint of travelers, and, when the place is not mobbed, it is a pleasant if smoky and atmospheric place, the kind of place that is just modestly exotic enough that it suggests that Thien Hau probably can be helpful.

I mean, a visit is not going to hurt, and in a major city that has doubled in population and probably quadrupled in traffic, Thien Hau with its incense and its yin-yang roof, its relative quiet, is an oasis, a place that is another world in a city that I already think of as another (if familiar in many ways) world.

The first time I visited, I was asked to take a small piece of paper and write a wish on it. I seem to recall that I then hung it on a swirl of incense. On that last day before I was leaving, I wrote one word, in English: RETURN. 

Vietnam 30: Fine Art Museum

The Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum, maybe a fifteen minute walk from Ben Thanh Market, has never had more than six to eight other visitors any time I have been there. The place is a quick visit, and, to be honest, the draw is as much the building as it is the politically-motivated art within it. The first time I went, I walked out thinking that I had seen exactly what I might have expected to see had I thought about it. Representations of an ancient golden age. Of struggle. And more struggle. (The Chinese occupied Vietnam for a thousand years, the Japanese for a few after World War II, the French for a hundred, and the Americans....well, depending on how you count, maybe between ten to twenty years.)

But part of the beauty of Ho Chi Minh City--despite its not being known for its architecture the way parts of Hanoi are, for instance--is its rapidly vanishing urban-renewed architecture. Progress sometimes means more destruction than what some of us would like to see. Why go to Ho Chi Minh City if it looks like everyplace else? Perhaps the locals-in-power do not fully comprehend the beauty of what their city already possesses. (And to the Fine Arts Museum's credit, it was designed with windows and more windows, even if the air is notably hot.)

And to the locals, it makes complete sense that there is a fence and a gate around the museum, even if it can be easily climbed (or so I imagine). Schools, playgrounds, museums, other enterprises: there is also almost always a guard at the gate, and if it is not a museum, you are supposed to be a "member" if you want to get in...for whatever reason.

VN 29: Everything for Sale (Make Your Own Shade)

If you can't transport it, you can't sell it, even when your place on the street or sidewalk is going to have to compete with whatever skyscraper is being built.

And it is important, of you are a woman, that your skin be as white as possible. In any shop there are shelves of skin whiteners. (I believe they are primarily Korean brands, but I could be wrong.) This is not for medical reasons but for vanity: if you are a woman, lighter is better. No sunscreen but a non-la (conical hat), long sleeves and gloves worthy of the opera. Sandals but also socks. 

And yes, the face mask, now helpful because of pollution, but originally to protect from the sun. 

No, no sunscreen, or, as a friend characterized it with some disdain, "chemicals".

And, truth be told, sunscreen does melt off after about fifteen minutes in the tropical sun and heat.

VN 28: Kids

  These three kids happened to be connected to a private mini-hotel on Nguyen Trung Truc Street in Rach Gia, Kien Giang Province. (Go to Ho Chi Minh City and go west to the Bay of Thailand.) During the American War, the Americans had a prison on Phu Quoc Island, now Kien Giang Province's premiere tourist destination, a tropical paradise that not just has modest privately owned mini-hotels like Tropicana Resort but also (of course) Saigontourist (state run) hotels but also, say, these days lots of places like decidedly upscale Phu Quoc Eco Beach Resort. (Let's hope the local pepper farmers and people who in the past, before the tourist boom, worked in the nuoc mam factories still have jobs or traded upward as the tourist infrastructure grew and grew. It is very unlikely that many Phu Quoc locals would be able to so much as set foot in the local expensive  resorts as guests.)

This hotel on the main street of Rach Gia ceased to be after I stayed there. (Remineder: Rach Gia is a city of 200,000 where I was one of 3-4 Westerners: a teacher sponsored by Princeton in Asia; a French woman married to a Vietnamese; and supposedly an Australian woman working in a water quality project) Why did the hotel vanish? Well, the building is still there, but the rumor I heard was that the mini-hotel had been underwritten by American relatives of the locals and somehow because of a dispute, the Americans branch had pulled out. This hotel in Rach Gia was notable because it also offered food.

The children were fortunate because they had family who tended to them--they were not sent out to sell lottery tickets on the street, for instance. Their English was limited to "Hello. What's your name?" And their response was to giggle and run away after I told them my name and asked them theirs.

Another hotel story. I once stayed in a hotel much closer to the beach ("lan bien") that, typical of small family-run hotels, had no restaurant. Initially, I thought the hotel was a good 3-4 very long blocks (sometimes in 100 degree heat)  from any local restaurants (and not every restaurant kept regular hours that I could discern). But it turned out that nearby there was a new place called Saigon Pho which, it turned out, was started by a Vietnamese-American who had returned and then opened one of the first restaurant/catering facilities I knew of in the city.

The Vietnamese-American  found me the first time I walked in and said "an com" ("Eat rice," or, "I'd like to eat.") He knew an American when he saw one, he made sure I got enough to eat during that visit, and he gave me the short version: he had left this country as a boat person right after the war, done well enough in the US, and had decided to return here--where he had started--since he had retired. He wanted to help his country. His spoken English was as good as mine.

When I told someone local about him, someone who had even met him, I got a different story: surely he had failed in the US so he had to return to Vietnam.

I know which story I believe.

VN 27: Laundry

A view from a Ho Chi Minh City hotel onto the neighborhood.

A friend once said that she thought washers and dryers would not be good for clothes compared to washing them by hand, and although I see her point, washing machines and dryers are far more common than they used to be. Even so, polyester (sometimes called "Vietnamese silk") is common, and that makes sense since, like tile and plastic, it is easy to wash and it dries comparatively quickly.

Still, how the clothes hung out to dry in the daily soaking humidity ever completely dry I have never understood, but they do appear to. 

Or you can hang them in front of the air conditioner over night.

If you have an air conditioner.

VN 26: Foot and Fish Massage

I once met an American who regularly did business in Vietnam and claimed to get rid of jet lag from his flight from Seattle by having a shower, a massage and a sauna (in some order) as soon as he arrived.

Showers help. But a sauna? Vietnam is a sauna. Why pay for one that is indoors? Walk outdoor and you are in a sauna. 

A massage might help, but usually I save that for right before I leave, after I have been in cars and on motorbikes that may or may not need new shock absorbers. I once went to a place recommended by the hotel I was staying at: the place offering massages  was next to the hotel, upstairs and at the back of a bar. The masseuse walked on my back and I lived to tell about it, but since then I have chosen to go to the spa at the Ho Chi Minh City Sheraton which--no surprise!--has Western city prices and standards of cleanliness. Appropriately, it is on Dong Khoi, basically Ho Chi Minh City's Fifth Avenue, and as far as I can see, the place offers a range of standard good-for-your health massages, not what some apparently do call "happy massage".

But next to my usual hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, Lan Lan 2, is  Kelly Hotel, a place that I imagine  is much like Lan Lan 2, give or take, with forty or so dollar rooms, including breakfast. But at the door to Kelly Hotel--in essence, downstairs  from reception  and at street level--used to be a Foot and Fish Massage place. 

Did I go? No. First, even the modest foot massage as part of a basic pedicure makes my feet twitch. Second, although I like the idea of little fish nibbling the callouses and dead skin off my feet--I mean, it does seem environmentally sound--I had to wonder how often the water is changed and what diseases (parasites?) the cute little fishies could transmit as they munch away--and what human-to-human diseases might be lurking in the water as well.

Fish are for eating.

Finally: fish are for eating.

VN 25: From Thatch to Skyscraper

Someone explained to me once that there was a time (and there is no doubt still a place) in Vietnam when material wealth was indicated by the material of your house: the movement was from thatch to galvanized tin to concrete. Trees. Pleasantly seedy (sometimes) and dark and cool (if damp) concrete.

Not so much in the cities any more. Urbanization in the form of glass and concrete has arrived.

In the sweltering and blanching noontime heat, here is a representative street in Ho Chi Minh City, a couple stories, a combination of home and shop, with the newish Bitexco Financial Tower in the background. Sixty-eight storeys, three basements, the fourth tallest building in Vietnam, the tallest (for a while) in Ho Chi Minh City. A multi-use building with office space, food court, restaurants, movie theatres, restaurants, night clubs, and the Saigon Skydeck offering 360 degree view of Ho Chi Minh City for a ten dollar fee.

A heliport.

Rather than echo the local French architecture, the inspiration for the Bitexco Tower's shape was Vietnam's national flower, the lotus, but I have yet to understand that inspiration. What part looks like a lotus?

VN 24: Behind Ben Thanh Market

Moving from the market to the neighborhood: more shops, more traffic, French architecture, and life on the sidewalk. Places where people live.

Everything is for sale, and even though it looks like everything is one big rush, really it isn't.

VN 23: Ben Thanh Market, Part 2

The low building to the right and behind the statue in the middle of the traffic circle is Ben Thanh Market--that is, before the renovations that are going on to remove the traffic circle. The building to the far right in the photo is a hospital which I never saw any use of (fortunately), but for many years, it was not unusual to see men urinating in broad daylight against the outside hospital wall. People just walk on by.

Late one night I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City and took a taxi from the airport. By then I knew--pretty much--what the ride to the hotel looked like even in the dark. All was normal, exactly as expected, until the cab driver went around this traffic circle in exactly the wrong direction, and, by that time, I had spent enough time in Vietnam to know that I would get to the hotel safely. (It did help that between midnight and one in the morning there was not much traffic.)

I got there safely.

VN 22: Ben Thanh Market

 

One of the major markets in Ho Chi Minh City is Ben Thanh Market; as the Lonely Planet guidebook once said about it, "If you can't find it there, you don't need it." At one point the French called it Les Halles Centralles, and as of last fall, the statue in front of it had been removed and the road was blocked as part of urban renewal: the new subway is supposed to stop in front of it, and I have also heard the market itself is supposed to be reduced in size but will have a lower, below ground section, not just a street level. At least these days, the place closes around suppertime and a night market opens on the streets on the back and sides.

Over the years prices have gone up. T-shirts (even with bargaining) are no longer a dollar. Counterfeit goods (Rolex watches, Chanel handbags) abound. Raw meat is on what look like lunchroom trays on the ground on the floor if you venture towards the back, and although sometimes hygiene may not always seem to be the top priority, a quick bowl of soup or a Coke or even a bottle of water in one of the inside café stalls is well worth it for the people watching. 

Some vendors are willing to haggle about tourist gifties or chopsticks, soap or flipflops--or even batteries (which did work for a while). And some are not.  I usually try to bargain at least some but finally cave. Why? Because it is freaking hot, and, secondly, the dollar or two we are haggling about very likely means more to the vendor than it does to me.

VN 21: Power LInes

Up until very recently, these were the wires a couple blocks behind Ben Thanh Market and on the way to my usual hotel, Lan Lan 2, in central Ho Chi Minh City. This is a pretty much main and representative intersection.

And then, three years after this photo, the wires were all been moved underground although how the people responsible for doing so figured out what wire was what is beyond me.

As an American friend said, "Sometimes I wonder why the whole place doesn't explode."

VN 20: And Now for a Digression

There are very few almost-solo photos of me in Vietnam. One is of me on the back of a motorbike driven by a Vietnamese friend, and the other is with an American friend who was my upstairs neighbor when I lived at Kien Giang Community College. Both were taken in the Mekong Delta. When I find them, I'll add them and tell their stories.

And then there is this one, which I have only as a computer-printed one, now scanned. This is from 2003: I am wearing my first ao dai,  the Vietnamese national dress, the one my student friend Cindy Xuan took me to buy. She chose the fabric over my protests; I had had in mind something less funky and flashy. Something with far less horizontal movement to it. (But the fabric would have looked good on Cindy Xuan who, she told me when I asked, already had about twenty ao dai.) And then after we bought the fabric in the market, she took me on her motorbike to the tailor so I could be measured. "You must wear big underwear," the tailor told Cindy Xuan to tell me.

I came to think of it as my country-western ao dai. A month or so later, the women in the college bought me fabric for what for what I think of as a much more tasteful gentle peach color ao dai. That is, when I wore than new peach one (no measurements required since they were recorded in a notebook already), I felt a little bit--a little bit--less like a water buffalo compared to the petite and sylphlike Vietnamese women.

My helmet I bought from the local Harley-Davidson dealership before I went to Vietnam,  the dealership as foreign to me in some ways as the tailor in the Mekong Delta. I wore it even though in 2003 there was no law mandating helmets--in fact, only recently had a law passed mandating at least one mirror on the handlebars of motorbikes. These days helmets (and many seem to be more like bike helmets to me) are required by law, but even so, one mother told me that helmets are not good for babies' heads.

My helmet was hot and it made it difficult to hear what the driver was saying. Riding on a motorbike is cool just because and because it generates a breeze--except for around my head inside the helmet.

So in a city of 200,000 in the Mekong Delta, I was the big American regularly enough on the back of a motorbike as I made my way around the city. To the locals, I was told, I looked like I had a rice cooker on my head.

Well, it was hot inside the helmet.

VN 19: Rice Paddies and Power Lines

A little perspective: in 1998, much of Vietnam, aside from the city centers, was this: rice paddies and power lines.

Rural. The boondocks. The back of beyond. "The countryside," as Vietnamese call it.

This photo was taken in 1998 on the road between Hanoi and Halong Bay and nearby Haiphong, a ride which now takes two hours (or less) one way because of improved roads. But in 1998, the ride was closer to four hours one way on bumpy two-lane roads. (Think of mostly-unused country roads in the US.)

At the time, Ford Motor Company had just built a plant on the road to Haiphong, one with metal fence and razor wire around it; these days the fence is hidden in full-grown trees.

These days you can easily travel roundtrip from Hanoi to Halong Bay and Haiphong in a day, and along the way, rice paddies and powerlines--scenes like this one--will be rare. 

Such scenery has been replaced by industrial zones--international manufacturing, many low no-nonsense buildings--that employ many people, no doubt some of whom used to be rice farmers (or who are their children). Industrial zone, industrial zone, industrial zone.

As far as the eye can see. Factories. 

When I asked a Vietnamese friend, he said I was right. Rice paddies had been replaced by industrial zones. No question.  "But I promise you that if you go far enough behind those industrial zones, those factories, eventually you will see what you saw in 1998. Those people are still there. The paddies are still there."

VN 18: Win Hotel: a Room

And here is one of the more expensive and biggest rooms at Win Hotel.

It looked out (well, almost) on the Funky Monkey bar.

Cost? At the most, maybe $40 a night (and likely less) for AC, bathroom with hot water, breakfast, and a balcony over  the street.

VN 17: Win Hotel, Detail

Detail from a place called Win Hotel, Hanoi, now permanently closed, and if Google and TripAdvisor are to be trusted, replaced by Hang Ngoc Dynastie Hotel, another three-star hotel, one now with an elevator, spa area and fitness room. It is now listed as #223 of 619 hotels in Hanoi. Not a bad rating.

Win Hotel was a family-owned mini-hotel with many floors, no elevator, sketchy AC, and a very friendly front desk staff. The windowless and inexpensive rooms were...well, stuffy and damp but clean. Safe as far as I know.

Win Hotel, possibly one of the first generation of privately-owned mini-hotels was recommended by the Lonely Planet guidebook, and it deserved to be.

Maison Centrale, Part 4

And one more bilingual commentary.

VN 15: Maison Centrale, Part 3

Sample bilingual commentary. 

VN 14: Maison Centrale Part 2

For the most part, the contents of Vietnamese museum and historical sights are low-tech, and in Hoa Lo Prison this is particularly effective. There is a large model of the prison at the time when it got the most use, and the French occupation is marked by (among other things) a guillotine.

John McCain's cell--fairly recently repainted, I think--is small and dank and dark, truly a hellish place. Towards the end of the do-it-yourself walk through the prison, a glass case encloses what purports to be the flight suit he was wearing when he was rescued from Truc Bac Lake and imprisoned.

VN 14: Maison Centrale, Part 1

Maison Centrale is known in the US as the Hanoi Hilton and is what the Vietnamese used to call Hoa Lo, "fiery oven". Much of it has been demolished, but just enough has been kept as a tourist attraction--as an important historical relic.

Hoa Lo has an established place on the tourist train in Hanoi, and it tends to be the place most Americans ask about when they hear I have been to Vietnam, the way Vietnamese are asked if they saw the Statue of Liberty after they visit the US.

Hoa Lo was built by the French to jail Vietnamese, something which many Americans do not realize. 

In addition to the experience of touring the prison  in the sweltering heat--a truly humbling experience--I can also recommend a view from the eighth-floor-or-so air conditioned Australian sports bar in the glass and chrome skyscraper across the street.

VN 12: Work Hard, Play Hard

This almost-divey bar is no more; the last time I was in Hanoi, I made a point of walking down "coffee street' in the Old Quarter, Hang Hanh, and it had been replaced by a hotel.

More specifically, according to Google, it has been replaced by one Lakeside Palace Hotel, a boutique hotel with "warm cherrywood furniture...silks and natural linen...Italian marble bathroom". The hotel  has seven storeys and a restaurant at the top. By Hanoi standards, at least on the website it doesn't look really, seriously, competitively  upscale--yet--but it is certainly not a earthy as the Funky Monkey was.

Funky Monkey was a dark and cool and well-located place to get a Tiger Beer. Whether or not karaoke ever happened there, I don't know, but my guess is yes, it certainly did.

VN 11: Copyright Violation: Everything Else

Let me put it this way: when I asked, a friend gave me directions to a neighborhood (an intersection, actually) where I could buy software to bring home to friends. When I found a shop and asked for not just one copy but for two, I got a quizzical look. But the woman did sell the two copies to me. Later I learned why: once you slide the software disk into the laptop, the first thing you needed to do was click "Crack". And then you could not only use what you bought but also make as many copies of it as you wanted.

These days DVDs of Slumdog Millionaire or Platoon or Mamma Mia! or pretty much any current movie are for sale in Ho Chi Minh City for a dollar each. The DVD may play well, may play for five minutes, or may not play at all. 

A book I was given for my Vietnamese class was a faint copy of a copy of a copy, nearly 300 pages  all stapled together. Some pages were crooked, some pages had darker print than others, and some pages were missing. Nobody seemed to worry.

With Vietnam's entry into the World Trade Organization, examples of copyright violation are lessening, but, tellingly, when Vietnamese visitors came to the US, they often chose to buy vitamins and upscale cosmetics to take home, in part to be sure of the quality and the brand.

VN 10: Copyright Violation: Art

On the bright side, one way of learning how to paint is to copy The Masters. And so, in select locations, at least in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, you see art shops open to the street where a painter paints, say, a copy of the Mona Lisa. Or copies a painting from a book.

Open-air, open-city painting.

I have heard that, as in the US, art majors are not always immediately successful or employable. And so I am told this is one place where art majors may end up after university.

I once had a professor in a graduate writing class who observed that the two ways of learning anything are imitation and practice. 

Maybe so.

VN 9: Water Puppets Walking on Water

Among the most charming of the routine tourist sights in Hanoi is the Thang Long Water Puppets.

Basically the Thang Long Water Puppets have taken a Red River (northern Vietnam) cultural activity--people living on the rivers entertaining each other with puppets controlled by dowels under the water rather than with strings--and made it a colorful and splashy indoor event. The puppets act out folktales and other stories: farmers harvesting crops, a student returning home, and a dragon dance, among others. It's a colorful and splashy event. Very plinky-plunky. The puppeteers are not visible until the end when they come out from behind the curtain that hides them, but the musicians are visible throughout. 

Whenever I have been to a performance in Hanoi, the audience seemed to be made up of mostly Western tourists, and when I asked (especially early in my visits), I was told the cost (maybe $%?) was too expensive for most Vietnamese. BUT in Ho Chi Minh City, the audience in the newer water puppets venue in District 1 (basically HCMC's Manhattan, give or take) seemed to be a mix of locals and tourists, possible evidence of the rising Vietnamese middle class.

VN 8: Slow Daytime Traffic in Hanoi

Until Vietnam remodels totally and unfortunately removes all the vestiges of their colonial history, going to Vietnam has moments when it is like visiting Paris. The architecture remains. St least dome. For the time being.

The street crowds are not Parisian, nor is the November craichin, dust rain.

VN 7: More Life on the Street

There are sidewalks but you can't always see them, and walking in the street in some places is perfectly acceptable.

You just have to manage not to get hit.

For a far more vivid explanation of crossing a street in Vietnam than I can ever give you, go to YouTube and search for "crossing street in Vietnam". Yes, there are many more brand new red-green-yellow streetlights in Vietnam than there used to be, and in some places the traffic does not always consider the traffic light as just kind of a loosey-goosey suggestion that can be ignored. These days sometimes cars and trucks, motorbikes and bicycles and cyclos do stop, even for pedestrians.

Really.

That said, it still helps to think of navigating the streets of Vietnam this way: as you make your way around, you have to help them not hit you.

And you also need to be aware enough to notice not just the new red light on the corner, but also the motorbike racing towards you--aiming towards you, it seems--going the wrong way up the one way street you are walking along.

VN 6: Forms of Transport

Of course in cities there are cabs, often with meters if you are lucky, although these days more and more people are buying cars ostensibly "for hire". Yoke ladies tote their wares, and some bicycles seem to have been there since what the Vietnamese call the "American War." Increasingly trucks bring in produce and everything else from the countryside. But 100cc motorbikes still do some of the hauling of goods from vegetables to hogs and ducks to fifteen feet of rebar if necessary.

The pedicab (cyclo) in the front is a dying breed, so to speak. In the past as often as not they were driven by former allies of the US who most likely one way or another come across hard times. (But I did once have a cyclo driver in Hanoi who could not have been more than twenty but who had only one arm. But he could pedal.)

Given the increasing car and truck traffic in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi (and the accompanying pollution), I was not surprised to read that licenses for cyclos are no longer being issued--except, I assume, for the bright, shiny new ones supplied to guests by some world class hotels,  silver and clean cyclos that have a red canopy over the seat, one advertising, for instance, the Hanoi-located Hilton Hotel.

VN 5: Life on the Street

At least (if not before) since 1986, the time of doi moi (the socialist-oriented market economy), life has been lived on the streets. Especially in the cities, the fronts of houses tend to be narrow since they are taxed according to that width. Or so I have been told.

In many cases, the front of the house is the family business, and that business  makes its way onto the street. Go past where the store meets the street--that is, go in--and you will find the home, however big or small: bedroom, kitchen, maybe a sitting room. Maybe just one room. 

It seems at first that everything is wide open since the front of every home is, well, wide open--until it is all locked up tight at night.

The sidewalk serves as sidewalk, yes, but equally as front porch and parking lot.

VN 4: Sitting, or The Crouch

Perhaps she recycles paper.

To rest, she sits on the sidewalk on a piece of the ubiquitous low red or blue plastic furniture--a stool or a low chair. Plastic makes sense in Vietnam given that the weather is always hot (at least by standards set by the northeast US) and that when it rains, it rains. Think a rain whiteout.

But all Vietnamese can squat--in effect, sitting without a piece of furniture. Which is to say they don't need furniture in order to rest.

Life is lived on the street.

VN 2: Yoke Lady

Especially when cars were fewer than they are now and Vietnam was more a developing nation than it is now, one of the more you-can't see-this-at-home sights were the yoke ladies.

They were (and still are) traveling sellers of fruit (usually only one kind at a time, depending on the season); sellers of bottles of water (by reputation the more reliable and safe is La Vie, bottled by Nestle)--or of postcards, trinkets and what have you. Whatever might sell.

Or she just carries whatever she has from here to there.

Or she may be carrying a small kitchen, basically, and for a price she will pour and cook some  batter and give you a small waffle to eat as you walk around.

Some loads bounce more than others as she walks along.

VN 3: Yoke Lady, Part 2

A closer view.

Always friendly, always willing to sell you whatever they have: lychees, rambutan, dragonfruit, mangos. The rule in Vietnam is that buyers are supposed to bargain over the price--politely and in a friendly fashion so that no one loses face--and although I did do some of that, when it came to the yoke ladies, I never really tried too hard. Covered to protect their skin from the sun, they walk and walk. 

If I am not in the market for what they are selling, they smile and nod and move on, as do I.

One yoke lady who found me on a beach near Danang told me, "You no buy, I no eat. Babies no eat." I was going to buy some of her lychees anyway, and when I did, she squatted down next to me and  ate them with me in a companionable silence, the two of us just smiling and looking out at what the Vietnamese call the East Sea (and what we know as the South China Sea).

VN 1: From Galaxy Hotel, Hanoi

Of course before I went to Vietnam for the first time in 1998 I read everything I could get my hands on. There weren't too many guidebooks for tourists, though, and as I recall there was one AOL interest group about Vietnam that had a total of three members, one of whom was me. (One of those members warned me that the weather was "sweltering" which proved to be an understatement. But still I remember reading it.)

So based on a recommendation in the Lonely Planet guidebook, I chose a three-star business hotel in Hanoi, Galaxy Hotel (now permanently closed) on Hang Cot, near the Old Quarter. My room was more than basic, had AC, hot water and a few Vietnamese TV channels, and except for one early afternoon, the electricity worked. The location was close enough to the tourist sights but it was also quiet--an amenity not all hotels in high-volume Vietnam (or maybe anywhere) can offer, truth be told.

The pretty much all-glass Galaxy Hotel  lobby looked out on a roundabout, and during the late afternoons when I sat to cool off and watch the traffic, I was usually offered a bottle of water or a Tiger Beer. Since at that time (more than these days), traffic moved like fish swim but with pedestrians, motorbikes, bikes and bigger vehicles just kind of making their way any way they wanted to, I had a lot to look at.

Third Anniversary and Another Change

The short version: whoohoo! Three years of retirement already.

Three years ago on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend I moved the last boxes out of my office, and the following Tuesday the first thing I did was to check online to make sure the retirement incentive had been deposited.

It had.

I was free.

I was buoyant in ways I had not expected. A fried was right: when you do what your parents expect; as an adult, you do what your workplace requires, and in retirement (if the Fates allow, anyway), you do whatever the hell you want.

Although I may be overstating things, most days I feel more centered than I ever have. I do on some occasions miss some of the people I used to work with, but, truth be told, although I am on the far end of campus and in the pool twice a week,  I don't visit any of the places I used to go. I go in the door to the gym that is the farthest from any place I ever worked. That said, though,  I do still enjoy, in a one-time-removed kind of way, a good rumor about the place every once in a while. And I still have the doll (if that is what she is called) a colleague made of me (and of all the members of her academic department) from a good ten to fifteen years ago, and she--a version of me--is at the top of  this page).

On the whole, though: not my circus, not my monkeys.

I no longer insist on staying in bed until at least eight  in the morning in part because for decades I got up around six. I can get up whenever I want to. I can read (and write) anything I want (no memos, very little work-related email).

Most importantly--and I know how lucky I am to be able to say all this--as far as I am concerned, the brain cells I thought were gone because of work stress and meetings, gone from spontaneous combustion or for whatever other reason, seem to have regenerated. Or at least that is how things have felt for a while in the New World of No Stress from Work. I like to think this is true.

What I choose to do with my time organizes my time. Yes, I still make lists as I always have, and some days I am more productive than others; there are things to be said for ignoring most of the items on the list and sitting and reading on the back deck. Celebration takes lots of forms.

To celebrate this anniversary, this blog is going to take a detour--for how long I do not know. But for at least the next few weeks (and perhaps much longer), this blog's much more frequent postings will consist of photos and prose, mostly about my almost-twenty years visiting and traveling in Vietnam.

Come along with me.

Copyright 2018
Sandra Engel

Organ Recital, Or My Grandmother's Knees

It seems I spoke too soon.

But let me back up.

Long ago I read that journalist Martha Gellhorn (and incidentally one of Ernest Hemingway's wives) back in the day of land lines refused to answer the phone once she got older since so many of the conversations were what she called "organ recitals."

I know how she felt--and I have for some time. On the whole, I have never been a big fan of organ recitals. And, to be honest, I didn't really think I had too much to add to the conversation. I was luckier than I thought I was.

These days, though, the organ recitals seems a necessary part of getting caught up with friends. Most days we get over them and move on (which may or may not have been the case with Gellhorn's callers). We exchange updates about body parts the way other people talk about their children or sports.

Cataract surgery was a happy prelude. I had something to add to the conversation: I can see! I can see!

And then things went south. My body betrayed me.

My  knees have popped as long as I can remember. Finally, after all the follow-up appointments to the ophthalmologist were over, I went to an orthopedist. (I asked my primary care physician to refer me to someone who perhaps had grey hair and who had more than 1% body fat. I did not think a jogger-thin sports medicine guru would be a good match for me.)

So I had an x-ray on Knee One, the one I fell on in Vietnam in October, and the orthopedist told me most people over forty have arthritis and suggested a cortisone shot--and if the shot was needed too often, then a knee replacement would be in order. I asked about glucosamine chondroitin and the answer was yes. Knee replacement surgery, like cataract surgery, has come a long way, but it is still surgery far more invasive than cataract surgery.  Surgery I would like to avoid.

The shot felt weird but it silenced the pops.

All of a sudden I was aware of my knees as I had not been before. Soooo a couple weeks later, after I realized I was favoring Knee One, I had Knee Two--still popping and popping compared to the silent cortisone knee--looked at.

This time there was no "I'm-okay-you're-okay" from the orthopedist. The diagnosis: "Your knee is shot."

A cortisone shot in that knee as well. I asked about water aerobics and the answer was yes.

No mention of physical therapy or footwear. I took those into my own hands (and my primary care physician did the referral for physical therapy). Knee Two still feels...sore. The muscles around it are very tight, I am told.

So I am going to the open pool hours until the next water aerobics class starts. I wear cushy Teva flipflops at home and took myself to the sneaker store and bought a pair of  very light Hoka (Cavu model) sneakers for their cushion. (They were originally made by and for ultramarathon runners.)  Getting into the space capsule cockpit of my Jetta's driver's seat has never been my favorite thing even in the VW dealer's lot before I bought it, but it is doable.

I ordered a book on safe exercises for arthritis, and I am taking the glucosamine every day; this is no longer a "I try to remember it" kind of activity. I put myself on the Healthy Shit Diet which I have managed to stay on, mostly, except for, say, birthday cake. No Girl Scout cookies this year. I refuse, however, to sacrifice strong Vietnamese coffee (50% decaf unless I really need to be supercharged that day) and sweetened condensed milk for breakfast and through the morning. Life is too short to sacrifice that.

And then.

A year ago we had three feet of snow over two days, and I did my share of shoveling. That was bad enough, but after a week of hip-deep snow, I fell as I was moving groceries from the car to the house, all of maybe six feet.

The good news is I did not hit my head.

The bad news is I fell on my back. And it hurt.

Heat, ice, Ben-Gay, and rest. So much ibuprofen that my ears rang.

Eventually the pain went away, as is the case with many back injuries.

That was  a year ago, and lately my back, either from that last shoveling of a foot and a half of snow the consistency of wet cement or in a perverse anniversary celebration, is again sore.

Creaky knees I can deal with. A bad back I can deal with. But both at the same time?

Back on the heating pad. Ibuprofen. Ice. Heating pad. Ben-Gay. Lidocaine.

I know how lucky I am even if I creak a bit.

In other words, I spoke too soon. The good luck of right now is not as lucky as I hoped it would be for a while.

And then the gods added insult to injury: about the time I went to the orthopedist, I misplaced my passport. It  had been in the modest pile of "I am not sure where to put it" on the top of the rarely-used microwave. But to try out the new InstaPot, I had to move the microwave off the counter in my small kitchen. Where I put my passport in that move I have no idea.

The passport was new last August and the photo actually looked like me. I just like having a passport even if I am not going anywhere right now.

I am just superstitious enough to believe that the minute I complete the paperwork for a lost passport and its replacement, my August passport will show up.

So let me get this straight: the gods gave me new eyes so I can see better, can see distance, and then....slowed down and restricted my movement.

I can only see so far if I can't go anywhere.

I was zapped by The Fates.

I have to face it: I am a woman of a certain age,  and I have my grandmother's knees. And when my legs are the stiffest right when I get out of bed in the morning and make a couple shuffly steps before I get really moving, I am doing exactly what she did decades ago when she was even younger than I.

I know I have little to have a pity party about. I know people who have had cancer, heart attacks, epilepsy, gallbladder and carpal tunnel surgery, and knee and  hip replacements--all of which are far worse than a bad knee and a touchy seasonal backache.

And to be brutal here, I know a lot of people (many of my vintage) who are no longer above ground.

Already.

How fortunate I am that at this point I have nothing more serious. (Touch wood.)

Grandma was tough. I can be, too.

For now I can go places, including to the physical therapy that I arranged and to the blessed watery weightlessness of the pool. For now I manage to do pretty much everything I need to do albeit a bit more slowly.  I don't mind lying on a heating pad and reading for a couple hours a day, and I think a long Easter ride on a heated car seat will do some good. If I look for my passport one more time and then decide to abandon hope, I can take my paperwork to the post office and apply for a new one (right before I find the old one). In an attempt to alleviate back pain, I stand and type this on my laptop which is on the kitchen counter. I religiously do the exercises that the physical therapist gave me for my knee. Insurance will pay for ten appointments with a small co-pay on my part.

It's a start.

And right now, until I know otherwise, I take heart in what a friend says from time to time, a question direct and pragmatic: "Can this be fixed?"

Let's hope so.

The Good Luck of Right Now

These nights, when I look out around 11.30, I see it is not dark out, really: the low cloud cover is white, the snow is white, and when I turn out my light, my bedroom is darker than it is outside. Not that it is deep black inside.

I suspect that I knew nights are not always, well, dark, but over the years I had forgotten. Or I couldn't see well enough without my lenses to notice. Or equally possibly, on some days I was too busy getting to sleep so I could get up and go to work to bother to notice what was going outside my window.

I can see.

Yes, this is still a surprise. My depth perception is coming along without my having to think about it, to be self-conscious about seeing the world, at least most of the time. Vision and movement are a means to an end, after all; I need to reach for my coffee mug, not watch myself reach for it. Although I can see the traffic better in the rear-view mirror--and it does look closer than is used to--I don't worry about it.

I got my new glasses that I certainly do not have to wear all the time: a very slight prescription for distance for the astigmatism in one eye; glare coating so I can see even better at night, and reading lenses that are stronger than I can buy at Rite-Aid. I don't know yet what I am going to do with my old glasses; I will never need them again, and eventually I will probably give them to the Lion's Club, but right now it feels like I would be giving a body part away. Still.

Cataract surgery may be the closest I ever get to being born again.

The first book I finished early this year with my new eyes (so to speak) was a remaindered copy of The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick. The main character narrates the book through letters he writes to Richard Gere. This narrator is a geeky 40-year old who in the past got locked into closets and whose mother recently died. She had taught him "the good luck of right now" idea, and the novel includes Buddhism, synchronicity, the Dalai Lama, a lost father, a priest, and a Girlbrarian. I bought it with a Christmas gift certificate (thank you, John and Colleen), and I bought it as much for the face of the black cat on the cover as I did for the clever title.

How did I not know there used to be a cat parliament in Ottawa? Janet Maislin in the New York Times didn't especially care for the books, but for me it was a fun read, the kind of book that I will want returned if I lend it. I won't care if the last book I read in 2017 is returned: The Old Man and The Knee by Christopher Matthew, a pleasant enough experience that introduced me to Winston Churchill's "KBO": "Keep Buggering On." Although Matthew encourages readers, by the bye, to "stop sitting around for half the afternoon in front of the telly watching rubbishy quiz shows, get up, get out, and do something worthwhile", he also admits that he has never owned a pair of jeans....which loses him more credibility than he can imagine in my book.

Both books are examples of how increasing eclectic my taste in books has gotten since I no longer have to read for a living.

I have been sorting through my books again, which means I have been deciding what to read and reread. For my book club I am about 150 pages into Caleb Carr's Alienist which I did read when it came out over twenty years ago; it still reads well. My To Be Read L. L. Bean tote bag includes The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, a graphic novel on her refugee experience; Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard Thomas, a Christmas present (Thanks, Sara and Scott), and Hue 1968 by Mark Bowden; Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and Walter Isaacson's biography of DaVinci, which, like the borrowed biography of Bob Fosse that has been waiting for almost two years, I am going to have to read sitting up since they are such bricks.  Books I want to reread: E.L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel, a fictional telling of the Rosenberg case; Dodie Smith's I Captured the Castle, and Ian Rankin's novels featuring Inspector Rebus now that I have watched the British television adaptation on Acorn TV.

One of the great gifts of retirement is that I can read only what I want (no memos, no reports, no email, comparatively little student work since I do teach one class online). I read only what I choose to read, and, these days, I factor into that decision of what and how much to read respect and protection for my new eyes.

I am going to keep a list of the books I read this year as well as those I have started and not finished. This is a first.

*****

People bloom in different ways at different times.

The most interesting reading through the first dozen years of my education was often not assigned in school (and often it was just boring. But I did it anyway.)

The first books I remember reading--or having read to me--are The Little Engine That Could ("Yes I can/I think I can") and Make Way for Ducklings about the ducks on Boston Common (which I don't think I have ever seen, actually). I don't think I could read, really, before first grade, but I do remember feeling weird about learning to read "See Dick run. Run, Dick, run." Who spoke like that? Nobody I knew. Train engines that talked, ducklings that lived in Boston: comparatively speaking, they were very interesting.

The school reading was boring and I now see how prescriptive the writing instruction was. Reading in school was a task designed to answer the questions correctly  at the end of the assigned reading. If there was supposed to be pleasure involved, I didn't see it. And writing? The five paragraph theme which I remember being defined by Warriner's Grammar Book: five paragraphs or none at all.

Not surprisingly, one of the first things I learned as an undergraduate was the literary world--reading and writing, even my reading and writing--was far wider. And not surprisingly in hindsight, in graduate school I found myself gravitating towards the essay--the essays of Montaigne and Thoreau and others, essays that have fractures, that wander and follow the movement of the writer's mind-- nothing like the writing I had been taught in high school.

As often as not, I chose to teach writing, and the students wrote many drafts and revisions, all of which I read.

A lot of reading. No wonder my eyes were tired.

*****

With my new eyes has come joy. I finally took my workplace parking sticker off my car and replaced it with a vinyl sticker of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road: a walking away statement. (And part of me wonders as I iron a flannel shirt if the exhaustion from work all those years was in part introvert hangover from just too much constant human contact.)

Right before Christmas and during the ice storm, I took Amtrak to Boston and ended up with many other passengers sitting in the café car with my backpack on the table in front of me. The train was just packed full. In email I asked Amtrak for a partial refund since I had made my reservation a full two weeks ahead of time, not the day of the ice storm, and Amtrak quickly gave me partial credit for me to use for another ride, and that is, in the grand scheme of things, okay. My plane ticket to Vietnam in October was screwed up (I will spare you the details), and after an email to them that got no response beyond an automatic "We'll get back to you within a month" (which they never did), I wrote them an old-timey three page letter and mailed it to Delta headquarters. Delta refunded my money, enough to pay for another trip (or to replace some of the upstairs windows). So someday I will take the train again and I have taken Delta off my Do Not Fly List.

The cats seem healthy (touch wood). I took the knee I fell on in Vietnam to an orthopedist and got a shot of cortisone, and then a couple weeks later, got the same treatment for the other knee; I can't remember a time when my knees did not pop.  But bum knees are not contagious, and nobody ever died from them, and  I take some heart that I have always responded well to whatever treatments have been prescribed. I will begin water aerobics classes again after Easter when the classes start, and I am long-finished with the surgery-related eye drops.

My potted chicks and hens which I did not know could have stayed out all winter sprouted in the kitchen, and the cat grass has grown into kitty salad, just as promised. Since I don't need to carry my glasses and contacts lens solution with me any more, just in case, I bought myself a smaller pocketbook less than half the size of the one I used to use.

I feel lighter.

Fear not: I am not turning into Little Sandy Sunshine. By inclination and training I am used to seeing things from multiple points of view--the difference being that I can now actually see.  I can see the dust and otherwise unnoticed shadows that do slow time down; I notice the shadow of the blender on the top of the refrigerator: in the morning the shadow is on one wall, and in the afternoon it is on the other wall, albeit much fainter. I don't just hear the neighborhood crows at suppertime, but I can see them if I look. I have always been able to see both the forest and the trees, but now I see both much better. I can see the dust better and I have removed the cobwebs now that I can see them. I notice my cats' whiskers, my chipped nail polish, the frost on the inside of the windshield. The tree at the lunchtime restaurant now has St. Patrick's Day decorations. And I have a better sense of what needs to be done: replace the windows, get the dripping faucet fixed, clean out the basement.

I like where I am, and where I am includes other places, too. (I have done my holocaust tourism: Dachau; Tuol Sleng and the killing fields in Cambodia; the touristy Clink prison in London; My Lai, Hoa Lo (Hanoi Hilton) Prison, and the War Remnants Museum in Vietnam. I have been taken to a couple orphanages in a developing nation and I have seen a half-dressed child squatting near a fire trying to roast what looked like a dead bluebird on a stick.)

I have been looking through old photos of places I have been.  The first time I went to Vietnam, twenty years ago this coming October, I took a manual Pentax SLR. The result? "Your pictures are great, but some of them are a little out of focus." Well, they weren't out of focus to me. I thought I was being an artiste with my manual focus camera, but before I returned to Vietnam I did buy a camera with autofocus capability and never turned the autofocus off.  I wisely never shot in black and white.

And I do think that now I see the colors differently than I ever did before, even nineteen years ago. Everything's brighter (yes, still and even two-plus months post-surgery). I should probably celebrate more than I have, but I have to admit that in many ways good vision is pretty much its own reward.

Last week I framed three of the photos of my last visit:  a hotpot, a barbeque, and a shot of the ice in the metal ice bucket in Light Hotel on Hang Bong in Hanoi, a tribute not only to the heat but also to my regular icing of my knee. I have some catching up to do--at the least I have to go back and look at those photos: this is what I saw.

So much of life is a matter of focal length, which is to say of light and color. How many times over the years have I learned--and told myself--that things last as long as they last? My new eyes and the reading glasses over them lash my eyes to the page, this page, this yellow pad of paper. And these days, reading or watching or writing, I find myself still marveling at what I can see: look, look.

The good news of right now.

Still Retired: New World, New Year

"Let there be light," God said after creating heaven and earth.  Let me add another line: and then there was color.

Cataract surgery: it's what I had. And yes, my world, my seeing it for the first time, really, in a long time, has been right out of Genesis. My right eye was done on the fourteenth of December and the left on the Thursday right before Christmas--on the day of the winter solstice, as it turned out.  This was less an Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller at the well kind of moment than it was an Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol scene. Being happily whiplashed into the seeing world, now able to see distance (where "distance" means anything more that a few feet away without any kind of lenses) easily has made me into a character in my first grade reader, Fun with Dick and Jane: Look, look. See Sandy look.

"I can see you," I said to my brother.

Before the surgery, without lenses of any kind, I had maybe a four inch vision range. My eyes used to be -14 or so but correctable to 20/20 with hard contacts and reading glasses. (I started with pink cat eye glasses for reading only in elementary school and things slowly progressed from there.) Vision changes as we age and I have had cataracts for some time, or so I was told. But late this summer my very slow growing cataracts were finally declared "ripe"  which meant they were bad enough that health insurance would pay for the necessary surgery. This judgement meant that my sense that my driving at night was unsafe was not irrational at all. I was vindicated!

As I write this, I have 20/25 vision in my right eye. (New York state requires that drivers have only one eye--and this vision--to drive without corrective lenses.) My left eye is still healing but is well on its way to catching up with the right eye (almost). I can see laugh lines, bigger smiles.  I can see farther (the snow on the top of the neighbor's Christmas wreath on their front door), and in general things look much closer and brighter. I can stand in my dark kitchen at night and see shapes and details, including my black cat Swishy. (I can see much better where the light hits her fur.)  And the photos I have taken overseas over the decades? They look brighter and are going on the walls as soon as I can get them enlarged and framed.

I have a lot to look at.

Mostly because I can.

Yes, this is all very trippy.

During the week between the surgery on my right eye and on my left eye--Cyclops week which was not as bad as I imagined it would be--I could see the difference not just in vision but in color: through the eye with the cataract, yellows were more grey-yellow, dull, and whites were, well, dirty.  (Think of an old biology book with the body part overlays. Think of Mary Hartmann's "waxy build up" on her floors.) Nothing was as clear and bright  as things were through the new lens in my right eye.

Now with two new lenses: so this is what the world looks like. Wow.

I can now see dust and cobwebs. There is a curious architecture to the cobwebs when I put on my drugstore reading glasses to peer at them. I think of them  as having been made by one of my own little Charlottes (the most benign characterization I can think of for the critters who, I assume, like Charlotte, have now moved to that Great Cobweb in the Sky). But although I can see cobwebs, I don't have to manically take them down right now. In this annual time of endings and beginnings, the cobwebs are old news. I will get to them. Newer news: the color I tried out on the living room to make an accent wall last summer now looks dingy and blah; I have already picked up paint chips and a test pot of a bright coral to replace it, a color rich and celebratory.  I don't know how long it has been since I saw motes of dust in the sun coming in the front windows. And why is there schmutz at the bottom of the refrigerator door?

Vision restored.

I can see snowflakes. On the way to New Hampshire  I could read billboards with a glance: "Gift wrap a torso" and "Give them a squat" for a company selling athletic clothing. "Breakdown lane open for traffic." "The shortest distance between two people is a story." Christmas lights were brighter. I turned on the television for the first time in a long time. Yes, I could see it. (And then I turned it off.) I may not be able to see detail as calico Moonbeam comes in for a nose touch (without my wearing reading glasses, that is), but her caramel, white and black colors are vivid.

The new lenses that replace my corneas are less than a quarter of an inch in diameter. Unlike glasses, they don't fog up. They don't require soaking or cleaning solutions although I will be putting in eye drops several times a day until my eyes are completely healed. I will not lose them down the  drain as I am washing them. Although I no longer have to take my contacts  or glasses off before I go to sleep--a nice fuzzy departure to the day--I do have to wear eye patches at night for a few more weeks to protect my eyes. Just in case.

And the surgeries were paid for by health insurance except for a total of $600 for better-than-basic lenses for my -14 eyes. (Abbot -1 in the right eye, -1.5 in the left. The lenses have barcodes for identification.) I agreed to the surgery in August although the soonest it could be scheduled was December.

It turns out cornea surgery is one of the most common procedures in the world, and I had about three months between the decision and the procedures to consult Dr. Google: half of Americans have cataracts by the time they are eighty. NOVA has a two minute video under "Gross Science" called "Ancient Cataract." Monet had cataracts. Mary Cassatt and James Joyce had successful cataract surgery. Less successful was the surgery on JS Bach (he went blind and died four months later).  Early treatment included basically pushing the cornea into the vitreous part of the eye ("couching"); doing this got the cloudy lens out of the field of vision but didn't do much else. The first artificial intraocular lens in the US was in 1951, and phacoemulsification (breaking up the lens and taking it out) started circa 1967. Howard Ridley, a British ophthalmologist, noticed during World War II that shattered windshield fragments in the eyes of fighter pilots did not always lead to infection. Still, old timey US cataract surgery involved incisions, stitches and time in bed with your head between sandbags. (My dissertation director sat through my defense a few days after cataract surgery and with a felt eye patch under his glasses. At the time, he was much younger than I am now. He did once tell me that in general the more ways you have to see things, the better off you are.) Why is it called "cataract"? Because it was thought--correctly--to be opaque, like a waterfall.

I had no big incision, just drugs that made me happily loopy, a slightly scratchy eye for a couple days, and no pain.  The surgeon's work itself took maybe ten minutes per eye. I have started for the moment to shut up about the medical-industrial complex, but I can still rant about the prices Big Pharma charges. When I thanked the ophthalmologist who did the surgery, he was modest, marveling with me at the move from -14 to 20/25 but also giving most of the credit to the technology: "It's amazing what you can do these days."

Recently in the New York Times Jane Brody discussed cataract surgery changing peoples' lives. Certainly I am not going to start running marathons, but I am looking forward to getting back into the pool in a few months after the risk of infection passes. I do find myself eating better, more vegetables: I mean, carrots, as in "Have you ever seen a rabbit wearing glasses?"

And there is still the matter of depth perception. I am still learning how far away the coffee cup is. How quickly or slowly I need to downshift to stop at the stoplight. If the walls and trees and people all seem significantly closer, they also seem more brilliant, vibrant, alive--even if  they are inanimate. And these days it seems ungrateful to close my eyes on a world I can finally see. I look around just to see what I can see. In the supermarket the lights seemed to have been brightened just because I had arrived. Fruits and vegetables were beautiful.

My naps are shorter and fewer. I've always been a slow driver, and I have to be careful not to slow down even more because I am looking around.

Cataract surgery is one of the best things I have ever done.

I didn't realize that the second eye was scheduled on the winter solstice until the day of the surgery. This is the season of light, after all, and I am pretty sure I have been staring and gawking even more than I know. I have not been hopping around the room singing "Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens" but I am taking less for granted than I used to: Colors. Size. Close and far. Detail. Angle. Light. Dark.

I don't want to say "The world is charged with the grandeur of God" as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, but maybe something secular along those lines. Richard Wilbur wrote, "Love calls us to the things of this world," but these days the things of this world call me to the world.

I can see.

Not that any promises come with my new improved vision. We can all be hit by a bus tomorrow. But I marvel at the world: so this is what it is like to wake up every morning and see the world without lenses and wetting solutions, without fog. I had forgotten.

Christmas lights are crisp and sharp. "Have yourself a merry little Christmas, " the song goes. "From now on our troubles will be far away." "Through the years we'll always be together" is followed by the most chilling words of any Christmas song, after all: "If the Fates allow."

I can see stop signs from afar. Faces. Comparatively speaking, the world seems nearby. And the shadows, both early in the morning and in the late afternoon, are more vivid and dramatic than they were, say, on December 13, the day before the first surgery.

Although I can't see around corners to see what comes next, I can now see colors and shapes,  lights and darks and seemingly infinite shades. My ophthalmologist assures me the world as I see it now has always been here--I just haven't been able to see it for a while.

I'll settle for that.

A new year, a new world.

Copyright Sandra Engel

January 2018