That day again

I don't particularly like anniversaries of any kind but June 19th is one of the worst: the anniversary of my mother's death. It's been 8 years, which seems like a long time considering all that has happened to me (growing up for example), but my memories of that night-before of the 18th, eight years ago still make me physically ill, even if some of the details are gradually fading away. One day I might be able to write my story of that night - today is not that day though.

On Saturday I went to Chappaqua, NY. This relatively small, mostly white and wealthy looking town in Westchester, NY was where the Mentoring Program of the Harlem Justice and Community Centre - a program aimed at helping disadvantaged high-school kids from Harlem -held its annual retreat. My new Australian friend, Gaby, has been involved in this project for about a year and I agreed to become a mentor as well. I went along partly because one of the best experiences I had in London was tutoring Fayza, a shy, 18-year-old Muslim refugee girl from Eritrea, whose father had been persecuted and possibly killed. I still feel guilty about "leaving" her behind. We had developed a friendship of sorts - albeit necessarily an unequal one - and she was so happy when I offered to take her to a film, after which I had to break it to her that I would be leaving on a long trip so I could no longer help her out. I have not gotten in touch with her ever since but I think of her a lot. Maybe I can alleviate my guilt with the new one.

Andira, my new mentee is 17. She grew up in Harlem with her mother from Puerto Rico and her stepfather, who is a strict, hardworking man from the Dominican Republic. She has never met her natural father, although she knows of him: a good-for-nothing Puerto Rican with loads of children by various women. When I asked her if she had a desire to get to know him, her answer was an unequivocal "no". Luckily for me, Andira is a nerd. She does not drink, does not do drugs and does not smoke cigarettes or pot. She does not have fake diamond tongue rings or scary tatoos. Unlike some of the other girls who were at the Edith Macey Conference Centre for the team building/get-to-know-each-other exercise, she does not have attitude. She likes to read (Janet Evanovich, bestseller writer, incidentally, fondly read by my cousin Elizabeth in French translation) and wants to go to college to study forensics. Andira is a short and stubby teenager, not very pretty and, accordingly, quite shy and an introvert. I somehow managed to engage her though, and I found her to be smart and curious and badly wanting to learn and evolve. By the end of the day she felt much more at ease. On the train ride back we were almost chatting away like we had known each other for a while. At some point we talked about traveling and she said a curious thing: "I want to go to Sweden." When I asked - or aksed, as she would say - her why, of all places, Sweden considering she had barely ever been outside of New York City, she said: "Because I am obsessed with white people. I grew up in Harlem all my life and only know blacks and latinos. I want to hang out with white people more. And they are all blond and white in Sweden, aren't they?" I must say that, momentarily, I was at a loss for words. Then I gathered myself and tried to wisely explain how hers was more a fascination with the unknown rather than obsession and that white people aren't all that nice anyway but her belief that they must be nicer than black ones seemed unshakeable. Go figure.

The Polish cleaning lady from Guatemala

I have moved in to my newest temporary home: my brother's place in Astoria. He is kind enough to be letting me the room formerly occupied by Nana, our foxy Hungarian friend who is now on her way to Ghana to teach maths to the Ghaneans (sp?) for about a year. The room is small but after a day of cleaning and arranging, it is no longer impenetrable due to large piles of superfluous clothing and other personal items that were shipped over from Paris. Small but cheap and the flatmates - Aron and Gyurka, another Hungarian - are satisfactory, even if my brother constantly seems to find fault with my domestic behaviour...

The humidity was suffocating this weekend. As I was sweating away in my cleaning lady outfit all day yesterday, I fantasized about having a real, professional cleaning lady come and scrub away all the dirt and dust that had gathered on the window panes, under the cupboards, on the shelves - everywhere. I thought fondly of Madame Therese, the Portuguese magician who made sure that our large Parisian flat and everything in it was the way it was supposed to be.

And then I thought of my former east village hosts' cleaning lady, whom I met last Tuesday, the day I moved out of their apartment. Natalie and Micah had told me about her: they said she is not great and they are afraid to ask her to clean the cupboards, but that they couldn't fire her because she has been working for them for five years now and she is a Polish illegal alien in a difficult position. As I was opening the door last Tuesday, I could already hear the TV was on Spanish language soap opera. Then I saw the cleaning lady: a diminutive dark-haired, olive-skinned woman, chatting away on the phone in Spanish. I was a little surprised. She was clearly not from Poland but some place in Latin-America. I talked to her a bit and she is indeed an illegal alien - but of course from Guatemala, rather than Poland. Now this incident shocked me. I have not seen Nat or Micah since then so I didn't have a chance to confront them and I am not sure I will. I am just really puzzled as to how they can possibly not know where this woman - a person who is not only intimately acquainted with their lives but that they have known for five years - came from. Especially because it took all of two minutes for me to firmly establish the region, if not the country, that she came from...(I thought of the movie Dirty Pretty Things. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dirty_pretty_things/ . Perhaps I could get it for them.)

Arrival

So here I am. I have spent the past few weeks peeking into other people's lives, be it my corporate friends' in Prague or the good doctors of Lille, France but now I am in New York and I am getting a peak of what my life might be if I had the luck and willingness to finally embrace a life of sorts. So for the record, in one week I managed to do:

- 1 weekend with my married/pregnant and yet cool friends in Connecticut at a 18th century mansion of a 60 year-old psychiatrist named Elizabeth, who happens to be my friends' neighbour and catsitter;
- 2 great dinners at French restaurants that are better than the Parisian ones;
- 1 afternoon of jobsearching with a friend getting snobbed by irritating American restaurant middle managers (him being snobbed, not me, of course; added bonus: the re-realization that I could NEVER do anything other than eating in those restaurants)
- 1 night out in the East Village with the Hungarian crowd listening to gypsy music in the one bar where you can actually still smoke;
- 1 pretty good celebrity sighting (Liv Tyler) with eye contact and all - albeit in the middle of a torrential rainfall;
- 1 wonderful PINK MARTINI concert at the Central Park summer stage - coupled with being soaked again by said torrential rainfall;
- 1 accidental run-in to a good friend from London;
- 1 vintage store hunting shopping trip with French-Togolese girl-friend from Paris (extra condiment: loud-mouthed English woman working in the fashion industry);
- sunbathing in Central park; and
- various deep(ish) conversations about race, work, the US, the EU, Hungarian culture and politics, etc).

This seems to be a pretty accurate list of all that's happened but doesn't include the numerous coffees, drinks and lunches that were all in their own way special and exciting. New York is truly that kind of a place where if you are open enough but don't expect much you can be amazed at almost every moment of your wandering through the city.

What I have yet to find out is whether I can make some sense of it all and settle - at least for a while.