The Luxpats

Tag: memoir

  • Where Are You, Gary? Have You Killed Anyone Yet?

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    It was Valentines’ Day. David and I didn’t have plans, but that wasn’t unusual. Holiday celebrations are a luxury of the settled. We’d spent the past three months so disoriented by this land of opposites, by driving on the wrong side of the road and by Christmas in the summertime, that holiday traditions felt like…

  • The Philippines: Steam and Ghosts, Part III

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    The zoo is an hour’s drive in the rain, through soupy fields of rice paddies. Occasionally we pass a farmhouse that seems to float in the water around it. A family sits on the porch: a grandmother,  a mother, and a small boy watching a teenaged boy steering their water buffalo through the muddy furrows.…

  • The Philippines: Steam and Ghosts

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    They send a car to fetch me in the morning, even though the call center is only a kilometer from my hotel. I am a client, and they are careful about security. On the drive we pass through shafts of dusty sun that pierce the dome above us. Even the sunny days steam here, even…

  • Conversations: Gypsy Bar

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    One evening, I had drinks with a black friend at a gypsy pub at the foot of the mountain. I say black because it would matter, when he said, unprovoked, “What some people don’t understand is that the whites came and built everything. Some black people just want to take it all without working. They…

  • Dear Aboda: The Carousel of Houses Part IV

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    The money they suddenly wanted to charge us is more than David makes in a month. On that restless night in windy Vredehoek before we finally moved into the mansion, David and I had been asleep when the agent called from Seattle. She wanted to confirm our move the next day. From the bedroom I…

  • The Carousel of Houses: Part III

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    In the afternoon we sat together on the couch, waiting to move again. Including hotels, it would be the fifth and hopefully final move in two months. We fanned ourselves in an amicable silence. We don’t always analyze our fights anymore, at least not right away. Before Spencer, we performed constant maintenance. Ours was a…

  • The Carousel of Houses: Part II

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    Green Point, where we’d been living, is an upmarket little neighborhood that slopes gently up from the beach. Cool breezes dry the sweaty foreheads of its residents as they enjoy sundowners on their porches, and there is little real wind there. In Vredehoek, where we moved the next day, you are perched upon the steep…

  • The Carousel of Houses: Part I

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    On New Year’s Eve, David was in the middle of his nightly relaxation routine, putting a rack of ribs on the barbeque, when we got a call from the rental agency woman. “I just wanted to make sure you found accommodations for tomorrow,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you to be homeless!” We were supposed…

  • Nannies: The Thaw

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    My paranoia about A’idah kidnapping Spencer got worse and worse. Every day, I’d be in a good mood when she arrived in the morning and a black mood when she left to go home. I was surprised to acknowledge, however, that I didn’t dislike A’idah. In fact, she and I got along wonderfully all day,…

  • Nannies: Paranoia

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    Every night before she leaves to go home, our nanny makes a joke about taking Spencer home with her. I don’t think these jokes are very funny. Call me paranoid, but with each new joke I get a little more uneasy. It’s not in A’idah’s favor that she wears these thick-rimmed bifocals that make her…