Puffy. It’s a laundry powder in the Household Chemistry section of the neighborhood market.
Breakfast with the President
My Bishkek Fridge
My poet friend Jill Divine is creating a project she calls Ice. Box. Vignettes. When she wrote me about it, this is what I sent her.
I heard someone once say that nothing telegraphs loneliness more than an empty fridge door. I heard that on NPR, and I remember looking up from what I was doing and staring at my radio like Buddha was in there talking directly to me. I was packing for Bishkek then, packing for living a year away from my cozy home and covey of friends and life I knew the rhythms and contours of. As I thought about my upcoming life in Kyrgyzstan, I imagined there would be some loneliness, and who needs to encourage that quicksand with a naked fridge door? So I scrawled on my Packing List: stuff for fridge. And in one of my suitcases I put poems and Monopoly money and New Yorker cartoons. I put goofy and inscrutable playing cards I like to plunder out of weird board games at the Goodwill. I brought a drawing made by my 8-year-old niece Eva Mae. When I got here I made my unpacking a kind of ritual. I was all swimmy in the head with jet lag and dislocation, and the unpacking felt like I was drunk at a religious ceremony. Out came the magnets, out came the pieces of paper that I lovingly affixed to the front of my fridge. With those little bits of paper like prayer flags I made a shrine. And in the mornings when I am in what Rilke calls “the silver heaven between dream and day” I go to the fridge to get milk for my coffee ritual, and there it all is on the fridge door, humming soft little songs to keep me safe and calm and surrounded by love that lives elsewhere.
The Mighty Manas
Within the 17-page document detailing life here in Kyrgyzstan sent to me by the U.S. Fulbright office, this paragraph was the most interesting: “The Kyrgyz think of themselves as the poets and artists of Central Asia. Nothing illustrates this spirit more than the Epic of Manas, the longest narrative poem in the world. Manas is a hero who, according to legend, unified tribal leaders long ago in the mountains and valleys knows as the Kyrgyz Republic.”
The airport is called Manas. One of the larger boulevards in Bishkek is named Manas. Manas is a Kyrgyz-Turkish university. The U.S. military base here is the Manas Transit Center. Manas is an Italian shoe company, an online journal of intellectual inquiry. Further investigation landed me on one of dozens of websites parsing narrative poetry, the Kyrgyz tradition of oral storytelling and Manas the man. In the chart-busting poem, which bests the length of The Iliad and registers at more than a half million poetic lines long, we are given the bio of Manas. It is pretty substantial: “He is created from the beam between the Sky and the Earth. He is created from the waves of a river under the moon. He is created from the blend of gold and silver.”
I, on the other hand, was created by Ann Gatti and Emmett Kelly in Mobile, Alabama. No gold, no silver, No Sky, no Earth. And nothing to do with the waves of a river under the moon unless my mother and father haven’t told me the whole story.
“One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.“ ~ Anne Lamott
The Electric Bill
Emil, my landlord, came over yesterday and told me I need to help with the electricity bill. My job is to read the black meter that looks like an antique diving mask implanted eye level into a wall in the foyer. I write the numbers on a piece of scrap paper and tape the paper to the front door by mid-month. Electricity people will come by, he says, read the numbers, write a bill and slide it under the door. Yes, I say. Gladly. Eagerly. Participating in the most minute tasks that are the machinery of daily life are what brings me closer to feeling as if I live here.
When he left, he pointed to the front door of the flat next door and said, “Here is example.” Taped onto the brown vinyl beneath a cluster of three peepholes was a piece of lined paper, the kind I used in three-ring binders when I went to grammar school. The numbers I could read; the words looked like smashed bugs or maybe Klingon?
Toiletry of the Day
Splat Professional. It’s a toothpaste.
Father Frost
The Kyrgyz call him Ayaz Ata; legend says he was born of moonlight and cold weather. He appears around New Year’s Day, gives children presents and sports a white beard, a floor-length coat, a hat that stories say is fashioned from snowflakes, and a magical walking stick. He is often accompanied by his granddaughter, Kar Kiz, the Snow Maiden, who acts as his helper. The woman I saw in the square acting as Kar Kiz is far more fetching than any rendition of Mrs. Claus I’ve ever seen.
Father Frost in Ala-Too Square
untidy exuberances 