jodyrathgeb

    A snatch of lyrics from a Paul Simon song:
    "When something goes right,
    well, it's likely to lose me.
    It's apt to confuse me,
    it's such an unusual sight.
    I can't get used to something so right."
    The song popped up for me as I was flying home from the Turks and Caicos and thinking back on the trip, which included the best sales ever of Fish-Eye Lens. I took 30 books with me and sold all 30.
    Yes, 24 were a pre-sale to Ocean Club, a Provo resort. That left six, which the resort allowed me to sell and sign at its Cabana Bar and Grille. They were gone within three hours and two G&Ts.
    Obviously, that's not many when you consider the huge sales of a Cussler or Cornwell. But until then, the most I'd sold at a single event (excepting my book launch party, which had free wine) was four. Usually, it's one or two. Sometimes it's been nothing.
    So I am left wondering what it was I did right.
    Some things I can rule out. It wasn't my Island Trivia game ($1 off for a correct answer), which I've offered before. And my chatter and description of the book doesn't change much from event to event.
    Other theories quickly develop holes. When my tables at Richmond bookstores were dead, I thought that perhaps I needed a beach vacation setting. But in two days at Outer Banks bookstores I sold just two books.
    I thought that perhaps more nontraditional venues like festivals would be better than bookstores. They are, but not always.
    My publisher believes that having a program or talk generates more sales than merely sitting at a table. But at Ocean Club, that's just what I did. Next theory.
    Is it better in the Turks and Caicos merely because the book's setting is based on North Caicos? And does it say something that sales go better when both I and my potential customer are holding alcoholic drinks?
    Oh, my. This could be dangerous. If the book sells better to people who are actually at the beach (beyond the East Coast) and drinking is required...
    Well, ta-ta and cheers!

    I love this house. Sorry. I always thought house-proud people were pathetic, valuing stuff over people, but as I sit in Aloe House I realize I am head-over-heels. The map of the Turks and Caicos Islands, against a yellow wall. Next, the painting my sister made of us entertaining friends on our porch. To the right, the Jim Tillet silk screen from a trip to the U.S. Virgins, beside the CD holder Tom and I fashioned from a piece of bamboo driftwood. Even if we hadn't built it, it would be our place.
    It's not the posh, grand type of beach house people are building these days. We have tile and stone, not granite and marble, and it's not equipped with the latest in electronics. There's no air conditioning, and we still do our dishes by hand and hang laundry to dry in the Caribbean breeze. When Aloe House was built, it was difficult and expensive to get the materials you wanted. "What's available" was our go-to choice for decor and material decisions. We have slowly upgraded things over the years (beds replaced futons, tile on the stairs), but it's still more beach house than villa.
    Even as a beach house, it's far from perfect. The island climate is hard on any structure, so it needs constant maintenance. Plumbing fixtures have to be replaced, as do the original baseboards. Water seeps in on one side of the house in a heavy rain.
    I love it anyway. It is A Place. Other vacation homes could be mistaken for motels, all very tasteful but displaying no particular taste. This one says that people live here and are happy here. It is a part of its environment and its neighborhood. Kids come by to swing in the hammock and hope to be offered cookies or popcorn. Friends stop by, hang out, pass on information. Neighbors know they can take water when they need it or store something large in our garage.
    Sure, there are times when I think Aloe House is too "open." We are always replacing plastic spigots that have been turned too vigorously, the plants we like are mysteriously replaced with others, and I can't seem to maintain a supply of laundry or dish detergent. But in the long run, what are some spigots and supplies compared to a place that people find comfortable and happy?
    Aloe House connects us to this island and informs both us and others of who we are. It is where I made the transition, long in coming, from nonfiction to fiction. It is where Tom's creative side blooms. This Thanksgiving on North Caicos, we have many things to be thankful for. But Number One this year is this place, this living home.

    This is a strange blog week for me, because on the day I usually post it I will be running around Provo, looking for a Thanksgiving turkey. The break in routine, though, allows me to introduce something new to my website. I've created a "Sampler" page, where I will occasionally put stories or parts of things I am working on to share with anyone who cares to read them.
    My first Sampler is a Thanksgiving story with a multicultural angle. It was originally a chapter in my current novel-in-progress, but I eliminated it while trying to hone my story arc. Only one of its characters (Rebecca) remains in the novel, but I kind of liked the other characters, so I refashioned the chapter into a story.
    As you get ready for your own Thanksgiving, drift on over to Sampler to see Rebecca's. It's not terribly original - all families have less-than-perfect family meals sometimes - but it might be fun to peek in on someone else's turkey trauma.

         Just a couple of weeks after I traveled to the Bahamas to visit a friend, B Naqqi Manco from the Turks and Caicos visited the same friend. I found his comments about the "Over the Hill" neighborhood (pictured) that we both experienced to be accurate and thoughtful, so I'd like to share them in a guest blog. Heeeere's Naqqi!   
     The Bahama Archipelago is a geographic unit. It is not The Bahamas, which
is an independent Commonwealth Realm country; it is not the Turks & Caicos
Islands, which dangle at the southeasternmost extreme of the Bahama Archipelago,
ready to be eroded and snapped off by the Gulf Stream and flowed to some
temperate Irish shore like so many drift seeds and Eagle Stones. It is both,
called by some geographers the Lucayan Archipelago along with a few stray bits
that have been dealt meaninglessly over to Cuba. This smattering of seafloor
limestone monoliths is divided politically into preposterously unequal portions
- The Bahamas occupying the bulk of the land area, with the Turks& Caicos
comprising only three percent of the total.


           
We in the Turks & Caicos inhabit a vestigial remnant of land,
exiguous in the world and affecting little outside our borders, save the
occasional British civil servant's ire or the odd billionaire's bottom line. We
host nine species of plants, five of reptiles, and several of insects found
nowhere else on Earth; we share several more of the hundreds of species of
plants, reptiles, and insects unique only to the Lucayan Islands. We can claim
only eleven and a quarter percent of the Archipelago's total population, and
very little of its natural resources. There is plenty to love here, and I do
love our tiny islands, but on the global scale we are quite
inconsequential.


           
A visit to New Providence put that inconsequentiality into perspective.
Of course as I always do when traveling, I packed a barely passable number of
outfit changes all probably too casual for an international conference, and
packed an overabundance of subsistence provisions. A pile of Clif Bars in
various flavours, and two of my favourite chocolate bars were tucked into my
luggage just in case my hotel was overly distant from supermarkets. But I did
not pack enough for my trip's duration, just enough for a few days to give me
time to get to a supermarket.


           
So on my third day in Nassau, my chocolate supply eliminated and my Clif
Bar stash getting bleak, I went out on a foraging mission with a friend who was
kind enough to indulge my dietary perplexities and ferry me to an emporium of
edibles.


           
Our first stop was to Super Value, a small supermarket in Centreville.
The area was fairly older and "well broken in," I suppose. In fact, most of
Nassau city is "well broken in." I think that's what surprised me the most. I
keep forgetting that pretty much everything in the Turks & Caicos Islands is
either more than 200 years old, or less than 30. In Providenciales, the ancient
relics are retired into dense bush or occasionally cleared for gawking by
tourists weary of water sports. The majority of our edificial experiences are
with structures conjured up from imported money, material, and labour within the
last three decades. Being that our tourism audience is largely wealthy, the
buildings put within their sight are well-finished and make an attempt at being
aesthetically pleasing - if they are not, their newness belies their ugliness
with smooth, white plaster and shining windows. But Nassau has been developing
steadily for the last three centuries, and it boasts all manner of architectural
styles. As there is a massive ridge dividing the island's most populous areas
from its tourism centres (so much so that everything outside the reach of an
average cruise ship visitor is referred to as "Over-the-Hill," and touted on
travel boards as uniquely dangerous), New Providence never had to worry about
making its structures easy on the eyes, and so they were largely built for
function over form. Give those structures a good century of hurricanes,
industrial exposure, economic hardship, and scant maintenance, and you get a
place that looks like Centreville's Super Value. Peeling plaster, mismatched
paint, expansive stains of grey, windows that have lost their shine from
scratches and have lost their appeal from the metal
bars.


           
Inside, packaged food rules, while fresh foods delicately line the outer
aisles of the square building so sparsely that one could be forgiven for
thinking this was a going-out-of-business sale. I selected a package of
newly-wrapped red globe grapes because it was the only appealing thing I could
find in the produce section. There were no granola bars, let alone Clif Bars.
The candy aisle was a hodgepodge of unsorted bags of Bach's and Hershey's sugar
crap, with not a single confection of European origin within sight. I checked
out behind a young family whose cart was dumped with a collection of boxes and
tins, mostly brightly-coloured and primarily composed of C12H22O11 and BHT.
Three fresh green peppers bumped together in their untied plastic bag, as if
trying to push their way toward the toddler who must have needed their vitamins.
My mind wandered to the food crisis in the United States' megalopolises -- crime
and economics push supermarkets out of low-income urban neighbourhoods, until
the residents are left with only convenience stores to shop for food: food
similar to the contents of the cart, minus the green
peppers.


           
I needed my IGA, or my downtown Quality, or Cee's, or at least the Island
Pride, where I rarely deign to shop due to the dead body smell and frequently
visible and highly diurnal rodents. I know this sounds privileged, but I spend
nothing on luxury goods of any kind other than food. And so I broke down and
said what I hadn't wanted to say to my friend, who was infinitely tolerant of my
quirks and eccentricities and foraging. "OK, here's what I didn't want to say
before," I cleared my throat gruffly, "but can you take me to where the rich
white people shop?" Because how else would one ask to be taken to the IGA
without knowing anything but the quality of food they want to find? It was an
awful thing to have to say, but we both knew what I meant. So he took me to the
other Super Value on the hill in Centreville, which was bigger, brighter, and
looked far cleaner and more promising.


           
I will not delve here into the issues of economic race relations in
multicultural Caribbean countries, but this particular store did have its share
of ethnic diversity, and its stock reflected that clientele. The produce section
was very well stocked, and even had loose Shiitake mushrooms by the pound
($14.99) and bananas, where the other branch did not. But it still didn't have
Clif Bars or dark chocolate. I was able to find some Nature Valley chewy granola
bars, which sufficed, despite being so high in sugar they have to be taken in
moderation to justify eating them for breakfast, but the candy aisle was a
repeat of the market down the hill. I made a run through the baking supplies
aisle and picked up two bags of Baker's semisweet chocolate chunks, my chocolate
methadone fallback when Lindt & Sprungli can't, for whatever reason,
deliver. A few handfuls and I was back to my settled self, so I was able to
begin contemplating (and by contemplating, I mean what it is I'm doing on the
rare occasion that I'm alone, but not talking to myself out
loud).


           
For the next three days I contemplated - often to others, some of whom I
didn't know. How is it that in the capital city of a country of 354,000, where
250,000 reside on that capital city's really rather small island, the
supermarkets can't hold a candle to the most run-down one on Providenciales, an
island of only 25,000 in a country of just under 40,000? How can this be? Even
after I fond out there were richer-appealing supermarkets on New Providence,
they still were considerably smaller and of less epicurean impact than our good
old Graceway.


           
On my last day there, it struck me. It struck me as I walked with my
friend Aggie through Bain Town, dodging a crumpled, dessicated rat so worn into
the pavement that only its texture revealed its presence, to Burial Ground
Corner, to join her friends in the yard between charmingly painted but decidedly
dilapidated wooden houses (between which teenagers toted buckets and gallon jugs
of water from a public standpipe, because this - not entire new wings of houses
built to hurricane specifications with indoor bathrooms and kitchens - is what
the government could provide for the neighbourhood) for a birthday barbecue. As
backgammon dice clattered on felt and the jittery domino table was ever shifted
into the evasive, moving shade of whatever coconut tree was not directly
overhead, through games I lost and won; as gallon jugs of wine glugged into
plastic cups and roughly-cut-off litre water bottle bottoms were swirled with
rum and condensed milk; as a stout, square monochromatically-tan dog with fur
that looked like worn patio carpeting and a pigeon feather sloppily stuck to its
rump wheezed its way around trying not to look like she was begging for food; as
a young fellow with impeccably-matched clothes (in red, including his socks)
ducked in to his aquamarine-painted house and emerged in equally
impeccably-matched clothes (in blue, including his socks); as the humourous
insults were traded and abundant good-natured smart-ass remarks were volleyed;
as the simple pleasures of yard-cooked wholesome food and actual interpersonal
activity and games that made sounds that were not electronic and one fellow got
drunk for being accused of concealed homosexuality and another got drunk to play
dominoes better and another got drunk so that he would have an excuse to wear
his trousers as low as he did, and a quiet young lady smoked a hand-rolled cigar
as thick as my thumb and twice as long; as people related to people and there
was no Internet or Facebook or Words With Friends in sight ... I figured it
out.


           
Here in TCI we spend all hours on our high-speed Internet, playing word
games with people we rarely talk to; we spend driving time on high-speed roads,
bypassing yards empty of youths, yards whose coconut trees can dump their loads
whenever they damn well please because fewer people are navigating uneasy domino
tables into their shifting shadows; we spend our time scurrying from one young,
shiny building to the next, confident that this is how life is meant to be and
yet often unsatisfied at our financial, political, and gross-domestic-happiness
level and blithely unaware how well we have it.


           
And that is the point I figured out. We are spoiled.Terribly,
unequivocally spoiled. Our chronologically infantile infrastructure is squeaky
new, aside from a few mishandlings, of which we are unabashedly ashamed and
outspokenly critical (I'm looking at you, Salt Cay and Grand Turk water plants,
and don't think I can't see you, Major Hill Road). Our inflow of new money and
upper upper middle class and lower upper class and middle upper class and upper
upper class tourists, our association with questionable (and regardless of one's
political leanings, they were questionable) multizillionaires spewing cash into
our early-Naughts economy and hospitality corporations and land speculators and
astute local businesspeople all working hard to ensure we have the biggest, the
newest, the most luxurious... It is why wireless Internet is standard in our
hotels and restaurants, whereas in New Providence I had to feed American bills
into a cantankerous by-the-minute desktop system in a dingy afterthought of a
room off the hotel lobby to check email. It is why I can add phone minutes by
auto-machine or Internet or any shop to my phone (or a friend's in another
country) instead of having to search relentlessly for a supermarket customer
service desk that can feed my funds into LIME's international system, only to
have to email a minute-selling friend back home to spot me some credit because
I'm making international calls on roam in the same country I'm in. It is why I
can not worry about locking my house when I'm out, whilst in New Providence I
was forever gazing through barred windows and dodging dangling razor wire in
back alleys. It is probably why we don't really even have very many back
alleys.


           
Like it or not our current situation and economy, we still have it damn
good. Not that the Bahamians don't - their larger population supports a
wonderful array of restaurants. You want good Chinese food that is actually
Chinese? You want peas and rice that will leave you brimming full without the
guilty association of Maggi and Accent, with a tangy aftermath of tomato and red
pepper? You want a restaurant where you can get vegetable sushi, Thai curries,
and delicately crispy spring rolls in one stop, all expertly prepared, and
affordable? In this regard Nassau blows us out of the water. It is also
proportionately cleaner than we are, with people out making it that way, taking
obvious pride in their work at removing litter. We can learn from that.            
And that is what travel is about. Home looks different after travel, and
in fact, after each place traveled. We gripe and suffer and complain and
struggle, but at the end of the day, we really have it very well here in our
tragic little tailbone of land at the Atlantic's mercy. At the end of the day,
our tiny population, limited natural resources, and bizarre almost-post-colonial
political situation have done very well for us. At the end of the day, there's
no place like home.

    Writing a nonfiction piece, such as a magazine article or newspaper feature, isn't always easy, but the process is straightforward. You do the interview, visit the site, do some research and take notes, and then you gather up all these "construction materials" and build something from them.
    Many think that fiction must be simpler because you just pull the story out of your head, but actually the building process is more complicated because you don't find the construction materials all in one place. Getting ready for a magazine article is like going to Home Depot. Getting ready to write a short story is more like beach combing.
    My current story-in-progress explains the metaphor more fully. It began with a conversation Tom and I had while driving to Pennsylvania for a visit. The day started out foggy, and instead of the sun coming to burn off the fog, the weather just got gloomier. Hurricane Sandy was on its way. We talked about how often there were such gray days in the Western Pa. town where we grew up, and we wondered if the weather had affected our outlooks and attitudes. Did so much depressing weather lead to a tendency toward depression?
    Interesting topic, but no short story ... yet. The conversation merely got me to thinking about the weather in general and extreme weather in particular. I remembered North Caicos nights spent watching lightning storms over the ocean and the island's frequent rainbows. One night I'd even experienced ball lightning, an electrical disturbance similar to St. Elmo's fire. Hmm, said my mind, that would make an interesting scene in a story.
    As our weekend went on, the weather got worse. An event was canceled, and with the Weather Channel predicting dire things for the entire East Coast, we decided to head home early.
    We were on the road again, traveling through valleys near where I once lived in near-poverty just after school. With dark mountains reaching up to dark skies around us, I remembered bits and pieces from those days, wondering when my life was ever going to start yet happy with a small circle of friends. The bars we used to frequent, filled with plaid shirts and hunting gear at odds with the disco music. A friend's mother lying on their sofa, dying of cancer. Hearing about an acquaintance who shot herself in her car, parked in front of her friend's apartment. Everyone knew they'd been more than just friends.
    As Tom and I passed yet another wall of rock, something clicked and I knew I had a character to experience the ball lightning: a native of these towns we were passing, gay, alone, grieving. She began to take life from other pieces in my memory: a friend who'd taken care of her ailing aunt, tending bar, the times I've thought how difficult it must be to be gay and living on North Caicos, my sister still living in our childhood home, the feelings of being completely myself when I'm on the island. Thoughts and feelings that span almost 40 years.
    It's all going into this story. Maybe things will be cut, definitely things will change, but these are my construction materials. No one-stop shopping but a gradual accrual.
    Whenever it's done, someone might ask me how long it took me to write. Would they believe me if my answer was "40 years"?