Rust Stains

This week we read about disasters, and more, and more—disasters. First, there was the Great Chicago Fire, and then the swarms of locusts that swept through the mid-west in the 1870s. That pesky omnivorous scourge didn't just devour everything green, everything planted with such care by pioneering settlers--crops , orchards, gardens--but also sheared the wool right off the backs of sheep.

Our readings this week for world history were also replete with calamity: Oliver Cromwell and his bloody Protectorate, followed by the Restoration of Charles II, a time filled with the silence of the plague, the silence of the dead and dying--all you could hear were the funeral bells tolling, followed by the deafening roar of the 1666 Great Fire of London, which destroyed four-fifths of the city.

I thought Simon would have trouble handling all this suffering, but that aspect of the calamities did not interest him very much. Instead, he focused single-mindedly on rewriting history, on fixing the problem, on making sure such catastrophes do not happen again.

He said: “Well, Mom, if Chicago had been built out of bricks, the fire wouldn't have happened. Mom, what is our house built out of?”

He said: “I think if I had a farm in Kansas, I would put a net over it. That would work against locusts, wouldn't it, Mom?”

He said: “Mom, if the plague came to Miami, I would bring all the cats from all over America to Florida. I think all the pythons in the Everglades could also help. They would kill the rats that are covered in plague fleas, and that way people would not die."

The next time I toss and turn at 3 AM questioning why I'm spending so much time on history, sometimes at the expense of math and science, which are not studied with exactly the same enthusiasm, I hope I remember the net spread over acres and acres of Kansas farmland, or the rat-eating pythons of the Everglades. Simon is, if nothing else, learning from the past.

As I've told him hundreds of times, I'm so grateful he ended up in our family—just think of it, by some act of magic or fate, he could have been born into another nice family, maybe one in Italy, or Korea, or Wyoming. We would have never met. Instead, Simon ended up born to us. And that's the best thing that's ever happened to me. Should shit happen, I've got the kid who thinks of rat-eating pythons on my team.

* * *

Simon's response to these catastrophes led me not only to muse about the delight and privilege of having him in our lives, it made me aware again of the fact that Simon is an American--a 100% American boy.

At the risk of of generalizing too much, let me try to explain. I think of Americans as viewing disasters as opportunities: opportunities for action, and if action is not possible--learning. There is a relentless optimism, a go-get'em, go-do-it certainty that the impossible can be achieved, even against hopeless odds. And if all else fails, if all you're stuck with is lemons, as they say in this country: make lemonade; make the best of it; make sure it doesn't happen again.

I, on the other hand, when faced with disasters--think of other disasters. I think of wars, genocide, fires, military coups. I think of lives lost. I find myself so consumed by the lugubrious meanderings of my mind that I'm incapable of wrapping my head around the disaster, and am, initially, clueless as to how to begin to fix or improve the problem. (If there is a crisis, you should think twice about having me on your team.) I lack that American positivism. I tend to go to some dark place first. But then my parents were Simon's age in 1945. Their fathers had died. They lived in urban centers that had been, for the most part, bombed into utter ruins.

That year, when the Russians marched into Berlin, they pillaged what was left and raped more than 100,000 women in that city alone, many repeatedly, as punishment for what the Germans had done in Stalingrad. When they came to my grandmother's apartment, which they entered by rifle-butting a panel of the front door, she hid inside a pull-out couch, or so she said. Afterwords, she discovered that they had ransacked the place and had shat in the bathtub and the sink.

She told me this story in the 1980s. I was offering to remove the rust stains in her tub. In America, they had a product that could do the job; I was sure I could find something similar in Berlin. She insisted the stains would never come out. Not rust. Excrement. Die Russen. They had ruined the tub forever. There was no way to change her mind.

We have stains in our tub here in Miami. Five years ago, we had to redo the plumbing in the kitchen and for a couple of months we did dishes in the tub. Something metal scraped against the enamel and the stains will not come out without an enamel repair kit from Home Depot. Day in, day out, I shower in that tub. When I notice the stains, I think of my grandmother, who died a few months before Simon was born. She was a nice lady. Marie was her name. She read me all of Grimm's and Andersen's fairy tales during her visits to Peru long ago. Year in, year out, I fail to make the repairs.