Am off to Auckland New Zealand for ten days or so to visit my mother, who is thinking of selling up her house and moving into some kind of retirement village. So I won't be blogging for a couple of weeks. In fact I'll be off line completely, which comes as a kind of relief.
My feelings about the trip are mixed: once baby comes I wont have a chance to spend time alone with my mother and in my old Auckland hangouts, so this visit is kind of valedictory, or feels like that. And it will be summer in Auckland, and I am looking to walking down to the Howick beaches for swims. My mother's garden will be glorious: it is large, private and on the cliffface directly fronting the Harbour. It is a pity that the child-to-come will be unlikely ever to enjoy it. On the other hand I have so much work here, and the trip itself is so uncomfortable, expecially given that now United don't fly the LAX-Auckland route I can't upgrade to business class. And I will miss being around Lisa whose pregnancy I am enjoying: it's a process of discovery.
Yesterday two emails from colleague-friends about my impending fatherhood. One from a man who has himself had a baby in a second marriage at roughly my age. Here it is: "CONGRATULATIONS!!!!! It is a fantastic gift from the gods, these creatures, early or late in one's life." And the other, from a friend who has also recently married a younger woman but whose son in his first marriage turned out to be schizophrenic (this became clear in the boy's adolescence) saying, painfully, that he couldn't face parenthood again. A very sad message, which cast a gloom over the day.
Watched the second installment of the PBS doco 'Country Boys' last night. It's about a couple of young men approaching their high-school graduation, who live in Appalachian East Kentucky, not far from where Lisa and I visited a couple of months ago. (They live near Prestonburg, we visited just north of Harlan and south of Boonesville). Mixed feelings about this: at one level, these kids and their families and society are being presented as freaks to the liberal bourgeois audience who mainly watch PBS. And the show's narrative mode: reality-TV presentation of everyday life, coupled with retrospective voice-over by the boys and some of those close to them creates weird frictions and gaps: it is clear that we are not getting the whole story—which becomes very clear, for instance, when one of the boys (Chris) is almost expelled from school for supposedly supplying a girl with speed, an incident to whose background we are given no access at all. It comes as a shock, or did to me. This means that in the end we don't actually know the boy's characters, what they are really like, for all the hours that they're on screen. Yet the program does present the material and social setting of the boys' lives with real vividness and force, and in such a way that may remind us viewers that poverty curtails opportunity at all kinds of levels, a message which has political charge, hopefully.