Zanj
The doorways of the old buildings in Mount Vernon, my neighborhood in Baltimore, are adorned with wreaths and some of the stairways glitter with white lights in the winter dusk. We are in the holiday season, during that festive interim in the United States between Thanksgiving and Christmas, with Hanukkah falling somewhere in the middle this year. Our work, or what we have managed of it, for the year is winding down and, along with it, what we have been able to put forward towards our loves and dreams this year, goals aspired to, some reached and some not. Mount Vernon’s Washington Monument, a white marble doric column that was completed here in 1829, predating the more famous one on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. by several decades, has been strung with lights and saw a rousing fireworks display and community party last week.
But, of course, all is not well in the world. Israel’s sledgehammer assault on Gaza, which followed the genocidal pogrom Hamas launched against Israel’s Jews on 7 October, continues to collectively punish a helpless, trapped civilian population for the crimes of a relative few. The killing of civilians by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his Russian backers continues in Syria. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, terrorists supported by the ethno-supremacist dictatorship in neighboring Rwanda still go about their bloody business as a president who stole his first election now prepares to steal his second one. More than 1,000 political prisoners - including many of the country’s foremost musicians, artists and writers - remain either jailed in the gulag of the Cuban regime, or in exile abroad. In my beloved old neighborhood of Viejo San Juan, the dumb beasts at The National Park Service are making plans to cull the beloved community cats that frolic around the grounds of Castillo San Felipe del Morro, ignoring the wishes of the community and likely breaking Puerto Rican law. And in Ayiti Cherie, the population remains at the mercy of remorseless armed groups, the progeny of the nation’s irresponsible political and economic actors. In a season where one of the world’s major religions marks the arrival of what they believe to be God’s messenger in the form of a baby - the most defenseless and vulnerable entity imaginable - there seems to be precious little mercy or tenderness to go around.
Personally, I greet this holiday season deep into rounds of chemotherapy, necessitated thanks to an unwelcome visitor that showed up in my life a couple of months ago, and my first intensive experience in 50 years of the United States healthcare apparatus - calling such a seemingly random patchwork of services, companies and for-profit entities a “system” would be a stretch - has been maddening exhausting and eye-opening. My struggle to get any coverage at all finally succeeded after several tries in getting health care under Medicaid, a U.S. government program that provides health insurance for people like myself with limited income and resources, but which is nevertheless administered by a series of intermediary private entities which sometimes overlap and sometimes compete and whose gaps in coverage give no assurance that needed treatment at any one place or time will be covered.
I was literally in the recovery room from a minor surgical procedure connected to my illness in early November when I was informed, without warning, that my first round of chemo scheduled for that day had been canceled and that it was unclear if I would be able to get any treatment at all through my hospital because of insurance payment issues. Summoning skills honed by my years as a journalist, I tracked down and wrote directly to one of the hospital’s directors, pleading my case and, through the grace of God, found a sympathetic ear that was able to wrench the blockage standing in the way of treatment forward and it was commenced the following week, though it made for a greatly stressful couple of days. Needless to say, the particular set of skills I happened to have to do all of that are not those generally available to everyone who encounters such obstacles, and I shudder to think of those who fall through the cracks. In 2015, thanks to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) crafted by the Barack Obama administration, I was able to purchase government-subsidized health insurance and obtain health coverage for the first time in a decade - I remember how wonderful that felt standing in my apartment in Miami at the time - but, clearly, in the near-decade since, the kind of nihilistic individualism that taints too many aspects of American life has effectively kept any sort of concern for the general welfare and actual health of our citizens from interfering too heavily in the profit-and-nothing-but model. How many irreplaceable lives have we lost because of that?
I could talk of all of this but, honestly, these days I try to fill my hours with thoughts of gratitude. Gratitude that I was in a position to get treatment at all (too many in my former home of Puerto Rico, for example, are not so lucky, one of many aspects of life there we should all want to change). Gratitude that, thus far, I seem to be tolerating the chemo quite well, with its main side effect being that I am a bit tired from time to time, though I still manage to be up at my desk and writing every day at 7am. Gratitude to be surrounded by my animals and the love of so many friends who have appeared from so many corners of the world near and far to make sure I don’t have to march through these uncertain and quite frankly sometimes scary times alone. And I’ve been thinking about the little blessings and the little moments of grace that come into one’s life at unexpected times, and those who act as their messengers. In the pantheon of Haitian vodou, one might call them zanj (angels), a word I have always loved both for its phonetic aspect (have I mentioned what a beautiful language Haitian Creole is lately?) and its spiritual attributes.
After my first catastrophic attempt to get treatment, I arrived back in Baltimore from Philadelphia, exhausted and despairing on the train and grabbed a taxi at the station, too tired to make the brisk 20 minute walk back to my apartment. The cab driver an African-American guy of about my age, and I began chatting testily with one another and I actually thought we were going to argue, but then somehow it came out that his mother was also being treated for cancer and that he was always on the phone with insurance companies who at one point were trying to make her pay for her own medication, “$7,000 a month,” as he said. I shared my own experience that day and in the course of the brief ride we realized that maybe we had more in commission than we thought at first. When we arrived at my door he simply said “This is on the house,” a gesture of simple human generosity that had the effect of turning a day that had before been an example of human incompetence and seeming unconcern into something else entirely for me.
Figures like the cab driver - whose name was Mike, as it happens, and whose cab I would unexpectedly hail again a few weeks later - have popped up now and again through my life at the most unusual times. One evening walking through my neighborhood in Miami Beach more than a decade ago following the premature death of my mother, I found myself talking to a weathered old hippie who related to me the story of how he lost his wife and young child to a drunken driver in Oregon years before and, though it had taken him years, he had finally made peace with it,
“My generation used to have a saying, life sucks and then you die,” he told me, a snow white beard under a straw hat shielding him from the setting sun. “But it’s not so bad.” Though his observation may sound trite in the cold light of 2023, it was an affirmation I badly needed to hear in 2012.
During a particularly lonely episode of one of my sojourns living in Paris, before I really spoke French very well, I remember a trio I met at my local shebeen in my neighborhood of Château Rouge, a little dive called Au Gamin de Paris, a guy from Brittany and a girl from Normandy and an older Mexican artist, who invited me back to their flat to cook me dinner (something any Parisian will tell you is not really done off-the-bat) and introduced me to calvados for the first time, a creation of community that at the time meant a lot. When I was running for my life amid gunfire covering a demonstration in Petit-Goâve in Haiti in November 2002, I remember the person - who I did not know and who I never saw again - who pulled some high-school students and I off the street and inside her humble house to hide from the braying pro-government mob that was hunting us. I remember the local pastor whose help enabled me to work in ways and in places in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri region that I would never have been able to without him. So many angles, appearing without warning.
During a roving, searching life I have realized that, not just during this season but always, there really is no past or future but there is simply a continuum of experience, good and bad, that makes us all who are, and the moments when bondye interceded to help us are as present with us today as they were when they happened. I’m reminded of the words of Joe Zawinul, the Austrian jazz keyboardist and composer and co-founder of the band Weather Report, talking about the group's captivating one-time bass player Jaco Pastorius, himself a son of Pennsylvania like me and, for my money, one of the best bassists of all time
A person like that is never really gone. Time as we know it is not really time. There's only one time. And when you speak about someone and you think about someone in the moment now, then that's what it is now, not that it was almost 20 years ago but that it is now. and these people will never die...And one should never cry that it's over with, one should be happy that it was.
And so it is. You can either curse the raw deal you feel that fate has dealt you or you can be grateful for the unexpected angels sent your way and each moment of grace that comes with them. And, hopefully, if you have lived your life well, you will be the angel crossing the paths of others, too.
May you all be closing out this year joyfully.