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The Fallen Stones: Chasing Butterflies, Discovering Mayan Secrets



The Fallen Stones: Chasing Butterflies, Discovering Mayan Secrets PDF

Author: Diana Marcum

Publisher: Little A

Genres:

Publish Date: March 1, 2022

ISBN-10: 1542022851

Pages: 220

File Type: Epub

Language: English

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Book Preface

As a girl, any time I’d pick a library book, I’d flip through each option, skimming the story, and put the book back on the shelf if it began with a couple who was already together. What was the point of reading anything without a budding romance?

So I’m loath to mention Jack Moody right at the start. But we were already a couple—on the verge of breaking up, should that add any intrigue—when we discovered Belize and the butterfly farm that would come to obsess me.

We often joked that our relationship was like an arranged marriage. We had known each other forever without romantic inclination. He was the divorced, single father of two who lived down the street. A photojournalist at the same paper where I was a writer. Several other Jacks worked there (hence my newsroom habit of using his last name). I found him cranky. He considered me flighty.

Then one summer, after his kids were grown, after we no longer worked at the same paper, we fooled around and fell in love, as the Elvin Bishop song goes. Despite our personality quibbles, we could vouch for the other being basically decent, and anyone who has dated enough knows that’s nothing to scoff at.

It wasn’t until after I’d moved to an island in the middle of the Atlantic that Moody had an epiphany and called to say “I love you.” I found his timing suspicious, considering I was six thousand miles away. He flew from California to the Azores islands twice, and we, being older and attempting to be wiser, negotiated the relationship as if we were two families haggling over the number of goats to be exchanged. Once we settled our negotiations, we congratulated ourselves on our fine matchmaking skills. We liked recalling incidents of prior disinterest. That time I’d been planning to break up with a doctor and Moody had said, “But he’s a catch and he doesn’t even mind the way you laugh.” How I had tried to set Moody up with my single girlfriends, telling them, “He doesn’t say much, but he’s handsome if you like that standard astronaut, baseball-player kind of face from back when those types all looked the same.” It was a sweet and easy-breezy arrangement until I landed a journalism fellowship at Harvard.

For me, the fellowship was a chance to right an ancient wrong. I had not gone to college when deep down I believed I was destined to be a scholar. This was an opportunity to fix that—at Harvard, I might become the kind of person who could readily locate countries on a map, accurately define the waves of feminism, and really get photosynthesis. And just the idea: Harvard. I’d never dreamed they’d let me nose around there.

Moody liked the idea of leaving our California home and spending a year on the East Coast. He wanted to go to baseball games at Fenway Park, eat pizza with a crust that drooped off both sides of his hand, and photograph unfamiliar terrain.

We packed up our two dogs and moved to Cambridge.

But my idea of the fellowship turned out to be a “Martian Taco.” My friend Michael Mayhew (alliteration demands the use of both names) coined this concept back when we were teenagers. He used it to defend his inexplicable love of Jack in the Box tacos, a disgusting concoction at a fast-food chain:

A Martian Taco

Imagine someone described a taco to a Martian who had never actually seen one: a crunchy, folded edible container filled with something soft and greasy and savory, topped with crisp green stuff and dairy-like shreds and a drizzle of sauce.

The Martian then comes back with a Jack in the Box taco, which matches the literal description while bearing no resemblance to an actual taco. The trick, MM said, was to appreciate it, like he did, as its own entity. It was important to remember all interpretations are based on previous experiences.

I was the Martian at Harvard. I had based my expectations on descriptions and interpreted them as someone who had never actually sampled higher education.

The literature for the fellowship had promised intimate conversations with leaders in many fields. I had conjured up shooting the breeze with scientists, mirth-filled riff sessions with the literati. I was very excited by the new close friends I was about to make. I hoped some of them would own beach houses.

In real life, a staff member entered the room and rang a little bell when we were supposed to take our seats in the audience. Should you wish to ask a question of that day’s prestigious guest, you were to introduce yourself with full credentials in the manner of a White House briefing.

Spouses and partners of fellows were known as “affiliates” and strongly encouraged to take part in seminars. It was “our” fellowship year, we were told.

The year began with a two-and-a-half-week, eight-hours-a-day orientation that covered everything from the correct way to wear a bicycle helmet to the history of Harvard’s statuary. It featured testimonials from former fellows.

One of these fellows advised us to make time for something fun. During her fellowship year, she told us, she had not only studied statistics, conflict, and Israel but had also enrolled in a soul-stirring poetry class, learned Croatian just because, and taken advantage of a Harvard discount to rent a scull and row on the river at five o’clock every morning.

“I’m out,” Moody told me that night. “This can be your thing. I’ll find other ways to keep busy. I’ll take the dogs to the park.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “We can’t get intimidated.”

“I’m not intimidated,” Moody said. “No one should learn to speak a Slavic language just for fun. It’s gross. And I’m not a joiner. You’re the one they want. I’ll do my thing. You don’t mind?”

It wasn’t a question. It was a directive.

He went to the park. He took day trips to New Hampshire. I grew ever more unhappy as I clumsily negotiated the treacherous group dynamics.

I would report back, trying to pinpoint why I now had social anxieties.

“The French writer who never talks to me hates me and I don’t know why,” I told him.

I recounted the story to Moody: I was finishing writing my first travel memoir and had been discussing a chapter with a friendly colleague when the French writer joined us and asked, “Did you know I also wrote a book?”

I replied, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. But that’s wonderful! What’s it about?”

“It’s about a journalist who died,” she said, and glared at me.

“Her eyes were like daggers,” I told Moody. “I’d been talking about the chapter where my dog eats all the neighbors’ bread.”

“You’re being paranoid,” Moody said.

“You had to have been there. Which you never are,” I muttered to myself, climbing the stairs to our room while he stayed on the couch.

It snowed. At first, it was magical, leaving icy stars in the eyebrows of George, the shaggy stray we’d brought back from the Azores, and giving Murphy, our lab, an added challenge to his habit of sniffing out food dropped on sidewalks. The snow lured Moody and me out for nighttime walks on silent, glowing streets. Those walks were the first time we had spent much time together since I’d started attending required functions—which was a classification of events that translated to parties without raucous laughter or spontaneity.

It kept snowing. The once-pristine drifts blackened with city soot, their color matching the dingy gray sky.

One afternoon at the fellowship house, a young woman from India and a man who was born and bred to Canadian winters exclaimed from quite different but equally shocked perspectives how cold it was. They were overheard by the curator, who suggested that perhaps they should have done more research before moving . . . to Boston.

Both fellows panicked, worried that they had not sounded suitably grateful for the Harvard Experience. An unsettled tension fell. I wanted to be back in California.

Soon after that, a distinguished journalist told me that I could have been among the best journalists of my time if only—and she stumbled as the unspoken words typed silently out between us—“if only you weren’t you.”

I told Moody that, in the end, it had come out as, “If only you weren’t—you, uh, you—would you like more tea?” But the intention was clear.

“Ha! You coulda been a contender,” he said, showing off his Brando imitation. “Why are you being so insecure?” he asked. “Why didn’t you just ask her what her problem is with you?”

“Why would I want to know something like that?” I exclaimed. “Why aren’t you on my side?”

“I am,” he said. Then he paused. “But I am going to leave for a bit. This weather is getting to me. All of this is getting to me. It’s like you joined a cult. You don’t mind if I go back to California in a couple of weeks and hang with my brother?”

Again, it wasn’t a question. It was a directive.

The next two weeks in our Cambridge rental, we were overly polite, which is our way of being mean to one another. I envy those tempestuous types who battle it out. The conflicts of the mutually emotionally contained are sneaky and draining.

One morning, we made a nice breakfast (or at least as nice as one can make when there are no decent avocados available).

“You can take breakfast with you if you want, since you’re always rushing out the door,” Moody said.

“Like I have any choice,” I said.

“Like you have to go to the coffeehouse? Like you have to go out for drinks with the fellows?” he asked in a mildly curious tone.

“I’m not eating these eggs,” I said evenly. “You make rubbery eggs.”

Well, after that blowup, all bets were off. When he left for his trip, I said, “So, have fun.”

He said, “Take care of yourself. And the dogs.”

Clearly, the relationship was in trouble.

The snow piled higher. It got even colder, although that didn’t seem possible.

On yet another charcoal-hued afternoon, I was studying beneath three blankets and two dogs—Moody doesn’t like the dogs on the bed, but, hey, he wasn’t in our bed. He was in California.

The phone rang. I sighed—the photo on the screen was Moody and me in the Azores, back when we were happy. I almost didn’t pick up. But I worried that, following that impulse, any universal judge of character might deem me petty.

“Hey, there,” I said with false cheer.

“Listen,” he said. “Things have been weird between us. I have an idea. Would you like to go to Belize for winter break?”

“Sure,” I said. “Where is Belize?” (My geographical inadequacies remained.)

I studied up. Belize is a slender strip of a country, with one foot in the Caribbean and one in the Central American jungles. It is bordered to the north by Mexico, to the south and west by Guatemala, and to the east by the Caribbean Sea. English is the official language because it was once British Honduras, making it the only English-speaking country in Central America. It has the world’s second-largest coral reef and a string of cays and white-sand beaches.

It should have been a wonderful vacation. But I am probably not the first to discover that a plane ticket doesn’t fix a relationship. One night in a little village next to the ocean, we were lured off course from a seaside stroll by the sounds of an R&B band. The song brought us to a bar where people danced on a dance floor and danced on the sand, writhing to the music. We sat there. I had my eyes glued to a boisterous group of locals, willing them to make contact. Soon, I started chatting with a woman restaurant owner. Her Canadian Jamaican husband good-naturedly invited me to dance. He was the one keeping the party lively, and he knew how to move. I was midgroove when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Moody storm off down the beach.

When I caught up with him, he yelled, “That was so disrespectful. Dancing with someone else right in front of me!”

For weeks, as I muttered about him leaving me to face “our” fellowship year alone, he’d apparently been stewing. He’d convinced himself that I needed a partner who relished repartee at functions. Someone who liked to do things like . . . dance.

Looking back, I can think, Poor Moody. But at that moment, I was as angry as I have ever been. I despise men who try to control women with their little fits and jealousies.

“What’s wrong with you? Don’t try to tell me what I can and cannot do!” I screamed, no longer envying tempestuous types.

“Maybe you should go find a Diego, a Mikhail, a Pierre who likes to daaaaaaance!” he bellowed, doing some odd imitation of a cha-cha-cha. “Maybe you’d be happier without me. Maybe we shouldn’t be together.”

I didn’t think I was the histrionic type, but apparently I am. I started crying.

“Leave me alone. Don’t follow me,” I hissed and ran down the beach to our sad little shack that he’d booked because he only looks at the photos and doesn’t read 227 comments.

When he came in, I slid to the far side of the bed with my back to him, refusing to speak.

I had been happy living on my own before we got together. He’d lured me into this partnership with his trips to the Azores and his general decency. I’d very slowly started to feel a sense of security. Now—boom, it was done, over.

The next morning, he got up early, went for a drive, and saw a keel-billed toucan. I panicked that my passport was with his and he had it hostage. I was going to need it to catch a plane. I was going back to California.

But I’d sublet my California house and he’d sold his. I didn’t have anywhere to live except Cambridge. Plus, I’d taken leave from my reporting job at the Los Angeles Times. I couldn’t just pop back in and tell them Harvard wasn’t my thing. A person was only allowed to feel gratitude for cold, glittery Harvard. And the dogs! How would I get them back to the West Coast? How could I have let my life get so entwined with another person’s?

Moody came back from his bird-watching jaunt with apologies and breakfast. Too late, I thought. He looked at me closely.

“What’s wrong?” he asked with alarm. “You look funny.”

“You broke my heart,” I said. “How am I supposed to look?”

“But you look weirder than that,” he said.

I was tired—so tired. And strangely warm, and my skin felt raw. Later that day, a rash appeared on my side.

Moody thought I had an infected sand flea bite. The pests had already gnawed my ankles to a red pulp. He insisted we go to a pharmacist.

We slowly walked our bicycles to town, not speaking. The pharmacist looked and said it wasn’t a bite.

She sent us to a doctor, whose one-room office was a few blocks away. The sign on the door said “Dr. D.” accompanied by a picture of a stethoscope forming a smile and a phone number. We called the number, and Dr. D. came to the office. He looked at my side. He told me that I had a disease sometimes called “serpent of fire” in Belize. It is also known as shingles.

Shingles? I might as well have packed slippers for the retirement home. What next? Rickets? Scurvy?

The fellowship didn’t provide health insurance. If I’d gotten sick in the United States, I would have been in dire straits. Luckily, we were in Central America, so I had access to health care. The bill for the medicine and doctor’s visit came to forty dollars.

Over the next days, Moody brought me fresh pineapple juice, cool cloths for my forehead, and paperback novels borrowed from a nicer hotel. Dr. Internet informed me that it could have been worse. I could have suffered neurological damage, I could have lost my sight.

The illness was believed to be brought on by stress, so, obviously, Moody had almost blinded me, although I did give him a few small points for his generous care of the afflicted. I had no choice but to let him be nice to me as I convalesced.

A week later, I was back to normal, other than a deep fatigue and a discolored midriff. We left the shack and arrived at Hickatee Cottages, a modest eco-resort in the Toledo District of Southern Belize, where we’d planned to spend the last few days of our trip. That night, we sat on the veranda of our pretty jungle bungalow listening to the whoop-whoop-whoop of howler monkeys in the distance.

“We need to talk,” Moody said, which, I knew, was never a good sign.

“I was an idiot,” he said. “I have jealousy issues that have nothing to do with us. I’m going to deal with them the second we get home.

“I want us to stay together. I love you. When I’m thinking straight, I know you love me. But we’re going to fight sometimes, and you can’t start divvying up the dogs every time.”

None of those books I used to borrow from the library had a suitor who promised fights.

He nudged my shoulder with his shoulder.

“Will you dance with me? Are you up to it?”

He had a song on his phone, ready to go.

It was Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together”: Loving you whether, whether times are good or bad, happy or sad.


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