Make Your Dissent Sustainable

I’m feeling overwhelmed these days. At a time when my energy and focus is needed most, I am scattered more than ever.

And I’m an expert at self-management! I’ve had over 15 years of practice as a sole-practitioner, a soul-proprietor, an indy, writer, coach and SeeChange president (wink-wink). I am my own boss. I don’t take orders from the man. Every day it’s up to me to set the agenda, construct my day as I see fit, balancing my creative, business and social interests.

But right now, beneath this darkening sky of oppression, I am unsure, thrown-off my game. My vision is blurry.

I awaken each morning and wonder where to turn, how to focus my energy. I am lured right onto social media to check-up on the latest Trumpian drama and trauma, to post and comment and scream at my screen. I refuse to be in the dark. I’ve committed to get out of my liberal arm-chair and into action.  

I’ve marched, I’ve protested, I’ve sent emails, made phone calls, written letters to the editor and gotten on the TV news. While I live in Taxation-without-Representation DC, I’m finding ways to be heard. I co-organized and facilitated What NOW? An Evening of Drinks, Dialogue & Dissent event. Now we have a Facebook page with 150 members sharing, supporting, being dissent. (Please join: https://www.facebook.com/groups/whatnowdc/) I’ve taken non-violent direct action (NVDA) training and I’m committed to getting arrested this year!

Okay, I’m not like some friends who have turned activist PRO overnight!  Who have made this fight for freedom and justice their full-time job. These people are amazing and admirable and I honor and thank them.

But I am doing something.  It may not be enough, it’s never going to be enough. 

And herein lay the problem.

Even as I’m being pulled out of my work routine (and for good reason), devoting some time and effort to the cause, I’m ridiculing myself. 

One of the tricks of the time-energy-management trade I’ve employed for years is My Morning Pages. I’ve been a devout journeler for years, since high-school.  And more recently, in adulthood, I’ve been further encouraged by Julia Cameron (of The Artist’s Way and The Right to Write fame) to practice a daily routine of pouring it out on the page - first thing, first thoughts, each morning – and sometimes at night just before light’s out. 

It’s my way to get centered. It’s like having a status meeting with myself each day – accomplishments, challenges, next steps.

My morning pages include memories that pop-up as I’m brushing my teeth or washing the dishes that can lead to whole chunks or chapters of my memoir-in-progress.

I muse on ideas for my SeeChange clients, a new workshop for creatives, and the importance of finding your incubator within.

My journal pages can degenerate into to-do lists, and that is fine, as long as the writing doesn’t start there.

The idea is to let my brain run free, uninhibited, like a child tearing through a field or finger-painting with reckless abandon.  Unsensored. 

But guess what? 

I’ve been skipping my life-saving writing ritual of late. I’ve been drawn directly into email and social media to get my fix of what’s going down under this new, scary regime.

I have to know – I sometimes participate in actions – sharing posts – commenting, encouraging, raging, emailing or calling officials to get my voice heard. But more often than not I’m simply trying to keep up with what’s going down.

It’s fine, it’s okay, I try not to make myself wrong for it.  I’m buoyed by the blossoming, burgeoning activism among my friends and fellow-citizens. It IS the silver lining.

But the truth is, by 10 or 11 am, after forcing myself off the internet, I’m left scattered, discombobulated, unclear where I’m headed for the day. And worse:  adrenaline-infused and angry.

My creative juices have been sapped.  Sometimes I get up and grab something to eat to fill the directional void and hope I get some clarity as I stand over the counter cutting bananas into my hot cereal.

Like this morning. It’s a gray day.  I’ve just read an article called Trial Balloon for a Coup. Don’t click here if you don’t want to be distracted and so very upset. https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e024990891d5#.5dbwrwf8d

I know, I KNOW, this getting scared and pissed-off is just what they want. Their aim is to wear us down. I know it and I still let it happen.  Because the other side of it is also true:  We need the information to spur us into action.

But right after reading the article and sharing it around, I took a pause. I shutdown Firefox and turned my phone on airplane mode. I opened my AMP 2017 Journal file and paged-down to the bottom and typed: February 1, 2017 at the top.  Then I got writing.  

I wrote all over the place about this feeling of confusion. In the stillness, it got quiet enough to hear my thoughts. Ah-ha, I’m not making the space. Gradually, I could feel my weight settling into the chair, my body getting grounded.  I resisted the vague urge to get up, make another cup of tea or check the heat or grab a snack out of the pantry. 

I wrote this.

This is about sustainability.  How do we participate in this newly blossoming democracy, develop these new activist muscles, effectively?  How do last not just days or weeks but persist for months and years, maybe the rest of our lives?

The Buddhists call it Right Effort.  Not too much, not too little, just right. 

Shoot, I faced this in the Peace Corps, in pueblito Mexico, where the needs were so great, the unknowns so huge, the game of community development so new, the language and culture barrier so high…and most daunting of all, the expectations of myself out of whack.

I survived (and eventually thrived), though: I stood up for the women, learned the language, had some kind of impact. And they had an impact on me.

How do I find that here, now, the space and grace for sustainability? 

First by taking this pause in the regularly-scheduled programming to recognize:  I’m flailing around.  Then by writing this piece admitting to it.  Then by sharing these ideas and inviting input. 

Are others going through this too?

Mala Mujer ~ Bad Woman

With the help of some important little messengers of late, I’m beginning to see that Mexico did not treat me very well.  

“As a single and childless woman, you’re an oddity. They don’t know what to do with you,” said Elizabeth, a new friend and client who’d lived and worked in Mexico for eight years. She regaled me with stories of her alienation, even working with the good guys in reproductive health, even in Mexico City, despite her fluency in Spanish. "Until I got married and had kids. Then, miraculously, I got some respect."

How could I know that the very untethered state that allowed me to wander off for two years to be of service would doom me?

I was a mala mujer down to the core. I lived alone in my apartment on Diaz and I bought wine at the Bodega Aurerra (Mexican Walmart) and I used tampons, which you could only get in boxes of 10, available only from behind the pharmacy counter, on the upper shelf, out of harm’s way, where a sales associate had to retrieve them for you. God knows what manner of shameful behavior was going on behind my closed apartment door.

According to Octavio Paz, the ambassador, poet, and Nobel Prize winner for his renowned book of essays, The Labyrinth of Solitude, “the mala mujer – the ‘bad woman’ – is almost always accompanied by the idea of aggressive activity. She is not passive like the ‘self-denying mother,’ the ‘waiting sweetheart,’ the hermetic idol: she comes and goes, she looks for me and then leaves them. Her extreme mobility…renders her invulnerable. Activity and immodesty unite to petrify her soul.” (Labyrinth)

Wow! I read his piece on Mexican Masks over and over, intrigued, mind-boggled, referring back frequently to my highlights and margin notes that bloodied the pages. But I could not, at the time, see how I how was fighting the unspoken label to curry favor with my counterparts and, in doing so, was losing me. I was too close to it. And if I had seen and acknowledged the kind of discrimination thwarting me at every turn, I would have had to surrender, take a Peace Corps ET (Early Termination), and head back across the border where I belonged.

Perhaps this was why, despite my ambivalence about being home those first weeks and months of my Returned PCV status, a cauldron of profound elation, at moments, was bubbling inside me.

 I remember the first night I ventured up to Mount Pleasant Street for a glass of wine at the local watering hole. Glass of wine. Even the words filled me with a sense of other-worldly appreciation as I stepped in the door as was met with a rush of body warmth and din of merriment. I sat tall in my stool, like a big girl, as the bartender came right over and laid a coaster before me.  I was mesmerized by the lengthy, laminated list of possibilities, Pinot, Merlot, Riojo. 

I couldn’t possibly decide; so Will the bartender recommended the Rhone and gave me a taste before filling my glass to the rim.  It was a late winter in Washington, and every time the door opened, a waft of frigid air swept in and gave me a shiver of exhilaration down to my frozen toes. After two and a half years in a desert, I felt profound thanks for the bone-chilling cold. 

As I sipped my ruby wine, taking in bombardment of English chatter, a waiter suddenly appeared a flatiron pan held high over his head. He lowered it and lit a Bic lighter to it and the pan exploded into flames. The entire establishment erupted in applause; cheese flambé was cause for celebration in Mount Pleasant, USA. My eyes must have been popping out of my head as the waiter set the bubbling halloumi on the bar because the couple next to me smiled and offered me a bite. 

At El Fenix, my local watering hole in Rioverde, other than Rita’s brightness and the merry mariachi music whining over the sound system, a solemnity pervaded, a sense that those of us there, sipping our cervezas and michaladas (only beer-based drinks served), were hiding our sins from the rest of the world, behind the smoke colored glass. We were the scorned ones. And I would not have been welcomed if it hadn’t been for the fact that the owner and bartender was a woman and fast becoming my best friend. 

Now talk about a mala mujer. Rita was not only single and childless, but a cantina owner on top of it, serving up the diablo’s brew, and Dios only knew what else. But she didn’t care what they thought. She’d lived through the death of her father at age 12 and abandonment of her mother at 15. Left to raise her four younger sisters, she crossed the border, worked as a domestic, and sent the money back home. Even then the neighbors in her community cursed the Garcia girls:  You’ll all grow up to be bunch of putas. They did not. They learned how to survive the small town fires. Pueblo pequeno, infierno grande.

Once I found Rita, and she found me, we did not let go. I became her protection – because “Nobody gonna touch me when I have the gringa by my side.” And she became mine, because nobody would or could explain the inner workings of the pueblito and make me feel better for feeling so useless as Rita. Suddenly I felt not so alone.

So can you see I’m only just beginning to understand all this? To survive my time in Mexico I had to stuff the fears down and put on my Mexican mask and carry-on. My ingrained American optimism, in the face of challenges, also served, or it suckered me. 

A year and a half after I left Rioverde my friend Rita risked life and limb to cross over the border again. It took her three months and close to 10,000 dollars, money saved up for El Fenix and her sister’s house-cleaning business in Dallas going into the hands of the narcos, not just dealing in drugs anymore, but much more lucratively, in people.  On her journey she was jailed twice, and the final time held in a motel room with 12 other migrants for weeks until the coyotes decided it was her turn, until her sister was so desperate that she would agree to a doubling of the fee upon drop-off or never see her sister again.

That’s how bad Rioverde was for single women.

As my writing partner, Julie Gabrieli, put it on a recent check-in call, “We’re good at talking about the lipstick, but what about the pig? There’s only so much you can do if you are forced into a system that is fundamentally broken.” 

What IS ‘The Story of Sustainability from South of the Border,’ really?  I’ve been getting closer to the truth, moving away from my initial yearning to make it a story with a happy ending and, thus, justify my 2 years and 3 months’ investment in PCMX at the peak of my career. 

But underneath it all I’m still blaming myself. I was the demanding exijente gringa, pushing for change when they weren’t ready, not honoring the cultural norms, fighting the paternalism ineffectively, and even deeper, bringing my history and baggage of issues with the ‘father’ inappropriately into my Mexico service. "Life is a fight and I am alone."

I don’t want to put lipstick on a pig, and I don’t want to be a whiner. I want to share the truth of the experience:  the good, bad and beautiful. I want to discuss the darkness of the culture and the experience and also the light.  Because there was light.

I stuck it out and met Angelica and the Zama Mamas and we did something together that was pretty extraordinary.  I don’t know if it was sustainable.  I have not been in touch with them.  I’ve been too afraid to find out.  I stuck it out and met Rita and made a friend for life. And I cannot say I wasn’t at least an indirect influence on her decision to cross the border and make a more sustainable and happy life for herself with her sister on this side of the border. I stuck it out and met Professor Fernando Nino and had the opportunity to teach his engineering students about sustainability and innovation and open their eyes to what’s possible.   

But mostly I stuck it out. Now coming on four years since the completion of my service, I may be just be getting glimpses of what it all meant.

The Heart of Memoir

I had the good fortune, last week, to attend a book talk by my memoir hero, Mary Karr. Her first memoir, The Liars’ Club, opened my eyes, back in the 90s, to what’s possible with the form, joy and pain in the unvarnished truth, through the eyes of a child.

I began to devour memoirs back then (Nabokov, McCourt, Welty, Woolf and Wolfe), developing a quiet aspiration to tell my own story someday.

The other night, at Busboy & Poets, amidst a packed house, I devoured the author’s nuggets of wisdom on the craft, a few of them harder than others to swallow, washing them down with sips of mojito.

Mary Karr & Busboys & Poets

First and foremost, she told us, find your voice as a memoirist, the most interesting version of yourself. And yes, she clarified, it’s made-up.

I haven’t found that voice for Mexico yet, though I have heard it in fragments here and there.
Write (even the people you hate) with as much love as you can, said Karr.

For me that means the corrupt mayor, Don Bruno, the paternalistic Peace Corps bosses, the machismo engineers, the gossipy, dismissive Consejo. The whole cast of characters with love?

She also said: From the second you choose one event over another you’re shaping the past’s meaning. It’s a hell of a lot of responsibility.

She went on to say that sometimes you have to write a ton to get past the pages that don’t belong, like I did the first 100 pages of my Mexico book. But that’s nothing. Karr told us she had to lop-off 1200 pages of her memoir, Lit, before it set right. The DELete key is my most important tool.
 
During the Q&A, I forced myself to raise my hand. I stood-up and posed a question into the microphone. I had a million, but the one that won out was about my challenges writing and completing the story of my Peace Corps Service. ‘I got back in 2013,’ I told her. ‘Do I need more distance from the events?’ Here was my chance for some answers. (I mentioned, incidentally, that I had my Kickstarter backers – like an agent collective – waiting for the finished product.)

‘Oh, that’s tough,’ she acknowledged, and graciously thanked me for my service. Then she answered my question with a question:

‘Is there some way in which you were meant to change through the experience and didn’t OR some way you changed and aren’t ready to claim? Explore that.’

‘Yeah, do I have to?’ I grumbled under my breath, feeling my face turn red hot, and sat back down like a kid who’d gotten the answer (or in this case the question) wrong.

Okay, I admit, there’s stickiness there, like dried soda pop on the kitchen floor, and I keep stepping in it. I’m the President of SeeChange, for godsakes. I should have known better, done better, if not in changing Mexico, at least in changing my self.

What pops to mind is an infamous line of my mother’s, worn in to grooves of my record so it keeps repeating: ‘I have great things in mind for my daughter and I don’t want you fucking them up.’ Back then the you was a man. Now it’s universal, anyone (including me) that might get in my way.

Then I think of my wise and concerned friend, J, who tried coaching me through a rough patch in my service when the local board of sustainability to which I was assigned turned on me and the Peace Corps threatened to throw me out. ‘Has it occurred to you,’ J posed over Skype at about my six-month mark in Mexico, ‘that this experience could be doing you more harm than good?’

No, no, no, he didn’t get it. My friend was in development, yes, but a policy wonk, a diplomat, jet-setting around the world to negotiate treaties and wine and dine with the powers that be. On the ground work was a different ball game. He just didn’t get it.

But in the end, had he been right? I had (hidden) aspirations to change the world, at least a small corner of it. I had stuck it out, two years and three months. But what had I accomplished? Returning home to DC, I was back in the same old place, maybe I’d even gone a few giant steps backwards.

I don’t want to tell that tale, a story of disillusionment. But it’s there. Ways I hoped to change and didn’t. Ways I changed and don’t want to see. Can I face them? Can I handle the truth with tenderness? Can I see beyond the parternalismo and machismo and corruption, and my own getting in the way, to recognize that I did do some good, maybe even some ‘great things’?

F. Scott Fitzgerald says the definition of intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing truths simultaneously. When I’m there, I’ll be ready to write. Or perhaps I write to get there.

Mary Karr's new book is called The Art of Memoir and can be found on Amazon or her website http://www.marykarr.com/books.php.

Story Slam ~ Momentos of Home

I got slammed, friends.

I was selected as one of eight contestants to stand before the Busboys and Poets audience and a panel of judges and tell my story of home.

It was a packed house, and many supportive friends had come to cheer me on. My hair was looking pretty good despite the humidity. I wore my colorful Mexican camisa. I had the sound guy play a song by my favorite huapangero, Guillermo Velazquez y los Leones de la Sierra de Xichu, as they announced my name and I danced up to the stage.

But it was not easy to compete with homeboy stories about the ‘Mayor for Life’ and rants about endless, senseless murder in the hood. How about the fellow who opined about Metro? The problem is not lack of funding, he told us, but lack of love.

These stories, so close to home, DC, USA, were told extemporaneously, limbs and lips loose, while I, the gringa, stood still, shielding my eyes from the spotlight, and carefully read my well-edited words from the typed page. Mine was a story of a different home, not found here, in a place, but in fleeting moments, on my journey through Mexico.

Momentos of Home

It’s another day fighting Mexico. On the Vencedor bus with the backed-up bathroom, we all hold our breath anytime someone ventures in. Seven hours traveling in the driving rain from my pueblito in the high plains desert has me squirming in my seat. But I welcome the deluge, like a baptism, after endless months of dust and burning sun. I plug-in my headphones and close my eyes to block out the noise: the crying baby behind me, videos overhead blaring violence in Spanish, the restless niños across the aisle. The guru whispers her wisdom in my ear: ' You’re going to die and I’m going to die and we have these moments together.'

I sink into the seat, lazily crack open my eyes, and notice the little boys are playing with their tongues. I blink and pull-out my ear buds, curious what they are doing.

‘Su len-gua se si-en-ta co-mo un car-a-col,’ the little one says with perfect diction. Your tongue feels like a snail? I grin at their discovery and my comprehension of it.

It’s the older brother’s turn. ‘Ahh-bra,’ he says, ordering his little hermano to open wider, grabbing the tongue and pulling on it. ‘Ewwwe,’ the older boy cries, an exclamatory that requires no translation.
The mother beside them sleeps right through: It’s the only way she gets a break. But my seatmate and I are riveted. Strangers, we bond through our mutual eavesdropping.

For all the alone time I’ve had, the lone gringa in my rural village, divided by language and culture and a subtlety of small-town suspicion, I feel an instant kinship to this señora. The expectation to do or fix, develop or improve that has defined my Peace Corps service is non-existent on this bus. It’s a relief to just be.

The bus pulls-off at a muddy truck stop. There’s a long line at the toilet. I pull papery rectangles from a napkin dispenser and wait my turn. Inside it’s dark. My eyes adjust. I suspend myself over the hole in the ground then flush with a bucket of water I fish from an oil drum.

Outside, the smell of coffee and cinnamon, exhaust and pork fat, hangs on the wet night air. Men in splattered aprons chop barbacoa on a greasy woodblock, piling stringy meat into double layers of tortilla. We stand around the plywood table, spoon guac sauce and chile verde, runny, green and super spicy, onto our tacos. I slosh back into the bus with raindrops on my head and chile on my tongue.
When we land at Terminal Central, my seat mate and I turn to each other and smile. I wonder if we’ll part ways with Mexican cheek kisses, but instead we bid a polite buen vieje and shake, the American way. I watch as the niños, like barrel of monkeys, are pulled through the station by their mama, around the corner, then out of site.

You’re going to die and I’m going to die y tenemos estos momentos conjuntos.

 ~~~

O’Hare Airport is decked out for Independence Day. American flags hang regally from the rafters of the shiny concourses. Embarrassed by the touch of patriotism, I snap a few photos when no one’s looking. It’s Saturday night in Chicago and I’ve got some time to kill, a three-hour delay to DCA. But Mexico’s taught me something about patience.

I find a bar playing the baseball game, and Julio from Jalisco serves me a tall Blue Moon with a bright wedge of lemon. We speak Spanish because now I can, and I feel a little bit proud. He’s proud too: he’s lived in the US for 24 years, he tells me. And I’m living in his country, for the last year, I say, and one more to go. We laugh about this cambio de casas, trading places.

My beer costs 10 US dollars including tip, a lucky Mexican’s daily wage. I take a final precious gulp and head for the baños. I’m awed by the granite countertops and polished marble floor, toilet seats with protectors that rotate to a clean place when you press the button. Whiiir. Endless rolls of toilet-paper and automatic flush. Full-length mirrors for primping, soft peach light that makes you look like a movie star (though I’m playing a raggedy traveler), soap in the dispensers and your choice of hand-blowers or towels for drying.

At the gate the children sit quietly reading books and tapping Ipad screens. Airport TV hums overhead reporting go-local organic markets, heirloom tomatoes and artisan cheeses. The AC purrs, the laptops click, the air hostess smiles, English is spoken.

America makes it all look so easy, smooth, in-control. It’s not fair.

The flight is announced and we line-up by zone. As I file down the jet way I feel both drawn and repelled, straddling two worlds, two homes, the orderly and spontaneous, the haves and have-nots, divided by a thin line that is thickly fortified. And I get to enter. 

Merry Christmas Muse ~ Naughty & Nice

It’s a soggy, warm one, a climate change Christmas in Washington, gray and misty and oh so quiet. No racing cars on Park Road today, no noisy neighbors or clamoring renovation projects; only the sound of a few birds tweeting and crows cawing.

If I pretended, I could convince myself I was in a cabin in the woods, a perfect place to write. Santa’s gift to me is this peace. 

I have a goal, dear supporters, to get this Mexico manuscript sample to you by the end of the year. Just around the corner, eek!

I’ve had a few distractions, but good ones. Your encouragement has fueled a writing habit that’s branched into other territory. I’ve re-discovered a book I started writing back in 1998, and I’ve taken some spare time to breathe new life into it. I’ve been playing with short-form too, some opinion pieces and personal essays, submitting them to publications and inviting the rejections, which often come in the form of silence. But this is part of the writing game I’m playing, down on the field, getting banged around. And I’ve never been happier.

As Steven Pressfield (http://www.stevenpressfield.com), author of The War of Art, says, when you beat Resistance and do The Work, even the blemishes on your face clear-up. (Or did I say that?)

To get to The Work each day, I warm-up with a little free-writing. I got zinging one morning in Ptwon about a holiday event I’d attended the night before.Then, that evening at the public library, after I’d shut-down and packed-up to go home, I discovered a gathering in the periodical room. A monthly meeting of the Writer’s Voice Café, folks were sharing stories of their holidays. I had no holiday stories, so I sat in the back and listened, until they’d run out of readers. I signed their register and slipped out. But half-way down the block I remembered: I did have something.

I ran back, and they welcomed me eagerly, someone to fill the dead air. They helped me plugged-in my computer so I could read from my screen, and they adjusted the goose-neck microphone so I could reach.

Here is what I shared (for adults only), this version a little prettied-up for submission.

Naughty and Nice: The Cup of Generosity Runneth Over in Provincetown

On a recent off-season sojourn in Provincetown, a fingertip of land at the end of the hand at the end of the arm of Cape Cod, after weeks of solitary writing, I happened upon The Kook, a gathering of the townies at Grotto Bar. Underground, with special guests Penny Champayne and Whitney Houston (aka Qya Cristal), sprightly elves danced, baring cheeky cheeks, the club mix thumped, and Santa’s Helpers offered-up tits-for-tots shooters between bountiful bosoms.

I felt like a voyeur on the fringe, DC product that I am, sipping my Dark and Stormy, too timid to dive in to the marshmallow folds. I saw that it took some skill, a team effort, the receiver bending on one knee as the titty teapot tipped forward. Good to the last drop, and sugary sweet, one imbiber reported. All for a good cause.

That’s what kept me out past my bedtime, gave me the excuse to partake in the first place: the cause. Sure, you say. No, honestly, I insist. Though I didn’t realize exactly what I was getting myself into when I got there, that the entire contents of my wallet would be empty by the time I left.

In a place know for the first Pilgrims’ landing, lighthouses and lobster, and fun in the sun with the queens, queers and bears, I saw another side of Ptown. It was the workers in the house, after their shifts, waiters and bartenders, performers and artists, dropping fivers in the collection trough for a pink tit shot, funding Santa wishes taped to the wall, ice skates for 10-year-old Vicky and a Star Wars Lego set for 8-year-old Dan. These children of working class families live in a place where locals have been priced right out of their own market. Amidst a sea of posh seaside DINK retiree cottages, so called ‘tiny houses’ selling for a mil, there’s just one low income housing project; and the waiting list is reportedly a mile long.

The event organizers, a gay couple in this for the 17th ‘straight’ year, were vibrant at the helm. Scott Martino played the potty-mouthed elfin MC; and his partner, a drag performer out of costume in blue jeans and Hawaiian shirt, sang twisted Christmas tunes, thanking Ptown for supporting him through his career, and matching the contents of the collection trough after each round. Their generosity and resourcefulness was like something out of the Peace Corps play book: 'Do what you can with what got where you are.'

These people were doing plenty. As a returned Peace Corps volunteer (Mexico 2010-12), I know how hard it can be to rally the community. As an out-of-towner, I was delighted to participate, stuffing my bills in the till, and a big one after Streisand’s lip-sync of jah-jah-jah-jah-jingle bells. 

Oh what fun! Generosity is alive and well in Provincetown. And those lucky kids will have presents under the tree this Christmas.