Not Friends

How I got there

2011-01-18T20:08:00.000-08:00

Listening to Lucero, thanks to Dave R. long ago and Tom Gabel from Against Me! (Thanks again, Dave) covered this little song called "Wagon Wheel." And my future-roommate had this album called OCMS that he played once or twice in the background on car trips.

And then there was early 2008 and feeling horrible and lonely in a dorm. Matt Dellinger's article in Oxford American contained this passage,

The plan was to drive across the continent and earn their keep busking on the streets, playing for gas money and food. It's the type of ten-thousand-mile joyride every desperate or idealistic band tells itself it will do. Most lack the requisite live-free-or-die instinct or zeal for North American nowheres, but these boys are touched with both. Ketch fondly remembers waking up one early November morning in a hay field near the border of Manitoba and Ontario with frost on his bedroll. They drove in to Winnipeg that day and bought then usual groceries: lunch meat, cheese, white bread, mustard, peanuts, and a jug of water. They played all day and drank free coffee and made a hundred dollars, and a television crew stumbled upon them and put them on the six o'clock news. They spent the night at some college party, where a kid with a beard sang Phil Ochs songs and Ketch kissed a girl who'd seen him on TV. Three months of this, Ketch says, and they never went to bed hungry.

Old Crow Medicine Show started off breaking my heart a little more than comforting me. But maybe that was the dorm talking. Maybe that was the people who were so suffocatingly my age. The ones I was supposed to enjoy the company of were choking and depressing me. The girls who steered me into their group and did nothing but talk shit about everything non-stop. No humor, no angle, just rubbish and vomit and complaining.

I walked to Border's and bought OCMS and Big Iron World at once. Then the message boards. Like every new obsession, I had to seek out those who shared it. I started off as the pip-squeak new fan. I remain it, relatively speaking.

But it started with S.T. messaging me before the Morgantown, WV show. Urging me to get a brew with him before the show. Little then-22-year-old-me being invited with the grown-ups.

And suddenly there were better poems. There was first tastes of moonshine. There was learning about John Prine, Tommy Jarrell, Charlie Poole, Justin Townes Earle. There were always more songs.

J.K. and S.T. played their old time music in 103 degree Richmond weather. They played it on the cold porch in Nashville, Tennessee.

I could say so much more about it, say it better. But somehow one band and one piece of the internet led me to being barefoot in Tennessee for a whole day. A few sips of moonshine, chicken, collard greens, all the perfect cliches you could hope for.

No haystacks yet. But I got this far.

The despair of that dorm, the first time Old Crow clicked...Between then and now is Greyhound and Megabuses, strangers on the buses, sleeping with T. in the Montana meadow, adventures climbing Frisco hills, front row at the Ryman with S.T. in Nashville, riding in the Crow Wagon listening to some good tunes and feeling like yeah, not the best friend, always the kid, but it was okay I was there. I was enough in myself that I could be there. And at the little house we rented in Nashville, S.S. gave me a knowing look and at the end of the night said "It was more than 90 seconds this time." I got my Nashville. I got my New Years.

I may never get to fully thank Willie or Ketch. But I suspect they started something very good here.

I can tell the Not Friends, though. And I believe they'll understand. Which means plenty.

I shoulda told this better but I got a burst of optimism in the middle of trying to avoid my school work. I'll tell more tales later, perhaps.

Virginia man

2010-07-26T17:57:00.000-07:00

Richmond

2010-07-26T14:08:00.000-07:00

I look at pictures and I am puzzled that I was the one behind the camera. It has already become a blur, which means several things -- it was fun, it was fast, and it was foreign.

The boyfriend and I were cozy, so it was hard to leave. And it's already a bit of a stomach drop to leave on a Greyhound at midnight. It got worse in Baltimore at 4 am. That's when I start to doubt my own self. The supposed identity of, at least, someone who loves to travel. But then I transferred to a comfier bus where I got two seats. I fell asleep staring out the window and when I woke up the Virginia sun was on my face.

I arrived at 8:30 in the morning. I asked a cabby where More Street was, since I was deathly in need of coffee (and, for reasons hard to explain, I wanted to feel like I was my own traveler before being fetched by S.T.) I shouldered my big old backpack just like I have always pictured and walked. The buildings were old and lovely. The streets were empty and more industrial than commercial. Some guy walked behind me (which always prickles my neck) and said something. I kept walking somewhat nervously. He just wanted to know if it was hot enough for me.

I sat at the More Street Cafe. I ordered bacon, eggs, coffee and pancakes. The waitress and the woman behind the counter were friendly. I overheard Southern and other accents. On the television the horrible news suggested calling a tip line if I spotted the pictured woman. She apparently grew a lot of weed plants.

S.T. and T.R. (not the president, thankfully) arrived. I felt shy, but not like I was suddenly over my head in anything. Going to visit people you don't know is strange. On the bus, and the days before, it had become some impossible thing. I'm a girl, I can't be trusting strange men to not cut me into little pieces.

But I trust my mama's instincts and to a lesser extent my own. If I learn to separate my anxiety and paranoia from my instincts, I might be okay with this stuff.

Anyway. I was steered into the infamous Old Crow wagon which S.T. bought some years ago. It was a friendly van, worthy of its impressive legacy. Not a creeper van. When I got inside, possibly because I sharing the backseat with Willie Watson's signature, I decided this couldn't have been a bad plan. If I was in the back of a van with a stranger and a man I was meeting for the third time and I didn't feel unsafe, I was powerful.

As the temperature rose to dance in the early triple digits, I was steered around Richmond. We saw Monument Row, with its grandiose General Lee, Washington, and other heroes. We saw the Confederate congress. The grave of Jefferson Davis. S.T. bent down in one graveyard to rip grass off the grave of a fellow (I've lost track of him already) he's fond of. I had a moment of wanting to help, but figured that might have been disrespectful. I do like anybody who will bend down to clean off a grave.

Throughout the day there was weed and chicken. We passed the James River and it was just beautiful. There were railroad track beside it and lovely trees. My camera finger itched. There were Southern trees I couldn't identify, antebellum houses... It all came together and said, this is not home. You, Lucy, are in a foreign place. Is it any wonder I didn't call my mother and boyfriend?

We saw Civil War photos, Confederate currency (always a great way to make it real, at least for me), and -- though I'm conflicted on the conflict - a truly nauseating statue of Lincoln playing around with a little kid. (Rule of thumb, president plus child is always creepy.)

Eventually we went back to S.T.'s place to meet J.K., who plays fiddle while S.T. plays guitar. They busk a lot. I have never found a busker as good as they are. We drank some amazing iced tea and ate our chicken. J.K. and S.T. started playing tunes. Moonshine in a mason jar (yes some things are that perfect) was brought out. I looked at S.T.'s photos and his stuffed mink/weasel perched angrily on the mantel. Other people's homes, particularly those belonging to rather mythic characters, are always interesting to be in. It was a nice, comfortable place. I marveled that I didn't feel more out of place. I was a bit of a tag-a-long, still. Though an officially invited one. Maybe that's the youngest kid syndrome. Both literal, and me feeling like I'm always chasing after folks who know something I don't. Or they're different somehow.

Or just the obvious things in common that the three older folks had with each other cannot be escaped. Which is just fine. T.R. was a darling, however. She's a mom and she was motherly enough to make me feel safe, but was plenty girlfriendy so that I felt in on the adventure.

We went to Maymount a few hours early. We smoked in the party lot and drank more moonshine. It was impossibly hot so even after we started drinking melted cooler ice, it was even better than the shine. S.T. and J.K. played "Ruben's Train" and "Big Sciota" and "Fall on My Knees" until the sweat stung their eyes, then played more. I saw on the grass, talked to T.R. and took a few hundred pictures.

I was just glad to sit there, sweating away with these people. Things feel perfect and all things possible when you're drinking moonshine from a jar in 103 degree Richmond while your friend plays "Sally Anne" for spare bills.

We almost missed the start of Old Crow, as the boys played right through Ben Kweller's opening act. We sneaked through the crowd. The other folks got beers, I stuck with overpriced water. And Old Crow brought their magic.

It was a blistering night in Richmond, my favorite band was sweating and looking and sounding like angels. I was with friends, or at least good folks.

There's always somebody drunk punching you to get a better look at "Wagon Wheel." Your feet always go numb and you might faint from heat. But this is my religion. No fear, everything's possible and not the everyday. That's what Old Crow's given me more than any other musicians so far. And they've already given me poetry and aching for things and history and what's new around the next bend.

And Richmond says, old time still exists. I haven't slept on a haystack yet, but it's possible.

Must really like the bus

2010-06-22T02:56:00.001-07:00

Butte, Montana

The next Greyhound driver is missing in action
And I’m stuck in the Butte station again
Inside you can buy fruit salad for 2.99 or watch television
Outside there is real grass
Where last time I saw loose dogs play tug-o-war with someone’s lost Mountain Dew
Today I sit at the gray picnic tables
Provided as if any of the people I have seen from Pittsburgh to Great Falls
Travel with a full picnic basket and the all the time to settle down in Butte

At the table are mostly Montanans who haven’t met before
A gray-haired, plump woman in pink seems pleased with herself
She tells stories of her hometown somewhere North
That she knows we’re so eager to hear
And the man beside her, a stranger, listens with such a look
That I want to take his photo, or have the hands to capture him in blue pen or black pencil
He is lovely and gray, like he’s worked hard all his life but kept his temper
He has a Styrofoam cup of coffee, that should taste good but certainly doesn’t
A cigarette is either in his left hand, or I’ve put it there afterwards
He’s handsome like a different Lee Harvey Oswald or my dead Grandfather
Who gave three quarters of his life for the pipes of Anaconda Copper
And this man at my table
Could have made pancakes on a Sunday morning for my mother
Could have told my Aunt Julie, as the oldest girl, that he was so sorry
He just couldn’t say those things, you know he loved her, though
Of course he loved her

But this man is less complicated than my mother half-orphaned at 12
He is just the momentary falling in love with a kind face
With listening to a well-meaning, tactless stranger
With two days of bus stations, their people inside
With the moment the sky opens up, somewhere past Wisconsin
The way it peels away the sides and tops and just blossoms
And with my Greyhound bus, God bless the late driver
Who is putting one more moment between home and me

Lisa

2010-05-23T03:27:00.000-07:00

I just found this story about Lisa from last fall in the Daily Iowan.

More than 10 years after the deadly protest, Weaver was the sole correspondent reporting with a live
video-phone feed from China on the Hainan spy-plane incident during the standoff between China and the
United States over the mid-air crash between the nations’ planes. That’s when authorities arrested her on live
television.
But Weaver shrugs it off.
“That’s nothing. That just happens,” she said, noting that she’s been detained in China “lots of times.”

That kind of modesty makes people who wish they were as cool as you just want to give up.

Hell, I don't care if she thought Alese was hot shit or if she never emailed in response to my post card. Chatham is so not the same without fawning over her. And I still curse the fact that I signed up for her International Journalism so late that I missed most of her Tienanmen Square talk. I never got the full story of what she was doing in '89.

Also, why is this yet another story about Lisa that's really blandly written?

But, as the tall and thin
woman said, she didn’t intend to go into broadcast journalism.

What is this, a wanted poster? Tall and thin woman?
What I wouldn't have given for an excuse to pester Lisa outside of class. If she had been here for 20 years since Tienanmen, that plus Chinese Chatham students could have been a killer story. Certainly a little more so than one of our Deans we had for three years is leaving, here's a puff piece.

But somehow all the sub-par writers in the world always get to interview her first.

Lousy Iowa.

A.

2010-05-11T23:15:00.000-07:00

While listening to old Against Me! and after reading old Mitch Clem comics, I was reminded of A., my sister's friend. Was she her roommate, briefly? I think so. This fades, and it wasn't even that long ago.

But it was in the middle of no, no, school. I can't go to college. I want to be some bad-ass. Some Christopher McCandless punk. Some runaway trainhopper. I wanted to live with my underage best friend cousin in some terrible squat in Montana. If there is such a thing. I wanted to not do what I was doing then. I wanted my life to be active and creative and bold. It was none of those things. I was frozen. Entirely terrified. Jealous of everyone who seemed powerful or confident in ways I wanted in myself.

So there's A., from Minnesota. She wore no make-up. Her face all sort of blended together. She was not pretty, but I had to focus to remember that. Her accent was her most prominent aesthetic.

She needed surgery. My mother had told her to call if she needed anything. She hadn't had it yet in the day we hung out. I remember being in Squirrel Hill. We were waiting for my sister for some reason. I seem to remember going to a shoe store, and A and I both being bored very quickly.

So A. just talked and talked. She spent 3 months in Brazil alone. She once hitched a ride through the Northern Midwest with Against Me! Her friends and her built a raft to sail down the Mississippi for a while. She had done it all, and she was tired of it already. She eluded to bad things having maybe happened to her. Maybe threats, or close calls, maybe some real, terrible thing. She was sick of her friends who could only talk about their glory days. She wanted stability after all her adventures. That was the part I ignored.

She was perfect. She was who I wanted to be so desperately. She had no interest in being admired. She was friendly to me for that one day, a good talker, but that was all. She had her surgery, I believe it turned out fine. She went back home to Minnesota. She sings in a sweet, pure old time sort of voice and plays the washtub bass.

A double not friends kind of a poem

2010-01-11T21:39:00.000-08:00

The tale of an internet friend and her intriguing obsession with this fellow, so nice as to be named Rivers twice. Look him up, he was a fascinating character. Not sure how the double not friends -- a girl I've only typed to being obsessed with a long-dead fellow -- came through, but it was certainly poem worthy.

Doctor Rivers and the girl

She’s looking for the doctor,
Here are pieces of him, if you care to look,
Rivers is in the mud, in the graveyards,
In Oxford’s thousand year old halls
Where she reads the great Englishmen.

Rivers lives in the scrawl of his notes and letters,
The whispered love with war poets,
He’s with the headhunters,
All those ticcing, weeping warriors walking between the lines.

She will put the good doctor together and you will know him,
She will fill in his lines, shade his edges, rub away
The smears of indifference, the decades that bury him,
Because his mercy still shines on dark aged corners,
He’s been gone more than a lifetime, so he’ll never leave her.

The young soldiers died to prove his power,
They fell down before Rivers, wrote poems
In praise of how he set their minds quiet,
Then sent them back to their duties in hell --
For the pied piper this time he came
Down so gently, with such regret.

Her mum died on the Doctor’s birthday,
But no there’s no negative transference,
He heals all traces of war neurosis, of shellshock,
He puts her back together, too
As she maps his life, gathers the parchments and fragments,
She does it for love, we must love him, too,

Soft eyes, angel by the bedside,
Father of the Empire’s broken toys.

Letter from Mr. James

2010-01-08T20:18:00.000-08:00

If the house were on fire, I would grab these.

Dear Mormon girls

2010-01-05T08:57:00.001-08:00

I didn't mind you stopping me in the snow, while I listened to Hank Williams sing the blues. You three with your black wool coats and bright colored gloves, holy book in hand. You were impossibly nice and earnest, and you asked what I thought in such a way that I had no answer -- they were leading questions about men and God and no, what you said doesn't mean a thing to me, but I just said I didn't know.

I didn't mind, because while you tried to make something click in my head or soul, while you talked about Joseph Smith and holy lights, and how even good heathens get to the lower levels of heaven, I tried to look in your eyes and figure you out. How'd you get this sincerity and certainty that you have the truth?

Maybe I should have told the truth. I'll look at your pamphlet, sure. I once read a whole book for heathens by Christians -- then I threw it on the floor, because it answered nothing.

I'm not saying there's no God or heaven... It's just you always insult the work of man, and sure we're incomplete. We got issues. But --

If you want moments of clarity, see me reading "Nirvana" by Charles Bukowski in a Borders and almost crying because poetry could be like that.

If you want bravery, check out Christopher Hitchens, so sure that there's nothing after death, but knowing he'll go out with his head up. And if there's a God, Hitchens will be right there giving him a few cross words.

If you want self-sacrifice, how about Raoul Wallenberg's life for 100,000 strangers?

If you want loving your fellow man, how about men being told for months to hate the other, then shaking hands on Christmas and burying their dead?

And if you must have religion, if you must have religion, why not the crowd singing the chorus of "I Hear Them All" on New Years Eve? Sure felt like religion to me.

Come on, it was even in church.

That's what means something. That's a God and a heaven, no matter if there's a God and a heaven, too.

Nashville

2010-01-04T19:47:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on the Tennessee Old Crow Medicine Show New Year's Eve Show. No offensive to anyone, particularly R. and J. who are both highly lovely people.

In the break between Old Crow Medicine Show sets, S.T. grabs my hand in one of those friendly two-hand shakes and says, "I know this was a big deal for you." Sweet of him to say that, but no no, something wasn't right. It wasn't a big deal, because I didn't risk anything.

I thought about it ever since I ran into S.T. (the subject of "Yankee Bones Lament") at the West Virginia Old Crow show in November. He told me to come to Nashville for this epic gathering of Old Crowites, this all night party. I thought about asking friends, I thought about how we'd get there, and I thought a lot about going by myself. I thought about taking the bus, I thought about asking for some floor space from a guy I'd never met. I asked females who were going whether the gentlemen were reputable sorts. And I tried to picture how I'd pull it off. How I'd not get scared if I ended up walking in a "foreign" city in the middle of the night. How I would just be able to figure everything out.

I ended up going with a friend and his friend -- I liked the new girl, liked my old friend, of course. I like a road adventure with people. J. turned on her beloved Johnny Cash and we passed signs that said "Hell is real." I was feeling the South.

But one thing turned to another, and the intriguing folks I wanted to see I just saw for a few minutes. I chickened out and didn't ask things like "hey, can I stick around and hang out with you two?" Or "just in case it's somehow possible, can somebody drive me back to my hotel?" Limping around Nashville for half an hour searching for the rental car, I kept thinking about who I could call, what I could do besides go sleep and then go home to life. But I chickened out.

When R.P. sent me a ticket in the mail and didn't want to be paid for it, I knew I was going no matter what. But I didn't have to risk it, so I didn't. And as perfect happiness as the show was. The Ryman Theater was beautiful. I counted down to midnight with nobody I knew in sight, just Ketch Secor on stage looking sweaty and beautiful. Balloons came down, and I wouldn't have minded a good kiss with my boy back home, but I also was perfectly content by myself for the show.

I met K.K. who was dressed in an elaborate Western shirt and came well supplied with a thick Tennessee accent and a sweet Southern friendliness. R.P. and a slightly whiskied me wandered off to lean against a building, surrounded by neon celebrations. We talked about the hierarchies of the Hank Williamses. For some reason I sang a part of "Political Science" -- "We'll save Australian, don't want hurt no Kangaroos." He said something about taking in the scene, and at the moment I was so happy my face was about to crack. So happy because where the hell was I -- in Nashville in the drunk streets, talking to a stranger.

I met S.S. and R.S. for far too short of a time. They had been so sweet and helpful when I schemed to come to Nashville by myself. S.S. seemed shy, R.S. not so much, but both friendly as hell and seemingly glad to meet me for 30 seconds. And then they all went off to drink beer and God damn I was low and jealous.

Not friends -- none of them less than 11 years older than I. Maybe they have no interest in me. Maybe we got nothing in common besides our undying love for the Old Crow. Likely none of them is my undying soulmate true love best friend or anything like that. But it was just me not being able to hang with the cool kids again. Me not quit pushing hard enough because I was dying to meet new people.

While S.T. and I limped and trailed behind J. and R. on the way to our rental car. When I jumped out of the car later at Broadway, so sick of waiting, and walked into the Barbecue Place by myself. I was pretending, like I pretend on every trip, no matter how much I love who I'm traveling with, that I was by myself. I did it in Guatemala and Belize in the markets, trying to talk. I did it a hundred times in airports, walking ahead of whoever I was with, pretending I was alone with just a backpack.

When I nervously recognized beards and hats and suddenly worried what I was thinking in thinking these people wanted to hang out with little old me. When I wandered down Broadway with R.P. and my friends had disappeared and it might have been a bad idea because I was a little drunk but it wasn't. When S.T. gave me a sip of whatever good whiskey he keeps in his flask, and this time my mama wasn't around to make me hesitate for a second. That was what I wanted this trip to be. But it was just bits and few minutes.

I don't mean to fetishize the South exactly, "Yankee Bones Lament" and its possible-hopefully-not-cliches-not-withstanding. It's just that's it's culture shock and the home of music that raises the hair on my neck and hurts me so well. That the people down there are different and seem darling. That I've spent so much of my life comfortably following older people about and some more of it standing around wishing I could follow them. And it's that my life is what it is, that I'll finish my college, but after that it's go to be different - whether I go South or West, I got to get out of this town. And these people are different and they're disconnected from the rest of my life. They're more signs that the world is nice and big and not the same and oh fuck, I can't even explain it.

It just broke my heart to not drink with them. It broke it strangely sharply.

Not friends pictures

2009-12-12T22:00:00.000-08:00

I chased this guy down Carson Street, lost him, but then took his picture when he doubled back. He's my Not Friend because anybody who provides the joy of a man singing and playing "Wagon Wheel" on the banjo while riding a unicycle is worth recognition.

(Getting back on the unicycle with the banjo is the tricky part.)

More Not Friends poems

2009-12-12T21:53:00.000-08:00

(This is what I look like on a greyhound bus.)

Poems written for my this semester's poetry class. Obviously based on the afore-written-about people, but it was an interesting and weirdly difficult experience to make up some details.

Smoking in Helena

The bus driver in blue, chews his sweet-burning pipe,
Paces under the mute station lights,
His face is long-gone handsome and furrowed with impatience,
He wants to make it to Great Falls before midnight turns too far into tomorrow
Maybe his wife is waiting, maybe just a mealy Motel-Six --
Still, you can’t leave pretty girls with freckles and third babies on the way
In a closed up capital city,
So we’ll all smoke together for a while.

The bus driver makes mean jokes that are funny, too
While Charity, Marissa and I sit on cold black benches
Our hands brush as Charity passes white wisps of cigarettes,
We try not to drop them or burn each other’s fingers,
Trading DNA with strangers, with pregnant Marissa, Charity
Who used to love meth, now with her big brown folder of children’s drawings,
Community saved her life, she tell us as we watch the dark.
And we wait for maybe an hour, suspended like this,
In all atmospheric intimacy, swapping spit, passing poison
We release white puffs onto the black,
There’s nobody else here to breath it in.

The bus driver says we’ve got to go,
We say we’re sorry to leave her like this,
We hope for car lights to take her home,
Marissa says it’s alright, and she holds her cigarette close,
Green sweater taut over her stomach,
Cheap red luggage clustered round her delicate little shoes.

---

Moonshine country

I‘ve never tasted moonshine,
But I’ve curled up on a Greyhound bus, cutting though the Montana dark,
A slight hell-raiser from Great Falls
Named Asia in the seat behind,
Kicked out and heading East to find a boy
Watched out for the moment by a thick, tattooed man called
Spider, heading down South to see his mama
-- And Asia was talking about moonshine,
How she sat a table once drinking glass after glass feeling fine
Then she stood up and fell cold on her face
Then this boy took her home and they spent four days together,
That’s all it took, and she’s New Hampshire-bound, leaving the West
And I hope it’s true love, because I like a bad idea to turn into the meant to be
But I just don’t know if Asia’s country song would end that way or not.

--

(If I'm ever gonna write good poetry again, I may need to take another bus trip to Montana. And this time I will take more photos! I almost entirely dropped the ball on that -- maybe I was sleeping too much?)

Mr. James

2009-11-19T20:34:00.000-08:00

Obviously not my photos. No copyright infringement intended. Also, how's that for handsome in his flyer days?

Waiting to call Mr. James, my stomach was in vicious knots. Once I had told him it was an honor and hung up the phone, I had a high that somebody shouldn’t ever bottle, because there’d be a whole lot more addicts around. I did it. Jesus H. Christ, I just talked to a piece of history.

It began with Mom renting “The Great Escape” from the library when I was 14. We watched one tape, then I had to go to bed, but hated to go, waiting for the conclusion. The movie led to two obsessions – Steve McQueen and POWs. For Steve, I just watched all his movies and vowed to one day stand in his footprints at the Chinese Theatre in LA. For the POWs, I remember waiting anxiously for a battered, used copy of “The Great Escape” by Paul Brickhill to arrive in the mail. I remember a Time-Life style book of POW photos.

One day I found a website about the real history of that mad exercise in nose-thumbing and gentleman and soldier’s duty. I found a few names of men who might still be alive, and then an email with the webmaster and suddenly I had an address. Mr. Bertram Arthur “Jimmy” James of Shropshire, England. Born April 1915, shot down in a Wellington Bomber in 1940. Number 36 (I believe) out of Stalag Luft III’s tunnel “Harry.” Survived the murder of his 50 comrades, sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp with Harry “Wings” Day and others. Tunneled out of there, but somehow managed to avoid being executed again.

Survived to the rest of the war. Survived until January 18 2008. While people at Chatham were crying over Heath Ledger, I was crying over Mr James.

I sent a letter and got a response. Blue ink, formal handwriting, gentleman old British politeness coming through. So glad I sent a letter, would I like a copy of his book? More letters, and finally I asked if I could call him for an interview. He said yes, of course. Call anytime. Like you could just phone up people like that and it was nothing. Like I had every right to pester him to tell the same damn story over again.

I called. And it meant I was a journalist and absolutely nothing on earth could stop me. I called at Dad’s work, and afterwards went out to lunch with his coworkers/my future friends, Chuck and Betsy the war correspondent. It was the sign that maybe I could be a journalist and talk to people like Mr. James and basically life could be God damn perfect.

**************

I came back from three days in Croatia and there was a letter postmarked “WWII Magazine.” Dear Lucy, we are pleased…etc. They had accepted me. I was 15 years old and once again I was a wunderkind. What the hell else was there to conquer in life? The letter said it would be a while before they published it, and now it’s going on seven years. Somehow I’m not sure it will ever happen, but I check every month at Barnes and Noble, just in case.

A couple more years, a couple more letter exchanges. I almost went out there to England – I made tentative plans. Journalist hooks could have been the 60th anniversary of the Great Escape in 2004. An exhibit on it at the Imperial War Museum… I had gotten my moment with Mr. James, but I wanted more. I wanted to meet this man in person. But what did I think I was going to ask him? I had no profound questions for this guy who had spent the last 60 years being known for the worst war in history. For the act of bravery that lead to 50 comrades being killed. Sydney Dowses, a fellow survivor of the Great Escape and the Sachsenhausen escape never wanted to talk about it. One of the only articles about him I saw mentioned how he never even saw the movie. He had no interest in ever doing so.

Still, I know I didn’t ask him anything new. I had no new brilliant question in mind as I made hopeful plans for planes, and trains and where in Ludlow, Shropshire, UK, I would stay. Whether we would have tea and whether suddenly I would be comfortable with this man.

I wanted to be his friend, or his easy pen-pal. I wanted to be special to him and to hold a fascination that was even a tiny percentage of the one he held for me. At the very least I wanted to be the one who thought up the brilliant question. But perhaps there wasn’t one to ask. And maybe I was a novelty at least, because how many 15 year old American girls were writing him?

I waited for him to go those last few years. I googled every year or so to make sure there was no new obituary. He turned 92. His penmanship got shakier in the last two letters. But as much as I made this writing about me again, as much as my experiences with Mr. James were partially about being bad-ass and 15, it’s really about him. He was a character, a piece of history, a brave gentleman flyer of the old school. I just want people like that to stick around forever, because when they’re all gone, there’s nothing left of a whole amazing chuck of humanity. And of history.
***************
I can’t write about him good enough yet. He meant too much for somebody I never even met. The fascination still has a hold of me. Montana; Tobin and I ran down the hill to escape a mountain hailstorm and it was German bullets nipping at our heels – we downed, brave flyers trying to make it over the Alps. In a wide, flat Central Valley California tomato field last summer, Tobin and I lay flat in ditches and then when the timing was perfect, we ran for the barbed wire fence – the border and freedom again.

It’s a little insensitive, it’s juvenile, but it all comes from some desperate need to know what it felt like climbing over mountains, praying to avoid patrols, and trying and trying for years to make it home this time.

******
My interview with Mr. James -- the version I sent to "WWII Magazine."

A not friends poem

2009-11-17T20:38:00.000-08:00

A fellow met at the above Old Crow Medicine Show show in Morgantown, WV on November 14. Not his real name -- it sounds a lot better than this one I made up.

Yankee bones lament

Bill Wildwood up from Pittsylvania county, with a beaten down tri-corner hat.
With metal all down his legs, woven through his bones, and up his shoulders,
For reasons he won’t say in particular, just the weather aches
Him something awful in the Virginia damp.
He hands me whiskey in a flash of silver flask, brown paper hidden,
Some knee-jerk self says reject a stranger’s booze, In West Virginia,
Waiting for hot fiddles and high, lonesome sounds,
But this ancient, boot-stomping love brought us from our separate ways to here…
So I take three good sips, pass it back,
Now he and I, not friends, but easy enough,
Talk the gallant suicide of Pickett’s charge, the perks of a pocket of weed,
The illegality of West Virginia, and how some in some Appalachian
Corners tucked away, they speak the queen’s English still.

And this New Years Eve in Nashville’s gonna be damn near historic!
I should really come on down, everybody’s going to be there,
And I wish to God I was somebody else who knew just how to run
Away to a stranger’s floor in Tennessee, unafraid to ring in the new life,
Dancing all night until the metal in my leg sings sharp and stiff.
I’d drop my gs in a minute, drawl slow and easy,
Not because I tried, but because it would get in my marrow that quick --
Living on big, wide, wooden porches, covered in creeping vines,
Banjos, banjitars, howls of poverty and odes to contentment,
Having the kind of patient soul to make food and flowers --
Things that grow -- out of well-loved, death-defended dirt.

Charity and Marissa

2009-08-05T01:16:00.000-07:00

A bus window sunset somewhere in the non-specific West. At least it's the right journey...

More Montana 2008 bus trip. On the way to Great Falls. Once again, so many of the details I wish I still had were lost.

Sometime late at night, we stopped in Helena. At a closed down for the night bus station, in the most deserted capital city you could ever imagine, our whole bus was waiting for Marissa's relatives to show up. Marissa was blonde, freckled, 23, and pregnant with her third child. We were waiting for her hated Aunt to come and take reluctant custody of her. Marissa was at least happy to be returning to her children, though, after a few days away.

While we waited, Charity, Marissa, an older woman from the endless stop in Butte, and I smoked cigarettes. The older woman smoked her own, the three younger girls and I shared Charity's handrolled, whispy white ones. There is an immediate, pleasing intimacy, or at least honest friendliness, to quick drags and passing and fumbling for the burning, flimsy paper with strangers.

The older woman told us stories, Marissa told us about her horrible Aunt. The bus driver was a strange mixture of funny and humorless. A teenage girl came up to him as he smoked his sweet-smelling pipe beside us and reported that someone was drinking on the bus. He boarded it, only to quickly return to the outside to tell us that it had just been root beer. Then he insulted the girl's intelligence cheerfully and wearily, once she was back on the bus. I don't remember the details of the insult but it was about 50-50 mean to funny.

Minutes passed, and Marissa's Aunt had still not arrived. The busdriver wasn't supposed to leave passengers alone -- especially not pretty, young, pregnant ones, but we couldn't sit there all night. I wondered why Helena didn't seem to have a single resident -- late night or not, you expect to see somebody when you're waiting for more than an hour.

We smoked and waited. I had occasional disturbed pangs that I was smoking with a pregnant girl, but if I hadn't told my first busbuddy, Laura, to leave her abusive boyfriend (I too weakly and vaguely suggested when we parted that "if it doesn't work out, you can do something else!" after wishing her luck) I wasn't going to be nosy just about smoking.

Charity and Marissa had been bus acquaintances for the last few hours --they were already talking like old friends. Charity was coming from somewhere in Northen Montana. She had been babysitting a friend's child for a few days. Now she was eager to get back to her boyfriend in Great Falls -- she borrowed my cell phone twice to text him, because our bus was late and her phone was misbehaving. Charity was beautiful, younger than I, and had had a wild past, like all my bus girls. She was part Native American and she used to do drugs. She admitted this easily, like people usually do on buses, but I still felt strange listening to her talk about a certain rehab center to a wonderfully "yes ma'am, no ma'am" sort of a marine who had had some trouble with that himself. His present buddy had also gotten a DUI and done rehab and boot camp. Thanks to her substance troubles, Charity had done community service at a children's museum, did that explain the massive folder she carried and kept careful eye on? I thought I saw colors and paper peaking out that suggested a childish hand.

By the strange nothingness of the locked-tight bus station, we sat and sat. The driver, gray haired and looking part Native-American and long-gone handsome, still smoked his wonderful pipe. He worried more and more about making it to Great Falls in time, but kept saying he wasn't supposed to leave passengers alone. I wondered why the hell they had decided to close the bus station then. Finally, Marissa convinced the driver it was time for us to go. I can see her still pretty and far too young, dressed in a green sweater, luggage around her feet, sitting on the park bench smoking, stomach sticking out far and full. We all waved and wished her luck, saying we were sorry we had to leave her that way.

I wondered if either of the girls, the busdriver, or the mostly forgotten old woman had seen our hour like I -- sitting on our benches in an empty capital, filling our lungs with poison in the dark, not a loved one or familiar face in sight, feeling like you could wait all night and you wouldn't mind.

Asia

2009-06-15T00:55:00.001-07:00

Butte, Montana bus station.

Last August I bought a bus ticket for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Great Falls, Montana at 9:30 pm -- the bus left at midnight. People hate Greyhound buses, but I spent the next two, dirty, strange days having the time of my life. It was a little dull until I got to Wisconsin and beyond the Midwest, but after that it was West. Quite possibly all I need in life is a dark highway, a bus, and the Carter Family and Old Crow Medicine Show in my ears. Another perk of traveling by bus is the people. You spend huge chunks of time with certain people, and it's so much more than sitting next to someone on an airplane. You get comfortable with them being around, their faces seem familiar, and sometimes you talk. I met a lot of girls about my age on that trip, all with rather down and out tales to tell. I'll start near the end though, because right now I feel like writing about Asia.

I first saw Asia in the Great Falls bus station at seven in the morning. She was crying, and I immediately needed to know her story. I was on my way home after six short days in my favorite place on earth, here was someone else who maybe didn't want to leave. She was fooling with her bags and saying goodbye to a little girl who I first imagined to be her child (just the daughter of a friend, it turned out.) Aunt Molly, Tobin, Chloe and I watched the this skinny, pierced, pretty brunette plead with the man behind the desk. Sorry, your luggage is over sized, you have to pay the fees. Asia cried more, saying she wouldn't have any food if she paid, that was her food money, didn't he get it? She could hardly starve for three days. Before I could formulate any sort of response to this awful little scene, Molly was handing a twenty dollar pill to the girl. Asia was shocked and grateful, she hugged my Aunt, and the cousins and I exchanged quiet looks of pride in our relative.

Our bus was ready to go, I loaded my big back underneath, hugged my relatives a sad goodbye, and struggled under the weight of my overstuffed backpack up the stairs, and to a seat. I chose one beside the girl, who was crying again. As we waited to leave Great Falls, I fought a quiet battle with my shyness. I hate to bother upset people, thereby drawing attention to their tears (something I don't like when I am in the unfortunate position of crying in public), but I wanted to talk. My bag of tiny chocolate bars seemed an icebreaker, so I offered and the girl took some happily. She asked if the woman who had given her the money was my mother, I said my Aunt, and Asia complimented my choice in Aunts.

I was with her for the next many hours, and during this time, Asia turned my first impressions upside down. Like so many other girls I had met on buses, she was a wild child. Born and raised in Great Falls, she drank and partied hard, beat up the 15 year old skank who had taken her man, and raised hell in what sounded like the ultimate small (ish) town fashion. She was also only 18. Her little sister had ratted to their parents about Asia's doings, and now she was booted. So, she was packing her life into a few oversized bags and moving to New Hampshire, where a boy she hoped might be special lived. She had met the boy during his months ago trip to Great Falls -- Yes, yes, Asia was moving across the country to live with a boy she had spent less than a week with. It would make a kick-ass song, but seemed like a pretty bad plan in real life. Yet, I was impressed. Bold, stupid leaps like that just tickle me. I wish I were more like that.

She talked more than I did, and I can't remember everything she said. A lot about her life, a little about mine. I do know that once I was on a Greyhound bus, gliding through the Montana dark, talking to a girl named Asia and a man named Spider about moonshine. I had yet to partake (still haven't), but Asia and Spider were fans. She told a tale about drinking moonshine at a table at some party. She felt fine, she felt fine, then she tried to stand up and just fell flat on her face.

Asia was not the tearful grownup woman, leaving her home to seek her fortune that I thought at first look. She was a silly, wild little girl in many ways. Nobody I would want to be best friends with, a little self-absorbed, but she was a hell of a companion all through the night as we rode to Billings. Not shy in the least, she asked me questions that I can't remember now, and the conversation rolled smoothly for hours.

Spider and Asia left me in Billings, they had a 3 AM bus and I had to clutch my backpack and curl up to sleep until about 8. I actually saw Asia again in Columbus, more than a day later. She told me about her adventures since then and saying goodbye to Spider, who was heading somewhere more Southernly (he was one of two males who had found her interesting in her two days of travel. New Hampshire boy might want to worry a bit, I thought.) I was pleased to see her in Ohio, it was one of those false feelings of friendship, like we had made plans to meet. We stuck together for a few hours, during which Asia acousted a scruffy-looking boy who was traveling all over the USA by bus. My "friend" was absurdly, rudely, hilariously, forward and may have actually asked if he was gay. The boy was more amused than anything else, and I wish I could remember some of the interesting things he said.

I wished Asia the best of luck, and was too shy to ask if I could take her picture. I soundly regret that now. She was an awful, wild little thing, but she made her mark on me, if only for the moonshine talk in the middle of Montana. I even looked for her on myspace (we discussed friending each other), assuming that Asia must not be a common name, but I never found her. Like the rest of my foolish, messed up Greyhound girls, I hope everything worked out for her in her new life. Hell, maybe New Hampshire boy was the one, but I don't know if the country song would end that way or not.

Willie Watson

2009-06-06T10:44:00.000-07:00

This is a brief entry, where I cross over into the land of teenage -- never mind my being 22 --infatuation over a musician. But I assure you that this gentleman qualifies. I aim to write about strangers or acquaintances, people I do not know well, nor can I call up for a chat, but who still mean things to me. If we're talking about strangers who mean something, who better than a musician? I say music breaks my heart and saves my life, I even speak of its effect on my soul, and I don’t feel like I’m using hyperbole in the least. Musicians are the most important strangers in the world, even if their importance is a little easier to explain than the smile of a Guatemalan merchant boy. Yet there is still something inexplicable about my reaction to my most well loved makers of music.

Rob F and I saw Old Crow Medicine Show in a packed, beautiful theater in Homestead, PA. I was in the very front row, and near the end of the show, I lost any remaining reservations, and danced madly in front of hundreds of people. I danced with a tall, brunette stranger and her balding maybe-boyfriend. (They certainly qualify as Not Friends, as do any strangers who have ever grabbed my hand and made me dance with them. Girls especially sometimes do this, and I will love them forever for it.) I knew I wasn’t important to the band, who had a whole audience to see and engage with. But I was in their line of sight, which gave me a cheap and wonderful satisfaction. Mostly, I just wanted to get my point across through awkward stumbling, tapping boots. You people mean the world to me, and you’re making me purely happy right now. That’s what I tried to communicate as I stopped giving a shit about 800 people knowing I couldn’t dance or about the fact that life is hard and we’ll all die someday.

After the show, Rob and I joined the dozen or so people standing by the tape that separated all of us from the band’s tour bus. We were rewarded by Willie Watson, desperately skinny, cigarette tucked in his mouth, clad in a Neil Young shirt, and in need of a good haircut, walking towards us. Gill Landry, the more reserved and laconic guitar and banjo player followed. As I looked at Willie Watson, he looked right at me and gave me a grin that could easily have stopped my heart, and might have for just a moment. (Now, here is the dilemma, the difficulty in describing honestly your utterly teenage infatuation with a musician, when you’re especially in the mood to write because you just finished reading a delicious Christopher Hitchens book. But the truth must be told, and hopefully I can keep my dignity, with a minimum of tedious, unoriginal self-deprecation.)

Ultra-cool, laid-back and lively, Willie Watson interacted with us all, signing ticket stubs and draping his arm around Rob’s lucky shoulder for a photograph. My mind was blank of much of anything to say, not even the obligatory, high-on-life fawning that I do after shows. ("I love you guys!") But all the same, I felt oddly relaxed and I said some already forgotten casual conversation things. Watson’s manner was so ordinary and relaxed, that I imagined it possible to converse with him as if he were a normal person, if only you had something to say. There is no way to describe the importance of this to me without sounding silly and juvenile. I have far too many heroes, musicians, journalists, life-savers, all people whose presence would send me into stammers, or worse and more likely, wordlessness and blankness of mind, as much as I would long to talk to them. This is a horrible attitude for a would-be journalist, who wants to be able to rub elbows with people who intrigue and fascinate. That’s half the point in being a journalist, you get the excuse to ask questions about the people that interest you most. I’ll do that, if only I can get over my fawning. But how can I not fawn, when people fascinate me so? And Willie Watson’s friendliness, and his dangerous grin, cannot undermine the power and the fact that he can sing so well it gives me shivers. That response is all primal, all feeling, and dangerously moving. No wonder I can’t look at anyone who has that ability as anything but far above me. Pure words can have power, but without rhythm and melody, it’s a whole hell of a lot harder to affect people -- And almost impossible to make them dance. I will strive to string words together to the best of my ability, but I don’t know if I’ll ever shake the feeling that musicians have some voodoo that I cannot imitate, but am powerless to resist.

No Amigos (Not Friends in Spanish)

2009-05-30T11:29:00.000-07:00

Two more reports from the Chatham Belize-Guatemala Trip.

Belize

Rachel Martinenz’s grandmother was making tamales, for the educational and gastronomical benefit of the 23 Chatham students. We stood in the not-wilds of the Belize jungle, outside a replica Mayan hut, while Miss Nila, her husband Phillip, and another woman whose name escapes me did the preparation work. The students and Dr Lenz and Dr Wister did token work in assembling the tamales – flattening the soft dough into a tortilla shape, then spreading the red chicken filling, finally trying to wrap the whole mess in a banana leaf without spilling it.

We waited, some of us inside the hut beside the hot fire and tamale smells. Some of us outside, looking at some of the traditional herbs growing in patches around the wooden hut. Miss Nila and the other woman told Amy S, Lauren G, and I about what helped arthritis, and what de-wormed children and what was just wild cilantro (the last one had a smell you couldn’t mistake for anything else.)

While all this went on, a beautiful little girl wandered back and forth amongst the adults, playing, being distracted, picking up leaves and fiddling with the coolers of plates and cups. She spoke only Spanish. She was wearing “little girl shades” of pink and purple, with a design of a cat on her shirt. I desperately wanted to talk to her, because she somehow seemed more foreign than all of the well-spoken women. Small children are frequently aliens, and though I play well with them (having honest enjoyment of bubbles and sidewalk chalk helps) I do not possess that special knack for fake excitement and talking down that works well when trying to communicate with the smaller members of our species. Having a mostly forgotten, never more than basic grasp of Spanish would not help the ease of conversation. It would, however, help bring the experience up to a more notable one.

I never know how to open – I steeled my courage, leaned down but not too far, and asked the little girl, “como se llama?” No hesitation, “Rachel Martinez.” Somehow completely amazed by my ability to make a child who didn’t speak my language understand hers, I then asked, “cuantos anos?” She held up three fingers. I imitated my mother in my head, and said approvingly, “Ahh, tres.” She held up four fingers, “Cuatro?” She nodded. A while later, fellow students said she was three, going on four. Her communication methods were quite savvy. I certainly didn’t remember the Spanish word for almost.

Being completely unable to think of another Spanish phrase or question that a child would know, I wandered back the Mayan hut. There I told Lauren and Amy, with absurd amounts of satisfaction, about my brilliant cross-cultural exchange. It’s hard to describe the moment now, but it felt more real than the circumstances, which were fascinating, but still some Belizean version of Colonial Williamsburg. We stood in the jungle, twenty minutes’ walk from Duplooy’s lodge, huddled inside a Mayan hut as a woman paid to make tamales for us gave us token instructions in folding them. It was damned fun, a thrilling novelty, but it made me ache for some “National Geographic” excuse to document and record real, foreign life in action. My inane little exchange with Rachel Martinez felt like one of the first snatches of communication with someone alien to my life and my American bubble.

Guatemala

I didn’t learn anything about the merchant boy at Tikal, not even his name, but our interaction was a classic Not Friends moment, because it would have felt meaningful at home, if not as exciting.

After some hiking and exploring of the incredible Tikal temples, some Chatham girls and I walked a short ways down the road from our “Jungle Lodge” to the little market. As I had in Belize, while shopping, I quickly slipped away from the rest of the girls. My pockets were light, and besides stocking up on the infamous Guatemalan coffee, I didn’t have very many shopping ambitions. I just wanted to take in the atmosphere, and to do so, I had to ditch my pale compatriots (though since the market was tiny, I ran into one or more of them every two minutes anyway.)

The Guatemalans are often less pushy than the Belizean merchants, but still at every stall the (mostly) women urged me to come in, amiga, look around. We have skirts, shirts, earrings. If they spoke first, they often opened in English. Have to assume the worst about blonde girls in your country. I countered with awful Spanish that got progressively better. I had words filed far back in my mind that I managed to retrieve and dust off. I decided, without consciously thinking about it, that I was going to avoid English as much as I could. Usually, their English was better than my Spanish, but I managed to fake what I didn’t understand reasonably well.

I got to one booth, and a young man approached me. I can’t remember clearly how old he must have been. I think it was hard to tell at the time, but somewhere between 13 and 15. He had a very sweet face to match his manner. Earnestly he began to show me his wares. Inside was a woman who was probably his mother, with a baby tied to her back. I only wanted coffee, and spying big, decorate bags I asked, “cuanto café?” He said 65 (in espanol) quetzals, but after 29, my Spanish numbers got shaky, so in response to my black look, he clarified that it was 65. I asked “de donde?” and was pleased to remember that one. “Antigua” said the boy, and I replied as if I knew the place so well, “Ahh, Antigua!” I somehow specified that I wished to buy the coffee, and then did so. I circled the booths again, seeing nothing I desperately needed, besides beautiful weavings I knew my mother would kill for. Demasiado denero, though all of them well worth the cost.

I came back to the boy’s booth, without thinking about it, and before I knew it, he was in selling mode again. There was something wonderful about his methods, though. In place of flattery, imagined friendliness, or just plain pestering, he was unceasingly, earnestly showing me his wears. He held up a pink striped wrap skirt, and I politely called it pretty. Then he was carefully tying it around my waist in a way that I still can’t figure out how to repeat. The skirt was nice, but I had no real interest in it. I asked how much, and it was a very reasonable 75 quetzals. I admired the skirt on, as it fit well, and then took it off. I said “no se” in exaggerated tones (it seems instinctive to exaggerate your mood, when your grasp of the language is highly shaky; any way to get your intended point across.) To make sure I knew all of what he offered, I suppose, the boy fetched a hooked piece of wood, and began to capture a skirt perched high above on the outside displays. I tried to get across that it wasn’t necessary, but I was of course ignored. This other skirt was red striped. I held them both out and again exaggerated my indecisiveness. Hmmm, “Rojo o…” I couldn’t remember the word for pink. I signified that the boy should tell me his favorite, and after quick deliberation, he specified that the pink was best. I realized there was no way I wasn’t buying a skirt at this point. I certainly hadn’t wanted one at all, though they were nice, I had no desperate need to posses either of them. But I feel briefly in love with this young man selling them, we had our conversation in Spanish and bits of English and pointing, and all of that was worth more than 75 quetzals. He was just trying to sell me something, like anyone else, but like my moment with Rachel Martinez, it felt very real. I felt oddly relaxed, chatting with this boy, and then I waved and said “adios” with my coffee and skirt in hand.

Even if it was all business, it was still talking to a local on their terms, not just looking down and out the window at them, from a pleasantly cooled tour bus. Most of all, it was the simple fact of suddenly developing an inexplicable fondness for a stranger’s face and manner.

Fermin

2009-05-23T13:30:00.000-07:00

From April 29th to May 13, I was in Belize and Guatemala with Chatham University. We traveled with 23 girls, two professors, and our guide, Fermin.

We were going to make our plane, though that was hard to believe. After squeezing past the overturned citrus truck, which was blocking the one-lane Belizean road, we made our way to the airport as fast as a bus can move on that aforementioned, bumpy road. We made arrived with ten minutes to spare. We stood up, backpacks on, all of us ready to sprint, as the bus parked at the front curb. We ran, Fermin going ahead to make sure the plane would actually wait. We checked our bags to the sounds of the fourth "Final boarding call, Belize to Houston."

Standing in the security line, I realized Fermin was making his goodbyes. I gave him the warmest hug possible, with my one free arm. And I felt surprisingly sad. Fermin had been our guide for the whole two weeks in Belize and Guatemala. He met us at the airport and he was there for everything. He fished me out of the MaCal river, he paddled my canoe into Xibalba, as I sat rigid with claustrophobia. And the days passed, and all the girls fell in love with him just a little bit. Good humored, full of endlessly interesting information, unflappable, and doing every single activity, he always had our backs. He watched out to make sure I didn't get heat stroke, and asked if my ankle was okay. He makes you want to have a Fermin in your own life to watch our for you, amuse you, and teach you about everything in sight. I had no brilliant, soul-bearing conversations with Fermin. We have very little in common, and I was too shy to pry too much. He liked us, but there was a sprinkle of reserve in his manner. Yet, he came to the airport just to hug us all goodbye, because that was tradition. And he approved of my Elvis songs, as we piped by iPod through the van speakers, driving through Guatemala. He is not a friend, there is no brilliant connection, but saying goodbye to Fermin felt like saying goodbye to a friend. I felt the familiar pang of saying goodbye to relatives and friends at an airport. That was a surprise after two weeks. I told him thanks for coming to my rescue when the canoe flipped. Then I waved until the security line moved us out of sight.

I pulled off my shoes, and there I was, running ahead of Drs Lenz and Wister, clutching my hiking boots, sprinting through an airport in Belize, running for the gate (the outside gate. Yes, the classic stairs from the runway was the way to board.) I was glad we made the plane. I wouldn't have minded if we hadn't. Belize is hard to leave behind, even if I wanted to go home sometimes. As Dr Lenz said to Lauren and I, we were now in a cult. Fermin is a part of that. As I said before, you just want Fermin to always be around, coloring the most insignificant moments in life and making them bloom into the unforgettable.

Lisa

2009-04-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a dream that Lisa and I were going to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes besides an old well (the latter detail clearly being the result of watching "Lawrence of Arabia" last night.) I was very excited we are going to do this, in a drinking bourbon in Chuck Kinder's house kind of a way. Meaning, I wanted to do it for the the thrill of drinking and smoking with my former war correspondent academic adviser. In my dream, she understood this, and thought it was silly, but we were going to do it anyhow. Sadly, I think we never got there. My subconscious got sidetracked by alcohol selection and other dream things.

The point of this is, I was sad when I woke up and remembered that Lisa is leaving very soon. She is a true Not Friend. I have known here for two years and taken four classes from her. That's one class every semester I have been at school. I have what they call a friend crush on her. I am platonically smitten with her. She fascinates me in every way, including her perfect little outfits. The kind I strike to have, especially once I have a career. Usually fairly functional, not too girly, good boots, accented with scarves and earrings. Something you could go to a fine dinner or a war in.

I first appreciated Lisa as a character (the idea of her, tall, thin, scarves, Tienanmen Square) and a bad-ass, for all the things she's done. Later, I began to realize what a wonderful person she is, but the latter might not have happened without the former. and It began with her war stories in International Journalism -- Tienanmen Square (for THE events, yes), Jakarta, Beijing, Afghanistan, Iraq... I asked questions, she was annoyingly modest about her interesting life. Eventually she turned into someone whose sense of humor I really liked. And me, with all my school difficulties, all my near-dropping out, and my late, nervous registration, she never lost patience. She never even was 11 feet tall like my old adviser. She just helped me and consoled me and encouraged me. Her personality made me feel better, and the fact of her being on campus tended to make the place seem just a little more exciting -- especially on those days when it feels like routine might just kill me.

Lisa, a true Not Friend, though I wish it were different. She means more to me than any old person on the street. But our relationship does not justify keeping in touch, and her awkwardness makes it unlikely. She has no idea how important she has been to me, and how she has helped. And she'll never quite get it.

All I can do is say, half-joking, that when I am a famous correspondent for Atlantic Monthly in 7 or 15 years, Lisa you must have a drink with me.

Gentleman

2009-04-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

I was walking down the Cloud Factory road in Oakland. It was about five o'clock and busy. I had a low-level kind of a bad day, the kind that isn't bad for any tangible reason, but you there is nothing special in the whole world to spark your interest. I walked down the road, trying not to get run over by the cars. I walked in the dirt and the trash, beside the pokeberries and general weeds. I love that road, because the Cloud Factory is literary and eye-catching and beautiful in its way. And I love that the railroad tracks are right there. Sometimes there are extra cars for coal and I go look at them and think about how I like trains. There's the romantic itch about trains that may not be based in any real world...

I walked by all of this and I felt a little better. Then a boy passed me on a bike. He was skinny and maybe vaguely punkish, but friendly in his dress. I actually can't picture him now, and this happened just a few weeks ago. Nevertheless, I glanced at him, and he looked at me and nodded firmly and politely. It was a sincere nod, but also a business-like, required nod, a gentlemanly nod at a lady as you both travel a muddy, dangerous industrial road. And I felt much better after that nod.

Montana Wheat

2009-04-22T15:57:00.000-07:00

I feel like I should rewrite this specifically for the blog, but in the meantime, Matt the Farmer is a definite Not Friend. I met him on a trip to Montana with my parents in Summer '07.

2/20/08
We sit high above the endless wheat and Matt wants to know why I think it’s so strange that he’s only 22.

The combine we ride in is a handsome, intimidating machine. It seems to move light and easy, but the long line of teeth that separate and pick up the good parts of the wheat suggest a monster I don’t want to mess with. It might belong to any old farm you pass by, but in the inside cabin where Mom and I squeeze together beside Matt, there is AC and a computer that tells him about bushels and acres.

I don’t know how big this field is, but the road that brought us here is a distant strip. We are lost in wheat and I am delighted. The moment my parents and I stepped out of the farmer’s truck, and found ourselves sweltering under miles of no shade, I felt deliciously out of place. There is nothing more American than farmers but that doesn’t mean the workings of them are anything familiar to me.

Dad rides with the old man, asking questions about how this operation works. The old man looks exactly like an ancient farmer should, stout, strong and white-haired -- even dressed in overalls.

Matt, who might be good-looking somewhere under his ball-cap and sunglasses isn’t quite laconic, but fittingly is no chatterbox. Dependable Mom starts him off with questions about working here at Montana Wheat, and eventually we move to true conversation. There’s something about this man’s North-Western accent that is desperately charming. He seems to enjoy my attempts at witty remark, and I realize with satisfaction that he is one of those people whose laughter is rewarding to cause. He seems charmingly surprised by some of the things I say – so usual that I can’t remember what it was now, but I am glad the novelty here is mutual

I am going to be in love with him for the next few days, like I was with the friendly redheaded girl in the century-old soda-shop in Lewistown. These are people I will never see again and I wish there was something to make us smitten with one another, or at least friends. But our interactions are nothing more than passing interest, not based on any deep connection.

I still halfway regret being here with my parents, squished childishly close to my mother. I wish I was some lone traveler who met Matt in a more spontaneous fashion than my dad’s journalistic curiosity about the wheat business. I wish I was more beautiful and much tougher – like the West.

Everything sounds so easy as Matt controls this monstrous, graceful machine hungrily gathering wheat. He works 15 hours a day at the peak of harvest season. He graduated from college in something scientific and fit for farming. And then there’s his land a few miles from here. He has his own thousand acres for his own crops. The promise of way out West says that a man has to own land. Matt thinks nothing of it, and is politely amused by my incredulousness at his youth.

I’m here with my parents, three days drive from the East. We spend our evenings exhausted from staying indoors, zoned out in front of movies. I’ve come on this family vacation and I am two years younger than Matt. It hurts me to sit in this wheat field and feel so firmly tied to loving apron strings. Because a decade ago, I assumed I would be brilliant, bold, and brave. The moment I turned 18, I would kiss my attachments goodbye, and head in some new direction towards my own life.

What now?

2008-01-12T18:37:00.000-08:00

Well, now I no longer need this blog for school, so what next? I don't feel like abandoning it, and God knows, all the cool kids had addresses that involve blogspot.

I'll keep it, then we'll see if it serves a purpose.

Monologue

2007-12-03T00:10:00.000-08:00

The worst is the manager. On the first day he called me “Red” in that way they always do. I told him that that was my brother’s nickname, not mine. My name is Kay, I said. He laughed, and touched me shoulders, and neck. He was looking at my backside. I like them feisty, he said. That’s why Reds are my favorite. I didn’t say a word, because I had only just started. I can’t just quit a job, you understand. I can’t quit when I have just began. I may not have a lot of ambition, but I am stubborn as anything.

Maybe the manager was right about redheads, I don’t know. I only know myself.

I am wretched at this job, I really am. I can’t type fast enough for them. My shorthand is good enough, but I type slow and steady, and that isn’t any good. I can be popular and funny, I can be the life of a party. I don’t know if I can work. I have to work. I am one of the older children, so I have to work now, instead of go to school. Does anybody care about orphans at 22? I’m too old to be an Oliver Twist, object of pity. But I am too young for it to be fair.
Some of the men at the store don’t leer. Maybe red head and freckles isn’t their type. They don’t leer, but they talk down. They talk slowly to me, explaining what I did wrong in the worst sort of kind voices. I think, just because I don’t type fast enough for your liking, doesn’t mean I am slow in the head. I know I am smart. I did well at Pitt in my three years. I laughed, and flirted with boys plenty. Just like before. But I learned a lot of things, interesting things, maybe useful things. If I knew what I wanted to do with them.
I didn’t want to be a teacher or a nurse. I don’t particularly want to be a secretary, but I am good at shorthand. That might be my only money-making talent. I guess you could say I don’t have any ambition. No specific goal for my life. I went to college because father wanted me to. It would have been ungrateful to refuse. Lord knows what else I would have done. Stayed in Welland, I suppose. Maybe gotten a job like this one
I might marry and have children, of course. Never men like these, though. The men at the store don’t deserve me. Even if they cared to have me, they wouldn’t deserve me. I am not a child or a pinup. It’s been a long time since I felt like a human woman. At Pitt and back in Welland, the boys could be pals. We would laugh and flirt, but they could look me in the face.

The worst is the manager. Today he called me Red in that way the always do. Then he patted my backside. I wanted to slap him, but I can’t quite. It’s only been a few weeks. I may not have ambition, but I am stubborn as anything.

Child soldiers

2007-12-02T19:14:00.000-08:00

I haven’t the slightest idea what should be done about child soldiers. Clearly, the worst of it is going on in Africa, and sometimes it seems like the more affluent places try to help Africa, the less it works. Not for any reason except for the assholes in charge, who until they are out of the way, will always be standing between the people who need help. And these are the people who take money and food for the intended recipients. People’s charity is wasted, and they just end up helping the last people they wish they were helping.

Why is this problem important? It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t a sociopath that if 250,000 children are being used as cannon fodder in twenty different countries, it’s a problem. We’re supposed to care when we hear about horrible things happening to people, especially children. It’s in our nature. However, it’s a long way from caring to doing something about it. I haven’t done anything about it, because I don’t know what to do, and because my silly life is a great distraction.

It feels vaguely pertinent that I was watching “Oliver!” earlier today. That’s a shiny version of a book about horrible poverty, and the Charles Dickens grimness is lightened by musical numbers. Still, the theme is one little boy, innocent (to say nothing of the other boys in Fagin’s gang, who have already lost their innocence) who is being pulled back and forth and being exploited by adults. Some of whom were exploited in their own lives, when they were young.
Regardless of political difference and argument, people should feel that there is something fearfully wrong with that. With Dickens days it was poverty, and with these current conflicts in Africa, it’s poverty and warfare. But most of all it’s people who can justify the horrors that they do to other people – smaller, weaker people, who should be protected by them, or at the very least, left alone and in peace.

Grandma Kay

2007-10-24T14:12:00.000-07:00

Because my Grandma Kay will be 90 years old on December 26, because she’s feisty and sarcastic, and because she majored in Journalism at Pitt but was unable to complete her degree, I think I have the misguided notion of her as a would-be Martha Gellhorn, stifled by family tragedy and obligations. Part of this comes from my bewilderment as to how she ever married my Grandpa Bill. They seem to be polar opposites, and he’d be a hell of a difficult man to get along with. I haven’t the slightest idea about how they really feel towards one another.

For years I had the feeling that Grandma could have done more, and the stupid unenlightened world hindered her. That world, of women being firmly pointed towards the kitchen, is not an illusion. Grandma Kay tells me that she saw it. She remembers her teachers in school, and it dawns on her that they were men, or they were spinster women. Her three years at Pitt, she was taught my only male professors. She tells me this now, and she sounds surprised. She was born in 1917, on another planet, in my mind, but maybe she’s used to my world now. The idea that women had to be single to teach school, would that have been a bizarre thought, if she had stopped to think about it then? Or did something change in her mind, in all the decades since then?
Grandma says there were expectations in the world. Poor women, especially, they knew where they would end up. “Behind a counter at Woolworth’s”, then married, then children. Other women might be nurses, teachers, or…housewives. Of course they could always be housewives.

I don’t know what my Great Grandmother would have expected her daughter Kay to be. She died when Grandma was 12, and I try not to ask too many questions. Terrible age to lose a mother, but I somehow doubt there’s a good age.
As Grandma tells it, her father and older brother decided that she would go to college. She would live with her brother in Pittsburgh. Even a widower with eight children could manage that.
She doesn’t know what she would have done if they hadn’t said she was going to college. She would have stayed in Welland, Ontario and gotten a job, she supposes. It would have been ungrateful to refuse college, certainly. In highschool she was concerned with having fun, boys, popularity, what the other girls were doing… All the things that sound shallow and petty to me now. But they take on a wonderful and impossible quality of story, when I realize that they took place in the middle of the 1930s. Ten million lifetimes away from everything I know, or so it seems to me.

Once when Grandma was married and had most, or all of her children, she took her only daughter to the doctor. The doctor and my Grandma went to Pitt together. He told her, “I always thought you were going to end up being a journalist. How come you never pursued that?” “Because I didn’t have anything to say.” Now she tells me that she still thinks that’s true. He thought she had a talent in that area that she never thought she did.

Grandma did work, for decades of her life. She worked in that utterly stereotypical expected career of women of long ago. She was a secretary. She took a 23 year break between her time as a working woman, but she was always a secretary or an assistant of sorts. The ultimate female career, in the time of almost no female careers. She was not the stifled Martha Gellhorn that I sometimes imagine. But she tells me that she had no ambitions for a career, and maybe that’s true. Still, it was decided for her. Her brother and father sent her to college, and the death of her father made it necessary for her to drop out. The world implied that she could be a teacher, a nurse, a secretary or a housewife. The women who did something else were notable, strange exceptions to this rule.

My Grandma Kay has no notion of what she would have done, if she hadn’t been pushed along by outside forces.

Tony Buba films

2007-09-18T20:58:00.000-07:00

1- Activist art is, by definition, people attempting to call attention to problems, injustices, or issues that they see as not getting enough attention. This could be any of a myriad of problems, and the methods for drawing attention to it vary as well. A community film festival, posters, graffiti, anything as long as it's outside of popular media. Some people might pay, or get consent to display their art, whereas graffiti artists general risk prosecution for their work.

The Guerrilla Girls ran an ad on New York buses, condemning the lack of female artists, but the excess of portrayals of nude women in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The anarcho-punk band collective, Crass, left anti-consumerist, anti war, and feminist graffiti stencils all over the London underground in the 70s and 80s.

2- By using film, instead of any of the other mediums he could have chosen, Tony Buba can show the whole world that is Braddock. Or at least, he can show people, real people, speaking, and looking, and as they are, with their real opinions and voices. If he had painted a picture, or even taken one, it could not have contained so much real information. A painting is an impression of one thing, that can often be interpreted in varied ways. Even a photo is just a tiny hint of real life, a moment. Whereas with a film about Braddock, it Buba wants to record real people's words with the whole city as a backdrop, there is no better medium for the task.

3- Buba's film is powerful because of its simplicity. He is not making any grand statements himself, and he is not trying to move you at all costs. He is just showing real Braddock and real Braddock people talking about the town. He shows some of the grim squalor around, and it's very effective, but he lets the people and the place speak for themselves. The film is like any number of documentaries, except that many of them tend to have a lot of narration, trying to sum up the whole of events in a few neat words. Buba is relying soley on the people and the place to tell their own story.

4- The "everyday" IS the story in Buba's films. Braddock is one of many towns that had a boom, and are now a shell of their former selves. The story Buda is telling is of the town, and its people. The various people and their stories, the words they use to tell their stories, and the town, often looking shabby and grim in the back round, are almost everything the viewer needs to get the point. A minimum of context, Braddock was something, and now it's this, is all that is needed to effective.

A town like Braddock is a piece of a bigger story; the downfall of towns after the industry that kept that booming is gone. But it also is its own story, which is what's less likely to be told, the story of one, small, getting smaller all the time, and will maybe never be as important to the world as it once was town. The people in it do not tend to be subjects of films, especially simply for living in Braddock.

It's not as if nobody but Buba would have ever thought to do this film, but it is a less likely subject. Buba obviously cared enough to make sure it got told.

5- If I were to make a film about a location, I think I would do something smaller than a whole town. In my family there are three buildings, old and important to us. I would do a film for my family about my family home, our cottage by Lake Erie, and my Grandmother's cabin in Montana. They are 70, 60, and 90 year old respectively. One side of my family or another has owned them for much of their existence, but not for all of it.

These buildings have had so many different people living and staying in them. People have died in them. Many happy vacations took place in them.

I would record their reasons for being built, why they were built the way they were, what they were used for, how they came into my family's ownership, and any of the strange tales I could find related to them. And all of this in relation to the bigger picture of the world outside -- what was happening at this time.

At this point, most of the living subjects to interview would be family members, but to get their stories and thoughts on film would be worthy for posterity. It would be for sake and theirs, really.

The history and myth of my home and hill

2007-09-11T14:28:00.000-07:00

On the top of a hill in the South Hills, 20 miles outside of Pittsburgh, PA, there is house that has been there longer than any of the others that line the gravel driveway. It is a big, brown, old, house with redwood siding. It doesn’t sit neat and square and small like some houses. It spreads its self out across the top of the hill, rectangles and ovals and squares stuck together.
The most conspicuous room has the terribly original moniker of “The Front Room.” It could also be called the First Room, or the Hunting Lodge, if my family had been more poetic, and perhaps more descriptive in its naming. The Front Room was built two years before the rest of the house in 1939, and it doesn’t entirely match. It rather looks as if the rest of the house grew out of it, like a plant growing from a seed. It is an oval shaped room, the floor covered in red tiles, and except for two doors and the stone fireplace, it is all windows. They are great big, old windows, very tall and hard to open. When people first see the room at night, they find the almost 360 degrees of windows ominous. Anything could be waiting out there, surrounding the house. But in daytime it is light and bright, with views of mostly just the woods and deer and turkeys.

The Front Room never made sense to me as a hunting lodge. The idea of a hunting lodge suggests something along the lines of my Grandmother’s Montana mountain cabin, but probably even more rugged. It should be made of logs with almost nothing decorative or pretty. Only practical things, and plenty of fur and skin and heads mounted on the wall. And I see it as dark and small inside, with a minimum of windows and glass. The Front Room has strong stones, and the windows are tougher than they look, but all that glass suggests decoration and architecture as art, instead of practicality and Your Hunting Convenience.

Mister William Hess, formerly of Germany, built our house on the hill. He probably oversaw the construction by contractors he knew and trusted, since he was a contractor for buildings in downtown Pittsbugh. Hess and his wife Corine once lived on Hazel Drive in Mount Lebanon . Not much is known about them, so it’s hard to say why they moved from there to the farm country. Maybe Hess just loved his deer hunting so much that he decided to make a life of it. It was definitely farm life—if more comfortable farm life than most. The barn now decrepit and used only for tools and old furniture, had chickens in it. There was a pump house to bring water from a spring up towards the house. The woods were smaller then, and there must have been amazing, almost panoramic view of the countryside. It’s the second or third highest spot in the county.

The truth of why the the Hesses moved, and what they did has become mostly lost. What is in its place in my mind, and in my family’s is mostly myth -- hearsay of the eccentric. When my father bought the house in 1988 he tried to find out the history of his new home and its builders. The Hesses died in the early 70s with no children to take over. Most of their belongings,( though not the house), were left to a nurse who took care of couple in their last days. That, and the family who lived in the house between the Hesses and us, meant that there were no documents or belongings in the house to help my father learn the history he wanted.
But he wanted to know more, my father; he is that type of person. So he found the Nurse, and called her on the phone. And she told him in enthusiastic, sure, tones about secret tunnels, buried gold, German paratroopers meeting in the barn, and an FBI raid on the house—Mr Hess had too may powerful radios for their liking. After all, he was a German during WWII.
Now, some of this was obviously impossible. There was no secret tunnel under the dinner table that led to the barn. The idea that Nazi paratroopers landed without anyone in history except this nurse knowing about it seems very implausible. But the gold. Oh, the gold.

I don’t remember the first time I heard about the hidden gold as a child. Sometimes it was just a lot of money, but usually it was very definitely gold. Regardless, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know and love the story. A legend of buried treasure in my own house, and it was probably buried by Nazis. Yes, I was sure as a child that the Hesses had been Nazis. The house was finished in the undeniably historically significant year of 1939. And it was built by a German man. Just because I have a German last name myself doesn’t mean I was immune to the wonderfully baseless accusations—near certainty, actually—that if Hess was German in WWII, he must have been a Nazi.

My friends were (and continue to be) delighted by the idea of buried Nazi Gold. Sometimes we even went searching for it. There were two key places in the house, both situated in and around the Front Room. The first was the small, rectangular, metal door on the outside of the house. The door said Coal on it and was forever sealed shut. A small, sealed, shut door—who could resist it? Of course the gold was there. And if it wasn’t there, it was under the odd tile. The Front Room floor is covered in plain red tile—except for one tile that is yellow with a design. Completely different from the other tiles, nothing matching at all, we all knew this was as important as the sealed coal shuttle. There wasn’t much to do about the tile as child, we could hardly dig up the floor, but we sometimes tried to open the coal shuttle; little, weak and with poor tools, we never got it open.

A mythic house—whose history my family only knows the bare facts of. I think it was a house to get away in, though. Hess loved his hunting life, maybe, and that was someplace to get to, but what if he was also getting away from something? The politics of the time are significant, as well as mythic. The Hesses moved in permanently in 1939. Europe was going to hell, and the biggest, baddest, aggressors were Hess’s home country. Maybe Mt Lebanon got awfully small after that, there might have been looks, whispers, paranoia. Who could blame a man for wanting to get away from that? To get to a place where he could breathe easy and hunt all the deer he wanted. And if you wanted to stay away from your few neighbors --- just farmers, too—you could do that.

Or that’s bullshit. My Grandmother always said that everyone knew nice Germans during the war – they were much less alien and strange than the Japanese. Nobody would hate you just for your German blood. Perhaps Hess only wanted to breathe easy and live the farm life, with politics not an issue.

Nevertheless, my childhood in the mythic, old place was certainly shaped by its stories and history. The woods were taller, and there were more houses in sight, by the time my parents moved us in o Christmas Eve, 1988. But it was still the country, and it was still a near polar opposite from the life we were leaving in Las Angeles. There was still a barn, and 12 acres of our own. This was the country, and I grew up a country girl. Even if compared to real country folk, we were just pretending, we were the real thing when it came to the suburbanite we knew. I knew which wild plants were edible, and I ran around with no shoes on.
We were famous, too. We were the family with the unique house. People were delighted and bewildered when they saw our hill. And it was often a novelty to me, too -- especially when I could see it through their eyes. The eyes of people who were usually from the suburbs, their homes built in the last 20 years (certainly not by Nazis), and their green lawns were a half acre at most. They had no myths of buried treasure, but we did. That made us more exotic even beyond our isolation.

Though I can hear cars from the hilltop, and I can see far more houses than I once could through the trees, it still has space and freedom and breathing room. If my parents never decide to sell the place, they will always have 12 acres of space. No matter if the rest of the county builds its self up to a futuristic metropolis, we will still have 12 acres of space to stop time and progress – if we choose that.

And dammit, I still believe we will find that gold someday. It’s there somewhere, hidden, buried, but there. Just like Hess’s loyalty to the fatherland in 1939.

Thing

2007-09-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

I am incredulous when people tell me that they no longer have their beloved childhood toys. Or even that they're packed away in a plastic bag, back of a closet, not seen for years at a time.

Perhaps I am overly sentimental, but I'm not in all ways. As far as childhood goes, I guess I am. Because I had a hell of a childhood. My childhood can probably beat up your childhood.

I'll tell you about Tobin. He's in my dorm room and everything, even if I don't technically "need" a beat up doll in my daily life.

I named toy Tobin in homage of my cousin of same name, when I was six, and he was two years younger. Human Tobin hates his namesake now, which amuses me. I think in the last few years, I finally became as well acquainted with human Tobin, as inanimate Tobin.

Toy Tobin and I have spent more time together in all, though. I took him everywhere for years of my childhood. But never did I ever play that he was my baby, and I was his mother. Tobin may be a baby, but he was much too busy attempting to survive Alaskan plane crashes, or trying to flee from political troubles in Europe, to ever be helpless. That was the kind of weird thing I played as a child.I had no interest in the "domestic", so it may seem strange that my favorite toy was a baby doll at all.

Most beloved objects come from other people. They were Grandma's, or Chuck gave it to me before he moved, or the British man I interviewed signed his book... Some item that proved or reminded me of something or someone important. Tobin is like all of my childhood, and its amazing games of pretend, condensed.

I bought Tobin in a thrift store when I was six years old. I remember the store, in Canonsburg, PA, but not why we were there that day. I was searching through an old baby crib filled with stuffed animals and dolls. And then I saw this baby doll, someone had already owned him no doubt, because his cloth body wasn't perfectly white. He was dressed in little checked shorts. Something about his plastic smile was terribly pleasing to me. I needed to have this doll, I knew that.

I asked my mother permission to buy him, and she gave it, though I can't picture that. I do remember approaching the counter, feeling apprehensive, as if maybe he would be out of my price range. The lady at the counter said Tobin cost a quarter, and I find it funny now that I must have been expecting a hefty price for this wonderful find. I was so relieved that I could afford him after all, with my very own money.

So for a quarter a childhood companion was bought. We spent years together, and Tobin got more beat up through our adventures. He's got marks on his cloth body where rips have been sewn up, and my dog as a puppy managed to chew off half his nose. He is the quintessential battered and beloved childhood toy, but he sits on my dorm room bed now, because his being anywhere else wouldn't ever occur to me.

Home

2007-09-09T17:11:00.001-07:00

I'm home for the weekend, in theory. I think I still live here, 40 minutes from Chatham.

Someday I won't live here at all. It will either be only my beloved childhood home, where I sleep in my old bedroom on visits to my parents, or someone else will live here and I won't be able to come back at my own leisure. My house on the hill will most likely become someone else' home someday. But it will always be mine. Nineteen years of my life and what made me were spent here.

My parents have put the house on the market a few times. They price it high, so only someone who needs it will buy it, but whoever that may be, they have not come around yet. The 12 acres it sits on might appeal to a person with big pockets, who wants maybe their own hilltop, and a view of a corn field.

No matter who lives here in ten or twenty years, I wish the house its self would remain. But maybe it won't, and it certainly won't forever. Homes are torn down and changed it ways you could never imagine -- even in your lifetime.

My parents I visited Smelter Hill in Great Falls, Montana this summer. Where my mother spent her first 12 years-- the only ones with her father. For a while the EPA wouldn't even let you stand on the hill. Years of copper smelting put poison in the soil.

And all the houses are gone, my mother's as well. But she can still find her front steps. She thought she would live there forever, but she went on to live in New York, Chigaco, San Francisco, LA, and that hill in Pennsylvania. Some may not have been her home, some were just where she lived. Now my home is her home. Someday she will probably find another.

I will live in Alaska, Montana, Budapest, Zagreb. Maybe I will make homes there, and lives. But there is a first home, a childhood home, that never leaves your head or, dare I say it, your heart. No matter what happens to the land and the house, it shaped you in ways you will never fully be able to figure out.

****************************************************************

Smelter Hill

The dead hill is covered in yellow grass
Three archaeologists approach,
surprised that the entry is no longer barred
One lived when people lived, and was sent away
The archaeologists are here to see the remains
The lost city of anywhere’s walls cut the hill forever
Rusted metal fences like 60 year old spider webs
Protect the children long gone from the steep
The archaeologist sits down on her home steps
Down from the road that isn’t a road again
They lead to her great big house, seven siblings
That isn’t a house again. Yellow grass
The hill is covered in scrub trees
The walls of the lost city remain
The archaeologist climbs the hillside
Hand over foot up the dead waterwall
Such luxury this city had, her feet would once be wet
The dust kicked up in 100 degrees
It might still be in the soil, gray
There must be something in the soil
The reason for the tower and the men
The workers put the poison, in the soil
It’s ever so quiet, as the ruins fade
-This is where the wild cats lived
And this is where the children played
The pool was here, maybe here again
We weren’t supposed to go this way
But I did, the fort was here, and here again
Jimmy Cross lived here, keep off the father’s grass
The Christmas lights were red and green-
The rivers stays the same way past
As the ruins fade into the yellow grass
Scrub trees; they took away the shade
The archaeologist digs through the house that isn’t again
One curve of pipe the rain meant to fall through
Only a museum piece for the benefit of life continued
The archaeologist sits on her front steps
Take them down to hurry inside
To the house that isn’t a house again
And grows more alike the hill everyday
As the yellow grass grows taller and weaker
Higher and more like chaff
Scrub trees, the sun hammers down blows

Place

2007-09-09T16:45:00.000-07:00

Using a blue pen, and real, honest to God paper, I am trying to think of words to write about "place", as I sit in the back of a run down van. With my friend Cassie driving us to West Virginia.

I'm smiling because ten-thousand movies will never ruin the perfect feeling here. The feeling that comes out of driving, and highway-worthy music playing good and loud.

I think of place, and I think of wanderlust. Especially at this given moment.

I have spent years, it started to get extra itchy when I was nine, wanting to be in some other place than where I was-- almost always home. London, San Francisco, Montana, Alaska, Croatia, Hungary, Nepal, Australia, Japan, Bosnia...someplace else I had either never been, or hadn't been enough. Where I was would only feel right, if I had the freedom to leave it and see the rest of the world.

It used to be only the locations themselves that called to me. I didn't like the journey. I would be stuck in the back of the car, no control over any part of the situation, maybe carsick, and no doubt waiting with the beautiful frustrating impatient of a child who really, really, really, can't wait to get there.

But then my friends grew up and got cars, and my whole life got a little freer.

Then one 3:30 AM night for the first time, my friend Bob said "pick a direction." And we drove and tried to get lost. We didn't get home until 8:30 in the morning, after finding a perfect, real, diner at exactly 6 am.

We did that many times, always in the early morning, when the world was ours.

And once we took a real road trip. We drove for three weeks from Pennsylvania, down through New Mexico, up through California, across to Montana, and home. Three weeks of seeing different highway, and different places.

Maybe the best part was the very first day, only minutes from home. It was a beautiful April day, and I couldn't stop grinning, because we weren't going to turn around in five hours, or five days. We had three weeks of different places to see, and three weeks of highway and music.

Bob and I ended up spending more time on our way somewhere than in any place in particular. But that was beautiful, the feeling of movement, different places every minute, passing by.

I still spend half my life longing for Budapest, London, Zagreb, and the Alaskan wilderness. But maybe more important now is my gut need to be on my way to someplace. Not there yet, just on the way, watching the road names and the highway signs change.