root system

It’s 11:00pm and Delilah’s hosting Friday Nite Girls’ Night on 102.9FM. Kenyon and I are driving south on Highway 35, singing along at the top of our lungs to Shania Twain and Uncle Kracker and all the other old-school love song dedications. It’s been a long night since we left the Hill at six, thinking we’d be back in an hour and a half to get groceries, make dinner and watch a few episodes of Sex and the City.

Instead, we’d gotten lost multiple times in and around the Twin Cities, driven Josh to the edge of madness with our burning hunger, and ended up pulling into a gas station on Eustis Street to ask for directions back to 35W, heading south.

“No way,” I breathed, craning my neck to peer down the hill into the darkness. “I used to live right down that hill. This is my ‘hood. This is where I lived when I was little.” I was struck by the sudden familiarity of the landscape, struck by how everything came flooding back despite all the years that have passed. More than years, some incredibly thorny and breathtaking landscapes, situations, and people have filled the space between then and now. And I felt incredibly lucky to be driving through my old ‘hood with my roommate, all of those odds and ends stashed away in the same old brain. The past and the present looked each other in the eyes, startled. Blinked, and walked on, shaking their heads. For a split second, Then and Now slipped over each other and became the same moment, a solar eclipse in the vast universe of one single and very short life, and I didn’t even have time to put on my sunglasses and look right at it before it was gone.

***

Kenyon and I throw ourselves into the booth at Perkins with two immense sighs of relief. We examine the menu with full recognition of the magnitude of the decision it presents, laughing at how different this eleven o’clock is from the one we’d imagined.

Where else could we be? At 7:30 we could have been at Econofoods, planning our meals for the rest of the weekend. Or we could have been on the road, three hours outside Chicago, on our way to Columbus for the weekend. At ten we could have been cuddled up in our room, watching a chick flick, full and satisfied and ready for an early bedtime. Or we could have been looking at the Chicago city lights, looking for our turnoff to Olivia’s aunt’s house where we would stay the night.

In my first econ class this semester, Bruce, my professor, explained the concept of opportunity costs, which basically refers to the value of whatever you could be doing or spending your money instead of what you’re doing or spending your money on. I remember laughing out loud, incredulous, trying to fathom what my life would be if I thought about opportunity costs at every step. Unhappy, I thought. I would be so unhappy if I spent all my time thinking about what else I could be doing with my time instead. What a ridiculous idea, I thought.

So Kenyon and I look at each other and laugh, knowing full well that this Perkins late-night breakfast tastes so much better than it would have three hours earlier.

***

I come from “the Dirty.” That’s what they call it, Rug City of old whose two-family immigrant houses sag sadly along all the main roads and whose rich history now resides in the gaping broken windows of old factories and churches built for laborers who spoke different languages. When I came to St. Olaf, a month passed before I got used to going to Target, Econofoods and Walgreen’s instead of Walmart, Price Chopper and Eckerd. One year later, Amsterdam built a Walgreen’s on the corner of the old Sanford Farms, and an old friend wrote me, “The new Walgreen’s finally opened, but I haven’t been yet.” Target finally filled the empty plaza vacated by K-Mart years before. Eckerd got bought out by Rite Aid and Memorial Hospital got bought out by St. Mary’s, which brought the Dirty’s grand total to five McDonald’ses, five Stewart’ses, three Rite Aids, and two St. Mary’ses. Two projects and six Catholic churches and three Lutheran churches. Population 18,000. A town of monopolistic competition, Bruce explains.

I come from the Dirty. My friends there would surprise my friends here. They are really smart and really cynical, and a bunch of them go to the same schools and still hang out with each other when they all carpool back to town. That landscape, in darkness or daylight, is impressed on the inside of my eyelids and on the soles of my bare feet. In the Dirty, we hang out in the parking lots of churches that nobody goes to anymore, or in school playgrounds, or pitch a tent in the backyard and invite boys over. In the Dirty, we only talk about our dreams when it’s dark and we can’t see each other’s faces. We all want to leave, but we all come back eventually.

***

I come from Limbo. I was born a mere half-hour drive from the place where you can straddle the bulging belt of the Earth. I was born the product of two mountains, in a leftover cloud of volcanic ash. My mother grew up in the mountain range that contains the mountain whose peak is the farthest from sea level, and my father grew up in the mountain range that contains the mountain whose peak is the farthest from the center of the Earth. They met and fell in love a mere half-hour drive from where I am now.

My dad had a conversation with someone once about missionary kids who go back to the United States for college. She said that MKs from Latin America seemed to have more violent identity crises than those from Asia. My dad figured that had something to do with the fact that Asian students he knows at Woodstock tend to submit to authority rather than question it. The North Americans don’t question authority because as long as nobody questions the system, each individual person can go on living. But in Ecuador, he said, lucha is the word of choice. Fight. They question authority. They rebel against governments and create new ones, rebel against the Church and create liberation theology, because their security lies in their communities, and communities take a lot of work to stay functional.

Ecuador and its neighbors and its neighbors’ neighbors have been fighting since the beginning of time. The Incas took over all the smaller scattered tribes and created a golden empire. Then the Spanish arrived to baptize and kill the Incas, and after a few more centuries the Latin American Spanish rebelled against the Spanish Spanish. Ecuador gained independence two hundred years ago, and since then a series of governments, militaries and presidents has ruled the country. Quito’s streets bear the names of important dates in the various fights for independence: 10 de Agosto, 6 de Diciembre, 9 de Septiembre, 12 de Octubre.

That lucha has seeped up through my roots and into my xylems and phyla. That lucha is in my blood and my bones and in the sometimes stubborn set of my lips. You know the one. And that lucha has been luchando with the quiet unquestioning majesty of that other mountain range, the majesty that waits for cows who stop to eat in the middle of crossing the street and talks to their neighbor when they’re stuck in a traffic jam. That lucha has beef with waiting for that Ecclesiastical Time to come along. And that accommodating spirit, though it doesn’t really have beef with anything, waits for the lucha to come along and then waits for it to go on its way. Meanwhile it sips its tea, sharing gossip and watching the sun come up over the latest landslide and the smoggy winterline.

I finally accommodated the lucha and found a peace with Limbo. I found my sea legs so that I can straddle the Earth and I can straddle mountain peaks and faultlines and tides.

***

Kenyon and I burrow into the pile of blankets and pillows on top of our mattresses, newly heaved onto the floor next to each other in front of the TV, still shaking our heads at the course of the night. We talk about the things we are struggling with, we talk about our luchas; and we talk about our contentednesses, and sometimes they are the same. Sometimes they come to tears or wrinkled brows and sometimes they come to laughter, but in the comfortable quiet that follows we both agree that we are inextricably tangled up together forever. We both agree that this is beautiful, and that someday we will be able to face anything that comes because we are two-in-one. Our families are photo negatives of each other and our life perspectives are like two puzzle pieces next to each other in the big picture. We have learned, but never stop learning, how to get from negative to photograph, and how to get from a pile of puzzle pieces to a completed puzzle. We are not perfect, but we are comfortable in Limbo.

***

In the Amazon jungle there grows a tree whose roots are walls. The base is buttressed, with great triangles of thin wood extending far down into the ground and feeding the tree. The locals slice off the roots and bend them into huge bowls for mixing and cooking.

In the Amazon jungle there grows a tree whose roots send a resonant boom several kilometers into the jungle when you hit them with your machete. If you are lost in the jungle, someone will follow the boom and find you.

If I were a tree, my roots would extend clear out of the jungle and hug the Earth. My base is buttressed but torn, because passersby have sliced off my roots to make huge bowls for mixing and cooking ideas and relationships. If you are lost in the jungle, you can just find the little tips of my roots buried somewhere in your soul and follow them until you find me, standing somewhere in the middle of the jungle, smiling and wiggling my toes in the mud, content to wait until you get here.