ten days of dreams: a history

*Adapted from "Birth of the Titans," a poem by Fake Andrew (Jim Cahalan, James Doyle, Timothy Otte and Clara Swanson)


I was conceived in an earthquake, mud sliding around that first
dodge colt, perched on some precarious peak.

Every time my parents went to Ecuador, they got pregnant.

I was conceived in a village in the Andes Mountains, a village plundered and ploughed by an oil company, in the aftermath of a devastating 1987 earthquake. I was conceived in a house riddled by bullet holes, whose walls shuddered through the violent domestic conflicts next door. Jungle cats prowled outside at night and my parents had the only car in the whole village. If anyone needed to leave the village, my parents had to take them. It was a tiny little car that needed to be pushed over the peak half the time, with pregnant ladies in the front seat and the backseat full of laborers looking for work or visiting their families.

I was born the product of two mountains,
In a leftover cloud of volcanic ash.

My mother was born in California, but her parents were missionaries in the tiny town of Jumla, Nepal, nestled back into the Himalaya Mountains. (Later, I took baths in a pot on the stove in that same tiny town.) The Himalayas boast the highest mountain above sea level, a mountain that has sent many challengers to their deaths. My father was born and raised in the Andes Mountains, in the country of the mountain whose peak is farthest from the center of the Earth. They met at Bethel College in Minnesota, USA, and took walks around the lake while they sorted out their cultural differences and identity crises and questions about their parents’ religions. They spent their college years with the other confused, disillusioned missionary kids, who gathered at a cabin on a lake to give sermons in made-up languages, which someone else would translate into another made-up language.

I was born in Quito’s Hospital Metropolitano while overhead Pichincha spat clouds of ash out onto the city. As my dad says, I took my time coming. As my aunt Judy says, “Kathy was having way too good of a time to stop and have a baby right then.” I was born five days late.

Then, where the sea crashed, pulverized
Tons of quartz, I hid my eyes beneath
My own personal sunny-colored honey color,
Blew like palm trees in little breezes.

Grammi said my hair was honey-colored. Not brown, not dirty blond. Not ordinary.

We went to the beach, my mom and dad and me, my dad’s older brother and sister, sister-in-law and brother-in-law, my two older cousins Alex and Angela. My parents, protective of their firstborn, stopped to buy a hat to shield my newborn skin from the equatorial sun. It was buttercup yellow and far too big for my tiny head, but I wore it anyway and lay in the hammock while my parents took pictures of me and listened to the huge waves crashing on the sand.

I spoke in darkness, the first words of poetry,
Moony eyes refusing to close
After ten days of sleeping.
Nothing escaped my watchful eyes,
And I, quiet, created the first tiny worlds
Out of iron fairy dust.

When my dad held me for the first time, his glasses slipped off his face and shattered on the floor. He didn’t even get to see what I looked like for three days until his new glasses came in.

They brought me home from the hospital and I fell asleep almost immediately. I slept for ten days straight, so soundly that they had to wake me up to eat, after which I would fall right back to sleep. Everyone worried, but the doctor said I was fine.

After ten days I woke up and refused to sleep. I wanted to be in the middle of the action. I wanted to see everything and meet everyone. My theme song was Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” and I did not.

When I was older, my parents put me to bed and I would lie there in my crib, with Snowball the wide-eyed teddy bear face-down next to me so I wouldn’t see his eyes glowing in the dark. I used to sing my own little lullabies: “My eyes are sunny, my eyes are moony, my eyes are dark, I cannot see!”

I was playing dress-up as soon as I could walk. Or dress-down, as it were, running around the house in my plastic diaper cover, my dad’s shoes and aviators. Sometimes I hid in cupboards wearing nothing at all. My favorite toy was the MagnaDoodle. I lay on the floor for hours while I learned to write my name, and drew pictures of my imaginary friends (Fingerbopper, Poony, and the gang), who all looked like blobs with sticks for arms and legs.

I still draw people like that sometimes, for old times’ sake.

I was raised in a field of flowers
With a lioness to tend our blazing thirst.

When I was little my mom worked a series of odd jobs, first with Billy Graham and then later as a caterer at the Holiday Inn. She used to come home late at night smelling like scalloped potatoes, after Papa had fed us and bathed us and (theoretically) put us to bed – but I remember still being awake when she came home at least once, after a Scandinavian banquet full of drunkards and carriers-on.

I remember once when I had just finished with the chicken pox and everyone else was in the throes of it. Thomas and Maria were still too young to go to school and Asha was a babe in arms. In this memory, which seems too crazy to be true, Mama took all four of us to the grocery store on the city bus in the middle of a sleet storm. The overhead emergency exit on the bus was stuck open and sleet was sneaking in and drenching everyone. I knew the WIC office all too well, but I aced all my classes at Mississippi Creative Arts Magnet School and it never occurred to me that I couldn’t have whatever I wanted out of life.

I grew up among the tribal dancers
Of many villages, threw wishes on the fire
To watch them curl up in smoke
To the gods.

My first passport photo features a huge disembodied hand coming in from the side to hold up my tiny head. My parents got hurried through the diplomat line at an Asian airport when officials saw their golden-haired, golden-eyed baby. Bus passengers passed me around in Nepal at three months old and when I was three my best friend was named Lulah, because my baby brother couldn’t pronounce Elizabeth. At Luther Seminary in St. Paul, I played in the sandbox with Lena, whose family was from Croatia. They disappeared suddenly when I was five or six years old, leaving all their Legos and Barbies in plastic bins outside their apartment.

We left Minnesota when I was seven so my dad could take a call at two churches in St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands. We lived on Peter’s Rest and tried to sell homemade perfumes on the front steps with our next-door neighbors Al and Shelly, and learned to rollerskate on the linoleum living room floor. After our car exploded on a cliff in the middle of the island, we moved across the hills to La Vallee, where we salted slugs on the steep slanted driveway and made fun of Jordan, the little boy whose parents took care of the sheep that ran around our rutted road and tripped us when we tried to ride borrowed bicycles out to the street. Last time I saw it, the road was still black at the site of the explosion. But that was eleven years ago.

I learned to swim in crashing waves, to race.

At seminary our toys mostly came out of the dumpster. People were always moving in and out and so we often found pretty cool things in there, like decent training bicycles, and there were always loads of cardboard boxes for building houses and time machines. We made epic forts out of couch cushions and staged the Olympics on the blue backing of my baby quilt, which made a perfect swimming pool AND gymnastics mat. We reenacted scenes from “The Lion King” on the back of the couch, and the hallway rugs saved us from the lava bubbling across the tiles. One Christmas, my dad got homesick for the mantel at his parents’ house in Quito, so he drew out a fireplace on a huge roll of brown paper and all of us kids helped paint it. We stuck it up on the wall so we would have something to hang our stockings on.

My dad always loved the sound of waves crashing on the beach. He loved the sparkling blue of the ocean and the thought of what lay submerged beneath it. He loved snorkeling and bought us all prescription snorkeling masks so we could enjoy it together. I learned how to swim freestyle with little crests breaking my stroke; I learned to time my breaths to the side with the troughs between waves.

Later, in a swimming pool in Upstate New York, I learned racing dives and streamlining my breaths and what it feels like to pull against the kicking of the person in front of me in the lane.

I fell in love with rhythms and with fire,
Would throw myself on any thrumming pyre,
And Achilles could have, would and had his way with me.

I spent most of my life from the time I was eight until I started high school reading. I finished 100 books in a summer easily, blazed through half of every library and half of all available series and the Scholastic book catalogs they sent home with us every few months. I read the Arabian Nights when I was eight and grew up with Harry Potter, hoping for an owl every day after I closed the cover of The Sorcerer’s Stone. I imagined my lifelong romances with Madeleine L’Engle’s Adam, with Lee Jordan and Cedric Diggory, with Achilles and Sebastian and Duke Orsino. I watched Wishbone religiously until I discovered the Worldbooks in the living room. In tenth grade my friends and I started a book club and read A House Like a Lotus and Sophie’s World; we hosted Shakespeare readings and memorized sonnets. Our stint at Amsterdam High School was colored by characters and incidents from Romeo and Juliet reenactments, LOTF (Lord of the Flies), A Separate Peace, The Merchant of Venice, Mayor of Casterbridge, and Dorian Grey.

I believed in a life of adventure followed by happily ever after. Everyone always shook their heads at me, but I always knew I was going somewhere and while they called me a cloud-chaser, I think they secretly believed that somehow, in some way, I was right.

I fell asleep again,
Ten years later
And saw things in my dreams,
The ghosts of fairies
Rising from my palms.

I left the country alone for the first time when I was 15, and spent the next year at an international boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas, exploring my mother’s past. I built stage sets for her stories and staged my own stories in them, all over the hillside and the dorms and hallways of Woodstock School.

Two weeks after I graduated from high school, I passed my driver’s test, packed up my car (later named Cloudchaser in honor of its color and my dreams) and moved into my friend Deanna’s basement for the summer. At the end of August I packed up Cloudchaser again and drove halfway across the country with loaded memories, blind anticipation, and Subway sandwiches to keep me awake on the highway.

Back in Minnesota, I take new classes, look up old friends and family members. I uncover family histories and knit my past together with my present. My inventory of homes grows steadily larger. I go “home” for the summer to a house in India where someone else lived last time I visited, “home” the second summer to a brand new hotel in my country of birth. I go “home” for Christmas to an island off the coast of Canada, “home” for Christmas to a friend’s house in Amsterdam, New York, “home” with my roommate for Thanksgiving and Easter.

When I ended up at the gas station on top of the hill on Eustis St., I still could have walked the road between Luther Seminary and Peace Lutheran Church in a green velvet dress with lace on the cuffs and collars. I can get into my dorm after 8pm without even taking my ID out of my pocket. More than a few airports look intimately familiar to me, and all of them trigger different sets and combinations of images.

I die in peaces, my immortality, my loves and lucky charms
Live on in shreds and threads and photographs
Memoirs and breathing artifacts.


In class this summer Mario asked us what we hoped to leave as our legacies on earth after we die. I hoped to pass on my passion. There is a part of me, I said, that never needs to die. I live, and I try to make that life available to everyone I talk to and everyone I touch. It can be a pandemic.

My aunt Lisa bought me my first blank book when I was seven, but I started writing the story of my life long before that. I wrote it on the backs of pots and pans with spoons and spatulas and spelled it out in Legos and cardboard boxes. I started writing in my father’s three-day blindness and scrawled fragmented phrases on chalkboards for my wide-eyed siblings and playmates. I leave messages in my disappearing tracks across the globe, and I can only hope that they are legible and worthwhile.

In the beginning, all was void.
Then, from nothing, from the elements we rise
A race of titans strong and beautiful
To love the earth in all its chaos and turmoil
To love and hate and create each other
Our brothers, lovers and mothers
We rise!