everyday drama

One of these days around Christmas, two dogs show up on our porch, panting at the window and wagging their tails every time anyone shows signs of food.  My sister has found her calling taking care of the neighbors’ animals while they are away for Christmas, and after a few days of keeping an eye on things the dogs get lonely and decide to come hang out with us.  We tend to be indoor-dwellers, though, so I can’t imagine it would be very interesting for them to sleep outside our door all day waiting for someone to pop a head out and tell them to go home.

Whether or not the dogs are amused, Grandma’s cat, Missy, is most definitely not.  She prowls the windows all day, occasionally sticking her head out the cat door to sniff for any sign of Abby and Max.  Grandpa suggests we just open the door and throwing her outside, but none of us dares betray her so.  Instead, Grandma finally coaxes her outside by holding the kitty door open until she is safely crouching just outside the window.  She works her way out from there, tentatively scouring the grounds to find out exactly the extent to which the intruders have encroached upon her territory.

We can see her sitting among the bushes, getting comfortable and watching out for signs of the dogs.  Next thing I know, my mom is out front yelling, “MAX!  LEAVE OUR KITTY ALONE!  SHE BELONGS HERE!” (unlike certain dogs we know of) and there is a great commotion at the cat door as Missy tumbles through it, terrorized, and Max pulls up short right outside, panting excitedly.

She leaves muddy footprints on the kitchen counter.  Her tail is the size of a toilet brush and each of us takes turns trying to soothe her, hoping she got a chance to pee before the big black dog discovered her courageous jailbreak.

***

After lunch Grandpa recruits a team to go fix the roads.  I jump at the opportunity to get out of the house, although for a split second I think, “Pouring tar?  Ambitious…”  Then I remember that it takes at least 45 minutes to walk to the nearest paved road, and that what we’ll really be doing is pouring gravel.

This must what I’ve been lifting weights for.  (And yes, I am a little sheepish to admit that I have, in fact, been lifting weights.)  I join the boys, secretly excited to claim the title of “Girl Who Isn’t Afraid To Get Dirty And Play With The Boys.”  I have the flat shovel, which means that on top of shoveling three loads of dirt in and out of the wheelbarrow, I have to rake the dirt flat once it’s filled the potholes so Grandpa can tamp it down.

This is a very important task, you know.

***

While we’re fixing the road, Grandpa’s discussing the pros and cons of solar power versus wind power, and complaining that the guys at the fair are going to charge him $15,000 for solar paneling and installment.  “I don’t want them to sell me installation of solar panels,” he says, “I want them to sell me solar panels!  Today I’ll buy a few, and I’ll make the frames, and then I’ll come back and buy a few more, and before you know it, I’ll have a whole farm!”  The windmill costs $7,000 without the stand or controls.  “What’s the point?!”

Next on the list is cattle guard versus a gate, and what the neighbors have to say about these projects.  Grandpa is the ultimate DIY-er, and most of us are certain that he will die falling off a ladder on a Habitat for Humanity building site.  Once he broke his hip doing just that, and instead of staying in bed for six weeks and staying away from ladders and unfinished houses for a few months like he was supposed to, he got out of bed after two weeks and drove cross-country to build a retaining wall behind our house with recycled slate and rocks.  He was just too restless to stay in bed any longer than that.

But by the time we use up all the gravel and get back to the house, he says, “OK, now we’ve done all this hard work, I guess we’d better go do something FUN!”

This is a legacy I am proud to carry.

***

“You got balance from your mom,” my uncle Juan Miguel told me once.  “I think that’s good.  Because your dad’s side of the family tends to get caught up in things.”

We are well aware of this fact.  My mom says that what I got from them is “making things special,” and while this is definitely true you could easily substitute the word complicated for special and hardly notice the difference.

Thus the ten-foot-long scale model of the solar system that I built in fifth grade out of wood, wire, and papier-mâché.  In order to make this even fit inside of a building, I used one scale for the planets, to make them all proportionate to each other, and a different scale to measure the distances between them.  The planet scale started from the width of the wire I was using to mount the planets on the wood, the tip of which was the smallest any of my model planets could possibly be.  I made the sun out of newspaper, and I think it ended up being at least 8 feet in diameter.  I was devastated when somebody mistook it for trash and it disappeared before the presentation, but that was the least of my worries.  To fit it in the car, we had to make the base into two five-foot puzzle pieces that linked together in the middle, with half of the solar system on either side.

Most of my classmates stuck foam balls from solar system kits inside of shoeboxes they’d painted to vaguely resemble the universe.  I’m not judging them for this, especially because I’m sure they didn’t spend the ride to school splattering the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter with an old toothbrush, trying not to get gray paint on their cute little Aeropostale jeans.

I bet you can guess who helped me with this project.

That’s right.  My dad.

A few years later I decided, for another class project, to quilt a resources map of the United States out of cloth.  This one was my mom’s idea, but instead of suggesting more three-dimensional ways to mark resource mother lodes, she was urging me to go to bed at 2am when I was crying over tangled bobbin thread.  “Why don’t you get up early in the morning and do that?  Go to bed now,” she coaxed.  “You’ll do a better job of it.”

I’m still not sure whether I am a night person or a morning person, which is a problem since I have deduced that the key to a successful marriage is marrying a person who is the type opposite of what you are.  I think my dad said something along those lines once, probably in jest, and I took it as the ultimate truth.  There is no going back.  I’m sure my type will suddenly become apparent to me someday, just as I suddenly realized that I am, in fact, an extrovert.  (I’m not sure if extroverts and introverts are also complementary, but I’m sure that information will be useful someday.)

The student teacher almost certainly gave me “100%” on the Quilted Map of American Resources.  It practically made me into the next Betsy Ross.

(I wonder if she came from the same Scottish clan as my ancestors?  Grandma found a Ross-clan tartan necktie in the trunk of heirlooms and gave it to my brother for Christmas, and I’m a little jealous.  All I got from that side of the family are the Ross hips.  And a pair of Iron Man briefs to cover them.)

Grandma also feels the same way about knickknacks as I do: just another thing to clean.  Not that I don’t appreciate pretty things, because I do—another Swanson Family Legacy…  But I got balance from the Buckners.  We’re historically not wildly materialistic, so the best Things in life are both pretty AND useful.

…Just like me ;-)

the search for love

Today is like a movie.  Your letters make me feel like I am sitting in front of a roaring fire in a hardwood living room, with snow sifting down like flour outside the picture window.  I can hear your voice echoing inside my head as though you are narrating this scene of my life, and I will suddenly get up with the last skills I need to tackle the crisis from Act I.

This isn’t the first time I’ve felt like this today.  At eight o’clock I left Ytterboe and noticed the snowflakes falling in time with my booted footfalls, each one carefully chosen to keep me from wiping out on the ice from yesterday’s rain.

It’s funny how fast things change.

You’ll be back before long; all my projects will be finished and I will be crossing my fingers for good weather in Denver on my way home for Christmas.  I will be thinking about December 20 last year, and inevitably mulling over the conclusions of 2010.  2011 is coming soon and I will be a different person.  Harder, like JJ said – jade is only possible under pressure.

***

It’s an evolutionary game of chicken.  The two phenotypes – wimps and machos – are competing for the Fittest.  It seems obvious which one will win in this classroom full of football, hockey, and rugby players majoring in economics – but as it turns out, there is only a single polymorphic strategy.  The population will settle at an even number of wimps and machos.  If one more macho walks in, no matter how brawny and invincible he is, he will lose the game of chicken.

I sit there in class laughing, the wimp among the machos, and think about the implications of this game for hegemonic masculinity in the United States today.  If we glorify the football players, is it because the majority of our men are wimps and we need more machos to even the score?

I wonder if the fact that I’m thinking about this makes me more evolutionarily fit in the long run, or less.

Or maybe it really is just a game…

***

I hope I never become not fun.  I hope I never find myself in a place where I can’t laugh (at dumb jokes and bad puns and double negatives) and I hope that I never lose the ability to start a dance party, even if I’m alone in the room.

Thanksgiving resolution: laugh and be merry, dance ‘cause you can’t help it and sing even if you can’t hit the notes.  It sounds cliché, but that’s just because it’s important.

***

A few Wednesdays ago I noticed that Mary’s laugh was different.  Louder, sharper, from the gut.  I thought it was desperation at first, but maybe it’s just happiness.  When I said something about it, she told me I was crazy.  Maybe it had just been too long since I’d heard her really laugh.

A few semesters ago my roommate told me she didn’t like the guy I was seeing because he made me laugh unfamiliarly.  I was actually really worried about it, and mulled over it for days until finally bringing it up with someone else who said, “Yeah, he makes you giggle like a middle schooler with a big whopping crush.”  If we’re being honest, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t laugh like that around my roommate.

***

I don’t need a man.  None of my friends do either.  At least that’s what we always say.  We just like them, and we like having them around, and we like when one of them likes us.

Sean sent me a poem about how everyone is just constantly searching for love, and how that quest is what drives everything we do.  His latest letter turned into something of a philosophical rant about love-seeking, and how our society corrupts, hides, delegitimizes that search because we’re all afraid of ultimately being rejected, or maybe even afraid of love itself.  I’m sure it would have made a very good narration to this scene in my life.

unexpected

She has always loved old things. She loves a lot of different kinds of old things; her driveway and garage are bursting with beautiful pieces of furniture, kitchenware and dishes, clothes, classic VHS tapes, jewelry, games, toys and trinkets. She has even more items in storage, and never stops buying. She can easily judge the worth of different pieces and she can really drive a bargain!

She sidles up to me and whispers that if I think anything is unfairly priced, we can “talk” about it. While we look around marveling at all her offerings, she mentions that she wanted to start an antique shop, but that this was what came of it. As I watch her man the aptly-named Treasure Sale, I suddenly understand that this is far more than an overpriced garage sale. There is more to this than a tired old woman clearing out the leftovers of her life dream. The significance of this venture suddenly seems much greater than it did at first. Everything looks much shinier, like dreams come to life. I turn back to ask for an interview, and she seems hesitant at first. But as she writes down her contact information, her husband appears from the back room and says, “That would be great. I’ve always said she could sell the Brooklyn Bridge without cracking a smile!”

She hands me her phone number, with a twinkle in her eye, and says, “He’s always told me I could sell snow to an Eskimo.”

***

She grew up in Manly, Iowa, in a home where they didn’t have much. She was inspired by the spirit and energy of her mother, a childhood victim of polio, and in high school she started working for a restaurant in town for 35 cents an hour – a 10-cent increase from her babysitting job. She worked through her lunch hour and between school and basketball practice, until close every day. One day she came home in a huff, vowing to quit. Her mother told her, “Sharon, you’re going to take a lot in life – you’re going back to work.” So she did. She became friends with her boss, building the first in a long series of positive work relationships and the root of a dependable, hard-working reputation.

That restaurant closed a few months before graduation and the Coffee Cup Restaurant lured her with a 50-cent-per-hour cooking position. Sharon, who graduated high school with plans to be a masseuse or a beauty operator, stayed on as the sole cook, working in the kitchen from the early morning until close, seven days a week, at 65 cents per hour. The Coffee Cup manager called her “the best help I ever had.”

She told me she always planned to open an antique shop someday. She started out selling antique dolls, picking up good specimens at flea markets in Mason City. Her focus quickly expanded, though, as she bought furniture, collectibles, and glassware. She did not buy pieces because she liked them, but because she knew they would sell, and over time she developed the ability to judge the value of a piece just by picking it up and looking at it. She knows the big names and she knows how to find her way in an unfamiliar city full of garage sales – full of treasures someone else mistook for outdated kitchenware.

In between flea markets, she got a job in sales with the Fuller Brush Company and eventually became branch manager. Her boss found her so indispensable that, when headquarters eliminated all branch managers, he paid her out of pocket. She was offered a position selling insurance, and eventually took the offer. She passed her license test on the first try and ended up joining the Million Dollar Club for selling over $1 million in insurance.

In 1976 she studied for and passed her real estate license and moved to Storm Lake to sell real estate. She eventually quit, because of shady business practices and frustration with the inefficiency of the company. She decided to get her broker’s license and opened her own real estate business in Sioux Rapids.

Throughout her job history, she held onto her principles of integrity, took her work seriously and built long-lasting trust in relationships with both bosses and customers. In the 1970s she and her husband bought a brand-new $3000 car, the envy of the street and a marker of great success for a woman who grew up with “lump soup” lunch breaks.

She sold real estate in her own business until 1984, when she became very ill. A long series of doctors eventually diagnosed her with a genetically-based autoimmune disease of the liver, and told her she had two years to live.

By this time she had accumulated about 100 boxes of glassware, among other items. It was only a matter of time before she moved from real estate to antiques. But she no longer had time. “When you’re terminal,” she said, “that [possibility] goes out the window.”

So, not wanting to leave her husband with the daunting task of selling her collection, she hired an auctioneer. In one day the products of her lifelong collecting were all sold. She calls that day “the hardest day of my whole life.”

Through a series of miracles and a good bit of asserting her will to doctors, Sharon secured a prescription for a brand-new test drug that brought her back from the brink of death. “It’s hard to kill a bohemian!” her mother used to say. “You’re just too stubborn!”

Over the next 25 years, as she regained her strength and continues to struggle with the disease, she has refurbished her collection. With characteristic persistence, she still gets up at the crack of dawn some days to drive up to the Twin Cities and go treasure-hunting. She says she is probably too old and tired to go on, but she loves it too much to stop.

In the beginning, when the Treasure Sale was still a garage sale on neighborhood signs, she held sales all summer long. When some neighbors got upset and complained to city officials, they instated an ordinance prohibiting more than three sales a year by the same person. Sharon changed her signs and started her three annual holiday-weekend Treasure Sales: Memorial Day weekend, Fourth of July weekend, and Labor Day weekend or Defeat of Jesse James Days. She puts up big signs from her real estate business on Highway 3, Highway 19, and on the interstate near the Elko flea market. She also sells year-round on eBay and Craig’s List, meeting clients in the Twin Cities or in Northfield to make transactions. Some buyers, like her, buy to sell. Others ask her to find specific items for their purposes, and still others think that her Treasure Sale is just a garage sale, not fully understanding the value of the collection they are looking at.

She tells me she will probably continue holding Treasure Sales until she dies, at which point she will leave her treasures to her son, who will hire an auctioneer to evaluate prices and sell everything at once. Until then, she vows not to slow down or move into a retirement home, because “whatever you do in your life, I think you become your surroundings.” She sees no reason to give up her passion or become complacent – she is “not ready to die! Too many sales to go to… There are a lot of miles left in these legs!”

***

When evaluating owners of other shops, she says it is important to control what comes into the store and make sure it is of high quality. A business owner must also know how to present herself to the public, with appropriate, professional dress and behavior. One shop owner now going out of business had her “hands in too many pots.” Coming from such a multi-skilled woman, this evaluation holds particular weight. Sharon herself, although she has done many things throughout the course of her life, has put a lot of effort into completing one task at a time, while constantly working toward her ultimate dream. While she never officially opened her antique shop, she overcame substantial obstacles to sell her beloved old things in a creative and resourceful way.

This creative expression of her unrelenting drive, her determination to achieve her goals, is the spark that first attracted me to her and her seemingly small-scale venture. I am amazed at her application in studying for her various licenses and her resounding success on every test. I am amazed that she had the confidence and assuredness to tell her doctors what she wanted and how she wanted to be treated as a patient. I am amazed at her full-scale immersion into the working world at a time in history when women were just beginning to populate the workforce and rarely entered the business arena. I am amazed at how much she knows about antiques, how she will drop names and models of glassware and speak of their value, both monetary and intangible. She pinpoints herself as a type-A personality, a controller, and a doer. “Usually in a family there is one doer,” she says, proudly. She is most likely an implementer, and certainly believes that her aspirations are within her reach. Her delight in her work is inspiring and is no doubt the source of much of her strength and success.

Sharon’s story provides an unsettling example of the reality of unforeseen circumstances. Such an active, ambitious young woman would never expect to be stopped short by a terminal illness in her early forties, but she was. Although she was very proud and passionate about the track she was taking, earning one license after another, she might have missed out completely on selling antiques if her passion for life had not made her fight to keep it. That same passion led her to start buying antiques again in spite of the vividly precarious nature of her life. Her lifelong investment in her love of old things in the end has had worthwhile returns economically but, more importantly, in her quality of life.

I wanted to talk to her because of the tangible passion with which she conducted her business over the course of that hour. I could tell, although I did not know at the time what she had gone through, that the Treasure Sale was the result of long years of planning, some setbacks or complications, and an incredible set of dreams. The entrepreneurial spirit emerged distinctly from the collection and arrangement of items and her thorough knowledge about them, and was clarified through my conversation with her. I came away from our meeting somewhat overwhelmed, but also inspired and deeply touched by the possibilities that are available to someone who is determined to move forward, to use her gifts to their fullest capacity and approach the end of life with a sense of pride, satisfaction, and a life well-lived.

bearing the name

It’s a long drive across New York. On the way, you pass exits for Cairo, Delhi, Bethlehem and Troy, Amsterdam, Rome, Liverpool and Geneva, Bath and Babylon, Cambridge, Carthage, and Corinth, Jamaica, Manchester, Versailles and Valhalla, Lima, Greece, and Greenwich. In most cases, the name is the only thing they have in common with their twins abroad; maybe, if they’re lucky (or desperate), some long-forgotten history or a founder from the namesake.

I-90 heading for Boston. Take the Arlington exit. There’s an Arlington in Minnesota too. And New York. Also Texas, Georgia, Virginia, Massachusetts, Nebraska, South Dakota, Tennessee and Washington. Iowa has an Aplington, a mere typo, no doubt, and Illinois has Arlington Heights. Apparently Arlington, whatever or whoever it was, had some great impact on American history—now, that impact is lost on myself and probably most people I would talk to.

It means different things to us now.

***

My name is Clara Swanson. It’s the name of my Swedish great-grandmother, and there was one other Clara in the family before me. (She descended from a girl cousin, though, so her last name is Rapson.) Five years ago, when the extended family got together, my second cousin David called during church to announce the birth of his daughter – Clara Swanson. Like me, she can easily project how old she will be at any given family reunion (in multiples of five); she is an unbridled spirit (and I pray that no one tries to break her); and she busts a move at the slightest suggestion of a beat.

I passed by her lunch table at this summer’s reunion and her family said, “Oh, YOU’RE the other Clara Swanson! She’s been dying to meet you!” I had been dying to meet her, too, but at the actual prospect of such an anticipated meeting we both suddenly became very shy. We greeted each other and I didn’t linger long, but walked away with the odd feeling that I had just shaken hands with myself.

I remember when Grandma Clara died. I was five, and I stood next to my cousin Paula while they lowered her coffin into the ground. I remember the exact moment of understanding what was happening, when I looked around and realized that a lot of people I knew very well were crying. I remember wondering what they knew that I didn’t know, feeling that I should be crying too. I teared up—but I stopped myself, thinking how stupid it would be to start crying just because everybody else was. Then someone threw dirt into the hole, onto the coffin, and I realized that Grandma Clara, the 100% Swedish, 98-year-old version of myself, was not going to get out of that box and spend time with me ever again.

***

My name is Clara Lee Swanson. The Lee is on my mom’s side. I carry the patriotic legacy, in my name and on my government-issued ID, of an illustrious old Southern family. From Gram-B, a legendary link in our history: my great-grandmother, Allene Lee.

In fifth grade, I developed a penchant for tragedy, specifically the sinking of the Titanic and the so-called American Civil War. Maybe it was just a fascination with history, with the history of people, which through some lenses seems like a long series of tragedies and their resolutions. Anyway, my mom mentioned in passing that I was somehow distantly related to the great General Robert E. Lee, a piece of information I took back to class and announced during an educational visit of a representative from the Sons of the Civil War. He blinked, looked down, cleared his throat and after collecting himself managed to say coldly, “Yes, well, there is also a group called Daughters of the Confederacy.” I struggled for years with his dismissal before finally deciding that General Lee was a tactical genius and a man of good character, and that I was proud to be the eight-times-great-granddaughter of his brother Henry.

***

In some cases—online, and in my notebooks from high school, and, in theory, on the cover of a novel or a book of poetry someday—my name is Clara de Tierra. It was the Shot Heard Around the World in my personal War of Independence. I desperately needed to find my place as a citizen of the world, beyond the several countries I could claim as my father- or mother- or brother-sisterland, beyond belonging to my father because I bear his name—I wanted to identify myself as a human being living in unfathomable society with the rest of my (absolutely fascinating) species. Plus, it seemed like a good way to integrate my official traditional Ecuadorian name (Clara Lee Swanson Buckner) into my life in the States, without cutting out my mom’s Indian influence. By changing my name, even unofficially, I ceased to be Clara Lee, son of Sven, and became Clara, daughter of the earth and everything else.

At the time my favorite writer and greatest inspiration was Madeleine L’Engle, author of the Wrinkle in Time series and a ridiculous number of other books (I have by now more or less exhausted them). I was reading the first Crosswicks journal, which chronicled one of her summers spent at a rambling, teetering manor in smalltown New York with several generations of family members popping in and out at various intervals. Her husband, Hugh, was an actor whose last name was Franklin; she took his name when they were married, but on the covers of her books she remained always Madeleine L’Engle, because how can anyone make a name for themselves if they just go changing it every other novel or so?

I took this detail to heart and thought it was high time I think ahead to the days when I would no longer belong in name to my father but to some other man; and decided instead to take matters into my own hands and foray into the world with a blank slate and some extra space in my name. That way, I could safely create a name for myself without instigating any political uprisings among the men in my life…

And besides, Clara de Tierra rhymes.

***

I do not have a name like Dessa or Shihan or Felony. At the National Poetry Slam, established poets take the stage to speak their word. In a still-unfamiliar poetry culture, the pre-poem silence fills up with shouts of “C’mon, poet!” The Slam is not about fame, so it’s not about a name. It’s about poetry. It’s about the Word. So each of its speakers is just that: one piece of the poetic stereo. One letter of the Word. One soloist in the chorus and one shout in the crowd.

“Yeah poet!” So they speak. About themselves, but for the world. For our shared experience.

***

One late-August morning, almost exactly three years ago, I sat in a diner in Rome (New York) with Nate, Elisabeth, and Dave Preisinger. I’d known Nate for a long time, since we were both on the Foothills Regional LYO board, but I was feeling shy then that he was where Elisabeth and I are now—entering his senior year at St. Olaf College. “Actually, I’m kind of jealous of you guys,” he said with theatrical enthusiasm. “You get to start fresh. You can be whoever you want to be. You can change your personality completely! You could even change your name!”

At that, Elisabeth’s dad and brother started suggesting the most farfetched nicknames they could think of. “What about Eli?” Dave cackled, and we all tried it out. “Do you think it would actually stick?” Nobody could imagine people actually calling her that.

Three years later, people at St. Olaf ask me if I know Eli Preisinger.

And Math Matt, for the life of him, can’t remember my real name—he still calls me Scheherazade.

no-wake zone: nothing ever changes

I.

“Hey. I have kind of a weird question for you.” His voice echoes in that weird empty telephone way. “When you write your parentheses… do you still put that little dash in the middle of them? Because I’ve been doing it like that for four years and I just had this thought—I wondered if you still do that.”

I’m amused that he’s calling to ask that. I’m amused that he ever picked that up from me at all—the kind of thing he would have teased me about four years ago. He actually adopted it and kept doing it, and when everything else has changed for us, he kept my parentheses.

II.

Chad lets me take the wheel of the boat for a few minutes, for a photo opportunity. I take it because it’s an opportunity to try something I’ve never tried before, and might never get to try again. He stands next to me and tells me what to do, what buttons to press and what levers to pull, and explains right of way and the buoy system on the water. When I relinquish pilot again, he hands me the map and tells me to find where we are. I’m learning things.

“Look for that buoy. There we are. See how the water level changes, and how they mark it on the map?” he says. I look at the creases, and the publishing date. “Does anything change about the lake from year to year?” I ask, thinking about erosion and how high tide is slightly different every day. “Nope,” he replies immediately, almost before I’ve finished asking. “Nothing ever changes.”

In the no-wake zone, speed limit is 5 miles per hour. Not fast enough to make a wake, to create waves that beat up against the other boats and knock them against the dock, to wear down the bridge supports. In the no wake zone, the goal is to drive the boat as if we have to convince everyone later that we were never there.

III.

We never would have heard the car if not for the music—the guy was backing his boat right down our little beach, where the three of us lay with our eyes closed. At the last minute we heard him and scrambled out of the way just in time. We sat off the path, watching him launch while a familiar old folk song wafted out of the open car windows: “If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone. You can hear the whistle blow, a hundred miles. A hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles, you can hear the whistle blow, a hundred miles.” It played three or four times before I realized it was on repeat. That one song, that one verse. The old man was alone with his car and his boat, a hundred miles.

IV.

Opening day: new season begins at Amsterdam’s city pool

On July first, the Recorder’s front page was dominated by this headline with an accompanying full-color photo. One day after another of ninety-degree heat and Florida-scale humidity in some cities legendarily bodes ill for police and fire departments, making a splash for story-hungry journalists. But in this town, the heat wave splashes water on our headlines.

Another day at the city pool. Another hot, boring summer—by mid-July, we wish school would start back up again. Another night waiting for the sun to go down so the house will be hotter than the backyard and we can go sit in the porch furniture and try to figure out how to get alcohol, where to drink it, and what to do once we’ve done that. Another horde of mosquitoes chasing us inside to watch another episode of Futurama and go to sleep to wake up late—again.

V.

I’ve gone a hundred miles, five hundred miles—one thousand, one hundred and ninety-one miles from this no-wake zone, this town where nothing ever changes. And things have changed.

I come from a town of 18,000—now it’s a town of 15,000. I rode my bike past my old house a few weeks ago at dusk, when you can see into the upstairs picture windows. When we lived there, you could see a wine-red wall and a deep blue wall with purple sponging. Now it’s white. When I left, I had just finished going to my classmates’ graduation parties. Now, I’m going to graduation parties for my brother’s friends.

In the past six months there have been two drug busts in houses across the street from where my ex-boyfriend grew up. At least twelve houses on their street are for sale. The old immigrant two-family houses from the Rug City era are becoming unoccupied and dilapidated. Some of them are drug houses. Amsterdam’s drug of choice is cocaine. The police now wear bulletproof vests at all times, and the fire department changed their uniform so they wouldn’t be mistaken for police officers and shot at. Hagaman and all of Amsterdam’s parks have curfews. Fastrak scans IDs and cops hang out there at night and somebody pulled a gun at Stewarts’ on Market Street a few weeks ago. They kept it on the down-low though.

The “bad” neighborhoods are moving up, and the people I know who used to live in those neighborhoods are moving out, locking their doors and not answering them unless they’re expecting you. Another old factory building just burned down the other night; they’re still investigating whether it was some kids fooling around or insurance fraud. It could be either one, but everyone who lives in the area was evacuated and camped out behind the Noteworthy Indian Museum at 2:30am on Wednesday night. Everyone else drove to Rite Aid to watch the blaze.

Five years ago I was leaving the country for the first time, and everyone thought I was crazy. Now, most of my friends are out of town, and quite a few of them are out of the country—in Europe, India, Brazil, South Africa. They’re playing, working, studying, or looking for direction in their lives. Five years ago my friends were getting their first jobs, and now my sister’s friends have jobs and go to parties that my friends go to. There are new jobs now, though. Businesses have moved and gone out of business and new ones have come in. Amsterdam has a local open mic night and a new Dunkin’ Donuts, a Target and a Super-Walmart, new townhouses and developing condos. I heard there is a bookstore downtown, but I haven’t been. No one ever used to go downtown and I don’t think they do now.

love songs

Slow down and love someone. You’re listening to Delilah.

We didn’t always have a car when we were little. I remember getting up extra early on Sundays, even in the depths of Minnesota Januaries, so we would have time to walk up the Eustis Street hill to Peace Lutheran Church. Me struggling alone in one of my well-loved frilly dresses and my brother or sister in a stroller. If we were lucky, last week’s paper would have had a coupon for Toaster Strudel and I would be warm and appeased by award-winning artistic frosting design. I don’t really remember complaining.

But there were times when we did have a car, a little red Honda with a sunroof in good years, and after Asha some 6-seater sedan. Sometimes we would be out late, and on the way home I would drift in and out of sleep listening to my parents talking in hushed voices and two languages, and then my dad would start seeking through the radio to find Delilah’s evening show on B95.5. I could barely stay awake, but I’ve always had trouble sleeping in the car so I remember her syrupy voice through the fog of stars and blackened street-side snow.

You could always tell when Delilah started going through one of her divorces because she started giving terrible advice and her laugh got really bitter. My dad would make one of his frustrated noises and change the station, probably eventually settling for off, maybe humming his way into our parking spot behind the apartment buildings. And then Delilah switched stations and we didn’t find her again until New York.

In the secret, in the quiet place, in the stillness you are there.

In the secret, in the quiet hour I wait, only for you, ‘cause I want to know you more.

Green and Andrew dig through Liz’s guitar case, sifting through the mess of camp songs and hymns for ones they recognize. Green stumbles upon “In the Secret,” the song I loved in 8th grade at Beaver Camp. “This is a really creepy song,” she says. “I always thought of it as a love song,” I said, “so it’s not as bad.” “Yeah,” she says, “but it’s about Jesus.”

In 1998, as Hurricane Georges gathered strength over the sea, we went to church. The air was heavy like my baby quilt is heavy: soft because it’s worn so thin, torn in places and tearing more by the moment. Constantly seeming on the verge of complete destruction. Like God had both hands on the place where the sky and the sea meet, waiting for the perfect moment to rip them, vertically, into battling sea-sky pieces.

The little whitewashed church building filled right up – at first with the regulars, the core congregation; then long-absent relatives and families and random other people started cramming the seats. Our sweat mixed with the sweat of the sea and we knew the storm could break at any second and we would all be trapped in the unfortified house of God.

My dad decided not to follow the liturgy or give a sermon. (I don’t remember if he wrote one, or if he was too busy readying our house for the coming hurricane and was hoping for a way out.) Instead, he asked the congregation for hymn requests.

To this day he marvels that those poor islanders, fearing for their lives, couldn’t have cared less about pleas for aid and assistance. They did not want to sing hymns begging God to spare them. To this day he speaks with the awe that proves to me that God exists, about the faith that proves to him that God exists: that poverty-stricken, hurricane-threatened island congregation wanted to sing about God’s strength and compassion. Their relationship with their God was not defined by an anxious attachment; they did not expect their God to abandon them. They wanted to sing love songs.

I love you, you love me. We are one big family.

With a great big hug, and a kiss from me to you, won’t you say you love me too?

I actually had to look up the lyrics to that song just now. Which is amusing, and surprising not because I watched Barney religiously as a little kid (I don’t remember if I really did or not), but because my family adopted it as a sort of theme song when we were a family of four little kids.

I think it started when I was a baby. I don’t remember, of course, but from what I understand I didn’t like to go to sleep when I was supposed to. Someone suggested to my parents, or they somehow stumbled upon the successful strategy of singing songs to me when I was in my bed with the lights off for the night. Maybe it worked, maybe it settled me down enough that they could go do their own thing for the night, or maybe it was just a nice bonding experience. (After they put me to bed, I used to sing my own lullabies: “My eyes are sunny, my eyes are moony, my eyes are dark, I cannot see!” My stuffed friends probably enjoyed the songs with me in my crib.)

However it started, it stuck, and my parents always took time to sing to each of us four kids at bedtime. How many songs we got depended on how long it took us to get to bed after the official bedtime call, and how late it was. Whoever got to bed first got first choice of songs, and if there was a tie, well, that’s why we had two parents. We got to choose what songs we wanted from an arsenal of Sunday school songs, camp songs, kid-choir car tape songs, and old folk songs. My favorite is a song my mom taught my dad when he studied abroad in college – they were always spending summers and semesters on different continents from each other, and yet somehow it worked. My inner romantic credits it to this little ditty:

I see the moon and the moon sees me.
The moon sees someone I love to see.
God sees the moon and God sees me.
God sees the one I love.

At some point (I remember being thirteen), due to a combination of later bedtimes, bigger scrambles to make bedtime, teenaged angst and embarrassment, and probably the beginnings of my religious crisis, I stopped getting sung to. In the chaos of six people trying to brush their teeth at the same time (my baby sister literally poking fun at my brand new “big boobies”) I would sneak into my room and get in bed. After everything died down, my parents tiptoed in and sat on the edge of my bed, asking if I was asleep. Sometimes I responded, but on a lot of nights I just pretended to be sleeping. Sometimes they sang to me anyway, but other nights they would just kiss my forehead and leave, shutting the door behind them.

I love you, always forever. Near and far, close and together.

Everywhere, I will be with you. Everything, I will do for you.

When I was seven I kept the radio tuned always to the popular music station, barely audible because my parents didn’t like popular music – but it was loud enough to hear when Donna Lewis started singing “I Love You Always Forever.” It topped the charts that year. At school my two best friends (whose names were both Melissa) and I would chase the boys around on the playground singing it at the top of our lungs, and they would scream and clamp their hands over their ears and run away as fast as they could. That is how I learned that boys hate mushy stuff.

When I was fourteen I fell in love with the movie Love Actually. I still can’t choose a favorite subplot or character, and I can still quote almost the entire movie from top to bottom, including the star-studded soundtrack. In one scene, to the sound of “Silent Night,” Mark silently serenades his best-friend-in-law Juliet with a set of posterboards confessing his undying love for her, and then leaving it up to Fate – an idea so brilliant that when I fell in love at fifteen I adopted it. I stenciled cryptic messages onto brightly colored card paper and flipped through them while Katya played the riffs of “Konstantine,” by Something Corporate, on a portable piano keyboard. The boy didn’t get it, but to this day the song reminds us of each other.

When I was sixteen I fell in love again and that time it stuck. He remembered that we had danced to Howie Day’s “Collide” and when I left for college I couldn’t listen to it for almost an entire year. When I was eighteen the King remembered that we danced to Chris Brown’s “With You” and a month later the song was overplayed and he skipped it when it came on when we were together. I started keeping secrets when a song reminded me of someone.

You’ll always be a part of me – I’m part of you indefinitely.

Boy, don’t you know you can’t escape me, ooh darling, ‘cause you’ll always be my baby.

Wednesday nights are poetry nights. Several weeks in a row I have read poems inspired by love. Everybody can relate, whether it’s a breakup piece or an I’m-excited-about-a-new-potential piece. We all write them and we all read them – after all, Jane, love makes art possible. Or do you say that love makes art good? And maybe that art makes love good too? Jim and I joke that we wrote a new song about love and relationships and then break into “What’s Your Fantasy.” A few weeks later I sing (terribly) an acoustic rendition of my all-time favorite Mariah Carey song with Ben on guitar. I’m in love with love but, with my heartbroken peers, I’m a little suspicious when it turns up. I pretend like I know what it looks like and tastes like and feels like. I look for it and then run away from it. It’s like hide-and-seek.

I’ve been alive for two decades now. The more moments pass, the more moments remind me of a movie scene or a song I danced to in middle school. I start to believe that movies and songs are based on real experiences rather than just overactive imaginations like mine. I start listening to Delilah again, and she’s getting over her latest divorce and directing her energies into her kids, her farm, her goodwill and her nightly radio show. I roll my eyes at her advice and her song choices and then smile and hum along.

And on Sunday nights, I become my own Delilah. I play songs for the people I love, and I play the songs that secretly remind me of them. I play the songs that make everyone roll their eyes and laugh and then hum along, the songs that make us believe in love again, that convince us that our gods will not abandon us in the week’s hurricanes and that our lovers fall asleep to our same moon, even if our sun is just now rising.

It’s a Monday night and we’re all buckling down, getting ready for the week ahead. I hope you’re not too stressed out, that you can take this time to take a deep breath and remember that you have what it takes to get through the week. I’m here to play whatever it is that you want to hear, so let me know what that is. Until then, I have a really nice lineup of feel-good songs to keep you from getting sucked in… You’re listening to the Queen of Sheba.

may the force be with you

The plane bumps along like a wagon on a cobblestone path.  I look outside, expecting to see nothing, the plane swathed in clouds, but the sky is perfectly clear. Just perfect cobalt blue, interrupted only by wisps of white and, far below, little marshmallow poufs of clouds.  I can feel the pilot negotiating the wind, the flaps raising and lowering to compensate for anemometric forces that challenge the massive aluminum body of the plane.  It's amazing to me that an invisible force can shake an airplane, thousands of pounds of passengers, luggage, and equipment, a miracle of engineering.  Outside the window, I can see no obvious obstacles to a perfectly smooth journey -- and yet the wings rattle and the plane stutters in the sky, and my stomach lurches as I casually rifle around for a barf bag, just in case.
The wind is invisible, but I remember the day before sitting in a room on the sixth floor of Mohn Hall watching this epic thunderstorm pelt the building with waves of rain, sheets of water.  The wind blows buckets straight in through the cracked windows and then in the next second throws all its weight in the other direction.  Confused swarms of raindrops race every which way over the parking lot and it looks like a war in the sky, one school against another and the wind against the buildings.  If it wasn't raining, though, I might not be able to see it at all.

The pilot tries to avoid another punch from the wind, tilting the plane at a terrifying angle.  I can feel my stomach flip to reorient itself with the core of the Earth, so I check my drink to make sure it's not about to slosh over the side because of the angle.  My cranberry juice is completely straight in the cup -- the meniscus is parallel with the lip and with the floor of the plane.  It didn't occur to me that airplanes had fake gravity, but it explains the odd feeling of stretching toward two differently-oriented grounds when the plane tilts to a 45-degree angle.

I can't see gravity either.  My fellow passengers and I defy it and find ourselves in the same moment enslaved to it.  Despite all our incredible feats of modern engineering, we can't escape the invisible forces that dictate our lives.

Sometimes I am sure that I will be blind in the future, and I like to prepare myself for that day.  I imagine what faces will feel like under my seeing fingers, and I appreciate bright colors and contrasts and walk with my feet instead of with my eyes.  I become painfully conscious of how much our society relies on sight and I try to imagine what it would be like to live here without it -- simultaneously realizing with a leaden stomach that I can't imagine it at all, loving my sight and hating my dependency.

But the wind is invisible and I feel it every day; gravity is invisible and I use it every day.  When my eyes are closed and I imagine myself a blind poet, I wiggle my toes into the dirt, feeling them inextricably tied to the earth, and let my goosebumps rise to greet the wind tickling my skin in waves.  There could be colors to those sensations, but when they beat the plane they are the same color as the clearest, stillest sky.

the end/luftpause'

I can put the period wherever I want to.
This doesn’t have to be the end.

But right now, I feel like I’m stuck in the middle of a run-on sentence that just keeps running and running and running and it won’t ever really be the right time to put a period because it seems that as soon as you draw that one little dot everything goes up in smoke, or if not smoke then at least something unexpected happens and that one little dot suddenly seems so insignificant and I think how silly it was to think that it was enough to hold everything in that perfect moment even long enough to take a breath—

I guess that’s why it’s so important to find the rhythm of your breath (’) when you’re running.
Then you get your oxygen without breaking the pace.

***

It seems impossible to write about this. I have started it in my head almost every day since the Wednesday after Spring Break.

Spring. It’s always spring. First year, it was just starting to get warm enough to take our trays and eat outside when he started rinsing his washcloths in the sink at my station on Sundays at lunchtime. It was warm enough to run outside without a T-shirt when he started subbing in the home line on Wednesday nights and telling me stories about third-graders calling him “Hercules” when he ran past the elementary school in the afternoons. It was warm enough to ride a motorcycle when he started asking me to hang out after work.

It was the Sunday of finals week before I accepted his offer. “Nothing implied?” I asked, because he had run high school track with the guy I was dating at the time. Whatever the case, we both really wanted me to ride that motorcycle.

We rode for awhile on all the back farm roads of Highway 19. He showed off to see when I would lose my cool. I never did, though I asked him calmly at a stop sign to slow down a bit. He laughed about it when we got back to the lush green football field. “You never freaked out,” he said while I peeled apart blades of grass and he did round-offs in the shadow of the goalposts.

We talked about our dreams and our passions. He told me how much he’d wanted to go to St. Olaf before he was rejected, and how he’d had to reformulate his goals after that. He was going into the Army Rangers after hopping a few (little?!) hurdles. “No fear,” he said. “Even if I’m afraid of something I still try to do it.” I said goodbye and he promised to write.

The next time I heard from him was the next spring. “Hey there long time no talk... my bad. Truth, it was because my life got turned upside down on me,” he wrote. “I developed cancer in my spleen, liver, and bone marrow. I have been fighting it ever since. These days my spirits are generally pretty high I will make it. One day at a time. So I sent you this message with hopes of answering that small little question in the very back of ur head possibly wondering if that Cafe kid is doing ok.” OK?! His outlook on life was as persistent as always, but the body that I’d watched flip through the air in the sunshine was giving him a run for his money. Or a run for his ambition.

Four months later he wrote me about his “bran new immune system,” said he was doing great and had a lot of life left to live. “You only live once and before you know it it’s too late,” he wrote. “I want to climb mountains, run marathons, travel the world and never look back.”

I told him I was proud of him and asked him to keep me posted on how and what he was doing. He didn’t write back.

I should have known it wouldn’t be until next spring that he came back into my life. I’d just returned from Spring Break in the Ozarks and I was catching up with a friend over dinner when she said, “Hey, I’m sure you heard, but I just wanted to make sure… Chris Lund?”

I felt my stomach float up into my abdominal cavity when it should have dropped. “He passed away. On March 16th.” I hardly ever cry right after something happens, but this time I did. I couldn’t believe that one of the most alive people I’d known had joined the ranks of the least alive.

But what does that mean, really? It was obvious to me in the following weeks that he had very obviously not joined the ranks of the least alive. He wasn’t breathing anymore, but I felt as if every breath that left my chest was leaving his. Every word I spoke, I spoke for him.

One sunny Sunday I rode my bike out to the cemetery where he was buried. His grave wasn’t marked, but I did my only successful cartwheel ever next to the freshest mound of dirt. I wove him chains of flowers and peeled apart individual blades of grass, imagining him telling me to make the most of the day. I promised the wind that I’d never forget him, and rode back to campus in time for work, where I smiled and greeted everyone who passed by.

***

The meter of a poem has a lot to do with
Where you break the lines
And where you breathe.

It has less to do with punctuation,
Less to do with capital letters and grammar,
And more to do with
This-is-how-this-should-be-read
Today.

***

Less than a year ago, Grandma Helen was trying to convince me to spend a Sunday at the orphanage with her and a group from church. When I hesitated, she laughed and instead taught me how to play Bananagrams with a bag of Scrabble letters on the kitchen table. She played her old Frank Sinatra cassette tapes in the old tape player on the fireplace while Grampi did the dishes and she Skyped her friends in Poland. In the afternoon, she planned Aunt Lori’s 50th birthday party, complete with a homemade cake and affirmational party games.

The next Sunday she went to the “Old Folks’ Home” to help lead a church service before I was even awake. We met her later that morning at the English Fellowship service, where someone she’d met at the women’s prison gave a testimonial about how Jesus helped her find her way out of drugs and the mafia. She ran up to Helen after church and gave her a big hug and kiss, and cried, “Helen, I’m going to miss you so much!”

We went home and ate the lunch that Helen made by herself in the kitchen instead of letting me help with anything. I set the table, but mostly I just ate the gumdrops and chocolates she’d left out in a tray on the end table by the photo albums. We were invited for dinner at the neighbor’s with a big group of mission workers at the orphanage. “You’re really sharp,” they told her, awed. “You’re the quickest person of your age I’ve met, maybe ever!” Embarrassed, she giggled and tried to change the subject.

Grampi opened the car door for her and she laughed at his silly jokes and he pulled out her chair so she could sit down at the dinner table. “Let’s shed a little light on the subject,” he would say, switching on the light while she made a beeline for the answering machine or a printed email from an old missionary friend or a Skype date with a far-flung relative. It did not surprise me that she always remembered my birthday, and the card usually arrived in my P.O. box a few days early.

At a group meeting on Wednesday, I checked my email and saw the subject heading: “Helen passed away today.” I was not surprised, since she’d been in the hospital for weeks and I did not expect any treatment to do damage to the tumors nestled in her brain. I didn’t cry until almost two days later, when I was folding laundry and listening to Delilah while my friend Liz wrote a poem in the chair in the corner. I didn’t cry until I realized that I could hardly picture Helen still for a moment, to say nothing about her capacity to be permanently still. I didn’t cry until I realized that a year ago, the picture of her in my head would have been in black and white. Now it was in color and it wouldn’t slow down. My dad told me on the phone on Sunday that they could hardly hear her when she spoke, but my moving mental picture of Helen didn’t use a microphone and her laugh rang through the house as her fingers pounded out old hymns on the keys of the piano in the hall, across from the wall where the picture of Grammi as a four-year-old Shirley Temple-lookalike used to hang when Asha was four years old.

That was ten years ago.

***

“I’m afraid of not existing,” he said quietly in a rare moment of self-exposure. I felt his words echoing into my pillow as I lay in the dark, measuring my breaths so I wouldn’t cry. Maybe.

It might be easier if they just suddenly didn’t exist anymore. But I can still feel them in that aphysical cavity somewhere behind my sternum. It’s as if they exist both inside of me and somewhere in the physical world, and when they stop moving in the physical world the string connecting their two beings is suddenly cut. I reel backward, try to regain my balance since I am no longer tied and balanced by the stage presence of these real-life actors. The end of that string whips around in the wind and I know that those strings will never be tied to anything again. Except on the inside.

***

In music, we play in phrases.
Made up of bars, we break our phrases with an apostrophe ’
That marks the collective drawing of breath.
It’s called the breath mark.
Or the luftpause – stop the wind.
Almost imperceptibly.
Otherwise it breaks the ’ flow of the music.

Through the course of a composition, the wind stops only ’
For a series of moments…
Until the last chord.
Until the end.

the border crossers

When I saw him on the platform, dressed in five different shades of green, I guessed that he was Tibetan and that he didn’t have a confirmed seat on the train. As I watched him negotiate his way onto our car I found myself hoping there was a seat for him, surprised to feel behind my sternum that rumbling anticipation of meeting someone important.

By the time the sun set, he had been bumped from the neighboring compartment into ours, bearing gifts of Tibetan empanadas, a twinkling smile and stories of his trek from Tibet five years ago. On his first attempt his group of forty was apprehended by Chinese border police and thrown in jail, all their money and possessions confiscated. As soon as he was released he set out again with two Tibetan monks, barefoot, south through the snowy Himalayas. They all reached Kathmandu alive, though seriously frostbitten and recovering from a debilitating bout of altitude sickness. When we ran into him he was on his way back to Dharamshala, where he studies English and a few other subjects in Tibetan. His luggage contained his own handmade paper books, rosary beads from the Dalai Lama himself, beautiful Tibetan rugs to sleep on, and warm woolen pants and jackets to replace his Hawaiian shorts and olive-green T-shirt. His name is Choekyi and he is 27 years old.

I didn’t know what to say to him or what questions to ask, so virtually everything I know about him I learned through eavesdropping or mooching off his conversations with other members of our party. Mostly we just stared out the window at the passing Indian landscape. But Choekyi understood silence. I was satisfied with only his warm, twinkling smile, and he seemed satisfied with my returning startled grin. I understood with an ache how much he loves and misses his beautiful, rich and peaceful homeland. But he is Here Now, and by the end of the two-day trip he had crossed another border – into Us.

I remembered listening to the stories and local wisdom of our Tibetan taxi driver Gyatso in Leh Ladakh a year and a half ago. He had crossed into Leh from Tibet in 1961 and lived in a refugee village until he could settle into his new life as a Ladakhi. He had an 8-year-old daughter and a ready smile, and a contagious passion for the land and for life.

-- RESPECT THE RIGHT OF PEDESTRIANS ON ZEBRA CROSSING --

Every year the multicultural orgs invite a Latino spoken word group from the Twin Cities to perform at St. Olaf. They call themselves Palabristas, word-slingers, and they speak out of anger and love for their families and their countries and themselves. They speak with a passion for identity that I know very well.

Every year I go and sit in the corner and I wait for That Piece, the most poignant and most true, a piece by a Peruvian man who married a Guatemalan woman and loves his American daughters more than life itself. He stands on the small, intimate stage and struggles through his identity crisis for all of us to feel. “I am a border crosser,” he begins in even tones, and by the end he is shouting: “I AM A BORDER CROSSER! YO. CRUZO. FRONTERAS!” And my heart is beating fast and I am fighting tears and gripping the plastic booth with white knuckles. Because the Border Crosser is the truest label I have ever heard.

President Rafael Correa of Peru’s Andean neighbor speaks for his people: “Todos somos migrantes” – we all are migrants. To date some 1.5 million Ecuadoreans live abroad, primarily in the U.S. and Spain, and remittances constitute the third highest source of national income. The amassed resources of a migrant population attract thousands of Chinese and African migrants in transit to other countries. My teachers this summer swore that every single Ecuadorean has at least one family member in another country, and parts of Cuenca consist of beautiful mansions being built from abroad – all empty.

I am an immigrant. I understand the feeling of straddling an expanding fault line, a rising barbed wire fence. I have spent much of my life struggling to force-fit pieces of different puzzles together to try and get a glimpse of my true identity. When people ask me where I’m from I wish to be a snail, carrying my home on my back so the answer becomes immediately and uncomplicatedly evident.

For Choekyi, the relevant question is not “Where are you from?” but “Where are you going?” Perhaps it is more important to ask, “Where are you now?” And that has an easy answer: I AM HERE. I have come this far and because of that I know I can go on. But I am here, in my body, and I have a lot to offer.

James Doyle claimed his body as his home. When I mentioned that to my dad, he said, “Well, that sure gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘Home is where the heart is.’” “Or ‘state of mind,’” added my brother.

And as I, Choekyi, and the border-crossing Palabrista have found, when we are at home in our hearts we can go anywhere, cross any number of fronteras, and be no farther away than when we started.

healing kisses

“I don’t WANNA go to the beach!” I’d cry. “I have a cut on my hand and it hurts in the water!”

“It stings? That means it’s healing,” Mama would say. “Salt water is good for cuts and bruises. That’s what my mom always told me.” A list of other painful things that are good for cuts and bruises includes: alcohol wipes, antibacterial soap, hydrogen peroxide, and, contrary to popular belief, kisses during lacrosse season.

***

I was in the zone. I had a project and I could think of nothing else until I’d seen it through. The task? A 63-square-foot sandcastle with a moat, a huge palace in the middle that stood 3 feet high, sunken roads and a crowded village full of houses with shell roofing, pillars, wells, and rooftop gardens. The only way in was over a driftwood drawbridge that led down a set of steps into the village. We worked from noon to dusk, building and repairing cave-ins with coconut shells, rusty metal pipes and sand toys donated by onlookers. A European man asked his guide if it was Jaisalmer; Thomas dubbed it Mussel Valley. I thought of it as my very own Roxaboxen. There has been nothing like it in the history of the world – though, even if there had, there would be no lingering evidence to prove it.

The night wore on and we watched with bated breath as the tide came in. We stood and watched the first waves fill the moat, and sometime around midnight my dad and my brother watched the high tide erase every last trace of the day’s efforts. In the morning there was nothing to show for our sunburnt backs, aching thigh muscles and raw fingertips. Displaced crabs and oysters had already settled back into their underground homes. It was like watching history happen in fast forward, watching time wear away the desperate exertions of human civilization. From high tide to high tide, we came, we conquered, we left and were replaced by sand too smooth to have ever been a castle.

***

Kenyon and I walked up the beach to look for lunch and parasailing. We met hordes of people who tried to sell us their wares – first engaging us in conversation, asking where we are from and how long we are staying in Goa. One guy jogged up beside me and asked, “Are you my friend?” Taken aback, I exclaimed, “No!” It was his turn to look surprised. “No?! Why not?” “I don’t even know you!” I replied. “But you’re talking to me,” he said. The concept of friendship, at least for a second, blurred around the edges and I wondered if anyone ever answers him yes.

The hawkers assumed that we are English. “You are very white,” they told us. Laughing, I pointed out Kenyon’s hot pink sunburn. “She's pink!” They charged us English prices, which are considerably less than Russian prices (or so they say) but still considerably higher than they should be. When we turned them down to continue on our course toward lunch, they made us to promise to stop on our way back. I hesitated just long enough for Kenyon to shake on it. On our way back we devised elaborate schemes to avoid them, but they caught on to our detours and disguises and accused us of not keeping our promises. We learned quickly to only make a promise if we really mean it.

In Spanish, the word for “engagement” is the same as the word for “compromise.” I wonder if someone’s trying to tell us something…

***

All the Colva Beach dogs are neutered; Mutti says it was a genius investment for some rich businessman. On the road to Colva town one billboard encourages HIV testing for engaged couples. And Thom says nobody dies of malaria anymore (although that’s not to say it doesn’t cause a lot of misery in life – leave it to my cousin Maya to figure that out first-hand).

South India is famous for, among other things, its ancient ayurvedic healing practices. In one Ayurveda shop I found enriching eyeliner made with almond oil and a hangover prevention pill. (Both would have cost me about $6.50.) In the backwaters every plant, fruit and spice has a purpose – some leaves, when chewed or steeped as tea, combat upset stomach, respiratory issues, heat exhaustion, and any number of other ailments from the everyday variety to the life-threatening. And Kerala, specifically, is famous for massages, healing programs, and a traditional martial arts form called Kalarippayat. Taken patiently over a certain time span, all of these methods improve mental, physical and emotional health exponentially. The key is moderation and self-discipline… and faith.

When I get tan I can see the scar on the inside of my elbow where the dog bit me through the fence when I was three. His snarling black jaws permanently damaged my favorite sweater and my regard for the canine species, but the actual white scar only shows up in the sun’s rays. Other things that appear in the sun are some freckles on my cheeks; a glow in my skin and a sort of peace that comes out in a smile. In the pallid middle of winter I look for that scar but I can never see it.

The sea, despite my childhood complaints, does heal my cuts and hangnails, my calloused heels and unenthusiastic hair. It exfoliates and polishes my skin on the outside, kneads out the knots in my weary muscles and flushes away my anxiety. It reminds me how to breathe and how to walk and sit and sleep in that cosmic rhythm well-known to the ayurvedic masters, and it reminds me to listen and to have faith. Scars make us interesting once we let them wear down to a tight white spot that only appears when we squint in the sun.

entering the land of fried bananas

The apocalyptic fog held up 65 trains touching North India, kept 50 flights out of Indira Gandhi International Airport for three days, hit Jaipur with record-breaking cold temperatures of 3.3ºC.  We spent far too many nights in frigid train stations, waiting for trains that were seven hours late, wrapped in everything we brought and watching the rats squeeze in and out of cracks in the doors, rustle the trash in the bins.  One of them actually jumped on my foot before I realized what was happening.

My two-dollar Walgreen’s sandals finally broke as soon as we got on the train out of Jaipur – which is the last good place to buy shoes on the entire itinerary!  I fixed the strap by sticking a safety pin through the bottom of it, but the pin came undone and impaled my poor foot as soon as I tried to walk up the platform at Kota.  I bid them farewell (not too fondly) and gave them an improper burial in the trash bin, donning in their place my dad’s ancient Velcro sandals which are nearly as old as I am.  (For as long as I remember they complemented his ridiculous vacation outfit of linen tourist hat, Galapagos T-shirt, white shorts, and clip-on sunglasses.  I have always led the efforts to shame him into stylishness, and here I am ripping him off…)

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE LAND OF FRIED BANANAS… in your dad’s seventeen-year-old sandals.

We fell asleep on the train in bone-chilling temperatures and woke up to stifling heat.  Finally the fans came on, but the car was swimming in at least seventy-two different people’s sweat.  I nearly passed out from dehydration and was knocked flat before the fried bananas appeared through the open train windows at station platforms.  I must wait ‘til we reach Goa to taste that most favorite of all exotic delicacies.

Finally we reach the Fort Kochi waterfront strip, where the autorickshaw drivers offer to take us around town, to take us to hotels, advertising “Ferrari, madam?  Autorickshaw?”  I was unaware that Ferrari made put-puts, but I learn something new every day.

Such as the gelatinous quality of a caught, gutted and ready-to-cook octopus in a plastic bucket.

Or that the best way to eat fish is to choose your favorite raw fish (tuna? red-bellied snapper? barracuda? squid? shark?!) right off the waterfront from the fishermen’s stalls and then take it to the roadside shacks to have it cooked to order.  The stalls all have cats hovering around, and sometimes sitting right on the table by the fish, sleeping, prowling and waiting for remnants that fall in the wake of flies at the end of the day.

The Vasco Café and Homestay sits on a corner in the white house where Vasco da Gama lived when he was “viceroy” of Portuguese India.  He died on Christmas Eve in the year 1524, in that very house, of malaria, on his third journey around the Cape of Good Hope to the land of spices.  Before his final journey, he pirated and a privateered, trapped wealthy (heathen) traders inside the hulls of their ships and burned them, impersonated Muslims, took advantage of the rocky politics of the East African coast.  Gama traveled, in the same year, the opposite direction around the world from Christopher Columbus, and changed at least one city forever.

In 1965, sailor and author Robin Lee Graham touched many of the same ports, most of them African coastal towns with names starting with M.  Graham set out from his home in Southern California at the age of 16 in his 24-foot sloop with two kittens as company.  His goal was to circle the globe alone.  Until 2009, he was the youngest person ever to do so.  The trip took five years. Graham returned home a man, in body, in mind, in law.  He had seen the world and struggled with it, and struggled with himself.  And he discovered soon enough that these struggles were not nearly over.  He had been forced to find what he needed to work through them in himself.

In the hottest part of the day, we decided to do some exploring.  We walked from the Christian part of town (the part where signs on every street corner say “God’s Own Country,” the site of the Santa Cruz Basilica and St. Francis Church, where Gama was originally laid to rest) to the Muslim part of town, with temples and mosques towering above the other buildings and the palm trees.  We were blinded by the sweat running in our eyes, the sun so hot it stung our unprotected skin.  Every street crammed full of brightly-colored homes and darkened doorways looked the same.  But we crossed the canal back into the Christian part of town, the touristy part, and made it back to Napier House only 15 minutes late for our scheduled meeting time.  Everything we were looking for was within two blocks of the hotel, but we spent two hours getting lost about town, making our heading toward what we were sure was a shoreline.

After night falls it rains, the bucketing kind that sounds like snare drums on the windows.  My favorite sound to sleep to.  And in the morning when the sun rises, the egg-yolk warmth is very welcome, just like the morning after the longest night of your life.

At breakfast, Thom reads French tabloids over toast with pineapple jelly.  Apparently Hugh Jackman does yoga on vacation…?  Kenyon encourages me to get over my horrible loss of dear Vasco.  Maybe Hugh could be a good rebound man.

playing dirty

Our bodies are made to keep toxins out.  But still I can feel the dirt seeping into my pores, coating my nose and my lungs.  I can feel this heavy, ominous fog closing down on me, swirling into my head and making it ache.  I spend all day veiling my nose and mouth to keep the dust out, squinting into the gray air to try and glimpse the sun, and suddenly at night when I can't even see the tracks outside the train window, I feel intensely claustrophobic.

I am coated in the dust of many cities, mud in cloud form, heavy fog mixed with smog and dust from a dry winter.  Delhi is as busy as ever.  The city is scattered with huge signs saying "Delhi 2010" -- India is hosting the 2010 summer Commonwealth Games, which as far as I can tell is basically the regional Asian Olympics.  The people have amassed at this call to make a global impression: every hotel in Pahar Ganj is doing construction, improving their facilities.  The city suddenly surges forth to build an infrastructure from the ground up, building gutters, a metro system whose construction causes epic traffic congestion, and suddenly enforcing traffic, hospitality and cleanliness regulations.  To see an infamously dirty and disorganized city push so singlemindedly, all at once, to install the kind of infrastructure needed to host Asia, is simultaneously awesome and appalling.

Meanwhile, we sit in hordes of autorickshaws at an intersection and I am stunned by a young boy crossing the street in front of us, one hand raised in a feeble gesture: stop.  Please wait.  I once read that Indian traffic is regulated not by the government but by the simple law that bigger vehicles have the right of way over smaller ones.  Pedestrians in India understand that they are at the bottom of the traffic food chain, above only dogs.  This small gesture, backed by an uncommon faith in drivers and fellow human beings, moves me by its sheer impossibility.

I spent the first day in Delhi walking in and out of bookstores.  "The History of WHAT?" the booksellers say as I mumble the last word.  "Anarchism?"  Hardly daring to let it leave my lips.  A strange mix of reactions passes across their faces as they dismiss me before even saying, "No, we don't have that."  Heathen book, they neglect to add.  In an up-and-coming capitalist titan born from the clash between Moguls and the British Raj, "anarchism" is a dirty word.

Here the dirt comes in layers.  On the very inside, buried so deep it's supposed to be invisible, lies the remnants of the caste system, which still somehow dictates the way people treat each other and even the way we look at each other.  There is corruption of officials, confusion between different value systems: the ancient codes of community, the codes of hierarchy, the foreign hierarchies imposed over that, and Gandhi and the others' fight for freedom from it all, fight for the reign of humanity.  "Indian people don't use the dustbin," says a man in the train station, laughing as we walk our trash across the platform -- explaining the landfills lining the street.  There is the dirt from the air, and spread over it all a layer of Ponds fairness creme.  The obsession with paleness, whiteness, false perfection...  I can feel all these layers covered up in myself and it makes me feel both pervasively, inescapably dirty and free to act clean, since I am washed and pure on the outside.

We drive past a park scattered with groups of homeless, derelict bicycles and blanket-covered mounds that are hopefully merely sleeping bodies, and a business meeting of men in suits and ties, sitting on the grass, laughing.  I have hope that all these changes on the outside are a sign of impending change from within.  But even if they are not, somehow, it is beautiful.  I fill my lungs with a mix of dust and starving oxygen, take a deep breath, exhale warmth to ward off the fog, and squint out the window to watch at least the power lines pass in front of a yellow-grey midnight sky.