two old poems.
January 15, 2010 by admin, under Fiction.
The other day, my mom and I visited the storage unit where we keep everything she and my brother moved from Oregon after selling our family’s house last August. We used dustpans to shovel the snow away from the doorway, and filled up the car with boxes of my belongings.
Sorting things I still wanted to keep (a pair of black leather boots with ruffles and spike heels) from things I didn’t (a six inch thick English text book from high school) I discovered a stack of high school papers. I have no idea why I kept my AP history and English essays, handwritten and generality-laden as most such essays are. Unless it was to prove that I’ve always been fond of titling things oddly, such as, “Betty Freidan vs. Martin Luther,” and “The Fascinating Issue of Power as Viewed by Orwell, Plus a Few Frogs.”
A few months after graduating I went on a poetry-writing kick, and two of those poems have remained my favorite pieces of writing, ever. They were also lurking in this pile of old papers. So I thought I’d share.
“a friend I wish I’d had”
You appreciated so much of me, that year,
or tried to. But as April turned to May,
this was one thing you never understood.
… Please listen, children. Just one more sonnet before we are through,
one more month before you can leave…
You never believed my concern: My room is a mess.
So is mine, you’d say.
You’d smile.
Mad with thirst, I’d sneak from class and find you in the hall,
sit next to you on the bench with your books.
We’d talk, your hands punctuating the air.
I would drink and drink and
drink,
drink your conversation until the ashen hallway of that sheetrock warren
warbled away.
I saw only your chin,
jutting upward when you laughed.
Then the halls would fill with students, and we’d stand
(In my dreams, you pass by unnoticing)
… Just one more day, children, and you will be free…
Moving through the revolutions of bells, wishing she was wrong,
wishing I had the chance to talk to you…
always.
But, My bedroom floor is covered, I can’t make it to my bed.
Things I haven’t used in years are floating to the surface.
You listened sympathetically, but did not see the point.
Perhaps your mess was different.
The layers covering your floor, the clothes on your chair, books on your bed,
(I have lost so quickly what was never really there)
didn’t frighten you.
My room’s a mess, too, you said, as we stepped around the curtain.
… Just one more step until you have gone…
Sometimes I wish we were still there, laughing around her as she
read aloud a sonnet.
“Senior Year: Girlfriends”
Stalking hallways in black and curvy shrouds,
you girls taught me how to savor
insanity and pain.
Letters on your rumpled t-shirts;
your madness was a slogan.
(I was crazy before it was cool).
With dark eyes and limpid hair, they/we
ate lunch: a manic coven circle sitting
in a crowded high school hall.
Anger and joy passed through unwelcome:
genuine emotion unbalances woe.
Better sorrow, the clothing fit.
(The mall has a whole store of Misery)
Dismal bedroom, suicidal frustration.
Parents who are Mean.
Sorrow is never your fault.
Stepping briefly from our baths of tears,
we had a good time, sweeties.
Thrift store hunting, Mambo Lattes,
cigarette smoke fogged our nostrils.
Nights spent imagining what life looked like.
Remember, not the anguish, but:
sitting in the grass,
blowing glitter on each other’s faces,
cuddling around a scary movie.
Books of revelation, shared poetry,
coffee and rain and
laughing till I could no longer stand.
The lightness when we pretended we had no homework,
and it would always be spring.
That year, you needed a stranger to your sticky, spider’s web.
I needed the glimpses of genius,
your weeping pasts,
loud music in the car and a cloister to dance within.
The puzzle shifts and people who didn’t fit, now do-
pieces once perfect, now cannot be wedged into place.
Funny how so brief a space
can slay a common language.
I returned and asked:
What do I do now?
You couldn’t tell me.
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Thanksgiving Day reruns (a holiday-themed reblog from 2006).
November 26, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
Written Wednesday, November 29, 2006, “Sour grapes and the theory of impermanence” was about a Thanksgiving celebrated in Pennsylvania, and recovered from in New Jersey. This is raw, Myspace material here, folks. Perfect accompaniment to Ma’s green bean casserole!
Sandwiched between Halloween (my dad’s favorite holiday) and Christmas (my mom’s), Thanksgiving always came in third or possibly eighteenth in my family. To me a fun Thanksgiving required a ton of people in the house to eat all this dumb Pilgrim food with. We often didn’t live in the same region as our relatives, and the last time we did spend it with them, the evening had the ominous feel of the last act of King Lear.
So last year my family unhesitatingly spent “Turkey Day” painting the living room. But, hey, we took an hour off in the afternoon to sit on the covered furniture shoved into the middle of the room and eat turkey ‘n gravy on toast.
We all agreed it was okay if, this year, I didn’t dash across the country for the holiday dedicated to thanking our white man’s god for providing gullible natives who were willing to feed us, hand over their land, and inspire Cher songs.
Anyway. My friend M has this thing about Thanksgiving so we decided several months ago that, even if we were single, unloved, far from family and totally broke on that particular Thursday in November, we’d at least do something together. So when she decided she’d spend it with her brother and sister in law in Pennsylvania, I went too.
Driving past old stone barns turned into antique stores, M warned me that the town where her brother lived was Something Else. Waiting for something else, I watched twee tea shops and bookstores fritter into lovely straight streets of family-sized pre-war houses. The lavendar-grey sky melted into the naked mauve branches of the trees. As we parked in the driveway of her brother’s house, his wife opened the back door, holding up her adorable one year old to watch us lift dishes of sweet potatoes and turnips from the back seat. It was just like the neighborhood my family lived in before we moved to Oregon… perfect.
Digression: Many people would call the neighborhood where I currently live and work “more than perfect.” The Queen Anne and Tudor mansions on sloping green lawns grace the curving streets with a gracious distance between them. Expensive cars fill the garages, happy children run to and fro, pedigreed dogs bark from maintained fences. But no one actually lives in these homes. They commute to the city every day or spend four hours in the gym so they’ll be fit enough to pick their children up from Catholic school. Hired help cares for the lawns, children, meals, cars and windows of these “homes.” Like most of this town, they’re holograms of perfection, but you can walk right through them. End digression.
We’ll call M’s brother Dan and his wife Carrie. Their adorable baby, by the way, is truly adorable, unlike all the babies in this world whom you’re required to describe with that word. She accompanied Carrie and I around the house as I oohed and ahhed at the redecorated bathrooms, the new mullioned windows, the baby’s mint-green attic room with the two-inch thick wood door.
I asked her how she felt living out here after she said she’d lived in cities all her life. She told me with what seemed genuine contentment- I recognized it from hearing it in my own voice when my family lived in the aforementioned Perfect Town- that between the baby, her work, and the pleasure of having favorite “local spots” in the town, she felt fulfilled right now visiting the city only once every couple weeks.
They’re both writers, working from home… a home with mullioned windows.
We ate too much good food, played a couple games, marveled at the baby’s genius, met the three cats. Then M took me home and returned to hers.
The next morning I discovered the house full of cake, brownies, cookies and turkey leftover from this family’s Thanksgiving celebration. I had a slice of everything. I spent a good hour talking to my boss’s father, who was visiting with her mother for the holiday. I went to Barnes & Noble to buy a gift, glaring a bit resentfully at the shelves of books everyone else in the universe had managed to get published. Then I drove to M’s.
All this, having eaten cake for breakfast.
For some reason, as I drove, my thoughts strayed to that idyllic period (in the aforementioned Perfect Town) when I was living with my family in a sweet old Craftsman and teaching myself how to write. Those couple years were marred by my own frustration, isolation, and boredom, topped with a few ugly revelations before we moved about the town itself. But I also learned, during those years, as I had learned years before writing on a used word processor in the tiny living room of our tiny two-bedroom apartment, that a little classical music, loved ones nearby, and something to write on are sometimes all I need to feel… content.
I’ll let the word rest in its purest form.
I thought about contentment as I’d experienced it in the past. I thought about the books on the bookstore shelves, and the burbling ideas I’ve had lately for novels, screenplays, comic scripts, memoirs… hundreds of things I wanted to write. But because I don’t want to let my parents support me anymore, because I’m too high-maintenence to keep this job that gives me all the free time in the world, and because you can’t ask Santa for a husband/sugar daddy, I’m not sitting in a peaceful place writing stories all day.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t have cake this morning for breakfast. Today, I know, as I know nineteen days out of twenty, that I wouldn’t trade anything for the fun I’m having right now. But “for some reason” that day after Thanksgiving, I felt bereft.
You can puke any time. This particular story probably won’t get any less sentimental. I cried driving to Hoboken. Cried later that afternoon. Wasn’t until about three-thirty that I realized, gee. I just visited the Happy Suburban Family and must admit I have no means of attaining said happiness. I wonder why I feel blue?
Who knows how long they’ll have it- as M’s boyfriend pointed out when she described her brother’s situation to him, he’d had two kids, a house and wife a while back, too. Now he’s separated, his school-age daughters are in therapy, and his wife makes Norma Desmond look calm and open-minded.
In other words, even if you experience marital, familial, and workial bliss, it may not last. But that doesn’t make it any easier to live without it. I may don a Buddhist perspective sometimes and say “life is impermanence, so enjoy whatcha got,” but I have to admit that I want those few moments of shared happiness a young family hopefully experiences. Anyone who says they don’t just hasn’t been to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving lately.
So, once I’d realized that the combination of a hypoglemic-nightmare breakfast and a heartbreakingly nice peek into suburban life had given me an understandable post-ecstasy slump, I felt more pragmatic. Sure, I didn’t have a husband, child, cat, house, or the ability to support myself writing, yet. But… someday?
Pragmatism got me off the couch and to the liquor store with the hope that beer would finish the job.
I didn’t get drunk that night, however, or hit on any boys, or wander around the city looking for a distraction. I went to M’s boyfriend’s apartment with her. The three of us had a few beers, ate sushi, and listened to music. We assured ourselves that even if none of us ever experience that “Leave It To Beaver” stuff again, (and since all three of us lack the Calm Gene that makes such things possible, we may not) we can always adopt babies from the Congo and find some sort of compromised crazy substitute for Perfect Family Life.
And one of us may. Or they may get married and I’ll wind up the spinster with a hundred cats that M worries she’ll become. We might each end up on a different continent, we might not be talking this time next year, we might be drafted to fight in Iraq, we might find ourselves still drinking decades from now, wondering how to hold on to love.
Aware of all this, we just talked about David Bowie and how M’s boyfriend needed a haircut.
It wasn’t the most relaxed of evenings, but now that my blood sugar is stable, I have just one thing to say: I’m damn grateful I was there, with them, that night. I don’t know what’ll happen to them, or me, or anyone else I care about, tomorrow or ten years from now. I’m just glad to have friends who are willing, at least right now, to do what so few people besides my family have ever been able to do: to peek with me, almost blindly, through the curtain of night into the next day.
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oh, it's been broughten.
October 19, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
Nothing was “right” with my life a month ago. My mom and brother were sharing the one bedroom apartment with me, I felt like a cat in heat in the dog room at the pound, like Candi had become but a memory (said with a melodramatic wrist draped over my forehead) and ducking near-constant criticism and unfair blame from my boss.
But I didn’t want to talk to any of these people about any of the things that were bothering me, I wanted to just go, go anywhere, New York, San Francisco, Milan, Beijing, Fiji. I didn’t care. Just get me out of here and away from the bullshit. I’d had a rough year. I didn’t want to talk anymore, about my parents, my lovers, the drama. Just go, before I’d say something I’d regret. But I couldn’t find a way to escape, and meanwhile…
Mr. Hotness and I started talking again. After a few polite exchanges about where the past few months had taken each of us, I lost my temper with him, and good. Instead of throwing up his hands and walking away from the e-conversation, he said he was relieved by my anger, that it sounded like the real me.
Candi ignored yet another text message, and I threw my phone at the wall, hoping she could hear it way out in the ‘burbs. After the sheetrock settled, she messaged me on Facebook, “what’s up, Toots.” We met at Cole’s. I ate chocolate madness lava extreme rich dark mousse lushness, she ate ravioli, and we talked.
One night last week, my coworker found herself unable to contain her frustration with our boss, saying a couple times, “And Palmer agrees with me.” My boss invited me, unknowing, into her office the next day, to “hear out my frustrations”… and tried to make a lot of it my fault. I’d already had the conversation two hundred times in the past month, in my head, and was firm about the amount of responsibility I’d accept for the situation.
I left winded, but fifty cent an hour richer, and working with the woman I use to work with, the boss I was friends with, the boss who is an interesting artist with lots of big ideas for the organization. Not the boss who blames me for every little thing. She and my coworker and I had lunch today after a two-hour meeting, and talked about trashy TV we love and pregnant cats in the ‘hood.
My mom’s staying in Seattle, temporarily relieving the pressure on this apartment, and dating someone whose brain is as big as this apartment.
My brother is taking professional interest in and control of his job.
My bunny’s sleeping on my bed again at least a few nights a week.
I learned that box brownies taste way better in the shape of cupcakes than they do baked in a flat pan.
I’m going to two meetings tomorrow, representing the organization to people from all over the city- yikes! New challenge, good challenge, ahhh.
I met my dad for coffee yesterday. We avoided serious topics and talked mostly of work and the weather. His presence still showed me he was willing to try. Try even though I’d told him I didn’t want to talk to him anymore, even though I’d been blunt about the problems I have with him as a father, even though difficult conversations would inevitably follow. He was there telling me what Mr. Hotness did: bring it on.
For two months I kept thinking, “If you don’t let me retreat, I’m going to lose my temper… don’t make me lose my temper…!” I don’t plan on turning into Ms. Hyde, but I also have learned from this early fall madness that I have to lose my temper, like anyone else, and people are going to deal. They’re not going to evaporate or turn into dust cubes like someone in a Star Trek episode. We’ll move on.
So bring it, bring the drama and the pain and the mess, and also the bunnies, the brownies, and the love. We’ll sort out who wins later. Just bring yourself.
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when getting by with a little help from your friends isn't enough.
September 27, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
A few years ago, I went to work for a man who owned a window and door manufacturing and installation business, but was branching into elevators… fireproof elevators. My first days on the job were spent accompanying him, in his poorly suspended box truck, on a drive from Brooklyn to Boston to attend an elevator conference.
After his conference meetings, dinner, and a few glasses of wine, he would ask me to meet him in his room, to type things up for him while he stood behind me, breathing heavily and scratching himself. On my third day of this, I packed my bags, left him a note, and boarded a train back to New York.
The job had been my ticket out of working as a live-in nanny in the ‘burbs of New Jersey. I had taken the job, moved in with a friend in Hoboken, and now, had no job and owed her eight hundred dollars a month for rent.
For the next two weeks, in the throes of a violent head cold, I emailed, called and met with every potential job lead I could find on Craigslist. My parents sent me money to pay for my existence while I scrambled for work. Meanwhile, the “elevator guy” emailed me, asking if I’d gotten home all right.
I was terrified that I would have to go back to Oregon. I was more terrified of going back to Oregon than I was of working for a man who made inappropriate advances.
So, after the new year, I started work again at the window, door and some-day elevator company. He paid us an approximation of our wages in cash, because he couldn’t afford to cut the full checks “yet.” He hadn’t paid taxes or most of his bills in about a year and a half. One day, alone in the office, I answered the buzzer to find an IRS agent standing outside, who had just “dropped by” and needed to speak with my manager ASAP. That was just one fun highlight, though, from a typical week of putting up with his farts, his dandruff, his breathing over me, reaching over me, making comments about “oops- touched you!”
I worked there for two or three months. until I miraculously found the recruiting job. I put up with it because I didn’t want to go home. I was desperate to stay in New York. I loved it there- the trains, the skyscrapers, the noise, the crowds, the unpredictability, the Urban Outfitters on the corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue. Sometimes I dated, sometimes I didn’t, sometimes I hung out with my girlfriend a lot, sometimes I didn’t, but one thing remained consistent- at least one day every weekend, I spent in Manhattan.
On the other hand, I got by all summer here in Buffalo “with a little help from my friends.” Dawn and Candi talked with me about the DF over mojitos and martinis. My boss conspired with me to diversify the organization. Plumptopher held parties and game nights at his house. Life was fun, when I had company. But left to my own devices on a Saturday afternoon, I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t, and don’t, particularly care about exploring or learning more about Buffalo or Western New York. It’s not my cup of tea. I could fight that, by trying to force myself to enjoy it more, or I could admit that I want to go to the Met, I want to see beautiful people on public transit, and I want to have more than one option (aside from the grocery store) for great sushi.
You can get by with a little help from your friends, as long as your friends are there to distract, entertain and cajole you into a good time. When friends don’t have time to do that, you fall back on your own resources. Sometimes you realize, “Well, I’ll be okay, I can head for the Village, get brunch at Cowgirl, admire Jersey City from across the Hudson, maybe see a movie at IFC.” And other times you realize, “I have no desire to get out of bed today, unless the gang is going to lure me with a pitcher of beer and lots of pizza.”
And that’s when you look at your rabbit, and think, “Maybe we need to make plans.”
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my day, backwards, or, all the good and bad in a lovely heap.
August 18, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
At the end of July, my Executive Director retired, simultaneously firing one of her four employees. Another gave her two weeks’ notice shortly after. The new ED and I have spent the past three weeks learning our new roles while doing the work of five. Meanwhile, my mom and brother have just returned to Buffalo from Oregon; while they look for apartment(s), my brother sleeps on a second mattress in my room, my mom on the futon. Meanwhile, summer has finally arrived, bringing oppressive heat and humidity. This is how a “great day” plays out in that context.
With fans running in both corners of the living room, my mom, brother and I watched an episode of Boston Legal tonight, ignoring the piles of clothing, books, shoes and luggage my mom has desperately tried to stash away since they moved in last week. No matter how hard she works, the piles don’t seem to shrink, and my brother and I find drinking and socializing a lot more rewarding than putting stuff away.
Before that, my mom and I argued about nachos, the kitchen counter and air-drying laundry.
Before that, my mom brought us down those controversial nachos while my brother and I sat on the picnic table discussing our zombie movie project. I started the whole thing by saying, “We were just about to come up, before the zombies, I mean mosquitoes, attack.”
Before that, all three of us visited an apartment for rent about three houses down from the house my brother lived in before deciding to leave Buffalo in June. A two bedroom they could share, the apartment had spacious rooms, tall windows and an updated kitchen. But my brother quoted Funny Bones, saying he thought the landlord, a slender young architect who lived with his fiancee upstairs, “smelled French,” which is Davisese for, “He’s weird in an unquantifiable way I may or may not be justified in holding against him, but will anyway.” See the movie for more information, she said with a smile.
Before that, my boss and I visited a Boys & Girls Club, to discuss a dance program we’re holding in one of their clubs. I tried not to project my own terror of forced socialization on the children I saw reading magazines and playing games on laminated tables under florescent bulbs. The woman we spoke with was proud of their new ability to feed every child, in every club, a snack and dinner. She showed us their kitchen, full of industrial-sized cans of spaghetti sauce and Campbell’s soup, and I told her that was cool.
Before climbing in the car, my boss and I joked with Reverend Armand of the Episcopal church where we rent office space. He had just printed business cards on his office printer, we had just received freshly designed cards from a commercial printer. Ours were way prettier. Armand is a fellow Seattlelite who won my heart last week when I found him in the foyer, on his hands and knees, scraping paint from a large panel. He explained that a Holocaust survivor had recently done a series of paintings called “Jesus through the eyes of a Jew,” that the nearby Jewish Community Center had refused to exhibit. Armand had promptly invited him to show his work at his church. The panel was for the exhibit. “It sounded like radical welcoming to me,” Armand said with a gleeful laugh, scraping away.
My boss and I were just as gleeful about the business cards; they represented radical welcoming of a different kind. Our nonprofit’s mission is to provide school students with arts experience they wouldn’t ordinarily have. In the words of my boss, that arts experience had, for the twelve years of her predecessor’s traditionalist leadership, consisted of “white men with guitars.” Buffalo is not a white town, nor is it a folk-music-listening town. My boss and I have brainstormed for weeks on ways to recruit younger and more diverse people to our organization. Our new yellow and orange cards, replacing the sterile blue-and-white design of yesterday, beautifully symbolized those efforts.
Before that, I met Candi for breakfast, sitting outside on the first cool morning we’d had in two weeks, enjoying a souvlaki chicken breakfast and a cup of tea. We compared notes on the Brooks & Dunn concert we’d seen last weekend, the difference between men who wear boots to church and men who wear Cons to the bookstore, and how much we were overeating. The bees circled low over her plateful of syrup and my jam-slathered toast, and I didn’t even question that I had gotten up early to hang out with someone at a Greek diner in Buffalo. What else would I be doing?
And before that, I dreamed about my dad, friends in New York, and a spiral staircase in Grand Central Station that would only let you climb so far uptown, before you found yourself going down again.
Call me crazy, but I feel like it was a pretty good day, all in all.
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destination heartache.
August 16, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
Growing up with cousins in 4-H, grandparents who spent hours in the sun with their beans and roses, and a mother who loves pygmy goats, I took an annual summer trip to the Monroe County Fair in Washington as a matter of course. In various family formations, my family and my two aunts’ families would make their way out at some point in August, to eat corn on the cob and hamburgers with grilled onions, argue over how many rides we could take, and ooh and ahh over the floppy-eared rabbits.
We’ve been to fairs in Oregon, Washington, California and even Alaska, simply because we’ve lived in all those places, and a family has to do what a family has to do- even if Californians don’t get the importance of grilled onions and Anchorage can only afford four rides.
I’d never been to a fair on the East Coast, however, and Buffalo’s slogan, “America’s Fair,” was a red flag to a bull (yes, in this analogy, I’m the bull). Imagine with what enthusiasm, then, I rallied my mom and brother and our friends to go to the fair last night.
We were a hodgepodge group: my mom, a fair veteran, beelining for the market building, the rest of us in our twenties more concerned with riding the Star Blaster than perusing the demo booths. Admittedly no one did anything until we’d all stuffed our faces with deep fried foods (“I’m surprised no one’s deep fried the Kettle Korn,” my mom said, as my brother cowered away from the fried Oreo I was waving in his face).
Like one should after attending a county fair, I have picture postcard memories: Plumtopher and Dawn holding hands under the Ferris wheel, my brother shrieking like a girl (on purpose) on the Magik Xpress, Candi wrinkling her nose at the lemonade she’d bought from the wrong booth.
“Nights like this make me want a guy’s hand to hold,” Candi said, swinging her hand with a cheesy expression on her face to illustrate. Standing with her next to the sickening ride Plumtopher and Ian had insisted on riding twice, I looked up at the multi-colored lights of the rides against the dark sky. It was a beautiful night, and like nights at a fair in August should be, it deserved to be shared with someone.
Flashback to Wednesday, when I found out that my Distant Friend had been single for three weeks without mentioning it to me. We all know how I feel about the DF. Yet discovering he was A) free B) still not desirous to do anything long-distance, I found myself telling him, “This is one of those big changes that doesn’t change anything.” I still wasn’t ready to move back to NYC, especially for a man admittedly still not over an old relationship. He said he thought about me, but was still holding back, not ready to commit. We were right where we started two months ago.
Which of course led us to talking over a “visit.” We agreed it was a fun but risky idea, but I continued to think about it. I had put in overtime this month and earned a week off in September. Why not bus it down to Manhattan?
My mom and brother arrived in town Thursday. Plumtopher threw a sangria party on his porch to celebrate. Leaning over her glass, Dawn told me she was going to Mississippi on a road trip with a friend, and I was welcome to come along. I told her I would think about it. What I was thinking about, though, was Manhattan.
I went to work on Friday, starting another conversation with the DF about a visit. He said he’d “look forward” to it, but not as a gesture of commitment. I compared him to the carton of ice cream in the freezer I knew I shouldn’t eat, but knew I would. Why fight it? He stopped me mid-sentence with the question, “Are you being good to yourself? By considering this?”
Reeling from the pathetic tone of my inner voice responding with “She’s never good to herself!” I told him I needed to sleep on that one. Dawn called, asking if my drunken interest in the road trip still held now that I was no longer under the influence of the sangria.
I could only do one or the other. One entailed trips to the beach and bars with girls whose company I truly enjoyed. One entailed… certain things even the best girlfriend cannot provide.
Saturday night, watching people swung into space, I could feel that old heartache tiptoeing up behind me. My sentimental heart wanted to waste moments, if not hours, under that sky, wishing I could share it with the Distant Friend.
Instead I turned back to Dawn and Candi and made a joke about my brother and friend screaming from the ride overhead.
If Dawn hadn’t offered me an alternative, I probably would have gone to New York, to let someone who’s not going to take risks for me, touch me. There’s a big problem there, regardless of how well I understand where the DF is emotionally right now. But at least I took the alternative. At least I turned away from that night sky and continued to have fun at the fair. The DF would have wanted me to anyway, that’s the irony: he’s not asking me to pine. And he’s not the first person I’ve pined for. Still don’t know if it’s bad luck or bad choices, but for the time being anyway, I tried to avoid making journeys that were bound to end in tears.
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Guest blog by Peaches.
August 10, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
A 2009 college grad, my friend Sarah joined the Peace Corps and arrived in Mongolia about a month ago. She regales friends with her exploits via email; this is her most recent.
Apologies for my silence; we have been having some fantastic rain storms over here, storms that have knocked the power clean out three different days, electricity running in spurts through the house, stopping again in time when night falls to leave us in ink black darkness, laughing in the living room as ten of us search for the one candle by the glow of cell phone screens. So, bear with me for the next two years. Utilities are disappearing acts in Mongolia and always a source of amusement.
A rumor that runs through all of Peace Corps is that no matter how hard things get for volunteers, they always reassure themselves with one simple statement: “At least I’m not in Mongolia.” Statistically, Mongolia is the second most difficult Peace Corps program, following closely behind Mauritana, which suffers from periodic and serious food shortages. From speaking with current volunteers in country, I would argue that food shortages coupled with six months of winter where the temperature averages -30 would make Mongolia take the cake. I don’t know how my resume of art publications, dance instruction, and interests in experimental Spanish literature and opera convinced Washington, D.C that I was able-bodied enough for Mongolia, but sure enough, here I am, awaiting my fate which will be revealed on August 15th (mark your calendars and start praying), the day I find out which god-forsaken part of the country I will be shipped out to to start my life and share whatever appropriate talents I apparently have. The one safe bet is that I included my short time in the equestrian world and that being noted, the only place where I could possibly function is Mongolia. The other night, as shooing ten cows out of the yard with the help of my guard dog and a few rocks, a man literally rode through our gate on horse back, inquiring about my family’s whereabouts. It was quite the perfect moment.
They say that volunteers talk about two things: food & sex (but can’t that apply to most of the human race?) and so far, I would like to add a third to the list that in my experience, however short, has forged ahead of sex as a topic of conversation-bowl movements. Yes, everyone is very candid about the literal comings and goings of their bodies, if only to compare those movements with other volunteers. Mostly it’s because we are all terrified of things like worms and parasites and can’t help but compare notes when we are feeling like hypochondriacs. I, up until last week, had been immune to most issues. I ate everything that was put in front of me with no problems, slept like a log and seem to suffer from no abnormalities. Then the stomach churning came and the late-night hours running to and from the outhouse, candle in hand, were noticed by my host family, who couldn’t help watching me from the living room, and then inquired about my stomach, blaming the heat and my penchant for wearing shorts instead of pants.
But this weekend was different. After a wonderful Saturday spent with fellow TOFEL volunteers in the beautiful resortesque Terelj Park (I should have pictures up on the blog soon), where I managed to climb a mountain and get stuck in a slimy, smelly, quicksand strong bog (I scrubbed my sneakers clean and I swear, they look brand new) I spent the night at a friend’s house in town who was celebrating her birthday. After a dinner of pasta salad, cake, milk tea and dumplings, I noticed sharp fantastic pains in my stomach. Thinking it was just another intestinal adventure, I didn’t think much of it, except that it was torture to lie down, my back and spine hurt so bad. The pain came and went for another two days, coming to a head at night when my host sister would come into my room with a hot water bottle and blankets to rub my back so I could sleep. The third night, buckled over in pain and quickly becoming addicted to Tylenol, I called the medical officer explaining that I had an awful case of what I thought was constipation. The next morning my rib cage felt like it was about to explode and on the doctors orders, I was whisked away via a cushy land rover to the Ulaanbaatar to be tested and checked for whatever it was. Turns out I had a massive UTI that had my kidneys so swollen I was unable to sit, stand or lie down without wanting to cry. The wonderful medical officers promptly put me on medicine and bed rest not before giving me an allowance to buy some food. UB, however unseemly and well, unattractive, of a city it may be, it offers all the comforts of home. I ate shish kebab, pringles, chocolate and pizza before spending the night in the sick room at the Peace Corps office where I read two books cover to cover while listening to the traffic outside my balcony window, my well-being the talk of the staff and the absolute concern of my poor host family. My family has taken to calling me “The Sarah,” asking questions such as “where is the Sarah?” “how is the Sarah?” and saying things like “the Sarah needs food” and “the Sarah is outside.” After four years at Sarah Lawrence, where Sarahs were a dime a dozen and oft confused, I have a smug appreciation for this new-found title. The morning after my UB sleep over, well on the road to recovery with permission to return home, I had a homecoming that was as sweet as it was dramatic, with children running down the road to greet me, Mongolian gifts in hand ( a tiny little felt ger with a portrait of Chinggis inside, wooden Mongolian king and queen dolls, felt slippers from the countryside and a tiny wrestling boot pencil holder. “The Sarah, please don’t be sick!” my host sister, Zaya, exclaimed as I opened my gifts sitting in the living room with the family, Immortal Beloved dubbed in Mongolian on the TV. Of course, in the end, they all blamed the wet shoes I came home from the park in as the cause for my infection.
Attached is a picture of me with the whole gang, all thirteen of my family members, minus the one brother, Gana, who was out installing windows (which he fashioned himself in our kitchen for weeks, the smell of turpentine and cooking meat a perfume I will never forget) into his new house. The photo will be printed on a certificate given by PC to my family for successfully hosting a volunteer. The regular body count for any given night in my house is ten people, and this is a two room house, I occupying a large third that stands like a separate apartment. But in the almost-two months that I have been here, I have never once heard or seen any of the family members fight or raise their voices, minus yelling at the kids to buck up and behave. Ten people. Two rooms. When a German couple moved into town and started building their own house, my host sister said it was strange how many walls they needed. She didn’t see the need for so much space between two people. Makes living in a studio apartment seem positively palatial.
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Miss Crabapple
May 23, 2009 by admin, under Fiction.
Ghosting took all her energy. She floated from diner to diner, hovering near the clicking spinning ceiling fans, watching people shove large forkfuls of pancakes and roast beef into their mouths. Sometimes at the same time. Who ordered breakfast at nine o’clock at night? These were the questions that troubled her most.
There was no reason for her to manifest, to become real. The children she taught at school called her “Miss Crabapple” after the character on the Simpsons; her neighbor looked down her shirt whenever he stopped in the hallway of their building to talk to her about the weather. He had a pot belly and breathed heavily as though he had just walked the four flights up to their floor, instead of taking the elevator. He was married to a kind woman who always had a headache.
The children were not children, not really, her developing theory being that at twelve, a child became something akin to but not quite human. They passed out of it again around fourteen or fifteen, but she taught the last grade of an elementary school, as they prepared for the battle ground of junior high. They talked about the friends they had at the big school, and practiced doing their hair the way some idiot on TV was doing it that year. It was different every year yet painfully the same.
So instead of going home after school she took to leaving her body in the teacher’s lounge and floating down the road to the noise of traffic and the restaurants. She watched folks eat, with their friends, their parents, their children, their lovers. She watched them drink their water or their coffee: two packets of sugar or four of Sweet ‘n Low? She wondered if their companions remembered they liked their pie heated, a la mode. She did.
The children called her Miss Crabapple and assumed that she ceased to exist after class; the other teachers hurried harried homeward, and she had no one, somehow she had no one to exist for when the final bell rang. She was alone, and lonely.
She had not intended for that to happen. She had nourished her relationships, but one by one, her relatives had moved out to the ‘burbs, an hour from her, college friends had grown up and away, and she had less and less energy to leave the circle of school-to-home, school-to-home.
Maybe it was her fault.
She watched a woman lick her upper lip as she took a bite of a grilled turkey sandwich. She felt a physical pull from her chest to this woman, and she fell from her position near the ceiling fan, to drift near the edge of the table. Slid into the bench across from her, leaning forward to watch her dab her mouth with the burgundy cloth napkin, take a sip of iced tea, crunch a single ice cube, lick her lips again and fondle the pickle on the edge of her plate. She took one bite of it as she reached for the check, and it was in that moment, the silvery green crunch of the pickle disappearing into her mouth, that Eileen came back to life. She physicallized right in front of the pickle-eating woman, whose eyelashes flickered from the check to her new companion, and back.
“French fry?” Eileen’s friend said, putting a twenty in the folder with the check. “I didn’t have any.”
“Thanks,” Eileen said, reaching for one. She dipped it into the little cup of ketchup, and savored salty and tangy, smooth and crispy, in the darkness of her own mouth. “How was work?”
“Good,” Eileen’s friend smiled. “Let’s get pie.”
“I could go for apple, with whip cream but no ice cream.”
“I remember.”
