break my heart again
My running sneaks got left in Austin during the post-Quebec purging of baggage. They’re living in a box in La and Marc’s guest room, providing companionship for the tent and the watercolors and all the other things that were too bulky for a suddenly mobile summer. So I haven’t been running.
But yesterday I was sitting at my computer for the sixth or so hour, clicking my way through the job sites of the City of Portland and the State of Oregon and Monster and Craigslist and the American Society of Landscape Architects and every marginally progressive-alternative space-related firm and nonprofit in the region, and I looked out the window past my porch to the sunny afternoon, and that was it. I needed to be moving. And is it too late to grudgingly admit that all you runners out there were right, that this stupid antisocial non-sport has in fact grown on me, does in fact provide me with a certain convenient outlet for restlessness and crowded thoughts?
So I pulled on my REI scratch-and-dent trail runners and took off. And Portland’s Willamette River loop is not as serene and friendly as Eugene’s Willamette River loop, but it’s not at all bad. There are bridges and railroad tracks and sand & gravel barges and other assorted industrial delight. And Portland this week is indecisive and inbetween just like I am, warm bright days and chilly nights, confused crocuses blooming under already rustling oaks, mingling smells of summer barbeques and autumn leaves. And soon enough we’re all going to have to figure out what’s next, but it’s hard to stop flirting with the remnants of what was good for a while.
weekly reader
Sunday I swam in the Susquehanna. It started out as just a canoe but the river was so wide and smooth and it’s such a beautiful name, Susquehanna, that I wanted it all around me. And the sun went down and nine of us wandered around Talley’s farm, mostly staring up at the Milky Way but sometimes looking down to shadow box in the light from the barn.
Monday Ty and I crunched down the gravel road at five in the still-dark morning, south to Philadelphia. (Philadelphia. If I prayed it would be with place names.) We had a diner breakfast, eggs and butter-heavy toast and corned beef hash, and he left me at the bottom of the escalator in the Philadelphia Airport. I flew to Seattle via Houston because that is airline geography. On the second flight I gave up my window seat to a separated couple, and ended up between a serious whiskey drinker and a very nice guy from North Carolina named Ryan, who likes Seattle even though it is "very fast paced." Heh.
Tuesday I woke up in Beth and Sarah’s living room loft bed. Beth made French toast and I loaded the truck with a rocking chair and a fifties Formica table. I met up with Patricia and Gabriel, indie filmmakers who are finishing up a documentary on a design studio I was in three years ago. For four hours they filmed me walking by buildings and looking pensively at the Duwamish, and then I was back on the road. I drove over the river into Portland as the sun was setting, and the water was orange and the skyline was twinkley, and it felt like coming home.
Wednesday I was back on I-5, down to Eugene to empty my storage unit. Melissa hid a key under a pumpkin so I could claim three months of unforwarded mail. While loading the truck to airtight perfection I had conversations with the storage place desk guy (also from North Carolina), the storage place equipment operator (who ropes cattle), and two middle-aged men putting things in storage (one threw his back out ten years ago, the other spent several months living in New Orleans in 1984). Apparently a girl loading a truck with boxes is quite a curiosity. I found my way home with no map this time and no wrong turns. I celebrated with Jamey at the Aladdin, watching Andrew Bird from the balcony’s front row with end-of-summer hefeweizens.
Thursday I unpacked. Part of me kept saying What do you need all this stuff for? You just spent three perfectly fine months without it. But then there were the ceramic cups I made last winter, and the fuzzy white sweater I love when it snows, and my big folio of small-denomination stamps. And at night I ate a salad with lettuce and tomato from the garden and cheese and chick peas from the co-op, and I drank cold white wine from Cave Junction Oregon on the porch with my housemate Brad.
And this morning I woke up wrapped in blankets instead of a sleeping bag, in my bed under two sunny wide-open square windows. And the mailman brought one handwritten letter and one New Yorker, addressed to me here in Portland.
losing weight
Nothing makes me want to live in an eight hundred square foot sparsely furnished house (boat) like a couple days visiting my parents.
Today I cleaned out the garage. And by “garage,” I mean “enormous tangled heap of four decades of stuff surrounded by musty walls.” Luckily I just spent three weeks gutting houses in New Orleans, so the task – particularly in the distinctly fall weather – seemed downright inviting. Not to mention it’s the only non-shopping-themed diversion available in suburbia.
My parents have just enough post-depression-era-upbringing in them that they save mason jars and broken plant pots, and just enough liberal environmental guilt in them that they save gift boxes and paper bags. But the rest of them is affluent professional boomer through and through, so they’d never dream of actually reusing any of these things. They just put them in the garage.
So Philadelphia’s (undoubtedly unpopular) country music radio station and I spent five hours out there, organizing and consolidating and sorting and most of all disposing. I threw out a greater volume of material from my parents’ Pennsylvania garage than I myself own in Oregon. I threw out styrofoam packing peanuts and obsolete electronics and a big scary box of assorted household death chemicals.
Mmmmm, assorted household death chemicals.
And tomorrow morning Ty and I will drive four hours north to Bellefonte, and I will turn up the radio and sing loudly, and Ty will make his scrunched-brow small-smile face that says I don’t know how I ended up in a moving vehicle with such an off-key crazy person, but I feel I may regret it. (Ty makes variations of this face a lot.) And the weight of all this stuff will fly out the open window and scatter across the road and blow away.
news
I learned something crazy today.
I knew some information was coming my way and I tried to avoid it as long as possible, leaving on my long-sleeved shirt all morning as I repotted plants and hauled bags of topsoil in the sun. But eventually it just got too hot, and the shirt came off, and mom saw the new tattoo.
And I can’t believe I didn’t realize it before, I feel so naïve, but luckily she was here to inform me: Women. Do. Not. Get. Tattoos.
(You know what else women didn’t used to do? I refrained from saying. Science.)
Instead I replied, Could we just not make a big deal of this? And so she stared, and stared. With her mouth open. And eventually she said, Are you happy you got that? Not in the tone of Well if it makes you Happy but rather in the tone of I hope you’re Happy with yourself young lady.
And I said – with no sarcasm or defensiveness at all, which I think I should get some credit for - that I was quite happy, and I wouldn’t have gotten a tattoo unless it was something I’d be happy with. And she said well she just thought maybe I got it when I was drunk.
Oh, mothers. They always know just what to say.
And I know, I know it is bad form to bitch about my mom when the very reason I have suddenly found myself on the east coast is the death of one of my friend’s parents. But I think it helps me take it all in stride when I can lay it out here to laugh about. It’s kind of like being in the Balkans.
Wait, there’s more. Women Do Not Get Tattoos because why, you ask? Because (adopt appropriate look of mingled horror and defeat): Can you imagine it with a beautiful wedding dress?
And I’m pretty sure she’s been around for the past fifteen years, but sometimes it’s like we’ve never met. Sometimes she’s like the goldfish in the Ani Difranco song. The little plastic castle is a surprise every time.
(And also, can you imagine how disappointed everyone else would be if I showed up at my wedding in some sort of beautiful wedding dress?)
one monday
Today Princeton ended early admissions in order to make the college application process more fair to low-income students.
Today Lance Armstrong turned 35.
Today a suicide bomber killed 18 people in Afghanistan, and does anyone open these articles anymore? What could a journalist possibly come up with to say?
Today the Mets beat the Marlins to clinch the division, apparently for the first time since 1988, which doesn’t seem all that long ago. But clearly I’m no Mets fan.
Today the president of Somalia’s transitional government narrowly escaped assassination. He used to be a warlord. The Times reported a foreign minister explaining that politicians in this region are “not very popular.”
Today pump prices went down 12 cents.
Today The Who is playing at Madison Square Garden, and Carrot Top is performing in Las Vegas, and Mariah Carey cancelled her show in Denver.
Today I finished my job for Metro, really, completely, burned it on a disc and that’s that. And then I went on a lunch date involving pho in a noodle shop and ice cream in the Portland Rose Garden and a little less crazy than I prefer. Actually a lot less.
And today, at two a.m., my friend Julien gave birth to her first child, a seven pound two ounce baby girl. She has Julien’s nose. Julien and David are pretty kickass and no doubt their daughter will be the same. Welcome to the world, Sean Lee Kern.
all things considered
Yesterday I cut three roses to bring inside, and today I wish I’d been less judicious because the rain is knocking all the petals to the ground.
It feels early this year, and I am not ready. (And there is that quote that I call up so often I’ve lost its author, about how if you wait until you’re ready you’ll never do anything at all.)
There is this thing about loss, that some people try to fill it in, and some people try to climb inside of it, and some people take deep breaths and stare at it long and hard and try to get used to its presence. I think about loss a lot for someone who’s never really been visited by it. Usually that makes me feel lucky but sometimes it makes me feel overdue.
Last night I talked to lots of my friends, and I talked to Joshua for a long time, and I talked to Ty four times. And when I still felt lonely and sad Dave read me a story about a monk and a fox. He read it to me from San Diego, even though he has a cold. He read to me for an hour, and then I fell asleep.
And my family at nearly-thirty is maybe not the family that my parents would have picked out for me, and it’s maybe not the family that many of my friends have chosen, and it’s maybe not exactly all of the family I would like to have at some point. But here we all are holding each other up and figuring it out as we go, and it leaves me surprised and amazed and grateful. It’s not a thing I was ever taught about, or a thing I ever expected.
And I guess now, all things considered, it’s time for fall.
my friend's dad.
I guess since I’ve been telling you about great people in my life I’d like to tell you about Rob Fisher. Rob Fisher was my good friend Talley’s dad, and he died this morning. And all I’ve been able to do about it so far is cry, for Talley and her brother and her mom True, of course, but also for the whole world that doesn’t get to have Rob Fisher in it anymore. Which you understand if you were lucky enough to have met him.
Rob Fisher was a sculptor. His sculptures are huge and light and beautiful, airborne mosaics of drifting suspended metal pieces. They make you suddenly conscious of all the things around you that you were overlooking before – the light and the wind and the empty spaces – and it makes sense, because that’s what Rob did too. Rob would talk about anything, anything at all, and his eyes lit up, and he leaned forward and half smiled the whole time. Because Rob Fisher knew the secret about the beauty and magic of things, and he couldn’t wait to let you in on it.
When Talley was growing up, Rob would get a sculpture commission in some place like Japan and he’d blow the whole paycheck taking the family there. He skied and drank and debated with abandon. And this passion and engagement and wonder you could get from talking to Rob for one single minute. He was just so awake.
This past year Rob and True made it out to Oregon over and over again. They shared Thanksgiving with all the landscape archies at Liz and Larry’s. They came for Rob’s sculpture installation in Springfield that Talley and Ty ended up facilitating, because Rob tried to sneak in some snow time and broke his hip. The next night we all drank together at Lucky Noodle, ten grad students and True and Rob with his crutches. They came for Talley’s thesis presentation, and sat through all our thesis presentations, offering appropriate stand-in parent comments. And they came back two weeks later to see Talley get her diploma. Which I imagine made Rob really happy.
And I feel so blessed to have known Rob Fisher, and I wish you could have known him too. It’s not often that you meet the dad of a friend and think, I could learn a lot about life from this person. I could learn a lot about how to live every day.
yes, really: kickball.
It’s funny – both funny strange and funny ha-ha – that after this summer of unchosen motion I am now so reluctant to stay still. I am feeling restless. Restlessness probably borne of sitting in front of my laptop all day in my unfurnished dining room, but still. Restless all the same.
Here I am in Portland. It’s been one week. And so far I’ve been on an all night bicycle ride, found the co-op and the post office, sampled a 24 hour coffee shop and a 24 hour diner with Ty, seen a bluegrass show, hit up the Burgerville with Nikki, sipped a beershake at the Kennedy School with Deb & Nopporn, and watched the moon rise twice. There’s no shortage of To Do here. Not to mention I can now enjoy all those little pleasures that don’t come with life on the road, e.g. cooking and mail and tomato plants and the New York Times on my porch. And I joined a kickball league.
So it turns out I’m not actually restless to leave.
I think I’m just restless for what’s next. It’s starting to feel like the end of summer and that brings out a little panic in me, a desire to dash about and fight off the imminent hibernation with all I’ve got.
Also? I really need a fucking job.
(Words that came up in today’s spellcheck: unchosen, Burgerville, beershake.)
arrival
So here I am in a coffee shop on Division Street, a coffee shop that resembles the Fall Café where I used to sit with Paul in Brooklyn New York. Except now I live in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Portland – no kidding, really, right down the street from Brooklyn Park and the Brooklyn Pub. And I’m sitting across from Jamey, who is reading Le Petit Nicolas et Les Copains, and I have a fleur de lis on my arm, and I keep coming back to places that are almost the places I expected to be in the specifics, but dramatically different in the general. And fabulously better, plus with unexpected adventure on the way.
half way across
These are my friends from New Orleans whom you never got to meet.
Shannon who wears short skirts and black All Stars and you don’t mess with her, because she is strong and smart and right. Shannon’s smile can turn a room. She starts sentences with your name so there’s no mistaking who they’re for. Jenn. Where did you get that laugh? Jenn. I fuckin hate you. Shannon took a lot of New Orleans with her when she left.
Amanda who shaved off all her hair and you’d hardly notice because it’s all about her eyes. Amanda heads out every night saying I’m off like a prom dress in her South African accent, and I don’t think she sleeps. I don’t think she ever sleeps. And you know if she’s working on the site with you just by the energy in the air. In a ten second video of a van at 7 a.m. full of dark and leaning forms, Amanda is in the middle. She is dancing.
Gym who worked his way through the New Orleans phone book on the day of Mother in Law Lounge’s grand reopening to find a mullet wig. Gym is a bartender in Kansas City Missouri. K.C.M.O. He takes pictures, the real kind that get printed out on actual four-by-six pieces paper, and he gets them developed with doubles so that he can give them away. For days after he left, people would just look up in the middle of eating or sweeping or shoveling and say, I miss Gym.
Mark who is absolutely crazy. He used to be an army guard at Guantanamo. He used to be a stripper. He used to be a theater major. Two weeks ago Mark got his very first email account, and then he stopped liking real people. Don’t ask him about politics unless you have some time. Do ask him to impersonate any funny part of any movie ever made, or any funny movie that should have been made.
Chandra whose kindergarten teacher said, Chandra would walk across the bottom of a river instead of using the bridge. Is there really anything more you need to know about a person, to know that they’re fabulous?
Nathan who is at once improbably erratic and impossibly grounded. Nathan is partially deaf and works it, so that more than once when I spoke to him he reached his arm around my back and pulled me in, pulled me so that my head practically rested on his shoulder and my mouth was right at his ear. And then he would say softly, What? Just a simple quiet what? as if the physical motion was as ordinary as the verbal one, as if this sudden intimacy was just the flow of conversation. And it stopped my breathing every time, but what can you do? There he is waiting for an answer. I would deliver it directly into his ear, slowly, so that I could stay.
heureux hasard
Let’s ignore, for the moment, the fact that my new housemate Jamey – whom I found on Craigslist and spoke to exactly once on the phone and did not meet until last night when I arrived with my rolling suitcase – spent the first six months of this year working in the Netherlands, as I did last year. Let’s ignore that he then traveled to the Balkans, as I did, because who wouldn’t? Let’s ignore that, like me, he has no furniture and no car and uses peppermint shampoo.
And it isn’t that strange, really, that his bookcases are 80% the same as my bookcases, because Edward Abbey and Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut and John McPhee are pretty standard, and Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry and Barry Lopez and Pablo Neruda only slightly less so.
But really? Really he has the New Penguin Parallel Text Short Stories in French? The one French book that I did not spitefully leave behind in Quebec, because I had found it in a cool bookshop in Homer Alaska and it seemed like such a marvelous idea – contemporary literature in French and English side by side – and because even then I didn’t really want to hold a grudge against a beautiful language indefinitely?
That’s just weird.
delta blues
I’m in an airport, and I’m leaving New Orleans.
This morning I drew a brown pelican. I drew it big, with a black Sharpie marker, on a mural outside of a preschool. I’ve never drawn a pelican before and it wasn’t very good; I couldn’t get the long sinuous curve of the neck from my perch on the step ladder. My pelican was stocky. But whatever. There’s a pelican where there wasn’t one.
My friend Jon taught me a lesson a long time ago, back when he was an Americorps before anyone had ever heard of Americorps, when he was planting gardens in Camden New Jersey. Sometimes people would ask him what he was doing there, in a neighborhood that wasn’t his. And he would say, Someone needs to be here. Someone needs to be planting gardens, and no one was.
And sometimes I have wondered what I have been doing in this city. I’ve been to New Orleans exactly twice before this trip, and I have one memory from each visit. When I was seven I came with my parents and they let me pick out a pink and blue ceramic mask of comedy and tragedy. When I was twenty one I stopped here on a road trip with my then-boyfriend Mark Sloan, and we spent the night outside the city in a tent with mesh too large to keep out mosquitoes. That’s my connection to New Orleans.
Some of the Hands On volunteers have long and deep relationships with the city. Stasha visits every year on her vacation. Amy and Ben honeymooned here. But most of us simply felt compelled to come. Rick lives in Houston and took a long weekend to help out. Jess explains that God put a love for the people of New Orleans on her heart. If I thought of God that way, that’s how I might explain it too. But I don’t.
And now I’m headed to Portland. Many of my friends live there, and I’ve been fantasizing about the city for several years. The fantasy goes something like this: Portland has the excitement of the city life I loved on the east coast, with the friendliness and intentional living I have come to value in the Northwest. Also there is a big river, and people who own tents, and places to get a coffee after six at night.
For now, though, I’m just here in the airport. For now my feet are still in New Orleans, and my thoughts haven’t shot ahead yet either. For now I’d like to call Nathan on the phone, Nathan who brought me to the airport in the middle of a workday, (Nathan who pulls the car over on the side of the highway when there’s something cool to photograph,) and say Nathan, come back for me. Because there’s work here to do, and I know how to do it.
The only thing stopping me is my new housemate Jamey, whom I have never once met, who has borrowed a car in order to pick me up at PDX. I don’t know why I am so blessed to have a life full of people who pick me up and drop me off at airports when all I seem to do is fly around. But for now I’m just trying to trust that, and I’ll figure out the rest when I land.
best day ever
Last night Chandra and Ian and I drank forties in front of the A&P. It was a bad sign for the trajectory of the weekend.
But today! Redemption.
Today was all about driving in Nathan’s car from one fit-this-in-your-last-day attraction to the next. And to be honest? Just driving around in Nathan’s car all day would have been enough (d’ayenu!) because the windows are down and the singing is loud and the pauses between singing are filled with laughter, and Nathan and Chandra are fucking Awesome, and driving always puts me at ease. But on top of all that we drove to the ferry, which took us across the Mississippi to Algiers where we snuck past the $15 ticket gate into the Mardi Gras World warehouse full of floats. And we drove to Cooter Brown’s for the New Orleans Mufaletto sandwich, and to Fat Tuesday’s for five dollar twenty ounce mudslide daiquiris. And we drove to the Imax theater for a movie about the hurricane that would have been great if we were ten. And we walked around the French Quarter drinking two dollar beers and snacking on gumbo and lingering in doorways listening to jazz.
And damn, what a good day of tasty food and fabulous company, in a city where every scene seems strategically assembled for a movie, masks and music and gas lamps casting long dark shadows. You could do the same stupid shit here each night for a year, frozen drinks and jambalaya, or you could find something new every time working through the alleys and the dead ends and the unmarked doors. Following the sound of a piano or the smell of crawfish.
And I hate to leave, I hate to leave, but this was a good way to go out.
75 septembers
Well. I got my ticket onward.
I’m flying on Tuesday to Portland. Once again, leaving a place I’m not ready to leave. Planning a possible return before I’ve even packed my bags. Eck.
At the moment I have no job, no job prospects, and no commitments in Portland except the room in the house I finally arranged earlier this week. Here I am housed and fed and do hard rewarding work all day with the sort of people whose departures I mourn after knowing them for three days.
But I’m leaving, and I’m not sure it’s the best idea. If I could make $500 a month here I could pay for my storage unit and my phone and my miscellaneous drinks consumption, but my do-anywhere job ended with August. So I guess that’s the main reason I’m going home. And it’s maybe 10% about getting started with whatever is next, but seriously? Ten percent is generous.
Yesterday I helped build a playground with an organization called Kaboom. Their mission is A great place to play within walking distance of every child in North America, but since Katrina they are “bringing play back to the Gulf Coast.” In four days they have organized 10 playground builds, during which hundreds of volunteers from nonprofits and businesses and community groups descended on plots of vacant land in Louisiana and Mississippi and transformed them into lawns and slides and sandboxes and jungle gyms. I built picnic tables.
And today I pulled down the ceiling of the ground floor of a duplex, and scraped mold off the frame. And I guess that doesn’t sound fun, plus I haven’t slept in what feels like weeks, plus I spend most of the day filthy and sweaty and beat. But I’m not sure I could love it more. Every single day I have been here I have met someone fabulous and learned some new skill and made something happen for someone who needed it. When do you ever get to say that?
This time last year, and the year before, I was at Burning Man in the Nevada desert. And it was difficult and appealing for oddly similar reasons. But this doesn’t end on Labor Day. I’m leaving and it’s still here, with so much left to do.
So today, and all this past week and maybe for a few weeks to come, I’m plotting.
