My daughter returns from her month-long stay with my mom in the Northeast on Tuesday—and I can’t wait. It was a strange period of “vacation” time without her. I was laid off from my job, fired by my boyfriend, and enjoyed considerably more alone time, and 30 Rock episodes, than one person should have to withstand. (Liz Lemon, I am you!...) I also slept really late a few times and was accepted into Loyola’s graduate Counseling program, so it wasn’t all bad. Overall, though, the feelings I routinely experienced during this time make me think of a practice that my stepfather used to indulge in: walking across hot coals barefoot while chanting cool moss…cool moss…
Today I bought a cute tablecloth so we can eat meals, which I will theoretically make instead of microwaving, at the dining room table (not in front of the TV/at the computer, as was the custom before she left). With the crystal candlesticks from my dad’s parents’, the table I have been hauling from place to place for years—and have egregiously under-utilized—suddenly looks warm and sweet…and I realize that the one thing I need in my life right now is some kind of domestic happiness. I want to embrace the love I have in my life, with my child, and be able to really feel and give love (the real and nurturing kind, not the kind that steals from you and makes you less-than), in my body and in the space I create around me. This has always been the thing it is hardest for me to do; and I wonder why.
I keep trying to find a copy of the Laurie Colwin novel Family Happiness at used bookstores because I want to reread it. It’s about a woman who is split between her family, with whom she has a happy and secure connection, and her extramarital lover, who “gets” her like no one else; and chooses, in the end, to stay on both paths without ever having the two meet. Colwin’s writing is existentially comforting, nuanced, and buoyant and I need that now. I don’t think, though, I will be following the path(s) chosen by Polly Solo-Miller, the main character in the book. I want those two things together: a love, and home. Is it possible? I am going to hope. In the meantime, there is just a tablecloth. And three placemats.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Untying the Knot
For years, I’ve been wondering what to do with my wedding rings: two simple white-gold bands, the engagement ring featuring a pink tourmaline surrounded by two tiny diamonds. During the two-year separation, I occasionally brought them out of their black box in the bathroom closet and wore them (usually while cleaning, for some reason) to give myself a jolt of weird security. Their existence suggested I had once had things figured out: there had been a man, a cat, a rented house, and dinner to come home to, followed by Law and Order reruns. At the same time they were a reminder that I had failed to fulfill their promise. I had loved and, like so many others, lost, leading to a division of zero assets and the temporary moniker of “defendant.” Once in a while I would actively consider parting with them, especially after my ex remarried two summers ago, pushing our unsuccessful union further into the zone of irretrievability. But I felt paralyzed by indecision. Pawning them seemed so crass. Better to keep them—out of sight, out of mind?—or, someday, do something meaningful and ceremonial like toss them over a waterfall, experiencing a cathartic sense of release.
In the end I sold them, today, to pay my energy bill. The transaction was held at a cardboard box-cluttered jewelry store in a strip mall in the suburbs. The buyer—a guy with the same first name as my ex-spouse, which seemed poetic—dropped them in a plastic Krewe of Rex cup intended for beer conveyance during Mardi Gras; weighed their slight physical presence; and wrote down an amount that almost covers one month of AC use in New Orleans. Goodbye…
In the end I sold them, today, to pay my energy bill. The transaction was held at a cardboard box-cluttered jewelry store in a strip mall in the suburbs. The buyer—a guy with the same first name as my ex-spouse, which seemed poetic—dropped them in a plastic Krewe of Rex cup intended for beer conveyance during Mardi Gras; weighed their slight physical presence; and wrote down an amount that almost covers one month of AC use in New Orleans. Goodbye…
Monday, May 31, 2010
Were we even there?
Today a high school acquaintance “friended” me on Facebook and I accepted (though, as usual with these requests, I had never spent any personal time with her in my life), then checked out her profile. The thing that struck me is hardly unique among people my age: her profile picture was of her kids, not her. On closer examination, I saw that she was there, but in the background, with only her face and a sweet, self-effacing smile showing around the bodies of the small children she crouched beside.
This morning at 5:40 AM my daughter, in the next room, began crying, as she always does but not usually this early; and I lurched out of bed to see what was going on. She requested milk in her sippy cup, and when I told her that it was still time to sleep, not eat, she insisted, “I hungry!” So I got the milk, gave it to her, and flung myself back into my bed, in anger that I could not express toward my child. I can barely remember a single day in the past 3 years when I have been able to wake up on my own, when I wanted to, instead of being interrupted out of sleep.
The dining room in my apartment is a room that is never used. It holds a little piece of my grandparents’ house, where I spent so much happy time as a child, in the form of their 50’s wooden table, chairs, sideboard, and jelly cabinet. Large, red-toned portraits of them, taken in the early 1980s, rest high up on the walls looking down at me so often—I feel—in disappointment that I have no innate abilities (or maybe willingness) to create a warm and nurturing home; to keep a relationship, a marriage, a contract, a pleasant demeanor…erect a Christmas tree, host dinners, enjoy being a member of the larger social structure. How did I get this way? Is this how I am supposed to be? Is there some model for “bohemian, neurotic, introvert parent” that is missing in our culture? Do these labels absolve anything—just because I know I have these qualities, what do I do?
And so, the picture of my high school acquaintance kneeling in a streambed with her four children and muscular husband awakened old debates in me and a yearning for that word “family,” which is so fraught that it is impossible to feel positively about it and impossible to live without what it represents.
The division I feel inside continues in my life, in which I am dating someone who, though he has a daughter, too (older than mine), does not want to be involved with my child, at least at present, or to see me as a mom. He prefers that we get together outside of our domestic situations, current and former. So while our exes babysit, he picks me up in his sporty car like I am a teenager, and we progress from restaurant, to bar, to bed, to a brief iced-coffee session in the morning, then back to our separate obligations. This world we inhabit is about romance, leisure—illusion. Because how can these things be real when they ignore huge parts of our experience and identities? And yet, what single mom would not want such a break from the rigors and disappointments of life? A chance to enjoy globes of red wine, animated discussion about art and relationships, spontaneous time together; and avoid mundane conversations about dry cleaning or potty training?
On one of our first dates, he and I went to a wilderness preserve in another part of the state. It was just before spring had begun, and the irises he was hoping to show me hadn’t bloomed yet. Instead, there were all these waving, brassy stalks where, in a month or less, the flowers would surely appear. They were dry like husks. They resembled wheat, nourishment, but also gave an impression of decay. It was a windy day, and there was something displacingly eternal—I know of no better adjectives for this—about the sound the wind made blowing these parched golden things around. It was a dry, old moan-hiss that said, the world has been here forever, and this life is just an accretion of perceptions arranged in time, not necessarily wedded to anything stable…look deeply into anything and it will blow away.
It was a second or third date. We held hands, or his arm was around me, as bundled in our coats we walked and sat and listened in the quiet, far from highways. I don’t know what he was thinking, but on top of the thrill of feeling his body in contact with mine, that newness, I felt a detached weariness, like we were each just collections of particles experiencing other collections of particles, forming them into stories and feelings. Were we really even there at all? I imagined how months before we met, that sound had been there, with only the small life—insect, fish, mold—subsisting in that mute place to witness it; and it would be there in the utter blackness that night after we left, when people in the cities and towns nearby were fashioning certainties of their plans and happiness.
This morning at 5:40 AM my daughter, in the next room, began crying, as she always does but not usually this early; and I lurched out of bed to see what was going on. She requested milk in her sippy cup, and when I told her that it was still time to sleep, not eat, she insisted, “I hungry!” So I got the milk, gave it to her, and flung myself back into my bed, in anger that I could not express toward my child. I can barely remember a single day in the past 3 years when I have been able to wake up on my own, when I wanted to, instead of being interrupted out of sleep.
The dining room in my apartment is a room that is never used. It holds a little piece of my grandparents’ house, where I spent so much happy time as a child, in the form of their 50’s wooden table, chairs, sideboard, and jelly cabinet. Large, red-toned portraits of them, taken in the early 1980s, rest high up on the walls looking down at me so often—I feel—in disappointment that I have no innate abilities (or maybe willingness) to create a warm and nurturing home; to keep a relationship, a marriage, a contract, a pleasant demeanor…erect a Christmas tree, host dinners, enjoy being a member of the larger social structure. How did I get this way? Is this how I am supposed to be? Is there some model for “bohemian, neurotic, introvert parent” that is missing in our culture? Do these labels absolve anything—just because I know I have these qualities, what do I do?
And so, the picture of my high school acquaintance kneeling in a streambed with her four children and muscular husband awakened old debates in me and a yearning for that word “family,” which is so fraught that it is impossible to feel positively about it and impossible to live without what it represents.
The division I feel inside continues in my life, in which I am dating someone who, though he has a daughter, too (older than mine), does not want to be involved with my child, at least at present, or to see me as a mom. He prefers that we get together outside of our domestic situations, current and former. So while our exes babysit, he picks me up in his sporty car like I am a teenager, and we progress from restaurant, to bar, to bed, to a brief iced-coffee session in the morning, then back to our separate obligations. This world we inhabit is about romance, leisure—illusion. Because how can these things be real when they ignore huge parts of our experience and identities? And yet, what single mom would not want such a break from the rigors and disappointments of life? A chance to enjoy globes of red wine, animated discussion about art and relationships, spontaneous time together; and avoid mundane conversations about dry cleaning or potty training?
On one of our first dates, he and I went to a wilderness preserve in another part of the state. It was just before spring had begun, and the irises he was hoping to show me hadn’t bloomed yet. Instead, there were all these waving, brassy stalks where, in a month or less, the flowers would surely appear. They were dry like husks. They resembled wheat, nourishment, but also gave an impression of decay. It was a windy day, and there was something displacingly eternal—I know of no better adjectives for this—about the sound the wind made blowing these parched golden things around. It was a dry, old moan-hiss that said, the world has been here forever, and this life is just an accretion of perceptions arranged in time, not necessarily wedded to anything stable…look deeply into anything and it will blow away.
It was a second or third date. We held hands, or his arm was around me, as bundled in our coats we walked and sat and listened in the quiet, far from highways. I don’t know what he was thinking, but on top of the thrill of feeling his body in contact with mine, that newness, I felt a detached weariness, like we were each just collections of particles experiencing other collections of particles, forming them into stories and feelings. Were we really even there at all? I imagined how months before we met, that sound had been there, with only the small life—insect, fish, mold—subsisting in that mute place to witness it; and it would be there in the utter blackness that night after we left, when people in the cities and towns nearby were fashioning certainties of their plans and happiness.
Irises at Jean Lafitte National Historic Park and Preserve
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
I love...oops
Last night I spontaneously declared my affections to my boyfriend in the traditional style: in which, after weeks of unconscious deliberation, one stares into the face of the beloved and deploys the word love, hoping that it may be said back or at least, that one won’t be ejected from the beloved’s lap. Similarly to when I said I’m pregnant to someone else 4 years ago, it did not go well.
After the stunned silence and polite, non-I-love-you- infused reply from him, he asked if I would like some water (we had been finishing dinner) and went to get it from the other room, probably doing his best to restrain himself from leaving the apartment and from there, the country. I felt as if my insides were coated in tar, or that I should request my water with a side of arsenic. In short, I sort of extremely wished I could take it back. Now my miscalculation is sitting in the middle of my life, both of our lives, like a poop in a hotel sink. If the relationship does end it will be the first time, in my experience, that I love you has been the cause.
Afterwards, we failed to fuck. Nothing puts a damper on sex like saying those words to a man who is not desirous of hearing them; or at least, hearing them from you.
And today, some decision must be made. Do I take the email he wrote this morning—in which he spoke of his love for his recent ex, relief in finally being over her, and weary repulsion, now, for all things love—as a final end or a post-I love you male freakout? I think any self-respecting woman would end things with him, but self-respect has not been my thing. A trail of past missteps and humiliation had led me—over a candlelit dinner in his bedroom; after being referred to by him as his “girlfriend” multiple times; after 3 months of amazing sex, planning a vacation together this summer, and several calls/texts throughout each day—to tell my lover that I love him. Big mistake.
After the stunned silence and polite, non-I-love-you- infused reply from him, he asked if I would like some water (we had been finishing dinner) and went to get it from the other room, probably doing his best to restrain himself from leaving the apartment and from there, the country. I felt as if my insides were coated in tar, or that I should request my water with a side of arsenic. In short, I sort of extremely wished I could take it back. Now my miscalculation is sitting in the middle of my life, both of our lives, like a poop in a hotel sink. If the relationship does end it will be the first time, in my experience, that I love you has been the cause.
Afterwards, we failed to fuck. Nothing puts a damper on sex like saying those words to a man who is not desirous of hearing them; or at least, hearing them from you.
And today, some decision must be made. Do I take the email he wrote this morning—in which he spoke of his love for his recent ex, relief in finally being over her, and weary repulsion, now, for all things love—as a final end or a post-I love you male freakout? I think any self-respecting woman would end things with him, but self-respect has not been my thing. A trail of past missteps and humiliation had led me—over a candlelit dinner in his bedroom; after being referred to by him as his “girlfriend” multiple times; after 3 months of amazing sex, planning a vacation together this summer, and several calls/texts throughout each day—to tell my lover that I love him. Big mistake.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Easy come, easy go
Today my job with the Census, which was supposed to last until the end of the month, ended. I am dropped back into a familiar void: of not checking my bank statements out of fear, hoping I can coast on the fumes of cash past; wondering how I will continue to pay Sara’s daycare and my rent costs alone, wondering how I got to be almost 35 and in this position. Reader, that question will not be answered here but probably relates to my inability to check bank statements, stop buying lip gloss / red wine, or function while emotionally flattened—which, since graduating college, was most of the time.
On the plus side, I can lie in bed eating sea-salt encrusted dark chocolate and reading O Magazine. I bought a new notebook at Borders last night because I intend to start writing again: yes, the aforementioned writing that will never be published and, if it is, only a few will see. I feel like there is more welling up and I need to connect…and this past 5 weeks spent in meetings, wearing a nametag, driving over the steep Mississippi river bridge to New Orleans East, sitting in church cafeterias and community centers, walking the streets with my black Census bag, has definitely exhausted and disconnected me, even as it’s been affirming and invigorating (making money, being valued by the world in some way). I am hoping that I will be rehired for the next Census operation next month. But in the meantime, it’s back to the world of unemployment, guilt, and creativity.
Over 9 months of unemployment, even as I have lost much in terms of the means to be materially secure and proud of myself—and have wrestled a group of new poems from some inner necessity—I have shared a common fate with many other people in this country at this time, and I believe that is valuable...and provides perspective. A beautifully-dressed woman in her mid-50s who recently began working in my Census “crew” (only to be told, 3 days into her job, that we’re out of work) spent last week moving out of her home, which she lost after 3 years out of a job. “Now I live with my mother in the ghetto,” she told me. There was a kind of question in her careful but blunt tone of voice—why this, what now, why me?
I don’t know what the answer is for her, and can’t imagine being forced to make such a transition. For me, I am just trying to survive until August when I plan, if they’ll have me, to enter Loyola’s MS in Counseling program and from there—after years of homework, further debt accumulation, and a lengthy certification process—a new life and career I hope will carry me and my child forward for the long haul. One dream is definitely finished: while I will still write, I won’t try to live as a writer anymore. I won’t take jobs in coffee shops and bookstores, or volunteer at a holistic studies institute (I’m sure my mom still cringes at the thought of months I spent living in a tent in Rhinebeck, NY), in order to have the time and emotional space to write. I won’t pursue a creative PhD to be more competitive for academic jobs. I won’t market myself as a freelance editor or writer, making a business out of words and reading; or try to direct my skills into related fields such as marketing. And I won’t do any of this for the most impractical reason of all: my heart isn’t in it.
On the plus side, I can lie in bed eating sea-salt encrusted dark chocolate and reading O Magazine. I bought a new notebook at Borders last night because I intend to start writing again: yes, the aforementioned writing that will never be published and, if it is, only a few will see. I feel like there is more welling up and I need to connect…and this past 5 weeks spent in meetings, wearing a nametag, driving over the steep Mississippi river bridge to New Orleans East, sitting in church cafeterias and community centers, walking the streets with my black Census bag, has definitely exhausted and disconnected me, even as it’s been affirming and invigorating (making money, being valued by the world in some way). I am hoping that I will be rehired for the next Census operation next month. But in the meantime, it’s back to the world of unemployment, guilt, and creativity.
Over 9 months of unemployment, even as I have lost much in terms of the means to be materially secure and proud of myself—and have wrestled a group of new poems from some inner necessity—I have shared a common fate with many other people in this country at this time, and I believe that is valuable...and provides perspective. A beautifully-dressed woman in her mid-50s who recently began working in my Census “crew” (only to be told, 3 days into her job, that we’re out of work) spent last week moving out of her home, which she lost after 3 years out of a job. “Now I live with my mother in the ghetto,” she told me. There was a kind of question in her careful but blunt tone of voice—why this, what now, why me?
I don’t know what the answer is for her, and can’t imagine being forced to make such a transition. For me, I am just trying to survive until August when I plan, if they’ll have me, to enter Loyola’s MS in Counseling program and from there—after years of homework, further debt accumulation, and a lengthy certification process—a new life and career I hope will carry me and my child forward for the long haul. One dream is definitely finished: while I will still write, I won’t try to live as a writer anymore. I won’t take jobs in coffee shops and bookstores, or volunteer at a holistic studies institute (I’m sure my mom still cringes at the thought of months I spent living in a tent in Rhinebeck, NY), in order to have the time and emotional space to write. I won’t pursue a creative PhD to be more competitive for academic jobs. I won’t market myself as a freelance editor or writer, making a business out of words and reading; or try to direct my skills into related fields such as marketing. And I won’t do any of this for the most impractical reason of all: my heart isn’t in it.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Outside the door
I seem to be entering, or revisiting, a depressing phase as a poet—the old struggle of should I keep doing this? This is coming up because in the first months I was in New Orleans, I was very productive and now find myself faced with a poetic “product” or body of work ready to be disseminated—in literary mags, to chapbook and book contests.
But I’m deeply tired of the public poetry world: the money part (paying to enter contests you won’t win), how you have to be grateful for a remotely positive rejection, the bullshit that does get published that I find tepid or otherwise uninspiring (I’m not saying all published poetry is tepid, of course, but definitely some). And for what? So a few other, um, poets—talk about preaching to the choir—will read your scribblings? Probably they’re also jockeying for position, of necessity thinking: is this work better or worse than mine, has this poet won more or fewer contests/publications than I have? Even if someone is passionate about others’ writing, she cannot help but position her work/herself in relation to it and to the larger culture and conversation, which includes competition and doors that either open or stay closed. Yes, I can write for myself and never publish. But in this world of instant connection to everything, such a pose does not feel appropriate or realistic. With so many opportunities to connect, why would I make a goal of creating in isolation and obscurity? But self-publishing or doing so on this blog just wouldn’t give me the sense of affirmation I can’t help but crave.
I believe in saying something: in speaking out, preferably in a way that can be understood/felt not only by a few who are within the same official poetry forum, but by some in the wider human community. I believe in the power of writing to organize and capture, or even bless, a moment or emotional process that otherwise would have bloomed, died, and gone unnoticed. And I will keep standing up for that. However, whereas in my 20s it honestly didn’t feel important that I had no significant success and recognition to speak of for my labors (and trust me, it IS labor), in my 30s it does, creating a feedback loop of: if this is not going to be noticeably valued by or useful to others, if these words are sent out into the wind, then why am I putting so much energy into this, what is the source that will keep feeding this vocation? It turns out I can’t be like Tibetan monks who spend days or weeks completing sand mandalas, only to immediately dispose of them. I want to hear a response from the world besides the one that basically says: “Thanks for your $20, which will promote the publication of another writer; but your poem/manuscript did not make the cut.” (And if I did hear a more positive answer, as sometimes happens, how satisfying could that possibly be given the narrow margins within which such success is measured and appreciated?)
Lately, not only does it feel insulting and crappy to accept this reality, it feels limiting to have—as a life goal—writing for a few, while essentially hiding from the people in your own family who will never understand or like your writing. Going forward, I would rather reach other people in a tangible, humble way than promote my “so smart, so artistic” self in a finite and less-than-hugely significant one. (Caveat: if this unassuming, real connection can happen through writing, that’s fine too, but in that case it probably won’t be poetry.) I am glad for the moments of connection and recognition I have felt over the years as a poet in a larger community of writers; and I have found folks I met in this sphere to be among the most compassionate and nuanced people I know. But the question of whether such rewards as are available can sustain my whole existential enterprise is, well, a question.
Growing up, thinking that I was intelligent and creative kept me from feeling like shit. I clung to this side of my nature in order to avoid the other things: being judged unattractive, unpopular, clumsy in my skin—a flawed human like everybody else, but somehow worse. It’s a classic story. Now, the thought of moving away from this identity—born of pain and a need for approval—and becoming a therapist seems to offer a way of having my voice actually be heard: of receptively entering into an intimate conversation with the world outside my door.
But I’m deeply tired of the public poetry world: the money part (paying to enter contests you won’t win), how you have to be grateful for a remotely positive rejection, the bullshit that does get published that I find tepid or otherwise uninspiring (I’m not saying all published poetry is tepid, of course, but definitely some). And for what? So a few other, um, poets—talk about preaching to the choir—will read your scribblings? Probably they’re also jockeying for position, of necessity thinking: is this work better or worse than mine, has this poet won more or fewer contests/publications than I have? Even if someone is passionate about others’ writing, she cannot help but position her work/herself in relation to it and to the larger culture and conversation, which includes competition and doors that either open or stay closed. Yes, I can write for myself and never publish. But in this world of instant connection to everything, such a pose does not feel appropriate or realistic. With so many opportunities to connect, why would I make a goal of creating in isolation and obscurity? But self-publishing or doing so on this blog just wouldn’t give me the sense of affirmation I can’t help but crave.
I believe in saying something: in speaking out, preferably in a way that can be understood/felt not only by a few who are within the same official poetry forum, but by some in the wider human community. I believe in the power of writing to organize and capture, or even bless, a moment or emotional process that otherwise would have bloomed, died, and gone unnoticed. And I will keep standing up for that. However, whereas in my 20s it honestly didn’t feel important that I had no significant success and recognition to speak of for my labors (and trust me, it IS labor), in my 30s it does, creating a feedback loop of: if this is not going to be noticeably valued by or useful to others, if these words are sent out into the wind, then why am I putting so much energy into this, what is the source that will keep feeding this vocation? It turns out I can’t be like Tibetan monks who spend days or weeks completing sand mandalas, only to immediately dispose of them. I want to hear a response from the world besides the one that basically says: “Thanks for your $20, which will promote the publication of another writer; but your poem/manuscript did not make the cut.” (And if I did hear a more positive answer, as sometimes happens, how satisfying could that possibly be given the narrow margins within which such success is measured and appreciated?)
Lately, not only does it feel insulting and crappy to accept this reality, it feels limiting to have—as a life goal—writing for a few, while essentially hiding from the people in your own family who will never understand or like your writing. Going forward, I would rather reach other people in a tangible, humble way than promote my “so smart, so artistic” self in a finite and less-than-hugely significant one. (Caveat: if this unassuming, real connection can happen through writing, that’s fine too, but in that case it probably won’t be poetry.) I am glad for the moments of connection and recognition I have felt over the years as a poet in a larger community of writers; and I have found folks I met in this sphere to be among the most compassionate and nuanced people I know. But the question of whether such rewards as are available can sustain my whole existential enterprise is, well, a question.
Growing up, thinking that I was intelligent and creative kept me from feeling like shit. I clung to this side of my nature in order to avoid the other things: being judged unattractive, unpopular, clumsy in my skin—a flawed human like everybody else, but somehow worse. It’s a classic story. Now, the thought of moving away from this identity—born of pain and a need for approval—and becoming a therapist seems to offer a way of having my voice actually be heard: of receptively entering into an intimate conversation with the world outside my door.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
My Honda is da bomb
Yesterday I received a letter from Honda recalling my driver’s side airbag. The letter stated, in calm language, that in my model (a 2001 Civic) the airbag inflator is under too much pressure and “could,” if the bag deploys, explode, striking everyone in the car with pieces of metal.
For 9 years, since purchasing my Civic new from a lot in Las Cruces, New Mexico, I have driven back and forth across the country over and over, an intricate criss-cross reflective of major life choices at different times. There was the meandering trip my fiancé-to-be and I took from Cruces to Seattle—his hometown—and back the first summer we were dating. (My car was “the safe one,” as his was a much older Accord; so we used it for all our travels.) After he moved to Virginia that autumn to upgrade his MA degree to an MFA at the venerable UVA, I soon followed, packing up my small adobe house—at the time, everything I owned fit in my Honda. When I developed a flying phobia after 911, I thought relying on my car to travel long distances was safer than getting on a plane to anywhere. And so I went: from Charlottesville to NJ and back for holidays with family, to Asheville twice a year for grad school, to eastern Pennsylvania for Chris’ and my wedding in a town called Washington’s Crossing, and then to our new life in, of all places, small-town Alabama—occasioned by his finally securing a tenure-track position. Two years later, the Honda followed a yellow Penske truck driven by my stepfather over a thousand miles north to Ithaca, NY and my eventual divorce. After two more years, with my boyfriend (now ex) at the wheel, it ferried our 6-pound daughter away from the hospital in her first carseat; and, recently, has delivered me back to the South and another uncertain future.
All this time I thought the car was my friend, my container, my vessel from life to life. It hadn’t hosted a first orgasm or anything (that honor fell to a battered ’77 Chevy Impala, on a hilltop covered in cornstalks) but it had pretty much been everywhere else, and gotten me home safe each time—wherever home was.
What can I know about the journeys of my life, what they mean, where they should end up? I’ve been driving around a bomb.
For 9 years, since purchasing my Civic new from a lot in Las Cruces, New Mexico, I have driven back and forth across the country over and over, an intricate criss-cross reflective of major life choices at different times. There was the meandering trip my fiancé-to-be and I took from Cruces to Seattle—his hometown—and back the first summer we were dating. (My car was “the safe one,” as his was a much older Accord; so we used it for all our travels.) After he moved to Virginia that autumn to upgrade his MA degree to an MFA at the venerable UVA, I soon followed, packing up my small adobe house—at the time, everything I owned fit in my Honda. When I developed a flying phobia after 911, I thought relying on my car to travel long distances was safer than getting on a plane to anywhere. And so I went: from Charlottesville to NJ and back for holidays with family, to Asheville twice a year for grad school, to eastern Pennsylvania for Chris’ and my wedding in a town called Washington’s Crossing, and then to our new life in, of all places, small-town Alabama—occasioned by his finally securing a tenure-track position. Two years later, the Honda followed a yellow Penske truck driven by my stepfather over a thousand miles north to Ithaca, NY and my eventual divorce. After two more years, with my boyfriend (now ex) at the wheel, it ferried our 6-pound daughter away from the hospital in her first carseat; and, recently, has delivered me back to the South and another uncertain future.
All this time I thought the car was my friend, my container, my vessel from life to life. It hadn’t hosted a first orgasm or anything (that honor fell to a battered ’77 Chevy Impala, on a hilltop covered in cornstalks) but it had pretty much been everywhere else, and gotten me home safe each time—wherever home was.
What can I know about the journeys of my life, what they mean, where they should end up? I’ve been driving around a bomb.
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