Contents may have shifted; Do I have my things, or do my things have me?
“Those who know they have enough are rich.” — Lao Tzu I spent the December weeks before last Christmas boxing and storing my stuff to make way for an incoming tenant. Part Two of my holiday follies was folding into a torturous origami and cramming into two suitcases all the possessions I anticipated I would need to live abroad for a year. If we can put a man on the moon, can’t we reduce our material possessions into a handful of freeze-dried pellets that we could drop into water upon arrival and expand into an apartment upholstered with our...
read moreLost in translation; Startled by my mother tongue
It occurred to me when I saw the babushka tottering toward me on the sidewalk that she most likely did not understand the large English words on the front of her T-shirt: BLOW ME. What I immediately wanted was to make eye contact with someone nearby, someone like-minded whose look would fleetingly telegraph they thought this as odd and destabilizing as I did. That did not happen. What I wanted next was to stare. That also did not happen. Although she looked like a 70-something Kyrgyz grandmother, there is the possibility that the woman in the...
read moreMissing in action; Far from Flagstaff
It is May, and I’ve been away from Flagstaff for five months. It is our longest separation since I moved to town nine years ago. Most days I move through this yearlong decampment to Kyrgyzstan bustling with purpose and the rational understanding that this time away from home is temporary. I remember why I thought it was a solid idea to leave my community, my friends, my little outpost on the hill. This is not one of those days. And this is not a Letter from Home. It is a letter to home. A big, gooey love letter. Scrolling through my Facebook...
read moreUncle Brian; The Handsomest Man In The Whole Wide World
Fifty years ago, the Civil Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson, Beatlemania was in full bloom, a first-class stamp cost a nickel, and Ford rolled out the Mustang. I was seven. Fifty years ago the top stories in my life were becoming a first grader at St. Francis of Assisi School and the debut of the NBC television show Flipper. First grade starred Mrs. McGibney, patient and kindly and smelling of lilacs and baby powder. Flipper starred a dolphin and the character Porter Ricks, a dad and a ranger who was capable and dreamy and...
read morePostal love; A woman of letters
When I was in third grade, my grandmother and I began writing letters to one another. She lived with a smelly dachshund in a cottage on Mobile Bay in southern Alabama. I was her oldest grandchild growing up in a swarm of siblings in south Florida. I can’t recall the contours of her face with much clarity, but in the eye of my mind I can see her looping penmanship, the tiny ink blobs from her ballpoint pen and the flourish she added to her capital letters. She composed in tidy paragraphs and wrote on sensible stationary. Her letters glowed in...
read moreBecoming bilingual; The language of water and land
Water is my mother tongue. I grew up on a flat patch of landfill just north of Palm Beach called Singer Island, a place named after the 23rd child of Isaac Singer, the sewing machine millionaire. My family lived a blemish-free, resolutely middle-class life two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. What I remember most about my childhood is the milky blue-green of the ocean and the light itch my skin felt when salt water dried on it. My mom shepherded us five kids to the beach almost every day. She filled a thermos with Fresca, packed a sheet and...
read moreAnd so it goes; Beginning again
The solstice has arced through and left its promises of light and longer days. Christmas, Boxing Day and Hanukkah are in the past tense, and once again we inch our way toward the trailhead of another year. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m done with the resolution business. All those lists taped to the fridge, the scoldy shoulds hidden beneath the frothy encouragements. Resolutions: the word is too muscular for the delicacy of something begun anew. Newness has its fragilities and needs its attentive watering to encourage the passage...
read moreComing clean; The confessions of a transvert
I’m not alone. There are others out there, but we’re a formless group with no T-shirts, no password, no secret handshake. We don’t have a 12-step program, a 10k run to fund research for our cause or celebrity endorsements. We live among you, as unseen by others as we can be to ourselves. We’re misunderstood, often misidentified, occasionally misdiagnosed. I write of what I know, but it’s taken me years to come clean and declare my true self. And now that I’ve come forward, the liberating relief is heady and...
read moreThe lessons of Scrabble; Good, better, best
I must have been in my late 20s when my mom and I started playing Scrabble together. Even though I fancied myself a wordsmith and trafficked in language for a living, I was a listless and half-hearted player, intimidated by my mom’s skill. To distance myself from the possibility I might not do well, I mocked the game. Goofy little tiles and point scoring: I called it stodgy, old person-ish and nerdy. My mom was in another camp. She relished the game, was an ace player and clearly enjoyed the mental iron pumping it gave her brain. She...
read moreCity of Diaries; I give you my word
My first diary was a shared one; I must have been 8 or 9. My best friend, Andrea, and I had one of those palm-sized starter diaries for girls with a pink cover, a cheap lock and a faint impression of Tinkerbell in the bottom corner of every page. We made only one entry: the Webster’s Dictionary definition of penis. With my unmoored handwriting, I copied the inscrutable definition into the diary. The very act of writing whatever I wanted into that private place was almost as darkly thrilling as the word we had searched for. I was in Catholic...
read moreMy funny friend; Elmo the clown
I was indentured at the University of Florida when I saw an ad in our campus newspaper looking for marketing managers for some unspecified “family focused” entertainment business. The ad promised the trifecta: travel, independence and big bucks. Well, big to me. I was a breakfast waitress in a restaurant lined with aquariums that smelled like dead fish. Even though I was in my senior year, close to the college finish line and anticipated an internship and subsequent job as a newspaper reporter, I had a dodgy relationship with patience and a...
read morePleasing Anna; Grandmother is hedgehog
It started with Zana and the Albanian lessons. When I turned 40, I moved to Albania for a year to teach journalism. Once there, I immediately hired a language teacher. Language is a decoder ring; three times a week I sat with Zana parroting the goofy, stilted dialogue that is the Albanian equivalent of Look Jane look! See Spot run! Zana stood no higher than my armpits, spoke no English and got down to business as soon as our appointed hour began. When I did well on my homework or mimicked a decent accent during oral pronunciation quizzes,...
read moreOrdinaria; Exalting in the everyday
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” –George Eliot I visited New York City recently; my birthday coincided with an arts workshop I had flown there to attend. A longtime friend who lives in Manhattan offered to host a celebration and asked what I wanted. I told her something casual, low-key, come-as-you-are. “Most of all,” I said, “I want something that borders...
read moreThe tides of grief; Swimming through oatmeal
“The deeper the sorrow that carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” –Kahlil Gibran My father’s death in my mid-20s introduced me to grief and its idiosyncrasies. The sorrow I felt—and we all feel when we lose someone we love—had a language and texture all its own, one I’d never been versed in. Take a culture that is death averse, mix in a family upbringing intolerant of tears or sadness, and throw in a pinch of narcissistic control freak and there I was—bereft and fumbling with my response to loss. When would I be over...
read moreIt Takes a Poem; Living with poetry’s power
I went to grade school at St. Francis of Assisi, a Pepto Bismol-colored concrete building in the humid flatlands of South Florida. When I was in third grade, Sister Margaret Anina announced a poetry contest. I don’t remember that we were studying poetry or had learned much about it. Poetry back then was another unknown enterprise, and I had not learned to fear it. I just remember the contest. We were to choose a color and write a poem. I went for green and composed a three-stanza, singsongy bit of twaddle. It was my nine-year-old masterpiece....
read moreThat teacher; A love letter to Mrs. Permenter
It’s a Thursday afternoon, halfway through the school year. My 11th and 12th graders file in for English class. “Are we reading today, Ms. Kelly?” Tyler asks as he holds up his copy of “The Lovely Bones.” We are, I tell him. The room hushes. The students open their books and lower their heads. One by one, we circle the room; each reads a few paragraphs aloud. We make a soft chorus of papery whispers as we turn the pages in concert. They are quiet and engrossed. Their fidgety adolescent behavior is silenced by the world they hold in their...
read moreWaiting for snow; Momentarily quieting all the noise
I spent the first 18 years of my life living in South Florida where I spoke the language of sand, intuited the rhythms of the ocean, and trafficked in seashells. All this worked just fine for the wallpaper of my young life until this time of year rolled around. I wanted snow. Christmas television shows featured well-groomed people in coats delighted by falling snowflakes. Holiday cards showcased sleighs and earnest carolers in mittens or fireplaces blazing at warp factor 10. There was Frosty and the Abominable Snowman (who was scary on the...
read moreSoul train; Lighting the path
November 2, 1999. It is late afternoon when I board the train from Bratislava to Budapest. I’ve taken this three-hour train ride down the spine of Eastern Europe every Wednesday for the past two months, as I commute from my home in the Slovak capital city to the Hungarian capital city to teach. My coat stays on as I slide into an empty car. The seats are torn; the curtains are thickened with dust. Cryptic graffiti splays across the walls, and the car smells like a Goodwill store. The winter skies outside appear tufted with scouring pads....
read moreAll the way home; Signs of life from across the world
It’s 2001, and I live in Slovakia, an overlookable country with a language light on vowels. I’ve been here in Bratislava, the capital city, long enough to decode the essentials and enjoy the superficial mastery that bleeds into a muted smugness peculiar to ex-pats. But I’ve not been here long enough for social fluency. Instead I know just enough to be humbled by all I will never decipher. I teach journalism in this freshly minted country. My students are the Gen Y of post-Communist Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia,...
read moreRain now and then; Memories of furious water
Late August in Flagstaff. Outside it rains cold, fat and purposeful drops. I’m inside, and reminded by NPR about the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew. In a shimmering flash I am back in Miami Beach, back in Florida, back enfolded in the landscape that forged me. The water and salt. The crippling humidity and hot weather mania. A tribe of beloveds remains there, a tribe that includes my mother and two brothers. It still feels like home to me. And so does Flagstaff. Standing in my apartment at 7,000 feet in this little mountain town...
read moreHalf a world away; Communicating with the outer reaches
My father died unexpectedly when I was 26 years old. My parents divorced when I was in high school; my mother remarried and moved to New Zealand. On the day of my father’s death, my brothers and sister and I tearfully converged at his two-bedroom home to divvy up his meager worldly possessions: thousands of tools, books and some dour artwork that used to hang in my grandfather’s house. The only thing I wanted was Dad’s oversized world atlas. For me, it was the holy book. In the 1970s, when I fancied myself a tragically misunderstood teenager,...
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