Aloha, Hawai'i

I had a new job starting in Japan in nine days, and I'd been instructed to land with a minimum of $1200 cash to pay my first month's rent and to cover expenses through the month. I only had $900, which was dwindling fast, and a one-way ticket to Osaka for a departing flight on my 28th birthday.

I could have been at the Maui Hilton and still been restless, but in the reclined driver's seat of the rented Pontiac Sunbird, flannel shirt on backwards for warmth, I didn't stand a chance of sleeping. My mind was racing.

I was single, broke, and directionless. I was heading to Japan to teach English -- on a whim, basically: I'd made the decision on a phone call with a friend one coffee-and-Bailey's-soaked Sunday morning when I called her so I wouldn't be drinking alone. She and her husband were moving to Japan to teach English, she'd said; the money was good, and they hired anyone. I was bored in my college admissions career and ready for a change, so I flew to Boston for an interview, got an offer, and here I was. I spoke no Japanese (I had thought "sayonara" was Spanish - and I only knew "sayonara" from a Debbie Harry song) and I was completely unprepared for the plunge I was taking.

What was most unsettling, though, wasn't this impending move and career change - I wasn't that anxious about the job or the move because, incredibly naively, I thought those were no big deal. What was most unsettling was Hawaiʻi. I was completely overwhelmed: by the sheer breadth and depth and scale of the natural beauty -- you simply couldn't open your eyes wide enough to encompass all of the green -- by the graciousness of the culture, by the beauty of the locals. I'd been so focused on moving to Japan that I'd never seen it coming.

I gave up on sleep, popped up the driver's seat and cranked down the window to hear the muffled surf from far below. From that scenic overlook on that parking area above that cliff in west Maui I could see the hump of Lānaʻi to the left, looking so close I felt I could touch it, the bulk of Molokaʻi dead ahead in the middle distance, and between and above them over the channel a crescent moon leaving its reflection on the ocean below. It was somehow chilly, with a breeze from the mountain behind me, but my shivers weren't all from the breeze. It was the most beautiful place I'd ever been. 

I wanted to stay.  More than I'd wanted anything in a long time. 

 

Restless, I punched the cassette into the tape deck, out of habit, not really listening until I heard this lyric: "He was born in the summer of his 27th year, coming home to a place he'd never been before." Yup, pretty much. I was 27, and I got it.

It was the middle of the night but I didn't go back to sleep. What was propelling me forward to my next step? What was keeping me from staying? It felt like an impossibly juvenile, impulsive, Romantic thing to consider -- giving up a job to stay someplace I'd been for less than a week because it was pretty. For sure it was impractical: there was just no way I could afford it, I was already broke. What would I do for work? I'd accepted an offer for decent money in Japan. I had a job in hand. I had student loans (so many student loans). Didn't Japan have the potential to be awesome, too? Was I really someone who could quit a job without having another one? 

I watched the moon on the waves and listened to the surf from far below until the sky lightened, and then drove back down the hill towards Lāhainā town. I showered at a beach park just after dawn, using a sliver of soap left by a previous user, and I listened to the cadence of the lyrically spoken language around me. I looked at the beautiful men just back from surfing dawn patrol, all lats and tans and teeth. I noted the poverty of those who, from appearances, were living rough, permanently, as opposed to me who was there in a career interregnum. I tried to take in everything, every last bit of it. And I thought. 

I didn't realize at the time that I was one in a long line of Westerners who had come to these islands and felt the same things, that I was a colonizer, unbidden and by many unwelcome. I am embarrassed to say I knew nothing of the history of these islands, of the illegal overthrow in 1893 of a sovereign nation, of the illegal annexation by an imperial power (us) in 1898, of the successive waves of people from the North American continent who came here to cavort and convert, spread disease and steal land, and impoverish the indigenous people. My education about these islands would come later. Right now, I was part of the problem.
 

I was in the islands to cover some college fairs for the admissions job I'd resigned from a few months earlier - god knows I was profligate but not so much so that I'd take a Hawaiʻi vacation between jobs. The college wasn't paying me but they covered the airfare to Honolulu and around to the neighbor islands, and I could expense hotels and meals and get reimbursed in a couple of months. I could just barely afford to front the cost for meals; there was no way I could afford to front the money for a hotel every night - hence the restive night in the car. I agreed to the trip to save on airfare (one way to Osaka from Honolulu was way cheaper than from Chicago) and of course to see Hawaiʻi as well. 

 

I'd been fascinated by these islands since looking at my parents' photos and slides from when my dad was stationed at Schofield Barracks after being drafted during the Korean War. I'd thought about moving to Hawaiʻi before - I even considered Chaminade for college (one of three vetoes my mom exercised, along with enlisting in the Navy and Notre Dame) -- but I'd never even visited before. And now here I was. The fascination was only growing.

I inexpertly changed into my khakis and a new $7.99 aloha shirt from T.J. Maxx there in the beach parking lot and then drove to McDonald's for breakfast. I savored my pancakes and waited for other diners to finish their copies of the Honolulu Advertiser so I could read the news - and the classifieds - before I had to head to the college fair. Scanning the help wanted ads wasn't too helpful - the realization that I had no real skills was painful, but really, what could I do? -- and there weren't many apartments listed in that morning's edition.

Could I make this work? It was expensive, but why not try it? What did I have to lose? I had quit a job I hadn't liked to go to another I knew nothing about, so it wasn't like I was on a high powered career track. I had a shit ton of student debt to pay back, which had been a primary motivation to go to Japan, but... so?  I could defer that, right?

I was down to eight days in the islands before before my birthday, before Japan (if I was going), before I had to decide.

I wasn't super focused on work that week. I don't even remember all of the venues. 

 
What I remember from those eight days is rain -- every day, rain, and the few extant pictures from the trip corroborate that: after Maui there were no sunny days -- and the kindness of strangers. The bartender at Hamburger Mary's who told me where to park overnight to sleep in my car safely where I wouldn't be hounded by the cops. The off-duty HPD officer I met at Queen's Surf Beach, then the gay beach in town, who showed me around Kapiʻolani Park. The man sitting under the banyan tree at the old Hula's who shared his spliff and gave me ideas for where to find work. Lawrence, the local guy who worked at a Waikīkī hotel who let me use an un-booked room for a few hours. 

 

And all the while I wondered: could I make this work? Could I get the money back from my plane ticket and -- together with my meager savings -- find a place to crash while I looked for work? Could I build a life here? 

 

I didn't, in the end. I didn't stay. Not then. On my 28th birthday I returned the rental car to the Honolulu airport and got my stuff out of long term storage and checked it in for Osaka. In the United terminal in Honolulu you can still see the bays under an escalator where there used to be pay phones and where I sat for a couple of hours calling friends and family (using a friend's calling card number) to say, well, "Sayonara" for a while.

 

How do you know if a decision like that was the "right" one? Financially, it was. Undoubtedly. The yen-to-dollar exchange rate then hovered around 115 and I was able to pay down my student debt over my two years in Japan. I made some amazing friends there, three of whom I've kept in close touch with despite the years and the miles. I got to explore Japan (a little) and Thailand (a little more) and developed a cultural literacy that I had been sorely lacking before my departure, and that made me a much better resident of Hawaiʻi when I did first settle here in 2000. 

 

But what if I'd stayed? I have no regrets, only curiosity. If there were a "Sliding Doors" -esque movie made of my life, that week in November of 1996 is the moment I'd choose. 

The Best We Could

It's hard to write about my dad.

It would have been his 84th birthday today, and I've thought about him and our relationship a lot since he died last year. I've kept coming up short when I try to write about him, though, which is as apt as a metaphor for our relationship as any: he and I, despite our efforts, kept coming up short. But upon reflection I've come to realize a couple of other things, too, despite it all: we both kept trying, and we both did the best we could.

And since writing was how we kept in touch over the last two plus decades, writing seems apt as the best way for me to remember him.  

I'd try, sometimes, to be in touch in other ways. We had sports (if not many teams) in common, but even then it could be tricky. Baseball players had unions against which he would fulminate, and there were other, unlooked for challenges. One perfect NorCal afternoon, buoyed by the weather on my walk to the bar to watch Indy play a Monday Night game, I called Dad with what I had presumed to be some safe topics lined up. I started with the past weekend's Notre Dame game, but I got "I don't follow them now since they invited that baby killer Obama to campus." Deflated, I quickly wrapped up the call.

He'd try sometimes, too. He'd call and I'd see the caller ID as I sat freezing in the UH library, or while reading or doing laundry or smoking on my tiny back porch in Honolulu or on my roof in San Francisco, and I'd let it go to voicemail. The time difference and our respective travel and work schedules gave us a fig leaf to cover our mutual wariness.

Letters were safer. Writing multiple drafts gave me a chance to see and excise some of my anger and self-righteousness. (Some, though not all, I'm embarrassed to say - some of what I'd written in the letters I found when cleaning out his house made me cringe.) I'm not sure if he wrote multiple drafts or not, but his letters were angry, paternalistic, deliberately hurtful, and often oscillated between the forced-friendly and the furious.

But he read my letters, or at least some of them -- I knew this because I'd hear from those people we had in common that Dad was pleased about a promotion I'd received or a recognition I'd earned. And I read his -- or at least some of them. I learned that a quick analysis of the envelope could reveal something of the tone of its contents. GOP elephant on the return address label and a President Nixon stamp? Likely bombastic, confrontational, and political, with the added bonus of quotes from Rush Limbaugh. A Knights of Columbus or Right to Life return label? Milder but still hectoring, and likely to include quotes from The Catholic Answer or the Pope. A collection of stamps in different denominations (i.e., a 23 cent, an 11 cent, a five cent, etc.)? Likely playful and familial, without anything about the baby killers or how my sinful lifestyle was going to result in my terminal sickness and early death.

He also made copies of his outgoing correspondence. Each of the ten of us had a file, we found, and in mine, in addition to a number of my letters to him, were copies of at least some of his to me. And other things. My folder held funding appeals from organizations like Focus on the Family talking about how "homosexuals" - always "homosexual", never "gay", a convention he followed - were imperiling the moral fabric of America; how crimes committed by these homosexuals were never reported in the press, how homosexuals were pushing their - well, to be clear, "our" - agenda through the godless courts and via the godless Democrat (sic) party. These were all things I'd heard before. They land differently when you hear them from your dad, though.  

I came out to my mom when she was already dying from cancer in 1991. She cried, and we had some difficult conversations about it, but she said that she loved me -- and she also said, "Don't tell your father." I waited a decade, in part with my mom's words in mind, in part because I believed that coming out -- especially to a parent -- should be an act of kindness and not of anger. It took me a while to get there with Dad. And I was nervous about how it would go. I finally decided, when living with my then-boyfriend, to give my dad "the opportunity to do the right thing" as I'd put it to myself and my friends. Wanting us to have a more honest relationship, if nothing else, I came out to him. In a letter.

It didn't go well. 

First the questions: was I gay because he had traveled so much for work and was an absent father when I was growing up? Was I gay because my mom had a strong personality? And my favorite: was being gay why I was no longer a Notre Dame fan?  

And then the statements: your sinful lifestyle will result in your early death, due to HIV/AIDS. You shouldn't work in education because you'll molest kids and infect them with your sinful lifestyle. Don't come home unless you come alone, and only then if you have pre-approval from siblings so they can keep their kids away from you if they choose to. And then, after about a year of this, another letter with this question: did I become gay because I'd been molested by a priest? Dad wrote that he had been: a Catholic Brother molested him when he was 13, and "...let's face it, at that age, pretty much any sexual contact is pleasurable." I was deeply shocked, even though it's all too common a story. I just ached for him -- it broke my heart, and pulled back a curtain to reveal so much. I'd never known that, and I doubt if he'd told anyone else. Ever.

What effect had that trauma had? Survivors of untreated sexual abuse often suffer long term effects -- what had he suffered because of this? What had this introduced into his personality? How had this warped what was there? Had he ever talked about it? He never mentioned it again and never answered any questions when I asked about it. I'll never know.   

We never have a complete understanding of someone else -- we can't, it’s always imperfect -- and I'd aver that most of us don’t have a complete understanding of ourselves. I hope that this knowledge about my dad's journey made me less angry, more patient, gentler. I like to think it did, when I brought it to mind, and for a couple of years I thought of it often. 

Despite his towering temper, after I was nine or so he never hit me, and I remember the spankings I got as a kid being forewarned and a result of my actions. We never went hungry - none of the 12 of us - when we were under his roof. He worked impossibly hard - long days, many nights, many business trips to El Dorado, Arkansas, of all places - to make that happen. He never drank, ever: I saw him have one beer, once, before I graduated from high school. He never swore, ever: I heard him swear only once, after a storm destroyed the roof, the siding, and every pane of glass on two sides of our house in Fowler, and then it was a simple, exhausted, "damn."

But it wasn't easy. Through his illness and death I've been surprised by others' recollections of my dad: a cousin mentioning in passing how he was intimidated and nervous around him; a brother I'd always thought of as a favorite of his recounting Dad’s petty and mean-spirited bullying; forgotten letters from my mom telling me not to take his anger to heart. I took comfort in these recollections. It wasn't just me. From the available data, it was just dad.

And I'm sorry to say that I didn't help matters as much as I could have. I knew how to push his buttons, and I did - certainly in some of my letters to him, but also in person. Some small part of that might have been healthy since so many people tiptoed around him, a learned response to his bullying, and after all, what did I have to lose? I was never going to meet his expectations unless I signed up to be a priest; since I was gay I was beyond the pale, I had tremendous freedom from his opprobrium. In one letter, asking after his recovery from a car accident, I didn't stop myself from asking if he was getting his pain med prescription filled by sending his housekeeper (which he didn't have) to a parking lot with a cigar box (which he didn’t smoke) full of cash like his buddy Rush Limbaugh had. Like many of his generation he was notoriously tight -- even though one of his sons was a builder and submitted a bid to build his retirement home, he went with the guy who submitted the lowest bid. When I went to the house -- before I came out to him and was thus effectively banned -- I’d eyeball a wall and asked if he’d paid extra for its pronounced warp. When he was showing a group of us the blueprints for this house before its construction, he pointed out where the pool table would go in the basement. I looked at the drawings and said "I'm no expert but it looks like something's missing - where's the change machine?"  

I remember many instances of his support when I was a child. He drove me and a friend down to Tennessee one weekend when we were doing research on Confederate POWs who were captured at the Battle of Fort Donelson who were housed -- and died -- in Lafayette during the Civil War. He encouraged me in Scouting and came to a troop meeting to show the other kids how to carve leather work, and even though I had no real skill at it, he encouraged my interest in his hobby as well. He helped me anytime I needed it with homework whenever he was home, no matter how tired he must have been, without a word or gesture of complaint that I remember.

In fact I never heard him complain - about work, or his hours, or anything. (The Cubs, sure, but that's like distant cicadas buzzing on a summer night - part of life for many in the Midwest.)  He put his head down and worked hard, very hard, as a matter of pride, and expected that we all would, too. At many points in my life I've stopped and thought, "When Dad was my age he had to provide for x children." It was never a small number, and it was always nearly viscerally daunting.  

When I was a kid on Sunday mornings he'd get me up at 5:30 to do the paper route around Fowler, which we'd finish in time for the 7 o'clock mass, then come home after church and make waffles from scratch and play hours-long military strategy games, just he and I, until everyone else got home from church.  When I was in the 5th grade he took the day off - something he almost never did - and we rode a bus up to Chicago to see Pope John Paul II say a mass in Grant Park, just he and I.  (Well, and about 7 million others.)

I don't know when or why we began to drift apart. I hit adolescence and began to rebel, though it was nothing like what he'd been through with my brothers: I didn't smoke, flout rules, or show any signs of being counter-cultural. I served daily 7 AM mass intermittently through high school and was a devout Catholic - to the point that I fought with a church youth group leader to make sure we could attend mass on a weekend camping trip - but still, Dad and I drifted apart.

By the time I got my ear pierced my junior year in college we weren't on great terms. I'd timed the piercing so that I could take it out before I came home for Christmas, but mom was sick with a vague but worrying malady so I came home for Thanksgiving with a fake gold stud in the hole so it wouldn't close, though I knew that hell would likely break loose. It did. That was it. He didn’t speak to me for a few months.  I stayed in Milwaukee and worked over Christmas break; in February I only learned Mom had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer when I called a brother to bitch about my course load and he asked me how I was doing with mom's news. And after mom died that November, quite understandably, grief subsumed him.

He had a car accident and broke his back two years ago, and each of us ten kids took turns going to spend time with him to help his convalescence.  I was nervous about my week there, but honestly it was good. He was still mostly lucid, and I asked him about family stories, about his siblings and childhood, about my mom. We didn't talk much about me, and we certainly didn’t talk about anything in my life after I turned 22 - he didn't ask and I didn't offer - but we had time to be together, and I got to thank him for all of his effort and hard work.

Before that week I looked back and thought about my father's life, and I tried to understand the stress he must have felt about money, the shame he may have felt at taking charity the years we qualified for government support and the kindness of neighbors, the never-ending fatigue that he must have had so often so deeply in his bones. I thought about how the abuse that he experienced from a member of the Church might have contributed to his extreme rigidity, or his temper, or his emotional paralysis.

And I realized, painfully, that I could have done better. I could have been more mature, more thoughtful, and kinder in my letters; I most assuredly could have connected more often. I could have more often let sleeping dogs lie and not comment on something in a vain and futile attempt to make or score a point.

But there was a context for these actions and reactions, for both of us. If we were petty and churlish, easily offended or bullying -- and we were, both of us, all of those things -- well, we're human. In the end, we didn't act from malice. And, in the end, critically, we made the space -- and took advantage of circumstances -- to arrive at something like détente before he died. And in the end, that's enough; it has to be, but it is.

And at the end, here’s what matters: we did the best we could.
.

In the garden - in the weeds

Trying to feed ten kids, even in Fowler, Indiana, even in 1970, couldn't have been easy. Why did my parents have so many kids? When I was little, I didn't really think about it - it's just what was. As I got a little older, though, I thought I'd figured out the real reason they had so many of us: they needed us to work the garden.

We lived on the edge of town, on a lot that was quoted alternately at one and a quarter, one and a half, one and three quarters, or a full two acres, depending on who you asked and what they needed to do with it. What didn't seem to change was that a full third of it was garden. Our lot was bisected by a gravel driveway to the south of the house, which came straight back to shed and wrapped around the buckeye tree like a fishook with the point coming to the back door that everybody used. On the other side of the driveway, across the lower, southern half of the lot, was the garden. 

It was a romantic place, in the winter, with its very Hoosier-esque vista of corn stalks sticking up out of the frozen ground, if there wasn't much snow, and with its rabbit hutch set among some dwarf fruit trees.  The garden was bounded by a hedge row of evergreen bushes on its western side that acted as a snow fence so that during every blizzard, or even every passing front with reasonably good accumulation, the prevailing westerly winds would shape the driven snow into fantastic drifts that had a sclera of crust thick enough to support my scrawny frame if I was careful. I would tunnel through the drifts and build forts and name countries and reenact the Renaissance-era European wars I'd read about in our encyclopedias and reference books as Ginger, our German Shepherd-mutt mix, would run through the tunnels and over the top until she fell through, laughing, if you believe that dogs can laugh.  We'd play out there for hours.

The garden in the winter was fun, but beginning in March, the dirty snow would start to melt (and it was dirty - in addition to the snow there were almost always ridges of Benton County topsoil on top of the drifts. It would make my mom angry, actually - "these farmers want to save time in the spring so they disk up their fields in the fall, but what do they think happens?  The wind blows all winter and it gives their good soil to Ohio, is what happens!  The best topsoil in the world and they treat it like dirt. Wait and plow twice in the spring!" and then she'd trail off, shaking her head.  She had strong opinions about it.  When I first heard the expression "pure as the driven snow" in high school, I honestly didn't get it - in my experience, the snow that was the most driven was the dirtiest). And when the snow would recede until there was just dirty, icy patches left in an archipelago in front of the hedgerow, I knew what was coming.   

It began on a day in late March or early April when my dad would come home from the chemical plant where he worked with a lot of plastic sheeting and a barrel of some sort of poison. We kids would spread out the plastic, weigh it down with rocks and soil around its perimeter so no air could escape, and my dad would pump the poison under the plastic into our garden.  This was to "keep the weeds down." And whatever it was, it worked. We'd leave the plastic for a few days, peel it back, rototiller up that beautiful, deep, black, Benton County topsoil, and there wouldn't be a weed to be seen. Of course we'd be eating radishes and turnips and potatoes grown in that soil with whatever toxin my dad had pumped in there, but it made that first month of weeding easier.  Not exactly organic, but it was local, at least - and c'mon, it was the 70s, we were hardier then. 

And really, anything - anything - that made weeding easier was a good thing. That rich, beautiful, Benton County soil was so fertile it would grow anything. We had volunteer (i.e., not planted) everything, everywhere. Blackberry bushes on fence rows that would sprout up from one year to the next; pumpkin plants would sprout up in the yard from the seeds we'd spit out the previous autumn that would keep coming back no matter how many times we'd mow over them; weeds that would sprout up every damn place - in the gravel driveway between the wheel ruts, between the slabs of our pitching front sidewalk, in the tiny space around the marigold plants that we'd planted in front of the statue of Our Blessed Virgin Mother (a/k/a "BVM") in the front yard, in the gravel underneath the fire pit in the driveway where we'd have the occasional cook out - every damn place. Hence the need for herbicide for the garden.  And, to my mind, hence the need for ten kids - eight to weed, eight to harvest.

The plastic would be rolled up and hauled to the dump, the soil would be tilled, the seeds would go in, and the very next morning, it seemed like, the plants would be up.  And once it hit June and you had some nice summer thunderstorms followed by 90'F days of bright sunshine, well, buckle up - the garden was clearly in the driver's seat and we were all just along for the ride. 

On a summer morning the last thing you wanted to hear - the thing that would make your stomach drop and your heart fill with dread - was: "[first name, middle name], go weed the garden." There went your morning, or sometimes, your day.  The garden was big, and as you stepped out of the back door in your gardening clothes (your oldest hand me down t-shirt, cutoffs, no shoes) and turned south to face it, it got bigger.  The closer you got to it as you walked from the back door, past the beckoning tire swing, across the sharp gravel of the driveway and through the gate, the more it grew. To a five year old, by the time I'd reach it, it felt the size of Center Township. 

There was some strategy involved.  If it had been dry recently, well, you could get a hoe and work the dirt between the rows, cutting down the weeds at the soil line. In one way, hoeing wasn't too bad - you could see where you were going and where you had been, and you had the satisfaction of a clean row behind you as you moved - but that satisfaction was incomplete.  It was tempered by knowing with a certainty that you were only delaying the inevitable. It might look good from afar - from mom's usual vantage point at the kitchen window over the sink, for example, or from the road - but those roots were still there, waiting for the next rain.  Or the next bit of dew. Or for you to turn your back. Really, that's all it seemed to take before they'd sprout again.

Hoeing wasn't a solution, it was a stop gap. If we were having company and it'd been dry, then hoeing would do for the short term, but that was it. Once Father Froehlich or Monsignor Klein or some company from town left, we knew we'd have to get back out there and really weed.

It was best to weed the garden after a good, long, soaking rain, when the soil was maybe a little looser and the weed might come out with at least some of the root, but if it was dry you still had to get out there and do what you could. And what you could was usually grabbing the plant as low as possible, as close to the soil line as you could, gently rocking it back and forth at first, and applying gentle pressure, pulling.  Usually one of two things happened: the plant would start to give way, giving you hope, until you heard that distinct "pop" and you knew the root had held on to torment you another day, or your hand would slip up the weed, stripping off all of the leaves on the way up, leaving a naked and forlorn-looking but resolutely standing stem.  It would look ridiculous, and early in the spring a little forlorn, but you learned.  By June and July, you knew that stem would probably weather the summer if you left it, so you wrapped it once around your palm and you pulled, and then you'd hear the root "pop". And you knew it would be back.  Oh, yeah, it would be back. 

If we were weeding vs. hoeing we'd throw the weeds into a bucket and dump them on the compost pile, where they'd sprout but harmlessly, until they seeded.  Once a weed seeded, it was like a four alarm fire - mom would point out that those seeds would get blown somewhere and take root somewhere and we had to cut them down.  Or burn them (my favorite, as that required gasoline since the leaves were green and wouldn't burn without it and since I was a budding pyro). 

I liked the way the garden looked after we'd weeded it, and that was the point, really.  We harvested everything by hand so it wasn't as though weeds were going to hold down our yield by gumming up machines - they weren't.  It wasn't so dry in Benton County or the soil so leached that the weeds were robbing nutrients from the vegetables - they weren't. It was just that, well, it just looked bad.  We lived on the main blacktop- the only point of entry - into Fowler from the south. People we went to church with lived down the road from us, and the county highway department and the town dump was there, so people would drive by and see it.  And there was no way, never, that our garden would be allowed to look like it wasn't well loved.  In Benton County there was no culture around the yard looking particularly nice - I don't even remember watering the yard during those rare dry summers - but the garden was expected to be at an entirely different level of presentability.  It was house pride, I guess, just manifested differently: in a rural community people gossip about others' gardens. And perhaps particularly because things were tight for us, it was never, ever permissible for things to look at all unkempt.

Even then I liked things tidy, and I liked the way a row looked when you got to the end and glanced up to see where you'd been.  With weeding, at least, you had that sense of accomplishment.  You could tell where you'd been. You could stand back at the end of a row and think, "Nice. I did that."

As opposed to, say, when you stood at the end of a row of riotous green after having been told to "Go pick the beans."  No sense of accomplishment there, just a sense of futility.  Endless, Escherian, futility. If ancient Greek culture had flourished on the prairie just northwest of the Wabash River, Sisyphus would not have been pushing a rock up a mountainside - he'd've been working an interminable row of beans. 
.

Things I've learned with a broken foot

Click to enlarge. And if you're qualified to read it, diagnose away!  My doc is "busy"

I broke my foot while on O'ahu a few weeks back, and as I've been hobbling around my house and trying to drive and staring longingly up flights of stairs, I've had a few realizations.

1. Crutches suck.  The technology involved, if you can believe every production of a Christmas Carol ever, has not evolved since Dickens' time.  You need a lateral piece of something onto which you can put your hand so you can support your upper body, and you  need a lateral piece of something to jam into your armpit when your tris and delts give out from hauling your gimpy ass around.  Your tris and delts get sore.  You give in and drop onto the armpit body-weight-supporting bit.  Then your arm pit gets sore.  So you hoist yourself back up off the armpit bit and your arms and delts get sore.  And so it goes. 
2. Crutches suck, 2: You need a lot of lateral space to crutch with any efficiency at all.  Plant the crutches, bring your good leg as far forward as you dare, allow injured limb to hang loosely in the air because "you're not supposed to put any weight on it," swing the crutches in a half circle out and forward, and repeat.  You'll want to make sure the crutches move the same distance forward, or you'll be crutching yourself around in a circle before long.   
3. Crutches suck, 3:  How do you carry anything?  You can't - well, not in your hands, you can't.  Not the morning paper.  Not a CD of the Xrays of the injured limb.  Not a bottle of vicodin.  Nothing.  So wear cargo shorts. 
4. Despite 1, 2 and 3, getting around on crutches is almost always preferable to hopping unless it's over a very short distance.  Hopping... it's as efficient as it is elegant, which means: "in-".  You can get a decent head of steam, but if you're on hardwood floors, how do you stop?  You carom into walls, furniture, people, and doors is how.  You can't carry, well, anything, really.  Theoretically you have both hands free, but go ahead, try to hop - on one leg! - and move forward doing it, and see what your hands do.  And if you have something in both hands, how are you going to balance yourself when you arrive?  There are any number of engineering problems involved here.  So again, I assert that you can't carry anything.  Certainly not a beverage in a container that isn't sealed, for sure.  (I don't recommend trying this - take my word for it.)  Hopping does keep the muscles of the non-injured leg from atrophying, sure, but there are significant risks of new injury through collision, re-injury through missteps and panic, or both through humiliation.  Stick with the crutches unless it's a very short distance.  And there is no one at home with you.
5. Doorknobs are not load bearing.  Just... don't. When you're sick of using your crutches and you're hopping around the house, resist the urge to fling yourself toward the nearest door to use the doorknob as some sort of cane.  They aren't designed for it.  Best case?  You realize this in the half second you feel the doorknob sag southward and you pull up and put your hand on the door to steady yourself instead. Though in this case the door bangs backwards into the door stop (or the wall, in all probability, since the doorstop may not have been engineered to support the weight of a gimpy adult biped in addition to the door), makes a racket, and inspires your friends and family to holler in from the next room to see if you're okay. (You can holler back "Yup! Fine!" or "...ow..." or the always popular "I was never IN aisle 7!") And yes, that's the best case.  The worst case is when the damn doorknob snaps off in your hand, suddenly and unexpectedly, as your mind and your weight is still counting on something on that side of your body to support you, and you suddenly lurch forward and downward anyway, scraping your arm on the metal entrails of the doorknob's axle as you careen into the door, slamming it against the door stop (or, again, the wall), and you crumple to the ground, whimpering.  Why whimpering?  Well, the indignity of it, for one, but more for the now-bloody gash on your arm, the new bump on your head, and the fact that in all of the flail-age you've re-injured the limb you were trying to protect by hopping around in the first place because in your inglorious descent you put weight on it.  A lot of weight on it.  In roughly the same motion as how you broke it.  Again, see item 2, above: when you are crutching around, you don't need doorknobs. (And see item 4 - make sure no one else is home if you're going to insist on hopping.)
6. Stairs.  Bloody stairs.  Just... just don't.  Okay, you're going to want to try to do it.  If there is no one around, then maybe.  As you face the stair, do some geometry.  Put the foot of the crutch in the MIDDLE of the step, y axis, making sure you're away from both edges, x axis; put both crutches down at the same time; and slowly and consciously put your tris into it.  (If it helps, pretend it's the tri dip machine at the gym.)  And repeat, for the 17 times or so you need to get up the stairs.  If there are people around, forget about it.  Even if there are only three stairs, don't do it. Let them go first.  Pretend you left something in the car and turn around.  Suddenly grab your cell phone in your cargo shorts and stand and have a conversation.  Inevitably, people will try to help, you will want to encourage them in their well meaningness, and there will be flail-age.  Take the lift. Or, come back in 6-8 weeks.   
7. Backpacks are your friends.  Put everything in there - your chargers, your laptop, your checkbook, your Cup o Ramen, your flask, everything.  You don't want to have to hop back into the kitchen to retrieve something once you sit down.  You will learn that you really don't need anything in your life that you can't fit into your backpack. 
8. Drive thru's, misspelled though they are, are also your friends.  You don't have to get out of the car!  Oh my god, that's been a revelation.  Of course when you get wherever you're going you need to eat whatever it is you've just purchased, because, let's face it, you don't want the odor of that "food" in your backpack forever, and that 24 oz Diet Coke you just bought is not in a sealed container so you can't hop with it.  And it won't all fit in the bag that they served you in; and even it will, and you fold the top of the bag over so it will go over the crutch hand part, crutching is not a smooth action - the grease and / or the condensation from your 24 ounces of Diet Coke will, pretty rapidly, with the herky-jerky motion of your forward movement, destroy the structural integrity of the Arby's bag.  And then you'll have curly fries, Diet Coke and skin graft (a/k/a Arby's Roast Beef) sandwich all over the parking lot.  And you can't move quickly enough to flee or pretend that it's someone else's mess.  So just sit in the car and "dine."  It ain't worth it. 
9. You are going to get fat. You just are.  You are going to hate getting up for anything once you're ensconced wherever you settle; you wait til the last possible minute to go take a leak, for feck's sake, you sure as hell aren't doing cardio and burning up the calories.  And you're hungry because you're sitting around all the time watching TV with your foot elevated on a pillow on your coffee table and your backpack of snacks.  How are you supposed to burn off those calories?  You could crutch around the block, I guess.  But nah, not really. See item 1.   
10. That rotator cuff tear that's been bugging you since April?  Yeah.  You probably should have had that looked at before you needed to crutch around everywhere.  Because it's clearing right up now. 
11. Make up a cover story.  It's a great conversation starter, a bandaged foot and crutches, and people who have passed you in the hallway for months will stop and ask what happened.  Make up a story, because "Hungover, walking down stairs, rushing, carrying too much stuff, friends' dog, missed step..." kinda sucks as a story.  "Hiking on lava" is credible, short, tells people you were just in Hawai'i, and will move the conversation forward.  Especially if it's the guy at the end of the hall who always wears scent and fitted shirts and doesn't seem to do anything but a trap-and-lat workout - he doesn't need to know about the stairs. 

I'm sure I've learned more.  Like about two footed driving, for example.  And how jealous you can get of people who walk around without any seeming trouble, they just walk!  And how picking up a package at the Post Office turns into a 23 minute nightmare (thank god the meters go 24 minutes on a quarter). But that's it for now. I've waited to the last possible minute again...
.

 

The phone's ringing - for all of us

In Fowler we had two phones in the house, one upstairs and one downstairs. Since the one upstairs was in my parents’ room – a room which I really only entered twice in 13 years – really we had one phone. For ten kids. And that one phone sat at the far end of the kitchen table against the wall, and if you wanted a private conversation the cord was long enough that you could take it into the family room, sit on the top step, shut the door behind you, and no one in the kitchen would hear.

It wasn’t a comfortable perch there on the top step, but it was worth it for the relative quiet. The family room used to be a garage that my dad and brothers converted into living space.  It wasn’t hooked onto the furnace so it didn’t have heat.  Not that the rest of that house was balmy, given the cost of heating oil and the shape of the house (my bedroom window would often have ice on the pane in the morning), but the living room was especially cold.  We used it for cold storage in the winter months, putting things there that didn’t need freezing, necessarily, but it was at least as cold as the fridge.  I never thought anything about it as a kid – you could bundle up in a few sweaters, stretch the phone cord and go out there for a personal conversation. 

Fowler only had one phone exchange, 884, so all you had to do to memorize your friends’ phone numbers was remember the last four digits.  I still remember my friends’ numbers – Susan and Doug and Alan and Eugene and Bill – all these years later I could dial them all. Indiana only had three area codes then and we were in the one with Lafayette and Indianapolis, but the dentist and some of my friends were in the 219 area code which started in Earl Park just north of us, and calling them was strictly verboten.  The other towns in the county all had one exchange as well - Boswell was 869, Oxford was 385, Otterbein was 583.  They were all local calls, and they were all free and unlimited, and I was on the phone a lot. Hours and hours. And there was no call waiting, it was just busy until someone hung up. 

 Sharing anything ten ways isn’t easy, and while at any given time it was more likely to be 8 or 7 since Ray was in the Army and Dave was in Illinois and Therese was down in Texas, it still presented logistical challenges.  I got to be on the phone a lot, and most of my friends were local calls since I was from Benton County, so I never got yelled at for the duration of my calls. There were some conversations about polite phone conversation (didn’t matter if your friend’s parents told you to call them Gene and Myrtle, you didn’t over the phone) and some boundaries (never call anyone after 9 PM, no calls during dinner), but pretty much I had free reign. My older siblings resented some of the latitude that I got, and I can understand it – in this I was unquestionably spoiled – but what was I supposed to do, tell ma to kick me off the phone?  Not likely. Looking back I’m most surprised by the indulgence of my two sisters, four and five years older. Why did they put up with it?  I don’t remember them yelling at me for I, but then they were great to me all the time growing up. My older brothers were rough, but my sisters were really amazing. 

At the end of 6^th grade we moved from that sprawling two story farm house in the country to what was to my eyes a very modern one story ranch house with a basement in the city. We had a phone in the kitchen, a dark brown slimline model that had a truly amazing cord.  Because the base of the phone was mounted to the wall, the only way to have a private conversation was to stretch the cord long enough to get to the basement stairs five feet away – and then down to the third one so you could swing the door shut.  In warmer months you could take it other direction, through the living room six feet to the front door where you could sit on the porch and have some privacy.  I don’t know what that cord was made of but it was remarkable.  It never broke despite the stretching, despite the flipping and twirling as it was subjected structurally to some of the teenaged angst that it was carrying internally, despite the crushing by closed doors. 

We did it so we could have some privacy. We wanted someplace we could talk without our conversations being overheard by our parents and siblings. (Overheard and remarked upon, which I remember as being particularly infuriating to one sister, perhaps because it destroyed the fiction that conversations held in common areas were to some extent private?) For me it was important to have a space where I could stretch mentally.  I don’t remember any specific content from those conversations, just a general sense of talking about friends’ breakups, history fair projects, and plans for Friday nights, but I remember sitting on the step – in the cold living room in Fowler, in the gaudy yellow stairwell in town – treasuring my privacy.

I think of this sometimes when I sit next to someone on the train sharing the most intimate details of a relationship’s end, or when I, unwillingly, listen to a drama playing out for a coffee shop neighbor who is on the phone.  I wonder – did people change because of the technology?  Is that why there doesn’t seem to be a line between public and private lives?  Since we no longer need to be tethered to the wall through a cord to a phone that, as Lewis Black as has said, “Was so big, if a puma was charging at me I could hit it over the head and kill it!” – since we can connect with anyone from anywhere and since our private conversations can now happen in public, has that been the impetus for this erosion?  Or does privacy mean something different now?  Maybe it’s simply that I am extrapolating too broadly from my own experience? 

 At the risk of being the guy that yells at those damn kids to get out of his yard, I miss privacy, mine and others.  Maybe I just need to get them all a stretchy phone cord. 

 

Home at home?

A few years ago when living in Honolulu, my ex Arnold would come out to stay with me from time to time.  At first we'd do the tourist things but after a while his visits became less about seeing stuff and more about experiencing O'ahu like the locals - going to my favorite haunts, hanging out with some grad school friends, hitting the beach, going holoholo in town. 

Arnold is Filipino, and one night out at the club a real lokal bruddah comes up and starts talking to us.  Well, to him.  In pretty full-on pidgin. Arnold had no idea what bruddah was saying, so he looked at me.  I translated and responded, looking at bruddah.  Bruddah looked at me, confused, faced Arnold, and asked another question.  Arnold, confused, looked at me.  I translated and responded looking back at bruddah.  Bruddah, confused, nodded and turned again to Arnold and said something else.  It just didn't compute that me, one ha`ole, was in this context the "local" and was the one who could understand a little pidgin; or that Arnold, by now very tan and local looking, couldn't speak or understand a word. 

As that visit was winding down I asked Arnold how it had gone and how he was liking Honolulu. He loved it, of course - most people do - but then he added something that I've thought of often over the intervening years: "I've never felt so comfortable in my own skin." 

He had shared with me some stories of being bussed growing up, from his very diverse West Long Beach neighborhood to very white Wilson HS on the east side. He had told me about being called "Cambo" at school, meant pejoratively and as a reference to the thousands of Cambodians who had settled in Long Beach after the "boat people" exodus from Indochina of the mid 70's.  He never said these things with any particular rancor or bitterness but it had been part of his experience, and now when he told me that being in Hawai`i was comfortable in a way that he'd never experienced before, I remembered them. 

The following year I spent a summer in Thailand for work with a couple of professors from UH.  We were in Chiang Mai and I was taking full advantage of being there - we worked in a hermetically sealed, over-air-conditioned conference room every day from 8 to 5 (or 7 to 7 by the end of the workshop), but we had weekends off and I some time to go exploring.  I fell in love with the food, the pace of life, the people, the steamy climate, pretty much everything, and I contemplated arranging my life so I could live in Asia - feasible? Worth pursuing? As I was idly thinking about it out loud over dinner one night, one of my professors counseled against it.  She was of Indonesian descent, and said that she always loved coming back home to Hawai`i, to the familiar, to a place where she didn't stand out and where she could really be at home.  She asked if I wouldn't get fatigued always being the outsider in places where my appearance meant I wasn't a local and never could be.  I made a comment about how it didn't bother me the two years that I lived in Japan, but how I'd never really thought about it like that. 

I thought about it after she asked me, though, and I thought about not having needed to have thought about it before.  When Arnold first told me about being a bussed-in minority kid in high school I was sympathetic but I didn't get it; when he told me that he felt comfortable in his own skin in Hawai`i I thought smugly, for a split second, that I was above that feeling or awareness of race.

I shouldn't have, because I'm not. At all. I'd been aware of race in Japan - I wasn't being totally honest when I said that "it didn't bother me" when I lived there.  I was a guest in a foreign country on a contract for a finite amount of time, so of course it was very different to what Arnold may have felt as a 9th grader on a school bus being driven across town, but I felt it. Like the time on the train, exhausted and stinky after 14 hours of travel back home to Nagoya from Thailand, when a Japanese business man in a suit sat across from me in the carriage and made no pretense of not openly staring at me. I watched him watch me for a few minutes and then I made a big show of taking out a borrowed old school 35mm camera and squeezing off a couple of shots.

I'd been aware of race in Hawai'i, knowing that no matter how long I stayed or how much language or culture I learned I would never be as local as Arnold would be just by stepping off the plane; that bruddah would speak pidgin to Arnold even though he didn't understand and even though I was standing right next to him, replying. 

And then I thought about white privilege: I'd never had to feel or been made to feel a sense of displacement in my hometown like Arnold had, but more than that, growing up white in Benton County, Indiana, meant that I got to think about race differently than my friends of color, of whatever color. How that meant that I didn't have to think about race at all. I remembered watching my ex Gabriel be stalked around a store in the mall in downtown Columbus and think "Holy shit, that really happens!" How I would hear a jackass in a bar tell my Wisconsin-born Asian friend that his English is really good and think, "Holy shit, people really say that!"  How my ex- Joe, after asking about a restaurant shortly after moving to Georgia, was told by a black neighbor that, "No, 'we' don't go there," as she rubbed an index finger over the skin of her arm.  

So I don't get to be smug - or to be anything - about how someone else feels in his or her own skin, and I'm embarrassed that I was.

But I've thought of Arnold's comment in another way since I've moved from the Bay Area back to SoCal. I hadn't realized that I'd never felt as comfortable in my own skin as when I lived in San Francisco until I'd left it. I was queer in a place where queerness was unremarkable and nothing that needed be commented on - queerness just was. Perhaps like being Asian just was for Arnold in Hawai`i. Like being white in Benton County just was, or being Japanese in Nagoya. I hated the weather in San Francisco, and the prices, and the insufferable smugness that techies can mount. (Yes, we get it, you're really, really special.) I hated walking over that goddamn cliff every night to go to the gym. I hated running my furnace every night in June, July and August. (And careful BLC readers may remember how I hated Palo Alto.) 

But even though I only lived in The City for a year, I grew accustomed to a baseline of queerness. I didn't have to do the work that needs to be done in other places; I didn't need to do the daily coming out, educating and revealing straight privilege that other places may require. I got very comfortable. Not everywhere in The City - I have queer friends who won't go to the Marina, and I was gay bashed by two guys in SoMa and had the bruised ribs to show for it, so I am not saying it's perfect, by any stretch. But in my daily life I was surrounded by queerness and I was the beneficiary of the consciousness-raising of all of the brave queer folk who came before me, and of the commitment to real equality by innumerable allies. I grew to love San Francisco as a special place that felt queerly homey that I didn't fully appreciate until I'd left. 

So I'm sorry that it took me a while, Arnold, but all these years later I'm finally starting to get it - what that feeling of being at home in your skin feels like. And I'll look forward to getting it back.
.

Expansion

When I finished college I kicked around a few temp jobs in Milwaukee, and then I got lucky - I got a job in admissions at Regis College in Denver, Colorado in May, 1992. I loaded up my meager possessions into the Caprice Classic (thanks, Dad!) and drove west.

I didn't know anyone in the whole timezone, and didn't know much about those huge, square states between the Midwest and California. They weren't interesting geographically, so I hadn’t taken the time to learn much about them. On my mental map, the space between Lincoln, Nebraska (in my world, decidedly Midwest) and Sacramento (West) was blank.

I was confronted by my own ignorance, and was surprised in waves at what I found "out there" - mountains, yes, but space. So much space. I drove 18 hours to cover the 1100 miles from Milwaukee to Denver, which made some sense to me because Denver was in the West. California was in the West. What shocked me was that after all that driving I was not quite halfway to San Francisco. In my mind's geography, the rest of Colorado, Utah and Nevada simply weren't that big, and Denver was, oh, a seven or eight hour's drive from the west coast. (It’s 19 or so.) It's not quite as bad in degree as the error that Christopher Columbus made when he got to the Caribbean and thought he was in the South China Sea, but it was bad. This was precisely the type of thing I was supposed to know. How did I not realize this, I wondered?

As I lived in Denver, I learned a lot about the West - what mountains do to weather and roads and accessibility and culture; how water, a resource that is so bountiful in the Midwest as to be wholly ignored, was scarce and precious; what urban sprawl does, irrevocably, to natural beauty.

As I sat in Denver, broke, I'd think about weekend roadtrips to Cheyenne and the Rocky Mountain National Park and, yeah, on occasion, Milwaukee, and that required logistics and planning and thought while looking at maps. I'd then drive the roads that I saw on the map and I learned their beauty or desolation or both. I'd find a restaurant with taciturn locals and improbably good steaks for ridiculously low prices. I'd find a replica Statue of Liberty in Kansas, moonscapes along I-76, and good fry bread in Native American land. I got to know it. From Denver I explored to the Four Corners and over to Vegas (for Christmas one year for a Marquette-UNLV game), down to Albuquerque, up to Boise and Pullman, WA, and laterally from San Francisco and SoCal to Milwaukee and Chicago and St Louis at different times. I filled in the spaces in my mental map of "the west" with data.

As I looked out my 8th story window in Denver to the mountains and thought about and planned and tried to impose some sense of all of that space, all of that space was imposing a sense on me.

The same thing happened as I looked out my 8th story window in Dhaka. Before my trip to Bangladesh, when asked if I'd been there or to that part of the world before, my standard response was "No - nothing between Singapore and Venice." I knew what countries were there, just like I knew that Utah and Nevada were between Denver and the Pacific, but that's very slim knowledge on which to - well, on which to base anything.

Being in Dhaka filled in my mental map of a region that had been tabula rasa. What I learned from being there gave me insight into a whole region of billions of people. Not that I know what life is like there, but I can conceptualize it in a way that was impossible for me in January.

It's an imperfect analogy, but what I'm most reminded of is when a felt tip pen has extended contact with a cloth surface: the ink spreads out from one point to fill a growing space, and the longer the contact the broader the circle. Usually, that ink is indelible.

When I moved back to Chicago from Denver, my perspective had changed, indelibly, and I had a new lens through which to see things that were familiar. I loved - LOVED - Lake Michigan and treasured it in a way I hadn't - couldn't have – done before I realized what an amazing and beautiful natural resource it was. I loved the fact that I could get on a train in Chicago and in ninety minutes be in a whole other city, unlike Denver's isolation that required a 500 mile drive to be in Omaha (Omaha!) or a 600 mile drive to be in Kansas City. I loved the trees in the Midwest that I'd never really noticed before, and that deep green that fields and grass get in the summer that you don't get west of the Missouri River.

I was in Denver about 28 months; I was only in Dhaka about 28 days. I don't want to overstate the case.

I do know, however, that even though the tip of the pen might not have been left on the cloth that long, an indelible mark was made. I won't forget what I saw. I only wonder how it will shape what I see in the future.
.

Endless summer

It was a beautiful day on Sunday, so I joined literally hundreds of my fellow San Franciscans in the sun at Dolores Park. I saw a group of kids - early-20-somethings - with a few bottles, an old school boombox, some food, some blankets, a surfeit of time and a seeming dearth of responsibilities, having an unbelievably great time.

I'd seen them when I was at the park the week before - same group, same boombox, same blankets and bags, same summertime mode. I hope every day this summer, every single day they can, they are in the park. And I hope they don't realize how fleeting it is, or realize that they are innocent in a way they are unlikely to ever be again.

When I was their age, the summer of 1990, I was taking a summer and fall semester off from school to complete an internship and make some money so I could finish, so I had fewer responsibilities than usual. Yeah, I was working two or three jobs - 40 to 60 hours a week divided between Banana Republic, Kinko's and Marquette - but they were part time and ended when I walked out the door. It was easy. And despite all the time spent working, time didn't seem fleeting. The summer months passed by, but those days seemed not to, like they were enervated by the heat, passing as languorously over me as I moved through them.

I lived at 21st and Michigan that summer (the one with the hydrant in front), in the unairconditioned upstairs of an old house that had been chopped into student apartments. My room had "balcony" access - a door to a rickety porch roof (since wisely removed) with a view of the industrial Menomonee River Valley and I-94 - and I would sit out there in my boxers any spare hour I got, reading Pope or Gide or contemporary queer fiction, working on my tan during the day and listening to the neighbors' ska or reggae at night. In the fall my "six straight roommates," as I described them (inaccurately, as it turned out), would be moving in, but that summer it was me and Tim, and he had a day job downtown with regular hours and a girlfriend. Really, it was just me.

I was far enough along in my drinking career that I didn't need to go out every night, since I'd been served at many spots around Milwaukee for a good two years, but I liked to drink and I went out the two or three nights a week when I could afford it or when I'd get that occasional, random $20 that my mom had snuck into a letter. Bus passes were cheap and I had a bike, so basically all of downtown Milwaukee and the lakefront was my hinterland. If I had to work 3 - 11 at Kinko's or was closing Banana, I'd call friends until I got a hold of one - or didn't - and go to Bradford Beach for an hour or two, watching the volleyball players, if they were out, and then for lunch go for Mexican food and margaritas, and then go to work for eight hours. And maybe after work I'd head up to the East Side and go to the Landmark and shoot darts and play pool til I ran out of quarters or until the 30 bus was about to stop running.

If I worked 7 - 3 at Kinko's or 10-5 at Banana, I'd go the Union or Hegarty's and have lunch (June is National Dairy Month so all sandwiches with cheddar were $2.95), shoot some pool, play Firehouse or Nelson or Skid Row on the jukebox, go home and nap and write a letter and then get ready to go out, listening to the Vogue CD single over and over.

Time didn't matter.

Those days on the beach with Jason, my first boyfriend (and by then my first ex), and his friend Jeff, and Julie and Mike; those nights in the Landmark with Gail and Robert and Marty; those afternoons driving around Milwaukee with Erin; those shifts folding clothes in the back of Banana; those hours on my balcony, smoking, thinking, writing - time was frictionless, and its passing was undetectable. We had to set alarms and be places at designated times, and I had to punch in and out, sometimes as many as eight times a day. I don't mean that we didn't know that time was passing - we did - but its passing had no weight or presence in our lives, perhaps because it was not - because we didn't realize that it was not - a scarce commodity. We - at least and certainly I - didn't know it was finite. There was just too much of it for me to truly know this.

There were things on the horizon. Eventually, there would need to be a trip to my parents' in Indiana navigated as a newly cognizant queer; there would need to be money saved for rent, for food, for gas, for pitchers of beer, for tuition for the spring semester; there would need to be fall travel planned for work; and beyond the horizon there was a mountain of books to be read and understood, and papers written.

But as I recall the moments of that endless summer, I don't remember them being touched by any of that. None of that was present, nor did it have any implication for the present. I didn't wake up and find it was over - I woke up and it was still summer, still me on that single bed in a blazing hot room in Milwaukee. Still pool to be played and shirts to be ironed and music to be listened to. Still a full day of heat and sunlight and work and friends stretching out in front of me. Still a new queer identity to investigate and to stretch out in front of me.

I'd wake up on that narrow bed in that narrow room, lean across to my boombox, and press play - Depeche Mode's "Violator" was probably already loaded - and just listen to music, lying under that one sheet, watching the light edge across the ceiling, oblivious to the passage of time, not remotely cognizant of how stunningly luxurious that was. Or at night I'd sit on the balcony and play "Listen Without Prejudice" on repeat, as I wrote letters to friends from high school, coming out to them ("Freedom '90", especially, was written for coming out: "I think there's something you should know/ I think it's time I told you so / There's someone deep inside of me / There's someone else I've got to be..."), taking all the time I needed to get it right, because I had all the time I needed.

I hope those kids at the park have an endless summer like I had. I hope their soundtrack means as much to them, and I hope they have the time to just lay in bed and listen to it. I hope their moments with their friends and exes and coworkers glide frictionless through their days, not snagging on the present or the demands of their futures.

And I hope they don't know it. The consciousness that you will never again be this unburdened, or this young, or perhaps this handsome or innocent or carefree, is one way to look at a loss of innocence: cognizance destroys it. I know I was innocent, that time was languorous and frictionless, but I didn't know it then. That was part of its gift.

I hope they have it, and that they don't know it. Not until their autumn, whenever that may come to them.
.

Innocence Abroad

During the spring break of my senior year, my Ma told me that I shouldn't make too many summer plans since I'd likely have to work to make my book and spending money for college in the fall. I resigned myself to another summer of detassling. A month later, she handed me a plane ticket to Frankfurt, West Germany - I had been given the trip as a gift, she told me, and I wasn't to ask too many questions about its provenance. (I still don't know who paid for it. When I got home I was asked to write a nice thank you note and she'd see it delivered.)

Needless to say, I was over the moon. West Germany, for six weeks!? I couldn't even imagine it.

The world was much, much bigger in 1987 than it is now. International calls were expensive, rare, and of poor quality. You saved them for Christmas, and you learned to pause after you spoke so the party on the other line could hear and respond: there was a three or four second delay, and if you weren't careful you would end up speaking over each other, which I learned the hard way on the annual call to my brother Ray when he was stationed overseas in the Army. There was no Skype or internet, of course - if you wanted to communicate with someone in a foreign country, you sat down and wrote a letter, long hand, on onion skin paper, and put it into an airmail envelope, and mailed it with a stamp. If you were lucky, it would arrive in two weeks.

Come to think of it, that's how you communicated with people in other parts of the U.S., too - domestic calls were expensive, and people still wrote letters to communicate. I couldn't call my eldest sister who was away for college in Texas - I would get in trouble when the phone bill came if I did. If I wanted to tell her something, I had to get a pencil and paper and sit down and write it out. Same with my brothers away at school in the seminary in Wisconsin, or even with my grandma and grampa.

All flights were expensive - very expensive - but international travel in particular was well out of our reach. Going to another country was so rare that I remember a trip to Canada when I was in fourth grade - we'd driven to see my brother Chris in Detroit, and we drove across the river on the Ambassador Bridge and back through the Detroit Windsor Tunnel. I was thrilled. It was rare enough that us three little kids got our picture taken under a sign with a Canadian flag that read: "Tunnel to USA" as proof.

Travel to Europe was Halley's Comet rare - my dad had taken a trip to the UK for work eight years prior, and when he came home we all sat in the living room as he told stories about the long flight, seeing churches and castles older than our entire nation's history, walking Hadrian's Wall. I was completely mesmerized. Even as an eight-year-old, I couldn't quite fathom being able to touch something made by Roman hands. He had a stopover in Shannon, Ireland, on the way home and bought me a set of three porcelain leprechauns with "Made in Ireland" stamped on the bottom. I treasured them as exotic and kept them on my table by my bed.

And now I was going to West Germany? I couldn't believe it! I was to stay with the family of a girl who had stayed with us the summer before, in Oldenburg, Niedersachsen, a lovely old city in the north. It could have been the German answer to Akron and I wouldn't have cared, but it wasn't. It had a charming pedestrian zone in its center, a great old castle, and we rode bicycles everywhere (and I mean everywhere - to school, to the grocery store, even to church, all of us, the whole family, on bikes, to church in our church clothes! I was definitely surprised and charmed).

No internet, no Skype, no Google, no Wikipedia - just as you couldn't call someone around the world, you couldn't, from your bedroom or home, look at pictures of Oldenburg, Niedersachsen, West Germany. You could look in an encyclopedia, or in your library's travel section about Germany, but that was it. When I say that it was terra incognita, that was truer then than is possible for any part of earth can be anymore. Try it - Google East Timor or Majuro or Malawi and you'll get pictures, phone numbers, maps, and dining recommendations in seconds. I as an 18-year-old, was not much different than the Americans that Mark Twain had lampooned a century before.

What opportunities are there for that kind of exploration now? I'm not sure they exist. When you don't speak the language and are standing outside the closed station in Donauwoerth, Bavaria, having got off the last train of the evening, and you don't know where the youth hostel is and there's no one around, well, you need to be a little resourceful. No cell phone. No internet. You learn to work it out, that it will work out, that even when it doesn't work out it will still work out, if in no other way than in the great stories you get along the way.

At different points in my life, people have told me that they thought I was intrepid - like when I passed up a promotion to teach English in Japan, knowing nothing at all about the country; or even when I went to Lisbon by myself, on a whim, for a long weekend. I'm not sure that's true, but if that is a part of my character, I have to give credit to the generosity of an unknown benefactor, to trusting parents, and to a great host family. Credit, and thanks.

.

Liberty

One July morning in 1987, I was seated at a kitchen table in Niedersachsen, Germany, listening to rapid Plattdeutsch.

I was used to not understanding speech in the house, or only snippets, as I was staying with a German host family and my one summer of German was wholly inadequate to the task, but there was something urgent being discussed.

"Hast du diene backpack?" I was asked.

"Ja, eine moment bitte," and I got it.

My very kind host father with the ready smile went into his office and emerged with four plain white envelopes, his smile strained. His wife eased from my bulging bag the lunch they had packed me, took out the hard boiled eggs she had kindly prepared for me that morning, unwrapped them from the morning's newspaper, and handed them to her husband who re-wrapped them in the plain white envelopes.

They saw me looking at them, and in response to what must have been a quizzical expression Frau H. said simply. "Morgenzeitung (morning paper). You go Berlin. Verboten." And she shook her head.

I was stunned. I was leaving that day for Berlin, the first stop on my solo, eight day train trek, and I of course had to go through East Germany to get there. I would see East German soldiers. I would be in a communist country. There was no freedom of the press, and thus the morning Oldenburg newspaper was contraband. I sat up and started to pay closer attention, and to think about what I was doing - what had been a lark was now serious; what I had learned about totalitarianism through books and news media an ocean away I was now going to see through the glass of a train window, up close and personal.

My host father had business in Hanover that day, or so he said - I suspect it was drummed up so he could point me in the right direction and make sure my ticket was all sorted - and he rode with me and we spoke, as much as we could, about politics and weather and crops and history, and I was very glad for his company. My mind was reeling, though, and I wasn't real focused. What else was contraband? I was a very religious adolescent but I didn't carry a Bible or prayer book or even a rosary, so I was okay there. My journal? I wrote a ton, and scribbling in English could be anything to an East German guard. What about cash? I had deutschmark and dollars, but barely enough for my own purposes, not enough to foment revolution. But how much was too much?

I bid "tschuss" to Herr H. in Hanover and boarded my train east. I saw on the timetable that this particular train started in Paris and ended in Warsaw, which I felt bound it, and me, to history. Just east of Braunschweig we slowed to a crawl as we crossed the border into East Germany through barbed wire, yards of precisely groomed sand and open space, and square towers three stories tall with 360' of reflective glass on top. (When years later I read about a panopticon, I recalled those towers.)

I stared so hard my eyes hurt for the next few hours, watching the grey countryside, the unknown car makes, the small fields, the belching industrial megaliths and the occasional pock-marked building - pock marked by gunfire from WWII 42 years earlier, I realized with a shock - roll by. I looked in particular for people but saw very few, and certainly none very close to the tracks. In Magdeburg, East German soldiers boarded the stopped train and three went to each compartment, checking passports, while others stood at arms, backs to the train, coiled muscle and nerve.

I had my new passport at the ready, and after what seemed like 10 minutes of staring at my one entrance stamp, the soldier handed it back to me, unsmiling, and moved to the next car. No one searched my bag. I wasn't going to be pulled off the train and into a small room and asked questions. But everything radiated control, and a lack of liberty, of movement, of behavior, of speech.

There is a difference between knowing that not everyone in the world could get in a car and drive across a continent, and seeing the barbed wire and minefields and guard towers to prevent them from trying. Between knowing that not everyone could read whatever the hell they wanted, and wrapping hard boiled eggs in envelopes instead of newsprint so as not to appear to be smuggling illicit media. Between knowing that not everyone could board a passenger train that stopped in their city, and seeing, ten feet away out of a train window, soldiers with guns drawn who had orders to shoot them if they tried.

It was a lesson in liberty; the liberties that I had - liberties I scarcely understood and had taken completely for granted, at 18 - and those that others, even in Europe, did not.

When I got to West Berlin I checked in to my hostel and immediately went to the Wall. It ran through neighborhoods and was copiously graffitied, colorful, ugly, and omnipresent like a whine in your ear that you can't quite shut out: less or more intrusive, but always there. I developed an entirely unoriginal theory during my two days in Berlin: Berliners were all a little bit mad. More than anyone else in the world in those Cold War days, they lived in the mouth of a gun; their tomorrow might never come, so why not eat, drink and be merry?

I watched West Berliners in the parks and neighborhoods that abut the Wall ignore it, uniformly, and literally turn their backs to it. When I crossed into East Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie, I walked from a color film into one that was black and white. Buildings were pocked by Nazi and Soviet bullets from 45 years earlier and nothing was new or colorful. After the anarchy and madness and vibrancy of West Berlin, it was disorienting. I walked miles around the city, getting as close to the wall as I could in residential neighborhoods, and here in the East it was just ugly: monochromatic, menacing, ugly. I saw it for what it was - not as a symbol of the Cold War, not as metaphor, but as an instrument of state power, and state control. If I ran towards it, I could get arrested. If I tried to climb it, I would get shot.

The grandeur of the Brandenburg Gate, with its fascistic fronting lines and spaces, the better through which to see, with its adorning statue's back to Bonn, Europe, and the West, and face to the east, to Poland and Moscow.

Two years after that trip, when the Berlin Wall fell and totalitarian regimes across Eastern Europe collapsed, and I saw people my age dancing on the ruins of it, I knew I was witnessing history. I couldn't get enough of the shots on the news: East Berlin, and then Prague and Warsaw and Budapest and Bratislava and Sofia and Bucharest, became free. Totalitarian regimes collapsed. Fascism, under whatever name it took, was faltering. Millions of people across Eastern Europe could read whatever the hell they wanted, and go where they wanted. If people in Magdeburg now wanted to board a train, they would no longer be shot.

Many people have been making comparisons this week between Cairo, 2011 and Berlin, 1989; or speculating how far the comparisons should go. I was reminded of seeing what liberty was and wasn't. How what a state said - East Berlin was capital of the Deutsche Democratische Republik, after all - and what it did could be so blatantly at odds. How the will of the governed could be subverted by force, overt and opaque.

Watching the events in Tunis and Cairo come to their joyous conclusions, I was thrilled again. I have no ties to Egypt like I had to a sundered Germany, no study or ethnic bonds, and the tyranny under which Egyptians lived was perhaps not the same as that of the East Germans in 1987, but the truth of the matter speaks in eloquence beyond words. I was deeply moved as courageous people came together in Tahrir Square and demanded their liberty. There are not too many times in human history when the world has seen such a thing, and I've seen it twice now.

It's a long road ahead for the Egyptians and Tunisians and Iranians and Bahrainis (and, and, and...) And while the Belarussians might have some thoughts on that, so do the Poles, and the Latvians, and the Czechs. More liberty is better, more people living under more liberty is better.
I am proud to have been reminded of the freedoms I have by the people in Cairo. I'd love to learn the lesson again from Tripoli or Tehran.
.

Road Trip!

It's taken as an article of faith in my family that "Brennans love road trips." All of my siblings, though my brothers in particular, have elaborate stories about epic trips when they + another brother/ friend/ hitchhiker went from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska in an AMC Rambler in 27 hours, and how much fun they had doing it.

I am not immune: One evening, after wrapping up business in Cincinnati, I drove to visit a sister-in-law who was laid up during a difficult pregnancy. When I walked into her Knoxville hospital room, surprising her, she asked "What in the world are you doing here?" I answered "Well, I was in the neighborhood..." She loved that line, but to my mind there was truth to it - Cincy is a lot closer to Knoxville than Chicago, so why not?

I have an atlas on which I've highlighted every road I've ever driven in the US, and I will look at it before I take a trip and drive new roads, just to have more to highlight, more to see, more memories to steal away. I've had some epic experiences with hitchhikers as well - from Denver to LA, from Sacto to Tahoe, across Nevada, in Hawai'i, outside Arcata, the length of California - and I've always loved throwing a bag in the car and heading out.

Why is this, this centrality of road trips in our shared family lore, and individual pride, and myth-making? We all cut our teeth on the same road trips growing up, after all. We spent the same number of interminable hours on sticky vinyl seats, with no air conditioning, fighting or avoiding fighting with siblings, being sick or avoiding the physical manifestations of sickness of siblings, shoving siblings' things out the window. And all of this while our - well, what else can be said? - heat-crazed, exhausted, clearly en-maddened parents drove us across four states to get to a campsite, or a lake, or a historical marker, and all while they yelled at us to "Wake up!" or "Put that book down!" so we could "Look at the scenery!" or "Pray the rosary!" So why, given this background, did we all, without fail, as soon as we each had the resources to buy, beg, or borrow (or rent, in my case) a car, grab a sibling or a friend or a hitcher and an atlas and go on a road trip?
 

We did, though. (Stockholm syndrome, maybe?)

My first childhood memory of a family vehicle is the Tan Van. It was a Dodge Tradesman Maxivan, or what some friends have since called the church bus, with two bucket seats up front, an engine that protruded in between them, three bench seats, and an extended storage area in the back. (Driver's view, right, exactly our model.)

Each bench seat could accommodate three seated people, which is nine, plus Mom and Dad in the front bucket seats, which is eleven, which leaves me, child #10 and thus passenger #12, to sit on the engine, facing backward.

It wasn't the safest perch in the van. Had we hit anything I would have been thrown into the windshield at such an angle that my head would have been forced into my sternum, snapping my neck instantly, before the glass shattered and spewed me out of the van into whatever it was that had just been hit - but it was the 70s. No one had accidents. Which was just as well, because no one had seat belts.

I don't mean that metaphorically - literally, no one in that vehicle had seat belts. Our Tan Van had rusted out so badly that you could see the road rushing past underneath you, and finally it got to the point where my dad or a brother sawed a piece of 3/4" plywood to bolt onto what was left of the van floor so no one would fall through. They drilled holes in the plywood so we could bolt the seats back in, but no one was drilling holes for the seat belt posts. They got left behind in the modification.

The plywood floor was an improvement on the rusted metal floor that had been there before on a safety level, sure, but the main advantage? It was slightly quieter. 

Know the sound of rain on a tin roof? Or the sound of a rock being thrown by a lawnmower into the side of a car? Imagine that incessantly, at highway speed, while you are lying on the metal in question. Throw in the whine of the tires, and you're there. That old floor had transferred the energy of every rock kicked up by a tire, every pothole not avoided, every drift onto a gravel shoulder into sound. We slept on the floor, on blankets, and we heard and felt it all. Despite that, we slept so soundly that when we'd arrive back in Fowler we'd have to be carried up the steps and into bed, but I guess that's being seven.

Until siblings aged up into driving, Mom or Dad would usually drive and the other rode shotgun; then behind them older kids on benches, then younger kids on the floor. Given that math, any more than three kids in the van and I slept on the floor. Which was a piece of plywood bolted into a van. With a bigger older sibling stretched out on a vinyl seat immediately above me unrestrained in any way. Going between fifty and seventy miles an hour on mostly two lane roads, for the eight to ten hour circuit from Fowler, to Raymond, Illinois, to Springfield, and then home.

God, I miss the 70s.

Sometimes we'd do the whole circle route in one day - leave Fowler at 6 am, get to Grandma and Grandpa M's in Raymond, Illinois, at 10:30 or so, stay for lunch, drive to Springfield to see Dad's relatives, possibly stay for dinner, and drive home, leaving at 8:00 at night for the four hour drive back.

My parents had to have been just nuts.  They had to have been!  But at least on those trips to Illinois we were visiting relatives, so they had a putative objective.

For our summer vacations, there wasn't even that.

It couldn't have been the traditional objective of a vacation: how could taking one or two weeks, loading us all up into the van, and driving to Michigan, or Philadelphia in 1976 to see the Liberty Bell, or Dallas, Texas, in the middle of summer after the eldest moved there for school (god help us, I think I'm still hot from those drives), have been a vacation? And it's not like the Tan Van was worry free driving. One Dallas summer trip, the axle broke in Sikeston, Missouri - on hour six of a fifteen hour drive. (I clearly remember it was Sikeston, because there was a road sign that had the US highway shields for routes 60, 61 and 62 together on one post. I was thrilled!) We sat in a city park, all of us who were on that trip (and I don't remember numbers, but I remember there were a lot of us, and I remember it was damn hot), waiting while it got fixed. That can't have improved our moods, and there were nine hours to go, packed into that van, sticking to those seats, fighting with those siblings.

Can you imagine doing that, now? No DVD players, no headphones, no video game controllers of any sort - only AM radio, books and the rosary. We would play car games to pass the time, and talk to each other in between the fighting, and see the country roll by us. From my perch up front, facing backward, sitting on a folded up blanket in the summer to protect my butt from the heat of the engine, I got to see things I'd read about flow out behind me: the Mississippi River, the Gateway Arch, interstate highways cut through rock in southern Missouri, and in Arkansas and Texas rice fields with standing water and cotton fields with crops you couldn't eat - all things that made me realize that the way things were done in Benton County wasn't the only way to do things.

It was my introduction to travel as education. Through the encyclopedias I'd take on every trip so I could learn about the the crops and cities and state trees, birds, and flowers, as we'd pass through. Through the atlas I'd stare at for hours, memorizing the roads and the numbers and the counties. (I won't say that this initiated my lifelong love of maps and geography, because I don't remember a time I couldn't stare at maps for hours, but it certainly cemented it.) Through the stories read to me by my sisters, when I was a real little guy, and by my father when it was mom's turn at the wheel. He'd cycle through the Little House on the Prairie books, and when we got to "The Long Winter," regardless of time of year or where we were, we'd have to bundle up in blankets if we wanted him to go on. Through the stories my brothers would tell me about people they knew, from Chicago or Detroit or Minnesota; and what they'd learned in school, and they'd talk about music, or their worldviews, or family stories (which, even then, involved cars).

After all I guess they were fun, those trips. I never realized the generosity that my exhausted and harried parents demonstrated by taking us on them.  To connect with cousins and grandparents, to learn something about the history and geography of our country, to give us shared experiences as a family were all great lessons and great experiences. It was cheap entertainment, on one level, as gas was 29 cents a gallon, campgrounds didn't charge us much, and we bought food in a grocery store and made sandwiches and lemonade at city parks along the way, which was good, because we couldn't have afforded anything more.

Whether we were driving to Watseka, Illinois, for Dairy Queen on a hot summer's night (dilly bars, 39 cents), or to Lincoln, Illinois, for a family funeral when it was so cold our great aunt couldn't be interred because the ground was too frozen, and the heater in the tan van didn't stand a chance of keeping us warm, we were having the shared experiences that comprised our youth.

Maybe that's what the road trip experience has come to mean for those of us in my family - some nostalgia-suffused combination of freedom, the wonder of new experience, and familial bond that we have tried to recapture.

But maybe that's just my view, why I love them, and what I have tried to recreate. Maybe that's what I'm hoping for when I'm driving west on US 56 outside of Clayton, New Mexico, watching the sunset behind the Rockies and seeing "purple mountain majesty" for myself; or when I'm waking up after spending the night in a rented Chevy Cavalier on a cold, foggy morning in Port Angeles, Washington.

Maybe I'm just hoping to see it forward this time, as an adult, instead of sitting on the engine, looking down at the map, choosing a path, and then looking up to see it roll away behind me, backward, gone before I saw it.
.