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Big City Sidewalk

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In my forty-seven years, I’ve been all over the world, but all it takes are a few cues to haul me back to my childhood.

A certain sharp and damp and lumber-ish smell brings me to my grandparents’ farmhouse in Michigan (a smell it retains years after their deaths and despite my cousin’s attempts to eradicate it). Outcrops of red, grey, and black veins of Great Canadian Shield rock bring me back to camping trips and weeks at the cottage.

But the capital-P Place where I feel the instant settling of my spirit that says “home” is the big city sidewalk.

Settling the spirit might be an odd response to a place that’s loud and busy and can be crowded and chaotic, but that’s where I grew up: in the middle of the great city of Toronto, Canada. Truly in the middle: one block from the main north-south thoroughfare of Yonge Street, and two-thirds of the way up our subway line.Natalie sidewalk Toronto (1)

I was taking the subway by myself to school, walking ten minutes to church and seven minutes to the library, and biking three minutes to my choice of neighborhood parks by the age of nine. Despite my directional impairment (not a real disability, just a foible), I could get everywhere, because most streets were arrayed in an easy-to-understand grid. City sidewalks meant freedom.

They also meant relative safety, because there were always other people walking around, going about their business. I say relative because I was ten the first time an adult man cornered me in public and asked whether I wanted to have sex, and I can’t even count the number of catcalls I received. But these were annoyances, not threats. As long as the sidewalks were busy, I felt safe from serious harm. And they were almost always busy in our neighborhood, night and day.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan, the small American Midwestern city where I attended college in the late 1980s, there were no busy sidewalks. The busses stopped running at 5 p.m. The city center was an undeveloped ghost town. With no driver’s license and no car, I walked and took the bus or my bike – but only during the day. No people around at night meant no witnesses to possible danger, so I never went out alone after dark.

Every time I went back to Toronto during college, the first night, I’d head to the sidewalks for a walk by myself. Heat from the sun no longer rose off the cement, so the air was usually crisper. People didn’t rush the way they did during the day; they laughed and lingered on the sidewalk, which made a simple stroll feel like a celebration. It was my favorite coming-home ritual, better even than my first bite of a Coffee Crisp candy bar.

When I left Grand Rapids  for New York City, I vowed never to return. “Never” lasted five years. Today I’m back in Western Michigan, and while many great, big-city things are happening here now (a better bus system, tons of businesses downtown, and multiple arts festivals that draw crowds during certain times of year), busy sidewalks in my neighborhood is not one of them. Which made it tough when my daughter reached the age I’d been when I started to roam freely.

I wanted to set her free, but my experience on those city sidewalks I love so much taught me that men in the street can’t always be trusted.

If safety is in numbers, and there is no quorum of the public generally around, no shop owners always at their stores with well-lit windows, no nosy older folks sitting on their stoops or leaning out their windows to keep an eye on things– how could I let her go?

But I had to let her go forth on our empty sidewalks. Alone. I so valued my independence as a child, that I couldn’t keep her from experiencing the same sense of competence.

My solution, since I first let her travel alone to her friend’s house across the park at the age of nine, has been to make her take her bike, since she could get away from uncomfortable situations faster than she could on foot. But still. Can I confess that I’m relieved that her best friend now lives four houses up, so I’m 95% comfortable letting her walk over? But only 95%.

Now that she’s fourteen, I set her free as often as I can, and encourage her to head out with her squad. What will cue her memories of freedom when she grows up? It won’t be the big city sidewalks that I still daydream about, but I’m determined that it will be something.

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unnamed“Big City Sidewalk” is written by Natalie Hart. As the child of an entrepreneur, she only wanted a “normal” job when she grew up. Yet she’s wound up as a writer who is going all-in to indie publishing, simultaneously preparing a book of biblical fiction for publication this summer, and a Kickstarter campaign for a picture book for children adopted as older kids. Although she grew up in Toronto and Brisbane, and has lived in the mountains of Oregon and three of five boroughs in New York City, family and cheap real estate drove her to West Michigan. She blogs at nataliehart.com

 

The Writing on the Stall

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I am on the toilet, my black dress pants scrunched down around my ankles. I am not using the bathroom, but I want to keep up appearances. Or maybe de-pantsing is a reflex in bathroom stalls. I got up in the middle of improv class to check a missed call and voicemail from an unknown number on my phone.

If it’s someone from the Playground Theatre, I will be ecstatic. If it’s an automated message from the teacher’s union or my bank, I will probably crumple up and die on the bathroom floor, or at least, that’s what I am thinking in this moment. I take a deep breath and read the sharpie on the wall:

“Your jokes are better the more you love yourself.”IMG_0933

Many times in this stall I had repeated those words to myself, penance for plodding onto stage with cement feet and pandering for the approval of my classmates. The stall served as my place to recover from wounds on and off the stage.

Someone had sharpied this phrase on the stall door, right at my eye level. The stalls in the girls bathroom were covered with pen and sharpie graffiti, but those words always grabbed my attention first, usually with prophetic timing.

The stall sat in the far corner of the Del Close Theatre in the old iO building, the place I fell in love with and learned longform improvisational comedy. I started taking classes in 2010, somewhere in the depressive stupor of a difficult breakup. The place felt like a speakeasy for quirky folks–dingy, dark, and cramped. It did not provide a home for shiny-polished things, but a fertile ground for magic.

IMG_0932The iO building was located at 3541 North Clark, kitty-corner from Wrigley Field. It was not the ideal place for a theater. To get there, I nudged my way through Chicago Cubs foot traffic and mobs of bros who reminded me of my ex-boyfriend. I’d snake between cooing street vendors offering tickets from their back pockets and water bottles from blue coolers.

When I arrived at the theatre, purified by the incense clouds of cigarette smoke, I got swallowed into the crowd gathered in the lobby. I always think of people piling into that building; the walls pushed in on us and narrowed the margins between our bodies, teaching us to come together in the way tall ceilinged cathedrals invite visitors to crane their necks to the heavens. The building nudged us to huddle in, to listen to stories, and to perform in a way that made the audience lean forward and nod in recognition.

Before my graduation shows, our instructor counseled my class to walk on stage during the blackout so the lights went on as we entered, catching the momentum of our team moving forward onto the stage and into the light.IMG_0935

It was fitting advice for living too, after all, comedians are notoriously familiar with darkness of all kinds. We all tried so desperately to walk together into the light spaces, but the building held the darkness too, brightly painted blue walls and dark corners with ghost stories of depression and overdoses. There were nights when the building shook with laughter and others when it groaned from the weight of the heavy things we carried in our pockets.

My graduating class only got to perform three or four times at the theatre on Clark before the whole operation moved to Kingsbury street in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. The new theatre building has potential, but it’s sterile and easier to get lost in with no cave paintings on the bathroom stalls.

I tried to alter my daydreams of playing on the stages of the old theatre, relocating them a couple miles south, but my mind’s eye is slow to catch on.

As they say, you can’t go back.

Right now, the old iO theatre sits as an empty relic on Clark street, waiting to be knocked down and made into a CVS, which isn’t even as good as a Walgreens.

Our theatre will be disposed of much like the shows we performed on its stages and in its classrooms, carefully constructed, lived in, worn out, and then demolished– a flash in the pan, utterly forgettable.  And yet, there were those nights–those glorious nights–that we carried the show out as a glowing gift only visible to those who gathered that night to listen to stories. Playing improv at the old iO theatre felt like performing near the earth’s core while the patron saints framed on the wall watched on.

When I think of a fitting end to that beloved blue building, I think of us pushing it out to sea, towards some heaven-like land, something Lord of the Rings-like, Gandalf being set loose towards an elvin heaven. I wish to baptize every nook and cranny as sacred ground, to annotate hallways and stairwells with my memories. But maybe the best I can do is to take all that the building taught me, and bring its lessons into new spaces, whose walls don’t yet whisper.

* * * * *

IMG_1781“The Writing on the Stall” was written by Meredith Bazzoli (center with tank top, hands in pockets). Meredith has spent her whole life orbiting around Chicago and its suburbs. She currently resides just west of the city with her husband Drew, who grew up a hoosier. She never thought she could marry one of those. Meredith writes, performs improv comedy, and teaches in West Garfield Park (all stories for another day). She seeks to start conversations about the life we stuff under the bed and keep off our Instagram feeds.

 

If You Pass the Elephant, You’ve Gone Too Far

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My grandparents are gone, the property’s sold, but the elephant abides.

In the 70s, my grandparents owned Taylors Furniture and Gifts, a small shop in a two-story building my grandfather built. Huge windows faced the highway. In good weather, Nana lined up rockers and swings out front.

I recently found a business card touting their Gifts, Wicker & Rattan Furniture, Rockers, Ladderback Chairs, Barrels, West Virginia Glass, and unspecified “Mexican Items.”

Mostly I remember the store through Nana’s left-behind collection of photographs and newspaper clippings.

And the artifacts (think wicker monkeys and Fostoria glass) that still circulate in the family.

And the elephant.

nicole mom pink elephantPapa Taylor bought a pink elephant statue in Michigan, an animal nearly ten feet high to the top of his regal fiberglass head. Papa brought it back to West Virginia and parked it in the small square of lawn in front of the store. He faced that elephant toward U.S. Route 60, a busy two-lane then that’s swelled to four plus a turning lane now. The animal’s uplifted trunk curls behind him, as if to spray his dusty back, his riders, or the store with imaginary water.

Papa gambled that such an unexpected creature would make people stop for a photo, and then stick around to buy a fetching coffee table or a trash can shaped like a frog.The pink elephant is the spirit animal of that stretch of highway lined with grocery stores, car lots, pawn shops, strip malls, and fast food restaurants. On a nicer road, the elephant would be an eyesore. But there, he blends right in, an eccentric neighbor who causes a double take before he wins you over. He’s a non-native species that’s an emblem of our small town.

Papa and Nana printed the pink elephant on their business checks and collected pink elephant knickknacks in the house. For years after my grandfather died, my mom would find a token pink elephant for Nana at Christmas: a pendant, a statue, a tea towel. In the last days of her life, as she lay in bed in hospice, Nana slept with a plush pink elephant tucked under one arm.

My grandparents lived near the store, in the last house that Papa ever built, a split-level perched above the highway. We lived on a road down the hill from them, a road that Nana called a “holler,” as in “how are things up the holler?”

Our holler was close, claustrophobic, leafy in the summer, a handy place to store your shadows. In a holler, you’re tucked into the hills and most of the mailboxes bear the same last name.  You learn not to look at the Christmas lights unless you’re in the passenger seat. You learn the curves and gamble sometimes on what’s around the bend. Could be fog, could be wind, could be nothing.

The pink elephant was a handy landmark so friends and pizza delivery people could find us. We weren’t far from Rt. 60, but you had to know where turn. The holler didn’t draw attention to itself which was part of its charm.

Now I live in the Pacific Northwest, far from my native holler and its attending elephant.  With no tattoos, I feel a bit naked in this part of the world. I’ve thought about getting one of a stylized pink elephant, an elephant as it might look if it sauntered out of illuminated manuscript or a cathedral window. The ink would mark where I’m from.

“What does it mean?” People always ask that about tattoos. I could say that it represents that tall, hollow elephant on Rt. 60. It reminds me of grown-ups climbing ladders and hoisting up grandchildren to sit on the elephant for photos because it’s our birthright.

I could remind them that the pink elephant means starry visions when you’re in an altered state.

Pink elephants, the internet assures me, do exist. Behold the albino elephant, available in white or pink. And, affirms the internet, the pink elephant stands for what a charmed childhood and a badass tattoo must always be: “something extraordinary.”

more walk w virginia

Nicole’s work has appeared in Image, Mid-American Review, Hotel Amerika, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, The Ocean State Review, Western Humanities Review, Tampa Review, Quarterly West, North Dakota Quarterly, and in Permanent Vacation (Bona Fide Books, 2011) and Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical (Cascade Press, 2009) and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, and the web editor for Rock & Sling and How to Pack for Church Camp, an online anthology of creative nonfiction about summer camp.  She is on the Twitters at @heynicolesheets.

 

The Purple Valley

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I flew across the country from Southern California, to escape the orange haze of smog that drowned my Inland Empire home, just east of Los Angeles. After landing in Albany, New York, my escort took me on the long drive east through winding roads and rolling hills, over a mountain rooted thick and green, until we finally arrived deep in the Berkshires, to an otherworldly place they called the Purple Valley, home to Williams College.

The College is sheltered in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, protected by the majestic Berkshire Mountains to the Southeast, the Taconic Mountains to the West, and the great Green Mountains to the North. Acquiescent peaks and the annual melody of changing seasons breathes life into the area. The colors of fall — of beech trees, sugar maples, and yellow birch — fill the landscape with oranges and yellows, which eventually yield to the white snow and gentle chill of winter, until spring beckons back the song of the ospreys, warblers, and sparrows.

It is an enchanting place. The harmony of gentle hills and thick foliage offers a tranquil escape. The soft sound of water trickling down creeks and gusts of wind strumming leaves is like a lullaby for old souls. Ghosts of Melville, Thoreau, and Hawthorne stroll through its hills and trails.

*  *  * * *

I was not the only one to receive the invitation for that spring weekend. There were approximately a dozen other high school seniors who’d travelled to Williams, eager to determine whether the Purple Valley was right for them.

The College, in its efforts to convince us, designed the weekend to spoil us. We toured the school, met with current students, slept in dorms, enjoyed the dining halls, and attended parties.

One of the activities included a reception with professors hosted at a dignified building they called the Faculty House. We all attended, dressed in our best formal clothes. Drinks, hors d’oeuvres, and conversation filled the room as the sun radiated through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows.

As I casually turned to soak in the warm, glimmering sunshine, there she stood—the girl from New Mexico. She’d arrived late, wearing a tank top, shorts, and backpack, a defiant look for the occasion. Her beautiful, sensual skin glowed the color of honey. Her sultry almond eyes betrayed her playful, short hair and…and her unforgettable smile. Her alluring, gorgeous smile radiated in the intimate company of her sweet, lovely dimples.

*  *  * * *

By the end of our third and last night together, the small group of high school seniors visiting that weekend clung together like grade school friends, drowning in a cacophony of secret crushes and knowing giggles. Later that evening, close to midnight, a group of us, including the girl from New Mexico, headed down to a common room in the basement of one of the freshmen dorms for a game of Truth or Dare.

I was surprised by many things as we played the game. I was surprised by how rapidly a group of strangers can grow familiar with each other. I was surprised by how many chose to be dared versus the safer alternative. I was surprised by how many followed through on the salacious challenges, which are best left censored to the privacy of that windowless room.

But most of all, I was surprised by her.

It was after she finished her turn when she looked to me. I lounged eagerly in a chair about ten paces away, diametrically positioned across from where she lay on the floor.

“Truth or Dare,” she said, resting comfortably on her back. She delivered her challenge with a sly smile tugging at her dimples accompanied by the steady gaze of her sultry almond eyes.

“Dare,” I replied without hesitation. It was the only response worth offering.

And, to my surprise, she gave the tamest command of the evening, “Go to the girl you like the most and kiss her.”

I lingered on the instruction, confused by its simplicity, but only for a brief second. With a magnificent grin on my face, I stood up from where I sat and sauntered along to where she lay.

She remained still, her head nestled on her backpack and her focus fixed on my position. She gave me a mischievous look, fully aware of the game she was playing.

Brimming with confidence, I approached her facetiously and got on my knees, nestling her hips between my legs. I hovered over her for a brief moment as she looked up at me with an embarrassed smile and a soft chuckle.

As I bent forward and lowered my face close to hers, everything around us dissolved out of focus. I slowly closed my eyes as my lips melted into hers, the supple silk of her mouth embracing me with intimate familiarity, the soft touch of heaven slowly caressing my soul.

It was in that moment, in the warmth of her lips touching mine, that I fell in love, that for the first time in my life, I felt loved. In that moment, in the grace of the Purple Valley, I knew she was the one.

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Biniam“The Purple Valley” was written by Biniam Gebre. Biniam did decide to attend Williams (how could he not?), as did the girl from New Mexico. Nearly twenty years later, they are married and currently live in Washington DC with their two beautiful daughters. Biniam blogs at Choices and Values and can be found on Twitter @biniamgebre.

 

Downtown Cathedral

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The cathedral on a street corner downtown Hartford is unassuming on the outside. It’s easy to walk straight past it. It’s easy to walk straight past much in Hartford, a small city with large buildings which tower and preside over it. Financial institutions and insurance companies make their home in Hartford, and their buildings meld into one another. When experienced as a whole, their sheer height and the packed-in feeling of a tiny business district makes for a distinct indistinctness.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I have walked past the cathedral many times on my way to and from my downtown workplace. One day I looked at the place a bit closer. I was trying to find a church I’d heard of—one that owns the house that the poet Wallace Stevens lived in. I found myself at the cathedral, looking at it, and in it, for the first time.

The building is of a dark brown stone built in the gothic revival style some two hundred years ago, with a pointed pitched roof and high, arched doors on three sides. Venture in further and the doors open into the dark sanctuary. The walls are covered with frescoes and stained glass windows. Over the altar are miniature depictions of the symbols of the disciples and the shells of St. John the Baptist. On Sunday mornings the light streams faintly through the colored glass and the air is choked with incense. The curls of it rise up to the ceiling.

On Sundays I sit in my pew with the pew door carefully shut. I say carefully because the old wood has a tendency to bang against the jamb and it makes me want to run away, far and fast. Small talk and casual conversation, and indeed, casualness itself, are not in the fabric here. After the opening hymns and readings, the priest and acolytes process down the aisle for the gospel reading. The thurifer censes the book; clouds and puffs of thick scent waft into the air. And the priest scans the pages through the smoke and begins to read.

The cathedral reminds me of the church I left years ago. The seat of my childhood. That church is a mere sixty years old. It has been thoroughly modernized with proper plumbing and fresh expanses of white paint, and a state-of-the-art sound system for which the new sanctuary was designed. The pull of the cathedral, for me, is that it doesn’t get updated. It does remind me that it and the church I left exist in time. Time and space.

The cathedral seems to be getting smaller as new buildings rise around it. My old church gets bigger and newer, but its popularity waxes and wanes like air inhaled and then expelled from lungs.

One summer afternoon I sat with four other people on folding chairs on the tiny cement patio wedged between the cathedral and the rectory, with the sun shining hotly down on us. We were there for one of the midday concerts sometimes held during the week at the cathedral. That day a saxophone quartet, the artists in residence at the cathedral, played for an hour. The music was fresh and lively—a mix of klezmer and classical pieces transcribed for a sax quartet.

Memory tapped persistently at my mind again, of the kind of music played at the other place. The guitar and drum pieces punctuated in time by a short piece by Handel, played during the offertory. Short because the offertory is a slim, quick task there. At the cathedral it is all Handel, all Bach, all the time. The offertory there may be slimmer.

Time away from the old church has been good. I discovered the cathedral, which has been good. But like incense, once you’ve got it in your nose, you can’t unsmell it. You can’t unremember your memories.

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image1 (3)“Downtown Cathedral” was written by Elena Shekleton. Elena lives and works in Hartford and is moving across country to Colorado over the summer. She has a Masters in Comparative Literature for which she studied fairy tales and folklore and can say she is proudly acquainted with giants, dwarves, witches, clever princes, and enchanted cabbages from many different countries.

Rescuing the Past at a Run-Down Motel

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Two years ago I set off for an early morning walk along the Wildwood, New Jersey boardwalk in search of the most significant landmark from my childhood. It was the point around which my year revolved for a decade for our extended family’s annual vacation.

The sun was already blazing in the sky. The boardwalk narrowed, and then it stopped altogether, giving way to an asphalt walkway behind the dunes that seemed no match for the roaring ocean nearby.

After rounding a massive hotel that looked a bit more run down than I remember from over twenty years ago, I saw the familiar lit up palm trees on the horizon and the snack bar deck peeking out. I thought that the massive rock jetty nearby would tip me off that I was getting close, but the jetty was far smaller than I remembered. In fact, everything seemed smaller now: the beach used to feel like an endless desert, the tiny dunes had once appeared to be immovable barriers, and, most importantly, the Aloha Motel now appeared far less impressive and imposing.

boardwalkThis (apparently) rather small and simple motel was the destination of our family vacations every summer during early July. To my young mind, this motel was a palace of sorts. We set off for the beach each morning, making the “arduous” trek over sand dunes and across “scorching” sand in order to swim in the “freezing” ocean. At the end of the day, we’d return to the Aloha for a dip in the pool and then showers, before setting out for a night on the boardwalk. If our vacation coincided with baseball’s All Star Game, as it often did, my cousins and I would eat a late dinner huddled around the television.

Now, standing on the sea wall as an adult, with the Aloha before and the ocean behind, I imagined my grandfather shuffling along the first floor walkway in order to make our reservations for next year, wearing his large “Quinn” family hat. Pop was not one to be outdone in the planning department.

As I shifted from the magic and wonder of the past to the stark, underwhelming present, I found the magic of my childhood creeping up on me. My own child, back at a different hotel with my wife, was experiencing his first vacation in Wildwood. Just a year old, he couldn’t enjoy any of the rides or games that my cousins and I had experienced with pure joy, but just having a child of my own made my childhood seem more present. Everything was amazing back then.

Back then, every day felt like an eternity of waves, sandcastles, and beach games. Every dinner out for fried seafood or greasy pizza a culinary wonder topped off with Kohr Brothers custard. Every amusement pier promised an exhilarating rush.

That day, 20 or so years later, I could see the run-down Aloha Motel, the kitsch of the boardwalk’s games and rides, and details I don’t remember noticing as a kid, like people hauling coolers full of beer to the beach to get hammered while they tan. Left to my own devices, the present overwhelmed the magic of my memories that had all but washed away. Now that I had my son to consider (these days we have two sons), I couldn’t stop myself from filtering everything through his perspective.

On the one hand seeing the shore through my son’s eyes was a delightful delusion, but on the other, my son gave me a part of myself that could have been lost forever. The memories of the past roared back stronger and with greater clarity because I didn’t just see the pictures in my mind—I felt them.

I already could imagine him one day tearing around in bumper cars, zipping up and down on the airplane ride, or spending hours on a massive sand castle that won’t survive high tide. These weren’t just happy moments—these were the thrills that, in part, defined my childhood. As open as my eyes may have been to the more disappointing elements of the shore during that trip, through the lens of fatherhood I regained a childlike clarity that had once been my own.

Who’s to say which version is the better or truer one?

*    *    *    *    *

EdC200“Rescuing the Past at a Run-Down Motel” is by Ed Cyzewski. Ed writes at www.edcyzewski.com about prayer, writing, and the ways they intersect. He’s the author of Pray, Write, Grow: Cultivating Prayer and Writing Together, First Draft Father, and A Christian Survival Guide. Find him onTwitter or Facebook.

The Act of Inverting

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I am in a new town, having finally made the first move of my life: 2,500 miles north to a place very different from what I’ve always called home.

On an old, oiled, well-marked wood floor, I practice a different style of yoga with a new teacher (although she has the same first name as my longtime teacher in the south). The studio is on the second story of a downtown office building that originally housed a hardware store. I position my mat in front of a window onto an alley, through which I can see a brick wall with beautiful patterns in it, a sky that is sometimes  blue and cloud-filled, sometimes gray and spitting, and a church spire. Crows remark upon my practice from the opposite gutter.

Today I lie on my back with my legs above me, against the wall. Now the window is on my right. This is the asana (or pose) called Viparita Karani, upside-down seal or “the action of inverting.” It is supposed to help with stress, headaches, and cramped or tired legs or feet, among other things. Today I am not particularly stricken with any of these maladies; I am simply following my teacher. But I have been here before. I close my eyes.

Five years ago: I am lying in legs-up-the-wall pose on the same yoga mat on a different and much newer wood floor, of lighter-colored wood, also on the second story, but in a newer building on a wide, busy street in Houston, Texas. Two walls of the studio are floor-to-ceiling glass, and earlier in summer and later in winter I watch the sun rise from this room at least one morning a week, in angry rain or transcendent color or pale haze. This class is very full; we are all very close to our neighbors. I brush hands with the woman on my left, turn my head in her direction, and smile. We clasp hands. Kristi now lives in Australia, and has a new baby I have not met. I miss her every time I practice yoga.

Three years ago: I am lying on a bed in a mid-rate hotel in Alexandria, Minnesota, with my legs up the wall. I have removed the pillow so that I can get right up against the bedframe, still not as close to the wall as I’d like, but close enough. I am wearing compression socks up to my knees after having just raced 100 miles on hilly gravel roads on my bicycle. It is my first bike race since knee surgery and I’ve done better than expected: it was a scenic ride, with friendly people, and I am blissful, transcendent. Superlatively drained and equally ecstatic, I hum with happy exhaustion. My husband lies to the left of me, in the same position. Our shoulders are touching. Soon we will get up and break down our bikes and pack them in boxes for the flight home, then go out for more food and celebratory beers. I will take a picture of the process, of the bike boxes open on the hotel bed, and comment that we have done this in more cheap hotels across the country than I can easily count.

Today I am in a new place, and I am lonely. I put my legs up the wall.

*   *   *   *   *

DSC_2393“The Act of Inverting” is by Julia Jenkins. Julia is a book reviewer, librarian, beer drinker, dog lover, mountain biker and native Texan now residing in Bellingham, Washington. She thinks a lot about concepts of place and home. Her favorite color is green.

The sign of windmills

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There’s a curve in the freeway, just where the old Dutch Windmill waves its cheerful arms at passers by. It is nestled on the eastern slopes of Cape Town’s table top mountain, a gentle arc of land once populated by quaggas but now home to students from every corner of the continent. The freeway snakes away from the city, and I knew each twist: hospital bend, the little plateau as the freeway parts into two, the slight rise before the arms of the windmill break into view on the left. Even my muscle memory knew the camber of the road, knowing just when to brake, just how much to nudge the steering wheel to take the corner gradually, before flicking on the indicators to signal my exit.

It happened one day, driving home just six weeks into a fledgling relationship, that I knew I would marry this man. He was not at all my type: quiet where I’d always dated extroverts, cautious where I’d formerly been drawn to confident certainty. Our first weeks of dating had been rocky, too: an old flame was in town and was causing trouble.

And yet, as I drove home from a stolen lunch of perfectly spiraled sushi rolls and contemplated the unlikeliness of it all, it was then I remembered a prayer I had prayed some years earlier: an uncomplicated prayer, that I would find someone who loved me for who I was, who loved God, and with whom I could talk and laugh. I cheekily added a fourth request: Please God, if it wasn’t too much to ask, could he be tall, too?

7307290624_d6aeb0dc08_zI laughed out loud at the memory, just as the windmill came into sight. No, he wasn’t the life of the party or a teller of jokes, but we certainly did laugh together. He wasn’t a reciter of sonnets or the maker of grand gestures, but his quiet patience in the midst of my ex-boyfriend-tornado spoke volumes of his commitment to me. Yes, he loved God, and—Oh God, you remembered!—he stretched six feet and two inches tall. A man to look up to, in every sense of the word.

The windmill bore witness to it all. I flicked on my turning signal, grinning to myself. I’d been slow to realize it, but this was the one with whom I could be silly and cranky, and who could see my fissures and not run. This was the one with whom I could grow old. I felt the winds of change and sensed a deep shift, a milling in my own soul.

I drove home that same route the next day, and the next, smiling each time I drove past that historic landmark, noting its milestone. Six months later I passed by my windmill in the passenger seat, this time dressed in white. I rested my hand on my new husband’s knee. “Do you see that windmill?” I asked. “This was where I first knew we would get married. Driving home. One day after eating sushi with you. And I just knew.”

He smiled and flicked on the indicator as we passed under the windmill’s shade. Ever as always, it signaled home.

*   *   *   *   *

bronwyn lea umbrella“The Sign of Windmills” is by Bronwyn Lea. Bronwyn and her husband married and moved from Cape Town to California, where they now live with their three littles. Bronwyn writes about the holy and hilarious at bronlea.com, as well as other online places like SheLoves, RELEVANT, the Huffington Post and Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics. She is a member of the Redbud Writers Guild. Occasionally, she gets back to South Africa and always makes sure to drive by the windmill (pictured above, photograph by Ian Barbour). Follow Bronwyn on Facebook and Twitter.

90 Miles

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

I have the full lips of a good Cuban woman, wide hips that twitch at the sound of a Latin beat. I am red hot passionate, with an eyes-flashing, arms-waving temper. The sea is the only place I feel blood-rushing peace.

Yes, Cuba is inside me, whether I like it or not.

We flew through the skies one late July night. Surrounded by lightning and carried by turbulence, our entire California family landed in Miami well past bedtime. It was a journey of cultural homecoming for some in our group, and a first exposure for the rest of us. There in our two-star motel with its questionable swimming pool and a not-great view of the beach, I first understood just how wide are the borders of Cuban familia. We welcomed a parade of relatives, long ago friends, and friends of friends–categories that might as well cease to exist at the table a Cuban abuelita. Familia is familia. Everyone’s in.

Two weeks of all-day swimsuits and every morning breakfasts at IHOP are a blur in my memory now. I was only nine-years-old and not sure what to make of this place so different than my white-bred, dry-heat California hometown.

One half of a morning stands out in importance and recollection, however. After travelling to Key West, we found ourselves staring into the leaves of the southernmost tree. When a black cat darted from behind a bush, my cousin joked, “There goes the southernmost cat.” Just ahead of us stood a chain-linked fence, with the wide waters of the Atlantic splashing on the rocks below.

Attached near the top of the fence, a sign reads: 90 Miles to Cuba90 Miles

This is what we came to see, and so we stood silent for a moment. My dad slung his arm around his sister’s shoulders and she smiled through her tears. Thirty-ish years back and ninety miles south–that’s how far away their minds traveled in those few minutes. As children and with no notice, they left their island home with their parents, abandoning memories, dear friends, all the treasures of their childhood.

While the grown-ups reminisced in choked-up Espanol, my cousins and I, along with my little brother and sister, ran wild in a game of tag, hopping on and off large rocks that topped the cliff we were gathered on. Laughing and running, we blinked our eyes at the Florida sun with our feet pounding the ground of freedom that has always spread beneath us.

When I was sure no one was looking, I strained my eyes out over the forever expanse of water, searching for a piece of driftwood or the black ridges of a tire, signs of a refugee almost to shore. These were the stories I’d grown up with, stories of desperation and hope. Sometimes they made it. Sometimes they were picked up by the Coast Guard. Sometimes they sank.

Standing at the edge of our country, I felt like I was at the edge of something else, but as I was only a little girl, I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly.  I was overwhelmed. The gratitude I was supposed to feel, the imaginings of a childhood built with the brick and mortar of communism, language barriers so steep I feared I’d never break them apart, the constant volume and prattle of all these people who shared my blood, or at least a piece of my history, it was just too much.

Frankly, these Cubans of mine were too much.

We shared a gene pool, but we didn’t fit together easily. So when my dad walked out the door a few years after our Florida trip, filing for divorce and affirming all the discord I’d sensed, I erased them, mi familia, and Cuba itself from my very identity. 90 miles was too far to go.

But roots pull and roots dig.

All grown up now, I see it all with gentler eyes. As a wife and mother, I look at my babies and my husband and I see the dark eyes of my Abuelita. I wonder at the cost of her sacrifices, I wonder what it does to a woman to leave the way she did, to gather her children and pray that a far away land will be the answer she’s hoping for. I think of my dad’s childhood memories, and then I dream of sugar cane fields and a baseball soaring high above them, the exultant cries of a passel of Cuban boys.

I wince when I think of guns, suitcases, desperation and my dad as a skinny boy with enormous ears standing with his big sister decked in a white dress, helpless. I lose my breath when I think of my freedom-loving Papi in a cell all those times, his dream of a free Cuba still breathing, but losing color.

My heart edges close to what it all means, and sometimes that’s as far as it can go. But every now and then I stand in that place long enough to see the big picture–the mistakes, the desperate shots in the dark, the guts and the fear, the stubborn hope.

I know now that the edge I felt all those years ago was the edge of loss and anger, language barriers and picking sides. It was the sharp shatter of family, connection. It was me, trying to keep hearts safe and the coming realization that I can’t.

As I turn my gentler eyes on this this cast of characters in a complicated and sometimes devastating tale of a fully Cuban, fully American family, it is so clear that we all have scars of place and relationship. These Cubans of mine, and me. And if they are mine, and they indisputably are, then I am theirs and their Cuba lives inside me too. 90 miles is closer than I ever could have imagined.

Maybe in learning to make peace with a memory, I’ve learned to love a place and a people that I can’t escape. And the truth is, I don’t want to escape it or them anymore. What I want is to  step beyond that chain link fence, to slice through the self-imposed invisible line between here and there. I want my heart to cross the Atlantic and finally say, “Estoy aqui y te amo.”

I’m here and I love you.

* * * * *

profileBio: Sarah Torna Roberts is a writer who lives in California with her husband and four sons. She blogs at www.sarahtornaroberts.com where she digs around her in her memories, records her present, and is constantly holding her faith up to the light. She snacks at 2 AM with great regularity, is highly suspicious of anyone who doesn’t love baseball (Go Giants!), and would happily live in a tent by the sea.

 

90 Miles.jpg is a photo by Kay Gaensler, available for public use.

 

An Inner Place

Posted on by under Guest, Travel & Place

Japan is a particular place, unique unto itself and settled into that particularity. When I am there, I feel completely at home and completely foreign. There are people going about their daily lives, following the predictable patterns that smooth the tasks of everyday living. Yet there are also subtle differences that unsettle a visitor such as myself when I disrupt these easy, orderly patterns.

Just over a year ago, I was fortunate to have work bring me back to this country that alternately fascinates and perplexes me. For eight days in the cold of February, I traveled. I spent the time mostly on my own — Tokyo to Fukuoka to Nagasaki — navigating the obvious that did not seem obvious to me at all, at first.

I did things like standing alone on a cold and windy train platform wondering “Where are the other passengers?” and then realizing that they had stayed inside, not passing through the gates until a moment before the train would arrive. Because, of course, this was Japan. The train would arrive precisely when scheduled. I entered the bus terminal by the wrong door and fumbled about for the tray and tongs so I could choose my items at the bakery. Every day I made mistakes.

However, I recall most clearly the kindnesses of those who nudged me into success.

The gesture of allowing me to go ahead in line that was also guidance about which line I should be in. The hotel staff member who made hot water for me since the instant hot water machines were obviously beyond my experience and thus ability. (He explained that he wanted to be sure the temperature was just right for the specific tea I had selected, silent on the reality that I had not been able to procure any water for myself at all.) The sushi chef who realized I had not ordered what I wanted and gently recommended that perhaps I would be happier with the alternative option offered.

Slowly I relaxed into the flow of the crowds around me, trusting instinct rather than ability to read directions or make logical sense of behaviors I observed. Eventually I found the patterns that guide those who are able to expect and predict rather than bumble and trip. Through this becoming, I reflected on the paradox that, the more foreign my surroundings, the more familiar I become with myself – that self that is always within me but is not always present to me.

Becoming so dependent on others as I did is not easy for someone as driven and self-sufficient as I. My first tendency is to resist – to insist that I can figure it out on my own. To declare that being alone does not mean I am incomplete or incompetent. I have come to realize, however, that if I can quiet that voice; I can hear another. It too is mine but it is the voice that reflects rather than analyzes, appreciates rather than judges, and welcomes the generosity of others — accepting the community that makes me more than I can be on my own. More fully myself. More familiar. More whole.

On my final day walking from shrine to shrine and temple to temple in Nagasaki, one of the vendors insisted that she take my picture with my camera “so that you will always remember this place.” She meant because of the signs below and between which I was standing, tall signs identifying Sofukuji Temple in golden Japanese script. She did not know that she was capturing for me a moment in time to which I had journeyed – to that inner place in which I re-find myself.

* * * * *

photoremember“An Inner Place” was written by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe. Lisa is a librarian and is many times published, but always scholarly, professional pieces. It is a new venture to write in this genre, and she will have to think about whether she will do it again.

Lisa lives in Urbana, Illinois. When not at home, she lives easily out of a carry-on bag for up to weeks at time. Lisa can be found on Twitter at@lisalibrarian.