Category Archives: Guest

A room of my own

Posted on by under Creating Place, Guest

Even before we were married, Ben and I enjoyed dreaming together about where we might live someday. Sometimes we explored the possibilities of different geographical locations, but more often we discussed the details of our future house. While we plotted ideal but realistic spaces for each of Ben’s many creative interests, I struggled to know what I would do in a room of my own.

I was a very imaginative child, but even from a young age I set impossible standards for the things I created. As I grew older, I took classes to teach me the “correct” way to create. I enjoyed art, writing, and music, but there was always someone better than me. I grew weary of feeling like a mediocre imitation of someone else.

After college, life was filled with expectations to meet—job interviews, performance reviews, housework, bills. I wanted something that was mine, with no one telling me what to do or how to do it. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but as I struggled to find where I fit in the adult world, I needed a place where I felt free to experiment, make mistakes, and try again.

Simply the act of verbally setting aside space for me to create, even before Ben and I had the means to make it a physical reality, was powerful. The point wasn’t to be fair, making sure each of us occupied an equal allotment of square footage. Instead, it was about recognizing me as a creative being. We were investing in who I was and what I could create, without guaranteed results. My room was a gift of possibility, not something I had to earn. I was entrusted with resources before proving I would use them wisely and well.

Knowing I had space with no strings attached gave me permission to take my time and explore. I didn’t have to try to measure up to anyone else’s standards. I could rediscover my creativity my own way. Setting aside physical space to create gave me the internal space to start believing in my creativity again.

00030In our 525 square foot newlywed apartment, we carved out slivers of creative space. Our bedroom was small, but it became more than a place for our bed and our clothes. Amidst Ben’s drawing easel, computers, and musical instruments, I found room for a sewing machine I purchased from a thrift store. Choosing a less common pastime relieved some of the pressure to perform, and, as a tall woman generally unimpressed with fashion trends, the possibility of making my own clothes appealed to me.

A heather gray pencil skirt was one of the first projects I tackled. I even sewed a back vent instead of just a slit, not realizing it was a more advanced option. I just preferred the way it looked. I didn’t have any sewing patterns and didn’t know how to use them anyway—I made things up as I went, cutting into a 25-cent piece of clearance fabric after examining a skirt I already owned. The resulting skirt isn’t fit to be worn in public—the seams are unfinished, the hem is crooked, and the zipper insertion is appalling—but it still makes me immensely proud.

When the time came to move from our first apartment into our first house, we only looked at homes with at least three bedrooms. Of course we needed somewhere to sleep, but we also wanted to finally each have a room of our own. The house we purchased was old and the bedrooms were small, but they were ours to arrange and use however we wanted—places to experiment freely without worrying about the mess. After the crowded drabness of our apartment, our house was full of character. Built in 1926 in a logging town, it had beautiful birdseye maple floors and decorative molding above the doors and windows. I painted the walls of my room a soothing mid-tone blue and furnished it with dumpster dives, free finds from Craigslist, and anything that made me smile.

It was hard to leave my room behind when we moved to a new city, but I still have a room of my own. For now we’re renting and I’m not allowed to paint the dingy white walls. Bits of thread and fabric beneath my sewing table tangle in the utilitarian brown carpet. But when I feed the coral colored satin and lace of the bridesmaids dresses I’m making for my sister’s wedding under the presser foot of my thrift store sewing machine, I feel completely at home.

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JohannaSchram“A Room of My Own” is by Johanna Schram. Johanna feels most comfortable in places that are cozy and most alive in places that are spacious. Though the city changes, Wisconsin has always been the state she calls home. Johanna is learning to value wrestling with the questions over having all the answers. She craves community and believes in the connecting power of story. Johanna writes at her blog joRuth to help others know themselves and find freedom from the “shoulds” keeping them from a joyful, fulfilling life. She can be found on Twitter @joRuthS.

Places Unknown

Posted on by under Creating Place, Guest

There’s a towering man with a cane walking in front of me. Amidst the hustle of every other person around, his progress is slow, but sure. He doesn’t seem distracted like everyone else. It’s almost as if the massive skyscrapers around us all point downward to him. I slow my own pace and walk behind him, studying the motion. As an animator, unique “walk cycles” fascinate me. I wonder who he is, what caused the limp, and where he’s headed. I wonder if he’s even headed anywhere, or merely walking for the sake of being able, like me. It begins a story in my own mind that I dive into with the reckless abandon of childlike curiosity.

story_NYC_01I am not a huge fan of New York City. It’s big, crowded, and ridiculously noisy. Everyone seems to be in such a hurry, too. As someone who finds great joy in the stillness of a canyon or serenity of the forest, the sprawling mass of concrete and humanity that is The Big Apple tends to overwhelm me.

It’s also a place where I happen to be my most creative self.

I’ve often strolled down 3rd Avenue wondering why this city gets my mind whirring. It’s almost impossible for me to even think, with everything and everyone buzzing around me. Perhaps that’s the reason: The city overwhelms me and gets “me” out of the way. Ideas spring to mind like popcorn shooting out of a hot oiled pan on the stove, leaving me little time for anything but writing them all down before the next round of thoughts invade. There’s no time to judge the ideas, and judgment is the enemy of creativity.

The noise of the city is unrelenting. People shout from second story windows to friends waiting on the sidewalk below. Taxis create their own personal symphony of horns, rising and falling in time with the stoplights that never seem to last quite long enough for their drivers’ liking. I soak it all in, going slowly and deliberately in contrast to the gushing speed that seems to be standard to the natives.

In those brief moments I can almost understand why someone would want to live in such a place. (Then I remember the cost of real estate and am nearly run over by a taxi, and quickly come to my senses.)

Creativity is a fascinating thing. I continue to study and write about it, and one of the discoveries I keep returning to is just how important being “out of your element” is to the creative process. There’s certainly a time and place for being comfortable, but when we stay too long in the “known” there’s nothing to push us towards the new and unique.

For me, New York City is a place that pushes me. But it’s not the only place that does. I find my brain story_NYC_02firing on all cylinders in many unfamiliar environments, whether it’s a rocky cliff along the ocean or a hole-in-the-wall pizza shop I’ve never been in before. Close to home or far away, places I’m unfamiliar with make me wake up from the sleep-walking routine of daily life, and really take a look at the world around me.

Between the rush of people and the constant noise, there only seems to be time for reaction. Dodge a woman with her face buried in her phone while skirting an open set of metal doors in the sidewalk as cases of beer descend to basement storage. Notice the flashing neon sign of a camera shop only to be distracted by the gleaming golden statue outside a towering office building. You get lost in a place like this, and if you don’t keep on your toes you’re liable to lose one. Still, streams of ideas flow from the din and fly right into a trusty notebook on hand for that very purpose.

I wouldn’t want to work through the creative process in such places; that’s where returning to a quiet, well-known environment helps. It terms of sparking that fire in my head, though, nothing beats places unknown and unfamiliar. If you’re looking for something to jumpstart your creativity, you might do well to take a right turn where you normally veer left. See what lies down the road uncharted. No matter if it’s as epic as The Grand Canyon, or mundane like the street two blocks away that you never have any good reason to stroll down, unknown places have a way of unlocking our minds to possibilities we never before considered. It certainly works for me, as I return to the overwhelming streets of New York City with both reluctance and anticipation.

*****

JK Riki“Unknown Places” was written by J.K. Riki, an author and animator from Pittsburgh PA. When not lost in the deepest corners of thought, J.K. tries to appreciate every aspect of this journey of life we’re all temporarily on. You can find more writing by J.K. – both in blog and book form – at JKRiki.com which is updated every Monday at 12:01 on the dot. He also shares daily creative insights on Twitter @Creative_Go.

That’s Where I Lived

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

“It’s that one, right there,” I tell my husband Ian as the car slows down and we peer out the window. “That’s where I lived.” I moved back to my old town nearly ten years ago, so I’ve seen my childhood house as an adult. But every time it’s still jarring. It feels like when I run into someone I used to babysit and they’re now in high school and my brain sort of cramps up like it can’t begin to process that they’re no longer five-years-old and just learning to read. It’s the same with my old neighborhood; it’s aged, too.

Several of the small two-story houses on the block, originally built by the railway, have been painted and none of the neighbors standing in their yards are the same. Some have moved but the elderly woman who lived to the right of my childhood house passed away about 15 years ago. Looking at her house flashes me back to her funeral service. But I quickly yank my train of thought in the direction of happier recollections: her short white hair and friendly smile, and how her house always smelled like old person soap — the kind that sits in a fancy dish in the bathroom and is shaped like shells and starfish. I find myself wishing we hadn’t run through her garden so much. And I wonder if whoever lives there now loves her forest of rhododendrons as much as she did.

That's Where I LivedMy old house is a small, white two-story home shaped like a square with its front door smack-dab in the middle and a pane window on each side that gives the impression of eyes, and a triangle roof perched on top. This is what all the houses on the block look like, although they come in a variety of colors. This is how children often draw houses, and I felt proud because it was how my house actually looked. It was as if this meant my house had achieved some high level of aesthetic perfection.

My mom’s green bird feeder is no longer hanging from the tree and the yard feels incomplete without it. I remember how the bird feeder would routinely spill seed all over the yard, which I’d incorporate into games with my toys. Usually it was food for stuffed animals, but one time I tried to eat a piece, myself; I discovered it wasn’t nearly as tasty as a bag of sunflower seeds. A pig my neighbors were babysitting, however, felt differently about the uncooked seeds. They brought the potbellied pig down so that we could take turns walking it on its leash. And the pig, to our delight and amusement, sucked up those pieces of bird seed just like a vacuum.

The front is no longer a lively brick red and is instead sporting a new coat of boring old grownup-grey paint. For anyone else driving by it’d be just a small porch, just like any other small front porch on the street. But I know that in a past life it was a clubhouse, a detective agency, a shelter during extreme — and extremely unrealistic — natural disasters, and a queen’s throne when my bossy best friend got to pick the game and wanted to spend the afternoon sitting smugly on the steps of my house as she ordered us around. It was also where I’d stand as I screamed at my best friend when we fought: “We’re not friends anymore! I’m never going to play with you again! Never ever!” After melodramatically slamming the front door behind me, I’d be greeted by my mother with that you-just-disturbed-the-entire-neighborhood-and-I’m-not-happy-about-it look that I was a little too familiar with.

The patch of grass in the front yard looks so tiny now, but I had the biggest front yard out of all my neighborhood friends. This meant all the good games took place in my front yard. During the summer we’d sometimes flip our bicycles upside down and place them in a circle and pretend it was a fort. During the winter, when it finally snowed, we’d attempt making the snow equivalency of our bicycle fort. But because we were in the Seattle area our winters weren’t very snowy, so by the time we’d built a snow-wall we would’ve used up all the snow in my front yard. We’d have half a fort, a wall we were proud of, but the snow would be gone, the grass would be showing. And there was nothing left to have a snowball fight with. There was never enough snow, I think.

“Well, this is where I grew up,” I tell Ian with a shrug as the car stops for just a moment so we can look. I can’t explain how much it’s changed, and I don’t try. It feels smaller now, duller. It’s as if that wild, vibrant childhood magic faded and left an ordinary, run-of-the-mill neighborhood standing in its place. “It’s changed a lot since when I was a kid,” I say. It’s no longer the same neighborhood or the same house. But perhaps the biggest change is that I’m not the same little girl running barefoot in my front yard. That little girl, like the neighborhood she once loved, now only exists in memories.

*****

Kelsey Munger“That’s Where I Lived” was written by Kelsey L. Munger. Kelsey is a sixth generation Pacific Northwest native. Aside from three and a half months spent living in a very tiny town in Hungary among the sunflower fields, she has always lived in or just outside beautiful, rainy (sometimes a little moldy) Seattle, WA. Kelsey blogs at KelseyMunger.com and can be found on Twitter at @KelseyLMunger.

December 20th, 2013

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

Our destination was Toronto, straight north, about four hours, all highway driving. We were traveling to celebrate the union of two beautiful friends who would be wedded on the winter equinox. After the wedding, we would spend the night in Niagara so that I could see the falls for the first time.

But we never made it. We didn’t even get close. Barely out of Allegheny County, a tractor trailer truck merged into our Subaru Impreza. The police report would estimate that upon impact our car traveled 90 yards, almost the full length of a football field.

When we landed, I looked myself over. Somehow I was fine–not a single scratch I turned to the driver’s side where my wife sat.  She was not fine. The roof had compacted in upon impact, cutting her head. Blood, mixed with glass bits from the windshield, covered her face. She was conscious.

She was worrying about me.

Straddling the road’s shoulder and a grassy embankment, our car faced outward and I watched, terrified, as headlights from passing vehicles whizzed by. The ignition key remained in place but we were going nowhere. The front of our car had crumpled up liked a used soda pop can. The back and side windows were completely blown out. Far away from city lights it was dark and damp. The flashers hummed in the background: Tick, tick, Tick, tick.

I fumbled for my cellphone in the breast pocket of my coat, but before I could reach it, a Good Samaritan arrived, “Are you okay?”png;base645aaca8097519cafb

“Please,” I begged. “Please, call 911. Now.”

Taking off my downy brown winter coat, I used its sleeve to apply pressure to my wife’s head and draped the rest over her body. She was shivering from the shock and the chill of the night air. I didn’t notice the cold or the rain seeping through my thin gray cotton shirt.

I tried to remain calm, but my tears falling silently onto her face gave me away. Fighting the growing panic, I forced myself to focus. I reassured my wife, “It’s going to be okay honey. The paramedics will be here soon. Stay with me. Don’t leave me.”

Where was that ambulance? Why weren’t they here yet? What if they can’t find us? Taking a deep breath in and silently beseeching God to make an ambulance appear, I continued to hold pressure.

Finally, flashing red and blue lights approached us. My breath froze as I let out a deep sigh of relief, and  the paramedics  hurried to our car. Shouldering me aside they worked to remove my wife. I stepped aside.

On the side of Route 79-N in the wet grass and mud, my black and white converse sneakers squelched as I walked over to the stoic Butler County police officer.  I thought it odd that he didn’t offer me a blanket, jacket, or to sit in his car, while he rained down questions:

“Were you wearing seatbelts? How many people were in the car? Names? Ages? Is that your sister? What happened? Did the driver stop? What color was the truck? Did you see the license plate? Where did the truck hit you? How many times did you roll? How fast were you going? Did the driver see you?

Laying on a stretcher my wife was loaded into the back of the ambulance. I sat in the front. Fearful of being hit again, I turned my eyes away from the dark slick road and watched while the paramedics worked on my wife: cutting away her shirt, listening to her heart and lungs as she laid shivering and immobilized. An IV was inserted into a petite arm vein, a bag of fluids hanging overhead. No longer able to keep my fear at bay, my tears erupted and I sobbed for the rest of the drive. We returned to our city.

When we arrived, the paramedic went to wheel my wife in, “What about you? Do you need to be checked out?” he asked. “No,” I replied, but my wife cut me off, “Yes! She needs to be seen. She’s six weeks pregnant.”

Pregnant. Earlier that day, we were at a different hospital completing my six-week ultrasound. The printout of our baby was in my wife’s workbag. We were waiting to share the news with our families until Christmas, only five days away. We were elated. I had bought coffee mugs that read, “World’s Greatest Grandparents,” as a creative way to break our wonderful news.

Twelve hours after we arrived at the hospital, I told my mom the news in the hospital cafeteria among the sterile white walls, plastic trays, tasteless cardboard eggs, and a pint-sized carton of chocolate milk while we waited for my wife to get out of surgery. Despite my dirty blood-stained shirt, my mother engulfed me in a warm hug and we both smiled for the first time since her arrival.

My mother-in-law found out several days later. Combing through our things that had been salvaged from the accident, “What’s this?” she innocently asked holding up the ultrasound picture.

That ultrasound picture was our savior, a reminder of better things to come. A symbol of growth, love, and resiliency. During the weeks of recovery we would sit together and gaze at that black and white watermarked ultrasound picture, our hands resting lightly on my stomach.

In addition to the head laceration, my wife had broken her neck. The margin of difference between having full mobility and being paralyzed was less than a quarter of an inch. A quarter of an inch, in late December, just out of Allegheny County, that lay between a devastating loss and an abundant family of three. A quarter inch that changed the direction of my life and gave me new appreciation for every mile.

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png;base64d2e992f25f3ecfe1“December 20, 2013” was written by Kristen Stepanczuk. Kristen lives in Pittsburgh, PA where she is a licensed professional counselor and coach, and an aspiring writer, storyteller, and speaker. She loves to help and connect with others, and has made it her life’s mission to help women live healthy, happy, and balanced lives. Kristen counsels and coaches both locally and nationally. Additional information can be found on her website www.PittsburghHealthCoach.com.

 

Big City Sidewalk

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

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.

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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

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

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.”

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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

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

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.

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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

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

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.

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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

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

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?

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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.