Change feels like death because it is

On Saturday morning I'm driving outta the state I've lived nearly 30 years with a truck full of stuff and one orange cat. People keep asking me how I'm feeling. I have days where I have a lot of feelings, and days where I'm too drained from Taking Care Of Things to access my feelings. Then I feel bad for not having access to my feelings at moments when I am sitting across from someone I will miss very much, who I know I will miss very much, but who I can't feel the imminent absence of because it's still not happening Yet.

At other times, I just feel insane with greed for more time. For all that I'm inflicting this on myself, for the best possible reasons, I am greedy.

Yesterday, one of my closest friends tattooed the outlined of the Great Lakes on my back, moving from west to east. From Wisconsin to New York. Wisconsin sits behind my heart, and together with an older piece, I have Wisconsin shapes cradling two sides of my left lung.

And then there's the spot where the Mackinac Bridge, three different lakes, a hoard of intersections all converge at my spine, which hurt the most of the whole process. It also happened to be the boundary between Superior/Michigan and everything else. Those first two lakes I know. Intimately. Summers on Lake Michigan at my grandfather's house, perched on the flat shore rocks reading or watching the sunset. The bay where I cut my foot and needed stitches and my mother carried me dripping down the beach. The first picture of an endless vastness I would later understand was just child's play compared to the ocean.

And Superior, my second great love, iceburged in April and desolate. Flooded with tourists in July. The place I have been most myself, that lone woman driving her red Honda, stopping when she feels like it, camera in hand at every thunderstorm and overlook.

And ahead, there's Huron, Erie, Ontario. Places I know, but more vaguely. Shores I have stared from, but only once, years ago. Places that don't - yet - feel part of my world.

Pain is at the boundaries. Between land and water. Between skin and air. Known and unknown. The moment when you put the truck into gear and tilt down the hill toward the highway, slowly at first and then with gathering speed.

"At one point that night, she remembered, they spoke of how much they loved their country. In spite of everything. No Westerner would understand the love they had for the place. 'But I could never leave here,' Gamini had whispered.

'American movies, English books--remember how they all end?' Gamini had asked that night. 'The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.'"

- Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost

Got my notecards and everything

I'm giving this speech at a birthday party later tonight. I've never given a speech that wasn't homework before. I'm worried about details like, Is three minutes too long? What if the birthday girl can't hear me because I just had a cold and my voice is a croak and she is 90? Fluster.

"The first time I talked to Anna, it was homework. For my history class, I had to talk to someone who had lived through World War II. So I called Anna, at my dad’s suggestion. Now, most of you are probably familiar with Anna’s stories of World War II. That she was 18, in the resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, smuggling weapons around the city, and doing other things that sounded really glamorous to a 15-year-old high school freshman. I remember feeling my entire life view of what a young woman can do rearranged and amplified exponentially during that interview.

Since then, she has become a dear friend and one of the most influential people in my life. In talking to friends, I’ve tried and failed to express how much I love and admire her countless times. I’ve adopted the word “slush,” (that would be Anna’s word for “slut” and “lush”) for my own personal use. She’s been the inspiration for everything remotely crazy that I’ve ever done, and when I’ve needed to push myself past fear, I’ve always thought of her and felt braver. Knowing her has taught me many things, not the least of which is that when we make mistakes, that’s not the end of the world, because at least we’ll grow from that experience. Anna has always encouraged me to grow.

When I was in South Africa two years ago and had the privilege to stand in the same room as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, I immediately wrote her to to say that his personality reminded me so much of her own warm, generous humor. It was uncanny. And I could keep going forever. Knowing her has been such a privilege and a joy. My only regret is that I’ve never traveled with her – I think the two of us would have gotten into some marvelous trouble together. I hope when I am 90, I am even a tenth as big-hearted, fearless, and “slushy” as she is today. Happy birthday Anna. I love you."

We wear our trousers rolled.

I got a letter from my first internet friend yesterday. This is the girl I met on Dragonriders of Pern RPGs, who happens to share my last name (no relation), to whom I would write long letters about my teenage angst and put them in envelopes I'd painted the same vibrant pink as her then-dyed hair. I'd yell at my parents for accusing me of having "no real friends," because I spent so much time on the internet. But she was a real friend, in an era slightly before people accepted the internet as a real form of communication and connection. I visited her the summer before I started college, and it was my first solo cross-country trip. We hiked near Mt. Rainier and picked berries and rode the bus.

We managed to intersect a few more times. I visited her in Indiana. She came to Madison. I visited her in Michigan. And yet, it has somehow been four years since we saw each other or really communicated about our lives.

She gave me a list of her major life events, sorted by year, since 2007. The heartaches. The jobs. Somehow her mother has had cancer and a year of treatment/remission in that time.

I started my reply with a similar format, and quickly ran out of room on the card I was using.

It is so strange to me how time can slip away like that. I guess that is how these 20-something years go.

From the french passager which means "to pass by"

I have been reading about the passenger pigeon, which reportedly roosted by the hundreds of thousands over areas of hundreds of miles in Wisconsin at one point. Martha, the last captive passenger pigeon and the last known of them all, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914. I always think about her on my birthday.

I have been reading Wikipedia and even Wikipedia is enough to break the heart:

"One method of killing was to blind a single bird by sewing its eyes shut using a needle and thread. This bird's feet would be attached to a circular stool at the end of a stick that could be raised five or six feet in the air, then dropped back to the ground. As the bird attempted to land, it would flutter its wings, thus attracting the attention of other birds flying overhead. When the flock landed near this decoy bird, nets would trap the birds and the hunters would crush their heads between their thumb and forefinger."

I think Wisconsin, my birthplace birthright and motherland, ought to be filled with dark clouds of pigeons.

Old/Young

Robins, both of them, found a white hair on my head. I found it too, later. It's three inches long and sticks straight out. I will probably hunt for it in the mirror out of odd vanity, the way I do the one white hair I discovered on my wristbone last summer.

I alternate between feeling very old and very young. My sister expressed a similar sentiment at Christmas. She's teaching high school in rural Mississippi, speaks jadedly of feeling lucky when one student understands her lesson and follows directions, agrees when I wonder whether it feels like pulling "whatever you can save" from a burning building.

In retrospect, fire metaphors are not good for her - she lost a house in Minneapolis that way three Decembers ago. Then, she saved her roommates and a pair of boots.

Anyway, later we both have a little much wine at dinner, and traipse mercilessly onto topics that are not necessarily appropriate for Christmas. Young young young.

The front hallway of my building smells like old cigarettes (from my downstairs neighbor) and, in winter, wet wool. This is rather like what my mom's house used to smell like when she took up smoking again when I was 13. It's an odd set of smells to feel at home around, but I do.

Love Train

Oh Wisconsin. I love you so much. It's the kind of love where I want you to be even better than you are because it will be good for you, not because it will be good for me. For what it's worth, Wisconsin, I think a train would have been really, really good for you. Especially a train that went from Chicago to Minneapolis and stopped in Madison. Think of that glittering modern future, laid out on tracks. The movement of people is the movement of ideas, and the movement of ideas is a good way to stimulate a knowledge-based economy. Not to mention ship goods efficiently in an age when oil is increasingly dear (money-wise and environmental-cost-wise). You know, no one outside America really knows Wisconsin? We are a wasteland. North of Chicago, south of Canada. I want everyone to know how lovely you are, how good and caring your people are. Even when sometimes your people are actually a lot like people everywhere - dumb, easily mislead, and yes, sometimes actually selfish and not at all caring.

My 5-year plan, not so much a plan as a "Eureka!' scribbled on a a napkin, includes grad school. Even though I believe firmly in sticking to a thing you love even when it's cranky and run by idiots and not so fun to be around, I've now, today, this minute, decided I am not going to bother applying to Madison. Not even as a "might as well give it a try." I have lived here so long. I am curious about other places. The near future is as good a time as any to seek them out. That's still at least 2012, anyway. Maybe the world will have ended by then, like they say it will.

We live in interesting times, friends.

Dear blog,

Did you know I have a pseudonym? An e-mail address specifically for it? It's true. I have projects that I'm not ready to tie concretely to my real name.

In ninth grade I found a book by my then-favorite author that included a beautifully-written group sex scene. Pure poetry. I was enthralled! I tried to show it to a friend I'd known since elementary school, who also liked that author. She was weirded out. The writing didn't matter as much as the content. It was the first of many tiny gaps between us.

This was my first lesson in not telling people everything that's worth talking about in your life.

Forward

Dear blog. I want to talk about politics, I want to talk about poetry, and I want to talk about the things I am doing that are not my job.

There is just too much happening.

I do miss my cat, though.

Also, I kind of want to give Wisconsin a big hug. We'll make it, guys. In one form or another, we'll make it through these politics we do not like, which scare us, which make us clutch our guts in pain at their illogic, and we'll do what we can do limit the damage, and when we get the chance, we'll turn things around in a better direction.

I hold up the hope that the new Republican leadership will somehow stumble upon success by accident, and, worst case, I hope they are somehow right about what will fix this state's economy. Because that's better than them being wrong and all of us suffering for it.

With a big "I am an atheist" disclaimer

So! U.S. Rep John Shimkus, who is vying to lead the House Energy and Commerce Committee next term, is a bible-thumping climate change denier of the first order.

Look! A link to a video! I apologize for the expletives in the subtitles. If you are too lazy, basically he reads a passage or two about the Flood, to the gist of, "After the Flood, God promised there would be no other catastrophes," and says that some religious theorists think the earth is actually carbon-starved, there is no surfeit of carbon.

I don't understand religious people who think that if God has promised them something, it means we as human beings have to do nothing to fulfill that promise.

I realize there is a lot about faith that I was never exposed to. But I also have read enough to know that there are plenty of people who think that even if they've been promised something, they have to WORK for it. And that shall-we-say-God might not say verbatim what will happen, but rather the gist of what will happen. Riddles might be involved. Nothing looks like what it turns out to be. Etc.

And if shall-we-say-God has assured there will be no world-destroying events, perhaps really what shall-we-say-God has said is that human beings are going to pull through with the skin of their teeth because they worked their asses off to keep climate change from getting as terrible as we have heard, over and over again, it has a high likelihood of getting. It seems ridiculous, even if you live in a universe with a conscious, benevolant Creator, to assume that if they have promised you safe passage, you should just go ahead and keep punching holes in your rowboat.

Also, in the passages Shimkus quotes in that video, there's really nothing that says, "Global warming won't seriously screw with the human race." Instead - "Man will not destroy this earth." The big worry about climate change is that we will change the earth so much that it destroys us, and other life. The earth itself will be fine, honeybee.

I want to go to there

The PR director for the International Crane Foundation is going to South Africa for 18 months to manage a wildlife reserve as a volunteer. She knows I've been there, and we were talking about where exactly she'd be. It felt strange - beautiful - spitting out old place names I haven't said in more than a year. "Oh, by the Drakensberg?" Those are the mountains that inspired Tolkien's Misty Mountains. "The Giant's Castle? Howick? Yes, I know the place." Lesotho is close by. I miss Lesotho with an odd ferocity for a place I only spent a few days in. I question my motives for loving it - if I didn't hate the words, I would probably unthinkingly call it "remote," "exotic," or even worse, "cute." But also, "very poor," but also, "little crime, little rape, overbrimming with trust," which meant that after 6 months in Cape Town, the contrast was both astounding and welcome. At the end of our talk, A says, "My door is open, if you're ever up that way and need a place to stay."

So the rest of today I've been daydreaming about finding someone who will pay me to go back and write about efforts to save the wattled cranes amid the government's efforts to redistribute land to people who were cheated of it during apartheid. Poverty of persons versus poverty of cranepersons. Someone with more credentials may already be writing that story, though. And I think I'd probably need more than a 2-week paid vacation (which I haven't even earned yet) to do it.

artichoke heart attack

My dad taught me how to eat artichokes. It was our special ritual, because no one else in the family really cared for them. He'd come home with two, I'd practically squeal, and then the slow patient process of waiting for them to steam. The meal where the two of us were the last left at the table because it took us so long to pull each leaf, dip in melted butter, scrape with our teeth. Or, if there were leftovers, cold with mayonnaise.

I had one tonight, the first one I've ever cooked and eaten on my own. The process was awkward, I boiled it in my only saucepan, a pot too small to submerge it entirely. Flipped it every ten minutes until it seemed done. Stood in my table-less kitchen, at the counter, with the sun setting out the window and half a glass of white wine, my dish of melted butter (which I bought special for the artichoke, I don't use butter for anything else), my bowl for the chewed-up leaves. It's a greedy process, meditative, repetitive. Pluck, dip, scrape. Pluck, drip, scrape. Sip your wine. Your face gets a little buttery, there's no grace to it, you become a beast. Fibers catch in your teeth. Eventually the leaves pare down from thorny finger-prickling shells to gauzy little petals. Airy things. It's like plucking a bird's wing, from pinion to down. I like to read when I'm eating at home, I like to multitask, but an artichoke is too all-consuming. It's a food that demands your eyes and brain.

I saved the heart for tomorrow. Too many riches for just one night.

My sister has been digging through family photos and scanning them and sharing them all over. This is me and my dad's bear arm.


Once Becky was old enough to be dressed like me, my mom dressed her like me. At least I got to wear green. There was, also, a matching pair of sparkly pink shirts with giant cat faces and big rhinestones.

I like to think that if I ever had babies (unlikely), I would not submit them to such indignities. But we all know such cyclical behavior is inevitable. When we don't know what else to do, we become our parents.