No Time....For Things (Part 5 of 5)

At my friend Packer’s house up on the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York, there is a small decorated magnet with words painted on it. It says,

“The Best Things in Life Aren’t Things.”

I discovered this magnet the second day of my time at the River, and I – still waking up a bit – puzzled over it for much of my blueberry muffin. It annoyed me with its vagueness and seemingly obvious contradiction. Refrigerator magnets were supposed to be funny and easily understandable, but this one was neither. It was confusing.

But as I stepped back to pour myself some orange juice, I suddenly noticed that a picture was being held up to the refrigerator by the frustrating magnet. I stepped back up to the magnet and the picture.

It was a picture of one of Packer’s uncles – his Mom’s brother – sitting quite regally (with a huge grin spread across his face) in a kayak on a river. He held his oar proudly across his puffed chest – like a child bringing home a fish (not necessarily large, but caught all the same) to his parents. There was absolutely nothing noteworthy about the picture. I don’t even remember whether it was centered or not, though I do think it was a bit askew on the refrigerator on account of having the freezer door close too many times. But there was something about his unsinkable smile – one that could only have come from a true love for whomever was behind the camera that afternoon – that suddenly made the magnet make sense. And then, at least for that moment, everything was perfect.

****

The day before I was to take a train out of New York, I was already ready to leave. Beyond a quick impromptu trip to Columbia University and an exciting – though lonely – discovery of a delicious lunch place deep within Chelsea, I had failed at even coming close to cracking the city (or any city I had visited) on my own. D.C. had been perpetually confusing with my sense of direction completely shattered, while New York – though feeling accessible and exciting – became a place I could hardly ever drag myself out to explore. The cities – as I mentioned earlier – had remained mysteries.

So as a part of my New York requiem, I stopped into a wine shop after having eaten lunch in the neighborhood to find a few nice bottles of wine for the person who had so generously let me stay in her spare apartment for a week.

I should mention that, though this sounds like a nice gesture, I know so little about wine that had I been left to my own devices, I would have most definitely (though unintentionally) picked out the most offensively bad bottles of wine that would have rendered my gesture meaningless, if not seemingly sarcastic and possibly malicious.

However, just as I moved into the unknown realm of Argentinean wine, a voice from behind me asked,

“Can I help you find something?”

I turned around to see that I had been asked this question by an (and forgive me for this, but it’s part of the story) absolutely beautiful girl. I won’t go into details, because no one wants to read that – but I can say that I was completely taken with her from the way she smiled to the way that, when I asked her if she could help me pick out a few bottles of wine, she said, “Sure, let’s go to Italy,” which meant that we were going to look at Italian bottles of wine. (I think from anyone else this would have probably been hokey and slightly obnoxious, but, seeing that reasoning was not exactly present in my mind at the moment, I thought it was great and completely endearing). Anyway, for the next ten minutes or so, we puzzled about the store, looking for various bottles of wine and making sarcastic side remarks about whatever I could think to say. After we had picked out three bottles, we went to the cash register and talked about home and coffee and anything else that could possibly be used as the tinder for conversation, and then she handed me the bag, said what a pleasure it had been, we smiled, and then I left.

I don’t usually write about this type of thing, and typically with matters of the heart, I can be nearly silent and terribly reserved about them, but what was significant about this encounter was the way I felt when I walked – with wine in my hands – outside into the cloudy New York afternoon.

I don’t want to leave.

The New York landscape wasn’t exactly making a great case for staying – it was cloudy, smelled a bit like urine, and as I rounded the corner of the building a large clod of construction dirt exploded to pepper my eyes. But as I continued to walk back to my apartment to drop off the wine, my heart started to drag – like a stubborn dog on a leash that just sits down when it doesn’t want to walk any further – and I became overcome with an asthmatic sadness that I was leaving the next day.

*** I should stop here and mention that I have tendency to fall in love with the most hopeless circumstances. It’s the symptoms of romanticism, I suppose, but it’s ridiculous, while anything possible, feasible, or logical is out of the question. From falling in love with the girl at the gallery on a weekend trip to Oxford to our substitute teacher in Vietnam to the wine girl on my last day in New York, the majority of my love life could be called unrealistic and, at worst, imaginary. And yet tangled with my imagination is a deep sense of hope that sustains me but more importantly wakes me up to the wonderful things that I am graced with daily. (I should add that - after returning to my apartment, wallowing in heartache, and listening to the song “She’s Gone” by Hall & Oates about 15 times straight, I decided that I had to go back and get more wine. The second time, we went to Chile and Sonoma. It was lovely.)

Of course, I got over the fact that I was being unrealistic and hopelessly hopelessly romantic about the whole affair and future of my relationship with the wine girl, but when the sadness of leaving continued to weigh upon me, I began to realize that – as a general feeling of sadness and regret that I felt in each city was actually not a feeling rooted in regret for not having fully taken advantage of the city. Of course there were fun and unique things to do in both of them, but I didn’t feel terrible that I hadn’t taken a tour of the Capital or gone to the top of the Empire State Building. No. What I realized was that the sadness that I felt was rooted not in geography but in humanity – the people that had made my time in each city so wonderful and unique and worth the plane ticket and the cramped seat.

My ties to these cities and the connections that I made with them were based solely upon the people with whom I had had the absolute pleasure of sharing it. It is why walking the entire length of Chicago with Taylor last summer is still one of my best memories. It is why the Tamarins that are the happiest are the ones that share in the fury of new discovery and experience with other Tamarins – you little takers of lemons and makers of lemonade.

It was the people not the places that were making me feel so sick about leaving D.C. and so sick about leaving New York.

****

The other night, I went with my brother and sister-in-law and some other folks to a Fourth of July balloon-glow and fireworks display. We sat out on a small green hill away from the bulk of the crowd and spread out a blanket and covered it with little plastic containers of potato salad and barbecue, which we ate on paper plates with beer and bottled water. It was hot and the mosquitoes were out – hovering around our ankles and our ears.

The night grew darker as the horribly awful band continued to play. We only wanted fireworks and yet it seemed as though they would never come. Hours passed.

Finally, we started joking about how the fireworks would never come, and how the name of the band (this was Will’s idea) was Steve Azar and the Fireworks. We all laughed together and began to complain about our situation, and yet as our hope began to dwindle, a lone rocket flew into the air and exploded with a brilliant, shimmering yellow that smeared down across the night sky. And then, they came in streams – every color you could imagine, booming, swerving, and streaking across the sky. We lay down on our blankets – the grass crunching beneath us - and grinned at the explosions in the sky…together.

We smiled, because it was perfect.

****

So with the first half of my trip completed, I want to thank my interview subjects again – wonderful fellow Mississippians – but more importantly, I want to thank the people that gave the cities that I visited a heart and a soul. So, here’s to you Taylor and Brendan. Here’s to you Emre and Hannah (and Claudia, of course). Here’s to you Frances and Masha. Here’s to you Gabriella and Annalee. Here’s to you Packer and Mary and Pop and Gram. Here’s to you Mitch and Dixie and Jake.

Thank you all for making the past month absolutely wonderful.

Thank you all for making my heart feel like shit whenever I have to leave a city.

Thank you all for making what could be very ordinary spaces into extraordinary places.

And finally, as we say back Home – a place that I love – I want to say “Thank y’all” because it was y’all that made me feel like I was there every moment of the way.

No Time...To Discover the Soul of a City (Part 4 of 5)

In the past month, I will have slept in at least seven different places: a squeaky fold-out couch in Brooklyn, a large bed in a lonely bare room in Chelsea, a crooked inhospitable couch that looks out over the St. Lawrence River, a small single bed a few rooms over from the couch, a luscious looking bed in Atlanta with frightening tribal masks overlooking it, a desperately uncomfortable seat in a train traveling along the Hudson River, and in a cramped seat on an overbooked flight from JFK to Atlanta next to a large southern woman lightly humming bad modern pop songs to herself.

In the past month, I have woken up to Italian realtors banging on doors, turbulence somewhere over Virginia, and taxis blaring their horns at one another. I have woken up to behold a hidden lake in upstate New York with a lonely fisherman shrouded in low hanging fog and drizzling rain, and I have woken up to a lonely room in Chelsea with a loud window unit sputtering icy air at my feet. I have woken up to the sun rising on the St. Lawrence River with the most horrific crick in my neck and my back, and I have also woken up completely rested in a rainy, dark apartment with an overpowering craving for chocolate croissants.

The past month has been made of one-way trips, fast connections, and quick lunches for one. It has – at times – been supremely rewarding, while at others it has been infuriatingly unsatisfying and cripplingly lonely.

Let me start with the frustration…save Part 5 for the rewards…

The general protocol with most of my interviews has been like this: after a few emails (with lots of looking-forward-to-meeting-you’s from me), we finally meet. The location is different every time. I have interviewed people in Starbucks, living rooms, offices, noisy markets, lobbies, bars, conference rooms, and on dinner tables with the recording equipment snaking through the wine glasses and dirty dishes. The “foreplay” is pretty simple: I explain the project, they ask exactly what part of Mississippi I’m from, we usually find someone that we know in common, and then begin the interview. Interviews last somewhere between 30 minutes (at the most brief) to over two hours (at the longest). I think that the best ones fall in right around an hour and ten minutes. In general, I ask the same questions, and a lot of the time (and this is a good thing for finding themes), a lot of the answers are basically the same. Smiles are exchanged and laughs of understanding are shared. Connections are quick, our Mississippi-ness is acknowledged, and then as quickly as we meet, the interview is over.

But I think of two particular interviews in which I felt that a deep connection was found between the interviewee and myself – a rare, precious understanding in which comfort is not a concern and smiles come easy and frequently. Naturally, these two particular interviews flew and as we began to walk from the cafes in which we met – just like old friends, moving to the next place for dinner or just back to an apartment – we quickly realized, in both cases, that our relationships (at least for the time being) were doomed.

We come to a street corner. I say I am going North (not forever, I swear), and she says she is going South. We stop and waver awkwardly as though pushing against a greater more natural force, shake hands, and then walk away – resisting the urge to look back and smile.

No time.

We descend into the body of D.C. – the metro. Again, I’m going Uptown. He, downtown. “What a pleasure this has been.” “Please let me know if there’s anything I can do.” The lights on the floor begin to blink. The wind roars through the tunnel. My train arrives. We shake hands. I step on the train and watch his figure – now a dark silhouette – turn with the backpack over his shoulder to wait for his ride.

No time. No time at all.

The life of an introverted person traveling alone, I’m discovering, can be incredibly unsatisfying, and I would be lying to you if I said that I wasn’t lonely. I am. Not always and not to the degree that it begins to hamper my ability to move. It’s not that. On a day-to-day basis I’m quite happy, but, at times, I almost feel as though my discoveries and adventures (if you want to call them that) mean less because I am alone – unable to share with others in the joys, the mistakes, and the questions of the road.

I’ll be the first to admit that I bring this discontentment upon myself. Good and happy traveling demands a courage and a willingness to make mistakes. It demands that you stop into a restaurant that is not called Whole Foods and that you be willing to spend the afternoon at a coffee shop that is not called Starbucks (I’m guilty of both). It demands that you get lost, ask for directions, and – most importantly – ask for (and trust) recommendations. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I walked the streets of New York just trying to find a good place for lunch – only to settle with the Neighborhood Whole Foods. I would literally walk 30 blocks uptown and then 30 more downtown, just to return to the comfortable choice. Something that I knew I could count on. A place I knew that I could get soup and juice. What I really wanted, though, and what I knew I wouldn’t be brave enough to do was to stop into a café I knew nothing about – that may or may not be good, that may or may not have soup. How do you even begin to crack these cities?

If he or she was wise, a good traveler would try to be as much like a Tamarin as possible.

I recently came across a Discovery Channel show called “Survivorman”. The premise, as I understand it, is that an unfairly capable guy is dropped into the middle of some savagely brutal wilderness with a camera and seemingly worthless equipment. For the next seven days, the man records himself surviving in the most extreme circumstances before his film crew comes and picks him up. He is never comfortable - as he snuggles into his bed of gathered grass and says with a parched grin to the camera, “Sure hope there aren’t any scorpions in here!”

In that sense, I don’t envy him. I don’t wish I could eat live scorpions that pinch my tongue as I try to swallow them. I don’t wish that I not be able to find water for three days. My current self doesn’t wish for the struggle, though it wishes for the feeling – a love for the land as deep and profound as any love can be.

I need to yearn for the struggle that makes the love.

It’s a love that doesn’t hesitate putting scorpions in your bed or giving you food poisoning – but it’s a love that sustains and keeps you aware all the time.

Needless to say, at the end of my time in New York and D.C., I couldn’t help but feel slightly disappointed with the way I had treated my time in both places. I didn’t feel that deep Survivorman connection. I hadn’t survived anything. I didn’t feel like I had discovered anything about myself, nor had I discovered anything about the cities. In Survivorman terms, I had not found the water in the cactus nor captured the scorpion and eaten it while it still pinched at my tongue. I had not almost caught frostbite in the desert night only to be saved by the beauty and warmth of the dramatic red sunrise.

I am not a Tamarin. I am not Survivorman.

And yet, disappointed as I may be, I wouldn't change a thing about my trips as they occurred. Cities are tricky places. They take time to appreciate, but, in the end, they are just things.

Let me explain.

No Time...To Meet (Part 3 of 5)

It is always with mixed emotions that I deal with a canceled meeting. And yet while disappointment is often my initial response, I have to constantly remind myself of how lucky I am that this summer is happening the way that it is – and more importantly as well as it is.

I keep telling people that the money funding this summer is only responsible for about 4% of the success of the summer. The other 96% can be credited to the wonderful, wonderful people that let me sleep in their beds, dirty their living rooms, or just take large amounts of valuable time out of their days to talk with them – with the understanding that they will get nothing in return.

I’ve really been overwhelmed with the kindness of the people, who are making this summer happen for me, and as I was telling my brother the other week, I often wonder how I can ever repay their generosity and hospitality – to which he responded:

“You can’t.”

…which is absolutely true. Completely impossible. I have as good a chance of repaying the kindness I’ve experienced in the first month of this summer as I do getting over my peanut allergy (which, for those of you not as close to the allergy, is the only food allergy that one doesn’t grow out of). I will learn to write left-handed, will stop biting my fingernails, and will begin to warm to the idea of knee high black dress socks worn with brown loafers and khaki shorts before I even begin to crack the piggy bank of good karma that everyone whom I have encountered this summer has collectively saved up. It is a hopeless endeavor, and I just get stressed thinking about it. I suppose that I can only pray that when I am in the position of being a host or an interview subject (should anyone ever want to talk to me) I will be half as gracious and incredible as everyone has been. I am truly so thankful.

****

With all that said though, I will say that my feelings of warmth and gracious admiration do shudder just a bit when I emerge from the subway, loaded down with my recording equipment – my inconveniently long microphone tucked under a sore, sweaty armpit and the left side of my neck red-ly imprinted with the strap of my carrying case – only to discover a missed call and message that must have happened while I was underground (and thus without service) which tells me that the interview subject would like to postpone their meeting until the next week.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m truly grateful for just having a chance to meet with people – especially during the work day – but when I let my emotions become victim to the demons of spontaneity, I hear a barely audible whistling sigh of negativity escape my lips. In the heat of the moment and of the summer, all feelings of gratitude and positivism slink away back down the steps into the subway and take the train back to the apartment that I’m staying in, while I am left at the top of the stairs with a load of recording equipment and no place to go. A slow, dry whistle begins to buzz out of my lips.

You may think that the prospect of a free afternoon in a city is an exciting thing, and I suppose for many it is; however, I, being a creature of habit and planning, have a bit more trouble with simply being turned loose in a city. Last summer, during a quick stay in Chicago, my friend Taylor and I decided on a spontaneous jaunt through the city – with the goal of finding Wrigley Field. Starting up Michigan Avenue, we had felt so great about our fun-natured sense of adventure. Of course when Michigan Avenue ran into Michigan the state, our enthusiasm for the odyssey wavered a bit. When we did finally find Wrigley Field (about three and a half hours later), the game they had been playing that afternoon ended on cue with our arrival, and almost immediately we became two tiny specks of sand traveling against a giant tidal wave of furious, drunk, and dehydrated Cubs fans.

The rest of our day would be spent trudging back to our hotel (another three hours or so) and collapsing on our beds for about four seconds before we realized that we were going to be late for a concert – the primary purpose of our trip.

We had walked in a seven hour circle for the better part of our one day trip to Chicago.

Actually, looking back on it now, I can actually say that – yes – that was fun. Taylor and I complained about it for the rest of the day and much of the following year, but there was something in at least having gotten lost together that made the experience not only bearable but treasured. (I cannot tell you how much more bearable foot cramps and exhaustion are when they are shared with others.)

But as I emerged from the deep tunnel at Dupont Circle and discovered that my appointment for that particular day had canceled, I did feel a small bit of dread at the prospects for my unplanned day alone in Washington D.C. I didn’t really intend on sight-seeing, shopping was out of the question, and the thought of exploring a big city with expensive recording equipment on my shoulder just seemed unwise. And really besides going back to the apartment to read, I was left with only one option – one that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t sought out earlier.

I had to go to the zoo.

Which from Dupont Circle in a dress shirt and dress shoes is no small feat. It’s not impressive by any stretch, but it is certainly exhausting and will also doom any prospects of keeping your shirt dry.

So after a long, scenic hike, I arrived at the National Zoo – a sprawling, well-maintained public park that seems to just happen to have wild animals in it. Already exhausted from the walk, I moved straight to the indoor exhibits, which even beyond their more pleasant climate were much more enjoyable due to the fascinating animals which they housed.

And while I saw many things at the zoo (including two pandas and an octopus feeding), the unquestioned highlight of my trip to the Zoo was getting a chance to see the Tamarins – tiny, unbelievably expressive primates with disproportionately sized furry manes and a sense of curiosity that rivals most felines.

It was with the Tamarins that I spent the majority of my time at the zoo. They are remarkable creatures, and their sense of awe at the wonders of the world is enviously infectious. In the life of a Tamarin, there always seems to be something absolutely fascinating going on – from the way that the light shines through the top of their cage to the fact that a leaf is a bit greener than the day before – and it is a pure joy to watch these creatures discover – with such ecstasy - the smallest details of our world. I wish you could see the way that their tiny faces contort with an almost violently furious curiosity. It's just great.

Later that afternoon, after a swing through the big cat section and later the great ape house (where I felt a rather personal connection was made with one of the orangutans), I retired to an umbrella with a cup of applesauce from the concession stand to allow the midday sun to cool a bit before I walked back to Dupont Circle. It was there that I watched a family of 6 (including the grandmother) eat hamburgers wrapped in aluminum foil, while a man in a NASCAR hat with a maroon t-shirt a few tables over practiced taking pictures with a camera he must have bought earlier that day. In the concession area, there was a large group of pigeons, which to everyone except the man were by all accounts quite ordinary; however, the number of pictures that this man took of the pigeons made me begin to wonder if I was in the midst of some near-extinct North American Gray-Bodied Pigeon. I may have been, but I wonder a bit about the camera.

It was here that I met the most troubling question of my trip so far.

As I sat scooping up the last dredges of my applesauce, I couldn’t help but start to wish that I was a bit more like a Tamarin. Indeed, I found myself beginning to envy the ways that they so passionately and excitedly engaged with the ordinary, while finding the deepest joys and furies within it. I jealously despised the Tamarin for its courageous curiosity that compelled it to jump from its small concrete villa in the side of its cage to go vigorously inspect the rotting strawberry – mystical talisman - at the bottom of its cage.

I began to compare the Tamarin and the pigeon-loving man. Both seemed overwhelmed with the miracle of life, and yet as I – a quasi-documentarian this summer – continued to think on it, I began to realize (with a certain horror) that I, too, was the pigeon-loving man – observing everything with awe, only at a safe distance.

Oh, to be more like a Tamarin!

I know this whole thing sounds ridiculous, but let me briefly introduce my question before I illustrate it better in my next post, which is coming in the next day or so.

My question is this: How am I supposed to experience and appreciate this summer and, even more importantly, this life? I often feel such a draw just to remain home, invest my time and energy there, grow deep roots, and achieve a kind of understanding of a small, known world. But in that very same heart-pump and in the middle of that same caught breath, I feel a tug to the road, to the unknown, to the mystery and the adventure that lies somewhere out there, and yet I fear that when given the actual opportunity to walk the road, I will only walk it with great hesitation and observance of those before me. My problem is that I do not know how to experience a moment or even a long series of moments. Again, I feel that there is NO TIME to experience them. I’m not quick enough, and by the time I’m ready for them, the moments are gone.

So, given, say, two weeks in a city, how does one go about experiencing it?

To me, it's troubling, but it's not hopeless. Next post by Wednesday.

No Time (Parts 1&2)

As I was sitting in a New York-Mississippian's apartment last week, I asked her to compare her experience in New York with her experience in Mississippi.

"Everyone is always running at full speed here. No one has any time," she replied, after thinking about it for only a minute.

And I can begin to see her point. There have just been a few moments over the past two weeks that have been marked by the shortage of time. I suppose everything - in a sense - is affected by it, but it's been something that I've been keenly aware of for some reason since this trip started. Perhaps, because my time is so limited in each city, I feel this crunch much more acutely than usual.

Really, if nothing else, this can be a way for me to catch up with lost blog time by combining a number of things into one.

Part 1. NO TIME ... to wait.

As I got off the train in one of the DC metro stops, the screaming began.

"Hey!" A gravely baritone echoed down the escalator and off the cylindrical walls of the metro.

I wasn't inclined to look, and I prepared to just hunker down and press ahead up the escalator. But the shouting continued.

"Hey, you motherfucker! Waitjustagoddamminute!"

This, naturally, caught my attention, as my eyes swooped up the escalator to behold an unshaven - though not bearded - man with headphones, once-white sneakers (now a bit dirtier to the point that the contrast between leg and shoe was a bit more subtle), and a neon pink and yellow windbreaker.

He was yelling at the train.

The profanity continued as the man stood - coasting very slowly down the escalator. Moments later, about half way down the escalator, the train doors made their last beeping noises, signaling their close.

The squawks began to reach a fever pitch as the man - becoming more and more like a dirty antique parrot - began to boisterously hobble down the steps of the escalator, screaming as the train began to pull away and his bellows mixed together with the rushing roar of the departing metro.

I, meanwhile, had buried myself quite comfortably in the book I was reading at the time as I leisurely ambled onto the escalator and serenely ascended into the fresh air and sunlight.

At the time, I thought it was pretty hilarious that this oddly dressed man would so filthily assault the train only to get left behind, but as I emerged into the not-so-sweet air and into the glaringly bright sunlight, my conscience began to wake up a bit.

You should have yelled at the train too...

What? Why should I have yelled too? He was just some guy...

Ah, right. Some guy now. You're the big old city boy. Too cool to acknowledge people on the street. That's really nice. Don't go off and lose your manners in a day or anything...I sure hope you don't need anything from anyone, because I wouldn't help you...

I have a very aggressive conscience that jabbed at me from the metro stop all the way back to the house. It doesn't help that I already have a fiercely anti-social tendency that makes large groups and gatherings - at times - unbearable. But in cities like DC or New York, I get downright self-absorbed to the point that if we weren't constrained by biology and the laws of physics that state that you can't pass through solids, I would, I think, try my hardest to walk through people.

I love cities. They are exciting in countless ways, and when I ask Mississippians about why they move to places like New York or DC, I can't fault them for simply saying that big cities are more exciting, fulfilling, inspiring, and stimulating places. That's true. No question. Here in New York, everything is possible, everything is available, and nothing is off limits. In fact, since clean shirts in my suitcase are becoming more and more difficult to come by these days, I have toyed around with the idea of just not wearing a shirt and seeing if my not wearing a shirt around the city would have much effect on my fellow passerby. Ghostly paleness and lack of any sort of upper body toning aside, I feel like I could pull it off, and that as long as I didn't go out of my way to get in someone's way, then I would be fine.

Another part of that is that chances are I would not run into a friend of my grandmother on the street - something which would inevitably happen in Jackson.

Anonymity can be a beautiful thing though at times my conscience would beg to differ when the two Mariachi players get on the subway and with a quick 1-2-3-4, begin to play a cramped and yet rambling accordion-heavy love song. As the trains jolts back and forth, they try to keep balance while singing, harmonizing, strumming, and asking for change.

All the while - as this incredible feat occurs before me - I try to keep my eyes on my book, acting disinterested (though truly enchanted) with their song. After all, they'll never see me again, right?

At this point, I'm a bit hesitant to bring out a reference of the movie "Crash," especially since I never saw it, but I think it's slightly appropriate at this point, when they say something to the effect of "we crash into one another just to feel something."

It's a bit dramatic, but what I've found - in my brief time here - is that people don't crash into one another on the street to feel something. Instead it's the flip of it...we feel it when we crash into one another.

Let me explain.

Part 2. NO TIME...to sleep.

The father and son were Latino. The father had close-cropped hair with a toothy grin and a wonderful laugh. The son was skinny and lanky in the way that kids who haven't grown into their bodies yet are. He wore a Yankees hat. They sat across from me.

To my right in the next set of seats, there was a large muscular probably Italian man with gray hair slicked back. Across from him, a larger African American woman with swirling ruby red hair.

A hip gothic kid would join us a few stops down. He wore a black t-shirt, had greasy curly hair that swirled down from his hat that basically covered his face, and he wore a large pair of headphones.

Across and slightly to the right of me sat a middle-aged African American man with a Jamaican accent (I would discover that a little later...). He held a handkerchief over his mouth, looking nervously about the subway. At his feet, there lay a box on a rolling cart that, according to the pictures and writing on its side, contained a ceiling fan. His fingers were covered in large gold rings.

But, truly, the person who kept my most disciplined attention was the Indian man sitting between the Jamaican man and the father and son. Thinking back on it, I can hardly remember what he looked like. I don't recall what he was wearing or even how old he looked. All I remember about him was that he was outrageously sleepy. It was one of those exhaustions that - like quicksand - rendered a person literally helpless. Though he would wake up ever so briefly each time the train jerked, he would immediately fall back asleep, his chin rolling to his chest, his mouth slightly open.

By itself, a sleepy man on a train is not much of a spectacle. It does, however, get quite interesting when he - in the deepest abyss of sleep - begins to use the nervous Jamaican man next to him not as a prop - but as a pillow.

It had started as a gentle side-to-side rocking, but with the frequent braking of the subway, the delicate balance that had kept the man vertical was destroyed and he fell gently with his mouth open on the sleeve of the Jamaican man, who - along with the rest of the spectators - began to stare in disbelief.

Frantic eyes of recognition began to open wide amongst the passengers. I looked at the Latino father then to the African American woman down the aisle then to the two Asian American girls sitting next to me - and then, most painfully, to the Jamaican man with the head of the Indian man now burrowed in his lap. Eyes darted, panicked empathy began to grow as we watched to see what the Jamaican man would do.

Slowly, the handkerchief lowered from the man's mouth as he began to try to shake the man's head with his knees. No response and only half audible breathing from the man.

And then a miracle occured.

The Jamaican man - who I thought for sure had some obsessive tendency towards cleanliness - looked up and around the subway, back down at the man in his lap, and then burst into uncontrollable laughter.

Shortly after, the rest of train followed suit.

When the stop of the large Italian man came, he stood up and, with a grin, fired off a little quip:
"Don't do drugs!"

Which everyone thought was hilarious.

The Jamaican man continued to laugh until his stop drew nearer at which point, he slowly began to nudge the man in his lap. And ever so slowly, he came back to consciousness - quite embarrassed, though smiling. He and the Jamaican man, his pillow, talked for a moment, laughing a bit, and then the train stopped. The Jamaican man stood up and, with a smiling nod and sarcastic suggestion to not drink so much, he stepped off the train.

But the most beautiful thing - even after the laughing man's departure - was the way that a certain spirit of kinship hung in the air of our own little subway car, because for one brief moment, our stone-walled expressions had crumbled into laughter. We had seen one another laugh - the way that our eyes squint and our noses crinkle up.

We didn't have time to wait and talk, riding the subway to its last stop and then getting off for coffee, but as each of us came to our respective stop, there was an unusual pause we would all take the moment before stepping off the train, in which we'd look back into the car and give one last mischievous smile to one another as though to say we had enjoyed our ride together and that we only wished there was more time to talk.

More soon...

Going...Nowhere

Before I write anything, I'd like to mention that in that last post, I wasn't trying to sound homesick. My mom called the day after I wrote the post, worried that I was homesick. Which I'm not. All I was really trying to say was simply that I hate leaving places. In fact, nine times out of ten, the low, sinking feelings of going away from home sink away the moment that I get through the airport security and into a seat at my gate. Summer camps are a different matter, but that's for another day. I'm fine and happy and recently arrived in New York. I'll still be writing some DC posts soon, but I'll hope to catch up soon...

*****

It was by sheer coincidence that the Sunday after I arrived in DC, the National Cathedral hosted Mississippi Day at the Cathedral (something that happens every 4 years). Considering that the only conscious effort that I've made in my scheduling for this summer was to be in New York for the Mississippi Picnic in Central Park, I thought it was pretty remarkable that the one of the two Sundays I was going to be in DC was THE ONE for the next four years. Obviously, playing in with the feelings of homesickness, this was a nice way to sort of ease into being away from Mississippi.

But over the past week and a half, I've discovered that the problem is not so much, getting out of Mississippi. Geographically, it's quite easy. After all, Jackson is all of 50 minutes from Louisiana and maybe 90 from Alabama. The problem, I'm discovering, is leaving - completely. Let me explain.

It was a number of years back, when I last visited the National Cathedral. I can't exactly remember the reason for going - other than just being up in DC for vacation with my family. Either way, as we walked around the grounds of the Cathedral, my Dad stopped to pick up a penny dated 1974 - the year that my grandfather was installed as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church at that very cathedral. Anyway, ever since, I have always had this feeling that my grandfather's spirit lingers from time to time around that place. When I was in the Cathedral, a number of people came up to me just to tell stories about my grandfather and how much they had thought of him.

But it was actually after I left the Cathedral and took a 25 minute taxi drive out to Alexandria, Virginia for my first interview of this summer that I felt his spirit or at least his footsteps the loudest. The man whom I interviewed was - among many other things - a book collector. Besides having over 50 different editions and copies of Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," the man also had a book entitled "Letters of James Agee to Father Flye." Without going into too much detail, it's a book that has collected the correspondence of James Agee (author of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Death in the Family") with his mentor - Father James Harold Flye, a priest and teacher at the St. Andrew's school in Sewanee, TN, a place just down the road from The University of the South (where my grandfather and a huge number of my family went to college).

Anyway, the man I was interviewing took the book off the shelf and opened to the front cover, reading it for a moment. And then, with a small smile, he closed the book (I include those details only because I love the way that people who love books hold them...something about the way that they cradle them) and looked up at me and said, "Well, I guess this is yours."

I opened the book and read the message written in thick black ink on the inside cover,

I visited Father Flye
in the Regency Nursing Home
in Monteagle, on June 17, 1984,
in his 99th year. He
handled this volume. but was
unable to sign his name.
His prints are on these pages.

John M. Allin
Sewanee
June 17, 1984
Trinity Sunday

It is not the prints of Father Flye that excite me. Instead, and of course, it is the the thought that my Grandfather handled this volume and that on Trinity Sunday in Sewanee, Tennessee, he would have sat down in front of a window, looking out over a place he loved so much, to write these words without any knowledge at the time, that they would find me (not even born for another two and a half years) on the road and away from home.

At times, I'm overwhelmed at the ways in which we are found - often in the most remote places - by the things which have such transporting powers that we can be home again. Like I said, getting out of Mississippi is not the problem. It's leaving that gets trickier.

One of the people that I spoke to in DC captured the sentiment well. He said, "You know it's funny. I don't think I was ever a Mississippian until I left Mississippi." Then later, as I spoke with another, he said, "For me, getting away from Mississippi has made me realize - and be grateful for - something. Mississippi allowed me to be from somewhere."

****

I'm in New York City now, though I'll be writing a few more specific things about my time in DC. I took the train into Penn Station yesterday and though the skyline was shrouded by the low hanging clouds, it felt good to be here. Getting off the train, a boogey-woogey jazz beat echoed around the low stone ceilings of the underground train station. I came around the corner to see a woman - in a tight black dress with shoes kicked off the side near a column - dancing to the music (that I couldn't help but walk in beat to) while the band and the travelers who had a moment to spare, stopped to smile and enjoy her dance as she twisted and bounced to the music that, I like to think, was taking her back home somewhere many miles from here.

Leaving, or A Quick Summary of the History of My Patheticism

I have very vivid memories of my early, extended experiences away from home. It’s a large folder in my mind – jammed and overflowing with papers, photographs, little gray cassette tapes, and letters that were never sent. It sits in a far corner of my brain in a small cardboard box labeled with a thick sharpie written message: BAD MEMORIES.

It’s an unfortunate conflict that I have raging within my body – a mixture of a dashing, restless spirit longing for adventure and new unseen worlds and a much older, much grumpier spirit that wears an itchy brown cardigan, wheezes frequently, and constantly complains (by knocking its stick on its ceiling and turning up the volume on its 1930s polka anthology) about the other spirit staying up too late, being too loud, and talking too much about places outside of home. It’s a very passive-aggressive conflict, which partly explains why it remains unresolved to this day. It’s embarrassing, but it’s true. I simply don’t like leaving home (suggesting that my rattling, wheezing spirit is currently winning the battle of passive-aggression).

I’m not certain of the roots of my being pathetic, though like I said, I have plenty of material which probably helped it fester into a full-blown case of homebodiness. I’ll give two examples – embarrassing as they are.

1. McCallie Sports Camp, Summer 2001, Chattanooga, TN:

In hindsight, I seriously don't understand what it was that compelled me to agree to going to this. Many years earlier, I had determined that I detested the camp life as being a miserable week away from home in which private living habits (any and all things of the bathroom, sleeping, and eating) were suddenly put into a schedule - so uncharacteristically regimented for the summer - as well as on public display. So by the time I had to decide whether or not to do McCallie Sports Camp, I already had a thick portfolio of wretched camp experiences (in which letters from home were like drowning gulps of fresh air and in which songs sung with guitar and honeyed voices around campfires became demonic incantations to bind children forever to this hot, itchy place in the woods) that should have dissuaded me from ever even considering this camp. And yet, somehow, I caved and agreed to go for two weeks to a sports camp in Tennessee with my friend Packer.

As you would expect (and as I should have known) it was terrible. Perfectly god-awful. I could probably attribute any premature aging, graying, and high blood pressure to those two weeks in Chattanooga. From the stress of using the bathroom in public to coming to terms with trying to enter into a camp society whose hierarchy had been determined many summers before we arrived (we were pariahs - no matter our speed, talent, or charm), Packer and I could only wish of being home. In fact, so intense was our homesickness that we would rush back to our room after lunch and dinner to mark off each HALF-day that passed in a make-shift-pencil-drawn calendar we drew on the inside of one of our desk drawers.

My dad jokes - with a tinge of concern - that I'll end up on a psychiatrist's couch one day talking about this experience...

2. Anonymous Friends’ Houses, Grades 2-6, Jackson, MS:

In addition to my general aversion to camps, another trying hurdle for me was spending the nights at friends’ houses. I resist to write any of this only because I fear that any friend with whom I did not make it through the night will become suspicious of my 6^th grade motives; however, I will say it was never personal. Rather, it was simply my general discomfort with the unknown.

Needless to say, I had a habit – unfortunate and embarrassing I readily admit – of finding ways to avoid spending the night with friends at their houses. Whether it was the irrational fear that my friend’s creaky and unknown house was more subject to catching fire spontaneously than mine or the more basic longing for my own bed and more familiar monsters-in-the-closet, I would every once in a while (and I believe is the first time I’m admitting this) conjure up some malady (wheezing, upset stomach, etc) that demanded that I return home to sleep.

Today, in my older and comparatively wiser state, I realize how terrible a thing to do this was, but as a child – not knowing better – there were few feelings I cherished more than to see my dad – hair slightly disheveled and eyes heavy with recent sleep - drive up in our car to take me back home on a road that seemed somewhat celestial in the way that the street lights that hovered above our car streamed together and guided us home to my own bed – safe, warm, and known.

****

I write all of this to say that I've never been good at leaving home. In the past - and this past week as I packed my bags in preparation for (or fear of) this trip - my body has exhibited symptoms that only serve to remind me of the fact that I'm leaving. I know this all a bit overwhelmingly dramatic in the way I'm describing this, but I'd like to extend the metaphor just a touch more to compare it to the feeling a young sapling must feel upon, after having setting its roots firmly into the warm soil of its home, being ripped from the ground - roots gory with dirt and mangled worms. But, truly, that aside, I feel the pangs of leaving home throughout my entire body. The dinner the night before is typically accompanied by mild indigestion, my heart beats a bit faster, I stay up late the night before because I forget to pack (but also because I won't be able to sleep before that time, anyway).

The morning of departure (I usually make my plane reservations at early morning hours...) is equally miserable, because on top of not wanting to go, my traveling inadequacies are pointed out throughout the morning. So while I lie propped naked against the wall of my shower, marinating in the warm water that reminds me so much of my covers, my parents come in and out of the bathroom to ask me over the shower curtain about things that I've forgotten.

"Did you remember your toothbrush?"

"Yes." (Victory!)

"What about a tie?"

"Front pocket..." (A-ha!)

"Benadryl"

Silence (shit!).

"Benadryl??"

"Um, well no."

"What about your epi-pen?"

(God...) "No, I think it's...somewhere...I don't know"

The ping-ponging rally over the shower curtain ends in a blow-out: my parents the obvious victors.

Additionally, my dog - Bitsy - senses when I'm leaving and her depressed/curled peeking over her dog-bed only increases my own depression. She also usually rides in the car to the airport, which climaxes in a stringy crescendo of whines and whimpers as our car slows to a stop at the arrivals gate. Feeling carsick and already homesick, I hug my parents and try to acknowledge Bitsy - who in her fury has suddenly become disinterested (for the first time in days) about where I go.

I leave - feeling like shit, overloaded with bags - and wave goodbye to my parents as my mom taps on the window, mouthing, "I love you" - something I already knew (even when they were, in my attempt at packing, exposing me as a traveling fraud).

*****

My blog this summer is going to focus on (though not exclusively) the idea of home and place. It's something that I think fits with what I'm hoping/trying to do this summer in traveling around the country talking with Mississippians about leaving Mississippi. And though my interviews are much more site-specific (with Mississippi being my frame of reference), I'm hoping to find out about what it means to leave one's home - willingly or not. I'm hoping to explore the connections that we keep or don't keep with our homes. And ultimately, I want to find out what home (what a beautiful word it is) really is....but more on that later.

So, for this blog, I'll most likely just be writing about random little nothings that happen along the way in my travels, but I hope also not to lose completely the thought of home - whatever home may be.

I'm traveling to DC first (only a few more days here...late start on this blog...more on DC soon) and then on to NYC and then everywhere else.

Lastly, I'll say as a word of warning to those of you who were kind of enough to read my blog in Vietnam last summer, this one has great potential to be very different. There's a certain awe and wonder that overtakes a person in a foreign land, where one's language is not spoken, so I can't promise anything half as interesting as what Vietnam gave me; however, I do hope you'll bear with me...after all, if I live up to anything I just wrote about, homesickness (and time away from home) is a powerful thing that can, it seems, bring out the worst (or maybe, just perhaps, the best) in us all.

I'm going there to see my mother
She said she'd meet me when I come
I'm only going over Jordan
I'm only going over home

I love those words because - to me at least - there's something about "going" that means finally coming home...wherever that may be.

I'll be writing more (coherently) soon.

Love and miss you all.