A Drive In The West

The truck disappears into a cluster of rock and tree and mountain. We wind around, overheat, question a 15% grade on a gravel road. A man in blue jeans saunters up to the truck. "Is that your brakes I smell?" We don't know. He nods knowingly, "Smells like brakes." He puts his hands in his jeans, looking in the distance. He spits on the ground and walks away with the same steady, languid gait. Nothing to do but just turn around and look for something beautiful.

We turn onto a long stretch of flat road with hopes to find a lake. Fields of unkempt grasses flash by, their tips silver in the setting sun. Every mile or so another ranch broadcasts its name, and then flaunts its thriving stock of horses and cattle. It all seems unending, open land for miles finally yielding to distant blue jagged mountains. Scattered birds fly overhead. I spot a magpie on a wooden fence.

A turn in the road, a shaky bridge, and then we're in the middle of an expansive farm. We pull over and spread out our lunch on a dry patch of grass. Everything seems so appropriate somehow--wind whipping across the plains, the soul-sucking heat, the quieted dirt road. I push my hair out of my face and spot a hole in the ground below me. "I bet a creature lives in here," I say. "What kind?" "Oh, I don't know. A cute rodent of some sort." We eat our cheese and squint at the expanse. I turn my back to reach for more olives and calmly rise. "There's a snake right there." Sam gets up too and spins around. "Where? A big one?" We both focus in on the party-crasher: four feet long maybe, brown and gold, its head in a permanent cock as if it may strike at any moment.

Just as I question whether or not it is poisonous, it benignly slithers away, clearly uninterested in any maleficence. Sam steals a few photographs, but none manage to expose how road weary he is. The potentially menacing cocked head, upon further inspection, seems to be stuck that way, and his mid-section looks as though it has been run over, all but escaping bifurcation. Any run-of-the-mill farm snake would snap into the defensive within a ten inch radius of a human, but this poor soul calmly skulks away without so much as a hiss.

We finish our picnic and pour ourselves back into the car; the sun has managed to steal any scrap of energy we may once have posessed. On the way home, fields and fences give way to tight knit city blocks lined with century-old brick homes. Cows and horses are replaced by bikers and herds of people waiting for the bus. Suddenly the city seems much more urban. Suddenly I realize the difference between bustle and silence.

Ghosts (3/30/07)

I think I like history because I like ghosts. I’ve always liked ghosts; probably not more than any other kid. However, there are a few things that accent my love of ghosts which may not be so typical. For instance, the house I lived in as a child was a funeral home before I lived there. It was a large Victorian house with lots of nooks and crannies, and it was while living there at age four that I learned what a funeral home was. Even then, my definition was lacking, because I thought funeral homes were like graveyards. I thought that funeral homes were where dead people were stuffed into closets and window seats (especially window seats) willy-nilly and then left to do whatever it is dead people do. That is to say, I thought the dead people were still there. This didn’t make me frightened, only cautious.

I may also add: my mother took me to the graveyard for fun. I don’t know what normal kids do with their moms on summer vacations, but mine were spent making rubbings of old gravestones. I liked hot pink gravestone rubbings particularly.

And, too: my mother was a storyteller and historian, working in historic farms in Illinois and across North Carolina. When I wasn’t tensing up in a 19^th century attic convinced that something was moving, my mother was practicing one of her macabre traditional Appalachian folk tales on me. These were stories where family members killed each other and then came back from the beyond to recount their harrowing tales to unsuspecting children. I never learned the correct lesson from these stories. Instead of “Love Thy Brother”, I invariably came away with “You never know what houses are haunted, or which girls/inanimate objects are possessed, so watch the fuck out.”

I live by a graveyard now, one of the most exciting bonuses about my move to Chicago. It’s old and gigantic, and when I ride the el to work I love to look out the window and look for patterns in the gravestones. Sometimes they look like words. In the winter they gleam like mirrors in the snow.

I’m just now finding out about all the ghosts in my neighborhood. I live up the street from the Green Mill, noted hangout of Al Capone. And when I stand on the platform at my el station and see the roadies on the fire escape of the neighboring Aragon Ballroom—they’re standing on the exit to Capone’s private box. Charlie Chaplin also lived in my neighborhood, and shot a film here before taking flight from Chicago. What is most interesting is that my neighborhood has long been a refuge for people of all races and walks of life. Displaced Appalachian coal miners moved here around the same time that Native Americans were relocated. Immigrants from all over the world have found their home here. Now I’m here. I’m part of that.

But for all the theoretical, or intellectualized, ghosts that are all around me I have yet to see an actual ghost. An actual ghost like with translucent white robes and all that nonsense. It seems unfair to me, and I’m always a little jealous of people who claim they have seen ghosts. I also have a tendency to disbelieve. I feel like, I want to see a ghost really bad. I am open to that. If a ghost were to appear before anyone, wouldn’t they choose a willing spectator? Thus, if a ghost has not yet rattled its proverbial chains at my bedpost, why should I believe you?

The thing I am most frightened of is that they do not actually exist. Ghosts are my last bastion of spiritual belief. I don’t believe in anything that can not be seen, except ghosts. It’s just that the idea of real live ghosts (so to speak) is so exciting that I’m not willing to give it up. There comes a point as a child when you can no longer believe in all the characters your parents have created for you: the easter bunny, santa claus, the tooth fairy, etcetera. Even so, ghosts persist. As an adult, I have gone further to question my belief in anything, namely God. If I give up on ghosts, I will have given up on it all. There will be nothing invisible left. So I cling to the hope of seeing proof positive that specters are real. I collect ghost stories of friends and hang on their every word because maybe one day one of them will be too believable to be brought down. And I do a double take when I walk in my ancient neighborhood, because you never know what’s haunted. So look the fuck out.

Everything Looks Yellow In Reverse

Some memories are kept and treasured as they occur. Others are pieced together from what we see in photographs, what we hear in the stories of others. The convenience of all this is that we don't have to be faced with our former selves in the true sense. We can be kind to ourselves in that way, and remember only that we were good or funny or misunderstood.

My family rarely keeps videos, so I don't have much actual proof of the way things were; the way I was. So watching old Christmas videos is hurtful and heartbreaking as much as it is endearing. Case study: 1991 Christmas in July in Illinois. I will be nine in just over two months. I am heard before I am seen--hollering at my father, my shriek of a pre-pubescent voice booming a soprano cannon over the general roar of the extended family. I flail my skinny arms in a plea for attention. I open presents unappreciatively, literally dropping each one after I have sufficiently inspected it for imperfection. I do not say thank you.

And then my mother. Clinging to the siblings at goodbyes, making a (convincing) show of loving my father. Close up on the sisters having a secret conversation. Barb looks around, concerned. My mother looks over her shoulder, then turns back around to touch her sister's face. Two years and Barb will be divorced, driving from one coast to the other to move right next door to my mother. Seven years and my mother will be divorced too, a confirmed lesbian. Tearful goodbyes, embraces. My mother leans in and kisses the window of the car Barb has just gotten into.

Now it's our turn, piling into our car to make a trip I don't remember. My dad wearing a bizarrely out of place dashiki. Me in a Madonna t-shirt, my soft-spoken and long-haired brother advertising the Sex Pistols. And my mother, young and beautiful. Mothers are always more beautiful than you remember them. My grandfather talks up my brother about his upcoming senior year. My dad makes bad jokes. I hide myself behind a wall of pillows.

There we are all on video--proof we were once young, married, alive, a family. These gatherings have dwindled from their former glory to a modest seven or eight. I have trouble recognizing the people in this video as my family, and some of them aren't anymore. I don't know which one is more real.

When I think of my childhood in Illinois I think of car windows and fields rushing by for miles and miles. I think of hot, sticky summers and the smell of grandpa's car (the one he won on the game show). I think of the window seat on the staircase and the adjacent linen closet, both of which I was certain were packed to the brim with dead people. Baseball cards, night walks through town to get ice cream, the movie theatre's popcorn machine, yard sales. These memories are weighty and silent. I don't exist. I can't see my face or hear my voice. The people are frozen in time or maybe move in staccato. All these dutifully recorded memories, so horribly accurate, do not really exist. And yet here they are in all their garish color and sound, declaring their validity frame by frame.

I remember hungry hungry hippos right there by the stairs.
I remember the old-fashioned refrigerator in the kitchen.
I do not remember the sound of grandpa playing jazz.
I do not remember the sound of Z's voice.

The comings are so much more beautiful than the goings.
Everyone always has to go.