This blog has moved!
http://annearchynow.wordpress.com/

I hate when helicopters pass

too low overhead

And I am reminded

that I am here, in this place

Somewhere else

I think of things that have never been

that could never be

of you

of tea too bitterly made

of escapes unhatched

and half-thought out

of Spokane Indians

of quiet afternoons

in Nebraska

big skies

half sun-half rain

my life

half moon

well-travelled

wide-eyed

and

starry

Growing Up Open

When I was little, my mom used to take me shopping. I would always get hungry in the middle and we would go to the food court. My mom would buy me a cheeseburger and she would eat Chinese food. To drink I had what I called “orange” – that weird Slice soda that was so prevalent in the 1980s.

We would sit down to eat, my mom and I. She would offer me some of her hot and sour soup, which I loved because it was so spicy that it made my eyes water. “It’s good for a cold,” she said. Then we would move on to her lo mein, which she called, “Chinese spaghetti.” How I loved Chinese spaghetti! I could eat it all day long. Now, when I go to Chinese restaurants, regulars look amazed at how much hot and sour soup I can put away. What can I say? I was trained early.

My mom would eat some of my cheeseburger and then it was time to “do the dishes”, which meant throwing away our paper plates and returning our trays. Sometimes she did the dishes, and sometimes I did. When I rose to the occasion, she would say “Thank you for doing the dishes!”

Growing up I was exposed to a lot of different kinds of foods and cultures. All of my friends’ moms had accents. I didn’t think it was strange. Most of my friends were Jewish, or Chinese, or Indian, or Latin American, or some combination. I think I thought I was French.

Sometimes I would go to my friend Anna’s house. Her mother would make us meatballs and French fries. Anna still had an accent herself because her family had just moved from Russia.

I liked Anna. She was quiet and sweet and on Halloween we both dressed up as witches and went trick-or-treating together. I wore all black and she dressed, curiously, in red. A red witch! My older brother, a budding anti-communist, said that it was fitting. I was confused.

Then there was Sasha. Sasha’s dad was from Argentina and at his house we ate latkes with dulce de leche on top. I didn’t understand. “My dad’s Jewish,” she said. I still didn’t understand. I thought people from South America were all Catholic.

Years later, at 15, I became very close to a girl named Davni (the ‘v’ was added soon before we were friends – it’s silent). Davni’s family was from Bolivia, and they lived a few blocks away. Her house was different. She had older parents like me, but they often hosted parties. One night, I got to go to one of their parties and keep Davni company with some other friends. It was so exciting! Everyone was speaking in Spanish and so interested in talking to each other. It wasn’t like this with my parents’ friends, who were reserved and well, decidedly Anglo. Davni translated a few conversations for us; her parents’ friends were talking about how disillusioned they felt about Americans because they had allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by the then young Bush administration. I was hooked on these people, on this open discussion.

Around the same time I was getting close to Davni, I formed an all-girl rock band with a girl named Shira. Shira seemed hard to get to know. Ultra cool on the outside, I couldn’t tell if she had an inside. One day, I slept over at her house. She started to open up to me about her family, about a boy that she liked; all of this after hours of references to cool bands and quirky T.V. shows. Most of the references I didn’t understand, but the opening up part was surprising and nice. I liked Shira, even though she scared me a little.

Over the years, my friendship with both girls grew. I started going to Shira’s house on Saturday afternoons, when her Chinese step-mom made Kosher food and served soy sauce on the side. It was heaven for me.

Davni’s family adopted me a little bit. I cooked for them and they nursed my burgeoning Spanish. Davni’s mom often set a place for me at dinner. She encouraged me to eat more soup. When I had some nice, new chocolate, I brought it over. When I offered some, everyone said yes. It was a process of giving and receiving that still felt new to me, but it was nice.

Now, I work with immigrants all day. I teach English at night and my students ask me about American culture. I feel like I am in on both jokes, the immigrant experience and the great, big bumbling This American Life. Sometimes we commiserate about how strange this or that thing is, how odd it feels to us. And then some coworker, some know-it-all real foreigner will say, “Why does it feel weird to you? You are American.”

But it’s not that simple. I am an insider who grew up looking out, if that makes sense. Like a little anthropologist, at eight I was doing informal field studies. But no, that isn’t quite it either. At eight, I was playing with my friends. I was watching them go home and be kids and have mommies who had struggles just like my own.

Somehow along the way, the immigrant experience wove itself directly into my experience, creating a personal narrative where one was needed. If my friends had been climbing mountains and I had traipsed along with them, then some part of me would be a mountain girl. If my friends had been hot-wiring cars and going for joy rides, then some part of me would be a little bit of an outlaw. But instead this was my reality; the home lives of my friends were distinct cultural enclaves, and as such, I feel connected to different ways of looking at and living in the world. I recognize that there is not, cannot be one way only. That instead there are millions of ways, that within each way is a new way, and that nothing you thought you knew about one person or one culture is going to be true across other people and cultures. It is this fluidity, this relativistic attitude that makes me a foreigner in my own country, and perhaps a foreigner in all countries.

Never mine

In Colombia, displaced women demand their rights.

I sit here, rainy day, missing you.

I don’t know who you are exactly.

An amorphous collection, or loves.

The triumvirate – you are a country, a place, a smell.

One thing is for certain, you were never mine.

Slipped through my hands like sand on a windy day

I let you go.

When you left, abruptly, awkwardly –

Something of me traveled far, far away.

It fell asleep and when I called its name,

All I could see was you.

Give me back!, I cried.

But I was gone, in the pocket of your travels.

Earthy, archetypes, clay, raw

"Looking back on it, it was the right time. Even though it's painful and you are not necessarily aware when you're finished with a certain experience, you do know, something propels you out."- Anais Nin

Make love to me

I agree with everything you said

Thank you for saying it

To answer your question

Here’s a quote from Anais Nin

When my body hurts

And it’s hungry even though it can’t make anything

That is when this is not over.

When I want to sit.

And let the redness devour.

Just make and make until I remember

Your fear

How it feels cold, like snake-oil.

Make love to me.

Quiet supplication.

Everytime I see you

It’s in my eyes and it’s in myheart.

I am it. Needing.

I will drag you through the dirt of my existence.

My impatient repetitions will renew you, softly.

We will eat clay until the heat makes our heads swirl.

We will sit by the pre-colombian fire and roast coffee beans.

Our shadow selves will reach out and dance lasciviously.

While we watch on, puritans that we are, hoping.

Make love to me.

Train Writing

Western Loneliness

The train rolls along and I’m hungry. For two days we’ve made the sometimes stunning, sometimes lonely trek from Seattle to Chicago.

I know little of the American West. Or at least what that American West used to mean. What it symbolized in people’s feverish minds; hungry for something bigger; more open.

I grew up making yearly visits to the farm, or, farms, where my dad’s family lived. We always left in July and August and perhaps for that reason what I remember are the persistent signs of drought. Corn, burning in its stalks, too yellow and dry for the season. The grass too was yellow, but the mosquitoes were relentless. My brother Erik and I took all of this in from our air-conditioned back seat view, and I asked him, the older and wiser one, about geographical features that seemed strange to me.

“Why do the cows have their own pond in the middle of the pasture? Did they build the farm around that?” I asked.

“No, they made the pond for the cows. So they could cool off in the summer.” He responded, with older brother commonsensical wisdom.

The Middle-West (as my Dad calls it) that Erik and I grew up visiting is nothing like it was when Dad changed from a child to a teenager there. He remembers parades, civic meetings, community construction efforts that reflected a kind of socialist spirit. My grandmother tells stories about wheat-threshing time, pies that bubbled over with fruit, and pans filled with fried chicken.

She describes summers so hot that men would eat salt to avoid the necessity of sporadic hydration. And of course, there are stories about my great-grandmother catching turkeys better than the farmhands, who were really fairly lazy in comparison to her industriousness.

Then there are my favorite stories, told by my Aunt Lois. She and I are similar in that we both have dark hair, and we can both tan in the summer months, unlike most of my family. According to my Aunt, our ancestors, those solid, straightforward farmers, had shadow selves. They chewed tobacco behind the shed, and one man, I think a great- great uncle, had an affair with a Native American woman. The story goes that the two had a clandestine relationship that produced a child. He kept the son and brought him up with his white wife. That son, and subsequent ancestor apparently kept to himself as an adult, and often left for days at a time to be alone in the prairie.

I know that these are hollow stereotypes which my Aunt’s subconscious could easily have filled in, but as a 14 year-old, bored visiting her relatives in Missouri, this was quite a revelation. Aunt Lois claims to have heard these stories in whispers and fragments of whispers told between respectable ladies as a child. “Little pitchers have big ears,” she will say. My dad says that none of it is true, that as much as he loves his Aunt, there’s just no evidence for it. Besides, my Aunt has done many things that repudiate her credibility. She voted for Ross Perot, for example.

All of it though, that richness of tradition, the stories which may or may not be true, the town pride, have dissipated. My grandmother has a steadfast identity: she is a strong woman, born and bred on a farm during the Depression, and she locates herself as from the West.

As a little girl what I remember about that region and my visits there are meals eaten at the Ponderosa, not in farmhouse kitchens. Staunch republicanism and John Wayne types in their eighties. Ghost towns with old people, mainly. At every visit my dad made us visit the cemeteries, endless in their detailing of those who had died in that lonely, dry place.

On the train, somewhere around Nebraska, I decide I need something. Prices are expensive and I still have some cereal, but it’s a treat I need, rather than want. I buy some tea and spot two ladies who I’ve seen before. One seems like a naturalist who is making her way through the country by train. She wears white linen clothes reminiscent of safari wear. A train friend tells me that this woman’s daughter has completed a year working with AmeriCorps, and that we should talk since I, too, would like to join that program.

I recognize the woman. We had both sat in the same viewing car, in seats almost next to each other, for the entirety of North Dakota. The Trails on Rails program volunteers informed us that we are on Native American terrain. As we passed ex-reservation after old battleground, I began to notice the woman near me.

I remember thinking that she was so pale. Her face could best be described as plain, but there was a softness there, hidden under deep resignation. Every now and then, she would apply lotion to her face and hands. Nothing exotic like cocoa butter, she used the cheap, liquid white stuff you can buy at any pharmacy.

I introduce myself and she tells me about her daughter, who works for a community arts program on an island in the Puget Sound. Our conversation is interesting but I sense that there is more I can gain from this contact. I so often want to take things to the next level, to find out what a person is really about.

Her friend joins in the conversation after it is revealed that I spent a month teaching in Spain. She is an aging hippie, short of stature with long curly grey hair. She brought home-made bread and her own tea, which is herbal. We all enter into a conversation and I notice that something about our dynamic is off. Normally when there are two older women and one younger adult, the two eldest begin interviewing the younger. The younger is implicitly viewed as more in touch with the pulse of the world, and so receives more attention.

These women seemed enthused at having found one another. The white-linen clothes lady was actually not a naturalist at all but rather a housewife from the Wisconsin Dells. She told us at length about a historical project she was working on, linking a WWII female veteran to a more famous male counterpart through old photographs and letters she had. Her story intrigued the aging hippie, and I decided to stop talking and just observe.

I noticed that the woman was sad. She had deep, dark bags underneath her eyes and spoke in self-admonishing tones. She spoke of her husband who she said used T.V. as a “plug-in drug”. The hippie nodded in understanding. Her husband, too, had the same problem.

It is soon revealed that the woman was sick. She never specifies, but mentions that in order to treat her illness, she has to walk frequently. Because it gets so cold in Wisconsin, she went to Walmart to roam the aisles in the wintertime in lieu of outdoor exercise. As I child I spent many hours lost and bewildered in various Walmarts around the Eastern panhandle of West Virginia. I could imagine no worse a fate.

Around this point in the conversation, my friend from Western Canada arrives and sits down with the three of us. He is one of those happy, tolerant British Columbians and I feel suddenly awkward about my national identity. About my relationship to the bleak Midwestern landscape we are rumbling through. He tells the two older women about his travels and love of music. They listen on in awe. Now, unlike before, we hold the position of young people, in touch with the world.

At the crack of dawn the next day, I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and tried to meditate, to clear my mind, and catch that fleeting opening into sleep. I heard the conductor say that we had reached the Dells, and I knew that the woman had left.

She seemed like a kindred sensitive soul, a little defeated by her situation. Unlike the hippy from Washington state, the woman did not seem to embrace her life. At least not openly.

She left that day and I continued on, all the way east, until I got home. We stopped in Chicago and I said goodbye to my Canadian friend, who I think was secretly hoping we’d end up lovers. We didn’t, and in part because the trip through the West was not a trip to be taken lightly in my mind. It was a time to reconnect with my country, to meet its people, and reflect on what I had seen. What I came away with was a deep sense of loss, something I had felt as soon as I became conscious during our trips to the farm.

Behind that sadness was a sense of possibility. I had watched as two women spoke through their loneliness and reached out to each other on a snack car in Nebraska. I had felt the all enveloping sunlight of a North Dakota afternoon. I met a man with a heart defibrillator who had no fear of death. For the first time I experienced something I had never felt before; connection with this country. This place, with its tragic and amazing history, is where I am from and who I am.

Gemini

Twins.

A piece that likes danger.

One that abhors it.

Hide under the covers until it has passed. Drink the endless cups of tea, turn up the heater, lay low for a while.

Wait. Always, always wait.

Infinity.

Nothingness.

Fear.

Peace.

Two sides of the same coin.

An impulse toward instability; a desire to take the world

In and make it whole again.

The quiet child, secretly weeping

On the inside.

The proud public face, forgetful.

Dark.

The absence of light?

There is a time when wisdom will say, stop.

Do we listen?

Or continue the dance.