Read Me

Blazing Horizons

2011-06-24T21:13:00.000-07:00

While working on a play about a female veteran, I've been doing interviews with both amputees and Marines. My dad has been a source of encouragement and experience. I wrote this piece when he was newly returned home from Iraq in 2007. Originally meant to be fiction, there is nothing fictional about it.

The dry ring of mountains around our stucco-encrusted suburb ignites and smolders every autumn as regularly as the leaves yellow and fall. Ash rains down, coating everything stationary – parked cars, houses, buildings, and trees – with a crumbling grey veil that rubs off on children’s wandering fingertips. The air becomes an orange haze of heat and smoke and casts a rusty glow across the burning sky. Silhouetted against this backdrop, the flakes of ash twirl, tossed by the crackling wind. The dark mountains, with their thirsty trees and chunks of charred boulder, stand still beneath the flickering flames that flash over their shoulders. They have become resigned to this yearly ritual.

The valley below these fiery mountains is blanketed with a green, brown, and yellow patchwork of neighborhoods. The identical, dirt-red rooftops blur grey into the horizon and merge with their desert background. The sputtering spray of sprinklers awakens each evening to entice trimmed lawns out of the parched earth. Like beige beads, the houses are strung together with white fences. A few personal clues in the form of holiday flags, forgotten tricycles, and small statues, hint at the lives lived behind the symmetrical windows and slanted shades. On a burning day, all the colors of lawn, house, and candy red tricycle are muted by the filmy powder of crushed ash.

A section of these hills towers up behind our housing tract. The even sidewalks and manicured front yards give way to a dried-up riverbed that separates the bases of the mountains from the suburban sprawl. The asphalt street stops suddenly at a metal dead-end barrier, leaving only a few black clumps of tar and gravel speckled in the dirt on the other side. A few blooming roses reach over fences to cast their swirling shadows on the skeletal riverbed. Wild weeds with thick, sappy skins burst out of the cracked, sandy sides of the dead river. Thin trails up the mountain are encroached upon by bushes, tree branches, roots, and dried clumps of animal scat. My father used to hike with me, my brothers, and a scraggly group of neighbor kids clambering behind him. We would stop to hunt for misfired paintballs and squeeze them between our grimy fingers. He would find patches of miners’ lettuce, point out which plants could be eaten, and show us the holes in the rocks where Indians had once set up their kitchens and ground acorns for bread. While the other kids stared up at him, I noticed how straight my father stood, and how he spoke about everything with a quiet authority, as if he naturally knew everything about everything – from miners’ lettuce to the cooking habits of Native Americans. I saw the way my father calves bulged slightly above his folded tube socks, as he scaled the rocks beside a tiny trickling waterfall. The other kids watched him with a sort of awe, even Jeff, who cut of rattlesnakes' heads with a shovel. They thought he was strong and brave – not pale and spongy like some of their fathers, who only ventured outside to smoke a cigarette on the curb. Like an action figure, my father had helmets, uniforms, and a parachute, which he once took out and attached to my brothers’ red wagon. The orange cloth, faded with age, billowed into a giant mushroom top almost as large as the one-story houses on our street. The wagon, with my dad in it, shot down the cul-de-sac, swerving as he yanked the handle around as a makeshift steering wheel. Kids hooted, chasing after my dad in his homemade contraption like they chased kites through the park – always falling far behind the desired object in a fit of glee and giggles.

On burning days, my father walked my eldest brother and me down to the riverbed, clutching a hand in each of his, to watch the mountains blaze. Black helicopters whirred above the flames, spraying showers of chemicals. Neighbors bustled around us trying to get a better view, as if the spectacle were a firework display. On my upturned face, I could feel the heat radiating off the mountain. I could see the still-green trees bending before the flames. I knew, from numerous hikes into those hills, that the tree trunks would stand charred and chalky for years after the last flames were extinguished – their roots, like slivers of charcoal buried in the dust, and their branches turned into stubs smudged black against the blue sky. Around them, little shoots of new life would sprout, but they would remain dead and still like nature’s gravestones.

Squeezing my dad’s hand, I tried to look into his face to see if he was searching out the spots on the mountain where we had hiked and picnicked; to see if he could hear the crackling of dry brush before the flames; to see if he was remembering the black, twisted trunks; to see if he was eager and hungry for a spectacle like the neighbors who elbowed me for a closer spot; to see if he had a look of determination or concern or maybe even a small, shimmering tear at the corner of one eye. But I couldn’t make out his features above me. His face was dark against the flames, shadowed by the explosion of orange and red dancing before him. I wanted to read the reactions etched across his features. Straining, I could only make out the silhouette of his jaw line and his cheek bones dotted with bristles of close-shaven hairs. A raspy and weak “Daddy” lingered in my throat, like a moth knocking silently on a windowpane, hoping to turn his profile without disturbing the delicate evidence. The second he took to react to my voice would spoil the examination. So, I turned my eyes from the dark outline of my father’s face and back to the blinding blaze of the burning hills.

* * * * * *

I am still searching for the memory of my father's face as I sit at the kitchen table years later. My elbow sticks to the plastic, floral table cloth my mother buys each spring, after throwing out the crinkled snow-flake-covered winter one. I have been sitting here for an hour now with my hand cupping my chin. There is nothing left to do. The house has been cleaned, dinner eaten, and my brothers have all hidden themselves in their rooms; there are four of them now. My mother sits on the couch in a pool of living room light, listlessly flipping through old magazines. I wipe a few moist crumbs from around the edge of the cake plate in front of me, being careful not to smudge the swirling peaks of brown frosting. I turn to smooth the tape on the corner of a home-made paper banner hanging on the wall behind me. Both the cake and the banner read Welcome Home Dad: one in clumsy red icing letters and the other in a squiggly explosion of Magic-Marker colors. The cake is German chocolate, my dad’s favorite. Earlier in the evening, I stood at the counter stirring the thick batter, while my brothers lay on their bellies on the kitchen floor attacking the spread-out banner with their tongues sticking out of the sides of their mouths. The whole arrangement suddenly strikes me as painfully childish. I wonder if there is still time to get rid of it all. I glance toward the white plastic trashcan in the corner. My hands twitch reflexively toward the edge of the plate. The pages of my mother’s magazine flutter, as, unseeing, she turns to another article. I draw my hands back into my lap.

What will he think of this squiggly mess dripping with foolish innocence as he walks in the door – still in uniform, still smelling faintly of oil and with particles of sand clinging to his skin? Homemade cakes are for children’s birthdays – not for second homecoming from a forgotten war.

Mentally, I collect all the information I have received from his letters and e-mails about his last seven months and try to assemble the scraps into a complete image. He wrote that there were daily dust storms blowing a fine sand into every crack, even into the narrow slits between teeth and the fissures in chapped lips. It powdered the surface of sun-burnt faces and turned to mud at the moist corners of eyes and mouths. We sent him cleaning cloths so that he could coax the sand out from between the gaps on his computer keyboard. He sent back pictures of giant camel spiders, which looked like freaky puppets leftover from a sci-fi movie. He scrawled on the back of the photo that they were known to charge at people; he had to be careful walking to the bathroom. The other pictures featured smiling Marines with tired eyes, standing beside their helicopters with nothing but a tan horizon stretching behind them. I recognized their confident manner, standing in uniform and leaning easily against their menacing machines, from family day picnics on base. They seem too soft to control the sleek metal contraptions behind them. The thin blades of the helicopter slice into the tan sky and the window-eye of the cockpit glistens almost hungrily in the wavy heat of the Middle Eastern sun. My father commands these men and their machines in this dusty haze of a place. I don’t know much more. He can’t tell and we don’t ask. Even when he is free to share all the details, we still don't ask.

We stopped watching the news years ago, after he left for his first war in Saudi Arabia. My brother, who was five, saw the fiery blasts shooting out of the sand in oily black and burning orange plumes on the evening news and rushed the screen screaming “Daddy, Daddy”. Swiftly swooping in front of the television set, my mother flicked off the news, and we never turned it on again. My brother, twenty now, won't speak to him anymore. He has missed too many birthdays, graduations, changes. They no longer know each other. They have lost the easy habit of play fighting on the stairs.

We don't ask. He doesn't tell. His sleeping bags from Saudi Arabia, which still have flecks of sand buried in their corners, and his photo albums with pictures of each tour saved on crisp pages are buried in the garage behind broken bikes, the punctured river raft, and the wood for the swing set he never got around to building. We are all too old for swing sets now.

A month ago, I sent him Easter candy in a box lined with pictures of fuzz chicks and colored eggs. Sealing the overflowing box, I smiled imagining my father receiving it. He could boast to the other Marines about his family, who love him, and show off his private store of pastel colors in that colorless place. Mom refuses to write him anymore, but no one would need to know. He would have candies to prove our love. Weeks later, a letter came explaining that he had passed out all the candy to injured Iraqi children. I saw the pastel Lifesavers crinkling in their individual plastic wrappers in dark hands, crusted with dirt and dried blood. I saw their black, blank orphaned eyes and their dirty bandages. Who had hurt them, left them parent-less in the desert? I stopped sending boxes to my father. I only sent e-mails, which were returned sporadically, relying on the twisted black power lines snaking through storms and bombings. He would call on the phone every other month, and Mom passed the receiver around to us kids without taking a turn. She hated him for all of this. An echo punctured our conversations with long silences as we waited for his voice to travel through the line from worlds away. Our staccato talks shuttered and faltered like the engine of Mom's old car, never quite getting enough juice to roar to life. Still, we pump the pedal furiously, willing something to happen.

The last time he came home, he seemed smaller. As he walked across the movie theater lobby towards us, several weekends after his return, he seemed lost in his checked shirt and blue jeans. His hair had thinned, and the skin of his bald spot looked raw and sun-burned. It reminded me of the top of a baby bird’s head, tender with vulnerability and wrinkled, as if with age. I wondered if other people in that lobby could see these little signs: the quick bounce at the tip of his tennis shoes as he hurried towards us – which was too light to coincide with his profession – and the lines around his green eyes, and the neatness of his jeans, and the concerned glances at his watch as the movie time neared, and the big bucket of popcorn he stopped to buy for all of us despite the lack of time. Then he joined us, and I could no longer observe him as a stranger would.

On Sunday mornings, he always made pancakes. Leaning over the hot griddle, he waited, spatula in hand, for the white batter to bubble before flipping the soft circles over to brown on the other side. He heated the syrup in the microwave, then placed it on a plate to catch the sticky drips after multiple pours. Singing “O’ What a Beautiful Morning” at the top of his deep voice, he used the smell of his cooking and the sound of his singing to rouse all five of us from our beds. We grumbled, pretending to be annoyed, as we sat down with tousled hair and crinkled pajamas to a golden heaps of pancakes like we lived inside a Rockwell painting, safe in the folds of our simple American Dream. My father smiled, savoring the pleasure of being the one to wake us up at a decent hour.

* * * * * *

There is a girl who lives at the other end of our cul-de-sac. I have seen her through the car window as we drive by. She stands in her front yard clinging to the trunk of a tree, her tangled hair rustling in the breeze and her dark eyes starring. Her father is not coming home. I saw them bring his memory folded into the corners of an American flag up to her doorstep. A neat little triangle. Her mother no longer watches to make sure she doesn't run into the street. I think maybe I'll stop and talk to her, coax her grip off of the tree and break her eyes out of their locked gaze. But she is old enough to know that my dad lived and hers didn't. There is accusation in the blankness of her face. She doesn't want to hear about burning days or baby bird's heads or pastel lifesavers or unfinished swing sets. I drive on.

* * * *

The kitchen has gone dark with the passing hours. My mother has given up on the magazine, and it lies half open on her lap as it slides sideways onto the couch. Her eyes gaze ahead looking at nothing. We wait for the sound of the front door opening. We never pick my dad up at the airport, waving American flags and banners like the other families do. He says it is because he is afraid my mother will show up in a tie-dyed t-shirt waving a peace sign, which is not an unjustified fear. My mother has repeatedly hung up on the Wives of Marines representatives. Her whispered anger steaming through clenched teeth. “I don't need any of you,” she mutters to the empty room. She is not speaking to herself but to the specter of my father in the kitchen. She will not say it to his face, but there by the phone, unaware that I am watching her, she says it to the ghost of his presence, lingering on in his absences. It has always been different when he is not home. We get movies on Friday nights from the video store and get to pick out whatever dinner we want from the grocery store, even the greasy-hot buckets of fried chicken and fresh French bread. The boys used to scream and run wild. I had to wrestle them into their coats in the driveway, tell them stories as they lay in their bunk bed, and slop dinner into their complaining mouths on the nights my mother had classes. I don't mind because when he is not home my mom talks to my eldest brother and I like we are adults. Like we are her whole world.

His friend, called Ditto after his call-sign, drives him home. Walking off the runway, he squeezes into Ditto's car, waiting alone for Ditto's wife and little daughter to release his friend from weepy embraces before they can leave. Maybe, he watches as Ditto's daughter pats the stubble on her father's cheek with her toddler hand clinging like a clumsy starfish.

The rattling sound of the knob being jostled echoes in our silent house for only a moment before being eclipsed by the thunder of my brothers on the stairs, the dogs barking and scrambling up from their resting places, my chair scraping back on the tile kitchen floor, and the cascade of magazines sliding off the couch as my mother stands up. We all crowd around our blue front door before it can even open, and we all watch the knob twitch, not wanting to force it open after so many months of waiting. Collectively, we hold our breaths. Clustered next to each other in the small entryway, we wait. The door swings open, and in its frame stands the silhouette of my father in his green and brown camouflage uniform, with rough tan bags slung across his back – the same bags that had been piled up in our living room the week before his departure, physical reminders that confronted us every time we walked up the stairs or out of the door. I search, above the blond, bobbing heads of my brothers, for my father’s face. The porch lamp glows behind him as he stands on the doorstep. Momentarily between the light of the porch and the light of the house, his face is in shadows. I see nothing but the silhouette of his jaw line and his cheek bones dotted with bristles of close-shaven hairs. In the deep stretching darkness, I can see the memory of raging flames and oily black smoke just beyond the glow of our porch light. As he steps through the doorway scooping up my younger brothers, laughing at their eager greetings, and reaching out to my mother and me, it is already too late. He steps in; his face arranged in a smile. The darkness is hidden from view by the closing door, and my father’s bags are already back on the living room floor.

Somewhere, Celebrations

2009-07-05T14:08:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in this world, people danced in the streets bedecked in feathers, leather, and rhinestones. They wrapped themselves in flags – not of a nation, but of their own making, created to celebrate their own right to exist as individuals. I am sure that it was all a bit messy, crowded, and confusing. I am not going to glamourize or romanticize these city celebrations because I know that, whenever people gather to shift paradigms, their explosion of ideas can cause a naked rawness and a touch of chaos. We are human, after all – each of us an unlikely universe of paradoxes.

Somewhere in this world, people changed a history of shame and shadow into a day of freedom and color. I won't really know the details. That somewhere was not here. Here we carried on the grand tradition of silence and doubt. Here, I learned how anger grows in the dark spaces behind our smoothly professional faces, how being shushed only increase your desire to scream, and how cages awaken our gnawing hunger for open fields. I learned what a dangerous concoction those bottled feelings brew.

The details aren't significant: an article that went unpublished, the insinuations made as to why it couldn't be, the suggestion that I stick to writing about “festivals were people are having fun.” As far as injustices go, it was a tiny blip on the scale, an aftershock from a legacy of historical horrors and the popularity of the religious right. From a global perspective, I can't complain. No one got stoned, no one lost all his or her family members, no one even lost his or her job. But the voice of a girl, one with shoulder-length blond hair and a red lipsticked smile, never made it to the public. The voice of a girl, who was courageous enough to talk about once being a boy, never got to proclaim that she is here to stay whether they liked it or not. Her voice and mine were sidelined and replaced by restaurant press releases.

We won't be silenced long. The poisonous insinuations, injected to attack my deepest secret fears, made me weak for days – too weak to put up a proper fight. I still feel their sting as I work with these lopsided sentences and hard-to-express sentiments. Yet, I am here again, showing up on the page like a battered gladiator in the ring, ready to face the tigers of rejection and the spears of criticism.

As a writer, I know a little bit about the shame of an identity you just can't deny. Trust me, if I could be happy doing a respectable job and keeping my mouth properly shut, I would chose that life. No one sets out to live a life that invites head shaking, ridicule, rejection, and hate. Although, many people would argue that it is a matter of choice – that you chose to be a writer, to be gay, to be outspoken. In truth, the only real choice is to deny your identity or to celebrate it.

I chose celebration. Here's to surviving rejection slips, nasty comments, and harsh editing. Here's to knowing who you are in your soul of souls, even when others think it's sick, pathetic, or a lie. Here's to being an imperfect, chaotic human being but demanding your right to exist, to grow. Here's to that blond girl marching under a her own flag and refusing to sit on the sidelines.

To all those who can take to the street or can come to the page despite adversity, I applaud your courage. There will come a time when every day and every place is filled with the freedom of rhinestones and rainbows.

Recycling Journals

2009-06-04T12:24:00.001-07:00

The summer after I graduated from high school, I threw out all my journals. With a plastic garbage bag next to me, I sat on the floor facing my closet and flipped through each one for the last time. First into the trash bag was my Hello Kitty diary chronically all the injustices of having to eat tuna casserole, nicknamed cat casserole by my dad for reasons deemed inappropriate for dinner table conversations.

Next, I tossed the floppy school-distributed journals with their free writes and the illustrations of my dead iguana in robe with angel wings and a halo. The penciled letters denting their pages were so sloppily scrawled that my middle school thoughts were almost illegible. The garbage bag began to bulge as the woes and joys of freshman year, contained in a self-made diary covered with a left over scrap of wallpaper, were exorcised into the trash can. The flowered journal with the silk tie that I wrote in while propped up in hospital rooms and while lying on the couch with my limb rapped in hot towels to ease the phantom pains gave witness to the days spent watching the ivy creep up the window screen. It went into the garbage along with the journal containing embarrassing confessional poetry. They were followed by the spiral notebooks with pages devoted to Paul and all those angst-filled fights of adolescence.

When I was done, the white plastic of the garbage bag stretched between all pointed corners threatening to burst through its flimsy sides. Curls of sliver wire, bent out of shape on the edges of notebooks, tore little openings as if trying to escape. Stealthy, I hulled it all out to the trash cans on the side of the house. If I anyone saw what I was doing, I knew that they would try to stop me or that they would fish a few journals out of the pile to give to me when I was older and saner. I didn't want a single journal to survive my purge. I lifted the bag over my shoulder and chucked it in. Covering it with flattened cardboard boxes and other bits of recycling, I wished again that I could have burned them but that would have brought on questions. I worried about the journals sitting in a protective clump in some landfill and making their way back some day like the murder in a horror series or an incriminating body floating back to the lake's surface in a cold case thriller. This was as free of them as I could be. I turned back into the house to attack my stuffed animal collection.

In a family of seven, there is no room to leave behind a sanctuary of childhood memories. Eric moved into my room the day I moved out. I threw out almost all my possessions because I thought I was starting anew. Like the dry case of a chrysalis, the pages and pages of my young thoughts and memories seemed to be the barrier I had to rip through to emerge into the world as the fully formed adult I had always dreamed of becoming. I destroyed the intricate little world I had created for myself and felt the exhilarating fear of being delicate and naked, trembling in the vast open of possibility.

Yet, college graduation came and again I disposed of all my trappings. The egg chair, now stripped of its hot pink cover, like so much of my dorm furniture keeps reincarnating itself in siblings and in-laws college apartments and dorm rooms. Paul and I came back from our honeymoon to an empty apartment and a stack of gifts wrapped in white. We built up a home only to tear it down. Now, those gifts are packed back in boxes and crammed into the attic. The furniture is stacked and covered in a shroud of dust in the garage next to old yearbooks and deflated sports equipment.

I am not the transformed butterfly I thought I was six years ago. I am more of a snake, shedding successive skins as I slowly stretch and as scales brighten. Or maybe I am a blossom that dies to become a fruit that rots to reveal a seed that is swallowed by the earth and waits in darkness to finally sprout and grow into an firmly anchored tree. Metaphors aside, I am waiting for the dramatic turning point when my true life is revealed, when I finally free of the struggles of metamorphosis.

I interviewed a man for an article on hardship and homelessness this week. At 68, he still drives his motor home in continuous circles through the valley. Unable to settle into a neighborhood, he is restless and searching for the wife and daughter lost to him in a labyrinth of mental illness. His large eyes watered and his gravelly voice slowly recounted his story. He wasn't in a hurry; he had realized that in many ways we relive the theme of our lives over and over again, haunted and trailed by hurts we can't let go of. He drives away from people but knows he will return. His journey has no real destination just the continued motion of living. When his motor home breaks down, he recycles it and buys another used one that will last for a few years. A new vehicle, same traveler.

As much as I would like to believe that I am different from him, that I really do leave things behind in the trash, that I stand naked and new after each skin is shed, I know it's not true. There are memories deeper than paper and skin that survive each change. I am like a person who has been in multiple car crashes and can no longer feel the ease normal people feel when they get behind the wheel. Other people don't have the sound of screeching tires and crunching metal to carry with them on each trip. They exist in the blissful reassurance that car crashes happen to other people, not to them. I am the crash victim except my body is my vehicle, the sight of my near fatal accidents. In the mirror as I dry off after a shower, I see the dents and scraps, the hole where my rib was removed, the scars across my chest, each embedded with memories of pain and fear. Each twinge and developing lump, brings on the fear of hospital rooms and IV poles. These scars, among others, can't be shed or lost in transformation.

I am also trying to leave behind this ridiculous desire to be a writer. That path seems as winding and futile as the homeless man's loop. Yet, the dream haunts me even though I have thrown out the pages it was recorded on. I've tried to conform my hopes to other futures but I am plagued by my characters as the homeless man is followed by the memory of his daughter. He sees her face in that of the drug-addicted girl crying on the curb. People pop up from my past to push me on with whispered praise.

I can still see the journals struggling to free themselves from the garbage bag. The memory comes as I see pictures of graduates throwing up their caps and raising their arms as if to take flight with their freedom. My brothers, the twins, will pack up their rooms like so many grads at the end of the summer. They will throw things away and leave others behind.

I want to tell them not to worry, that in life we are never truly naked and new. The people they thought were unimportant or permanently confined to the past will reappear again in supermarket aisles, in writing clubs, and in foreign cities. Everything will be recycled back into their lives one way or another. Although we are the authors of our own lives, we will discover motifs appearing unbidden in our drafts. I want to tell them that they don't need to seek their future, that it will hunt down in a dogged pursuit.

Even at birth, we come with a legacy and we cut cords that never really break. This life would be unbearable if we ever were granted those new beginnings and feelings of finality we sometimes wish for. Like furniture that keeps reappearing, journals whose word-images live on even as their pages are ground into pulp for blank pages, and lost loves who come back in dreams, we have too much weight and impact to emerge new.

A woman in the check-out line yammering on to the clerk about her finally published novel, makes me laugh at my own vanity in believing my plight was ever new, individual, or aimed toward an ultimate destination. I can shed and trash all I want but I am part of a larger narrative, told over and over again, themes never really deviating despite the alteration of details. The aspiring novelists keep sitting at their windows trying to defeat their self-doubt, the homeless men keep driving in lonely circles trying to find or forget the broken people they loved, and the graduates keep searching for the illusive real world and its promised freedom after each successive cap toss. In these ways, we are never finished, never complete, never fully healed, and never new. As mixtures of constancy and change, we are always alive.

Necessities and Itineraries

2009-05-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's the change in the weather that is inspiring my restless dreams; shifting spring breezes – infused with the scents of ocean salt, of forest dirt warming beneath dried pine nettles, and of newly-unfurled, white magnolias – spill over the mountains into our already parched valley. While the brown crumpled bodies of blossoms scattered in our driveway crunch beneath my feet, the wind whispers that there are places still green and living. Or maybe it's the photographs of multicolored paper lanterns strung from the courtyard rafters in a Korean town that are creating this tug of longing in my chest. The photos were posted by a high school friend, who is chasing his dreams of making music while teaching English on the side. In one snapshot, his pant legs are rolled up as he reclines on ancient stone steps and dips his toes into the languidly flowing foreign river. His cheeks are unshaven and his jeans are torn. His care-free smile invites me out to explore Asian countrysides.

It's been four years since I've been out of the country. While walking along Pacific Beach with my brother Eric after his birthday dinner, we spotted the Banana Bungalow, a lurid yellow building with a wooden porch facing the ocean. Eric wrinkled his nose at the sight of laundry thrown casually to dry over the mismatched beach chairs and at the cracks in the dilapidated building, losing its battle to withstand the waves of backpacking youth with their six-packs of cheap beer. Eric doesn't do hostels, partly because of the horror flick and partly because of his love for luxury. He is the kind of guy who can capitalize on his good-looks, fashion sense, and well-connected friends to crash producers' parties in Hollywood and obtain entrance to the elite clubs in Vegas. Unlike him, I stared wistfully at the decaying hostel; smiling at the memory of the place in Paris with the plastic-lined, wall-less stairwell and the tiny kitchen in Madrid where everyone passed around three coffee mugs and one jar of Nutella for breakfast. I like a little grunge, a little adventure, a little uncertainty when I travel. Luxury seems uniform to me regardless of the location. It's on the streets where you realize what makes a culture and a city unique.

It seems like everyone I know is off on a trip to New York or Florida. Each week, friends who are luck enough to live and work abroad upload albums of day trip images. I flick through the photos and think about how much I'd like to load up the car and leave for at least a week, with grander plans pending. Then, the reasons to stay put come flooding in on my one-car parade. First, like nearly everyone in this economic climate, Paul and I have no money to spare. Although, we had even less when we traveled to over ten cities in Europe. Hostels, friend's couches, street food, and an Oyster card will get you to a lot of places if you are willing to share a room with fifteen strangers and can entertain yourself on twenty euros a day. Besides, I've learned the “having no money” is a state of mind that never changes, even when bank statements do. Second, there are to-do lists to be honored. I'm tempted to wait for the mythical free space of time in our schedules that is as elusive as the end of the rainbow. There is nothing like sleeping in a new bed or waking up in a tent to cure the illusions of these self-imposed limitations.

Last night, I dreamed that a friend appeared in my living room and invited me to take a ride on this grungy towel, the kind that looks like it has been retired to car and pet drying status. In the way I can only do in dreams, I remember the secret of flying. It's not effortless, but I know how to hold my body and catch the wind just right. Like learning to ride a bike, I gain this perfect, indescribable balance, which can only come from experience, and I'm suddenly sailing on this ratty, old towel. We packed a few sack lunches (strange how dreams mix the practical and the nonsensical without discrimination) and took a trip across the country in a montage of images, which owed partial credit to the Disney film, Aladdin. I awoke to the disappointing realization that I don't know how to make towels fly. Yet, I retained the conviction that I should be able to hop in a vehicle and defy the boundaries of my normal routines.

With flying towels out of the running, I still must decide on a vehicle and a destination. Trains are wrapped in a certain amount of allure, the romantic remnants of steam billowing around them in an old-fashion station. My interest in this antiquated form of transportation is probably left over from my dad's train obsession phase. He spent years transforming a board of wood in a model town, complete with interconnected tracks, buildings airbrushed with realistic rust, and tiny decals painstakingly applied to miniature boxcar sides. Recorded train sounds clanged from his upstair bedroom; rattling the walls and creating the effect of a freight train crashing across the landing with its whistle blaring. We took entire vacations planned around California train museums (trust me, there are more of them then you would imagine). Still, train vacations haven't lost their nostalgic romance for me. A fact I will never reveal to my father because I have to stand by the fits of utter disgust I threw as a middle schooler dragged on those trips. I would hate for him to know I inherited a portion of his interest. Besides, I still maintain that there is a difference between a trip planned by train and a trip planned around trains.

There is never a right time to travel. There will always be tasks to complete at work, necessities to save for (I'm not sure my shaky old Buick is going to make it much longer), or unmissable social obligations. Yet, roving is a not a luxury. Its a nomadic need. When it says go, I have to find a tent or a car or a cheap bed and breakfast. It's saying go. There's no time to book a seat on a train. The open California highways undulating through the deserts and winding along the coasts are calling.

So, its time to make calls to a few friends and load up our trusty RAV4. We'll have to roll down the windows because the air conditioning and the engine refuse to function at the same time. Maybe, we will stop in Sacramento to visit with my grandfather. His illness has made him too weak to read any of the books crammed up to the ceiling in his study. His fingers are too blistered to strum his guitar or carve canoes out of scrap wood in his garage. I'd like to sit and talk with him in the one-on-one way I've always been too afraid to arrange because he is so damn smart it scares me.

Then, on to San Fransisco to drop in on Paul's parents and sleep on an air mattress in their kitchen. Their studio is too small to provide any other floor space. But who cares where you sleep when you are in the hilly city that inspired Amy Tan and when there are art-filled allies to explore.

After that, it's on to Portland to return the visit we have owed to our college friends, Patrick and Brycie, for so long. Books, coffee, indie music, and catching up hardly costs a thing. All we need to pack are a few pairs of jeans (I'm notorious for making one pair last a week or more), t-shirts, a few changes of underwear, and a handful of tea-tree-oil infused toiletries. Of course, we will also load up our laptops, a journal for me, and camera equipment for Paul. These are the necessities: each other, the tools of our trades, and a few familiar faces along the way. Creaky couches and late night talks are all the luxury we need. No free time, extra money, or flying towels necessary.

Make-up: A Mini Memoir

2009-05-09T15:06:00.000-07:00

Now that our tumble weed, desert town has evolved into a miniature metropolis, complete with high end retail chains, I like to wander into our newly opened Sephora. I don't go in to buy any of the slim cardboard packages glopped with drips of sample sparkly lip gloss and powdered with excess midnight eyeshadow. I venture in, fighting the crowds of teenage girls busy layering all the freebies onto their already shellacked faces, to stare at the women who work there. Their faces are masterpieces. Technicolor sunsets of shimmering lavender and pale mauve grace their eyelids. Their flared eyeliner rivals Cleopatra's glamor. The outrageous false eyelashes, which look like exotic butterflies lying in their plastic cases with their fringes of neon green feathers and disco-ball sequins, come to life batting and fluttering against their cheeks.

I'm a finger-painter and scribbler in an art museum. I touch the rows and rows of specialized brushes anchored in clear beads wondering what it be like to wield these tools. Who would I become if I could master this art of disguise, of transformation? If I could make my face a canvas, what landscapes, emotions, ideas would I paint there for the world to observe as I walked by?

On my sane days, I know better than to try. When I had to wear false eyelashes for a show, I succeeded in gluing my left eye shut. I apply makeup with a shaky hand, causing colors to clump and smear, and end up wiping of half of it in the hopes of creating a blended, natural effect. I'm terrified of ending up like a mother I knew as a kid, whose face looked like that of a cheaply made doll. Huge rounds of blush clownishly covered both her cheeks, powder blue eyeshadow smeared beyond her eyebrows, and her fire-engine red lipstick bled onto her teeth. Her blonde curls were teased to highs that should only originate in a porcelain scalp. So, I err on the side of minimalism. I have learned that this skill, like the arts of cake decorating, sketching, embroidering, calligraphy, and pretty much anything requiring delicate fine motor skills, is beyond my reach. A flawlessly application of potions and powders and the twisting of braids and curling of hair is beyond the abilities of my clumsy fingers. The best I can hope for is a slight highlighting of my natural features.

My first official make-up lessons focused on the application of eyeliner and the plucking of eyebrows. Blinking and squirming underneath my mom's tools, I learned the age old adage about the relationship between pain and beauty. As the years passed, I was introduced to other implements of torture including the wicked looking, but generally benign, eyelash curl. The only times I felt like any kind of an expert was when my brothers came into the bathroom and perched on the toilet seat to watch the ritual minor transformations of their sister. They dug around my purple makeup case using the brushes to dust the other containers like archaeologist unearthing artifacts from a lost civilization. Their fun ended when I grabbed them and offered to give them a makeover or sprayed my cotton candy body spray. They dodged my lipstick tubes and screeched as if the pink perfume burned their skin. They got their revenge by hiding behind the shower curtain until I forgot their presence and by leaping out the minute my mascara wand touched lashes. Or they opened both the closet and the cupboard doors in the small bathroom hallway to lock me in a maze of doors.

From sixth grade until my sophomore year in high school, nail polish was my chosen medium. I designed lady bugs and combined colors like aqua green with moonshine purple. The colors never stayed limited to the confines of my small curved nails. The paint oozed over onto my fingertips, my bedroom carpet, the table, and crusted in test strips all over my makeup case. I was constantly having to rearrange furniture to cover the faded spots in the carpet where I had scrubbed polish up with equally damaging nail polish remover. My painted nails were always smudged, caked, or bubbled from being held under the fan. My mom regularly offered my five bucks to clean the neon tangerine remnants from my toenails. I idolized my redhead neighbor, who managed the contortionist act of painting her toenails while driving us to school; until the day her foot got caught in the lanyard hanging from the keys stuck in the ignition. After that, we weren't allowed to ride with her.

My hair is just as uncooperative as my makeup. It slips out of braids, twists itself out of up-dos, and goes limp the minute it comes out of curlers. As a girl, I dreamed of having princess-length hair in imitation of the powerful, mystic women populating my fantasy novels. Unlike their soft-spoken, pink-clad Disney counterparts, they were archers, seers, leaders, and adventurers. Daydreaming in class, I saw my long hair, braided around a slim sliver crown, whipping around my face as I rode through the stormy night. As a young woman, I longed for a chic bob, sleek with flapper-like sophistication. Neither extreme conformed to my imagination. Both managed to become a combination of limp strands and unruly fly-aways, which gave me that same child-waiting-for-a-mother-with-a-brush look. I dyed my hair only once. It was a lovely auburn red that was meant to catch the attention of a boy too stupid or uninterested to know that I liked him.

In college, I threw it all away. It added up to a full garbage bag of half-dried polishes, wrong-colored powders, and disappointing, clumpy creams. I thought college would be a place of the mind, where outer appearances finally took a backseat to intelligence and creativity. I went a year with product-free, hippie hair and a face covered only in a sheen of lotion. It didn't last because I was too interested in what its like to be other people to stick to one image. I missed experimenting, missed playing with the most easily altered aspect of my identity.

I watch people and mimic the ones I like. If the trends look too ridiculous on me or are beyond my budget, I incorporate them into my fiction instead. I play with henna and contemplate tattoos or piercings because I like the look of the girl playing the guitar at the coffee shop. Her green body ink and silver studs say that she has no interest in a life within the system of business suits and cubicles. They are the insignia of the outcast artist living within a different value system. Yet, I am also captured by the meticulously arranged curls of black hair falling down the back of the young mother in the supermarket. She dedicates time each morning bringing them into existence. I want to know why.

I, humble finger painter though I may be, am searching for that perfect combination: the lavender lipstick from the author at her book signing; the effortless draping of scarves from Middle Eastern classmates; and the dark eyeliner on the teen drawing in her journal at Barnes and Noble. The combination that turns me into the main character in my own story. The exact look that transforms this biological face into an outer expression of my inner life. The poetry of clothing. The impression of a face. The lyrics of hair. The musical stanza of perfume.

Isn't that what we are all attempting to do with our adornments and styles? We are trying to communicate the mood and theme of our inner worlds. We are showing passers by the genre we are living in. Like book covers, our bodies say this is a tale of romance, of glamor, of rebellion, of spiritual seeking, of outdoor adventure, or of the downtrodden average man. I love the disco-ball eyelashes and the nose piercings, in the same way I love but could never write fantasy.

Still, it is always fun to play – to dabble in other areas even if you look silly and to get covered up to your elbows in paint. I hate when people attack others for being wannabes, trendy, or posers. Fear of attack limits us. It forces us to chose and stick with those choices. When in reality, many of us have diverse tastes. We like to wander all the aisles of a bookstore. We like Michelangelo and Warhol. Some days, we would rather wear bright purple tutus with fishnet stockings and combat boots. Some days, we would like to try on a pair of outrageous false eyelashes or to paint our nails sunshine yellow. Other days, we want to wrap ourselves in cotton tunics and let our hair loose. After all, the joys of creating and inventing should never be limited to the masters.

Recreating Eden

2009-05-03T10:25:00.000-07:00

My parents are fast becoming full-fledged urban homesteaders. Each time I make the five minute drive between my in-laws' house, where my husband and I live with three empty rooms, his sister's golden retriever, and a plastic astroturf lawn, and my parent's home, I always anticipate some strange new development. It all started with a garden – a seemingly simple, normal idea. My dad decided to grow one after I announced I was going vegan halfway through my cancer treatments. Seeing his only daughter bald with a surgery wound circumnavigating half her torso rekindled my dad's dream to grow his own organic food. He bought some books off the internet, reminisced about the garden his parents grew outside his childhood home before they had to sell, and typed out a seasonal vegetable lists.

Growing a vegetable garden to feed a family of seven turned out to be a huge endeavor, which required more than a leisurely Sunday afternoon spent tootling around the sun-drenched rows of glistening tomatoes. Yet, the dream had already taken root in my parents souls, barring all sorts of go-green, hippie-loving practices. I'm not sure when I realized the garden wouldn't be just a garden in the traditional sense, but the birth of a new era in our family history. Maybe it was the appearance of Mother Earth Magazine and The Farmer's Almanac casually replacing the National Geographic Magazines and Woman's Days on the coffee table. The bookshelves also morphed, displaying a plethora of green bindings with titles like Choosing Simplicity and Clean Green. My mom offered to let me borrow them as she walked from the bathroom to the kitchen armed with a spray bottle full homemade cleaning solution consisting mainly of vinegar, baking soda, and tea tree oil.

The day I pulled up into the driveway behind my dad's truck stacked high with hay bales, I knew my brothers were in for a world of good-old-fashion work. I found them all out back on their hands and knees digging in the dirt, which they had already spent weeks weeding and churning up with a rototiller. A rock-rising bucket sat an arm-distance from each of them. The plopped pebbles in to be cleaned for my dad's soon-to-be-designed rock garden. Each boy had some sort of digging instrument, ranging from trowels to hoes, and they were yanking up the massive network of roots left behind by the long-gone lawn. Our six-toed orange cat, my father's faithful companion in all his activities, was rolling in the dirt next to my dad as if he were the result of cross-breeding between a faithful, lazy farm dog and a chinchilla. Their suburban backyard had become a portal to Oklahoma farm lands during the dust bowl, nothing green in sight.

My dad grinned up at me from beneath the shade of his straw hat. He gestured to the dirt with pride and asked me how I thought the garden was coming along. The five boxes he had constructed out of the wood that was once meant to become our playground sat waiting to be used on the patio. I retreated inside before someone could hand me a shovel. As I started dinner, my mom showed off the sprouts she had been growing in the cupboard. She snatched up and sliced the avocado peel and bell pepper innards that I discarded. She went into the backyard to dump these remains into the compost pile and returned with a few fresh cut herbs from her very own mini, picnic-table-top garden. Then, she started talking about chickens.

My brothers and I have spent weeks since trying to convince her that her beloved chihuahua and miniature fox terrier would playfully rip any chickens to pieces. Still, she cuts DIY chicken coop designs out of magazines and leaves them around for my youngest and most-likely-to-succeed-at-wood-working brother, Jacob. He isn't taking the bait, he would rather take his bow and arrows into the backyard to attach the hay bales, stacked and waiting to be dismantled. We try to tell her the dogs will slip under the chicken-wire and get their little faces pecked and scratched. Our gruesome warnings and reminders that chickens are most likely against home owners regulations are to no avail. She has already picked out names, Ginger and Red, and is thoroughly convinced of their value as garden-aiding pets. She is lost in dreams of their little beaks delicately plucking insects off lettuce leaves. She can already hear the soothing sounds of calm clucking and idle dirt scratching as they mill around the yard. No dark visions can successful cloud her sunny suburban homestead dreams.

I try not to worry too much. There are way worse habits and hobbies my parents could indulge in now that they will soon only have one child at home. Having a designated bucket to catch water while the shower is warming up or buying canisters of live lady bugs at the farmer's market can't be that strange. Besides, any day now, we won't have to battle the crowds in florescent-lit aisles searching for something that resembles food. We will be able to eat our vegetables straight out of the dirt still pulsing with the sun's life and energy. Perhaps, we will never be able to go back to supermarket produce after we have tasted the fresh reward of my brothers' and dad's hard work. We will be able to sit down in the evening to a salad and homemade soup completely prepared by each member of the family instead of individually eating microwaved meals over the sink in shifts. This promise of a garden reminds me that people are meant to live together, children help parents, neighbors offering a hand, dogs and chickens learning to coexist in harmony. We are not suited for this life of convenience foods and mini-mansions where four-person families lose each other in the great vacuums of privacy. Real life is made of dirt, sunshine, and the pursuit of crazy dreams. After all, paradise is a garden.

Photographs and Memories

2009-04-27T12:21:00.001-07:00

Click! Click! Click! Glancing up from my book, I look directly into the cyclops eye of my husband's newest lens protruding from the center of his face. He crouches on the floor at the foot of our bed like a nature photographer stealthy capturing images of an unknowing animal in its habitat. It is ten thirty at night and I am in my wrinkly PJs scrunched down between pillows, reading by the bedside table lamp light. Crab-walking, he moves to a new angle, never once lowering his lens. I hold my book over my face blocking his shot. Click!Click!Click! The rapid succession of his professional, high resolution camera makes its digital images inches from my face.

“Paul! I'm trying to relax. Don't take pictures of me right now.” We have had this discussion many times before. He lowers his camera enough to peak out above it. He doesn't speak for a minute, hoping I will forget he is there if he is quiet and still enough. But I'm not a lion or a zebra in a clearing. I know he is still there, waiting.

“You'll be sorry when you don't have pictures of your normal, day to day life.” He lifts his camera again and takes close-ups as I glower. “Besides, what did you expect, marrying a photographer?”

I didn't just marry a photographer like Ansel Adams or Ann Geddes or Annie Leibovitz, who focus on drawing out the beauty, majesty, and downright adorableness of their subjects; I had to go a marry a photojournalist. Someone who loves to capture the reality of moments, of human interactions, of life, and who thinks the best moments are when the subject forgets there is a camera present. A photographer who believes even the smallest of photoshop touch-ups are an affront to his work, a gross simplification and cover-up of the truth in the work. Unfortunately, the reality for me at this moment is an exhausted, makeup-free face revealing a few unsightly red zits, the remnants of mascara smudged unevenly beneath both eyes, hair still damp on my forehead and sticking up in different directions, and that downward gaze of intense concentration I never see in the mirror. The gaze that somehow makes the promise of old lady jowls (genetic inheritance from my dad's mother) appear in the etched lines above my frown.

Is he right? Will I be grateful to have these unflattering, candid photos sprinkled in with the planned ones, where I at least have a fighting chance to look beautiful with make-up and day clothes? I mentally review the jumble of childhood photographs stored in the linen closet at my parent's. It has housed so many albums and boxes over the years that the shelves collapsed. Those wood panels are now mixed in with the framed photos and plastic storage tubs of snapshots. Anyone who wants to look at the photos, must stand back when opening the cupboard to avoid the avalanche of memories sure to come cascading out onto the floor. Despite this hazard, I regularly dig through this mine of images searching for treasures.

I love to see my nine-year-old, missing-teeth grin hovering proudly above the Jello poke cake decorated with berries to look like the American flag for the neighborhood fourth of July block party. There are four pictures of me with different blanket bundles of baby brothers. There is my tween self with two-inch dark blue nails, humongous hoop earrings, a choker necklace, and a hippie bus t-shirt three sizes too big. In one high school homecoming photo, I am bending over to fasten my seatbelt. Ducking below the window line of my date's red Mustang, the top of my black strapless gown is hidden and I appear to be completely naked in the passenger seat. I remember the billows of taffeta scratching my legs, the jolt of the car when he ran over two curbs out of nervousness, and the way his mom laughed and laughed upon seeing that photo.

I am the one who pulls out the family videos every few months, much to my youngest brother's horror. Being the baby, he hates when all eyes are on him and all his birthday videos show him hiding his head under the table cloth, begging everyone to stop singing happy birthday to him. I love the video of me and him on a windy, cold beach. He pokes his fluffy blond head out of the gigantic hole my dad dug and I bring him yards of seaweed to decorate this fort like a momma bird bringing food back to the nest. The video is taken from afar by my dad, unseen and distant straining the zoom feature to its max. It reminds me that we had this childhood play time together even though we are ten years apart. I am in eighth grade, almost lost to his barely four-year-old self.

My mom also hates this ritual, mainly because she gets sucked into watching the video despite her best efforts to stay away. She perches on the arm of the couch and shakes her head sadly saying how young and sweet those babies were. She mourns their loss like we aren't the grown versions of those tangled-hair toddlers laughing and leaping in front of the lens. In part she is right, those people are long gone, swallowed up in the march of time, existing now only in memory. Perhaps, this is why I like studying them so much, to trace my steps back on the path that will led me to my future. Without them, this motley succession of selves, I am only wandering.

I know he is right, even though I cringe as he uploads these candid shots to the internet. One day, I will look back and I won't see the smattering of moles across my cheek, the under-plucked eyebrows, or the unsightly bulge puckering above my elbow and around my hips. I'll see the young women I once was, still wondering about her future, just beginning in her first years of marriage, at a moment in-between youth and adulthood. I will laugh remembering the red pillows I bought for our bed and the smell of the golden retriever snuggling down into the comforter she was never supposed to be allowed on. This will be lost to me in the same way my favorite pink bunny doll with the twisty ears, the golden shoulder-length earrings, and grey Whittier sweatshirt are lost. I will turn to Paul and ask when this picture was taken. Why was my hair so short? Why, again, were we living in your parent's house? We will remember where we came from and wonder where we are going. Perhaps, my daughter will study this face in awe, trying to piece together who I was in that mysterious world that existed before she did. In the same way, I studied my mom's pictures: a delicately thin twenty-something standing at the stove of a house I can't remember in Florida; a teenager looking like a model with her soft layers of feathered hair as my grandfather snaps her senior portrait; and the child, who ran off to read books under trees, cuddling the family's pet raccoon. Did she smile with pride after baking her first cake or smirk with rebellion while brandishing multi-colored nails for the camera? Does she remember the heavy, warm weight of a brand new sibling or the rustle of her first formal dress?

It is only fair that I have this photojournalist husband, capturing truth in his own way, because, as he clicks away, I scribble in notebooks and type at my computer creating a net for those same flittering bits of truth. Together we collect these feelings, emotions, and moments like birds collecting bits of string, broken twigs, and shiny gum wrappers. Out of the ordinary stuff, mistaken by others as litter or leftovers, we are building ourselves a nest, our own intricate network of time threaded together to make some deeper sense of this world, a place to retreat when it all seems to be chaos and random chance. We can look back and see that even an everyday evening was significant, a strand woven in to hold our lives together.

Gifted

2009-04-18T12:47:00.000-07:00

There is a gift that comes with being disabled. It is not just the bright blue placard that comes directly to my home every two years like a subscription; its wheelchair symbol proclaiming my right to park in those coveted upfront spaces. No need to contact the DMV for a renewal. I'm on a special list; my condition is forever. Although unlimited parking for life seems ideal, it is more of a consolation prize than a gift. My gift is subtle, so elusive I forget that I possess it. Sometimes, I need to fall on my face to remember.

A few weeks ago, I fell on my face, literally. I was using an old, back-up leg with a crack in the plastic socket, which pinched my skin if I moved to quickly, and a knee with all the advanced technology of a door hinge. My regular leg was in the shop being correctly aligned and updated to get rid of the irritating squeaking that had accompanied my every step for the last two years. As I walked across my parents' living room, my door-hinge knee failed to swing my leg out in front of me and I fell into the empty space. My arms were preoccupied with pushing my body away from the corner of the end table, so I half-dived, half-bellyflopped, smacking my chin and right cheekbone onto the tile.

Falling unexpectedly comes with the territory. My first prosthetist regularly scolded me for putting my hands in my pocket, warning me to be ready at any moment to find myself hurtling to the ground. A point that hit home the first time I fell, with a decorative glass jar of M&Ms in my hands, landing in a spray of broken shards and bouncing Christmas-colored candies. Its a reality I have grown accustomed to like the occasional fantom limb pain shooting through my body like an electric jolt causing me to twitch or the longing that comes from seeing other girls in summer dresses and sandals. How wonderful it must be to throw on a slip of fabric and leave your legs bare to bake in the sun or to flip off your shoes and walk with naked feet in dewy grass; to not have to dress a clunky piece of machinery each morning or wrestle a tennis shoe onto a plastic foot as yielding and natural as Barbie's toeless feet. Falling has become as common as finding a child beside me trying to mimic the pitching motion of my gait, like a ship rocking in the beginnings of a storm, and the stiffness of my ankle. They study me carefully, unaware that I am watching, and then try to adjust their own living limbs to match. After a bit, they give up. Their supple tendons, flexible muscles, and complex skeletal networks are too specialized and competent to mime the simplicity of my titanium pipe and springs.

I fell, not for the first or last time, and I cried like a three-year-old as soon as I hit the ground. The mixture of pain and embarrassment triggered that child-like response, lurking close beneath the facade of being an untouchable adult. Before I could pull myself up, my husband was there, kneeling on the ground, sliding his body beneath mine, and creating a human chair of his legs and chest for me to lean against. He stroked my forehead and examined my face, saying all the while that everything was okay and urging me to rest there for a moment. I don't know how he got there so fast from his spot across the room on the couch. He reacted with instinctual speed. It was then, as my dad told my mom to get some frozen peas from the freezer and my husband stayed on the floor with me, that I remembered the gift that comes with being disabled. It is like an extra sense. Disability never lets you forget your vulnerability, your need for helping hands and your gratitude when you find you are loved regardless of your shipwreck walk, constant crashes to earth, and inability to walk barefoot or curl up cross-legged. Other flaws can be hidden, disguised, or ignored, but it only takes a flight of stairs, a close-fitting pair of jeans, or misstep to destroy my delusions of one day being perfectly independent, beyond reproach or humility. With each step, my gift buried just beneath my consciousness whispers that I am human – frail, breakable, and clumsy. But I am also reminded – as I reach out an arm for support, climb theater steps for an audition, walk into a classroom full of children with their embarrassingly innocent questions – that I am brave, perseverant, and in essence something more than my body could ever contain.

As I leaned against my husband with icy veggies clutched over a fast forming bump, I thought of the day, years ago, when I allowed Paul to carry me down the shore and into the ocean. It was the first time, since my amputation at age fifteen, that I had felt the rhythm of the waves buoying up my body and the salt water splashing against my face. He had to lift me off my beach towel, where I usually spent summers reading a book in the hot sun pretending the ocean beyond my reach wasn't beckoning, and carried me past people starring at my scared remains of a leg. Unlike a pool, where the water is a few hops from the lawn chair where I leave my prosthetic leg, the ocean water is separated from my towel by a stretch of sand and shallows. It was embarrassing to leave the safety of my jean-clad prosthesis and to reveal my vulnerability to a beach-full of strangers. But that moment passed quickly and I had an army of brothers dancing around me, daring anyone to make a comment or ask a question. Then, I was in the ocean, clinging to Paul's shoulders to steady myself in the ebb and flow, squinting at the too-close blur of his smile in bubble of bright sun coming from water and sky. The memory is so distant and faded I can hardly remember the living pulse of those deep waters swirling against my skin. Perhaps, it is time again to relinquish the cocoon of almost-passing to be lifted into willing arms and transported into the sea, to accept the gift of love given to one as imperfect and broken as I am.

Facebook Reopens Religious Wounds

2009-04-11T12:20:00.000-07:00

In the barrage of random request for friendship, groups, and causes that regularly pop up in the special corner of my Facebook homepage, one rainbow color icon caught my attention and challenged me to revisit the religious turmoil of my youth, quite a feat for such a small graphic. The actual group description wasn't the catalyst for my week-long distress; I was familiar with the ideas it explained and had no doubts about joining. The seemingly benign step of selecting other friends from my eclectic list to join the group provoked a shocking self-discovery. I had checked only the people who would be sympathetic to the cause. I skipped over most of the people living in my current community or from my high school days. In doing so, I was editing my own personality, choosing to appear a certain way to those friends who are best described as fundamentalist Christians, and destroying the whole purpose of the group. I was supposed to be challenging my cyber social circle with the knowledge that I know and love gay people and believe that they deserve nothing short of equal rights. Instead, I was hiding, afraid of the epic flood of Bible verses and your-so-misguided-and-going-secular head shakes that were sure to find their way back into my life via my seemingly harmless social networking site.

It reminded me of the day I found out Paul, my then high school boyfriend and now husband, believed gay men were spiritually diseased. We were sprawled, stomachs-down on the trampoline in my backyard reading our summer AP assignments and baking in the sun when he revealed this belief. It was a complicated issue for a teenage, fledgling relationship to handle, but I couldn't let it pass. My uncle is gay and I grew up knowing that the mythically tall, African American man who had a fondness for belting out songs, especially the disco ballad Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain, was his long-time partner. While my church hardly ever spoke about sex (in fact, make that never, except in the cases of Old Testament readings where it was briefly acknowledge with nervous smiles then left alone) and I had heard the word “gay” used regularly as a derogatory term, especially from middle school boys who seem to posses a heightened sensitivity to all things sexual, I was relatively naïve when it came to the strong religious views against homosexuality. Paul, on the other hand, had always been told homosexuality was a sin, a perversion which needs to be exorcised out of the sinner before they are able to accept Jesus as their lord and savior. He had never had the opportunity to meet an openly gay person. In our suburbia, they are treated more like hypothetical others living and doing evil deeds in some film-noir-like, modern day Gomorrah. Like lepers, they are cast out of the normal realms of society. They are not brothers, friends, uncles, or fathers. And they are certainly not mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers.

Needless to say, for those who know him, Paul has had many experiences and paradigm shifts since that summer day. Depending on the camp you belong to, he has either grown to open his mind or fallen woefully far from grace. The part that troubles me is that I thought I was beyond the time when I had to hide my beliefs and seethe silently at the bigotry clothed in religious righteousness being preached around me. I thought I was beyond the time when I would simply sit, burning with shame, as a youth pastor announce that girls had to wear one pieces to the pool party so as not to tempt the boys into sinful thoughts. I only owned a bikini. Yet, I am back in my hometown where almost every lawn sported a yellow sign with a smiling family saying yes to Prop 8 and where a church actually sponsored a speaker to come lecture on the premises that the Nazis were all homosexual. A place where people regularly ask how your walk with Christ is going.

My second thought, after realizing that I am still afraid of these conservative Christian's opinions of me, was that if it is this hard for me to let everyone in my life know I support gay rights, how much harder is it for my uncle and my gay friends to live in this world? How would it feel to be told by strangers that you are perverted, depraved, spiritually diseased, next to rapists and child molesters? To hide your identity from parents, friends, colleagues until you can't stand it any longer? If I was so easily and regularly shamed about my “normal” sexuality in youth group, than how much more so those afflicted by “the spiritual disease”? I have seen the depression that results from this shame and hate. I have also seen the damage done from being tolerated but not accepted or celebrated. It is not harmless to disagree with homosexuality on religious principle. Nor is it necessary.

In the same week, I read a post about how the number of proclaimed Christians is decreasing, while the number of those who identify themselves as being secular is increasing. It really comes as no surprised to me. I don't want to be identified with this new gospel of hate that is more obsessed with what people are doing in their bedrooms than with global injustice and prejudice. I am more concerned with how we own the mass amounts of goods in the world while millions suffer and with the sanctioned violence perpetrated by the world's armies, than I am with how people chose to express their sexuality. This may be presumptuous of me, but I think Jesus, a peace-preaching nomad with a heart for healing the poor and overturning the rules and roles of society, is, too. Since when did middle class American values become synonymous with Christian values? When was Jesus reduced to being the poster boy for the religious right, endorsing the institutions of the nuclear family, capitalism, and nationalism?

My favorite part of my religious upbringing is communion. Even as a child, I was moved by the way everyone came forward, young women holding babies, old men wheeled up in their chairs, teenagers in saggy jeans, and newly-communed elementary school children both nervous and proud; everyone received a piece of God on the tongues. That is what the church should be in this world, an open table serving otherworldly love. We are not called to judge, to hate, to uplift one country's interest over all the rest or to use the Bible to marginalize others. All we are called to do is love and give. It is a testament to how hard those two things are that we are continually searching for easier roles.

In the end, I messaged every “friend” I had and wrote this blog, despite worries that some readers will never click on my link again. I know it is an infinitesimal act compared to what some do and live with everyday. Yet, it is important that people know I love my zany uncle, who dresses in mock drag to earn money for charities, who quit his successful sales job to pursue his dream of becoming an art photographer, who dares to make conventionally ugly spaces hauntingly beautiful, and who still lives his life with the same overflowing presence that made me run from his overly exuberant embraces as a child. He deserves his rights in every element of society. This may mean nothing to many people, but it changed Paul's mind all those years ago and freed him to live a life he may never have known before. It wasn't necessarily anything I had to say that changed him, but his own willingness to get to know the people he had been taught to insulate himself against that opened new friendships. Through love and understanding, he grew, and continues to grow, beyond the confines of his upbringing.

So, feel free to send me those obscure Old Testament verses about sexuality, but before you do, take a moment to remember the verses used to support slavery, segregation, and innumerable incidences of violence throughout history. Ask yourself if you want to be a force of love or a force of hate in this world, someone who heals or someone who wounds.

Multiple Personalities and Mixed Metaphors

2009-04-03T17:14:00.000-07:00

Empty days hold limitless potential or are hollow from depressing lack, depending on my mood. Lately, each day stretches out like a blank canvas illuminated in the dawn's light, hungry to be filled, yet evening yields only a few meager sketches in one corner with my own dirty footprints smudged across the remaining white space. It's a post-college conundrum worsened by our drooping, dragging economy. We are high on enthusiasm, idealism, and dreams, but low on opportunities. I know too many insanely intelligent and gifted people who are out of work or who have settled for jobs that neither challenge them nor meet their financial needs. My husband, a photojournalist, has taken to tracking the decline of the nation's newspapers with the fervor and distress of World Wildlife Fund worker clutching the endangered species list. Instead of frivolous posts, Facebook features SOS signals begging the vast online community to toss out a job. My brother, a senior in high school, can't even find a part-time job busing tables or blending smoothies. Things certainly do look bleak.

Yet, I am not easily afflicted by pessimism. I have continued to plan, search, think creatively, network, research, and do all the other good stuff which makes up the mantras of career counselors everywhere. Being a self-help junkie, I also enjoy the occasional indulgence in those addictive find-your-true-self exercises. While completing one, a collage meant to represent my desired future, I uncovered another problem implicit in keeping post-college students stuck.

My future collage appeared to be done by five very different people. In one corner, a glossy magazine cut-out of a yurt peaked over an illustration of a city loft further layered over by a beach cottage with fuchsia bougainvillea blossoms crawling up its wall. Next to this impossible neighborhood of dream dwellings, a cut-out of a teacher in a yellow cardigan smiling over a forest of raised hands was glued to a photograph of a delicate bird tattoo flying across a woman's back. A train thundered across images of India and well-worn backpacks. The whole continent of Africa made it into the kaleidescope of dreams as well as a computer graphic of a guitar. There was a theater stage, a bicycle, a veggie garden, an underground art scene, an image of interlinking hands, and words like inner peace, change, love, activism, and authentic scrawled over the pictures in glittery gel pen ink. In between a newspaper clipping of the New York Times Bestseller list (dream on) and an advertisement for a pottery wheel, cartoon children beamed up from the page asking not to be forgotten. How could these be the wishes of just one person?

I decided to attack my out-of-control collage with a healthy dose of realistic thinking. I couldn't possibly want all of these lives equally, some must have been whims implanted by the idealization of alternative lifestyles. Yet, I couldn't bring myself to rip up any pictures. They became an interconnecting web of paper and glue, no longer separable. Besides, each picture contained a feeling, a facet of myself, a whole imagined life that I was not ready to rule out. I thought maybe the tattoo could go; I hate needles. Or the guitar, I don't know the first thing about playing and will probably be horrible considering I have no rhythm. But no, they had come to stay, whispering that I am still the wild little girl who insisted on wearing flimsy, spaghetti-strapped undershirts as tank tops with white cowgirl boots and a hot pink boa. Okay then, I thought, maybe the mommy or the teacher pictures can go. No, they wouldn't budge. I sometimes feel as if those children are already here, hiding behind the corner or smiling in my review mirror, waiting with eager minds and open hearts. Like reversed phantom limb pain, they are already a part of me that has yet to materialize. So, there I was, not at a cross roads, but in a clearing with ten different roads branching out in different directions and I was not sure how to start my journey down one, much less, how to walk all of them at once.

When driving on the freeway, I always marvel at the fact that each car contains a person with a life and a network of relationships. It seems impossible, mind-baffling, that there are more of these freeways all over the world with millions of cars and even more people connected to them. It is unfathomable that each and every one of those humans is orbited by their own invisible galaxies of potential lives. It makes the idea of reincarnation appealing, a chance for each of us to live out all those different preferences. But I am pretty sure I only have this one little body, broken and needy, and this one life from which to explore the vastness of experience. Sometimes it feels like trying to see all of China from my brother's old red wagon. Although, it occurs to me that seeing China in a child's wagon might be a far more amazing experience than seeing it by car or train. Imagine all the people you would meet as you hauled your wagon into mountain villages for repair after days on bumpy dirt roads. You would feel everything in a wagon from the warm sunshine to the torrents of rain. There would be no barrier between you and the world.

In the end, I found guidance – not in the glossy self-help section – on the art shelves in an out-of-the-way corner. There I found Frida, an old love, who spoke to me from out of her many self portraits, saying that it is not so much the what of our lives that matters, but how we process it and share it with others. It is the chronicling, honest and raw, that transcends the details to arrive in a realm of universality. Her cracked-column spine and nail-pierced skin reminded me that the most barren times are often fallow fields about to yield the most abundant crops.

As I jump up and down in my bedroom, frustrated at a lack of forward progress, I realize that perhaps I am diver bouncing on the tip of the board about to take the plunge. Perhaps, life is not a series of roads or even a two-dimensional canvas but a body of water mixing and flowing with the water of many rivers. We must become comfortable immersing ourselves in our vast waters without even the meager protection of a red wagon, knowing there will be storms and stillness, depths and shallows. My empty days are immeasurable oceans waiting to be swum.

A Childhood Good-bye

2009-03-25T22:23:00.001-07:00

I noticed the road, curving and black like the body of a dead snake splayed in the grass, as I drove home. Cutting its way through the mountainside, the unfinished road dipped out of view under the branches of a few remaining oaks. The roadside barrier stitched together upturned dirt and fresh asphalt. I felt guilty for not noticing the road earlier, for missing the signs of its construction. Like a preoccupied mother discovering a scar on her child without ever knowing about the initial wound, I had neglected to see this change day after day; even though I have known of its coming for years.

The ring of mountains behind our housing track never belonged to us. The huge yellow signs posted on the dead-end barrier and anchored in the riverbed sand told us this much. Yet, these signs were easily left behind as we ventured along the winding paths to mossy wells, to Native American's acorn-grinding holes, to rusted wheel-less trucks, to mud-brick walls, to abandoned tree houses, and to color-splattered paintball battlefields. Beneath the twisted oaks, charred black by wildfires, my brother and I set out on adventures, both real and imagined. We found suitcases broken open and hemorrhaging t-shirts, faded jeans, and little boy's superman undies. From the lost garments, we tried to piece together the possible experiences of an illegal family on the run. Not daring to touch the white bits of clothing, we saved the feeling of them in our minds. We also horded collections of dusty bottle caps, unbroken paint balls, and tiny acorn hats. Each contained an inexpressible fragment of childhood wonder.

We imagined that we were the true owners of the land. We stole scraps of fabric from my mother's craft cupboard and painted it with smashed berries. Whoever was out of our good graces had to play the white villain to our rag-tag, make-believe tribe of neighborhood kids. When we were still in elementary school, my brother, my next-door neighbor, and I had the glorious plan to runaway to these mountains and live off the land. The plan was sabotaged by her babysitter during its first phase. Still, the riverbed and hillside paths never lost the allure for us. Each clearing housed layers of memories.

After it rained and the dry sand disappeared under a rush of water, we spent sunny afternoons wading in the reborn river. My best friend and I lingered behind my mother, who was engulfed in a flurry of fist-pumping delight created by my little brothers. Ankle deep in sparkling water, we whispered about boys and our plans to be friends forever. We promised each other that we would live in a cabin. As a famous movie star, I would have to show up in dark glasses and a head scarf, a lá Audrey Hepburn. She would spend her days saving babies in Africa. Our dreams stretched on with the stream and soaked into the earth.

On summer nights, my aunt told us ghost stories as we scrambled through the shadowy brush. The riverbed was eerily illuminated by back porch lights lining the path. She ran ahead, leaving us screeching wildly in the dark. She leapt out from behind a tree trunk and grabbed us as we pelted down the path. Screaming turned to laughter as we found comfort in our attacker's embrace.

All this never belonged to us, but we claimed it anyway. We explored all its trails, scaled its rocks, and took family Christmas pictures perched on its hillsides, as if they were our living room couches. The riverbed and mountains were an extension of our neighborhood, our backyard, our imaginations. Shaggy hair teens in clouds of cologne made pilgrimages there to push the limits of their adolescent freedom. Mothers with strollers came seeking solace. Families came with lawn chairs, picnic baskets, and binoculars. Yet, all our hours spent there and all our invisible watermarks of memory couldn't save it from its rightful owners.

The casino came and grew, spreading its neon golf courses and electric purple glow into our borrowed wilderness. The traffic doubled and tractors came to dig out trenches for asphalt rivers. The Native Americans, who we emulated in our childhood games, were covered over in bronze. One, a woman clutching her child, stands frozen forever by a lifeless pool in a smoking-filled, teeming lobby. Her metal eyes search for a shore beyond the oceans of parking spaces. People come and go, too blinded by booze and greed to see her.

Now, the road comes slicing through to make good on the promise of those once-benign yellow signs. There will be no more family talks accompanied by the satisfying crunch of dirt, no more paintball battles raging in the brush, and no more explorations along sage-scented trails. Years ago, we staged our one small attempt at rebellion. Under the cover of rain, we marched into the hills and pulled out the construction workers' markers, ripped away their pink plastic flags, and toppled their white pipes. We danced, crazy and howling, with rain weighing down our jeans and streaking down our cheeks. Deflated and dripping, we went home.

Even as the roads rise up to close in on us from every side, we know we can do nothing. We can't bear to be hypocrites; to say to the true owners that nature is a thing of beauty, not comparable to wealth or progress. We can't say it because we are the bringers of selfishness, of a heaven in the sky far away from this earth, of walls and communities that work themselves deep into the ground. We chose to build this world of asphalt, neon, smoke, blaring music, and the constant clinking coins on our portion of earth, which is why we had to borrow theirs in the first place.

We watch in silence as our neighbors race to fulfill the hypnotic call of our advertised, air-brushed dream. Hanging our heads, we wish we could scream, “don't follow us, this is not the way.” But we are too proud and too afraid of who we will be without our big screens, SUVs, convenience foods, and mega churches. We whisper our good-byes to dust, to twisted oaks, to the drying and swelling of riverbeds, to childhoods spent seeking adventures among the trees, to the scent of sage, and to the quick flash of a rabbit darting under the shadow of a hawk. Soon, we will all be standing under the florescence glow of super mart aisles looking for something we will never find in any of our nation's identical strip malls. We console ourselves with the fact that new families need large homes, that people need mega marts, movie multiplexes, and the convince of twenty fast food drive-ins...more than swaying wildflowers...more than mossy rocks... more than a secret place to come of age...more than earth...more than sky...

Why I Can't Teach

2009-03-19T16:03:00.000-07:00

By all accounts, I should be a teacher. I was the kid who forced all the other kids on the cul-de-sac to spend scorching summer afternoons sitting in a row of mismatched chairs and doing the assignments I dreamed up. Circulating the room, I mimicked the remarks I had heard my teachers make – gentle criticism, quiet praise, and calm reprimands. I was also the student continually praised for leaning over to help other students, whether they asked for it or not. I could be counted on to wrangle a quality project out of even the most motley group. Besides, it's supposed to be in my blood. I come from a family of teachers, five of them to be exact. I watched my mother go though the credentialing program and lug crates of books into her first classroom.

The year I graduated from college, I tallied up all these qualifications (including the fact that I absolutely adore school) and enrolled in a teaching program. The application was easy. Since I had spent numerous summers wiping noses, tying shoes, consoling criers, talking to parents about sticky issues, and managing the mayhem that is summer day camp, I had a plethora of crisis control scenarios to draw on. I was in and prepared to be transformed into the most inspiring, creative educator since Ms. Frizzle.

I still remember the thrill of the first day of student teaching. Walking down the elementary school hall, I delighted in the scent (something akin to play dough), the neat rows of books, and the sweetly clumsy student art stapled to bulletin boards. I knew that group of fourth and fifth graders were partially mine to influence, guide, and teach. The sense of responsibility and purpose was nearly overwhelming. I couldn't wait to open the door and find them sitting there, my first class.

What awaited me was a worksheet sweatshop. Thirty eight to ten year olds bent low over their desks, their pencils working furiously. They glanced up only to check the list on the chalkboard of the six practice book pages they were supposed to complete before lunch. Occasionally, a student stood up to walk to the trays at the back of the room and deposit a finished worksheet. Interruptions were quickly stifled by the teacher, who sat at the front of the room wielding a stamp and a stapler like a judge wields a gavel. I swear she had talons instead of fingers curled around that teddy bear stamp. The finished worksheets were redistributed throughout the room with red pen marks, a red stamp, and, for the lucky ones, tickets. A's were rewarded with three tickets, B's with two, and C's with one. Everyone else went without. I would soon discover that my chief job as student teacher would be grade book keeper, second official grader with stamp and red pen privileges, and grand high ticket distributor.

I sat in the back of the class, dressed in fresh-pressed slacks and a blazer, wanting to cry or puke or both. School had never been this much of a nightmare for me. Yet, even during the dark days in that modern classroom driven by test scores and ruled by massed produced curriculum, I made connections with my fellow refugees. There was the boy who always got F's on every worksheet but had a wicked sense of humor and an unbreakable heart. He always knew when another classmate was upset. He knew when to make them laugh with his vaudevillian antics and when to console them with words beyond his years. There was the girl who stubbornly struggled with every concept, pouting at her worksheets as if the hid their secrets from her on purpose. She had a fabulous sense of style and decked herself out in glitter, cowgirl boats, faux fur coats, dangling star earrings, jaunty caps, and once a pink feather boa. As I walked around the classroom pretending to help with their worksheets (some so poorly constructed that it took me a few minutes of rifling through the teacher's edition before I could puzzle out what they were asking the student to do), I slowly discovered the traits and histories that made each student unique.

Then, I made a big mistake. I feel in love with each and everyone of them. Even the trouble maker, whose roguish grin and one cocked eye brow could have rivaled those of James Dean. Even the girl who could barely read and came to school with uncombed hair and an empty stomach because she had to get breakfast for her younger siblings. It was no longer about me and my life-path. It was about them. They were getting lost under the blanket of standards, Scantron sheets, and skill drills.

I thought about them as I sat in the teachers' meeting, while the fourth grade team spent hours puzzling over the graphs and charts spit out by the test database. “What does this mean? What is this number here?” The teachers cried in frazzled voices. “What can I do?” I thought beginning to plan my four measly lessons to punctuate their year of worksheets. I decided to focus most of my energy on a writing lesson; a lesson without fill-in-the-blanks or right answers or any mention of obscure grammar rules. I created a writing assignment that asked them to explore their deepest wish. At first, they looked at me like I was crazy. I played on my craziness, a lá Frizzle, using it to make them laugh as I sent them back to their seats to write more, to go deeper. They had little concept of quality. They only knew of finished and unfinished, right and wrong. So, we toiled over their writing and we talked about how hard it is to write something meaningful that comes alive for the reader. It was frustrating, but electrically so.

In the end, I learned that Jesse, a little pixie of a girl with a perpetual juice mustache, wished other people could understand her diabetes and that she wouldn't have to miss so much school when she had low blood sugar. Children do want to learn. I learned that Jake, a nonchalant boy who seemed too cool to care in his trendy skater clothes, wished his awesome, guitar playing older brother didn't have to go to college because he didn't know how to tell him how much he would miss him. Children do care and have complex feelings. They taught me that even young kids struggle with big issues like economic hardship and cultural barriers. They want to stay home to help mom with the babies and they wish their parents knew enough to help with their homework. One little girl, who hardly spoke because of her accent, wished her classmates knew that she did want to be their friend.

Tears welling up, I showed the essays to my cooperating teacher. We had decorated them with gift wrap and ribbon. I presented them to her like Christmas gifts, a piece of each of her students in their own words. Smiling, she warned me that I should enjoy doing fun projects now before I had to do real lessons all the time. She acted as if the students had been cutting out snowflakes or gluing glittered macaroni to paper plates rather than learning to translate emotions and experiences into writing. I didn't share my work or teaching philosophy with her again. I just ran the photocopy machine and read from the textbooks like she asked. Real lessons.

Yet, I connected with the kids whenever I could. We discussed readings in relation to their lives. I learned that one student's neighbor regularly called him a “beaner.” We wrote stories and did illustrations. They had wild imaginations that just need some dusting and coaxing after years of TV and bubbling. In the end, I had to leave them and return to my college classroom, where fellow student teachers shared similar tails from the trenches.

My second student teaching assignment was worlds better. The zany, former art teacher allowed me to teach the students about social action during a self-designed unit on Clara Barton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, and other historical figures. The second-third grade class held more than its share of broken families and troubled students but, again, I fell for all of them. Here, school was a string of experiments, play, and imaginative projects. The students regularly moved around the class and voiced their ideas.

Yet, there was an air of fear and unease throughout the campus. We acted like vigilantes hiding our ideals and opinions, acting on them only when the doors of the classroom closed. Teachers were suspicious of other teachers. A young fifth grade teacher who had designed inner city social programs was fired. I watched her clear out her classroom, saw her stacks of abandoned books in the hallway, heard her whisper through tears that maybe it was better this way. She was tired of fighting the system for what she knew was right.

Waves of pink slips washed through the district. Schools were closed. Afraid for their livelihoods, teachers who had come to the school to practice experience-based constructivism dug textbooks out of their cupboards and redistributed them to the students. Men and women with five years or more of higher education, closed their mouths and did what they were told and only really taught in secret.

I emerged from the credentialing program with glowing recommendations and nagging doubts. For the second year in a row, the wave of pink slips and budget cuts have flooded education leaving the job database washed clean. Only a few odd jobs with strange qualifications linger like roof tops or cars lodged in trees. Without a class, I can't teach. Yet, I am left wondering if I could teach even with one.

“Wait five years,” my education professors say. “Pray Obama sorts education out, repeals NCLB,” people promise better times. I know I will make it. I'll find other things to do. After all, I am a bossy, smart girl. But what about Jake and Jesse and all the kids I came to love? Where will they be in five years? Can their imaginations, emotions, and individuality survive years of education sucked lifeless by meticulous standards and score-driven labeling? I may not be able to teach, but I pray to God that they will still find ways to learn.

Cheating Vegan

2009-03-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

Before you stop reading because you are afraid I am about to rant on about the virtues of lentils and the sacrifices our meat-saturated culture requires, I have a confession to make. I love fried wontons. Those of you familiar with these crunchy, creamy little blossoms of deliciousness know that they are stuffed with cream cheese. I am ridiculously addicted to them. I can eat a whole order all by myself, even though I feel like oil and cheese will begin seeping out of my very pores to prevent explosion. I used to make Paul take me to the same Chinese restaurant every Friday afternoon when we were dating in high school. All conversation was stalled as soon as the plate of wontons came – it was the only thing we ever ordered – as I concentrated on eating the wontons faster than Paul. He is a very fast eater and I grew up with four brothers, so my paranoia that food will disappear before my eyes is not completely unfounded. So, wontons are my weakness, along with cheese of any kind especially melted or thickly sliced on fresh bread, chocolate in all its glorious manifestations, buttered breadsticks dipped in ranch dressing, macaroni and cheese, and finely whipped mashed potatoes blended with obscene amounts of cream cheese and butter. If there were a support group dedicated solely to the victims of fried stuff with cheese and comfort food, I'd be the president.

For those of you who know that a vegan is a person with strict dietary regulations inspired by health/animal rights/environmental concerns, not an alien species on Star Trek (they are Vulcans, although I am pretty sure they are vegans, too, being so logical and all), then you can see my problem. Vegans aren't supposed to eat or wear or use any products that come from animals. That means no meat, no milk, no eggs, no yogurt, no cheese, no leather, no milk infused or animal tested bath products, and, in some cases, no honey. This list certainly clashes with the aforementioned list. Fried wontons are certainly not vegan-friendly or healthy. So, why do I still call myself a vegan? Vegetarian doesn't fully define my lifestyle because I don't buy milk, cheese, eggs, or yogurt at the store anymore. My infringements are isolated to eating out or at other people's homes. So, why not go easy on myself and use a label like vegetarian with vegan tendencies?

I use the term vegan more like a positive affirmation than a strict label (those of you who are unfamiliar with the term “affirmation” are long overdue for a trip to the Barnes and Noble self-help section or for a subscription to Oprah's magazine). Each time I affiliate myself with the term vegan, I am reminded of how my eating habits affect my health, my community, and the planet. My choices don't only directly correlate with the amount of flab on my belly or my longevity; they also have consequences in political, social, and environmental spheres. I use the title vegan in the same way I use the title writer or activist. These words shake people up a bit. They shock people into asking questions. What do you eat? Whole grains, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, spices, tofu, and beans, lots of beans. What have you published? Nothing. Where do you work? Nowhere. What do you stand for? Stick around, you'll see. It starts to make people wonder just a little bit about how they eat or how they define what makes someone a writer or whether the rules they have set-up for their life have any grounding after all. And I like to make people think. That's why I got my teaching credential, but will probably never use it.

If my labels have worked their magic, you probably have some questions. If you're still with me after the Oprah reference and the hint that you're consumer tendencies might have huge impacts on the world, then you must be really interested or really bored with no Facebook messages to respond to. Either way, I am happy to tell you how I began to aspire toward being a vegan. It started with my health. After getting pumped full of some of the most noxious chemotherapy on the market, I was willing to make any dietary changes that might spare me more hospital time. Following my bibliophile instincts, I began to pick up any book on the subject. I read about super foods, about health studies in China and Okinawa, about people living with cancer, about people who were supposed to die from cancer, about people who strove for optimal well-being using ancient Indian texts. The trend that began to appear was clear: vegetables, fruit, whole grains, nuts, seeds, spices, and teas – consumed and prepared in ways that keep them as close to their natural state as possible – have healing and restorative powers. McDonald's Big Macs, soda, and, sadly, fried wontons do not. Surprise, surprise. In fact, several studies showed that while vegetables turn off tumors, meat actually stimulates them. That alone was enough for me to pick up a whole foods vegan cookbook and begin up my consumption of the organic good stuff. To those of you thinking you don't need a drastic change because, thank God, you don't have cancer; it's time for a mini biology lesson. Everyone has cancerous cells in their body. It only takes one little bugger to slip through you're exhausted, malnourished immune system to start growing you're own unwanted little buddy. In other words, you want chemotherapy to be your last line of defense, not your first. Not to mention, a vegetarian/vegan diet can help ward off all kinds of diseases including heart diseases (veggies don't have bad cholesterol, go figure). Plus, eating mainly things that grow from the ground can make you slimmer and fight the affects of aging.

But wait, there's more. When researching health affects, I stumbled on all the environmental consequences of eating an animal-based diet. I never thought of myself as a crazy animal lover. I remember a girl presenting a project on animal testing in middle school and thinking the situation was horrifying. Still, I wasn't the kind of person who got all wiggy about animal rights. Over the years, I have been friends with devout vegetarians and never really listened to their arguments. I knew meat was dead animal, but I rarely thought about it. Yet, when I read about the conditions in our nation's slaughter houses, I couldn't get the image of cows' legs snapping as their hooves were being wrenched from frozen truck beds, and other scenes I can't bring myself to relate here, out of my mind. All this suffering for food that is not even good for us. Not to mention the factories massive consumption of water, the amount of food grown to feed animals rather than people, the “safe” chemicals injected into animals, and the factory run off polluting streams and earth. As one professor told me, you can get a low-flow toilet but most of your water waste comes second-hand from the meat you buy. Feel free to fact check this information by reading one or all of my suggested books.

After I got over my initial fury that the government allows all kinds of shockingly dangerous additives into our food and allows the meat-dairy industry to use established health guidelines as propaganda, I became a vegan, or rather an aspiring vegan whole-foodist with ever increasing tendencies toward the raw food movement. Most of the time, I love it. The very act of chopping up fresh tomatoes, garlic, kale, squash, and spinach makes me feel healthier and more grounded in a sustainable lifestyle. I particularly love my healthy nachos (sliced potatoes baked with a dash of olive oil, garlic powder, sea salt, and chile powder, then topped with chopped tomatoes, olives, fire-roasted green chiles, bell peppers, onions, black beans, and avocado). I also like to throw a ton of veggies in a pot of vegetable stock with brown rice and lentils for a fresh stew. Basically, combine a whole grain (quinoa, whole wheat pasta, brown rice, or oats) with a non-animal source of protein (beans, nuts, or tofu), some plant life (fruits, veggies, or fresh herbs), and some spices (turmeric, cumin, rosemary, or cinnamon) and you have a simple, healthy, homemade meal.

My hope is that my diet will continue to get healthier and healthier, even if a tricky, little fried wonton slips in every now and then. I also hope that the word “vegan” and the lifestyle it evokes will pop into people's conversations more often. Each time it does, people will question, if only for a moment, the sanity of our culture's eating habits. Even if they only add a few more veggies to their dinner, think twice before they nuke something vaguely resembling food in the microwave, go vegan one day a week, pick up a vegetarian book, or begin to look for labels like free-range, organic, and preservative-free, we will have moved closer to an eating culture based on health, awareness, and sustainability rather than money, addiction, and synthetic flavoring. So, I'll climb down off my well-worn soapbox (until next week that is), if you promise to remember that your fork is a powerful weapon that can be used for good or evil. As Spock would say, live long and prosper. And help others do the same.

The Club to which No One Wants to Belong

2009-03-04T21:32:00.000-08:00

They directed me to her room with eyebrows raised and questions trapped behind pursed lips. Flipping through the charts again in search of information that will not materialize, they ask for the third time if I am family. Their highly-trained eyes dart up and down my body taking in my bald head, frumpy cardigan, prosthetic leg peeking out the bottom of floral pajama pants, and the IV pole linked to the PIC line sprouting from underneath the skin of my upper left arm. Clearly, I am a patient asking to see the patient two doors down from my room. I can see the question in their eyes: is she delusional or does she actually know the woman in room 315? I cut them a little slack, since my chemo is known to cause paranoid hallucinations. I'm a former student, I explain, She was my sixth grade teacher. We have the same doctor. He told me to visit her. It's all true. Our doctor, with his boyish charms, high-water slacks, and unconventional frankness (he says “holy buckets,” once did a hillbilly jig in response to a good scan, and acknowledges that many things are beyond his control), told me to visit her when I checked in. The coincidences are too much for the skeptical nurses and they let me pass as long as I scrub my hands in the hallway sink.

I am in the room and there she is lying in the hospital bed, her daughter stroking her sock-clad foot and her husband acting the part of doorman and welcoming committee. Tears roll uncontrollably down her cheeks; her brain tumor is pressing on the area that controls emotion. The red hair I remember admiring – when I was a mousy, awkward middle schooler – as the epitome of feminine sophistication and spunk (it has a rebellious and unique nature, just like its owner) is splayed over the pillow, a large chunk missing. Wheeling my IV pole behind me, I walk to her bedside and take her trembling hand. She looks up at me, blue eyes searching for a second before placing me (the chatty creative writer who couldn't spell to save her life, who insisted on writing political poems that weren't allowed into the school's writing contest, who dramatized a fantastically narcissistic Pandora in the greek play, and who accidentally drew an alien that resembled male genitalia and was too innocent to figure out what all the boys were laughing at). We hold hands, teacher to student, patient to patient.

It is here, when she asks with fear in her voice what chemotherapy is really like, that I remember the older man in the supermarket who greeted my fifteen-year-old bald, self with a welcome to the club to which no one wants to belong. He presented his colon cancer story like a membership card or secret handshake. I never saw him again but years later his dark sarcasm seems fitting. There are bonds now that my former teacher and I will share that no one else can quite understand and a secret language full of horrifying medical terminology that we will throw around like jaded war veterans. We will gossip about our oncologist, trading notes and impressions like infatuated school girls. After all, we want to know this man to whom we entrust our lives in the same way that other people want to know what brand of cereal their favorite celebrity eats. Sure, the hazing is hell (my own has included an amputation, four lung surgeries, over twelve months of chemotherapy, anaphylactic shock, and more pills, needles, and scans than I care to recall) but it comes with a new knowledge and perspective. Like unwilling daredevils, we have been to the edge of mortal and back, not for a few insane seconds of hang time, but for months of uncertainty about if and when we will land safely back on earth. We share a kinship, one that I believe is spiritual as well as physical and psychological, forged by our fight for our lives in the sterilized halls of modern medicine.

So, what have we, the enlisted adventurers of the isolated plains of illness, learned? Our main lesson is that security and stability are illusions. In other words, we are all mortal and liable to be crushed by falling rocks, contract diseases, clog our arteries with grease, and step into the street just once without looking both ways. The bad news is that you can live as vanilla as possible, watching your step along the way and avoiding all the potholes, and taking all your multivitamins and still be slammed by some unforeseen cosmic blow. The good news is, knowing this, you are now free to live as your heart (and the universe) directs (or maybe that is also bad news to you because, frankly, it is as scary as all hell).

Now let's clarify something here: there is a difference between living as your heart directs and living recklessly/self-destructively/lazily. You can usually tell the difference by the results. The first option yields joy, freedom, positive relationships, and the realization of your truest, most secret dreams no matter how unconventional or unprofitable they may be. The second yields dependence, obesity, toxic relationships, self-loathing, shoddy attempts at your true work, and a cheating yourself of your true potential accompanied by bitterness and cynicism. Drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes are perfect examples of the second category. They can be confused with actions of freedom from societal judgement but really never lead anywhere worthwhile. (I will explore this topic further in an upcoming blog titled Drugs, Alcohol, Cigarettes and other Placebos for the Ready-Made and Impotent“Counter-Culture Revolutionary”... yah, yah, I know you can hardly wait). So, if you're covered in Fruit Loops and Lays crumbs and can't remember what you did last night or three nights ago and you can't seem to get away from YouTube long enough to finish your art installment, screenplay, grant application, business plan, fill in the blank here, then you can be pretty sure that you are living scenario two. Now, if you're finally quitting your mind-numbing day job to do that thing that both terrifies and thrills you – your parents'/former teacher/neighbors' conservative advice and country club mortification be damned – congratulations you're in scenario one. As for me, despite my multiple brushes with mortality, I am stuck somewhere on the precipice of scenario one; I know what I need to do but I am too scared to leap. And I can't even blame my parents because they would support me and pay my health insurance even if I joined the traveling circus (not my deepest, innermost desire but a girl has got to have some secrets even if she does author a blog).

That being said, I am officially reclaiming ownership of this club with reluctant members, to which I have had to help induct two former teachers and, very recently, another grandfather. It is now the club of extreme life-embracers (and no we will not have ribbons or bracelets of any color). Its members will be anyone who has walked through the fire – be it cancer, accident, divorce, depression, or what I like to call general malaise brought on by living inauthentically – and emerged scorched and smoldering with the desire to live like death is indeed inevitable. Because it is. And don't give me any of this I'll live when I am dead and safely ensconced in eternal paradise because, darlin', your spirit is here in this awkward flesh-suit to seek a passionate truth. This life is not a waiting room. You don't have to read Golf Digest just because its there or sit staring at people because you have nothing better to do. Nor do you have to pass the time doing what everyone else or the ads on TV tell you is right. You have a mission to fulfill and a lesson to learn. I hate to break it to you, but I highly doubt that lesson is how to find a good job, a good spouse, and raise a nice family in the suburbs. Nor is the lesson on how to discover the next “it” piece of merchandise to cloak yourself in to prove you're better than the next guy. I am pretty sure that the lesson has nothing to do with money at all, unless it is how to give it all away or risk it on some amazing, crazy venture (like building girls' schools in Iraq, not like taking a trip to Vegas, see above paragraph if you are still confused). I am also pretty sure that if you follow your right path, you're probably going to look insane/out-there/foolish/struggling most of the time. Sure, you may have glimmering moments of success but then you will push it to the next level like the extreme life-embracer you are becoming. At times, your life may even be in danger. Although, I have already explained that it already is, every day.

I am not exactly sure what the lesson is or, I swear, I would share it with you. However, I plan on taking some clues from the aforementioned club members. From my sixth grade teacher – who persisted in teaching poetry, acts of kindness, and puppetry even when they stocked her class with the worst behaved boys the school could muster up and called her “an average teacher” when her methods and commitment were anything but – I will learn the art of giving even when my efforts are derided. From my high school philosophy teacher – who threw the textbook across the classroom on the first day, who displayed the devil horns someone sent him in demonstration of their belief that he was the antichrist for asking students to examine their beliefs, and who had several couches in his room for the teens no one wanted to deal with to come sit and be heard – I will learn to speak the truth and ask questions even in the face of persecution. From my Poppy – who builds sailboats from scratch in his garage, who traveled to Israel when he knew he was sick, who learned to play guitar in his sixties, who wakes every morning to pray and ride his bike to his classes, and who wears Birkenstocks despite having some of the funkiest toenails I have ever seen – I will learn to conquer obstacles and ignore convention. These fellow cancer survivors are everyday radicals, who seek to be completely themselves no matter how steep the climb becomes or how powerful and nasty the opposition looks. The refuse to be beaten into a mold. I only hope and pray (because I am too much of a wimp and a people-pleaser to do any of this without divine intervention) that I will be able to count myself amongst their ranks one day. Who knows, maybe now that you know how awesome the members are, you won't be so afraid to join the club. Just remember, no one said it will be all sunshine, lollipops, and new age fuzzes. Yet, learning to live again, after having been on the verge of death in one way or another, is a thrill and reward like no other. Now that I know I will die, I am determined to become daring enough to live.

Keeping My Heart and Mind

2009-02-24T20:03:00.000-08:00

There is a quote my father likes to haul out at the end of nearly every argument. Like a trophy in no need of dusting, he presents it as if its fake gold sheen is proof of its infallibility. His satisfied smile always signifies a stalemate. He first began using this quote, as his closing argument, when I came home from fifth grade all riled up about the injustices revealed to me through a combination of history lessons and the reading of The Witch of Blackbird Pond. Filled with the passionate indignation young people possess when they realize for the first time that the world is not as it should be, I railed on about women's rights, religious freedom, Native Americans, and, most likely, the horrors of war (although, not in those exact terms). In an effort to calm me down, my father employed the quote, which basically states that those who aren't liberal in youth lack heart and those who don't become conservative with age lack brains. I would later discover that the quote's original owner was Winston Churchill, who apparently put it on permanent loan to my father and a few other fathers judging by the amount of blogs on the subject.

Although it shut me up, the quote achieved the opposite affect of my father's intention; it terrified me. I feared its logic was inevitable. Would my brain, without my consent, grow to override my horror for the exploitation of others, my passion for artistic freedom, and my love for a life of nature-loving, simplicity? Would I cease to cry at the thought of animals being tormented or people being crushed by misunderstanding and fear as long as a significant explanation of social necessity could be provided? I lie in bed at night envisioning becoming a complacent robot chugging along in time to a predetermined beat.

As I grew and my passionate indignation took on greater scope and sophistication, I regularly took the temperature of my idealism, checking for early symptoms of transformation. I cursed myself for demonstrating a desire for convenience over values when chucking unwashed cans into the trash instead of the recycling. I scolded myself for daydreaming about an elaborate, trendy wardrobe despite the surrender to consumerism the fulfillment of that desire would require. Racial stereotypes stung me when they whispered into my thoughts, provoked out of the dark caves in my memory by an external stimuli. I was convinced that a hardwired part of my mind might one day override the whole, leaving me with all the values of the white, middle-class, Christian, suburban girl, who I was on paper but not in spirit. My only hope was that my father's other favorite quote had competing power; in other words, that my teachers and, later, my college professors would succeed in brainwashing me. I chose a small, liberal arts college with just such a hope in mind.

Yet, now the post-college world is upon me and I fear that my introductory dose of higher learning and creative action will not succeed in sustaining me for a lifetime. I can feel foggy complacency creeping over my mental landscape as worries about money, career, and family stoke survival instincts. Worse, I find myself right back were I started. In the nightmare of most college students, I have returned to my hometown, which may as well be named Suburbia USA – complete with a Walmart megastore, a McDonald's on every corner, and enough fundamentalist churches to successfully relaunch the crusades. At this point, my brother would like to interject his favorite quote: “poor little rich girl, is your wallet too full and do your golden shoes pinch?” I acknowledge that to the majority of people living in the depths of poverty or genocide or starvation or all of the above, suburbia appears to be a heaven walled in stucco and street lamp safety, gorged in foods from every nation, and decorated with emerald lawns and neon ads. Although, the very fact that we live this way while others suffer (in many cases, to preserve our way of life) indicates a troubling crack in this convenience-saturated illusion. Yet, here I am, until I can sign-up with the peace crops or get a grant for graduate school in the city or join a co-op in Washington or the mother ship takes me home (if you keep reading this blog, you may not rule out the last option). So self-pity aside, it occurs to me that there must be others like me, trying to hold onto their hearts and minds as they struggle to survive in a disturbing world. After all, my quick-to-quote father removed the backyard lawn to grow an organic vegetable garden when I decided to become vegan after my latest cancer recurrence. He also takes my leftover curry soup and meatless jambalaya to work for lunch, braving the comments of his fellow retired Marines. Perhaps, this is evidence that time has not completely vanquished the rebellious youth who attended Buddhist meetings, dreamed of joining a nudist colony and, as his mother would say, Lord knows what else.

With the faith that there are others like me, hidden ranks of believers in the human spirit and the ability of activism and art to continue to chip away at fear and hatred and blind capitalism, I have begun to look for a space. I catch myself peering into empty storefronts with for rent signs plastered in their windows. There is a plethora of these buildings around as the economic recession takes its toll. I don't know exactly what I am longing for when I look into the depths of these gutted stores but I see a half-materializing vision of graffiti-covered walls, a makeshift gallery, a corner stage for poetry readings, lectures, small plays, and couches for class and meetings. Maybe there is even room for a cooking range and small cafe. A place where people can gather to eat, share ideas, launch their demonstration, and practice their art. The full purpose of this space is still hazy: a kind of work haven for displaced college friends – brilliant minds lost in the maze of cubicles and unemployment – where they can recharge and regroup; a recruiting center for the ever-morphing social revolution's umpteenth wave surging up once again to call for lifestyles that celebrate life in all its forms; a recovery center for disillusioned suburbanites; a safe space for aspiring artists and activists; or a nontraditional school for young seekers tired of over-testing and hungry for outlets for the counter-culture urges (come oh, ye masses of black tutu wearing, underground music listening, bored and restless youth). Perhaps, it is just my niche in the multitude of movements that are regaining their energy, tended these last prosperous years by those who knew our consumeristic ways would eventual drive us to disaster.

At this point, dear reader, you may be wondering what exactly I am proposing or supporting. You may also be one of those flame-tenders – eager for open ears and willing hands – frustrated that I am still searching and musing when your own cause needs converts now. You have been taking up protest signs, staging radical plays, building houses out of wreckage, and giving countless, thankless hours of aid. I hear you and even now my hands are making their way off this keyboard and out into the world. While I wait for my physical space to manifest and make my tentative attempts at social change in a suburban environ, I encourage you to join me in this written space. I have made the decision to navigate the coming years with both my mind and heart. Perhaps, this is not enough. The possession of heart or mind or both means nothing if they are not used. In that vein, may we help each other regain the use of our whole selves in this quest to heal our broken world.