Going South

I just returned from a visit to North and South Carolina. I’m tired - I drove 600 miles in less than a week and spent all my waking hours in the company of people.  My original motivation for the trip was to see my college roommate, Deborah, who has just emerged from a divorce and is shifting to a new life. I haven’t seen her for 18 years. It’s one of those friendships that allows you to pick up dropped conversations from years ago.  Dormant memories surface. “You never did like to drive,” I say as I retrieve the rental car keys so we can leave for the Biltmore House and walk in the Gardens.  Deborah is suffering from the tail end of a cold, a cold that hit as soon as she moved her belongings out of her old house in Augusta and settled into her mountain retreat.  She is low on energy and by the second day of our visit her voice is failing.  I talk, probably no more than usual, but her occasional whispered response makes me feel like I’m babbling.  So I treat my  words carefully. I weigh each one.  A zen-like discipline.   

We visit Deborah’s sister who lives in Asheville with her husband.  Dianne gives me a gift.  She has read my book and loves it. She drags me over to the independent bookstore, and demonstrates for me how to chat up the bookstore clerk about placing my book in their store.  We leave with instructions and contact information, and Dianne promises take a sample copy back for the owner’s consideration.  When I thank her, she just says: “ It’s a great book and more people need to read it.” Her generosity is disarming.  How can I not believe her?

Asheville fits nowhere in my memories of the South.  It reminds me most of Madison - an island of creative living surrounded by a sea of determined resistance to change.  There are several vegetarian restaurants (we used to have more of those in Minnesota, but most have had to cave to midwestern tradition and now serve free range chicken and grass-fed beef), art galleries, craft shops. Deborah tells me that a North Carolina legislator called Asheville “a cesspool of sin.”  The warm spring breezes had lulled me into a flirtation with the idea of living in Asheville, away from Minnesota’s 6 month winter, but there is comfort in not having to be mortified by all aspects of your state’s politics.  

I remind myself that North and South Carolina are at their best in May.  It is warm and sunny, but not yet hot.  Spring green has not yet been crisped into August brown.  As I drive south to Clemson on winding mountain roads, I pass numerous Baptist Churches, one with a tent revival going on out front, another with a sign that says: “God gave us Freedom. Soldiers protect it.”  No chance of reviving my sudden rapprochement with the idea of living here.

Clemson itself is at its most lovely.  School’s out, traffic is light, gentle sun shines through the tree canopy in Larry Abernathy Park, a new-to-me stretch of green space at the edge of downtown.  The lake is full and people are enjoying the holiday weekend swimming, boating and fishing.  My friend Joan and her husband show me the highlights of Clemson’s new face - mostly new University facilities - and drive me through the shaded winding streets of old neighborhoods.  Then they take me out to dinner at their favorite restaurant in Seneca where the chef serves me a perfect seared tuna fillet on seaweed salad.  I have a similar sensation to the one that surprised me in April when I was in Germany.  It’s nice to be here to see the new and the old, but it has nothing to do with my real life.  I have finally arrived in the here and now.  

PS: After I moved away, I developed a liking for these on a trip to Florida.  It never occurred to me try them when I lived in Clemson. Too local?

Lost Pages: Hair

When I edited Dreaming in German,  the rule was that no publisher would look at a memoir of over 250 pages, so I cut my original manuscript by over a hundred pages.  Today I am going to start a new blog feature. I am calling it "The Lost Pages."  Here's the first installment.

Hair

The battle began when I was eleven.  Or maybe it started before that. because my mother liked short hair and I had succeeded in growing mine out to my shoulders.  What I remember is standing at the window of our hotel room in Zadar, Yugoslavia, three tight beds in the slick room behind me.   Outside, in the distance, a line of cypresses blocks the view of the Mediterranean.  Teenage couples giggles as they walk hand in hand away from the hotel.  My mother, sharp comb in hand, tugs the hair out of my face, tightens it flat to my head with a rubber band.

I hate this.  I want my hair to fly free. I want to part it low on one side and let a swath of hair dip over my eye.  I want... I don’t know what I want, but I don’t want my  mother to comb my hair, pull it out of my face, so I look clean as a licked cat.  I shake my head and whine, “ not so tight, it hurts.”  My mother says,  “Hold still. Stop wiggling.”

Below to the left, closer than the cypresses, tangled vines define the terrace where my family will eat dinner.  Mirko, the Serbian waiter, will glow in his white uniform and treat my like a child.  My mother reaches into the top dresser drawer and pulls out a big bow, the one with the red flowers on it.  It matches the dress I am wearing, the dress my mother has made.

“No.”

My mother hesitates. “ What do you mean, no?”

I stomp my foot, but carefully, just enough that my mother, her hand still resting on my  head, can feel it, but not so much that my father, who is reading on his bed, will hear.  “ I don’t want a bow.”

My mother’s hands fall to her sides.  She says,” At least let me put in the small black one. You need something to cover the rubber band.”

I turn back toward the window as my mother feels for the black bow.  When I bend forward, I can see the fig tree with its light green bundles of fruit.  They are still hard and dry; my father picked one, because I wondered what their insides looked like.  A jungle of bird voices is rising, tropical and wild, cries and screeches twining around each other.  I cannot name these birds.  But  I long to fly with them.

Feeling at Home

In my book, I wrestle with the idea of my national identity.  I learned years ago that my moments when doubts drop away - the moments I feel rooted in the place where I’m standing - come when I’m participating in the American political process.  

Before I go further I have to explain my decision to include my politics, both in my book and in my blog.  Shortly after I first started blogging, my friend Anita Mathias, an established blogger,  was caught in a web tempest. One of her tweets was retweeted by thousands and trashed violently.  During the search for the younger Tsaernev she ventured to say that she was praying for him as well as the victims. I empathized with her - I had the same thought earlier that day.  After all,  my daily meditation practice is meant to enhance my capacity for compassion.

What lesson do I take from this?  The danger is small. Unlike Anita I write in relative obscurity.  Yet I wondered.  How should I approach my internet life?  My friend Barbara counseled me to use her grandmother’s rule of polite conversation: Never talk about politics or religion.  As soon as I heard her say it, I knew that wasn’t going to work.  My spiritual and political life are one and the same, and deep expressions of who I am.  

So it was today, that I found myself at the Minnesota State Capitol, singing, clapping, standing for five hours, waiting for the Senate to vote to legalize gay marriage.  I mention this because it was with amazement that I found myself singing “America the Beautiful” several times during those hours, meaning every word, choking up. I even managed to cobble together enough of the lyrics to the “Star-Spangled Banner” to pass.  And I have never been prouder to be a Minnesotan than in that moment that we knew the measure had passed.  Today, I felt at home.

Lost in Pre-History

Ever since my encounter with the Neanderthal museum in Germany, I’ve been digging through books on cave art.   I’m not sure whether my desire to escape into the past was partly motivated by our return - the first monitor I saw when I got off the plane in Chicago showed scenes of bloody marathon runners and bewildered bystanders.  Contemporary life didn’t look so appealing.

As soon as my jet lag calmed down enough so I could climb the suspended marble staircase at the Roseville Library (I refuse to use the elevator... there are few enough opportunities to climb in daily American life, and I am lucky enough to still be able to rely on my knees) and wandered through the Art History section looking for “cave art.”  I thought I was looking for images to stimulate my jewelry design.  I didn’t expect to get absorbed in pre-history. My last exposure to what archaeology had pieced together about the Pleistocene is terribly out-of-date. Not surprising.  I think my formal education on that topic stopped at age 11, so almost fifty years ago.  I also have a suspicion I might not have been paying too much attention to the vast segments of time discussed.  Perhaps when I was 11,  50 years and 50,000 didn’t seem so different.

One of the most amazing facts hit me yesterday.  Neanderthal humans existed on this earth essentially unchanged, with a stable hunter-gatherer culture, for 300,000 years.  We Homo Sapiens have only been around for 200,000.  And the change from hunting and gathering goes back only about 10,000 years. A few months ago, I went to see the touring Tut-Ankh-Amen exhibit, and was reminded that Ancient Egypt changed just incrementally over two thousand years.

A few days after the Boston attack, my sister-in-law called me to see how I was doing.  She called my cell and caught me in the library stacks, absorbed in tracing a line of 40,000 year-old red ochre dots in a photograph from a French cave.  I had to think for a minute what she was talking about.  I am not proud of this fact.  I admitted to her that one of my self-care strategies in times of crises is to stay far away from the TV and get all my news in written form.  And then I added: “ I’m busy escaping contemporary culture by studying paleolithic art.”  This doesn’t mean I don’t care.  It’s precisely because I do care, and there is nothing I can do, that I’m trying to take the very long view.  Another sobering fact: during one of the coldest glacial periods the total human population in Europe was down to 20,000 humans.  We almost didn’t make it.  

Megaloceros with line of black dots from Lascaux

Book Promotion for Introverts

Trying to sell my book anywhere but on the internet is forcing me to confront my inner shy person.  There’s a reason I didn’t follow my father’s footsteps into sales.  For most of my life I suffered telephone anxiety.  Anytime I had to call someone who wasn’t in my inner circle I would write myself a script so I’d be sure to get my request out as efficiently as possible.  I’d make lists of the main points so I wouldn’t let my nerves run away with me and get off the phone before I’d finished getting all of my points across.

For me, the invention of email has been a huge relief.  I can compose my communications as carefully as I like, proofread them and never have to confront a stranger who doesn’t already have some idea of what I want.  Recent trends towards email bankruptcy - people who are so overwhelmed by the flood of incoming messages that they don’t actually read them anymore - are a major worry for me.  I have had to pick up the phone once again.  

The first stage of selling a self-published book was easy enough.  I invited everyone I know to a book release party.  Then I did a Goodreads giveaway and a Kindle promotion.  So far so good.  Now comes the difficult part:  contacting libraries and bookstores to try to schedule readings.  This requires making contact with strangers.  I am feeling my way along, here.  There are phone calls involved.  I can psyche myself up for about one a week.  

Lucky for me, my first foray went well. I contacted the Germanic-American Society in St. Paul and now have a reading scheduled there in the fall.  I’m even trying to interest a bookstore in South Carolina in hosting a reading during an upcoming trip to Clemson.  

Eventually I hope to get brave enough to talk to real people in person.  A few weeks ago, I tried to gather the courage to ask a local  bookseller how I would go about trying to set up a reading.  Instead, I spent 20 minutes taking inventory of the memoir section and then slunk out deciding that I wasn’t quite there yet.  Maybe next month.