the Nixionary

I’ve been in Sitka for three days and have woken twice to the optimism brought here by the sun. Yesterday, Natalie and her two-year-old twins and I hiked up above town, stopping to yell “poop!” at dog poop and to sling rocks into a trickling stream. At the end of our hike, we walked to the pebbly beach and plucked tiny black crabs from where they hid under helmet-shaped rocks. Nat and her boys had just taken a trip to Colorado and the boys did the same thing there as they do here–peeled stones half their size from mucky riverbeds and screamed “CRABS!!!” whether they saw any or not. I love how they love what’s small, how their curiosity never stops them from stepping in shit or getting it wrong.

My favorite thing to watch them do is share things with each other. On the airplane coming to Sitka, Sage, the twin I was holding, wanted to give some dried mango to his brother, Stratton, who was sitting two rows behind us. “Give! Stratton!” he yelled, out of nowhere, through sticky orange teeth. Then he clambered up the front of me, popped his head over the back of my seat and stretched his little arm as far as it could possibly go until it the mango reached Natalie and then, at last, his smiling, expectant brother.

Before I left Colorado on that plane, I’d had a few meetings with literary agents. I pitched my book to them, I tried to tell them it was good without saying it was good. (Because who knows if it is.) I tried to explain the “narrative drive” of the book, but because I write creative nonfiction, narrative drive is an awkward thing to talk about. Narrative drive is the direction I have moved in my own life. It might be a quiet story, but it’s the story I have. I said this. I think that might have been considered flailing, but at least if I flailed, I did so inside the truth.

The agents told me two things. The one from New York said that his biggest regret was that he didn’t beat the shit out of his best friend who slept with his girlfriend. The second agent, the one I liked, said that he’d like to see my book in-full, but he also said that a lot of writers end up putting their first book in the drawer.

Which felt like a little bit of death.

I have worked on this project for almost ten years, and I don’t know if it is loud enough (would I want it to be?) to be sold to a big publishing house (would I want it to be?) or if it has narrative drive. But I do know that I will continue to work on what it still needs, and that I will not put this stack of pages inside some musty rectangular compartment, into some space that opens, then closes, and snuffs out contact and light. Because if I did not publish these pages, that is where they would go–inside the dresser where all my childhood journals went, the one with the Serenghetti lions on the front, the one made of cushy green felt, the three that have one line written on the first page and then nothing else.

I don’t journal anymore because I don’t write for myself.

To put this piece of work into a drawer would be saying that I wrote this book solely for me, and I didn’t. I wrote it for Kate and Ashley, for Michael and Brenda. I wrote it for everyone who has ever understood New Orleans and for everyone who hasn’t.

Crab! I am shouting.

Mango! See me reaching?

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I’ve been swimming a lot lately. Last week, though, Denver Public Schools let out for summer, which poses problems for us lap swimmers at La Familia. The lifeguards only block off three lanes, so the other half of the pool is filled with wriggling fleshy  kids.

What disturbs me is that some of them can’t swim, so they strap sky-blue flotation belts–the kind the older ladies use in aqua-aerobics–around their rolly bellies. As the kids waddled in last week on their first day of summer break, dripping and shivering in speckles of water from the locker room showers, I tried to keep swimming laps. But the more kids that cannonballed into the pool, the more nervous I got. There must have been around 50 kids, mostly obese, mostly unsupervised.

Underwater, I could see their waving skin and the straps dangling from their floaty belts. What if one of those flotation devices slipped off? What if a strap wrapped itself around a 4-year-old neck? Each thunk I heard underwater, I feared a kid had gone off the slide in the deep end and hadn’t been able to push himself back up to the surface for air. I’d stop swimming, look up, and scan for possible corpses. I must be becoming my mother who worried when I wore hoodie sweatshirts to bed that the shoelace in the hood would strangle me to death while I slept.

No children drowned, but I’m also disturbed by the proliferation of mini-boobies on the boys in my neighborhood. I live in Baker. The people who free swim at La Familia are overweight and Hispanic. The people who wind through the water doing laps are white and slender and can swim. There’s something wrong with this picture. Sometimes, when I’m swimming, I want to apologize for my ability and all my years of swim team.

Instead, we share the water, and I think that regardless of our differences, being in water together is a healing thing for most people. I just discovered this month that Congress Park has an Olympic-sized outdoor lap pool, and on 80-degree afternoons, I love swimming in the extra-wide lane there, chatting with the triathletes and the elderly and the new-to-the-pool middle-aged ladies who enter tentatively and aren’t sure how circle swimming works. When it’s crowded, you swim counterclockwise, round and around each other until you know the warp and weft of someone else’s ripples pushing you as they pass.

Despite the nicer pools in Denver, I prefer La Familia. People in Baker seem to be nicer than the ones who swim at Wash Park or Congress Park or the Five Points Glenarm Rec Center. And funny things always happen at La Familia. There’s an old lady named Hilda who’s in her 90s and sends me a huge smile any time she catches my eye between breaths, and a kid named Michael who swims every day, all day, and doesn’t care how he lands so that by the time he leaves, his back is a prickled pink from landing on it the wrong way any time he tries to dive. He reminds me of myself before belly flops and jack-knives became faux pas, and he reminds me that swimming is fun even when I’m really tired of all the work it takes to be skinny.

And then there was this: About half-way through my workout last week, just as I was beginning to really be alarmed at the number of young swimmers in the water, the lifeguard blew the whistle and yelled, “EVERYONE OUT! THERE’S PUKE IN THE POOL!!!”

All the kids clambered out screaming and the lap swimmers snapped their caps off their heads and everyone tiptoed down to the deep end to get a closer look at the nebulous cloud of vomit floating around in the deep end. Most of the kids stayed on the side of the pool, but I got one quick look at the brown mess, then rushed out to nab one of two showers in the locker room. While I was soaping up, I started to smell something warm and buttery coming at my nose through the curtain.

I popped my head out. Two little boys and a little girl with black-black hair and quarter-sized, round black eyes were sitting on the bench, staring straight at me. They were about 3 or 4 years old. They were eating corn on the cob. “Hi!” I said. “Hi!” They all said back, corn moving from left to right between their small teeth. It was all over their faces, little nubs of dark yellow corn. “Yum,” I said. And the little girl held hers out to me and said, “Want some?”

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It’s weird to move out of your house when you’re still living in it. This is what happens every year. Luke leaves for Alaska, and I bounce between my house or a friend’s or my parents’, depending on the night, depending on how much I’d like to be alone. This year is especially odd. My friend Lizzy is moving in tonight for two months, so I had to put all my stuff in four laundry baskets and drag them down to my parents’ house last night. Their house smells like growing up—cut grass and clean bathrooms, and when I stay there, a lot of my dreams are of the ten-years-younger me.

I work with students who are ten years younger than me right now. Some of my favorites are graduating this year, and I remember that excitement of going forward but not quite wanting to leave. That’s how I feel this time of year, too. When people start eating on patios, I pack my down coat into a duffle bag and switch out shorts for fleece pants. In Alaska last night, Luke was eating homemade swordfish sushi at a friend’s house that overlooks Silver Bay while I was waiting for Draino to undo the hair clogging our shower. I emptied out my closet. My mom worked her magic on the wood floors. I wish we had one of those vacuum cleaners that pops out of a little house and does it’s own thing while you clean the sink. 

As I piled dresses I won’t wear this year into the closet in the study, the beginning of my book banged around inside my head.  Do I start it here in Denver, with swimming, or do I start it in New Orleans, with leaving? I am ready for the next book about neither. I haven’t written right here in so long because all I have time to write is different versions of the same thing–memories of coming and going, clothes in different closets, that start-of-summer feeling that no matter how hard I work, I’ll still run out of time. 

Every summer, when I talk to my mom from Alaska, I miss the freshly planted flowers and the privilege of the reappearing sun. When I talked to Luke last night, I longed for that last glance at the ocean, past 10pm and still white with sky.

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I should be working on my thesis. Instead, I made tea and filled a bath, started reading Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul–a book about a city made of memories, photographs, and unused rooms. Unlike most writers who seem to go to the most incredible places en route to some story, Pamuk has never left Istanbul. Lives in the same apartment complex where he grew up over 60 years ago.

While I was pushing the bubbles into stretchy mounds and reading about Pamuk’s hometown, I thought about this Alaskan town where my ferry docked for a half-day two summers ago. 90% of the residents in the town live in a single building; a communistic cement block of 20-or so stories. In those layers of rooms that rise out of fog and mountains,

generations of families live on top of each other. I forgot the name of the town almost as soon as I left it, and had to look it up just now. Whittier. I may have even written about it before, but it doesn’t stick–the whole place is like some eerie dream that leaves abruptly and reappears in flashes like some kind of acid-without-ever-having-done-acid flashback. When in Whittier, the hours slid past without speech. I wandered past abandoned buildings in spitting rain and wanted to both stay and leave.

To get from Whittier’s unloading dock to its Tower, you have to walk through a narrow tunnel lit from above by swinging yellow lights. I wanted to call someone to make sure they knew if I reached the other side, but phones didn’t work in Whittier, or at least not that day. People leaned diagonally across doorways of sad hotels and leaky markets. Sometimes I think of that place for no reason at all but its sadness. And then I really thought about it for a while today when I read the epigraph in Pamuk’s book from Ahmet Rasim:

“The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy.”

Sometimes I wonder what Denver would feel like to me if I had never left: would I think about living elsewhere or would I be like Pamuk who writes: “My imagination requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view.”

The view from here is of the streets turning the same sugar-white as the sky. Metal stovepipes pump out pinkish plumes, and the top halves of the branches outside our windows are white and getting whiter. Tomorrow, the high will be 3 degrees. This morning, I couldn’t get through the ice on the windshield so I sat inside the car breathing into my hands in shifts. I am ready for spring. This weather makes me want to eat and sleep and forget all responsibility. (Which is what I’m actually doing by writing this).

Today, a gift arrived in the mail today from a friend of a friend: cassette tapes coiled up with the rhythmic chants of a Russian choir. I put it on while the snow picked up in curvy gusts around the window and I read of buildings against buildings in Turkey, where it rains on the ruins, where Christianity is disappearing. Do you ever feel like you’re supposed to go somewhere and you’re not sure why? For some reason, even though I have no connection to the place, Turkey has felt that way to me–the oldness, the sense of echoes, the closeness of the sea.

In the meantime, in the last few weeks, I painted the largest wall in the living room a peacock bluish-teal, dragged Luke to two lumber yards to look for wavy, half-rotten wood for shelving. One night, I came home and he surprised me with the L-shaped floaters we’d talked about but not planned on constructing for another week.

Building book holders and painting are worthy (and maybe less melancholy) substitutions for Turkish travel. I love that uncertainty and risk right before the bristles pull back against the white wall, right before the screw burrows into the just-right yield of the plaster. When I stand back, I’m in a new room. I love this color–earthy and of-ocean, warm and cool, familiar and exotic at the same time–and it reminds me of somewhere I’ve never been.

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At the Lighthouse blog for why I cried the other night:

Cloudy with a Chance of Crying

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