the Nixionary

…but didn’t have time for in the last few weeks:

1. My Indian dermatologist, Suma, says our brains contain a map of all our experiences and we refer to that map to get to each next place. She taps my toes, indents my calves, skims my hairline and sternum with her fingertip. The paper tears gently under my hip. Her assistant, a blonde housewife from Louisiana, rolls my feet outwards and gasps. Grabbing a pen, she traces the words written on my insoles, reads them aloud, writes them down. Then she says, “I’m not sure I get what they mean.”

2. My dad, over tea one night says, “I used to collect clean limericks which is a hard thing to do.” One in his stockpile: There was a young secretary none cuter / Who was replaced by a clicking computer / Twas the wife of her boss / Who put the deal across / Because the computer was neuter.

3. At the Body Worlds exhibit, the muscles looked like dried chicken meat dyed the color of raw steak. Between the red webbing, I kept forgetting to notice the bones. A young couple canoodled in front of a sign about the “brain-heart tango.” High schoolers pointed at shriveled balls and giggled. An older woman leaned over her own reflection in a case containing a cross-section of a brain tumor and teared up. Behind her, a quote by Goethe took up a ten-foot wall: “All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is exclusively my own.”

4. Larry Sutton tells his students in a lecture that the best ideas come while writing. They come to me in the pool when I’m without pen or paper. He also says: “With writing, there’s no guarantee you’ll get better as you go.”

5. A student writing about the basketball team at Manual asks: “Why does everyone say I need to tell a deeper story?” I ask him why he’s writing. He says, “To entertain, just to entertain.” I keep asking other people if that’s enough.

6. I think of this one day in Sitka for no particular reason. It’s the brown bag classical lunch series at the episcopal church three blocks down Monastery Street. I feel a little bad for myself for attending. A cellist and a pianist are playing Anton Rubenstein’s Russian Melody in F, which they don’t actually play in F. Doris Stevenson, one of the musicians playing, stops and says, “Mmm…oh my,” when it starts, then, “Oh…that’s very special.” A little girl in front of me does a spin on her tiptoes. She makes sure I’ve seen her. She spins again. Now, I can’t remember the color of her hair, her shirt, whether the my-oh-my’s came from the pianist or the cellist. If only I wrote everything down, I keep thinking. Elizabeth McCracken writes, “My memory is a goddamn liar.” I haven’t written anything but signatures on credit card receipts for weeks. A woman wrote an article about signing things like “I love dogs” and “ice cream sandwich” as her name on the credit card screens just to see if she would get away with it. She did.

7. J.D. Frey, a poet teaching a class says, “It’s nice to know you have this game to play with words.”

8. I worry that by morning, I will have completed nothing again. And so I: rearrange the couches, hammer nails into nicked doors. Read first paragraphs more times than I should. Prop my aching neck. My heart hurts with hurry. For nothing?

9. There is no 9 because there is no 10, and 8 is a better place to end.

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Nevermind that I woke up at 4:19 this morning. Today was a good day. After mailing off another set of errors to earn my degree, I had all day today to do whatever I wanted. I wanted to wake up at 6:30 or 7 but pre-4:30 gave me a few hours to just lie there and think. At 6:30, I got up, made my tea, and went to the park with Quincy and Luke.

While Luke lapped me a few times, Q and I blew our ghost breaths over the crispy grass, and I thought about what Luke said last night:

“You know, I know you don’t think Denver has much merit, but it really is a nice place to live.”

We were heading down South Broadway past the wig shop and the 7-Eleven, the Jiu-Jitsu studio and the Mayan Theater marquee.

I slowed down. “Do you really think I think that?”

“Well, maybe not in those harsh of terms…”

We passed the Victorian homes I covet more than I should and the tiny Asian lady’s 3^rd Street Market. Luke, by then, had started explaining to me the difference between an entrepreneur and a person who own her own business, but I was thinking about how I should try to be a better advocate for this home we’ve chosen.

This morning, after lollygagging around the park, I went to Pilates, which is taught by a woman named Ruth (my grandma’s name, my confirmation name), whom I’ve had as a teacher before at the comfortable albeit corporate gym where I work out. She has a head of maroon hair that curls toward her face like a halo of curious C’s.

“Drop those anchors from your shoulders and down to your hips,” she instructed, sitting Indian-style, and wiggling her tight old lady booty on her Mexican mat (I know it’s from Mexico because she told us the story once in Silver Sneakers class). (Silver Sneakers is the class at my gym for old people, one of a few I take where I’m the youngest one by two generations). Blame it on these knees.

I had planned on breaking a little sweat, but I left two layers on during the hour-long class. In Pilates with me were two other young woman and a large black man who Ruth had to keep readjusting. Every time she did, she’d say, “Is it ok if I fix you?” and he’d say, “Oh, please do.”

Ruth has a belly like a saucepot, but crazy-strong legs and surprising flexibility. From pigeon pose (in seated position, one leg tucked under your hips, the other straight back), she can bring her back leg up and catch it with her hand, then hinge her entire upper body backwards to grab that hind foot with both hands.

All the while, she keeps a calmness. “Do you feel that?” she says it almost orgasmically, beaming and relaxed but utterly energized, and because she’s looking straight at you, you feel pretty good, too. “We never get to breathe like this in real life! Just breathe right into everywhere you want! Your lymph nodes! Your ribs!” We do.

At the end, we do this really funny thing while all the weight lifters watch through the full-length glass windows to our right: we chug air in, three times, and each time, our arms go higher and higher on each side until they are above our heads, at which point, we give an exhale with a gust and we swing our head and hands down between our knees then swing back up to standing. All this we repeat three times, and at the end, Ruth applauds for us and we applaud for her and the day feels like it will be happy and healthy and that the world, right here, is a good place to live.

I left Pilates and bought some groceries. Mostly things we’ve needed for a long time, but keep forgetting to buy: Whole wheat flour. Lotion. Toothpaste. I dumped honey, oil, hot water, and wheat flour into the breadmaker and pressed start. I went to the Tattered Cover and sat in a coral-colored velvet chair for an hour and read a book I never want to end. Then I drove downtown to the library to find the books I couldn’t afford at the bookstore. A man in the elevator said he liked what he saw. A man on the third floor was licking all his fingers over and over again. When I got back down to the first floor, someone asked me if I had lost a glove. I paid my $15 library fine (sorry, Luke, I’m bad at these things, I’ll admit it here to set things straight: getting things that I don’t own returned on time; washing my car; making doctors appointments). But I’m good at baking bread and trying to get something done every day.

Two minutes after I walked in the door, the bread machine beeped: done.

This loaf has a just-right caramel sheen I hadn’t yet achieved with our less-than-perfect bread machine. I squirreled a chunk off the bottom and made another pot of tea. I’m laying on our chocolate couch now, tucked in like a toddler in winter. The sun dove behind the mountains a few minutes ago and the sky tonight has no hint of pink, just yellows sewed up with blues, like a light hanging inside a lake. The last two weeks, we spent on the West Coast, in the desert, and wondering through the reds of New Mexico.

“Let’s go back to Santa Fe,” Luke says from the office as I’m writing this.

But I like Denver today, and today, it likes me too.

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When I invite people over, I tell them not to look too scared when they get out of their cars. Across the street, a three-legged Rotweiler keeps watch from the yard of dirt. Out back, Crow trades meth for the money handed over by high school boys, emaciated women, and faceless people who remain in the cracked shells of their rusted white trucks.

When I back up out of the driveway, I back up into Crow’s front yard: a ramp that ends at a concrete slab in front of a door decorated with tossed off child toys and upended grocery carts. Crow wears a black t-shirt over his widening gut, which stretches out the already stretched out wings of a huge yellow-beaked bird. Above the bird are the letters (in the same font as the “Led Zeppelin” on the my brother’s favorite tie-dyed high school shirt): CROW.

Go four blocks in this neighborhood and you’ll find four times the income level you started at. A man with a Rodesian Ridgeback called to me from behind the potted plants on his front porch: “Is that a rescue dog? Good for you!” The white on his plaid shorts matched his teeth. It is sad that people are so supportive of rescuing stray dogs, but they won’t look closely at the situation across the street. The proximity of people living opposite lives are part of this place’s charm and part of its tragedy.

Crow and I say hi in the mornings, in the afternoons, and late at night, when I get home alone and hope that Crow is out smoking a cigarette and thinking whatever he thinks. Crow’s toothless mouth looks like his yard, gray-brown and lacking landscape. He said he’ll make sure I’m safe while Luke is gone. So far so good. Except for the retarded man who wanders the neighborhood early in the morning (when I’m out with Quincy), spearing trash with a sharp stick. When he sees me, he sticks his tongue out at me, and then I have to alter course. Yesterday, we went on two long walks, past the bilingual school’s community garden on 2nd, past the Victorian houses with their catalpa trees and long swinging bead pods on Galapago, past the creamy mansion of West High School, and all the way down to the smelly Albertson’s on Alameda.

When I came home in the late afternoon, a woman with egret legs was leaning back and screaming something in Spanish into a red cell phone in Crow’s driveway. Crow sat on his concrete wall, puffing on a cigarette, looking alternately between the dirt and the woman. His young son twirled a plastic bag on a stick.

Last night, I went out with my Maldovan friend Natalya who calls everything buckets: the containers where her bolts of fabric sit waiting to be made into dresses and shirts and robes, the laundry basket, the holder of the fried calamari we ordered on the corner of Broadway as the first fall breeze came in off the Divide. We talked about how part of the American myth is that we’ve all had hard childhoods upon which we can place the blame for our decisions and psychologies. Natalya became an orphan before she turned 21, made her way to the United States, and had a child–a joyful, earnest, astonishing little girl–with the wrong man. Natalya made me think about the people whose gestures and brake lights I watch from behind my barred windows. While we finished our wine and talked about how long we’re able to manage hope without knowing where it’s going, she described her life right now as a bubble:

If you reach out and touch it, it might break.

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When I left Denver for Lawrence, Kansas last weekend, I underestimated the time it would take and the storms that are always possible this time of year driving across the plains. The drive started well. I had four books on tape—Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Nick Arvin’s Articles of War, Joyce Carol Oates’s The Tattooed Girl, and Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls. I figured I’d save those for later. I stuffed sunflower seeds in the right side of my mouth and moved the shells, once shucked, over to the left. I had a fountain soda and a sunny afternoon ahead of me. My mom called to check on me. “No storms. All sun,” I said, all sunny. The sunflowers prayed at the sky. The wheat glowed gold. Then it started to storm.

Funny that “storm” is a noun and a verb and that storms themselves are nouns and verbs. A thunderstorm appears as a bulky puff and then it puffs its bulk over the fields. Rain rains, tornadoes tornado, but humans don’t human. Maybe we are weaker. Just proper nouns who do things.

I probably should have pulled over. Whatever in us makes us think “Surely, I won’t die. Everyone else might, but not me,” is the same thing that made me drive through the storm. I watched the black mass circle around the highway counter-clockwise as NPR announced its very clear severity. The swirls started south of me, whispy and half-serious, becoming black, but soon they were sitting on the highway, straight east, straight ahead of my hood. A fat rainbow twinkled out the edge of a furry gray cloud. The sunflowers bowed down, yellow bonnets curling over brown faces.

“If you’re on I-70,” the crackly voice on the radio said, “You should pull off and wait this cell out.” Cell. This storm sounded like something in The Matrix. I had a wierd feeling I’d either hit a really bad storm or no storm at all. Red pill or blue pill? What did I do? I kept driving. Well, no, that’s not entirely true; I pulled into the McDonald’s drive-thru for an ice cream cone, then I got right back on the highway, with my vanilla soft serve in one hand and my camera, flash turned off, in the other.

I don’t know what I was thinking. Wind does not blow over the plains; it rips across them. It tears paneling off cars and knocks semis over sideways. I tried to catch a line of cows running on camera. I tried about 15 times to capture the lightning hitting the ground and the dust galloping over the highway. But I could barely drive with two hands, much less none. I threw my cone into the cup holder and I wouldn’t find it til later, til it had melted into an opaque, milky pool.

One thing I love about storms in the West is that they approach. In Alaska, they just sit on the town, stubborn and sullen. In Colorado and Kansas, they make an entrance, swooshing their robes of many colors across the ground like an angry king. “Who stole my land without asking?” This king would say. Farmers would scatter. Sunflowers would lie prostrate. Cars would pull over and passengers would enter McDonald’s and stay for hours. The clouds would move and the world would run for cover, then stop.

This was one of the most magnificent storms I’ve ever seen. I counted: for every five seconds, I saw at least five bolts of lightning, sometimes more like ten. The bolts turned all my windows white (I took the pictures above during the same second). Some cracked sideways across the sky, then like a shattered windshield, branches erupted from the initial line, and squiggled down to the ground.

When my brothers and I were little, we used to go into this spoof gift store in Southwest Plaza called Spencer’s for ten minutes at a time while our mom was in the department store. Amongst the dirty playing cards and pins with the F word on them, they had one of those electric spheres on a stand—a crystal ball that looked like a giant lit-up snowglobe, with electric bolts wiggling out from the epicenter towards the glass like wavy tentacles. If I put my hand against the glass, the tentacles all came to meet it. They were hot pink and hot to the touch. The ball felt like magic. Was it magnetic? Did it sense me? Each of my fingertips controlled a magenta zigzag. I could rake the electric fingers with the tips of my own from one side of the curve to the other, from the top to the bottom. We always had to leave Spencer’s before we’d had enough.

So it was with this storm in Kansas. I couldn’t just sit there under the McDonald’s awning and watch the sky turn from inkblack to milk-white without going into it. So I drove. Pretty soon, I had my shoulders pulled up towards my ears. I leaned over the wheel like my mom does (even in sun), and sent the wipers into a fury. They did nothing. The rain came from both directions. The man on the radio reiterated the speed of the wind: up to 75 miles an hour. “Trees are lying across the road in Hays,” he said. “It’s too dark to see how deep the water is. Get off the roads!” I went 80. I would beat this thing.

There were other headlights, but not many. I had started going so fast that I realized, as suddenly as a bad headache, that I couldn’t stop. A black shimmery curtain covered the exit ramps. All I could see was the white line along the shoulder. If I stopped, someone would slam into me. If I tried to pull over and pulled over too far, I’d roll down the steep hill or end up going off the side of some bridge I didn’t realize I was on.

There was one brief moment, it lasted maybe two seconds, where I could see absolutely nothing. I wedged my car in between the shoulder and a semi spraying even more water across my windshield, and thought, prayed, I hope I make this, I hope I make this. I couldn’t see the shoulder, the sky, the truck, just water thrashing its way across glass like a thousand transparent snakes. When you’re going fast, momentum makes more sense than making a decision. My speedometer still read 80 (I know because I had never turned cruise control off—I just wanted to burst through the storm like I was digging to China and I’d end up in some wonder world if I could just get far enough to pop out into the other side).

Which is pretty much what I did. Right after I pictured my bloody body on the side of the road and my car flipped over and some bystander calling my mom, the rain let up just enough for me to see that I wasn’t on the road anymore, but driving down the gloriously wide shoulder. I righted the wheel and the semi disappeared into the mist behind me. The rain splashed against the windshield, but it left spaces for me to see. I breathed and brought my shoulders back against the seat.

I have probably driven across Kansas and Nebraska 30 or more times. We used to take I-80 to Chicago, I-70 to Kentucky, and later, I used to drive those same flat roads to pick up Ashley on the long drive to Louisiana. Most people think the plains states are boring, but the continuity of the land has a strange beauty and dependability to it—gray rocks, slow livestock, lines of gold-green that will pull a car across the country.

When you drive alone across a place that is mostly bare, you begin to feel that way yourself. Your best and worst memories wave from the roadside. You’re like those rusted old trucks half-decayed under the grass, half-growing into the green. I know all the signs along the side of the road like lines in a song about my summers growing up—“World’s largest Czech egg, next exit!” “A Kansas farmer feeds 128 people and you”, “Come see the largest live prairie dog in the world”, “Pet the 36-inch live donkey!”

When I drive across Kansas, I think of pulling over for storms and eating gorp in the back seat of the minivan. When I drive past the camouflage tanks parked in long, blocky strips at Fort Riley, I think of my uncle Mark who went AWOL from the Army and ended up in Alaska. When I pass the wooden “Welcome to Colorful Colorado” sign, I think about all the heartache I carried across these plains when I was in college. I like driving here because of the time and the storms and the parts of history–my history–that I would have forgotten if it weren’t for this highway.

I-70 was the first stretch of interstate that opened in the U.S. I always think of one of my favorite books, My Antonia, when I drive east out of Colorado. “There seemed to be nothing to see,” Willa Cather writes. “No fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

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Yesterday, I was walking through the woods in Anchorage, half trying to get lost, half thinking about how bad it would hurt to be stomped to death by a moose, when I came around a quiet corner and landed smack in the middle of a huge beach party. Men turned burgers on charcoal grills and bluish white women lolled on lumpy pink towels. Screaming kids tromped out into Goose Lake, some in red life vests, others dragging black innertubes out to where the buoys separated slow kayaks from cold water dawdlers. I stopped and stood like some creep watching suntanners from the trees. It has been three years since I’ve seen people doing summer things.

When I checked the weather yesterday before heading out to walk, it was 59 degrees. One thing I love about Alaskan kids is that as soon as the sun’s out, it’s an opportunity to get in the water. I had on my sweater pants (no, not a sweater and pants–we’re talking the softest, most sweater-y pants you’ve ever touched) and a light jacket, and here these people are, stripping down to practically nothing to soak up what I feel is one of the biggest sacrifices of being here: living so close to water and not being able to snap on my goggles and get in. Well, I could, but on most days, the double cold would make me miss the Gulf even more.

That scene, though–stumbling into what looked like some south side of Chicago lake shore picnic–is how it feels to live here for part of the year. I’m always coming around some corner in Alaska, tripping my way into an unexpected view or an unexpected realization of my place in this place.

A friend in the program writes about finding bones in the fields where he grew up caring for and killing cattle in Minnesota. Another writer showed slides of the bones he’s found in deserts where the sand sticks up like small castles and few animals can tolerate the change in the weather’s extremes. On my walk yesterday, running into him, I mentioned when I’d been Colorado three years ago, when I was waiting for those old knee bones they put in there to become my own, and sometimes, here, I feel like I’m taking all this cold, wet marrow into me to see if it will set.

I hate the houses here–poop brown, single-story shacks with overgrown grass and green trim–the sprawl, the strip malls, the way the trails I took yesterday kept ending up on some road. Sure, there is natural architecture–those Chugach mountains rise navy blue and angry just above Tudor Road, the one we take to the bar and the coffeeshop and the well-organized, over-priced Anchorage thrift stores. But this is no city for me. I will come here next year to finish my degree and buy used books, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be back after that besides as a stopover to smaller towns. In Sara’s voice, I notice this longing to leave Alaska mixed with a stable–or at least stabling–loyal love that might keep her here for longer than she planned. I wonder if that happens to most of us. Is it by convincing ourselves that we make the hardest decisions?

Michael, the friend who writes about bones, described himself as a city mouse-country mouse kind of guy. I thought I might describe myself the same way, but as I think about going home to Colorado, I think of all the places we’ll fly over that I’ve never seen. I want to find watering holes and wolves, vineyards, vultures, haunted hotels. Maybe I’m more like the “Give a Mouse a Cookie” mouse. Give me water, and I’ll want to swim. Give me mountains and I’ll want wild music. Give me bones, and I’ll want to pick apart whatever’s left in the ribs.

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