– and hid his face among a crowd of stars

Posted on by alisonmcghee

When she was a girl she built a treehouse in the giant maple. She wanted to be high up, above the earth. There she lay on the wooden platform, looking up into the green leaves. She carved her name on a limb and watched as, over the years, the tree fattened around her initials, finally absorbing them.

tire-swing1This was in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, in far upstate New York, where on summer mornings she walked down the road to see the sun rise over the fields. When she grew older she chose a college in Vermont, in the Green Mountains, because it was the most beautiful place she had ever seen. She wanted to live there, those silent mountains rising around her, turning themselves to flame in the fall.

All her life she has loved to hike. Up the mountains and then down, but not before standing on the summit and looking down at the rivers and valleys and towns below. No sound but the wind, whooshing about her.

She used to call her sister Oatie with her location, in a haphazard, human GPS-ish way, before starting up the trail.

“It’s me,” she would say. “I’m at the base of such and such mountain. If you don’t hear from me in eight or nine hours, you can start to worry.”

The rhythm of an upward hike through greenery, twigs and leaves snapping underfoot, trail winding steeply ahead, calms her like nothing else, soothes her highstrung nature and sets her mind free. Some of her best conversations take place in the mountains, back and forth between her mind and some invisible presence.

Wide open treeless spaces scared her, and had scared her as long as she could remember. Giant parking lots, shimmering with heat under the sun. Wide flat treeless land. A photo of a Kansas horizon, flat land stretching forever, could make her turn away, inwardly shudder.

Mountains were like shoulders, shrugging their way up from the vast living body of the earth. Sheltering. Someone like her could live in a valley among mountains and feel herself hidden and safe, while knowing that anytime she wanted she could strike out for the summit and be standing above what felt like the entire world.

She wanted always to live among mountains.

But she moved far away, to Minneapolis. At first, she refused to believe that she was living so far from mountains. She charted a hills course through the city, and when people came to visit she would drive them or bike with them on her personal Hills of Minneapolis course.

“See?” she would say, zipping up Dupont just above the Walker Art Center.  “This is a hill!”

“See?” she would say, zipping down 54th by Penn. “This is a hill too!”

She didn’t leave the city much. When she did, she avoided those wide flat lands, those lands that wild winds sometimes came writhing through, snatching up cars and houses and flinging them about at maniacal will. Snow that drifted forever, covering up roads and fences.

“Nowhere to hide,” she tried to explain to a midwestern friend once. “Nowhere to take shelter.”

Nowhere her thoughts could smooth themselves out, be free of her clutching mind.

“But the plains are beautiful,” the friend said. “Endless and rolling, like the ocean.”

She could not see it. She wanted those mountains back. Sometimes she subdued a sense of panic. The plains are not beautiful, she would think. They scare me. Get me out of here.

Now she wonders if she ever gave them a chance, back then. She has lived on the plains for more than twenty years now, and it’s only recently that she has begun to see them, really see them. She charts the change to a road trip she took a couple of years ago, following Route 12 from Minneapolis to Montana. She looked forward to Montana – the mountain part of it – but thought of the drive out as something mostly to be gotten through. Flatness to be endured, in order to get to the good part.

But, a couple of hundred miles west of the city, something changed. She looked out and saw not emptiness, treelessness, but a land of silent majesty as profound as the particular kind of stillness she sought at the summit of a mountain.

Her sense of this land shifted from what it lacked – lack of trees, lack of mountains, lack of shelter – to what it held, which was fullness. Soil that could grow anything. Miles of prairie with grasses taller than her, undulating in the wind.

If mountains are the shoulders of the earth, then the plains are its belly and breasts, its long, curving flanks. Had she turned away from these plains for so long because all she could see was what they weren’t?

She imagined herself on top of a mountain, looking down at the earth spreading itself to the horizon, and she felt her own self changing, widening out, able finally to encompass both the mountain and the plains.

Living in a Rock and Roll Fantasy

Posted on by alisonmcghee

debbie-harry-blondie-birthday-july-1-aShe was twenty years old, living in Taipei for half a year with the intention of improving her Chinese.  The city was large and gray and crowded. Pungent smells of cooking oil and stirfry and garbage filled the humid air.

It was a city of narrow streets, crooked buildings, packed buses and haphazard sidewalks onto which cars drove at will. She and two Chinese roommates lived in a fourth-floor walk-up just off Roosevelt Avenue.

This was a long time ago. The city was still under martial law, which in her then-ignorance meant little  more than that you were not allowed to hold dance parties.

This was something that she and two American friends who were also living there discussed at length. Why weren’t you allowed to dance?

She loved living there. Everything about the experience was new to her, including the fact that for the first time in her life she was deeply, truly a foreigner. She was a tall white woman walking streets crowded with Chinese people, and everywhere she went, people stared at her.

Small children came up to her in restaurants and touched her hair. Babies gaped at her wide-eyed, and when she smiled at them, they sometimes screamed.

Most people assumed she didn’t speak Chinese, and it was interesting to hear the things they said about her. It was also interesting to see their reactions when she spoke back to them.

After a while she got used to being stared at. So it didn’t surprise her when a small group of young Chinese men and women came up to her and one of her American friends on the street and asked them if they wanted to be rock stars.

“Sure,” said her friend Sally.

Sally had always wanted to be a rock  star, something she’d already confessed.

“Sal,” she began, but she didn’t finish. Sally was so happy at the thought of being in a rock band, even a Taiwanese rock band that was just forming itself and hadn’t yet rehearsed. How could she let her down?

“This is our chance!” Sally said. “This is our chance to be rock stars.”

The truth was that she herself loved to sing, and she loved music, and she loved to dance, but she had not even considered a life as a rock star.  Rock stars were cool and confident. They played things like guitars and keyboards and basses, while she played the clarinet. They sang wild songs in powerful voices, while she had sung alto in her high school and church choirs.

But Sally would not be denied. “Think of it,” she said. “We can be the stars. We can sing anything we want.”

The Taiwanese would-be rock band waited eagerly for their response.

“Okay,” she said.

They began rehearsing during the day, in the top floor apartment of a dingy building. Dance parties were forbidden, but rock band rehearsals were not. Was there any logic in this? No, there was not.

Sally was in her element. She, however, was not. The Chinese band members were so short, and she was so tall. They were so Chinese, and she was so white and American. They sang American rock songs with a thick Chinese accent. She didn’t sing at all.

What was she doing in this band? She wasn’t the one who wanted to be the rock star. That was Sally’s dream. She wasn’t the one who sang out with abandon. Ever. She was the alto, the harmonizer, the one with the blend-in voice. Not the soloist.

Meanwhile, she continued to attract attention wherever she went. Something as simple as ordering a xigua niunai zhi at a fruit shake stand could result in a long question and answer session with a small crowd.

Sometimes she tired of the attention and tried to be unobtrusive, but it didn’t work. The looks, the comments (“Wow, she’s tall”), the screams from the babies – all continued unabated.

One day, traipsing along Roosevelt Avenue, shopkeepers pointing her out to their customers, she felt something shift inside her.

It was impossible not to be tall.  It was impossible not to be white and American. It was impossible not to be foreign.

It was impossible not to stand out, so why try? It was impossible to be Debbie Harry, but why not just sing anyway?

So she did. Why not? In her memory, she belted out Living in a Rock and Roll Fantasy, but she doesn’t completely trust her memory. It was probably something like Amazing Grace.

Everyone stared. But they always stared.

She sang louder. Why not?

She has always remembered that day on Roosevelt Avenue. It was a grey day – in her memory, Taipei is a gray city, gray broken by splotches of color from clothes hanging on clotheslines draped across balconies of gray buildings – and humid. She was wearing her pink skirt and Chinese sandals, men’s because they were the only ones that fit her big feet.

Hello you, hello me, hello people we used to be.

Isn’t it strange, we never changed.