Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Dean Young

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Restoration Ode
– Dean Young

What tends toward orbit and return,
comets and melodies, robins and trash trucks
restore us. What would be an arrow, a dove
to pierce our hearts restore us. Restore us

minutes clustered like nursing baby bats
and minutes that are shards of glass. Mountains
that are vapor, mice living in cathedrals,
and the heft and lightness of snow restore us.

One hope inside dread, “Oh what the hell”
inside “I can’t” like a pearl inside a cake
of soap, love in lust in loss, and the tub
filled with dirt in the backyard restore us.

Sunflowers, let me wait, let me please
see the bridge again from my smacked-up
desk on Euclid, jog by the Black Angel
without begging, dream without thrashing.

Let us be quick and accurate with the knife
and everything that dashes restore us,
salmon, shadows buzzing in the wind,
wren trapped in the atrium, and all

that stills at last, my friend’s cat,
a pile of leaves after much practice,
and ash beneath the grate, last ember
winked shut restore us. And the one who comes

out from the back wiping his hands on a rag,
saying, “Who knows, there might be a chance.”
And one more undestroyed, knocked-down nest
stitched with cellophane and dental floss,

one more gift to gently shake
and one more guess and one more chance.

—
For more information on Dean Young, please click here.

Portrait of a Friend, Vol. 2

Posted on by alisonmcghee

You must have known her from kindergarten on, although it was in middle school that you became close friends.

She lived in a small bright green ranch house right across the street from the middle school, which was right next to the high school, which meant that all she had to do was walk out her front door, cross Route 365 –the main street of the town– and there she was, at school.

Unlike you, sitting on that accursed bus, groaning and lurching its way around endless curve after endless curve, down from the foothills, 45 minutes or more to school.

In your memory she is always smiling. She had silky dark brown hair, parted in the middle, falling over her shoulders. Her nose was sharp and red and a bit hooked, and her eyes, in your memory, are blue, blue, blue.

And the smile. A big, merry smile that showed off her high cheekbones. You can picture her in the yearly school class photo. She would have been in the back row, with you, because when you were kids she was tall, too. She would have been smiling that big happy smile.

In middle school the two of you used to escape at lunch and walk across the street to the bright green ranch house. She lived there with her older brothers and her older sisters and her mother, who was, you’re pretty sure, a teacher down in Utica. Her father had died when she was a baby.

Her sisters and brothers were in high school, unimaginably older and cool. They were hippies. You and she were too young, you missed out on that. But often, when you walked into that little house with her, they and their friends would be there. Lying on the old couch, sitting on chairs, laughing and talking and wrestling and making offhand comments and jokes about things like sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll.

Had you been alone you would have been stunned and cowed and half-paralyzed by their coolness, their easy laughter. But you weren’t alone. You were with her.

Why did she like you? In retrospect you were quiet and reserved and an observer and not much fun, although maybe you’re not the best judge of that.

But one reason she liked you is easy: she liked nearly everyone. She had a huge and generous heart. She was also unafraid of things that you were afraid of, like saying out loud that which scared you, hurt you, made you angry. She was honest about things. She saw life clearly, and stating the obvious didn’t scare her.

The boy you had a crush on used to ask if he could have a punch off your lunch ticket.

“Sure,” you used to say.

“I’ll pay you back,” he used to say.

You would watch him run across the grass, back into the school. You and she were nearly to Route 365 now, ready to zip across and into the safety of that little green house.

“He won’t, you know,” she observed. “He won’t pay you back. And you’ll give it to him tomorrow if he asks.”

You looked at her. She looked at you and smiled. She was wise. She was honest. She stated things the way they were. And she was unjudging.

Into her house the two of you would go, breaking the school rule, although in retrospect it’s hard to imagine that any number of teachers didn’t see you zipping across that street every day and mentally shrug.

The cool older siblings and their cool older friends might be lounging about. She would greet them all, smiling, and then the two of you would go into the tiny dark kitchen and pour enormous glasses of milk. Stir in the Quik with tall-handled spoons. Dig the knife into the big jar of peanut butter and spread giant swaths of it on slices of Wonder bread.

You’d sit eating and drinking, trying to overhear the conversations in the other room. Trying to get some sense of what life could be like, were you cooler and older and wore tight bell bottoms and peasant shirts.

She was one of the few friends you kept in touch with after high school. She stayed there, in the tiny town, population 300. She went to college, sure, but she never wanted to leave the town.

You? You left at 18 and never went back other than to visit your family. Not that you didn’t, and don’t, love it there, love the way you grew up.

But staying there never felt like a choice. For her, there was no other.

“I love it here,” she said. “I want to live here my whole life.”

She got a degree in gerontology and worked with old people. She loved them too. People on the fringes, people unnoticed, people quiet and shy, she saw them. She noticed them.

Twice that you know of, because she told you, men asked her to marry them.

“I said no,” she said. Smiling that big bright smile.

You asked her why. She shrugged.

“Didn’t feel right,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m happy just the way I am.”

She was Catholic and that, too, was something she loved. Hers was a happy Catholicism, a big bright generous religion whose God was always with her.

Everyone in the town knew her. At the drugstore, at the one tiny bar, at the church, in the one tiny grocery store, at the bank. She was one of those rarest of creatures, a human being completely comfortable in her own skin.

She’s been gone twelve years now, but you think of her every day. Every morning, you talk to her. Picture her.

When she appears in your mind, it’s always in winter. She’s always brushing up against you, wearing a bright blue nylon parka. That dark hair, those blue blue eyes, that grin.

When you pour a glass of milk and stir in some Quik, you make a toast to her. When you and some of her other friends organize an annual fundraiser in her name, for an annual scholarship in her name given to a high school kid in that little town, you do it for her. When you write your annual check to the food bank in that little town, you fill in the “in honor of” box in her name.

If she were still here, she’d no doubt be running the place.

You wish you could go home and see her again. Walk into that bright green house and have a peanut butter sandwich. You’d go to the bar with her, let her introduce you around.

A few things I saw this morning

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Five pelicans, flying in formation, skimming low over the water on the lookout for fish.

A thirteen-year-old golden retriever lowering himself to his haunches in the surf, then clambering out on the sand to wiggle ecstatically on his back.

Bubbles rising silently in a straight-sided copper bottom pot. The same pot a few minutes later, shimmering and shaking over a wide red coil of heat.

The bright black eyes of a squirrel fixed on mine as he advanced down a branch and toward my waiting palm.

Tan foam that looked like dirty whipped cream, surfing in on the waves that fold and retreat, fold and retreat, fold and retreat, at the shoreline.

A woman wearing a long white shirt and black shorts, bent at the waist and peering intently at something only she could see in the water.

An uninhabited wooden platform, like a treeless treehouse and taller than all of the few surrounding houses, standing sentry in a white sand lawn.

The silent, slender t-shirted backs of two sleeping teenage girls.

The far-apart vanishing footprints of someone who must have been running in the sand.

A transparent, blue-rainbowed sea creature blown up on the beach, shaped like a Chinese potsticker and trembling in the wind.

Portrait of a Friend, Vol. 1

Posted on by alisonmcghee

You met her fourteen years ago. She was tiny then, and now, at 90, she is even tinier.

The first time you met her she grasped both your hands in her own pale arthritic ones. You felt a shock of recognition that transcended the 40+ year difference in your ages, and she felt it too.

She has often spoken of it since: “We are soul sisters.” She believes that your connection was formed long ago, before this life, and that it will continue after this life.

She has glossy, jet black hair that frames her face, and she often wears black and red. Bright red sweaters, a bright red coat, black pants, a black shirt. She’s beautiful. She shines. Light surrounds her.

For almost sixty years she’s lived in a fifth-floor walkup in midtown, first with her husband and now, for the past twenty years, alone. You’ve met her neighbors, five of them, and you’ve seen how they too adore her. One of them brings her mail up, one helps with groceries, another helps her down and outside and into a cab, should she want to go out.

Which she does. She goes out a lot, to dinner, to see friends, to ceremonies that honor her work as an artist.

You’ve never seen her apartment but you imagine it: crammed with books and artwork and Chinese furniture –she is Chinese-American, born and raised in San Francisco and New York– and lovely fabrics. She is the kind of person who surrounds herself with beautiful things, and beautiful things are drawn to her.

Although you didn’t meet her until you were all grown up, you knew her work much earlier. She is an artist, and some of the picture books you read when you were a child contain her artwork. Thirty years before you met her in person, her art was part of your mind and memory.

Arthritis has taken so much of her limberness away, crippling arthritis that takes her three hours each morning to overcome enough to get out of bed. Once, she was trapped inside her apartment for a day because she couldn’t turn the doorknob and open the door.

She falls sometimes, and some of her friends –she has many friends– scoop her up. When asked if she’s okay she laughs. She has a high, tinkling laugh; it sounds like small windchimes.

“Of course!” she says. “I only weigh 65 pounds, like a child. Falling doesn’t hurt.”

She calls you sometimes, usually when you’re making dinner.

“Oh, what you are you making, my darling treasure?” she says, and you tell her, and she exclaims how delicious it sounds.

You call her sometimes, too. You hate talking on the phone but for her, you’ll do whatever it takes. You let the phone ring and ring and ring: arthritis. She has no answering machine, and sometimes you let it ring thirty or more times. And then she picks up.

“Hello?” she says.

“Hello!” you say, and she knows right away who it is.

“I had a feeling you might call,” she says, and then you’re off and running, usually for no more than ten minutes, minutes full of I love you’s and laughter.

Her voice is so young. She is so young. That’s one of the things you’re realizing these days, that it’s the body that ages, not the spirit.

“Goodbye, my precious darling,” she says.

Her father’s name for her when she was a child was Precious. He held her on his lap and read her stories. Her mother cooked for her. Her uncles and aunts played with her and took her wandering through the city.

“I grew up surrounded by love,” she says, “nothing but love. How could I not be happy?”

After you hang up, you go back to your work, and fifteen hundred miles away, she goes back to hers. Soon she will be 91. You have a box of notes she’s sent you over the years, not so much notes as tiny pieces of art. Someday you’ll frame them all and hang them on your wall, so that whenever you look at them you’ll feel her presence again, her light and sparkling presence.

The Archaeology of Snow

Posted on by alisonmcghee

That photo over there is a photo of the steps that lead up to her house. There are six steps, wide and shallow, covering a vertical distance of approximately four feet from bottom to top.

That’s what she remembers, anyway. There might be five steps, or seven. Who can tell, under all that snow?

She did a little experiment earlier. She stood at the top of where she thought the top step might be, and then she leaped. She landed, she thinks, on the sidewalk. But who’s to know, under all that snow?

Earlier in the day she put on her boots and hauled her yellow steel-spring snow shovel upstairs to her bedroom. Outside the large bedroom window is a small slanted roof (one of several, because it’s a house with several peaks and slants), a roof piled so high with snow that half the window was obscured.

Which would have been fine, because what’s a little more whiteness on top of whiteness, except that she noticed a crack in the wall, right through the plaster and paint, directly underneath the window and running its entire width.

No! This could mean only one thing: The Ice Dam Cometh.

Up to the bedroom she went, lugging the shovel. She pushed open the large window, which is on hinges, and hauled herself and the shovel onto the roof. Then she commenced shoveling.

The top foot or so was easy. Feathery light sparkling snow, the kind that whisks off the shovel and flies up in your face with the slightest breeze. Somewhat out of control, but weightless, so that it’s not really a bother.

Fling, fling, fling, gone. She considers this top layer Ectomorphic Snow. Given her body type, if she were snow, this is the kind of snow she would be.

The second foot or so was what she thinks of as ordinary, run of the mill winter snow. Solid, well-packed, not a lot of air. Difficult to shovel but certainly not impossible. She thinks of this kind of snow as exercise snow. Spend an hour shoveling this snow –she will call it Mesomorphic Snow– and there is no need to go lift weights at the Y. Mesomorphic snow is rewarding.

Her youngest child, if she were to turn into snow, would be this kind of snow.

The last foot and a half proved very grim. At first glance, this bottom layer looked manageable –granular, crusty, “corn” snow, as they say on the slopes. She attacked it with vigor, believing herself to be nearly finished, and a job well done at that. But the corn snow had been waiting, and it was going to take its time.

You think you are nearly done, O Woman With the Sock Monkey Snow Hat, but how wrong you are.

The corn snow –perhaps better termed the Borderline Personality Disorder Snow– was like a blind date gone horribly wrong. An unassuming, even pleasant appearance, a sociable hello, and then all hell breaks loose.

How long had the BPD snow been lying in wait? A long time, she realized. Months, perhaps, as far back as November. It would go to its death, yes, but it would not gently into that good night.

At this point, halfway through the dour BPD snow struggle, her neighbor emerged from her house to call up to her that she needed to get off the roof immediately because “You will die!”

She would not die, but the BPD snow would. She waved and smiled and carried on. Her neighbor, having done her duty, retreated into the safety of her own home.

And that is how it came to pass that her backyard clothesline, normally a comfortable few inches above her head, now hangs mere inches above the backyard snowdrift composed of Ectomorphic, Mesomorphic, and Death by Being Methodically Chopped Into Small Pieces and Flung Overboard snow.

So did you know that at our local gas station –

Posted on by alisonmcghee

You have to write something that begins with “So did you know that at our local gas station. . .”

Do you want to? Not really. But write it you will,  because this is what you signed up for, here on this write what I tell you, like it or not day.

Off you go to the search engine, to find a photo of your favorite local gas station, so that everyone can see how charming it is, if indeed a gas station can be charming.

Here are the words you type into the image searching engine: winner gas pump munch nicollet.

That photo to the right up there is what comes back to you. It is from a woman named Shea’s blog, which appears to be a food blog. Does Shea’s blog have anything at all to do with the Pump ‘n Munch on 44th and Nicollet, here in the frozen hell you call home?

In an alternate world, perhaps, but not in yours, at least not today, this early morning when your frozen hell city has been declared the nation’s coldest by all the weather stations in the country. But you shall keep that photo up there, because looking at that woman’s smiling face –Shea, is that you?– gives you hope that one day you, too, will feel like smiling again, here in the frozen hell in which you live. Look at her there, in what appears to be a greengrocer’s, surrounded by healthy green vegetables. You would like to live Shea’s life for just a few moments, perhaps the next five, to be exact.

PAUSE FOR STATION IDENTIFICATION

Not really. But you suddenly had an intense craving for a large spoonful of Plantation Unsulphured Blackstrap Molasses, and who are you to deny intense cravings? You also have an intense craving to be in Shea’s greengrocer shop (is that how you phrase it? or should you say Shea’s greengrocer’s – is just the word alone sufficient? You are not British, so you cannot speak with authority on the subject of greengrocering), but since that craving cannot be immediately satisfied, the blackstrap molasses will have to do.

What is it about molasses, anyway? Do any of the rest of you get an intense craving for a large spoonful of it every now and then? Does it indicate an insufficiency of something in the body? Certainly there is a lack, or maybe it’s an overabundance, of synapse firing in your own body, but can a large spoonful of molasses help with that?

BACK TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING

Which happens to be the Winner Gas Pump ‘n Munch at 44th and Nicollet, here in the frozen hell otherwise known as Minneapolis. You have written about Winner Gas previously, in terms of its being your preferred place to purchase lottery tickets, but you love the Pump ‘n Munch and you do not love the BP, the SA, or the Holiday, so back to Pump ‘n Munch you go.

There appears to be nothing that can’t be bought at the Pump ‘n Munch. For a store that’s roughly the size of half the first floor of your house (meaning, tiny), these, off the top of your head, are a few of the things you can stock up on:

Assorted candy, milk, cream, sodas (both brand and off-brand), beer (you think, anyway – you are not a beer drinker, but many of the Pump ‘n Munch customers seem to walk out with tall cans of beer-ish looking beverages), tiny bottles of weird-looking energy and/or aphrodisiacal drinks, cigars, chewing tobacco, condoms, pain relievers of all sorts, hot coffee, pre-made sandwiches, a virtuosic assortment of snacks, household supplies such as garbage bags and toilet paper, fishing supplies, birthday cards, “Busted: a magazine of Mug Shots, Sex Offenders, and Criminals in Your Neighborhood,” and, of course, all manner of lottery tickets.

But the best thing about the Pump ‘n Munch is the man behind the counter. He is there literally all the time. One of your friends, a man who also favors the Pump ‘n Munch above all other gas-dispensing establishments, asked him recently how much he works per week.

“70-80 hours!”

“Why so much?”

“Bills, Charlie! Bills!”

Your friend’s name is not Charlie, but the man behind the counter calls everyone –everyone male, that is– Charlie. Does the man behind the counter have a family? Interesting that you should ask that question, because your friend posed the exact same question to him.

“No! You find me a woman, ok, Charlie? Find me a good one!”

It’s surprising that the man behind the counter doesn’t have a good woman, because he is so endearing, so cheerful, so energetic and kind. Many is the time you have been waiting patiently in line at the Pump ‘n Munch –as patiently as you can do anything, that is– while the people ahead of you, people who, by all appearances, live hard and difficult lives, fumble in their pockets for change to buy their candy, their Mountain Dew, their lottery tickets and/or their tall cans of beerish-looking beverages.

“I got you!” the man behind the counter will say, fishing a dollar out of his own pocket. “See you tomorrow!”

When you buy your lottery ticket, he hands it to you and says, “Good lu-uck!” If he forgets, you remind him.

“You have to say good luck,” you say, and he laughs and says, “Good lu-uck!”

Yes, this is your local gas station. Everyone should be so lu-ucky to have one.

How she got so good at typing

Posted on by alisonmcghee

How she got so good at typing? She practiced. She took a typing class in high school, when she was 15. It was taught by a woman who also taught Business, which, now that she looks back on it, was shorthand (which they didn’t teach) for Secretarial Skills.

That photo to the right there is not what her class looked like, but it does seem to exemplify a class on Secretarial Skills.

The class was full, mostly girls but boys too. The typewriters were heavy, one per wooden desk. The keys clacked, loudly.

There was a book of some kind that the teacher passed around, a book full of typing exercises. She began by memorizing the keys, by touch, with simple little exercises that spelled out words. When she’d mastered them she moved on to sentences that incorporated punctuation, beginning with the three that you see in this sentence.

Longer sentences followed, ones that incorporated all the letters. “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” Then came paragraphs, short, circumspect paragraphs about the weather, various holidays, food.

Letters followed, letters that usually, in her memory anyway, detailed brief business transactions. Someone had ordered something. Where was the something he had ordered? Might it be arriving soon?

The teacher taught them the correct spacing after a period –two spaces– and how many times to hit the Enter key after a paragraph (twice). She had to unlearn that correct spacing after a period rule once computers came to rule the world, and it was not an easy task.

She loved to type. Her goal was words that appeared on the page as fast as she could think them, and a typewriter was a vast improvement over a pen. Clack clack clack; her fingers leapt about the typewriter, and the sheet of white paper inched itself up from the roller.

Make a mistake? White-out. Daub it on with the little brush, let it dry, roll the paper back down to the correct line, re-type the letter. Or the word, or the sentence.

When she went to bed at night, age 15, she typed herself to sleep in her mind. She would think up sentences and paragraphs, tiny stories even, and close her eyes and imagine her fingers on the typewriter, clacking out the keys.

That right there is how she got so good at typing. Imaginary typing. Typing that didn’t involve a typewriter or a ream of paper or any sound at all other than what she heard inside her head. She went to bed practicing her typing in the privacy of her own mind, and when she woke up in the morning, she was a faster typist.

She got to be incredibly fast, and incredibly accurate. In fact, when she moved to Boston after college and embarked on her life as an unpublished writer, she supported herself by typing papers for students. $1/page, whether it was a paper on Jane Austen (yay! no symbols!) or a math Ph.D. thesis (yikes! all symbols!).

Later, in the years of babies and tiny children, she would write her stories in snatches of time during the day. She had moved on to a computer then; all she cared about was speed and ease. She had not changed since she was 15. She still wanted the words to appear as fast as she thought them.

Sometimes, during those snatched stretches of time, type type type type type type, she would sense a presence behind her and turn to see her son and his friends standing silently in the room, watching.

“Whoa. Is your mom the fastest typer in the world?”

“Yeah. She is.”

She commits to writing a blog entry on the first suggestion that comes her way

Posted on by alisonmcghee

. . . and the first suggestion that comes her way is “what love is.”

In keeping with the spirit of the thing, she closes her eyes, blindly points the cursor in her photo file, and clicks, in the belief that whatever photo presents itself will have an intrinsic connection to the theme.

Take a look at that photo. That there is a wooded hill in southeastern Vermont.  A wooded Vermont hill captured in pixels almost six years ago, as it happens, a photo she hasn’t looked at since.

Note the rudimentary driveway with the rutted tracks, the small evergreens dotting the hillside, the tall oaks and maples and white pines to the right and also farther up the hill. The car in the lower left belongs, she thinks, to her friend Meredith, who took the photo.

Six years ago, she (she being me, not Meredith), signed a series of legal documents faxed to her home in Minneapolis. The legal documents meant that this land was now hers. Despite the fact that she knew this particular part of Vermont well, she hadn’t ever seen this particular hill in real life.

She studied the series of photos that her friend sent to her, and she imagined herself walking through these woods. She wondered what the view was like from the very top of the hill. She wondered if there was a flat patch of dirt where you could pitch a tent, maybe build a one-room hut.

There’s an outhouse in the woods, her friend informed her. An outhouse was a one-room hut of sorts, wasn’t it? Indeed it was. What do you know, there was already a house of sorts on the land.

She went to walk the land only after it was hers, driving down the dirt roads that are 70% of all Vermont roads, searching for the unmarked entrance to the rudimentary driveway. What had she gotten herself into? She lived in Minneapolis, for God’s sake.

You always wanted to live in Vermont, she reminded herself. But it makes no sense, she scolded herself, You live in Minneapolis. She had no rebuttal to that one; it was true, this didn’t make any sense.

But she went ahead anyway.

Once there, she couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. Those giant trees. That one white pine, my God, she had never seen a white pine so tall, so huge. From the very top of the land she looked east, to New Hampshire, and there it was: Mt. Monadnock.

A year later, she and her friends put together a tiny one-room cabin from a kit bought off eBay. Another friend cut down some of the little evergreens that were overtaking the slope. Someone else drilled a well, and someone else spread gravel on the driveway.

One friend lived in the tiny one-room cabin for six months and used the earth itself to build things. Wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load filled with large flat Vermont slate dug up out of the creek beds: a walled perennial bed. Saplings felled with an axe, stripped with a draw knife, notched with a hatchet: a tool shed and a bench and a picnic table and a ladder. A firepit lined with rocks.

A hammock now hangs from straps encircling two white pines. A clothesline stretches between two trees. A pipeless old sink is propped between two other trees, a water bag with a spout suspended on a hook above it. The old outhouse in the woods has proved extremely useful.

She sits on a couch in Minneapolis, typing away on this entry. Below her is the sound of the water pump; a tall boy is taking a shower. Above her comes the sound of a ukelele; a girl is strumming it. And in another room, another house, in another part of the city, another girl is babysitting.

Once, the boy and the girls did not exist. They were dreams in the mind of a young woman. All her life she wanted them, imagining the things they might do together. The books she would read to them. The places they would go. She imagined sitting them on the kitchen counter so they could help bake cookies. She determined that she would take them traveling as soon as they were born, that they would grow up to be adventurers.

In dark moments, she imagined all the awful things that could happen to them, these invisible non-existent children. She imagined the horror of watching them hurt, suffer.

It doesn’t make sense to have children, she told herself. Those things could happen. The world is full of hurt.

But she went ahead anyway.

From something that was not real and that didn’t exist comes something real. Something you can touch. The top of a tall hill, from which you can see a far horizon. A boy, girls, human beings conjured up out of flesh and blood and dreams.

And so it goes.

Things don’t make sense, but you do them anyway. What exists at first only in your heart turns, over years, into something real.

Love is risk. Love is faith. Love is action.

Hello, Miss Wang. Greetings, Mr. Li.

Posted on by alisonmcghee

chinese-english-dictionaryHello, Miss Wang.

Hello, Mr. Li.

How are you today, Miss Wang?

I’m well. And you?

I too am well.

That makes three of us, then, who are all well, thanks, Mr. Li, thanks Miss Wang, here in this small car on a Friday morning in late September, heading west.

You have a 500-mile round trip overnight ahead of you, and in preparation you went to the library –first having combed through your children’s rooms in search of their library cards, hoping that one of theirs, unlike yours, would be “clean,” clean defined as having less than a $10 fine attached to it– to borrow some books on cd, the better to educate and entertain yourself as you drive.

You made it to your underground neighborhood library five minutes before closing –how typical– and the very kind librarian let you scurry over to the books on cd section anyway, where you chose:

Breakfast for Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut (you know you read this in high school, but you don’t remember a word of it, and what with all the Vonnegut talk these days you figure it’s time to re-up your acquaintance).

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, because it’s a cool idea –a virus wipes out the humans and then what happens?– and it sounds as if it might leave you a bit more knowledgeable, always a good thing.

Fierce Pajamas, a collection of New Yorker humor writing from long ago right up through now. Funny! You love funny.

Beginning Mandarin, Level One. (Or Two. Or Three. Could it possibly have been Four, even?) You spot this quiet little unassuming book-on-cd and scoop it up, for reasons that are not clear. You already know Mandarin at a Level One/Two/Three/Four, so what’s the point?

And off you go, books on cd scattered on the passenger seat next to you, bright and early on Friday, the better to give yourself plenty of time to mosey about on your way west.

Time enough to stop in a diner on the way and partake of a giant diner breakfast, time enough to stop and cash in your winning South Dakota powerball ticket ($3!) that you bought last August.

Time enough to get to the conference you’re speaking at with hours to spare before your lecture begins. Imagine that, hours to spare. What a new and exciting experience that would be for you.

(That plan is dashed to pieces 200 miles into the journey, when you realize that the conference is taking place in Sioux Falls, as opposed to Brookings. How ever did you manage to screw up so badly? This fact is discovered over a big greasy diner breakfast somewhere between Minneapolis and Brookings, necessitating an immediate and panicky departure from said diner in order to find a gas station, buy a map, and reconfigure your journey so that you have a prayer of arriving there on time for your lecture, which people are paying you good money for, a fact which only increases your anxiety.)

Breakfast of Champions: you listen to the whole thing, hoping that at some point something in you will click into gear and you will like it. That does not happen. Did you, in fact, read this book in high school? If so, did you like it back then? Moot and unanswerable questions.

You move on to Fierce Pajamas. You lean back in your seat as you speed along, endless prairie undulating as far as you can see, ready to laugh. Ready to dispel your how-could-you-screw-up-the-city-where-you’re-supposed-to-be-giving-the-lecture-so-badly self-recriminations. HA!

But the selections in Fierce Pajamas seem only mildly funny. At best. Have you lost your sense of humor entirely? First Vonnegut, now Fierce Pajamas. Two strike-outs in a row. You are a loser.

Perhaps it’s time for a little self-edification. Your hand hovers over The World Without Us. Should you? No. You are too worried, too angry at yourself (once again: what in the world made you think this conference was in Brookings? Did you not receive the conference materials months ago? Can you not read?), too focused on glancing in the rearview mirror to see if any cops have caught wind of the tiny wild car hurtling itself toward Sioux Falls. As opposed to Brookings.

And that –this combination of worry and distraction and loser-ness– is how you end up listening to the young Chinese couple as they attempt, over and over and over, to make plans for the evening.

Hello, Miss Wang.

Greetings, Mr. Li.

Ah. . . here we go. This is just the ticket. Mr. Li has such a peaceful, deep voice. Miss Wang is serious, well-spoken yet not at all ponderous.

Do you have any free time tonight, Miss Wang?

Yes, I do, Mr. Li.

How nice. What might Mr. Li have in mind? A movie, perhaps? Maybe a stroll in the park, followed by a bite to eat? Judging from the innocent bubble that seems to comprise his and Miss Wang’s world, there will surely not be anything more than that.

Would you like to get something to eat tonight, Miss Wang?

Maybe, Mr. Li. What time were you thinking?

Aha. Exactly as you had assumed. Mr. Li and Miss Wang will be dining together tonight. How happy this makes you. They seem like such nice people, and look how polite they are to each other, carefully considering the other’s schedule, hoping for a date but making no assumptions.

How about 9 o’clock, Miss Wang?

I’m sorry, Mr. Li. That’s a little too late for me.

You’re sorry to hear this. But how can you blame Miss Wang? You yourself wouldn’t want to sit down to a meal at 9 p.m. You’d have to drag your food-filled belly to bed only a few hours later, and you prefer to go to bed empty-stomached. Well, maybe a little Jim Beam. But a big dinner that late? No. Sorry.

Do you have free time tomorrow, Miss Wang?

Perfect! Kudos to you, Mr. Li. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But please do re-think that 9 p.m. dinner time.

I might have some free time tomorrow, Mr. Li. How about you?

Oh, Mr. Li, this is your lucky day. How about 7? That’s a more reasonable dinner time.

The miles roll by. The minutes tick away and the time of your lecture draws ever closer, but where is Sioux Falls? The tiny car speeds ever faster, and the rearview mirror gets a visual workout.

Do you have some free time at 7 p.m. to get something to eat, Miss Wang?

Yay! You drum your hands on the steering wheel in happiness and relief.

This, the knowledge that Mr. Li and Miss Wang are both willing to work together to make this date happen, is the only thing keeping you sane right now.

Think about it. Mr. Li was turned down for dinner tonight –and rightly so, given the lateness of the hour– but Miss Wang is willing to give him a second chance. And who in this life doesn’t want a second chance? Here in this tinny little car, on the last 100 miles of this hellbent drive, there is hope for the future. If Miss Wang and Mr. Li can do it, so, perhaps, can you.

Sioux Falls is somewhere out there, somewhere on the horizon. Onward.

The People Who Learned to Hide

Posted on by alisonmcghee

snowmageddon-3Minneapolis has just lived through the fifth biggest blizzard of all time. “Lived through” is something of a misnomer; many streets still haven’t been plowed, and once we’d finally unburied the garage (a two-day endeavor), the car got stuck thirty feet down the alley, requiring the assistance of five Good Samaritans to become unstuck.

But they were there, those Good Samaritans, and later in the day we returned the favor to three more cars. That’s what happens, at least sometimes, when a bunch of human beings are facing something bigger than any one of us, or any all of us.

This blog entry made me think of all those in my city, my country, my own block, who feel themselves alone. Every entry on this blog –Your Man for Fun in Rapidan– is a keeper, but once in a while he hits one out of the park.

And now I’m going to call my 86-year-old neighbor, who has been snowed in for the past four days, to see if she might like a bit of toffee, delivered to her back door.