September 3, 2006

• Long time, no update! Blog entries may be scant as we complete our transition from the States to Scotland, but fear not: this little blog of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. We’ve been out of Chicago for a few days now, and we’re eagerly awaiting September 14, the day that gross amounts of fossil fuel will burn to fly us to our new pad in Glasgow. Until then, we are stuck in what I like to call “The Palpitating Heartland.” Read on, gentle reader, read on.

  The Palpitating Heartland
  The Author, 2006

  Wednesday night, after my last day of work and vegetarian burritos at Garcia’s, Shaun and I drove a big yellow Penske truck to Shaun’s parents house in Michigan. Thursday, we moved our books, couch, mattress, and cooking gadgets to storage in my Grandma’s barn. That evening, Shaun and I walked to the park to play Frisbee and ran into an old teacher of ours. And this isn’t just any old teacher. This is Mr. Beihl, the high school Peer Listening instructor. Beihl taught us that “should” is a dirty word and that the worst thing a couple can do is compromise instead of invent a better, new, third solution. A lot of how my marriage to Shaun operates has to do with what I learned from Mr. Beihl in Peer Listening.

  Walking down the lazy slope to Depot Park, I spied Beihl’s thick mop of wavy gray hair, his drooping blue eyes, his miniscule wife Evyln, and their even tinier wiener-dog Sam.

  “I know those two!” Beihl called out.
  Before I could control it, my inner-dork announced, “This is like, a dream come true! Every time we come home to visit, I hope that we’ll run into you and we never do.”
  “Come home? Where are you living?”
  We caught up on our Chicago adventures and our upcoming pursuits in Scotland. We found out about the life of Beihl these days.

  Before parting, Beihl told us, “Life is like a fast moving river that you are trying to cross, one log at a time, but you never know where the next log is going to surface, or how slippery it might be.”
  Never one much for anecdotes, I laughed and told him, “screw those logs–we like swimming!”
  He shook his head thoughtfully, “You two were always about the journey. That’s good. That’s good.”

  Continuing on to the park for our Frisbee session, Shaun wrapped his warm arm around my waist and said; “I guess cheesy movie narrative devices really do play out in real life sometimes. Loose plot threads are tied up, happy endings are had by all.” And at in that minute, with the sun streaking purple across the sky, the trees growing inky and blotted, with my love’s furry arm fitted loosely around my waist, my trusty Frisbee in hand, I threw my head back and laughed. In that minute, it seemed so true.

  But as the days wear on here, I am feeling less and less of that real-life movie magic. We are staying with Shaun’s parents, who live in our hometown, in the interim between the end of our Chicago lease (August 31) and the beginning of our Scottish lease (September 14). And while I’m thankful to share a hometown with my husband, to have a place to stay in this limbo, it’s hard to settle back into the abrasive culture of this place; a culture that we were so eager and proactive about high-tailing away from. It’s always seemed to me that the majority of this town still believes that, “a woman’s work is never done,” and that some patriarchal god with nothing better to do has “blessed” America. A culture that would never consider a bike as a mode of transportation that cannot fathom any job that is not with “The Big Three.” A culture that is so pathetically homogenous that they still think of pita bread as “ethnic food.” A culture where people make the automatic assumption that a woman wants children, that a wife is subservient to her husband, that an artist is a someone who sells pick-a-ninny lawn ornaments at craft fairs and a writer is someone who declares every town parade a success in the local newspaper.

  In this interim, my heart aches for Chicago. I miss my 5:30 am runs along the lakeshore path. During my last two and a half weeks in Chicago, I ran my 5-mile route every day without respite, rain or shine, afraid of missing one of the few Chicago sunrises I had left. I knew I would miss the orange-robed Krishna’s meditating on the concrete steps along the shore, their robes matching the light soaked hue of the horizon. I wanted to see the orthodox Muslim couple who took their morning walk along the path, the wife draped in cloth, her Nike’s a few paces behind her bushy-bearded husband’s. I wanted to watch the dark, lanky teenage West Africans, the Lost Boys, begin their first game of pick-up for the day on the beach side basketball courts. I wanted to smile at the gaggles of elderly Vietnamese and Cambodians practicing Tai Chi, slapping their bellies, stretching their slack-skinned, sinewy muscles in unison, smiling at me as I passed them by. I wanted to say good-bye to the white-bandana wearing black man who ran past me in the opposite direction every morning caring ten-pound weights and booming, “Good morning, sister!” I wanted to feel how my breath would become automatically baited in the moments between the pulsating glow that accumulates beneath the horizon and the split-second when the sun unearths the impossible weight of itself to rest for a moment on the undulating surface of the lake–a cycloptic God blinking the sleep from her eye before the long gaze of the day was to commence. It was in those breaths that I thought nothing, that I was a part of everything, that my life was nothing more than the extension of my legs, the sweat pooling between my chest, the air pushed from my lungs, the feeling that even if the rest of the day was shit, at least I’d had this one pure moment to myself.

  And while I still run in the mornings here in my conservative, Michigan hometown, I am alone on the sidewalk. Like in many other suburban places, most of the inhabitants of my hometown prefer to enjoy the beauty of their natural surroundings from behind the glass and steel of their SUV’s. The place feels so lonely and disconnected and archaic. Worse, this town is hopelessly uninspiring, uncreative, and stuck in the very outdated notions that will destroy it.

  Today, before Shaun and I stole away to the cafe for some uninterrupted writing time, I was cautioned by my father-in-law to not create one of those “Funny Farm” scenarios for Shaun. If you are up on your 80′s movie trivia, you’d know that Funny Farm is a movie about a writer (Chevy Chase), whose attempt at fiction writing fails while his wife (Madolyn Smith Osborne)’s frivolous foray into writing leads to a huge book deal. So, according to my father-in-law’s logic, my writing is frivolous. Because a woman can’t possibly be more successful than her husband. Because she shouldn’t want to be. I realize that my father-in-law was joking–and I honestly do love and admire him for many things–but I didn’t think his joke was even remotely funny. I thought it was sick and sad and disrespectful. Without cracking a smile, I evenly said, “I’m just as much of a writer as Shaun is. I take a fair number of writing classes. I went to college for writing for the screen. I just left a job where I wrote copy for a living. And if I was ever lucky enough to sell any of my creative writing, I’m sure Shaun would be just as happy as if he sold something of his own.” And as I threw my laptop backpack over my shoulder and walked out the door, I caught a glimpse of my father-in-law’s face and it looked older than I ever remembered it being.
  ________________________________________________________________

  Even if it was fleeting, have you ever felt that your life was following the narrative structure of a cheesy Hollywood movie? Also, what is your hometown like?

  ::Random Tangent::
  The good news in all of this annoyance with my hometown is that I am unequivocally happy about what is coming in ten more days: our move to Glasgow, Scotland. Unlike the other times in my life when I’ve played the “let’s see where the world takes me” game, I know myself better this time around. I know what makes me happy, who I am, what I want out of life. I am confident. And I know that where I’m headed to next will be cosmopolitan enough to have significantly less annoying ideas that those that float about my hometown. I couldn’t have agreed more with Shaun when he made the comment this morning that our hometown is coated in a “searing static” that makes it almost unbearable once you’ve been outside of it for a while.

  And while I already miss my three favorite Chicagoans (hi Lindsay, Caitlin, and Giles the kitty), I know that since I’m travel-happy and in constant pursuit of a good Internet connection, proximity matters little. Most of my best friends live all over the place: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and Michigan. And while the distance is sometimes taxing, more often it is cool to have friends all over the globe, learning new things, experiencing the world, and providing an array of free couches to sleep on.

  So cheers to our great escape!

  • 1:45 pm
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