Chicago

Beautiful cities, alive with people just spending time in shared spaces and walking and moving about in common transit -- in Chicago today, in Madrid last week
Each street, each rinconcito with character- and the feeling it gives me to  be somewhere exciting, somewhere with movement, makes me resent the sleepy Valley

or maybe it's reading "The Boy Kings of Texas" that's clouding my view and making me restless

You say you want to make the freelance thing work so you can just travel, spend several weeks in New Orleans, just get up and go
you say "You know how I am, by now", act surprised when I want to have a conversation about this, want to better understand what it is that you think you want, want to clarify where I fit in to this whole shebang

You say "You see the world differently, I accept that", but refuse to elaborate how I see the world - do you even know? I feel that you don't.  You certainly don't read my fucking poetry. And maybe you should. Maybe I should give you more, volumes of certain places and the way that they make me feel, and the way that living in those respective places have shaped where I am and where I want to go and what I think about, and more importantly the way that the city makes me alive and full of energy and vigor and potential so much so that I see flashes of my favorite rincones in moments of bliss.  Maybe you would understand me better, and maybe you would encourage me to pour more of it onto paper, like I used to do when I was lonely and living in New York and didn't have that many friends to talk to.

But ultimately, I feel that you just think about yourself and the path you're trying to carve. I guess it's natural to think that way, to not probe, to not know enough to care to ask or listen.  Maybe one day you'll find it's important to you to know me in this way.

Maybe one day we will live somewhere beautiful together, and you will understand me and I will understand you in this way of place, and all of this anger will go away, morphing into acceptance and something like understanding. Maybe we can share a love for a place. Because when I feel at home in a place, I just see more and more depths to uncover and interrogate and love, walks up and down the same decades of city blocks that help me when I'm stressed and make me feel at one with something larger.  When I feel at home in a place, like I felt in New York, I don't need to think about moving or whether somewhere else might have more for me; I start to think about how I can be more in it, and for it.

And that, to me, is Good.

Flying home

First 2 hours of my New England mini-vacation, following a full work day and 2 flights to get out of Texas  -
Frantic tunneling out of Boston in a newfangled rental car, exhaustion-fueled directional confusion until I'm safely on one of the long country roads that lead me back to this corner of NH
America runs on Dunkin' here - the girl at Alamo couldn't believe that Texas doesn't run on Dunkin, and after tonight, I can't either,
90s on 9 all the way home, the leaves rustling on the narrow winding roads a benediction.

At last at home, and the dog still remembers me, and loves me in his sleepy, middle-aged priceless way.  Embracing the antique, crisp clutter on the kitchen table, the three table lamps that suffice as lighting in my room growing up. Cool air the default, the heat not really on yet.  45 degrees in the middle of the night.  Forgot what fall felt like and tomorrow I get to see what it looks like.

autumn/feelings

Because it's beautiful to remember, looking back from another new place moving forward.  And because even though I haven't felt autumn weather for three years, I'm about to go back to the place where autumn and home both begin for me for a visit; and later, beautifully, the place below.


autumn/feelings [Madrid, 2011]


Something that catches me off guard, when living abroad, is just how easily life goes on.  My life goes on - a whole huge pool of experiences begins to form, interactions most of them shallow, but occasionally promising, vistas, steadily familiar narrow streets and the landmarks that you make of the places and statues you pass day by day, the things you teach yourself - or maybe the things the world teaches you and you ingest while walking through the park alone in the afternoon.  The release of finishing a day of work, a singular feeling inside of contentment that soon passes but was yours.   The flip side of that very contentment --  the swimming, the surfacing in this constant state of being in another temporality, while all the people you used to know in all of those places you used to live march on with their lives -- you do the same.   it's not dull, but it's much calmer than I imagined -- this steady opening up of your life, of what you are going to make of your life this year, of what you will fill the extra hours with, of how you will try to build upon yourself here.  Interactions in a language that's not your native one, the fragmented verse of  strangers trying to approach each other, the constant hum of desire to reach some depth through all these surfaces. the struggle to stay focused on what pulls you up in life, the search for patterns of meaning in all the experiences that have brought you here, and the feeling that I am quite simply just living.

3 SUVs and an ATV

3 SUVS, and an ATV - men in camouflage

In a public park by the University of Texas at Brownsville, down the street from la garita 

I had just parked there to head over to the library and continue reading "With These Hands", about those who labor in the fields in often oppressive conditions for their livelihood, allowing American Agriculture to run and the American People to choose from its cornucopia of fruits and vegetables in the supermarket

Three men running while the SUVS, white with the cheeerful green stripe of the Border Patrol, tore across the median and roared after the three dark shadows, running frantically, running chaotically 

As if it was the run of their life

One of them almost hit by the SUV, then doubling back into the woods behind the parking lot

Suddenly from nowhere, a green ATV came streaking across the parking lot toward the woods, a camouflaged agent began his descent, while back up agents in a mounting drove of vehicles gathered  across the street, to the left

I didn't know where the other dark shadows had gone to but I hoped they had somehow found freedom - I hoped they would be all right -

I didn't know what to hope for, but I felt a deep and useless grief in the pit of my stomach

and I got into my car and exited with a couple of other cars that had been waiting out the chase

It's no surprise here, next to the border, to see what must be routine, daily.  For it to cross over into the public spaces of the city when the city lives in the light and shadows of its sister country  

And who here would place blame on either side of the chase?  It could be that each is just trying to survive. In a city where both sides have grown up together, have evolved in co-dependence, share kinship with each other, it must be even harder.

Sentado solo en un banco en la ciudad

What hurts right now?
Being far from you -- estar lejos de ti, mi hermana  madrileña de Argentina, me hace daño.

English-Only is a Lie

When was he to learn English?

Perhaps during his two years of grade school in the campo 

or after school, when the nuns cared for him and the other children while his parents labored in the fields.

Surely it could not have been expected of him when after those two short years in the schoolhouse he left

to work beside his parents, a U.S. citizen slipping in beside hard-working Bracero mama and papa
Or when they sent him back to Mexico to live with his abuelita for a few years, rather than shuffle him across the Southwest through Texas, Colorado, and California with the agricultural seasons
where he learned to be a welder on the street - a skill that did him well when he returned to his native land, and worked for the same company in the Rio Grande Valley for more than three decades, and continues to work well into his 60s

It's not being born on the US side of the border that gives him his work ethic, his caracter humilde, his perseverance in the face of family loss and bureaucratic injustice
But you can bet that the mere fact of being born on these soils -  in a Texas border town, while his parents were Mexican nationals toiling on US soils and in US homes, in a region where those sharp distinctions between "us" and "them" become muted in daily life
gave him the chance to chase that American dream, to be an owner of a well-worn home, to lead his life in a region of the country that still speaks in the various tongues of its modern history and undergoes a fraught and frenetic and constant intercambio with its southern neighbor.

Reading articles on a Sunday in bed

after an overnight drive back from Austin with love + company
that felt like an escape back to the Valley, back to home

once the early-morning stretch blended into bedtime at dawn, and lazy dreams that stretched into the early afternoon
feels like the greatest luxury of all.


Because the hipster out-posts and scrumptious bites of the music city are a treat to the senses, and the drop of metropolitan life from this 24-hour window must feed my veins for another few months
when I'm nostalgic for the big apple above all

Forsaking the day's To Dos for an hour
feeding off  personal essays from salon.com and IHT in a cozy home back in Brownsville,
pleasantly full of pancakes and coffee can't be beat.

things

My landlord is kind
and 100% cranberry juice is delicious, but so damn expensive
I'm going to a training with a bunch of attorneys  - seasoned, hip, and sometimes both
Not sure why I'm invited, but I'm excited for the chance
Sometimes I miss the confidence of leading my own classroom,
and I surely miss the thrill of merging different voices, theories, interviews, into something tangible
(as tangible as an academic paper can be)
the feeling of having something important to say, and saying it - there is the problem of readership (it's not accessible to the ones who might most have something to say, or it's not supposed to be accessible given the way that academic work must be written, but maybe that could somehow be partially bridged)

But shit, it feels good to be able to listen to people and their problems, that they really do not deserve, and to know that their reclamos could actually be heard
and they could get back the money they're owed, or the money that can't quite pay for the suffering they endured - but it can help
but that process is long, and hard to see the end of when you're just helping to gather the facts

I want to keep a foot in that intellectual corner where I feel so alive
and do this job well, where I also feel alive and in a different way and less removed

culture / color

Living in Brownsville and being white is interesting. White privilege obviously works differently here, but it still exists, of course. I always felt like it would be beneficial for me to live somewhere (in this country) where I'm a minority, but even the luxury of having that interest reflects my privilege. But it's still challenging sometimes, though I don't even think about it a whole lot, it's kind of always there. People regard me with slight surprise. People are generally kind though. And I feel so happy to be in this place where Mexican/border culture are so pervasive, and that landscape makes me happy and comfortable most of the time.


Prejudice (do I want to say racism?) looks different here, but it also looks sort of the same. My landlord's Tia was telling me that people here are very prejudiced, and that she wishes she lived somewhere else but this is where family is, so here she stays. When I told her I wanted to do my PhD and teach at a college somewhere someday, she said 'Not here, right?  I have to tell you, someone as white as you, they will run you off the campus. They did that to most of the white professors.'  I told her that I didn't have plans to do that (I don't; I don't see staying in the Valley more than maybe 2 years and then going back to California to school, most likely).  Being black in Brownsville, she said, is much, much worse (as in, harder).  And that is pretty clear. But then, young people from here say that it is getting a bit more diverse.  That they are seeing different looking people in the street (but it being a novelty for them to see someone 'different' seems sad to me;  dare I forget that I come from a rather homogenous white small city in New Hampshire where I remember that same novelty). 


There's a lot more to say, or maybe none of this needs to be written at all, but thinking about it is good, I think.

but

I'm so glad that I had those days, and that they've passed and I've grown and met other people to love and strengthened other relationships and fallen in love and not been alone

and recognized 'this is the happiest period in my life' several times, and driven across the country 5 times.

Internet-gram to a friend: August 2008

I think about all of those little fragments that we send off through the web and then forget about and normally they're just gone.  But sometimes, years later, we accidentally find them and marvel at how dreamy and tormented and yet hopeful we used to be back in our university days.  I was Love-lorn and so lonely but also so happy, because the city I felt could just swallow my heart and make me forget about myself and all of these silly things.  Plus there was always love to be found in beautiful friendships with co-workers and peripheral interactions with teaching assistants.

Writing of transitions.

I never ever start packing until the day before I move. This weekend will be no different. I do, though, start losing marbles and slipping up, while the chasm of my room and its layers of transitory things and things in transit menaces in the corner when I bother to let my thoughts wander. I dried my hands with a white dish towel and left a smear of no-guilt blueberry raspberry bake (the remnants of which might have stayed off of my hands in the first place had I finished washing my plate, and not just begun). I forgot to put the baking sheet under the pie plate for the first twenty minutes, which almost triggered some smoke and moans, but fortunately not the alarm (This is not normal for me to forget, even if the recipe is new). I drove around a familiar country loop near my neighborhood and took a wrong turn in the night, went berry picking by myself after another bout of incessant rain yesterday because I didn´t want to stop driving. I will make time to run for an hour in the morning but I can´t seem to remember to fold my laundry until 1 am. And I often miss the tranquility of living alone and not having anyone to care about my occasional slips and being able to clean and polish just for myself. Do you crave independence, work, no time for anything, restraints on your restlessness, during idle spats? I like being lazy, though all of the things to do and decide buzz and I can´t go ten minutes through a book or the tube without a random guilt trip. I can, though, drive the routes and let the highway wind and the radio take care of that. I always miss driving. But that´s craziness too because in the end I will want to get somewhere, not just away from the places that are now empty vats of childhood -- perfectly lovely, with no gaudy colors, but more or less empty. 

You asked me once why I love New York, and I am inarticulate like hell when it comes to things that make me crazy happy, so I don´t think I answered very well. But maybe it has to do with the lack of escape plan. Once I´m there I feel that the world is gliding about and everything I might need to learn about -- at least their vague traces -- can be gleaned in its messy presence. It is concentrated life, gaudy, and no matter how divided things are there is still that person on the sidewalk saying I AM HERE with whatever tricks or glances he decides to slide by. Or life decides for him. I don´t feel as tempted to succumb to distraction or to just lose it on some quest for self-validation, and I feel the rush of energy course through me too -- that´s true -- and it´s to a limited extent like that in other cities too, because there just is no off button. And I like to hear the city at night, I just like to. It´s comforting. Noise, people. And it´s harder to feel lonely, maybe not always but impossible to be desolate.

far from Vermont

I can go days
I forget I ever came from there
I identify more with California,
I accept what Texas will teach me
but then I'll hear a pretty and vaguely familiar folk song
that makes me feel far from New Hampshire where I came from
and Brattleboro, Vermont

'he passes number 33'

When the headlines are heavy with senseless despair 

and stories of unsung injustice walk into the office all week;

when conversations with new souls are awkward at best

and understanding billows somewhere out on the shoreline más allá;

when the love you crave is on another continent

and in frustration you sprint ahead of the treadmill you’re endlessly running;

Certain songs comes out as a litany

from the permanent soundtrack of your life

as others roll in and out with the landscape,

and gain relevance with every new skittering fear.

They lull you back into the belief that people are basically good

And that believing in love is not just a cliché.

Será el poder de una canción

No puedo dejar de 

                 escuchar 

esta canción  

                 todo el verano

No puedo dejar de

                 encantar 

la sensación de liberación que me da.

tamarindo margarita

A tamarindo margarita on a Tuesday
is a grand finale to a fast-paced day
of intake-ing and translating, typing and re-formulating.
Unwinding with a friend at happy hour is a self-programmed system-wide cool-down,
an administrative exercise I needn't log into my timesheet.

Monday

La cucaracha had it made in the office kitchen

feasting off tamale scraps and coffee drippin's

Then Monday came 'round and he got hosed down

In his coffee mug tent -  what a lickin.' 


"Pobre cucaracha!" - my boss threw him away
and we giggled and we smiled and went on our way
Typing notes, scanning files, fielding calls for miles
Productivas y muy vivas at the end of the day.

La isla del Padre

Sunday, late afternoon
Drove down to the island
Hoping my 8to5 anxiety would blow out my car window,
Avoid making a casualty of weekend’s end, 
& float into the 88 degree wind before Port Isabel 


Hit the causeway at 6 pm
The reverse traffic all jammed up, cars piling back home 
while I soared cleanly east with a smattering of others


Listened to On the Sea, and flew over the bridge (my zig zag glider above the water)


I drove past surf shops, beachside restaurants, and small businesses clogging up Padre Ave, until they thinned into a sprinkling of hotel resorts.


The sand beginning to rise up and out into the concrete of the road while I continued on for several miles 
past Public Beach Access #1, 2, 3 through 6
I relaxed with every meter as the land became more remote, 
nothing but real estate signs stuck into the hills of green brush and sand
until finally the 
"Road Ends Ahead"
and I parked my car and walked over the ridge and to the sea,comfortably alone but not too isolated, with the occasional Texas truck driving freely along across the sand and a few families dotting up the beach, 
each finding their own corner.   


Walk into the water and it’s cooled off from the heat of midday
All I have to do is stand there and I know 
That I am whole
(no matter how many pieces seem to come dislodged entresemana
Or whether work fills me with elation and purpose or anxiety and inadequacy tomorrow
Or if I make mistakes even though I try so hard
Or if I feel so lonely later on)
And I feel happy here.

El Magico Valle

El Magico Valle

The tacos are so
Delicious in the Valley
Baratos, Buenos