A Family Dinner

Around the table, it was:  a retired banker who was in his time in charge of disaster recovery and continuity management, a real estate agent in the midst of losing her mind, a kindergarten teacher, a third year law student, and a college fundraiser.  It was the first time that we were together since we buried my grandfather’s ashes in July from the body that died in March and was cremated soon after.  We had to wait for the thaw, and then for a weekend that worked for us all to have a memorial.

Here, though, it was fall, and my parents, my sister and her boyfriend were visiting, at the peak of the autumnal colors.  We were seated last among several parties that arrived between 7:25 and 7:35, owing, probably, to the fact that we were five, and not the standard two or four.  I was in acute state of undeniable sobriety, sustained only by the fact that I was racing the coming week, and was off the bottle, itching hourly to get back on.  My mother’s provocations (“You can have one drink”) did not aid in the slightest.  Intoxication made these family weekends more tolerable; things were off to a shaky start.

While we waited for our drinks (a mojito, something that was champagne based, another that was scotch based, and my unsweetened iced tea) and my sister fingered her water glass as though it contained some secret message, my mother commented positively on the ambiance and the arrangement on the table.  We touched it, to discern if it was real.  We discerned that it was not.  The mojito was sent back (the prognosis was cheap rum), and exchanged for a blueberry martini, which received passing marks.

The highlight of the evening, however, was the soup, ordered by my mother and sister.  It had happened that the original soup of the day was a pumpkin bisque, but due to its overwhelming popularity, it had been consumed in its entirety by earlier clients.  As such, it was a cream of mushroom which was served, without their being informed.  We all took turns trying to figure out why the soup was not orange, but rather a greenish brown.  Democratically, we decided that it was the herbs and spices.  The evaluation from my mother “good, but maybe a little too gourmet for me.”

It was not until later, when we had overheard another table bring up the fact that her soup was not orange that we learned of the error.  And the fight was on.  Through several pointed but not quite direct inquiries, my mother extracted from another waitress a confession that a mistake had been committed and an apology for doing so.  I did not expect my sister’s boyfriend, up until now a somewhat-quiet-because-he-was-bad at-normal-conversation-with-humans-and-more-than-slightly-overweight type, to get as animated as he did, but no sooner had there been an apology that he began asking the waitress what would have happened if someone had been allergic, and asserted that they should not be charged.

Things escalated; our original server came out, apologized, received more invective testimony from the law student, who informed her that while he was not certain about Vermont, in Massachusetts, it was a board of health mandate that consumers be informed of such changes; after all someone could have died here.  Our server left to go cry in the kitchen to fellow wait staff, and summoned the owner who offered her own, apologies, who informed us the soup was free, and who patiently listened while the law student kept going, and while my mother informed her that she did not want the server to feel upset, but rather wanted the owner and the server to know that above all, she felt dumb for not knowing what she was eating.

I cut everyone off, told my sister’s boyfriend and my mother that there was nothing left to discuss:  our soups were free, the evening had thus far passed without any occurrence of anaphylactic shock, and our entrees were consumed without incident.  The owner thanked me, and once the seated members at the table agreed, or were forced by my death stares into agreement, she retreated.

My sister began to cry, we looked at the dessert menu out of obligation, and then asked for the check.

Antacids

In the week after she left, I had my first case, albeit self-diagnosed, of heartburn.  I came home to an empty apartment on a Monday afternoon, the only noise to displace the sound of my own footsteps being that of my pet rabbit, scurrying about in her cage, and being the not-yet-spayed female that she was, compulsively making nests which would inevitably spread onto the carpet.  I dropped my bag on the floor and greeted with a not-quite-sad face the thud sound that I expected, along with a clinging noise that I did not expect – I had forgotten that I had a glass mixing bowl in my overnight bag, for reasons which eluded me at that moment.

The week passed without incident:  we talked daily, ending each conversation with the truth that we missed each other, that we loved each other.  I kept up my training in martial arts and in running to prevent myself from having any free time to think about my lot.  Overall, it was a wise strategy.  The bed, as I looked at it each evening after turning on the bedroom lights, too large for just me, sat there, also wondering where the second person was.  It had been over a year that it had supported the weight of two people, with the exception of my somewhat frequent business travel.

And then, on Thursday evening towards eleven o’ clock, friends began arriving.  A college buddy, one of the best, a housemate my senior year, was to be married.  Weddings in the years since graduation, proved to be one of the large unifiers for a geographically dispersed group of friends, and this one proved to be no exception.  I had fallen asleep in the living room / dining room space in my apartment while reading a book when I received a phone call that the foursome, two married couples, three of which had graduated from Middlebury with me and all four of which I had known for years, had arrived safely, had parked, and were shuttling their air mattresses, and bags towards the apartment.  I welcomed them in; we gave each other the 5 minute catch up, discussed logistics for the weekend, and turned in.

On Friday, two other friends, also housemates during that fourth year of our undergraduate tennure, arrived, and on Saturday, three more ended up taking up space in the apartment, bringing the total number to ten, including myself, who, for the wedding weekend, called this small space home.  At the evening dance after the wedding, the bride came up to me and thanked me for hosting what amounted to more than ten percent of all the wedding attendees.

It was at that dance, once the bride and groom had hours prior successfully completed the several month regimen of preparing for and executing their wedding, that I, on a phone call with my lover, now reduced to a voice on the phone, a picture on my wall, and a daydream at my job, first noticed the burning in my chest.  I noted this out loud.  She sounded concerned.

“I think it’s because I haven’t drunk since you left,” I offered, thumping my chest with a closed fist as an acidy wave rose up.  We said good night, the burning continued, and I decided to dance it off to a funk band that during their breaks were replaced by a computer.

The next day, my friends had left and in the middle of a long run, I again began to experience the burning.  When I returned home to the once again empty apartment, I tried pushing back the pain with water and Gatorade as I stretched.  On the phone with her soon after, she began reading the possible causes of acid reflux, which included increased consumption of alcohol, and increased consumption of food, both of which had occurred over the weekend.  I thought about it, about the fact that I had a condition whose miracle cures were heavily advertised in magazines and on televisions, a frowning father at the dinner table, a woman touching her chest, clearly distraught, and a large, a improbably large purple pill splashing onto the screen, or a total eclipse of the sun followed by the trade name of another tablet which promised relief.

After a quick shower, having spoken to her, and as a team having diagnosed what I suspected to be heartburn, I set off to the supermarket in search of antacids.  It was Sunday evening and the supermarket was mostly empty aisles fully stocked.  A few shoppers frantically searched for an item without which dinner could not occur and a few college-aged students scanned the prices on butter and eggs, working out which was the best deal.  I stood in the aisle which housed the pharmaceuticals, hemming and hawing about how many tablets I needed, especially given that it was my hope that this new condition would be temporal.  Economies of scale triumphed, however, and I got a thin cardboard box of thirty generic pills.

I paid and walked home.  In the kitchen, as evening began hinting that it was on its way, I popped the beige colored tablet out of its foil, swallowed it down, and marveled at the fact that I was aging, that I was alone, and that that was probably a good thing, because honestly, who wants to love a twenty something with heartburn.

Prologue to my memoir:

This is a revised prologue to a memoir that I am currently rewriting/editing.  Enjoy!

—

Prologue:  And then there was light

I knew it would take years before I could engage the subject of Isabel.  I did not, do not want, to demonize her.  I loved her, even as it ended.  Even as we sobbed into the phone on our last day as a couple, I loved her.

Was it dysfunctional?  Yes, but dysfunction fails to distinguish it from others.  Was it abnormal?  Probably, but only in its intensity, which flowed up into unsurpassed moments of elation, and down, into a universe of self-abuse to which I had never before, and would never again, subject myself.

*

We walked into the terminal, necks craned up, looking for international departures, then, having located those signs, looking for the Lufthansa queue.  It was mid-October of 2004, the last day that her 3 month visitor status was valid.   One more day, and she would be illegal.  I had driven back to Connecticut two days prior, nursing a cold.

She had already complete packing, and as we were about to leave to drive her to the airport, she decided to check her e-mail.  There was a message.  It was from ESPN.  She had not gotten the job, despite the strength of her interviews.  A question of paperwork, of work status, it being October.  She began crying, right there.  I said something about other opportunities.  She said I was nuts, that this was her only hope.  It was borderline true – getting a job at ESPN was where she had focused nearly all of her job search efforts.  And close she came, but bureaucracy had the final say, and there we were, staring at the message, that they were sorry not to be able to move forward with her application.

“I’m never coming back,” she said.  I tried to console her, but I wasn’t even sure I believed myself.  She’d have better luck finding work in Europe.  She had family there, she had friends there.  Here, she was living with my parents.  She felt isolated.  She hadn’t found work.

So, this is really it, I thought.  She wouldn’t be coming back.

We punctuated the two hour car ride to the airport with a back and forth as to how we’d make it work.  When we’d see each other, how often, saving money, and me assuring her not to give up hope, that there would be other chances at finding a job here in the US.  Her scorning my pointless optimism, and me falling silent when she asked where were there jobs for her and how was she supposed to get them and what was I doing to help?

I watched her in line, back and forth with the Lufthansa agent.  She got her ticket and walked towards me.  Just over a year ago, I had met her.  She was the same, petite, black haired and olive skinned woman here in the airport as she was at Les Halles in Central Paris.  Same deep set eyes, same small hands, same attributes that drew me to her on a night when the museums were open late.  She looked a little more tired.  She looked at me.  She put her arms around me.  We were standing on top of a map of the world.  We were crying.

“No me dejes,” she implored.

“No te voy a dejar,” I said.

“Prométeme.”

“Te prometo, te juro.”

She said good-bye one last time.  We kissed, we kissed again, she turned around, and she was gone.

I would never see her again.

In December of that year, a month after I, in the form of a transatlantic phone call, terminated our relationship, I received two letters from her in close succession.  The first noted how in the weeks since the breakup, she had come to the epiphany that it was all her fault, and that she wanted me to know she had realized it only now.  The second wished me a Happy Birthday.  I held on to both, at least through graduation from Middlebury in May.

Her older brother sent me a message in the spring of 2005, the semester of my graduation, informing me that it wasn’t right of me to have left Isabel and only to cut myself off from her so completely, from blocking her on MSN Messenger, to not replying to her letters.  I should be a bigger man, and face it down.  This was the singular communication that I would have with him.  I unblocked Isabel from MSN Messenger, informed her by way of an e-mail that her brother had contacted me, and within the week, she wanted to talk about things.  We did so online.

She dove right into it:  was I with someone else?

I asked her why she would think that.  She had heard from sources she refused to divulge.  I told her that I was, that I had been for some time.  That yes, I was in love.  How could I, so soon after the breakup, she wanted to know.

So I told her:  “I just wanted to be happy.”

We were together eleven months.  I avoided thinking of her for years; I distilled my bitterness, fell in love again, and got a job.  But she remained in my brain, a whisper and then a scream, the possessor of my year in Paris – mostly lost but not forgotten.

The Only Man He’d Known From Iowa

I sit in the combined living and dining room of my grandfather’s apartment, where he’s lived since my grandmother died. He keeps the apartment very warm, such that my mother, when we visit, shakes the hair that falls on her neck as she brings his laundry back up from the basement.

“You should go see him,” my mother says the Saturday after Thanksgiving. “It means a lot to him.”

So I am there, with Ashley, who is meeting him for the first time. I don’t preface the visit with much; my mother has told Ashley about him already, all the back story she’d need for a quick visit to West Hartford.

When he expects company, the door is always left ajar. Still, I knock. I always do.

He tells us to come in, sing-songy. Whenever we visit, when he first sees us, it’s always, “Hey!” as though the announced visit were a total surprise.

I kiss his cheek and he kisses mine; he grabs my forearm, as though for support, even as he is seated in his overstuffed chair from which he watches television. Ashley takes a seat by my side on the couch.

He asks Ashley where she’s from. She says Iowa.

One of his shipmates on the USS Baltimore, the Heavy Cruiser which took FDR to Alaska, was from Iowa. He was teased quite a bit, for reasons I can’t quite remember, but it might have been the way he pronounced his A’s, something physical which invited attack, or, simply, some joke about corn gone a few iterations too far.

“Well, he got so frustrated he took out a knife,” he says. Ashley says wow, or oh my God.

He goes on to tell how he was the one that diffused the situation. He had settled them down. He didn’t get into great detail as to how it happened, but the shipmate from Iowa did not stab anyone.

“He’s the only man I knew from Iowa.”

Soon thereafter, I rise to leave, anxious to get on the road, Ashley rising in turn.

“See you soon, Gramps,” I say.
“Hey! Good to see you!”

His head turns to Ashley: “Come back soon, and we can talk more about Iowa!” He makes some reference to corn.

She smiles, and indicates she’ll see him soon.
The chance would never come, and the next time that Ashley would see my grandfather, his lips were sewed shut, and he was dressed in a suit that he hadn’t worn in years; we covered him with an American flag.

In Coastal Maine

A number of relatives knew only to start crying when they saw my grandfather, who, in the two years since his last pilgrimage to Maine, could now only walk three steps before needing a rest, and lived only with the aid of oxygen, monitored with great diligence by my mother who had done most of the planning for the trip.

We were there, at the family cemetery in Thomaston, to bury the ashes of my mother’s mother, my grandfather’s high school sweetheart in the late 30s, and his wife by 1980.  The pastor read the twenty third psalm without the letter R, and my grandfather, after some brief remark from my mother, told the small gathering about my grandmother next to a fallen redwood, claiming the photograph to be proof that she was the happiest gal you ever would meet, before the exertion and tears forced him to stop.

At the family cottage, twenty minutes away, at dinner, my family, with the exception of my grandfather, proceeded to imbibe with great zeal, and lighting citronella candles to fend off the persistent mosquitoes, we spread ourselves out, my father all the while the merry bartender.  It was a gathering of people you really only see at marriages and funerals, or in Florida, in February, to escape New England winters.

I myself turned in once one of my cousins began running shirtless around the kitchen, showing us a tattoo on his left shoulder.  It was after that point that he composed an open letter to us all that suggested that, now that Marie was gone, there was little need to maintain the falsehood that we enjoyed each other’s company.

Allahna on the Map – Part III

Allahna on the Map, Part III

Somehow, almost two years went by without seeing her and without any significant exchange, except for one morning when I was traveling in San Francisco in October of 2008, and right before a meeting, she called; I had to go; I returned her call; she wasn’t there.

2009 arrived, and so did the month of May.  It was a Thursday.  I missed a phone call from her; on Saturday, she was driving somewhere south, in order to fly to Iraq.  She would serve there for a year.  She was calling everyone she cared about to let them know the news, and to apologize for not being in better touch this past year, life’s been crazy, but things are good, she’s fine, it’s been an emotional month, and she’d love a phone call or a text if I could manage it between now and Saturday; she’d be driving all day.

So I sent her a message on Friday morning, asking when I should call her.  She called me back immediately.

I was at my office; I closed my door, and looked out the window at the small parking lot straddling the building.  I’m not certain I was the best listener this time around, as I was trying to monitor the volume of my voice, as it was a personal call at work, and so I cannot reproduce verbatim the conversation.  Which is unfortunate.

I can, nonetheless, attempt to reconstruct the content of the conversation successfully:

—

It has been a month or so of up and down.  One moment she is fine, another she is crying for no reason.  In yet another, she is cursing.

She clarifies the moment at which a picture was taken during an amorous tryst with her ex-fiancé.  My timing, it appears, was slightly off when I wrote about it at first.  She laughs about, indicates that it’s fine, and that she’s surprised that I remembered that detail, and is happy to be reminded of it.

She remembers one of the chapters I’d written about her, but wants me to send her both of them again.  I promise to comply as our conversation continues.

She’s going to serve as military police, as she understands it, which she thinks she does, in the town where Saddam was hung, or near there.  She will be working in a prison.  That makes me think about the photos revealed to the world in the spring of 2004.  She’s better than that, I tell myself.

She expresses her happiness with her new boyfriend who isn’t new anymore.  He just isn’t her ex-fiancé.  Which is good, that fuck up.  We don’t get into it.  But no, this new boy is pretty great, and pretty understanding.  She is excited for me to meet him.  I am, too, I suppose, but I don’t vocalize it.

The deployment will last about a year.  It is a long time, she affirms.  And when she gets back, she plans on jumping in a car and driving up to see me again.  Because it was a good time last time.  Almost two years ago?  No shit.  It has been that long.  She apologizes again for not keeping in better touch, especially the time I drove to Connecticut to see her after her fiancé converted himself into her ex-fiancé.  In general, too, though.  Life’s been crazy, fucken work was nuts, didn’t have any free time, and when she did, she was too tired, you know how it is.  There’s no need to worry, I say.  Life happens, I say.  I probably say some other things, too.

I’ve still got to write this book, she says.  I ask if she still wants me to continue writing about the stories she tells.  She says yes, that we have to work on that when she’s back and we see each other again.

So you’ll come up to Vermont, again, I ask.  She confirms.  You bet, Honey.  That’s good, I reply; it’s been too long, and I’d love to see you.  You going to be okay?  Yeah, I’m going to be okay.

The conversation winds down; she is bringing a webcam with her and a computer, so she hopes to keep in touch.  I can always e-mail her, too, she informs me.  She will try to respond when she has time.  Do I have to get back to my job, she asks.  I say that I should, but I’m glad that we connected.  I wish her well.  She wishes me well.  The line is cut, and the parking lot is still there, still half-empty.  I return to my desk, and set about checking my e-mail.

—

Later that day, she calls again.  She has reread the chapters, and is glad to have done so, and glad that until she writes her own book, that someone is getting all this shit down.  Thanks again, Sweetie, she says.  That’s it, really.  Just wanted to let you know I read them.

I am back at the window, looking outside again.  We say we love each other; she calls me Sweetie again as she says good-bye.  I turn around; there is work to be done.

Miss Jackson and the Plastic Vagina

Miss Jackson and the Plastic Vagina

I.
There were waivers passed around in early
spring, in anticipation of the last
chapter in our sexual educat-
-ion, that first year of high school, in a brick,
renovated building deemed “not enough,
only up to date but not state of the
art,” by my father, when baggy pants and
hockey jerseys were still very much in
vogue, and braces plagued the adolescent
mouths of a grand number of us.

II.
Both my
responsible parents dutifully
signed it, and I was ignorant to the
fact that it was, in fact, a parental
right to refuse.  Upon that discove-
-ry, I remember thinking about the
outrage with which I would have greeted the
news that my mother and father were to
deprive me of the chance to hear about
breasts and intercourse, and all these other
things which were to fill my sordid,
acne-ridden head.

III.
Ms. Jackson, about
my mother’s age, greeted us all (minus
one, whose parents exercised their rights), and
set the new ground rules for engaging the
materials covered in the next few
chapters in our textbook (and here I have
to believe that she knew we read ahead).

IV.
The reading, however, was not memor-
-able, not satisfying my puerile
need for visuals.  Although, there was an
afternoon in which we suffocated
a banana with premium latex
condoms (I thought the packaging looked a
bit goofy), all of us taking our turns
after Ms. Jackson demonstrated the
proper technique (“Get the air bubbles out,”
she said, rolling it down towards the stem, a
reminder that I would receive a year
and a half later in the bed of some-
-one else after school, before I went to
work at the pharmacy), before we ran
to the bathroom, giggling, to wash the
smell of spermicide off.

V.
No one could have
foreseen the complications involved when
out of her bag, Ms. Jackson produced the
plastic vagina.  Gender mattered not
as she placed the beige body part on the
beige desktop:  we were all in a state of
utter disbelief, with an esteemed class-
-mate Nate emitting a hushed “Holy shit.”
Class proceeded, but our fresh teenage eyes
seldom diverged from the unexpected
guest.

VI.
As Ms. Jackson began detailing
the names of all the various regions
contained within this as yet unexplored
region of the female sex (both in the
classroom and the field), her fingers ventured
inside, I suppose as a way to catch
our attention and demonstrate its depth.
It seems, though, that this action, smacked not of
prudence, as when she attempted to ex-
-tract her hand from someone’s replica,
she found herself unable.

VII.
As students,
this was fast becoming a bit too much
for one period’s worth of awkward dis-
-comfort; true, some did laugh, but most of us
stared without offensive intent, simply
coming to terms with the fact that our ninth
grade health teacher had gotten her hand lodged
uncomfortably, unintentionally,
and apparently quite securely in-
-side a plastic vagina about which
we had absolutely no forewarning,
and trying to retrace how exactly
we got here, and what we’d be doing if
our parents had never signed that waiver.

VIII.
Too young to analyze what this situ-
-ation meant for the long term student-and-
-teacher dynamics of authority
and power, we silently complied as
she dismissed the class, waiting until we
were at the other end of the hall to
begin our laughter, that slow, rising song
of puberty-plagued guffaws, done before
the ringing of the sixth period bell.

The Earthworms’ Rainy Springtime Deaths

The Earthworms’ Rainy Springtime Deaths

I.
In the Aprils showers that in Vermont
have extended to May, I see them on
morning runs, vying for dirt, slithering
with mixed purpose on the pavement, most of
them alive, but some are either squished or
severed in half.  I do try, honestly
I do, to avoid them, but I’m sure my
shoes, unintentional accessories
to the crime, have felled a few.  They are pink
and brown and sometimes a somewhat reddish
gray, all of them soaked as I loop back to
my apartment, the converted funer-
-al home.  Days later, sometimes, if the rain
lets up, they will be there, dehydrated
versions of their former selves, stuck to the
sidewalk, accidental, anorexic
peppers, or, if there is no reprieve from
the rain, they fall victim to cars or bikes
or passers by, before bloating signi-
-ficantly to a quite unpleasant end.

II.
And I think back to seventh grade science,
taught by a strange woman who did yoga
and talked about peeing on plants somewhere
in India (“It’s good for them!” she then
explained to a gawking class), as we learned
about the earthworm, we were all in a
state of disbelief when we discovered
that they could not regrow if they were cut
in half, given that we had just witnessed
something like that happen with another
animal (brown, slimy, lived in water)
in our petri dishes two weeks before.
We listened as Miss Develeskis told
us why, during rainfall, they tended to
surface, citing moisture, oxygen, and
other elements, I’m sure, then noting,
with little sign of remorse, that these side-
-walk adventures and pavement promenades,
owing to the way they breathe, resulted
with near certainty in their untimely
demise, their surfacing merely a short
purchase on life, driven from the under-
-world up into the less amenable
conditions of our own existence.  “So
the earthworms are basically committing
suicide, then?” asked a classmate and friend.
Miss Develeskis chewed on the question
for a bit, before replying:  “I guess
you could say that, yes.”  We stared back at her.

III.
Then it happened that I was a student
down the street, in a renovated high
school that opened late upon my entry,
when, once in my second year and once in
my third, I learned from classmates the news that,
in the springtimes consumed by tests, and sports
and part-time jobs, in our small, safe town com-
-posed of small, safe families, two earthworms
in the form of young men my age had, as
green lawns came back to life and the daylight
extended past the afternoon, as a
result of the raindrops of school bus taunts
and unrequited love, and of the weight
of the Baptist Church, and having to leave
student government and soccer behind
(respectively), climbed above the soil
of their daily grind, and out the windows
of their bedrooms, to be recovered at
a later time by their own species, up-
-on returning home from work, shocked at the
spectacle that they were forced to behold.

Revisiting Carina – Part III

Revisiting Carina, Part III:

Failed France

At the outset of my year abroad in Paris, she was in Germany, somewhere in the north, where she had been since her year in Seattle had converted itself into a semester.

In anticipation of a potential visit, I wrote a poem for or about her, which, if only for its brevity, is included presently:

Wine Reflections

You’ve not yet arrived,

but I’ve set aside some space for you -

both here and here – please, take advantage,

as others claim you can.

And I’d hate to see this chance fall through

And I want to believe you when you say it.

My friends have asked to meet you,

which wouldn’t make it easier to go without;

spinning about on this heavenly body,

I’ve so many things to show you.

We could be so many things -

perhaps, above all, together.

—

It took a few weeks after first landing at Charles de Gaulle airport (the wheels touching down immediately giving me a sense of nausea, as I thought to myself, What the hell am I doing here?  I wanted to study in Spain), before I was first able to phone her.  Having procured a phone card, and having begun to catch my stride and make a few friends, it was time to begin the laborious process of keeping in touch.

At the supermarket down the street from my apartment, a chain called Champion, I bought a small, wire, graph-lined address book with a purple cover, and began diligently recording names and numbers (and sometimes arrondissements, or nationalities, as there was a French Felix and a German Felix) of acquaintances old and new.  Having my cell phone stolen twice, this was the thread by which my ability to connect with people outside the classrooms, lecture halls, and cafeterias of the Institute of Political Studies in downtown Paris, tenuously hung.

There was a certain pleasure and a certain sense of alignment when she was the first name that appeared in the book, by virtue of her alphabetical good fortune.  I had carried her phone number and e-mail in my wallet with me from the US; the wallet would fall into disuse as the dictates of French fashion mandated an influx of tighter jeans, precluding the transportation of that clunky Americanism.  And so the address book traveled with me in my backpack or a jacket pocket at all times.  By the side of her name I drew a smiley face.

We connected in September, about a month into my Parisian sojourn.  The sensory overload, my recurrent flirtations (which was fast becoming a steady relationship) with nicotine, and the hormonal imbalances, all of which were onset by the strange institution of study abroad, were finally somewhat calibrated into my fiber, allowing me to reconnect with friends back home and elsewhere.

The Franco-German divide was the closest we had been in over two years in terms of physical distance, time zone differentials, and transportation costs.  The new setting of France, and the molting afforded by this transplant, was cause enough for hope that we would collide at some point, or several points, in the next 11 months.

There are promises one makes to one’s self when everything is new again.  They are usually promises of change, of gross alterations to one’s constitution, habits one will adopt or change.  I had experienced this in small doses when I arrived at College, when I traveled to Barcelona.  Here was my third attempt at metamorphosis, and it was not as much an attempt at growth as an attempt at radical departure from life as it was.

The problem was that I didn’t really have much from which I wanted to run.  I had had a wonderful collegiate experience thus far, had forged some great friendships, and felt like I was on the brink of being intelligent.  So perhaps it was more I wanted to run into new things, rather than run from old ones. The old ones, it was my hope, would be there upon my return from this 11 month liminal state.

The urge to run and redefine was societal, literary, and, ultimately, ill-conceived.

While not on the order of Gatsby’s “Think of necessary inventions,” I did have an unspoken, unwritten, set of rules for myself when I thought about maximizing my time in Paris.  Some of them are alluded to above, but for the sake of being explicit, they were:

1)  Smoke more cigarettes (and not just Camel lights!)

2)  Drink wine.

3)  Remain single

4)  Which is not to say be celibate

5)  Quite the opposite, actually

6)  Be flirty to the point of borderline promiscuity.

7)  Stress less about grades.

By year’s end, 1, 2, 4, and 5 had come true.  3, 6 and 7 are a different story.

—

The idea was that Carina would take the train to Paris at some point in November, or that I would travel to Germany at some point in the spring.  The night after the conversation that sparked the fall plan, I wrote the above poem, translated it into Spanish, and smiled quietly to myself.

The poem sparked little commentary until October, when, during the course of another courtship that happened somewhat accidentally, but not unintentionally, a certain Isabel wanted to scan samples of my poetry.  Upon doing so, she stumbled upon the translated “Reflejos de vino,” and restated Alejandro conviction, but used the present tense:  “¡Tío, estás enamorado!”

I felt like shit for lying about it when quizzed:  “No, no, someone in the past.”

Isabel and I started dating, and the dynamics of the relationship were such that I began scheming of ways to pull of Carina’s visit.

As it turned out, my well-developed ability to lie did not, in this circumstance, need employment:  the closest I came to seeing Carina was on a Tuesday morning that fall, when her doppelganger, dressed as she might have been, locked eyes with me as I missed a line three train on my way to martial arts.

November arrived, but Carina did not; subsequent phone calls delayed her visit until December.  December turned into messages from Paris left on her phone, each time with the closing:  “My number is 00 33 06 20 23 58 57.  Hope to talk to you soon.  A kiss.”

And then a note in December of 2004, one full year after I was supposed to see her, wishing me a Merry Christmas, and returning my kiss.

The VA Dialogue

The VA Dialogue

The day after my final grandfather died,
I was in Palo Alto, California, at the VA,
on a business meeting with a doctor in Pulmonary and
Critical Care.  We were there to talk about his
upcoming 25th Reunion, not about how my grandfather,
born in Maine, who when I was in grade school
built things larger than himself, in the years before he
died, couldn’t walk three steps without a wheeze.

We talked about how the doctor was doubtful he’d be
able to attend his reunion next year, despite his volition,
but that he wanted to be involved in any way possible,
not about how we could not convince my grandfather
to put the tubes in his nose and not in his mouth.

And there we were, talking at a table amid
an assortment of wandering veterans
talking about college endowments,
and the role of philanthropy in a down economy, all the while,
me wanting to ask if he’d seen many shipyard electricians with
lung failure, or anyone working at a printing press in the 70s,
and how on earth you got them to listen to
any advice other than, ‘Take these pills.’

Do they just get tired of not dying?  I almost asked.
In a manner of speaking, I suppose,
he, as a result, did not quite say.

And I imagine myself, as we walk towards the parking lot,
saying, not out of the blue, “He passed out on the toilet a lot;
and that is how he died,” and the doctor replying,
with his medical smile, “I’d love to have a look at that file.”