Empire State of Mind

This blog is getting revived because I appear to have a complete inability to think about things without writing about them. Which meant that during school, my classwork was all I thought about, which was fine. But also means that now that I'm out of school, I stand the very real risk of not thinking about anything at all.

Out of school... I've always thought of that phrase as signifying freedom, something like out of jail, out of prison, led out of slavery, etc. But now I'm thinking that it's more akin to out of sugar... out of eggs... out of money... out of time. Not that I've been set free from something, but rather that I've used it all up...

Well, we'll see. Anyway, out of school for now. Yes. I graduated. On Sunday. I am no longer a Davidson student. And that should be very earth-shattering or, at least, odd, but I've met it with more of a "meh" and a shrug of the shoulders.

Also, a shuddering, hacking cough, because I got sick the weekend of graduation and therefore while everyone else was crying, drinking, and hugging each other, I was drinking ginger ale and trying to stay upright. Struggle city: Population, me.

Actually, my current location is upstate New York. Near Cooperstown, aka the home of the baseball hall of fame. I'm working for a summer opera festival as their new general admin intern, where as far as I can tell I will be juggling an awful lot of mail. I learned several years ago that it's a bad idea to blog about work, so that is officially the last thing I am going to say about my job.

Instead, I'll pretend that this is still a travel blog (and isn't this the sort of thing where, if I pretend it, it's true?) and say that this part of New York is beautiful. We're on a lake - Glimmerglass Lake, which led Alex to rather reasonably ask if I was working in Fairyland - and it's lovely, surrounded by low rolling mountains covered in trees. This is one of those parts of the east coast that help you to imagine what it must have been like when it was all forests, trees from Maine down to Florida and inward towards the Mississippi... back in the Shenandoah Valley, even in the forested mountains you can see the wide expanse of farmland that fills the flatlands. Here, every lawn looks like an island, a meadow hacked out from the pervasive trees, and the overwhelming sense is that if you turned your back for too long everything would melt invisibly back into the trees that surround you in every direction.

There are other lakes, too, a few miles in any direction - at least that's what it seems like. On my to-do list: visit the Fenimore art museum, visit the Finger Lakes, go kayaking, find a road I can jog on without getting hit by a thousand cars.

On my more immediate to-do list: buy coffee that isn't instant.

Toodles.

Alone?

"Alone?" they ask me, incredulous, concerned.  Not alone, I want to say.  I travel surrounded by ghosts.  The echoing whispers of their lives roll down these tracks and weave through the air, a constant murmur in the back of my mind that says "you are not the first."   My great-grandmother rode this train to New Mexico with a trunk full of beautiful clothes, and somehow this knowledge has changed the shape of my backpack; my great-great-grandmother followed this road when it was a path cut through the prairie and the wheels of our car must be pressing down on her ancient footprints; my great-great-great-grandfather picked his way down these country lanes on mule and buggy and I can smell that journey in the air, muleshit and sweat.  These empty deserts are full of cowboys and these industrial backwaters have known a thousand laborers.  None of us are alone.

Besides, I want to say, even without these accompanying shades, company abounds.  My mother texts, my boyfriend calls, my cell phone shows my twitter updates and who messaged me on Facebook.  Every time I step off the train I walk towards family, towards a world where the quiet corners of my brain must be twisted into a socially-acceptable shape, where at dinner I am polite instead of moody and warm instead of cold.  The most basic duties we take on when we decide to live with other people - I take them for granted until I visit my grandfather, who has dropped these duties (and others) in the dirt of his past.  Seeing him reminds me that I do not ever live alone.  And in my bags I carry letters, cards, loaned books, little bits of other people.  In the seats next to me and the rooms across the hall sit strangers and we ask each other "Where ya headed?" and share our stories.  Even in the middle of an endless desert, in a little steel-and-glass shell slipping between canyon walls, there's no alone.

But I know that's not really what they're asking me.  They're asking, "Aren't you afraid?"  And to answer I return to ghosts: my great-grandmother came out here when the west was lawless and Las Vegas a place where the sins were deadly, not sexy.  My grandfather barely spoke English when he crossed this country in the colored sections of these trains.  My great-grandfather hopped freight trains with hobos in the great depression, fleeing along the dark and dirty edges of a civilization that seemed to be crumbling away.  And I've got a cell phone and credit cards, the internet at my fingertips, friends in every state, and the kind of face policemen look kindly upon.  

This isn't scary.  If anything, it's too easy.

But I don't say any of this.  I smile and say last summer I traveled alone in the Philippines, and that this is far less scary - deflecting their concern to a trip safely in the past, one I clearly survived.  To one woman, with a friendly smile and precocious children, I dare to tell a bit of the truth - that traveling "just one, please" is easier, less stressful, because there's only me to deal with.  When something goes wrong, it's just me to fix it.  When the nights are uncomfortable and the mornings weary, there's no snappy arguments because there's nobody to fight with.  When the days are long and slow there's nobody to keep entertained - just me, and I stretch my arms and yawn and open my netbook and I know that I'm fine.  There's no negotiations over when to stop and where to eat and who needs what and how we get it.  When it's just me, traveling is easy.  She nods like she understands and her son’s green eyes are watching me and they remind me of myself, when I was ten years old, and really believed in adventures.

But I don't tell anybody that I'm not alone at all.  When I was in the Philippines I rode down a mountain on the back of a stranger's motorcycle and felt a single, pure moment of ecstasy.   I realized that no one in the world knew where I was, except for Jun-jun, my ride - and he didn't know who I was.  For this brief moment I existed only with and for and in myself.  And yet I knew I was riding this motorcycle, the quick way down the mountain, because I had promises to keep, and miles to go and so on, and that there were people waiting for me just around the corner of my life, and I could not disappear.  One moment behind the curtains, but the show goes on.  The web that ties me to the people in my life is stronger than the distances I test it with, far stronger than these teasing absences.  

Sometimes I have the face of a girl who is careful and does not make mistakes, the kind of girl who savors quiet adventures and plans a responsible career and makes clever small talk and will laugh at your jokes, and this is the face I wear to dinner on the train.  I lost my nose ring in California, I brush my hair each morning, I work on my laptop, I do not flirt with strangers, I do not drink, I do not curse, I do not argue.  I would trust me to watch my laptop.  I would let me talk to my children.  And this is the person strangers fear to see alone in the world, the person other people's parents reach for with concern.  

I am as vulnerable as they need me to be, obligingly nodded my head like a wide-eyed ingenue as they warn me that New Orleans isn't the world's safest place.  Strangers surround me with compassionate concern everywhere I turn, every time I return a glance.  And yet they think I am alone?  

In the dining car, surrounded by the noise of wheels on track and engine through air and wind through sagebrush and knives clattering on plastic, I sit by the window.  I sip coffee from a plastic cup.  I cannot see the other passengers; I'm staring out towards distant mountains as the sunlight turns golden on the sagebrush, watching two delicate deer, ears up high.  I only look alone.

Southern Gothic

I first met Southern Gothic in an old copy of Flannery O'Connor's Everything that Rises Must Converge, a library cast-off with a broken binding.  I was in my first years of high school - or maybe I was even still in middle school. In those days I binged on books, sat down with them on lonely afternoons and curled up, barely moving until I turned the back cover and stretched cramped limbs.

So I started in on this book I'd chosen for its interesting title and the charm of its deterioration - no deeper planning, no name recognition.  I liked the eponymous story for its biting depiction of race relations, didn't get the title, gave up trying to.  I read the second pulled along by the tension, the same way I read mysteries, skipping chunks of narration for the plot.  And then I hit the third story, "A View of the Woods."  

I had slowed down a bit by now - the book was making me nervous.  I preferred my dystopias to be clearly delineated alternate worlds, not this just-twisted, recognizable planet.  At that age, I might have never heard of southern gothic, and was definitely not prepared for this.  As the grandfather and girl sniped at each I wondered whether there was a point to this interminable fighting, worried a little, wished it would end.  I was enough of an innocent that when the murder finally happened, written so bluntly, so sparingly - "then he brought it down twice more" - I was truly and deeply shocked.  

I closed the book, only three stories in, and fled to the kitchen.

Since then I've grew a little more of a taste for southern gothic - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, in the form of another battered secondhand book, stands in the part of my bookshelf reserved for rereading - and I've also grown more careful about what exactly I choose to binge on.  But I never finished that particular O'Connor collection.

And I think sometimes that I'm still just as innocent.  Gathering stories in the South, I did not expect or imagine that real life would imitate fiction, in content or in style.  Southern gothic is just a genre, the grotesque turn a plot element, right?  But family stories every now and again took a twist to the horrific.  The grotesque writ large - "So they hunted him down and hung him in the woods" - or small:

But listen, I’d do anything my daddy told me. 

(My great-uncle Sid is in story-telling mode, an old man with a smoker's cough and a sly look in his eyes.)

I don't care what it was, I believed him. Lemme tell you what I did one time. I wanted a knife so bad. I was a little boy. I’d see these little knives they had about thaaaat long, closed up, little penknife things, and I wanted one so badly but mama was scared of me having one because she thought I’d cut myself. So I never could get one. I tried and tried and tried. Finally I got one, don’t remember how exactly I got it but I got one and boy, I was so happy to have that little knife. And I was just carrying it around and showing it to everybody and talking about that little knife. I was probably about three, four, maybe. 

Daddy came in and I had to show it to him. He said "man, that's a fine knife." He said, "Now, I tell you what you do." He said, "You go out into the edge of the field and plant this knife like that, and it'll come up and make a whole tree full of knives, and you'll just have a whole treefull." Well, see, I knew they planted corn and beans and stuff and it would come up and make all that stuff, so I believed him! 

I went out to the edge of the field and planted a knife. Well the next day I thought about it and I went out to see if a tree came up and I couldn't see a thing. I couldn’t figure out where it was. I couldn’t find my knife. And daddy had got what he wanted all the time, get rid of the knife. But see, I believed him. 

He told me one time when I caught a crow, I caught a crow one time, and I was going to make a pet out of it. And I bought it home and I told him, see, I’m going to make a pet out of this crow. He said, "Aw, you can't make no pet out of that crow." I said "Mmm, yeah I am, I’m gonna pet it, pet it." And he said, "well, if you wanna make him talk, you take a knife and split his tongue. And he'll talk."  I said," Ohhh, that's a good idea."  

So I got my knife and split his tongue. The next morning he was dead.  

That's what daddy wanted all the time. Again he got me. He'd get me all the time.

(Uncle Sidney laughs.  And because every gothic tale needs an innocent, I sit at his kitchen table, swallowing hard, eyes wide, trying to chuckle.)

good news/bad news

so the good news is i got a great night's sleep last night!

the bad news is i missed my train...

the good news is i was a responsible kid and did not go out and get crazy because it was dark, i was alone, i didn't know where i was going and i wanted to be sure to wake up early and catch my train.

the bad news is i MISSED MY TRAIN ANYWAY, WTF IS WRONG WITH ME

ummm the good news is i get a little longer in new orleans!

but seeing as how i somehow thought that a single cell phone alarm set to vibrate would wake my tired ass up at 4 a.m, the bad news is that i'm an idiot!!



i've got a flight home tonight, using the voucher i got when continental screwed things up when i had to get a flight because north dakota flooded and blocked the train tracks. and now i'm screwing things up, and the train is running without me in it, and i suppose everything is running full circle. except the fact that i'm an idiot. that's just me on a straight line into idiotville.

just breathe (a love story, a lung story)

So far we've had a robbery and a death.  Who's ready for a love story?


First, the setting.  We're not in the backwoods farms of Georgia anymore, or the wide plains of Canada and  Montana.  Instead, we start with young Mary Elizabeth in Knoxville, Tennesse, from a well-heeled and respected family - the Gleasons.  Wealthy from a family beer distributorship and renowned for James A. Gleason's military success, the family lived in the lap of luxury.  But Mary's home life was hardly idyllic.  Her father was a strict taskmaster; he taught his children how to swim by throwing them into a pond and watching as they figured out how to save themselves.   Mary's mother had died when she was young and her father, before he remarried, passed the care of his children on to his mother.

Because Mary's two brothers were quite the handful for their grandmother, Mary was sent away to boarding school to make life a little easier at home.  To top it off, she'd always been a sickly child, always seeing doctors and at one point needing treatment from the Mayo Clinic.  Half-orphaned and often ill, Mary nevertheless did very well at her boarding school, graduating with honors and excelling at the piano.  She was a kind girl, soft-spoken and with the genteel southern manners expected of a young woman of her station.  Devout, obedient and with a subdued, modest beauty, Mary had become the perfect Southern belle.

Meanwhile, six hundred miles away in Philadelphia, James Larkins was growing up in a working-class family.  He, too, had lost a parent; in fact, he was an orphan, raised by a cousin's family.  His relatives worked as horse colliers and trolley operators, and Jimmie was enrolled in professional schools before he could finish high school.  He learned shorthand and mechanical drawing - skills that could make him useful at any jobsite.  But before he could make a career for himself, James Larkins was stricken with tuberculosis - the dreaded disease once called consumption.  At the time, the only recognized cure for TB was to move to an arid climate and follow a strict regimen of diet and rest.  So James rode the train out to New Mexico and tried to heal a little.

Meanwhile, back in Knoxville, Mary's brother Bernard contracted TB.  Mary herself was fine - no more sickly than usual - but since she'd graduated from the boarding school and wasn't yet married, it made sense for her to travel out west to care for her brother.  After all, caring for men is what women did.  But when the Gleasons arrived at the TB sanitorium, Mary - unsurprisingly, given her delicate constitution - caught TB and became the sickest of them all.

This is where James and Mary's paths crossed: a sanitorum in Silver Springs, New Mexico.  They spent the most thrilling years of the Roaring Twenties far from the cities that were their homes, and along the way they found each other.  Forced to stay outdoors for hours, lying down or engaging in leisurely activities, James and Mary spent day after day together in the sunshine.  In normal society, a working-class Philadelphia boy and a genteel Knoxville belle would never have spent long days having heart to hearts, but the TB sanitorium was its own little world.  The eyes of their families and the rules of East Coast society were a thousand miles away.  He was tall, ambitious and a man of few, well-chosen words; she was charming and friendly and as sweet as iced tea.  And they fell in love.

Eventually, they were both lucky enough to recover - and unlucky enough to have to head their separate ways. For four long years they stayed in touch through letters. He came through Knoxville once to see her, on his way from Philadelphia back out to the west - the dry, sun-soaked land where they'd met and fallen in love, the endless territory that had once been the wild frontier, and then the land of boundless opportunity.  Now that the Great Depression had hit, the west seemed less like a dreamland and more like a desert, but James needed a job.  And he found one, working at a desk running calculations for the men building Boulder Dam.  After long years of illness and unemployment, he had his health, a home, and a job.  There was just one thing missing, and toward the end of 1931 he sent a question back to his sweetheart in Knoxville, Tennessee.  Mary had seen him only once in the last four years.

The last day of the year, Mary wired a telegram back.  "HAPPY NEW YEAR DEAR WITH ME THAT IS YOUR ANSWER I BELIEVE IF YOU STILL FEEL STRONG ENOUGH."  Mary's well-to-do family, of course, were not about to approve of a marriage to a penniless young man from a family they'd never met, particularly a marriage that sent her across the country into wild, unknown territory.  So she didn't tell them: "FAMILY IN IGNORANCE," she informed James.  "DETAILS FOLLOW LOVE MARY"

Mary made copies of their birth certificates and contacts out in Boulder City.  She found a priest who would conduct a Catholic ceremony (although James was not a churchgoer, Mary had no intention of flagging in her faith).  She packed a trunk full of clothes and provisions, and booked her train tickets.  This time there'd be no brother - she would be a young woman crossing the country alone.   Highly unusual at the time.  Still surprises some people now, I'm qualified to say.

Boulder City, at the time Mary arrived, was not much of a city at all - more of a village of tents and makeshift roads.  It was brought into existence to house the throngs of workers building the dam, and its accomodations were - well, "primitive" would be putting it kindly.  Mary arrived in town on the night of the 22nd, and straightaway she could tell that her clothes weren't precisely suitable. She'd brought her finest shoes to wear at her wedding, but Boulder City was built on dust and dirt - no pavement to walk on.  To save the satin for the ceremony, she walked barefoot and carried her shoes in her hand.  Less than 24 hours after she arrived, James and Mary were wed in a temporary Catholic church - the first church wedding in Boulder City.  Her parents found out by telegram... after the marriage was official.

In addition to being Boulder City's first church wedding, James and Mary were another first - the first owners fo a bathtub in town.  Yep, she definitely wasn't in Knoxville anymore.  And while she was adjusting to the change in environments, she also had to learn fast: she'd been raised in a boarding school, and had never learned to cook, clean or keep house.  The first time she went to make an apple pie, she bought two apples.  She was living in a world of rough-and-tumble men and faced a job she'd never been taught how to do.  But she ordered a cookbook, asked for advice, and - just like she had at school - she proved to be a quick learner.

After the dam was finished, Mary followed James across the southwest as he found new employment - in Mexico, in the hills around Southern California, and finally in downtown L.A.  They had two children - one named James and one named Mary.  As an engineer, a hardware salesman and a contractor, James helped build the ever-expanding city of Los Angeles.  He bought land in the desert, an area he loved, where they could build their dream home.  Then Mary got asthma - bad asthma, that sent her to the hospital and sometimes kept her in her bed all day. The doctors said only thing might help: finding a climate that would be easier on her lungs.

So they tried.  They took to the car, driving up to the mountains, out to the desert and down to the coast so Mary could test the air.  James drove, Mary rode shotgun, and the kids fell asleep in the back.  The desert, which had done so well by them in their youth, made it worse; the pollen of vegetated areas caused her agony.  But the coast helped ease the painful sound of her struggling breaths, and a few specific spots, where the fog rolled in off the ocean, made her breathing almost clear.  Every night they'd drive out to the ocean by Redondo Beach and sit, breathing together, as Mary's lungs struggled on.

So James sold the plot of land in the desert, where they'd hoped to build a home, and bought one in a patch of field by the beach.  They were no longer moving to follow his jobs - they were just trying to save her health.  On the new plot of land, James designed and built a house for Mary, where they lived for the rest of their lives

Today the house is gone - torn down to free up the prime real estate, now surrounded by mansions instead of fields.  But as I stood where it once was I could taste the air - cool, clean, fresh.  I tried to imagine harsh desert winds, or the stifling heat of Tennessee.  I tried to think about finding a job in the Great Depression, or learning how to cook from a terse, unillustrated book.  I worried about the audacity of turning lives into neatly packaged stories.  But a new ocean breeze washed all those thoughts out of my mind as it brushed through the branches of the jacaranda trees.  Instead I thought of a car, perched by the sand, and these winds rushing in off the ocean, as sweet and pure then as they are today.  Don't think so much, don't worry, I told myself.  Just breathe.

ARRRRGH, or On Writing On People

I am terrified of writing about people.  Even in my journal, where I write without fear of being read - because, really, how many people can decipher my handwriting? - my descriptions of others are filled with scratched-out  lines and (maybe?)s and (I think)s and the occasional despairing ARRRGGH!

More specifically, I am terrified of getting people wrong.  Like the fear of dying, this is fear of a guaranteed fact - and therefore a fear both pointless and inescapable.  Obviously I will get it wrong.  Of course I will get it wrong.  Writing about people, to use an overwrought simile, is like trying to make a sketch of the entire earth by jumping up really high and drawing while you're in the air.  There's too much to cover in too little time, and you can never see nearly enough.

Or to put it another way: all I ever know about people is the tiny portion of themselves they show me, and even that is too much to write down.  So I have to choose fragments of detail from a fragment of a self.  It's like - here comes another simile - trying to write about the history of America when you only have information about the year 1823, and you can only write about people whose middle name begins with M, and you only have room to write two pages.  Hopelessly limited, in other words.

So there's no way to get it right, and that's terrifying.  These are real people with real feelings; I don't want to be wrong about them.  It gets even worse when I write outside my journal, because I try to write as though the people I write about will read anything I post with a critical, mistrustful eye.  I do this based on a thoroughly unpleasant experience, and one in which I had no intention whatsoever of being cruel or critical.  Being wrong, however you're wrong, can be as bad as being mean.  And I do hate being mean.  And I know I'm going to be wrong.

It's just overall hopeless, in other words.

But say that I try... When you write you turn people into characters.  And real people aren't characters any more than characters are real people.  This act of alchemy carries an intimidating sense of responsibility.  What kind of character do you turn them into?  What details do you pick and what shape do you give their personality?  How much room do you give them to breathe - how much do you let them speak for themselves, and how much do you let their bodies and their homes and their friends speak for them?  When do you let them use their own words, and when do you dive into guessing at their emotions?  If you can't get it right, how can you get it less wrong?



My great-great aunt drinks scotch and soda out of a Playboy glass.  She walks slowly around her house, muttering "I'm getting so damned old," but you'd never guess her real age - almost 90.  And, believe it or not, she still works full-time!  "People tell me I should stop working, and they're probably right," she says in a slyly subversive voice.  "But what would I do?  I don't play golf.  I don't play bridge.  I suppose I could do volunteer work, but I say, why not get paid for it?" She cackles and drinks more scotch.  Her niece told me that my great-great-aunt keeps her husband's ashes in a cabinet, so that when she gets angry at something she can open the door and yell at him, which makes her feel much better.

My great-great-aunt lives up a windy tree-lined road, on the edge of a golf course.  Her house is large and breezy, a gentle green on the outside and pale beige on the inside.  It's filled with Japanese paper screens and elegant artwork, plush pillows and soft colors and fresh flowers.  In an old woman's wavery voice, says she probably spends more money on flowers than on food - she just doesn't feel right if she doesn't have flowers in the house.  She walks slowly around her house, tidying up, arranging flowers and carefully slicing vegetables for dinner.

My great-great-aunt grew up herding cattle from a shetland pony, back when she was too small to ride a horse, in a windswept land where the winters dropped to thirty below.  Headstrong and independent, she later followed her sister out to Seattle, and she hated it.  "The weather was just awful," she said.  "The first day I got there it was beautiful," she said in an expressive voice, "the sunlight shining silvery off of everything.  And then I didn't see the sun for six months."  It just wouldn't do, so without the slightest idea how she'd make a living, she moved down to California.  Here the sun shines more often and the winters aren't so cold, and no cattle called her out into the cold.  Here she stayed.  As she walks slowly around her house, she looks out her wide windows at the blue sky and green grass, and she smiles, victorious.

My great-great-aunt goes to the farmer's market every friday morning for fresh local fruits and vegetables.  She walks slowly around her kitchen gathering together ingredients, and when I offer to help her she laughs. For dinner she makes broiled fish, smashed potatoes, fresh asparagus and a salad, served in a wooden bowl.  It's all very healthy, elegant, delicious, local.  Very California.

My great-great-aunt's bookshelves are impressively well-stocked: the guest bedroom alone features well-read copies of almost everything Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote, a lot of Salman Rushdie's work, some Milan Kundera, some Italo Calvino, lots of Toni Morrison, some Nin, some Mailer, a little Pynchon, and all of the James Bond books.  A massive dictionary sits on a stand near her reading chairs.

My great-great-aunt never went to college.  She left her frontier hometown when she was young and went to work at the naval shipyards. Later she worked at a jeweler's shop, then ran a drive-in restaurant, and now - at the age of almost 90 - she still works full-time in retail.  She's been a diligent, hard-working and focused woman all her life.

A raunchy spitfire?  An elegant matriarch? A determined sun-lover? A California foodie? An intellectual? A dedicated worker?

All these things, maybe, or none of these things.  And then I don't know a thing about her as a mother, as a wife, as a daughter, as a grandmother.  I don't know what she was like when she was 15 or 50. I was with her for only half a day.  And I am audacious enough to want to write about her?

Even after an attempt at thorough fairness, I'm left with an inevitable lie of omission - and a niggling doubt.  What if these best-guesses, these attempts at accurate and generous and multi-layered portrayals, are just plain wrong?

It's terrifying.  It's just terrifying.

A question

"Do you believe in God?"

It was a gut-clenchingly direct question, a kind that I wasn't really used to.  I suppose for believers of any kind this is an entirely familiar question, one asked and answered on a regular basis, the affirmation a matter of habit: the Shahada, the Nicene creed, the Shema... devout atheists, too, have a ready answer.

But for me it was entirely unusual and unexpected and alarming.  I had to scout around for an answer.  "Yes" didn't feel true.  "No" didn't feel honest.  "I don't know" seemed inadequate, even lazy.    "That's a difficult question" felt too evasive.  "None of your business" was combative.

And he wasn't be rude or aggressive, this young man with the carefully sideswept hair and the gentle, limpid eyes.  Just very direct.  Avoiding the issue wasn't really an option.  We were in the middle of a busy intersection on the island of Puerto Princesa, I was perched on the back of his scooter, and he was looking straight at me like we weren't moving until I answered.

"Sometimes," I said.  I'm not sure if it was an accurate answer.  I don't go around gauging my belief in God like diabetics measure their blood sugar, and I suspect that if I did, results would generally be negative.  But it felt like a good answer to give him.  And it wasn't entirely untrue - there have been times in my life when I thought I believed in God.  That all those moments were years ago felt, in the tropical sunlight and the softness of his gaze, rather beside the point.

Tha was almost exactly a year ago.  It was the last time, I believe, anybody has asked me in so many words where I sit with God.  But in trying to explore my family's history, God - like poverty, like wealth, like racism, like violence, like love and deception - is woven deep into the fabric of the story.  I have seen miracles of human impulse that have given me a deep respect for the power of money and hatred and passion and lies; the power of faith is a mystery to me.  So the question sits, not like an accusation, but like a test.


"Do you go to church?"  A second cousin in Georgia, smiling warmly, opening her house in hospitality.  The same question came from almost every relative I met in the Philippines.  Maybe that's one point where my grandparents' very different backgrounds converged - they came from worlds of deep devotion.

To this question, a more common and more manageable one than I'd faced on the back of that scooter, I had the same answer as always: "Um, well, not really."  Very eloquent, I am.

"Well, what matters is your relationship with God.  I'm not going to preach, I'm just saying."  Briskly she changes the topic without asking, and I breathe out a sigh I hadn't known I'd been holding.

"I'm going to skip church and go out to breakfast with you," another Southern relative says generously.  I stutter.  Now my irreligious presence is disrupting the faith of others.  Do I respond with guilt or with gratitude?  Somehow I need to figure out how to write about these communities.  But for them belief in God and sin and hell is the solid fertile ground beneath their feet.  For me, it's like their humidity, invisible but oppressive.  I'm afraid that I'm entirely the wrong storyteller for this family.


On the other hand, there's my Montana family, who weren't the same kind of religious.  I only heard one story about churches; the little fact that my Montanan great-grandfather went sometimes to his mother's church, where they preached in German.  He did not, as far as anyone can tell, speak German.  What does that mean?  Can I try to understand that fact without understanding faith - can I see it as an act of familial devotion, or of habit?  Or do I need to try to know what it would mean to believe in words you cannot understand?

But for the most part, it seems, my Montana ancestors did not wrap their lives around religion.  Aside from my great-great-grandmother's immigrant congregation, churches appear very rarely in their narratives.  They put their faith in their mules, in their labor, in the curing power of kerosene.  When the rains stopped they turned to gambling or the Communist party, not to prayer.

But I am hesitant to say I understand this.  Perhaps their lives were built on a belief in God so basic, so foundational, so taken for granted, that it needed no discussion or sermons or prayers.  What matters, as my relatives have told me, is your relationship to God.  And since I can't ask them what they thought about God, I can't assume that their churchlessness was anything like mine.

What I know, I can't understand; what I think I can understand, I can't know.

(There's another answer)