Room Sound

“Hark, A Vagrant,” Kate Beaton’s comic site, is so great.

Home/Heart

I
I’ve been thinking about Home a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about where to place your heart. When does your hometown cease to be your hometown? And all these people with their houses underwater. And all those particleboard condos standing empty where Freedom Parkway meets Boulevard. There’s this statue of Martin Luther King on one side of the Parkway, and he’s pointing across the way, right at the wall of empty condos, and right at the long plastic banner they’ve unfurled down the side that shouts in sans-serif font: From the Low Something-Hundreds This and Last Chance That. Whose last chance?

II
Meanwhile, up in Brookhaven, there’s this family trying to save their house. It’s been in the family since the 19th century, since before the Civil War, since the road it was on—one Peachtree Street—was still a dirt path in a lot of places. One acre remains of what was hundreds. From the road, I’ve been told, you don’t see any evidence of a farmhouse; only the giant grey block of an Extended Stay (which brings to mind for me, evacuees from Katrina a few years ago, a whole army of people with their own Home issues).

The family whose name the house carries cannot afford to pay the taxes on their property anymore. It’s zoned commercially, and from what I’ve read, it seems they’ve exhausted just about every option to get some sort of historic protection. They’re selling. They have no choice, and they’re terrified that the buyers, whoever they may be, will raze the place or take crummy care of it, so that sooner or later, the end result will be the same: the house will be gone.

This has gone on for years now. I imagine they must just be so tired. What happens when Home becomes, not just your everyday experience, and not just your personal feeling, memory, and attachment, but the weight of generations of your own family who’ve become legend not just to you, but to your city? The weight of History. What happens when all of this becomes your responsibility to save? What complicated resentments arise?

And this question: Where to place your heart. Where does Zen Buddhism place it? I think of all those walkers-away again, those people leaving the keys to their castles with their banks. Empty pockets. Empty hands. The problem with zen, to me, is its emphasis on emptiness. What about your heart and what about your heart? I want to ask.

III
This weekend, visiting Beach Town, a friend and I were eating Mexican food, and I mentioned wanting to leave Atlanta at some point. “I just don’t want to settle down there,” I said, faltering in my tone even as I spoke, for this is a top cliché for Atlanta residents (one that I’ve fallen prey to, time and time again): to say, for years and years and years, that we don’t want to settle down here, even as we settle right on in.
He caught the hesitation. “Why not?”
And I spoke the old litany about car culture, etcetera, etcetera, but even in my response, I wound back around to our house and our happy domesticity. The garden. The porch. The yard for a dog soon/someday. All the painting we’ve done. Our neighborhood. The farmers’ market and drive-in.

And Marshall and I have all these rules:
1. I don’t want to live somewhere cloudy.
2. Marshall doesn’t want to live somewhere very cold.
3. I don’t want to live somewhere that people are less friendly and open.
4. I don’t want to live somewhere significantly less green.

“It sounds like you’ve made your decision,” said my friend.
“For now,” I said, and smiled.

They say people are walking away from their homes now.

I know that this means that people are abandoning their houses that are, as news puts it, “underwater,” i.e., worth less than people owe the banks for them. But I never hear that term, “underwater,” without imagining these houses’ interiors in some slow watery light. As if their inhabitants one day land their feet on the floor by the bed with a splish, which soon becomes a deeper ploosh. Before they know it, they are paddling to and from the refrigerator; they are reading the New York Times floating from room to room on rafts. But then it becomes too much. Seaweed springs from the corners of the banisters they paid way too much money for, the banisters which, when they stop and think of it, they don’t even really own yet, huh. And the koi—so beautiful in the late afternoon, swimming around in the light of that gorgeous western exposure! But when the catfish move in, those bottomfeeders, taking up residence on the hardwood floors their own feet no longer ever touch, they know it’s time to go. It’s all underwater now. And humans cannot live this way.

As the news puts it, they are “walking away from their homes.” That nostalgic spin in word choice: “their homes.” There they go, locking the door with their worldly possessions still inside—I picture photos of grandparents and books and family relics, all locked within. They turn the key, walk to a nearby bank and drop it in the deposit shoot. Then—they just walk away. Away from it all—some generation of zen masters. Not just walking away from worldly possessions, but walking away from Home, from the idea of it. A simple, somnambulant move, only everyone here is alert and focused. There’s a whole herd of them, calmly leaving their wedding-gift Kitchenaid mixers, their basements full of paint cans and winter clothes, their garden shovels and scrapbooks and every dream and disillusionment they once had for the banks to sort out. Heading blankly, serenely, for the horizon.

It was the one I knew would hit, sooner or later. In my slo-mo recollection, this giant wave shadows my upper-body as it towers above me for one foamy-capped frozen moment, and I have time to think, “Better inhale,” before it tosses me sideways and rolls me along the ocean floor along with the other sea junk.

Knees scraped, I stood and grinned at my friends. “Now it’s a vacation,” I said.

Weekend in beachtown. A kapow punch that makes you realize you’ve gone waaaay too far in one direction. There is danger in associating a place with all that is good, with all that works in your favor, because it simply isn’t ever true; when I lived here, I had my share of misadventure, my share of angst and dread mostly of my own invention. But a vacation here reminds me of what should be. At the risk of sounding…

—I want to write some sentence starting with those words. To apologize for the hackneyed form these constructions take, coming out of so rusty an instrument. (There’s nothing worse, after all, than knowing what quality is and the ability to recognize your own distance from it, but not yet knowing what to do to bridge that gulf. That knowledge, it paralyzes. That knowledge is the very worst thing.)

But I’m tired of thinking, “At the risk of sounding” anything. So, what’s needed is: More yoga, less Facebook. More music playing, less applying for jobs I don’t even really want. More writing. Fewer status updates. More writing. Less networking. More friendships. Perhaps a little less coffee. More time in this world as it is. Less thinking about its artifice.

Every Sunday morning and some weekday nights, the sound of the church one street over comes pouring through our back screen door. It’s like this.

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We live between grocery lists. Mahi-mahi and chicken canzanese. Scratch biscuits for breakfast, then pork loin with fig jam. (“Fig Jam 2010!” I joke in the farmers’ market aisle.) Saturday, the hour after breakfast finds us at separate corners of our kitchen/dining room, slurping more coffee and poring over Thomas Keller and Cooks Illustrated.
“Lemons? We have lemons, right?”
“Yeah.”
“How about red pepper flakes? Are we almost out?”
“No, we’re good. How about flour? Oh, there it is.”
The fish is delicious. We eat it with grilled zucchini and squash and beer out on the screened-in porch, serenaded by Jay-Z and Soldier Boy from the teenagers across the street whose mother works every imaginable shift as a security guard.

And us? We live for the life we want. For me those are the fleeting moments with the dear students I have this semester or producing stories at my interim radio job. In free daylight moments, there’s a sensation of want as I scour the internet for jobs and collect rejections from agents who say the writing’s good but the subject matter’s not this or not that. In this striving, nothing fits. So we make popcorn. So we coast the beautiful springtime trail on our bicycles; we eat some rich brand of oatmeal cookie and bake popovers at a friend’s house. Fresh rosemary from the yard. Dreaming of the dish to come as I rake free its sticky spines with my fingers.

At my niece’s Girl Scout bridging ceremony, we cheer her on. We are louder than any of the other prim parents. But then I spot a pair of suede sandals on her classmate, decide I must have the adult equivalent, and the next morning I hunt down and purchase a pair on the internet. The shoes are hopelessly trendy; I would never have wanted them last year. But now there is no question.
I am all gratification where I can have it. I do what I have to and leave the rest. There’s a big pile of notebooks and folders and forms gathering tumbleweeds of cat hair beside this chair. It’s all so fleeting. I have gained five pounds. I sleep till eleven on Saturday. I sing as I cook. I imagine those shoes taking me down some sidewalk next year at this time, but when I try to lift my mind’s eye above the concrete, the scene will not come into focus.

Hey, folks.
If you missed last night’s “True Story!” reading, you can hear it here.  “True Story” is a nonfiction reading series–the city’s first, we think–that my friend Dionne Irving and I started some months back. It’s a lot of fun! You should totally come.

Readers so far have included, among others, Jessica Handler, Kay Powell, Jim May, Jamie Allen and Karen Gentry.

Last night we recorded events for the first time–and holy crow, are we glad we did.

The night’s tales highlighted particular difficulties: dating shiksas, making the perfect Victorian tiara from human hair, and getting band practice going already with Patty Hearst in the room.

The night’s readers were Mickey Dubrow, Kate Sweeney, and Bill Taft. Co-founder Dionne Irving emceed.

Emcee Intro, Dionne Irving

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Mickey Dubrow’s reading of his story “The Shiksa Paradox” was by turns, humorous, quietly intense, and sorrowful.

Mickey Dubrow, Part 1 of 2

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Mickey Dubrow, Part 2 of 2

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Kate Sweeney read from her unpublished book about death practices past and present, American Afterlife. The Victorians had lengthy mourning periods and created macabre mementos–but how much have we really changed?

Kate Sweeney, Part 1 of 2

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Kate Sweeney, Part 2 of 2

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Bill Taft read a meandering, often side-splitting tale about the problem of self confidence. We see a childhood play audition, an adolescent’s obsession with explosives, and a cameo by the late Benjamin, of Taft’s storied former band, Smoke. Oh, and Patty Hearst.

Bill Taft Part, Part 1 of 5

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Bill Taft, Part 2 of 5

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Bill Taft, Part 3 of 5

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Bill Taft, Part 4 of 5

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Bill Taft, Part 5 of 5

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Catch the next “True Story!” reading live: June, Kavarna, Decatur, GA. To be kept abreast of all things “True Story!”, write TrueStoryGa(at)gmail.

My mother says we are worriers. Not warriors; that would be amazing if she once invoked some steely line of courage underscoring the women of our family—but no. Instead she sticks with simple fact, and by drawing attention to it, aggravates the tendency. “We are worriers,” she’ll say over her fifth cup of coffee, warmed in the microwave. She’ll blow over the top and shake her head, unsmiling, just one of an accursed line of women who needs something to latch her mind to in order to analyze its possible disastrous outcomes down to the finest points—sharing only the iceberg-tip of these concerns with others for fear of bothering them or looking crazy.

I’ve found certain practices keep that iceberg relatively small: running, writing, engaging friends in long discussions—and realizing that saying a thing sometimes makes it true in ways that give it undeserved precedence in life.

Still, I am of these quietly-ruminating, worrying women. My usual areas of worry concern life legacy: career failure, thinking about people with whom I’ve lost touch and dissecting what I should have done to prevent this, and mentally replaying conversations to find the moments I said something idiotic.

I went through a phase last year during which I was weirdly terrified that Marshall would have an awful car accident in his sloggitty daily commute to work, and my latest concern is something I have about as much control over as some maniac on the roads.

I am worried that we will get broken into.

I have become a homebody; that is to say, any nights I actually have free time—and these nights are few—I’d rather cook and hang out on the porch than go anywhere. Our house is a home. (Unrelated pet peeve #458: the real-estate-turned-media-turned-everyone trend of calling the physical building where one lives a “home;” the idea that you can sell homes. How cruel-!, this buying-and-selling of quotidian moments that transformed mere living space—apartment, house—into Home.) Moreover, in this time of job searching uncertainty, our house pretty much serves as our one place of sure footing.

An awful lot of people I know—and not a few in my neighborhood—have been broken into; ever after, they speak of their place of residence with slightly deadened expressions and a restless twinge in their eyes. They no longer rest their souls there. They’re still angry about a time they did so, only to have that betrayed.

And that’s what I’m afraid of. My repeated mental inventories of late reveal that we possess little of monetary value. The burglars would leave, pissed to have braved the annoyance of a piercing house alarm to find two old computers and a stereo from 1990. When it comes down to it, what I prize the most—two quilts made by my grandmother and my mother respectively, and my word processing files, which I back up obsessively—would likely be safe.

Of course, what I hate is the idea of violated space. You know how in movies, the camera momentarily becomes the eyes of the burglars, and the burglars are always looking with cold, uncaring eyes at beloved framed family photos? It’s that imagined moment that gets me. The idea of that violence and ill-will and strangerly-ness keeps me wondering whether I locked the back door as I drive to work. I imagine strange hands rifling through drawers whose handles only we’ve touched. I imagine the knocking down of pictures we hung. Stealing, not things, but the sacredness of home.

But there’s what you can control and there’s what you can’t. The fight-or-flight instinct plus an extremely well-developed imagination is perhaps the most useless of combinations, and later we’re on a walk, discussing this. We have locks, we have deadbolts, we have an alarm, and that’s about all we can do. Marshall takes my arm and says that if you start living with the goal of preventing violation, you’ve already lost. There’s been no fiery crash; we return home and home is there. I have not lost what’s most precious, and imagining scenarios in which I do won’t mitigate tragedy when it comes in whatever form it eventually will. It’s funny how this should be a lesson to learn: to enjoy a walk, a dinner, a period of rest at night in one’s very own bed.

I got this postcard at an antiques store outside a tiny town in eastern North Carolina and it’s lived on my refrigerator(s) ever since. 1. The typed message there is actually some sort of label or a tiny piece of paper that’s been cut out and glued. I’m endlessly fascinated with the idea that Mr. and Mrs. Webb typed up all these labels and then affixed them to different postcards, rendering them completely impersonal.
2. Miss Priscilla Popkins. Say it out loud. Then try to stop saying it. Try to stop saying it in a fakey-fake British accent. See? You can’t.

Drink & enjoy.

Song of Longing, Part #183

Lately I’ve been occupied by daydreaming of two sorts. Two springtimes ago, my sweetheart and I stood at sunset in a park just east of and above Albuquerque, in the Sandia Mountain foothills. We stood awash in this beautiful, clear golden light. The temperature was bathwater. There was a light breeze. We listened as coyotes called to one another, watching the city below us slowly light up. My thoughts keep returning to the Southwest lately. I’m listening to an awful lot of Calexico; my mind is all arid landscapes. All of this is about something else, too, of course: you know how vast everything seems out there? How you can see to the next orange-brown mountain range on the horizon, and it takes you two hours to drive to it, and you realize then, again, that everything is bigger than you thought? This expansiveness is paired in my mind with the airy weightlessness of vacation life. The world wide open.

For lately, back in reality, I am awash—not in planning, exactly—but in imagining myself into different jobs in wildly diverse places all over the country. I read job descriptions and think, “Could this be me?” In and around the pixellated lines that comprise the online position descriptions, I imagine lives for myself. In the margins and tiny spaces between those words: “Compensation,” “Required Experience,” “Responsibilities,” I picture a daily existence—my imagined daily life in such a job. If I can make the mental leap of seeing myself in that role, in that state and climate, I apply. But then it’s over. The complex short story I’ve written in my mind, starring some variation of me, is closed. And I’m exhausted.

There’s a tacit decision to be made about the balance of one’s private life and one’s professional life. I’m never happy unless I’m happy professionally, so for me, the professional is always officially foregrounded. Some people were raised with romantic visions of a personal relationship that would Make Everything Okay; me, I was raised by an industrial psychologist and the belief that there is a professional life out there that will bring true satisfaction. I still believe in that. It’s about more than how I was nurtured, though; I feel like I’m wired this way: to be happy in my work, or not happy at all.

Only now, I’ve planted this garden.

I’ve gone in with my sweetheart on the rental of a backhoe from Home Despot, and we’ve turned over the tough clay soil and we’ve broken it, and doing so broke our skin—these backhoes are heavy, mean machines, and the Georgia clay is no nicer. It broke us into a sweat, this work. We’ve incorporated healthy black soil into the Georgia clay, and our own compost, and turned it all over and over with a shovel. Now there are seeds living in that earth, and we water it daily with the soaker hose we invested in. This spring, we’ve planted two blueberry trees along one fence in our backyard; two, we were told, would allow them to cross-pollinate so that we’d be able to harvest berries next year. Last week in the front yard, the flowers my mother dug up from her garden in Pittsburgh, that lasted an epic three days bouncing around in the back of my Honda on a roadtrip last summer, have actually started to come back in the little flower box around the lamp post, and Marshall built a second garden patch around the mailbox. There, we planted the rosemary we bought last week.

We’ve painted the bedroom a lovely antique yellow-white, and this weekend or next, we’re going to install an attic fan. We are not yet members of the neighborhood association, but last year we struck up a friendship with our neighbors through the exchange of garden vegetables, and the kids across the street come over in the warm weather months to ask us to pump their bike tires or to see if we have any more of those popsicles we gave them once last summer. We talk about putting twinkly Christmas lights in our screened-in porch. A hammock. Birdfeeders. And yes, we even discuss that largest of steps—a dog.

A future. Here.

I never planned to settle down for the long run in Atlanta, but if the right job came along here in town, I’d take it, because just as part of me demands true happiness in my work, another part of me is getting what it needs right here and now with this life. The trouble is that neither desire trumps the other; once my work with the radio station and the university end for the season next month, I’ll be unhappy; all at loose ends. And if a job takes me away from my good life here with Marshall, I won’t be content either, not for a while, anyway. But since the good life can be rebuilt, though ever so slowly, I’ll take that job, wherever it may be. I’ll go. I’ll start over, tilling the rough earth elsewhere.