Room Sound

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Kate Sweeney read from her unpublished book about death practices past and present, American Afterlife.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.

It’s springtime and all I want is to be outside. The pollen has fallen and everything’s coated in gold, and every chit-chatty conversation turns to this fact. I hear there’s an artist who comes and paints designs in the layers of dust on people’s cars. Everybody’s sneezing and rubbing their eyes and muttering, but for my part, I’m just happy for the world to feel big again. Big sky, open windows, bike rides against the green (and gold) everywhere, and at night, fire pits and barbecuing in the backyard. Last night we wore t-shirts and shorts and ate still more barbecue at the drive-in and my friend commented on the clear, gorgeous sky, the perfect temperature and the lack of insects. It has gone from winter straight to early summer here, and I could complain about the lack of spring, but I figure I’ll do enough of that later. For now, I’ll just revel.

There’s so much I want to do. I want to bike as far as I can on the Silver Comet trail. I want to go camping in the mountains north of town. I want to visit Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon. I want to hike up to the top of Stone Mountain at dawn. We have this neighbor with a giant, cast-iron dragon in the backyard. It must be ten feet tall. Their house is on a corner. You turn that corner, and above the picket fence that boxes their backyard, this dragon head warns you not to mess. At night, the dragon is backlit by a bright spotlight. I want badly to interview this neighbor, but even with my frequent walks about the neighborhood, I’ve never once seen a soul outside of this house. Only—once—a truck with a bumper sticker that read, “Artists with Guns.” I really, really want to interview this neighbor.

I’m spending a lot of my free time imagining myself into other cities and other lives as I look for jobs, but at the moment, I really just want to freeze this life. Of course, Frost was right. If there was ever a time when Atlanta was gold, this is it, and it won’t last.

I am always superstitious about admitting when I’m content. Nervous about telling the devil my plans. I must find the grey clouds inside whatever silver lining happens to be a’dazzling me at the moment so that I can guard myself against the moment I lose it.

So here we are again. I’m only ever happy when I’m happy in my work, and right now I’m deliiiiiriously happy. I’m working this interim producer position at the public radio station while teaching two fantastic English composition classes. I spend each day working creatively with a team or independently to create fantastic radio features or exploring effective nonfiction writing with my awesome students—who are miraculously, almost uniformly serious-of-intent this semester.

This is the life that I want. And it ends in May.

You ever heard that old summer camp question? You can take a year to have an epic, positively life-changing adventure. You will be the happiest you have ever been or ever will be. But once it’s over, you can never go back. Do you do it?

I always answered yes. Hell, yes, to adventure and the guarantee of satisfaction. And of course I’ll always have the pictures to show everyone, right?

But now I’m on that adventure. I’m the happiest I’ve been in years, and I’m also terrified, counting down the weeks, afraid of the moment I lose this balance.

The interim producer position is just that, and adjunct teaching work goes semester by semester. So in May I’ll be downright unemployed. It took almost two weeks into this routine for the truth of this to strike. I don’t know why. I knew the facts. Still, it was on one evening drive home from the station while mentally plotting out a slew of new feature story ideas that the heartbreak hit. Maybe it was the springtime smell in the cool air; it was the first evening I was able to drive with the windows cracked. It was the sense of things changing even at that moment, even as I drove. This would not, would not last.

So I’m looking for jobs. And I guess it’s just time to accept that I’m addicted to jobs in which I get to work on cool feature stories. And of course my ardor is only enhanced by knowing the meager availability of the sorts of feature-work I thrive on and the glut of talent out there competing for it.

In the meantime, I’ll do my best to enjoy right now. It seems to require a sort of zenlike attitude. Tips? Tricks? I’m open to suggestions.

We needed to shake the winter off of us.

There’s winter’s physical component—the cruel frigid rain and stinging frozen slivers called “a wintery mix” by news announcers—that gets blown down the neck of your coat by fell winds. Then there’s the temperament indicated by things like nightlife choice: a Twin Peaks-couch-blanket-space-heater-Thin-Mint bender that lasts for weeks. Endless head and chest colds. The certainty when you do go out that you chose wrong; at 9:30 you are fatigued; you can feel that space heater and Laura Palmer calling to you across the miles as you stand somewhere talking to friends in nice clothes when you’d rather be holed up in sweats.

But last week, the birds started up. I heard them as I dropped another David Lynch DVD into the mailbox, and noticed too, that the air smelled fresh. But it still contained the occasional police siren, and Marshall and me, we both felt constrained to the paths we had trodden for weeks: from work to grocery store to home and back.

It was time for a trip. A spur-of-the-moment weekend jaunt to Savannah, just four hours away.

Turns out hundreds of other people had the same idea.

Observation #1: The city-sights are you.
Olde Savannah is a topsy-turvy oppositeland composed entirely of tourists and art students. This is what we discovered through pure scientific deduction. It was, after all, a sunny Saturday afternoon in the historic district. This was clearly a random sampling.

By the end of our afternoon downtown, we were wandering the crafts market on River Street happily sore of foot, commenting on how odd it was that the booths of a crafts market in a town that houses SCAD should still showcase primarily water-color paintings and brass yard ornaments shaped like dogs. As we strolled, we passed back and forth a cup of Yuengling that was perfectly legal under the city’s scandalously permissive open-container law. Still, we passed it rapidly, sure somewhere beneath our skins that at any moment a plainclothes authority would grab the wrist of the hand that held said-cup and shake it, condemning the holder to some humiliating fate.

We walked and relayed the beer among the same packs of fellow surreptitious beer-slurping tourists and sketch-pad toting hipsters with whom we’d spent the entire afternoon. In 18th-century cemeteries and city squares alike, every person down to a man carried a camera, wore a little circular sticker that signaled tour-group membership, or wore pencil-jeans and/or a beard. I swear to god, at one moment strolling the market, I looked up from all this at a mammoth cargo ship carrying train-cars down the Savannah River, and I knew that a pair of binoculars would reveal a cap’n in oversized purple plastic glasses and a sweatband.

“Why such a curmudgeon, Sweeney?”
More on that later.


Observation #2: Tour of Ghost Tours
That night we ate a really good dinner at the most crazily rambling restaurant in the world, a place called the Pirates’ House. This restaurant is so big I literally got lost in it after we ate. It’s made up of several of the town’s original 18th-century wood buildings, all sort of lashed together with more old(e)-looking wooden passageways and rooms; resulting in a colonial compound that stretches for blocks. The city’s first settlers built the original house, we were told, to accommodate the caretaker of the settlement’s first experimental garden. These settlers wanted to find out what crops would grow in this new environment. Their discoveries: mulberry trees, not so much; peaches, wow yes.

A real perk of the actual restaurant today is that, besides really good food, we got to partake in no fewer than three ghost tours coming through the Captain’s Room, where we sat and ate. Every 15 minutes a group of ten tourists crowded in, led by a petite red-haired drama major in a floor-length leather coat. In a dramatic Irish accent, she regaled them with the tale of the closed door behind the spot where I sat, where many an unfortunate young men of yesteryear had been locked up before being shanghaied off to the South Seas on pirate ships. By her second visit, I was ready for the dramatic question she would pose to me, “Did ye hear the ghost knockin’ on the door behind ye, lassie?” As the evening wore on, she grew increasingly familiar with our table and with those around us; the third visit, she actually leaned over a neighbor’s meal and asked him how he was “enjoyin’ the grub.”

By now, we had realized that this was an amazing two-for-one kind of evening: we weren’t just eating a nice dinner (and I insist, the food was delicious); we were actually on a tour of ghost-tours. We counted four more parading by outside the window. It felt like Halloween; a Halloween characterized by fake Irish accents and floor-length leather coats. The next tour guide to bring his group inside, a bearded man, also wore such a coat—as, I think, do all such guides everywhere on the planet. The bearded guide actually threatened to drug Marshall himself and shanghai him before he had the chance to finish eating his snapper. I was similarly confusingly hit on later as we attempted to leave the Pirates’ House. Passing through room after dark oak-beamed room, we walked through or past three more ghost tours. There were, we realized, more ghost-tourists here than actual diners. As we stood still and tried to regain our bearings, guide number one approached us again, and began talking to me in the same fake Irish accent she’d been using with her groups all night about the “ghastly hoards” of people here tonight. “Maybe you’ll join us tonight, lassie?” she asked. I said no, I didn’t think so, looking around for the exit. She continued to misunderstand our desire to leave as a desire to join a ghost-tour, and started talking at length about the haints of olde Savannah, brushing my shoulder lightly with her hand as she spoke. There was no way out of this but to just walk away from her toward what we hoped was the exit. It was.


Observation #3: Undignified and Old
It was only when we arrived at the bar across town that our friend G. had recommended that we finally broke free of the tourgroup stickers and round, purple eyeglasses circa 1985 that had characterized this day. Pinkie Masters reminded me of bars in Wilmington, North Carolina, where I lived for three years; Marshall said it reminded him of bars in New York. It’s a small, smoky room with a good jukebox and a u-shaped bar, filled with the most ordinary-looking citizens I’d seen all day. We got beers, found a comfy corner, and chatted with a couple of guys who’d been coming in for years. One pointed out the nearby video poker machine on the bar. “I hate that thing,” he said. “Before they brought it in, I would come in and sit right there and read. They let me bring in my own reading lamp and plug it in. Now there’s no room there for a lamp or a book.” But he kept coming in anyway.

On this trip, we’d been enjoying new sites, but it was now, here, that I finally felt myself unwind. Pinkie Masters has a long history; the walls are covered with proud newspaper clips about regulars, autographed photos of stars who’d come in—and the story goes that Jimmy Carter announced his run for presidency here.

Now, two glasses of wine and one glass of beer deep, I announced a startling realization: I hate every bar we go to in Atlanta. “What?” said Marshall. “I think that’s a bit extreme.” No, I insisted. “Our bars in are all filled with twelve-year-olds I don’t know all trying to look more important than one another. This bar just has—people,” I finished, sagely. I went on to say that my favorite bars in Wilmington had been this way, too. There was no sense of attempted adolescent coolness. It was just people you knew catching up on things, regulars that you got to know over the years.

Marshall leveled his eyes at me. “Look at you!” he said.

“What?”

“You want to live in Cheers! You are a total cranky-pants!”

It was true. I was a cranky-pants. We were on this trip in part to celebrate my birthday, and now I was drunk and bitching about the Young People: the hipster 25-year-olds we’d spent the day walking the sidewalks with and all the negative abstractions they represented.

As we went back that night, a memory came to me: When I was ten years old, I wrote a report for school about how I wanted to write children’s books. There was some sentence about how I would never forget what it was like to be ten and how I would always stand up for kids and their perspective. Then when I was in my mid-twenties, I wrote earnestly about how I would always, always keep up with new music and go to rock shows and divey hipster bars. Both points of view, of course, seem foreign now. I have no recollection at all how it feels to be ten. And Marshall jokes with me about what a homebody I’ve become. Most new indie rock sounds derivative or boring to me now; I’m increasingly wont to say that the music I like best is played by people who older than me.

And this is what starts to freak me out.

How does one accept the natural perspective-shifts of the aging process without becoming a close-minded asshole? The easy mockery of the art students and their cookie-cutter fashions, if examined closely, is just a shade away from mocking other senses and beliefs that are inherent to the young, which is just a shade away from becoming rigid to change altogether. My maternal grandmother stayed lucid, healthy, and optimistic until late in life. She ate and spent frugally and guarded herself against becoming too set in her ideas about the world. “I like the young people!” she was known to say into her mid-90s when she still spent time with her church’s youth group and at fish-fry parties thrown by 40- and 50-somethings in her neighborhood. She kept the skylight in her mind open. I want to do the same. This seems to be a challenge for the years to come, Henshaw.


4th and Final Observation: Time Flies.

The next day, we drove out to Tybee Island and after a kick-ass breakfast and a walk on the beach, we went to nearby Fort Pulaski. Fort Pulaski was built by the federal government in the early 1800s, but was taken over by the Confederacy during the Civil War. Marshall is kind of a buff of all wars fought ever—we spent one early date on a hike in which he refreshed me on the details of the causes of WWI and the fall of the Roman empire. This is one small thing I love about him; just like good historic sites, Marshall makes history into fascinating stories.

Likewise, I appreciated the simplicity of the story of Fort Pulaski, printed in the state parks brochure we were given when we drove in, described in the small interpretive signs ringing the fort, and explained in detail in the small museum (which we walked through) and apparently also, a 20-minute film (which we skipped). The story is this: The Confederacy occupied the fort and thought, “Hah, hah. We totally rule. Those Federal troops over on Tybee Island over there can’t friggin’ touch us.” And then the Union began bombing them with these new cannons that shot cannonballs extra far, extra fast, and began totally decimating the fort. After 36 hours of this and one fatality on each side, the Confederates surrendered the fort. After that, it became a POW camp for the Union.

For Marshall, among the most fascinating parts of our visit to Fort Pulaski was the story of the evolving tactics of warfare signaled by this battle. It changed how forts were built forever (i.e., no longer out of bricks, which these new cannonballs could shoot to pieces). He lingered over the displays of weaponry and when we looked at the old cannons themselves inside the fort, he explained to me their technical operations.

This was plenty cool, but I was more captivated by the question of how much we were seeing and walking through was the original fort. Some of it had been rebuilt at various points in history—after the Union capture and again after a fire a few years later, etcetera—but I wanted to know which of these cannons we looked at and touched had actually been there during the battle. Which bricks were the bricks that dirty, exhausted soldiers had leaned against in the moments between fighting? I lingered at the displays of the rum bottles they had actually drunk from, the dice they had actually played with in their spare hours. The stories of strategy and the larger picture of warfare was fine, but to me, that story was a container for these real things that had been there. I stared and stared. We stood in a chamber where the Southern troops had stored gunpowder. The Union later used this room as solitary confinement for their prisoners. It had tall ceilings. It was dank and chilly. I shivered. Then I asked Marshall if he thought this was the original wood floor that the prisoners had actually stood on.

As we drove away, we talked about what it must have been like back in the 1800s to travel from Savannah (now 20 minutes away by car) all the way out here, through these marshy, buggy lands. In the Union captain’s quarters, his wife had added what interpretive signs called “a woman’s touch,” nice furniture stolen from houses in neighboring towns. There’s also a photo of a few union soldiers and a woman—possibly this furniture-nabbing model of femininity—at the fort. The place looks muddy and miserable; the woman stands there in a wide hoopskirt and layers and layers of stiff clothing. I wouldn’t ever want to travel back to that time or any other to live. Let’s face it; post-1980 is pretty much the only era to be anything but a white male in this world. But the tactile facts of the past do engage my imagination. I want to press my face against the glass of this history. We know the world through our five senses, and if photos and old brick buildings I can stroll through are all I have to know the past, I’ll walk till my legs ache and if I can help it, I won’t blink.

This weekend, for once, I was the aunt I want to be. Marshall and I went to the park with my sister and her two girls. We packed a picnic for the girls, complete with basket and blanket and a variety of sandwich toppings. Never mind the day’s cold-searing wind; it was a beautiful day, and when the sun wasn’t behind a cloud, we could all take off our woolen hats.

My nieces have another aunt, too—my other sister, who lives in Chicago. The difference between their two aunts could not be more pronounced. There’s one, who slips them three or four cookies more than their mother allows and plays the same shrieking game for hours on end, and there’s the other one, who adheres to all the dull rules set by their parents and promptly disappears when she can, to some bedroom where she reads all afternoon and doesn’t want to play much at all. The fun aunt and the boring aunt. I know where I stand. What can I say. I like books.

I am a lot like my maternal grandmother in this sense. A child’s truth requires little weighing of subtleties, and when my sisters and I were children, there was no contest in this matter. My father’s mother, whom we called Banny, was our favorite. My first perception of Banny was always of that long, head-crushed-to-ample-bosomed embrace, in which gulping breaths of Paris perfume stood in for oxygen. Everything about her was expansive. While my other grandmother—my mother’s mother—is an elderly version of my own fairly lean form, part of what made Banny seem the better grandma was her amplitude. She was composed entirely of round, soft flesh. There was no part of her that didn’t reach out, grab you and hold you to her. She was the grandma who’d wake you up at midnight to make ice-cream sundaes, take you out for surprise shopping trips that lasted hours, slip you a multitude of other sugary treats right before the family meal and then hover over you during dinner itself, asking why you didn’t eat more ham, more sauerkraut, more mashed potatoes; she thought they were your favorite. She’d made them just for you.

Since Nona lived much farther from us than Banny, in eastern North Carolina, we’d visit her only once every couple of years—usually in the summer, on the way to a beach. I remember arriving at her house after hours in the hot car. That small house carried the scent of the farmland that surrounded it for miles on every side. That and dust and old wood and the cold cream Nona slapped on at night. I’d heft my red Snoopy WWI Flying Ace suitcase through her small house, back to the bedroom my sisters and I would share. I’d plunk the suitcase down, come back to the kitchenette and look up at Nona, waiting for something to happen. She would only pause while cutting up chicken for salad and say, “Didn’t you bring a book?”

For a few years now, I’ve comforted myself with the idea that as my nieces grew older, I’d become a better aunt to them. After all, when I grew to be a teenager and a college student, I became more interested in Nona’s long conversations and sitting out on the porch. We’d sit out there for hours, inhaling the pine scent of the summer and drinking pink wine as the shadows grew long and she told me about growing up in the Thirties, about peeling dozens of potatoes for her huge farming family’s dinner each day and about the time a neighbor-boy dared her to climb a water tower and she refused until he offered her a quarter, too. At Nona’s house, there were usually no real planned activities. Sitting like this and sharing stories is the activity.

I never think to plan special activities for my nieces. Their other aunt is the one who comes armed with plans to build gingerbread houses, who acts silly and gets them excited and running around and around the house. I’m the one who’s there to talk if they want, listen to music or maybe take a walk. That’s about as intricate as my fun times get.

But on Sunday, I was determined to do something different. At the park, I watched the girls zip around on their bicycles, satisfied. I felt like the clear skies and the park paths and the refreshing air hitting my nieces’ lungs were my doing. The older one showed me an abandoned Civil War era textile mill by the river and, talking fast, told me about other historic sites in her part of town; one has something to do with a Girl Scout badge she’s earning and another with a paper on Teddy Roosevelt. We should go to more such sites together, I said. “I’ve already been to a lot of them,” she replied. But she’d go with me if I wanted. All of us sat in the blanket in the sun and huddled against the cold, taking in the birdsong and the smell of spring. After the sandwiches and fruit, Marshall presented mass-produced chocolate cupcakes and the girls applauded. Through my camera window, the photos of the girls and their mother waving the colorful picnic blanket against the blue sky and laughing is proof of success. Success, even though my eldest niece politely refused a sandwich at all once she saw that I’d packed no white bread; even as the younger one got mad at the older one and burst into tears, and as, hours later, the older one sat and sulked in frustration about the unfair attention the younger one gets. As we ran errands and the girls and their mother sang along to pop hits I’d never heard and which made my skin crawl, I thought of how my one idea for an entertaining outing was now spent. About the next weekend or the next, I had no clue.

I am not the brand of cool aunt I had planned to be when these girls were born. But you can’t make yourself over for anyone you plan to know for very long, and imagining myself an expansive, larger-than-life personality for children was just unrealistic. If I can plan nothing else, at least I know I firmly intend a lifelong relationship with my nieces, and we’ll all get to know one another only as we are.

For the past couple of days, I’ve had a nasty earache. I’d never had an earache before, and so I immediately assumed it meant I either had an ear infection or was one in ten-thousand people in the world with a rare condition that would confound a number of specialists I couldn’t afford before resulting in deafness and the probable amputation of my entire right ear.

The physician at the doc in the box on Tuesday looked in my ear and told me it wasn’t an infection. She said that the ear canal is bright red and highly irritated, “but the ear drum’s fine.” All this was probably due to the previous week’s irrigation of the ear to remove (sorry; grossness alert) a massive clot of earwax. She gave me numbing drops that smell like Bactine. As I lay in bed and dripped the stuff in and consciousness of the immediate world closed in, I was returned to that ocean place. I thought of that white plastic bottle of my youth, its bright red sun matching the bright red sunburns on my back as my mother squirted the cool chemical solution across my shoulder blades.

My earwax is sort of a useless adult child; instead of ever leaving my ears, it prefers to hang around way past its welcome, until its consistency is something like granite. I yawn one day and suddenly I can’t hear a damn thing, and this is how I know that it’s irrigation time again.

In the past, too, irrigation—basically, getting an ear flushed out with warm water till the earwax is loosened and drops out—has been an oddly soothing experience. I hate it when my ears are stopped up, but there’s something I look forward to in the experience that follows. Warm waves rush in, and one side of my head feels like it’s been submerged in the ocean; I close my eyes and I am in some primordial place, the slow-moving demersal deep. It feels cleansing and good and then, boom, it drains and all at once, I am back in the world, my hearing restored in sharp-crystal focus. Everything sounds completely new, completely novel. For a short spell, every sound is the original sound.

Instead of this, last Friday, the doc in the box shot a hard jet of water straight at my eardrum four times. I dug my fingernails into the chair. I had just signed three waivers that had to do with no fault, no fault, no fault for anything that resulted. My head jerked from her gun, but I walked out hearing again.

All this ear business makes my own body feel foreign. My body: not my self. Suddenly, there’s this canal that I can actually feel just under the skin on one side of my head. I know it’s there because of how it throbs. When I lie down, I feel the whoosh of fluids in there. They rush through channels I’ve never felt before and can’t access or control. The ache sharpens for a moment before being blurred slightly by something, dulled over and turned dormant. A look in the mirror reveals none of this. The woman at the Box/Doc told me there’s nothing, really, to do about it but wait. I lie awake at night and feel my heart beat through these aching channels and think: Why now? Why the three days between the powerhose and the pain? Later my boyfriend will suggest changes in air pressure, seasons, fronts, movements in the atmosphere larger than us. Uncontrollable. Now, in the night, I think, Who are we in these tiny lives we inhabit, residing in bodies, on continents, that turn on us? What do we really know?

Last week: my credit card was a’frauded the same day that there was a debacle involving Marshall, his car, and the icy night both were stranded in; (I didn’t hear my cell phone to save him). Then I got sick and spent three days straight mostly sleeping. This morning I awoke to a sharp little pain deep in the ear I got irrigated last week at the Doc-in-the-Box, and in my first hour of consciousness, my impression of this has already traversed the quick route from, “Huh. How ‘bout that,” to complete certainty that this is the first sign of a degeneration into total deafness that shall take effect in just a few hours—that this is, indeed, my last hour of normal hearing. Damn all those waivers I signed at that stupid clinic—and that irrigation hurt.

There are good things, too: chief among the good things, there’s this golden space of a few free hours this morning—before I need to make up a handout on quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing for my classes this afternoon, and before I worry—damn it—about returning to the the Box-Doc for my inevitable eardrum-amputation diagnosis. Another bright spot is this: I’m no longer working the coffee joe job. Again. For now.

Finally, I’ve gotten what they call a “good rejection” letter from a fancy-dancy literary magazine for an essay I wrote.

For those of you who live in the actual normal world which doesn’t involve publications with names like the Wheat County Review, here’s the deal: literary magazines still exist. Some are chock full of really amazing, beautiful writing and artwork—and there are more truly excellent literary publications alone out there than anyone on this earth will ever have time to read. The truth, too, is that literary magazines are mostly read by other writers, poets, and artists—precisely the folks who are busy sending the magazines their own work and trying to get it published.

These places are really hard to get published in.

Or, closer to the truth: So far in my own little writing life, I’ve mostly submitted to the gold star sort of lit mags—places like Tin House, Agni, Creative Nonfiction, and the Kenyon Review. And since you generally get back no more than you give in this life, mine has been filled with rejections a-plenty. Henshaw, these lit mags are the Beautiful Ones, filled with amazing writing and amazing design, the places where uber-talented upstarts rub, err, pages, with really famous established writers.
My pattern is this:
1. I write something. I revise it a whole bunch and get excited about it.
2. Then I send it out, usually in one, glorious, caffeine-drenched fit.
3. The Gold Star journals summarily reject the piece.
4. I kind of give up. I never admit to myself that I’m giving up. The giving-up takes the form of never really trying again with that particular piece of writing.
5. Which is exactly what “giving up” means. And, which is exactly the opposite of what you’re supposed to do, as a writer.
6. But c’mon, we’re homo fricking sapiens. We respond to conditioning. I was a teenage feminist, and I was taught that “No means No.” I believed that.
7. Still, I know…

I have been published in commercial magazines—places with a more general audience—but the lit mags, these are the tougher nuts to crack. Friends tell me to look at this in a positive light. It’s like I’ve jumped some hurdle without even practicing, they tell me. I, of course, am convinced that it means my writing must be hopelessly middlebrow* forever.

["Hopelessly middlebrow:” the term my old friend’s sister was tagged with by a snotty ex-classmate at a reunion. The sister made some ‘70s television reference. Rejoinder from former roommate: “Sarah,” sigh, “you are hopelessly middlebrow.” We who began our careers writing pithy news copy about City Council fights could stand a little assurance every now and then from the Literary Community that we are not hopelessly middlebrow.]

Then last week happened. I sent this essay I’m really excited about out for Round #1 of submissions, which means The Big Guys. The very next day, I received a rejection letter in email form. Only—Hang on, the email told me, this was no standard rejection. That is actually close to the exact wording: This is not a standard rejection. There were a couple more sentences about how this was the kind of writing that made them excited about something-or-other. This was the sort of writing that inspired them to do what they did. Why, this was the sort of writing that—well, it was just great, but still, no.

This “No” did not feel like rejection. This “No” excited me. This “No,” coming, as it did, from one of the schmancy lit mags of the land, said that maybe, just maybe, I was not hopelessly middlebrow after all. This was the kids at the cool cafeteria table complimenting me on my shoes. I still couldn’t sit with them, but now I went on with my day blessed with a little spark of acceptance. Ah, those Doc Martin knock-offs of yesteryear.

We are in a strange business, Henshaw. You spend almost all your time getting rejected. I have friends—good writers—who have collections of their “good” personalized rejections taped to their office walls. I’m trying to believe this is a healthy lesson. Some sort of zen thing. Right? Something about not clinging to material victories in this short, short life. Still, the good rejection means something. For me, this morning, it means I’ll shoot that essay off to two more lit mags for every one I’ve—excuse me—it, has been rejected from. I have a fiction-writing friend who makes this her policy; she tells me she now gets excited about rejections because they spell out this vast opportunity to populate the world with her stories. My fiction-writing friend does a lot of yoga and meditates, while I drink too much coffee.

I’ll let you know. Maybe I’ll get another good rejection to pin up tomorrow.