how cool will it be!?

Currently, barackobama.com opens with a nice graphic and the sweetly rhyming phrase "Who Will Be Barack's VP? Be the first to know." Us Virginians and pseudo-Virginians are crossing our fingers for Governor Tim Kaine. And we're eagerly awaiting the news. It's just a bit unfortunate that the slogan sounds remarkably like an ad for a home pregnancy test.

And just in case you aren't obsessively checking the NYTimes for the announcement, the campaign can send you a text as soon as the decision is made:

Barack is making his decision and will be announcing it any day now. If you haven't had a chance to text "VP" to 62262 pull out your phone and do it now! How cool will it be to know before it's announced by Wolf Blitzer, Katie Couric, or some other news outlet?

Um...I want to know too, and yes, before Katie reads it off the teleprompter. But is this how the campaign thinks we want to be spoken to? Barack, he's so cool! I agree, but please--I'd like a little substance with my exclamation points.

vaccumming the valley

This is Barry K-, president of the Plains District Memorial Museum. Here's a truncated version of an article I wrote for a local publication:

Barry King was plagued by a triad of problems. Or, rather, the old feed mill that he hoped would house the Plains District Memorial Museum suffered three afflictions. Asbestos. A leaking roof. And pigeons—or rather, piles of pigeon guano.

“In my mind, every time it rained, I could feel the raindrops on my head,” said King.

The building is a much-needed upgrade from the museum’s current location, a small garage brimming with Virginia artifacts from decades and centuries past. It took the dedication of dozens of volunteers, a number of fundraisers and generous donations, a few negotiations with the electricians, and a visit from a pigeon abatement company to ready the mill for moving day. Today, a few buckets still collect raindrops in the back section of the building, but the front room—a spacious area complete with museum-style lighting and climate controls—will open its doors in September.

Now King’s task is to fill the mill. “I’m in vacuum mode,” he said. “Do you have any old ledgers?”

Unlike a typical diviner, King sniffs out history, and is not afraid to ask his friends and neighbors about the contents of their attics, basements, and sheds. “Once you start to smell the ancient dust, it gets in your blood,” said King.

gonna look both ways

The funny thing about documenting sprawl is how the experience literally reinforces the very definition of suburban ooze: its utter inaccessibility to anything but a car. You want footage of the land where the Wal-Mart was supposed to go? Park on the slender shoulder, slog down the hot asphalt, past shrieking cars and belching trucks. Wade through the bracken in the ditch. The crickets will leap in fright. To get a shot of where the Wal-Mart ended up, tripod off bank ATMs and lean against street signs. Cross highway traffic with a prayer that if you get hit, your camera will survive. (Don't worry, mom: I'm gonna look both ways before I cross the street. Three times.)

What is most disturbing, in the end, is not the tireless uniformity or the men who yell out car windows but the anomaly of a footed figure. That what everything thinks is bizarre is not a girl with a camera, but a girl--if they notice you at all.

If I can't be a health teacher

...I can at least write about it.

When I think about statistics, it is often in the form of those textbook charts and graphs: HIV infection rates appear as progressively darker blots around the globe, scars on Haiti, Lesotho, Indonesia. A large dark circle surrounds New York City, where infection rates are the highest in the country. But there is a smaller, darker circle inside this one: take the train up to the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium, and walk north (beware, Dorothy, this isn't Manhattan anymore and your ruby reds may have a hard time on the steep hills).

This is Highbridge, where AIDS is the leading cause of premature death, where three in 100 people are HIV-positive. This may not sound like much, but what it means, on the ground, is that many of those people you walk past know someone--an aunt, a brother, a best friend--who is positive or even deceased. And this makes me think of other circles: the circles of privilege I tread in, where life can be lived at the extreme reaches of advantage, circles that are lightest or darkest based on the merit of their designation, whether it be infection rates or income or Internet access. I observe this not with overwhelming and impotent guilt--as Paul Farmer astutely notes, guilt can be an extremely productive emotion [pg. 93]--but certainly with a sense of guilt that demands justice, a guilt that insists we dive into other circles and blow their borders asunder.

And yes, please, please, please use condoms.

P.S.

Due to a somewhat nomadic childhood, I kept a fairly significant correspondence during my early years, much of which I have reviewed and culled during this past week.

When my family moved in third grade, my former classmates sent me letters, all in cursive, all in proper letter format on yellow and blue-lined wide ruled paper. The pedagogue in me appreciates my teacher's creativity: while the content of the letters is middling, it was the perfect thing to cheer up a homesick nine-year-old while practicing penmanship and letter writing.

The culling carnage was rather drastic (yellow and blue-lined wide ruled paper recycles well, I hope) but I couldn't resist recording the following from two of the letters:

Larry W- closes his letter by informing me that: "P.S. I have a hermit crab."

...and Chadd K- writes:

"Dear Sara,
Hey Sara! Guess what are [sic] class got a new student in are [Chadd dear, we need to work on homonyms] room. Her name is "Brenda." She still isn't as good as you."

If I recall correctly, "Brenda" was the daughter of the couple who bought our house (it was a very small town). After we moved, there was a rather unfortunate incident involving our homemade swing set: we left in the winter, and my father intended to return in the spring to extricate it from the frozen Pennsylvania ground. (My father has carpentry in the blood. Suffice to say it was a well-built swing set, involving post holes and cement.) Unfortunately, due to a miscommunication that remains nebulous to this day, Brenda's father and my father exchanged a series of heated words (an anomaly for my father; I can say nothing of Brenda's) and my siblings and I were never to swing on that swing set again.

In summation, despite the fact that my father spent this past Sunday's morning exhorting us to seek justice rather than revenge (he also has preaching in the blood), I have just taken my score-long revenge: Chadd K-, dear boy, I agree completely.

Say yes to Michigan!

There is a surprisingly extensive list of songs about Michigan. Where, one wonders, are the songs about Connecticut? Of course, this is the only state where residents can hold up the palms of their right hands and point to where they're from. Now I can say yes to that!

A few for your listening pleasure:

see all of Greetings from Michigan by Sufjan Stevens

Half Acre, by Hem (you'll know it from the Pay it Forward-esque insurance commercial, which, mercifully, is only one minute long and thus far less painful than the movie. You may decide how you feel about a company reminding you to do what your mama and papa taught you--not to mention anthropomorphizing itself as a paragon of responsibility. You know, in the great sellout debate, what I find most disturbing is not always the artist's willingness to sell their music to the Man, but the fact that the music I love also appears to be the Man's favorite too. While Andrew Bird's whistle really shouldn't fetch any price, I am glad he can make enough to keep himself in glockenspiels. It's just unnerving to hear his melodies trickling from the television. Or maybe it's the editorial hack job meted out on his music.)

Michigan, by the Red House Painters (I keep trying this band but they never take. They're one of those bands where the first 45 seconds of a song writhes with promise but by minute two you've memorized their three power chords and pasty lyrics and the incessantly nasal drone of the lead vocalist. In fact, your time would probably be better spent waiting for the seventeen-year cicadas to emerge. They'll be here, in Michigan, in 2021.)

one writer's beginnings

During the years 1999 through 2001, I had the following pieces published in a certain secondary school's literary magazine:

1999
a. a poem about a family returning from the beach (narrator: middle aged man)
b. a poem about the eating habits, or lack thereof, of girls from the West and girls from impoverished countries (and on her plates/are the remains of food she hates/sandwich crusts, broccoli stems)
c. a poem about 43-year-old man's nostalgia for childhood
d. a short story about an incarcerated woman giving birth*

2000
a. a poem about domestic abuse
b. a short story about a mentally unstable woman miscarrying her child and subsequently drowning herself**

2001
a. a poem about a poor mother trying to make a life for her son
b. a poem about a bi-racial relationship

I wonder that my family did not worry over me, but clearly they were not too concerned, as I never appeared to have a curfew and was mostly spared from what one of my siblings refers to as "Monologues with My Father."*** In fact, I may have been entirely too wholesome--I even cried over the only C I've ever received.**** Ultimately, I say that the mildly amusing list is evidence of the mind's potential for empathy and imagination (however maudlin)***** rather than that of a disturbed teenager.

*Rather than a product of my imagination, this one was inspired by a photograph.
**This one is the most painful one to reread. Did I actually write this? I'd like to blame it on reading bad fiction from The New Yorker but my mother refused to buy it during the Tina Brown days.
***If you know our father, you'll know who did the talking.
****Algebra, and in my defense it was not due to an inability to comprehend algebra, but a habit of wavering attention...sometimes due to writing the pieces listed above.
*****A final comment: while a rereading of the above pieces may find one turning certain shades of pink and/or crowing with laughter, my use of figurative language and experimentation does show a spark for the craft***** (although I promise to never ever again refer to the embrace of a bi-racial couple as like an Oreo cookie).
*****Two selections:

The handcuffs and shackles lie there in metal crumples like serpents...

and, in a variation on the serpentine theme:

Coming back from the beach
My wife and daughters burnt red,
Faces like shining Buddhas.
A week later
Their bodies emerging, snakes
From decaying skin.

so gallantly streaming

It is the last game at the old minor league baseball stadium (it will be torn down for a local university's expansion). Dear, dear L- agrees play tripod girl and accompany me to the last game--although we soon learn there is actually a make up game on Monday night (more about that later). We waltz across the field in search of Bobby W-, owner of the Turks and, coincidentally, my camera's first quarry. Unwittingly, he drives away in the golf cart; we make chase, as do the eyes of the baseball team.

Somebody yells at Bobby to stop. He flips the cart around and, taking our hands, asks which one of us is going out with him after the game. I smile sweetly and ask him to submit for the camera--considerate subject that he is, he whisks us off to the outfield and answers my questions against the backdrop of the stadium and the familiar tinging of baseballs and bats. (He played on this field in high school; later in the evening he gently grasps his son's neck as they prepare to bid farewell to the turf).

Back to the stadium go we, where we meet an older, even saltier gent whose name I can't recall, but who Bobby informs me is loaded--loaded, I tell you! They are astounded to learn I do not have a boyfriend, and equally aghast when they hear that L- is a married woman. Indeed, there is nothing quite like discussing one's love life with old men while at work. But in between compliments and flirtations, they give me some good tips for shooting the game, and I mainly laugh when they tell me later that I'm a young 26, although I remind them I'm but five and twenty.

L- waits patiently in the stands while I capture b-roll and interviews; it is my first time at the ball field and I am sad that it is going--there will be another ball field, but how can you reproduce the stains and dirt and scents of over sixty years of baseball games? I dread the sterility of the new diamond, the erased echoes of girls and boys flirting in the stands in the golden light of a dying summer day, the undamaged scoreboard. What words have smashed against these walls? asks Maya Angelou. For is it not comforting, endearing, hopeful to think of visiting a dear, dusty place and adding one more evening to the strata of memory?

But it seems there will one more memory to bring to the sod and discarded peanut shells: L- and I had an offer we could not refuse, an offer that involves warbling the national anthem at the final final make up game. I fear she will win the harmony argument, leaving me to that eyebrow-raising high A--or is it a C? Unpatriotic as I may appear, on Monday night, Veterans Stadium will indeed be the home of the brave.

where numbers fly like pigeons

the arithmetic of life as a quasi-unemployed graduate student (don't try this at home, kids):

interview a man about a historic museum. discuss annie dillard. forget to look at the KKK outfit--brother-in-law wants to know who made their outfits. their wives? or did they emasculate themselves with a needle and thread for such nefarious activity?

invite self over for dinner at friend's parents'. mother of friend's sister-in-law has made dinner--her family is indian, and they probably know my grandparents. dress in sister-in-law's saris (she is too tired and hot from cooking all day to do so herself). pray that won't drop briyani on glorious blue silk.

have pictures taken for anonymous software company. script includes line about unsuccessful pizza tossing: try to position head under flying pizza dough while maintaining correct angle for camera. learn a few tips about tossing a pizza (two fists!), share a few laughs with the Hispanic bakers at the Italian restaurant, leave with flour in eyebrows and hairline.

change niece's diapers (3 times in 20 minutes); act like a general fool (stick out tongue, make clicking noises, sing, dance, finally make baby laugh), visit baby aisles at Target (there were at least 5), fold diapers (too many to count).

lug camera and tripod around town, looking for elusive college students. why they aren't out getting drunk at 9 on a friday is beyond one journalist's imagination. the best college bar in town has a suspended liquor license. tell every acquaintance the news (in approximately 17 minutes, this totals 7 people, plus someone's new wife).

house sit for friends who go on real vacations. 2 cats, 1 dog, 2 messy houses; 18 hours hasta que vengan.

trollope: 1 down; edward abbey: 2 more chapters; nabokov (first name, for the record, almost rhymes with redeemer; last: hold the middle syllable on the tip of an arrow [bow] and then break into the edge of the final hard k): lolita, lolita, lolita.

He must marry money

There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable as that of matrimony."-Anthony Trollope

Fortunately (I believe) we are no longer shackled to the demands of blood and money in marital matches, as Trollope's Frank Gresham is repeatedly reminded by his family. (I warn you that Trollope's wit is done a great disservice by such a dry synopsis, the sad fate of many a synopses, so dear reader, listen to Lavar Burton and read the book.) Of course, we have not cast of the bonds completely; our greedy tendencies have merely settled in deeper, darker spots: I ain't sayin she a gold digger but if she starts demanding a push present, you may have more to argue about than who changes the 4 a.m. diaper. (Coincidentally, I did write a piece on this topic before the NYTimes. There was just that niggling issue of publication.)

But if you do happen to find yourself blissfully ensconced in matrimony, regardless of money or blood, there remains at least one battleground: the in-laws--one I never really feared because my own relations were and are a source of joy and delight (and yes, the occasional annoyance). But I have found recently found myself, albeit in-law-less myself, dispensing two pieces of advice for the wedded:

• Write it all down. I'm not sure of Trollope's matrimonial relations, but such character sketches and plot lines come free of charge. (I must give credit to an anonymous acquaintance for this observation.)
• Read, and if needed, write to my guilty pleasure. All advice comes with a good serving of snark, which really is something our dear Abby could use.