Have Children, Will Travel: Bangkok

Unlike Saigon’s back packer district where grizzled old army vets in tank tops and tattoos could be found drinking beer at any hour of the day, Bangkok’s Khao San Road seemed to be populated by the twenty and under crowd. Everyone was young and cool and international with an earth-grunge-free-love-but-can- afford -to-travel -extensively-and -wear -real -Crocs-and-Ray Bans way. As we dragged our two children, Hudson and Lily, through the crowded sidewalks, a hippie wannabe wearing overalls and Birkenstocks sang “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. Beside him hung a rack of t-shirts with rasta-colored marijuana leaves on them. At the next stall, little paper containers of phad thai were for sale for fifty cents and looked like they’d been withering out in the sun all day. The phad thai vendor’s t-shirt read: “I Lost My Virginity in Madagascar.”

Other things for sale on Khao San Road:

•camo cargo shorts
•batik halter top
•fresh mangoes and sticky rice
•fake spongy Crocs
•Camus, Hesse, Dostoyevsky novels
•wraparound peasant skirts
•bootleg Xeroxed Lonely Planet guides
•toe rings and silver ankle bracelets with little bells on them
•tie-dyed sarongs
•a black t-shirt that said “Dave Hits 50!
•brass incense holders
•patouchouli oil
•people who would dreadlock or French braid your hair


The young twenty-something set I could actually deal with; we both taught college, after all, and were used to being more than twice the age of our students. No, our biggest tactical error about traveling to Bangkok was the all-out oppressive heat. It was beginning to make me sick and feeble. As we plowed through the hot crowded streets, Lily kept pulling on my hand, begging to go back to our hotel, to please let her go swimming in the pool. By that point, however, Hudson had become hellbent on buying a small Thailand flag with the bhat he’d earned earlier by massaging our feet and by cleaning up errant puzzle pieces off the floor. Hudson had been collecting flags from all the countries he’d visited . So far, he’d scored Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan and Canada, but we were having a hard time finding aThai flag among the hippie detritus of Khao San Road.

Once we arrived back in our room (alas, no Thailand flag purchased), we were startled to see men dangling right in front of our window outside. Our room was not ideal anyway: it faced a cement wall and was dreary and damp, but now there were four men staring in at us. I called the hotel desk three times, but they blew me off. I whipped the curtains closed, but they were so thin you could see right through. The men soon began pounding against the side of the building with mallets and hammers. Our walls shook. I called again. We were paying good money for the room! I complained. This was unacceptable! But again, the manager, clearly used to bitchy American tourists, put me off. “Nothing else available except the suite I told you about earlier. It is $150 U.S.”

Later, after we’d all taken a stultifying two-hour nap, I woke up to the sound of dripping water. “A leak!” I said, triumphant, and called the front desk to report it. I hated to be one of “those” people, but there really was water coming down right through the ceiling and dripping onto our luggage. This time the manager sighed loudly when I called. He made a familiar clicking sound I’d come to associate with impatience and irritation in Asia. When I told him about the leak, dramatizing it just a bit, there was something in his voice that insinuated I’d actually orchestrated, or caused, the leak just so I could get a different room. “All right. Yes. You may have the suite,” he said. “Yes, for the cost of a regular room.” He clicked his mouth again.

The suite had thin plywood walls with a big white divider running down the center of the room. It was nice but not that nice with a yellow vinyl couch and a whole bank of windows—windows that were frosted so you couldn’t see outside. I had a hard time enjoying it, though; I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d unfairly defeated the manager and so my victory felt tainted.

The next morning’s highlight was the breakfast buffet. The kids gunned immediately for the silver dollar pancakes, the hot dogs, and the red Jell-O, but pushed away the bright orange papaya chunks, which, I had to admit, smelled like butt. They also declined the beautifully fanned circles of fresh pineapple. But who cared? Real life no longer applied.

Around us sat young European women in big linen Houdini pants and tight camis, braless, who seemed tested by the hotel’s 9:30 a.m. buffet cut-off time. They sat with their heads in their hands, smoking, picking at bits of toast. They’d clearly had different evenings than ours, which had entailed trying to bathe the kids in the microscopic shower stall, then watching back-to-back dubbed episodes of “Will & Grace.” The other prominent buffet group was the thuggish American college boys. They were easily identified as American by their Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts, their droopy cargo shorts, and, most importantly, their penchant for wearing ball caps—backwards if they were really cool, regular if they were medium cool. They swore a lot, whacked each other on the arms, and ate huge bowls of cereal. This was a tribe I knew well from teaching at Brockport. Sometimes they looked so much alike that I honestly had a hard time keeping them straight even by semester’s end. Still, I had to give these guys credit for schlepping all the way over to Asia for vacation (even if it was primarily fueled by the infamous live sex shows and preponderance of affordable prostitutes).

Most of my students had grown up within an hour or two of Brockport and didn’t seem to have the travel bug at all. In fact, one year when I’d used a literary magazine focused on travel writing, a strange, antagonistic bitterness came pouring out of my students. “People who travel think they’re so great,” one graduate student said. (I happened to know he still lived at home, in Brockport, with his parents). “It seems like these writers just want to say, ‘Oh, look at me! I’ve been here and here and here and you haven’t, so I’m better than you.’’ A couple students went a step further by wondering why anyone would want to leave upstate New York anyway since it was so great and had everything you needed. “I just like to stay home,” one student said. “It’s less stressful.”

Indeed, but as I watched this posse of big beefy American boys begin a food fight with Cheerios, I thought: at least they’re here; at least they’re allowing themselves to be influenced by something bigger than themselves. “But don’t do what they’re doing,” I whispered to the kids, who looked on with wonder and awe at their food fight. “Very rude.”

We loved the tuk-tuks—tiny open-air motorcars as public transport. We hired a bright green one for a few hours to take us to The Golden Mount Wat, an elaborate gold-encrusted temple far up on a hill. When the tuk-tuk driver dropped us off, Mark said, “Isn’t this peaceful? to which Hudson replied, “My underwear is sticking to my butt,” to which I replied, “Mine, too.” We had to scale hundreds of steps to reach the top. There was no shade. At times, I had to carry Lily on my back to help see her through. When we reached the top, my head was spinning. Luckily, cold bottled water was for sale at the top. Mark and I looked out over the sprawling, smoggy city. It was our 15th anniversary. We'd met as Peace Corps volunteers in The Philippines and had been bonded by international travel ever since.

“We’ve come a long way,” Mark said. He squeezed my hand. The kids were digging through bins of trinkets for sale—beaded bracelets, laminated Buddhist prayer cards, gold coins, tiny Buddha statues, rosewood fans with silk tassels. They were so good about being dragged from place to place in the grueling heat without complaint. We bought them each a fan and some chewing gum and headed down.

Later, back at our hotel, Mark and I opened a bottle of red wine we’d bought on Khao San Road, and started talking about Vietnam, where we’d just lived for six months. It was hard not to make comparisons when traveling from country to country, and we began to note the differences. Vietnam was cheaper. Thailand was cleaner. Vietnamese people seemed suspicious and distrustful. Thai people seemed more cosmopolitan and open. Saigon's traffic was scarier. Bangkok's food was better.

We realized, with some chagrin, we missed little about Vietnam. But we also realized, talking further, that we didn’t regret living there either. How could you simultaneously dislike something and find it very difficult while at the same time enjoy the experience of it and come to embrace it? Which is exactly how we’d come to view our days in Vietnam. There was an odd pleasure to the difficulty of living hard in a strange place.

For our anniversary, Mark and I had both purchased each other silver jewelry—a Bangkok specialty. I bought Mark a braided silver ring for 350 bhat on Khao San Road; he bought me a matching silver necklace and bracelet. Fifteen years, and there we were in Bangkok, Thailand—a family of four.

We stayed up late that night drinking wine on one side of the room, the kids asleep on the other.

Politics Miniature?

I found these tiny pieces of wood along the Erie Canal foot path this morning in Brockport, New York. Each one is no bigger than a credit card. Each is 1/4 inch thick, and pine, I think. I kept hoping there would be more—a sort of Hansel and Gretel bread crumb trail leading to some final profound epiphany, but there were only these two tiny notes, written on both sides of the pine. The only person I passed on the canal path was a large man on a three-speed bike with sunglasses and a dark moustache who did not return my "hello."

Was this some sort of apocalyptic doomsday warning?

Performance art?

Guerrilla politics?


* * * * *

I want to respond in kind. This person had obviously taken such care by sawing the little pieces of pine into nice even cuts, writing the messages in permanent marker in a passionate scrawl, dropping them randomly along the path over a nearly five-mile stretch.


I think I'll leave a trail of fortune cookies leading to the nice open clearing by the cottonwood tree where you can see the cabbage just beginning to peek up. There, I'll have a small table set with a splendid meal of bread and cheese, strawberries and kiwis, and a pair of binoculars for clear viewing.

Iguanas, Ipods, and Birthdays

Today when I went running, my ipod was dead so I had to use my son’s. He’s nine. His ipod is newer than mine; it’s lime green and has slick graphics and better games. He also has a fairly eclectic range of music. I saw he had 16 playlists, which surprised me, including Carole King, White Christmas, and Graceland. But he had one playlist with 25 songs called “Party Mix,” so of course I chose that one. Party Mix?


*

“Minnesota Polka” by Karl and the Country Dutchmen

*

I headed out along the Erie canal path, determined to reach Sweden-Walker Road despite the heat. Yesterday I’d gone to Dick’s Sporting Goods and then Target to get myself some new running clothes. I love clothes, and have always been drawn to wintry fabrics like velvet, corduroy, and merino wool; athletic wear has always repelled me with its glossy sheen, meshy fabrics and jelly bean colors. But as I jogged along in my Blue Burst shorts and my Sun Flash top, I swore I ran better, faster, no side ache, no problem. It was the bright new clothes! And also, perhaps, my son’s music.

*

“Fame” by Irene Cara

*

I remember with both of my pregnancies, I’d swum laps at the college pool right up until the day of my deliveries. What I loved about swimming laps was not just that cool blue immersion but the meditative way I would mindlessly count each and every stroke. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…and absolutely nothing else. I would not plan menus or classes. I would not worry and fret and make myself miserable. I would count and breathe and swim. When I run, I plan. My daughter’s sixth birthday party is on Saturday, and although we’re not “theme” kind of people, I run through a checklist in my head to see if all is in order: pink paper plates, purple plastic cutlery and purple napkins, a two-layer vanilla and chocolate cake, goody bags with the right balance of candy and toys (I’d spent probably half an hour in the birthday aisle at Target, debating: monster finger puppets or bundles of fake money? Nerds or Skittles? Glitter pens or hologram notebooks?). Because I want to give my children so many things that I never had, I sometimes find myself overdoing it.

*

“Slash Dot Dash” by Fatboy Slim

*

Lily actually turned six last week in Montserrat, a small island in the Caribbean just south of Antigua. We’d gone there because my husband, Mark, has been transfixed by volcanoes ever since the Mt. St. Helen’s eruption dropped ash on his hometown—miles away from the event. Every morning on Montserrat, roosters woke us up at our villa. Iguanas scootched around the yard, panting. We had packed brightly-wrapped gifts for Lily, but after she opened the pink Zhu Zhu pet named Jilly and its little pink bed, after she’d opened the rainbow sucker and pack of Orbit gum, I couldn’t shake the feeling that her birthday didn’t feel special enough. Sure, I’d stumbled around before I’d even had any coffee and whipped up some pancakes for her. I’d stuck a candle in the middle of the stack and we sang "Happy Birthdady" to her, but then—I don’t know. There we were in the middle of the tropics on a tiny nearly deserted island with a panoramic view of volcano, mountains and ocean, yet it felt “off” somehow for a six year old girl’s birthday. We so often dragged them around to places we thought would be “adventuresome” and they were. They certainly were.

*

“Kids of the Future” by Jonas Brothers

*

Hudson admitted to us after we got back from Montserrat that he wished he could have spent his latest birthday in a foreign country, as well. He’d turned six in Vietnam. We’d thrown a 3-day party for him there including a boat ride down the Mekong River and a stay at My Khanh Resort that offered straw huts right on top of the water. Lily had turned 3 in Taiwan; I’d wandered all around Taipei in the dark, searching for a fancy birthday cake and finally found one in the basement of a department store. It was a little chocolate mound with a flying elephant riding a wafer cookie on top. Once word got out about Lily’s birthday, the hotel also sent a cake up: white and elaborate like a wedding cake. We’d gone out to a smoky Japanese restaurant for dinner that night and what I remember most was looking out the smudged window as it rained and Lily sat, warm and snug, on my lap. That's what mattered.

*

“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen

*

Listening to Hudson’s ipod makes me long for something I can’t name. It’s a mood perhaps, like nostalgia, or missing everything, then realizing it’s all right there in front of you.

Egg Salad: A Meditation

Yesterday my husband, Mark, boiled six eggs and asked very kindly if I’d be willing to make egg salad for lunch. There’s a fairly complicated way that I make it that he absolutely loves and over the years I have never revealed to him the ingredients. It’s a little secret I hang onto, a pocket of history in our marriage that radiates something tender between us. He has also promised not to read this blog entry to honor my secret.

Egg salad is one of those comfort foods, like tuna noodle casserole or potato salad, that must be made just the way you remember it. I remember when Mark and I went on our honeymoon we encountered our first “his family’s way of making something” versus “my family’s way of making something” argument. Our honeymoon consisted of driving our little Datsun station wagon from Minnesota, where we got married, through Iowa, and into Missouri. We’d made no plans or reservations; we had a tent and a car full of all the wedding presents we’d received, and I lived in fear that someone was going to steal them while we slept. In fact, I was so worried about it that every night we unpacked the whole load, shoved it into whatever tent or cottage or motel room we were staying at, then reversed the process every morning. It was quite impractical, but so were we.

It was the way we did things back then: an open, spontaneous, winging it that carried us along to interesting places. One night near Branson, Missouri, we found a small resort at the end of a twisting gravel road. We took the last available cottage, then decided to make tacos for dinner. But that’s when we hit a snag. Mark was soft-shell tacos; I was Ortega hard shell in a box. Mark was kidney beans mixed in with the hamburger; I was just hamburger. Mark was cumin, chili powder, sautéed garlic and onion; I was 99-cent Ortega flavor pouches that turned the meat a delicious, greasy orange color. He let me win; we made the cheap crunchy version I’d always had in the trailer court with my family. But the victory was short-lived. As I opened the oven door to get the shells out, a big blue flame leapt out onto my face. The cottage instantly reeked with the sour smell of burned human hair; a good portion of my bangs had balled up into hard little nuggets. The flames had also licked underneath my eyeglasses and singed my eyebrows and eyelashes. A hot red patch appeared on my cheeks later that night, and Mark held a dish towel of ice over against my face while I leaned against his shoulder.

As time passed, we learned to forge our own recipes via a hybrid of what we grew up with and what we’d come to concoct on our own. In fact, our tuna noodle casserole now has a decidedly Asian flair with water chestnuts, chow mein noodles and sesame seeds—though it still contains, of course, the crucial cans of cream of mushroom soup.

Here are the ingredients for my egg salad:

6 hard-boiled eggs (bathed in cold water with ice cubes)
Coarse ground black pepper (I hate powdery pepper)
Salt
McCormick garlic powder (not garlic salt)
Clover Valley mayo (from Dollar General—it’s creamy and yellow and cheap)
Miracle Whip Light (our jar is almost always empty)
Kikkoman soy sauce
Lea & Pearins worcestershire sauce
White sugar
Pudliszki mustard (one of those weird German ones from Aldi)

I chop the eggs to bits while Mark sits at the kitchen table and reads either The Economist or The New Yorker that almost invariably comes in the day’s mail. He’s more prone to reading magazines than me, while I, on the other hand, keep a much brisker novel-reading pace. Magazines, for me, are for prettiness and pleasure. I grew up with my mother’s many women’s magazines lying around the house. I loved browsing through them, looking at cute ways to organize your closets with white storage cubes or how to make bird feeders out of 2-liter soda bottles or how you can entirely change the tone of your living room by adding bright red throw pillows. Magazines to me are for looking and dreaming. As a professor, I read serious books and articles for a living, and break them apart and look at them from every angle, so when I’m home I want Martha Stewart to show me the simple secret of how to fold fitted sheets. And I wish mine were such a lovely robin’s egg blue as hers are.

But back to the egg salad. I like to chop my eggs very fine with a serrated steak knife. I chop them right in the Rubbermaid container and then layer all the ingredients on before I stir. Mark likes to toast his bread for an egg salad sandwich but I like to sink my teeth in soft bread. Sometimes we have fancy greens in the fridge and this time there is an arugula, spinach and radicchio mix. I just use the spinach. Egg salad should not have fancy greens associated with it.

My mother used to make not only egg salad sandwiches for dinner, but fried egg sandwiches as well. She fried the whites to a hard brown lace and the yolks to flat chalky disks. She fried them in butter. She made them with cheap white bread, then cut them into triangles, stacked them on a plastic tray, and served them with a bag of Old Dutch potato chips. The grease would soak through the white bread and make it look gray. She also fried onions to a brown caramelized state, but she and my father were the only ones who slathered such horror between the bread and egg. We drank thick white milk with the egg sandwiches and ate off paper plates. “It’s not like the Queen of England is coming over,” my mother would say.

Mark and I polish off the entire egg salad in one sitting. After our sandwiches, we dredge potato chips through it like dip. We can’t get enough, though finally I slide the container over to Mark. He always says the same thing. “Well, there’s not really enough to save,” he’ll say. And then I’ll say, “Yeah, you might as well kill it.” And he’ll say, “I might as well.”

And between us we will have consumed six eggs and countless moments sitting across from one another at the table like this, holding our secrets.

On Facebook and The Fabrication of Lives

At first I was reluctant. I remember my students telling me a couple years ago about the wonders of Facebook, and me saying, “Yeah, but why can’t you just send your friends email?”

“But no!” they said. “Just try it. It’s all under one roof. You’ll see!”

And oh. Oh-ho, yes. It didn’t take long—old high school friends, college roommates, relatives, acquaintances, current and former students, writers, colleagues—all under my own blue and white roof. I was smitten. Fun! In touch with so many long-lost friends all over the globe. Caught up with people I hardly ever see. It was magical.

It may have been one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made.

Let me explain.

1. I have never had a good shut-off mechanism. If I want to buy a coffee table, say, I will search online for days, weeks, late into the night, obsessively, trying to nail down the exact right one. I cannot let it go. I cannot stop the hunt. So, too, with Facebook.

2. Sometimes I’m more concerned with what to write for my status update than I am with my current book-in-progress (and I have heard this from other writers, too).

3. I have seen newborn babies ushered into the world, celebrated a friend's successful surgery, even followed a couple day by day on their honeymoon via Facebook. It is neither good nor bad to witness these things. In fact, I find it quite compelling and can’t get enough (see #1). But by tearing the mask of privacy off these life-marking moments, I am often left oversaturated yet oddly underfed. I don’t know where to go next, what to think, how to respond. More importantly, in the shadow of all these significant moments, I often find my own life to be lacking. In fact, Facebook has made me very dissatisfied, uncertain and confused about my life. In reading so often about other peoples’ lives that make them sound witty and wonderful and adventurous and generous and creative, there is a dark sense of competitive doom, a gnawing anxiety that my own life will never be enough. As much connection, friendship and pleasure I’ve experienced on Facebook, there has been just as much envy, longing, and loneliness. It makes sense to me why so many people, at one point or another, publicly announce, on Facebook, that they’re taking a break from Facebook. It’s simply too much; it can become damaging to our mental health and well being.

Below, some examples of Facebook's negative effects on my life:

1. An old friend of mine, L, seems to spend so much more time with her two little kids than I do with mine. Plus, she’s remodeling their rooms so cutely and they wear really expensive and cool Hanna Andersson clothes. I’M SELFISH AND DON’T CARE ENOUGH ABOUT MY KIDS OR HOUSE.

2. How could T, who just had a baby, be writing again already? I’M LAZY.

3. How does N know so much about wine? I’M A YAHOO.

4. So Ms. P started running suddenly and lost tons of weight and now wears a size 4? MY STOMACH IS DOUGHY.

5. So this family does nothing but travel all over the country and camp in a tent in gorgeous state parks? BROCKPORT SUCKS.

6. My sister hosted a huge Christmas dinner with 25 relatives at her house. WE ARE ALWAYS ALONE.

7. One of my friends, J, thanks another friend, M, for the great time she had at their party. WHY WASN'T I INVITED?

8. Friend G has been out digging in her garden all day. I LIVE IN MY HEAD.

These are admittedly petty, small-minded and short-lived reactions. But here’s the thing: how many of these posts are accurate portrayals of lives lived? Not many, of course. What's hard to remember is they're just excerpts, incomplete moments polished and shined for the public. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying anyone is out-and-out lying in their Facebook posts, but just as when a photographer takes a picture, there is a choice made between what to put in and what to leave out. It reminds me of when me and my husband and two kids lived in Vietnam and kept a blog. Looking back through the postings and pictures later, I was amazed by how fun it all looked, how exciting, how many smiles & swimming pools & gorgeous sunsets there were. What wasn’t included, of course, were the long hours and days spent holed up in the only room with air conditioning, simply getting through the days. What wasn’t included was how, in the absence of friends or a support network, I felt my depression creeping up on me again, threatening to throw a wet blanket over my mood. What wasn’t included were the many long nights Mark and I would sit outside in the ungodly heat drinking warm beer, slapping mosquitoes on our legs, hoping we wouldn’t get malaria.

Facebook, of course, is the same, although I’ve noticed that when someone does write, “I’m sad today,” there is a general supportive rallying, a rushing to aid the person in need that I actually find quite moving. But it isn’t very common. Mostly we show off a little or amplify the actual experience lived. I remember last Christmas standing on a kitchen chair, photographing some beautiful pink frosted cookies I’d made. I took over 10 shots just to get them exactly right. Then, I posted them on Facebook, and waited for numerous responses that eventually came flooding in. What no one knew was how awful the cookies tasted and how I ended up throwing them out. What no one knew was how making the cookies brought back the grief of my mother's death so sharply that I ended up clutching the kitchen counter and sobbing until my head hurt.

If we all posted truly honest status updates, it would be too worrisome, too raw; we would end up scaring each other—thus, the fiction. The fabrication of our Facebook lives is necessary and understandable, but it can also unsettle with its false bravado, its embellished cheer, its manufactured candor.

On Running and Writing

Every single time I go out running, I think of Joyce Carol Oates. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I met her briefly when she came to Brockport as our visiting writer; she seemed grouchy and reticent to engage in any kind of small talk, but she did mention how many of her novels are composed in her head as she runs, and that she actually envisions scenes and then revises problematic scenes as she runs. "Ideally,” she writes, “the runner who's a writer is running through the land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting.”

I head out, crossing first over the Erie Canal bridge, then zigzagging through a neighborhood of modest ranch houses before swinging past the public library and back up Main. I listen to my ipod; without it, I can’t run very far, if at all. The fact is in real life I don’t like listening to music very much and find even classical music grating. I have neither hip nor sophisticated musical taste: Meatloaf, Donna Summer, Ethel Merman, polka, Ricky Martin. I’m a little embarrassed to admit I’ll sometimes skip forward to hear Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t’ Start the Fire” when I really need motivation.

Unlike Oates, however, when I run I’m usually trying (desperately) to run away from my writing. I run in order to not think. “Little Machine, Little Machine,” I chant to myself in my head, which is the only way I can keep myself going. The fact is, it’s very difficult for me to run for several reasons: 1) I have a bad lower back, 2) I don’t like to sweat, 3) I hate the look and feel of athletic wear, 4) I hate to exercise in public, 5) I have a hard time shutting off my mind. But because I live so much inside my head, I have to make a concerted effort to remember that I have a body and to use it.

But there’s something that happens when I run: I get ideas. Yes, sometimes it’s an idea for a great new way to cook pork tenderloin. Or sometimes it’s an idea for a cool outfit I might put together the next day for teaching. But more often than not, it’s an idea for a story, an essay, an opening image. Most often it’s induced by the senses, and imbued with memory. I can’t, for example, run along the Erie Canal without thinking of my grandparents’ cabin on Lake Minnewawa and the way the sunlight twinkled off the waves, the way my grandpa would scale and filet sunfish in the backyard, dropping their tiny gray guts into an ice cream pail full of water, the way my sister and I drank root beer on the dock, read Seventeen magazine, slathered ourselves with Coppertone and had to keep moving, plank by plank, to follow the sun.

On weekends, when I run past college rentals with students playing beer pong in the yard, wearing bikini tops and shorts, holding up signs that say, “YOU HONK – WE DRINK,” I can’t help but think of those Friday afternoons in Minneapolis when we all threw money into the beer kitty for a case of Pfeiffer’s, played quarters at the dining room table for hours, then went screaming down the street to Blondie’s Bar where we danced on the table in our tie-dyed t-shirts.

“Little Machine,” I chant, “Little Machine.”

I could've never predicted I’d end up here in this tiny town on the Erie Canal, the great, gray glacial plains of Lake Ontario to the north, the deep black Elba onion fields to the south. Yet it’s been a fertile place for my imagination to grow. My novella, “Freeze,” is the first fictional piece that truly grew out of this region. You can’t drive past the Kodak tower for almost a decade and not have it worm its way in. You can’t run past tall, eerie Victorian houses and not imagine lives lived inside. You can’t walk over huge slate sidewalks, spun out of place by old gnarled tree roots, and not feel the power of history beneath them. My town is called a village—something I used to find very amusing and “quaint” when I first moved here twelve years ago. Now, I understand what that means.

“Little Machine,” I chant. “Little Machine.”

I run past my friends’ houses and wonder what they’re doing, if they’re happy, what they worry about at night before they fall asleep. I run past our babysitter’s house and hope she isn’t still suffering from insomnia. I run past Jill’s Antiques and think I should go buy those Pyrex bowls before someone else does. I run past the house that just burned and wonder what was lost—a pressed corsage? a valentine in a grandmother’s cursive? I run past my friend’s apartment complex and wonder if he’s on the treadmill or cooking salmon on his George Foreman grill.

When I reach home, I’m shot, utterly. But full, too, of freshly oxygenated thoughts.

“Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running,” Oates writes, “the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.”

Short Stories & Telephones

One thing that’s important to me as a fiction writer is a certain inclusion in terms of character. I much prefer stories told by those not often granted a voice. Growing up in a trailer court, my family didn’t have a telephone. The reason was purely financial: we couldn’t afford one. I remember my bedroom windows faced the graveyard and a dead-end road. There was a loneliness that pervaded my days, and I spent a great deal of time either looking out at the gravestones or reading. Looking back, I can see how this lack of a telephone influenced me as a writer. Without a phone, I wasn’t heard or heard from. We were all, I remember thinking, essentially silenced. Instead, I read and filled my head with other voices, but that need, that pressing need, for all of us to be heard, to be recognized by the larger world, stayed with me.

As the late Frank O'Connor wrote of the short story: “…the modern short story is a genre that deals with members of ‘submerged population groups,’ excluded by one means or another from living in the certainties of civilization-- people of a minority, outsiders, marginalists, for whom society provides no place or means of self-respect.”

Many of my characters in my book, Super America, reflect this:
•a postal carrier injured by a pit bull on her route
•an elementary school lunch lady
•a gay hairdresser
•the ATV driving, gun-toting “hillbillies” who disrupt a quiet suburban subdivision
•a pregnant college student waitress

Having grown up in a family in which both parents floated from one menial job to another, I almost always end up focusing on issues of class in my fiction. Also, I’m intrigued by the way education (especially advanced degrees) can create isolation, alienation, and even resentment. In my book’s title story, “Super America,” Theo, a theatre major, is picked up by his ne’er-do-well father for spring break. On the drive home, the father says, “Don’t talk college. That was my one rule about you going off to the Cities like that. Don’t be an ass. You got to talk normal. You gotta stay who you are.”

Fiction, particularly short fiction, has always been a means for me to work out the tension and alienation of class. I think short fiction works so well for this because, as Frank O’Connor also says: “What makes the short story a distinct literary form is ‘its intense awareness of human loneliness.’” I try to teach this elusive idea every semester in my writing workshops, it seems, but how do you train students to pour human loneliness into a short story? How do you get student writers to even accept and acknowledge human loneliness?

Writing about her own work, Eudora Welty once said, "What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself."

I want to make that jump; I want to amplify silent voices.

There’s a woman in my hometown in Minnesota who shows up at all the grand openings and ribbon cutting ceremonies with her 110 camera. She’s tall and willowy with stringy gray hair. She wears old-fashioned blouses and skirts with white anklets and brown lace-up shoes. She snaps millions of pictures, then takes the film cartridges to Rexall Drug for developing. She lives alone. She wears bandannas tied under her chin. She keeps a folded hankie squeezed into her hand at all times.

There’s a man in Brockport we call “The Security Guard.” He looks a lot like Charles Manson, follows all the postal carriers around town, and pretends to talk into a fake walkie-talkie. He thinks he’s protecting us all. He’s crazy, yes; he salutes every car that passes; he has gold chevrons sewn to the sleeves of his dirty jacket; occasionally, he jumps on his bike and hurries away in a panic as if someone's chasing him. Sometimes I watch him pacing with his walkie-talkie in front of my house and wish so badly I could hear what's going on in his head.

The telephone is ringing.