Ten Years

The summer before my senior year of college, I went down to Guatemala for three months. I chose Guatemala for several reasons, one of which is that a family friend lives there with his wife and daughters. I flew into Guatemala City, stayed overnight in a small hotel, and was driven out to the countryside to the American mission by one of their drivers. That makes it sound fancy, doesn't it? It wasn't. The driver was a member of the church who had business in the city anyway; it was three or four hours in his (mostly quiet) company, holding on for dear life as we bumped over two-lane asphalt highways and then small dirt roads, heading due west of the capital.

I was deposited mid-day at the parish, which consisted of a good-sized church (for that town), attached to living quarters for the priests and nuns, offices, a dining room and a kitchen for feeding all the American volunteers. I lugged my bag into the dining area where one of the priests explained that everyone would be gathering for lunch soon. After lunch, I was shown to the volunteers' living quarters, where I stayed for about two weeks, until my new friend Jessica and I arranged a homestay with a church family. A few days later, Sister June introduced me to another volunteer, Steve, and asked him to show me around the town. I think we walked all the way up the hill to the clinic and also around the cemetery at the far edge of town and everywhere in between. It was quite a thorough tour.

A few weeks in, I contacted our family friend, Paul. He's always looking for new things to do, and asked me lots of details about the different projects the mission has. After his own solo visit, he made arrangements for himself and his older daughter, then about 14, to come for a few days. While they were there, Lucia got a chance to work on some of the medical projects since she dreamt of becoming a doctor (and she has almost achieved her goal now, ten years later). Lucia also got to know me and some of the other volunteers, including Steve. She invited me to her Quinceanera, which was in July. She was careful to let me know I could bring a friend, and had a ready suggestion: Bring Steve, she said.

What could I do? It was the girl of honor's request. I very awkwardly asked him if he'd ever been to a Quinceanera (he had; he'd been living in Guatemala for maybe 9 months and is very kind and easy-going, and worked with kids; it stood to reason that he'd befriend many families and be invited to at least one or two) and mentioned that Lucia (and I) would like him to go to hers with me. He accepted graciously and we made our plans. Paul would come back to the town for a few more days of volunteer work and then take us back to the city with him for the big day.

A slight problem occurred when we realized we had nothing to wear. We had come down to Guatemala expecting to work hard and live simply, not go to fancy city parties! However, Lucia's mother was about my size and so we went through her closet together, and Steve ended up with one of Paul's suits, which hung on his slight frame. It felt like we were playing dress-up in our parents' closet, but it was fun. They also made a hair appointment for me. I couldn't believe that this family, who had so many details to prepare for their older daughter's big day, would go to so much trouble to make sure we were taken care of. They even helped arrange for me to go to synagogue and Steve gamely came with me, sparking the first of many conversations about religion.

The day of the party arrived and the Mass was beautiful. Lucia dedicated herself to the church with grace and there were tears in my eyes at hearing her conviction. We headed over to the reception afterwards, where she danced with Paul and other significant men in her life in a choreographed ritual that was new to me. Then the general dancing started.

I am not a big dancer, and Steve had a big job on his hands to get me to the dance floor. But once he got me there, it was enough of a different experience from American dances, and he was so carefree and fun, that I was actually having a good time! Though we hadn't talked much before this trip, we became fast friends. As a longer-term volunteer, he was friendly enough but understandably not overly interested in making friends with the shorter-term volunteers, so we hadn't really gotten to know each other except for a bookmobile trip down to rural Totolya to read and sing with the kids. Ten years later, I know him much better, thanks mostly to Lucia.

I think it's safe to say that Steve is addicted to living overseas. To my friends who only know him from stories, he has alternately been known as Guatemala Steve, East Timor Steve, Thailand Steve, and currently, Cambodia Steve. In the past ten years, he's been back in the U.S. maybe a grand total of two years, instead mostly doing ~4 year stints with Maryknoll Lay Missioners, and we usually have epic phone conversations while he's stateside. This summer we will have been friends for a decade and tomorrow (or today, where he is) is his birthday. Happy birthday to a great inspiration to me on how to live your values, simplify your life, and concentrate on what really matters. To many more birthdays, and many more years of friendship!

Meeting Becca

"Chrissy, is that you?"

I froze. It was not me. I was just minding my own business - really, nobody's business but mine, seeing as I was in a dorm shower stall my first week of college. But my eyes widened and I wondered who would be so bold as to address someone she couldn't see, who was also in a vulnerable position.

"No," I called over the steam and water, trying to sound casual, like someone addressed me over the shower stall every day.

There was a pause. Clearly this was not the answer she expected.

"Oh... who is it, then?"

This girl wanted to carry on a conversation with me! In the shower, no less! Crazy. But it was still early enough in my freshman year that I didn't know more than three people in the entire building: my randomly-assigned roommate and two friends from high school who roomed together three floors up. If this stranger in the next stall lived on my hall, it was an opportunity to meet someone. So to speak.

"Um, Amy?" I squeaked.

"I'm Becca, nice to meet you," she said cheerfully.

I finished rinsing, keeping my ears perked in case there was more to come from this Becca person, but there wasn't. I wrapped myself up in towel and bathrobe and squished in my shower shoes back down to my dorm room.

Not long after that, maybe a day or two later, not having new friends still weighed on my mind. I sat in my room, psyching myself up to go out and make some friends. I gave myself a little pep talk and instructed myself to open my door and walk around until I heard noise - any noise - and follow it until I found people, and then force myself to knock and give it a try. I'd never had trouble making friends before, so I wasn't sure why I was so nervous now, but I took a deep breath and stepped into the hallway. I started down the hall towards the bathroom and followed the sounds of laughter and talking, all the way to the end of the hallway. The last door on the left was open and I peeked in.

The first thing I saw was a guy I'd gone to high school with, who'd graduated two years ahead of me. (These are the small-world joys of going to college an hour away from home.) His hair was now pink and he smiled at me, which encouraged me. I thought he recognized me, but he could have just been his characteristically welcoming self. I took a tentative step inside.

The room was full of maybe a dozen new faces, and they all looked over welcomingly. It was as if the whole room stopped and said, "Hey, great, another new person! How fun!" They asked my name, and then all introduced themselves. About halfway around the room, a girl simply said, "I'm Becca." and the two of us started laughing. Everyone else exchanged bewildered but bemused glances and I knew I was in the right place. I relaxed as we told the story of how we'd met, and settled in on the bottom bunk bed next to Becca to get to know my new friends.

The Great Tornado of '90

Sitting here among the piles of snow that now cover Boston, I realize that I don't remember childhood snowstorms as well as I remember tornadoes. For one thing, nothing especially untoward has ever happened to me because of snow. However, tornadoes are indicated by a siren, and a downright terrifying one at that. Also I think that the effects of a blizzard are pretty well known and finite: you could lose power or water, not be able to get out of your house, starve or freeze to death, etc., whereas with a tornado, one never really knows what will happen. You might just end up in Oz for all you know. Pretty scary stuff.

Michigan, where I grew up, is at the tip of Tornado Land (not even sure it's officially in Tornado Alley, but it is susceptible) but is sheltered by the lakes and generally doesn't get many tornadoes. Therefore, the tornadoes we did get, maybe one every few years, made enough of an impression. There was one in particular that anyone living in the Detroit area in 1990 (I think - could have been '89) remembers well, particularly if they were in school at the time. I was in third grade and remember it clearly.

The first thing to know is that my elementary school had a lot of outside walls and most of that was windows. There were two parallel hallways of classrooms, with courtyards between almost every one. At least one wall of each classroom, and most of the hallways, were big plate-glass windows. The rooms in the middle of the school were back-to-back, with the bathrooms in between (and doors from both classrooms, its own special kind of terror!). In one such arrangement, at the end of the hallway, the girls' bathroom also had big plate-glass windows. So of course, that is where the third-grade girls were shuffled into when the tornado siren went off that day.

Your whole life in Tornado Land, you are told to stay away from windows! Yes, they often say the bathroom is the best place to be, but not when the bathroom has an enormous window in it. Even at 8 or 9 years old, I remember squeezing into that smelly bathroom with 20 of my peers and looking at that sheet of glass maybe 8 feet away from my face and thinking, This is really dumb. And then my friend Melissa started in.

Don't get me wrong, Melissa was a really nice girl. She was probably my best friend in third grade, until she moved away. I don't know what possessed her to do this, but after we'd been shut in by the teacher and left to our own devices (another brilliant plan, grown-ups), as the sky got that weird green tornado-y color and things were quiet and creepy, Melissa started listing off all the ways in which every person in that bathroom was vulnerable: The people by the window are going to die first because they're going to get crushed by the glass. The people by the toilet are going to get sucked down it. (This included me, and I have to say, I did not appreciate this assessment.) The people over there by the vent are going to get sucked in. And so on. It was terrifying even for those of us who hadn't seen The Wizard of Oz (or hadn't seen past the beginning).

This went on for what felt like eternity, until the tornado had passed (leaving us all unscathed, as with pretty much every tornado I remember) and the teachers came to get us. We all walked back to class pretty subdued. I have no idea if a similar situation played out in the boys' bathroom, but for their sake, I hope not!

The Library of Amy

My friend Rachel (of middle school ice skating tomfoolery fame) was as into clothes and fashion as I was into books. I had lots of books and regularly lent them to her, and she occasionally lent me clothes (though I'll admit, I wasn't as into clothes as she was into books). And there is at least one book on my shelves that she has read and I have not. In fact, we referred to our respective collections as Rachel's Boutique and The Library of Amy.

This morning I saw there was a new post up on Lois Lowry's blog, which I follow. Since she lives in my neck of the woods, she speaks here often and even spoke on my birthday a few years ago, which I dragged my sister to. Today's blog topic was about how she is downsizing her possessions in preparation for moving. While reflecting on moving into her house many years ago, she says that she unpacked her books "in an orderly fashion, as if I were a librarian."

It made me think about my own current personal library. The Library of Amy has had about 95% turnover since I was a kid (I have kept my E.B. White box set, The Giver, Tuck Everlasting, and a few others, if you were curious) and has been repeatedly downsized with every move (last count was nearly 30 moves over the past 12 years). There was exactly one attempt to organize my shelves in some logical way that other people would understand, because they lived in a common space in a former apartment. The effort involved putting all the fiction together, alphabetically by author, then kids' books, and then nonfiction. It was tedious and didn't make me feel like I could find things any more accurately. For example, I know that Cervantes wrote Don Quijote, but that doesn't mean I associate his story with Robert Cormier or Malcolm Cowley. I do associate DQ with War and Peace and Brothers Karamazov, as Big Impressive Books I Have Read.

So in all other unpackings, I have made very little attempt to organize my books at all. The only thing that guides me in any way is my gut. I know I put The Giver next to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Ender's Game, because although one is a kids' book, one is fiction, and one is science fiction, they are among my top favorite books. They also live in my room, close to me, as with all other important things. On the upstairs hallway bookcases (built in!), I stuck all my books from undergrad together, fiction and non, and my grad school books are sequestered together too. But mostly they are all jumbled together on the shelves, several of which would really benefit from a bookend. But if working with books has taught me nothing else, it's that books are not built to last, even hardcovers. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the reverence that my friends have for books, and wish that all library users treated them better, but I do not expect mine to stand the test of time.

Probably there are lots of librarians and would-be librarians who get great satisfaction from organizing their books. I am not one of them. Does this mean I'll be a bad librarian? I hope not. I hope it just means that I will not be the kind with my hair in a bun, shushing kids and yelling at toddlers for pulling DVDs off the shelves willy-nilly (though don't get me wrong, that is annoying). I don't really see that as the future of librarianship anyway.

But still... don't tell my boss I don't organize my own books!

Donald

There are very few rules in my house growing up that I outright broke. One of these rules was not crossing one of the four main roads that create a boundary to my neighborhood, and I crossed it fairly regularly with a friend to go to the drug store on the other side. So we could buy candy. Which was another rule broken.

One Saturday morning, Sarah and I set out on such a mission. I remember lots of things about that day seeing as I got hit by a car and broke my wrist. There are some things I do not remember at all, like the time right after falling and before Sarah's mom arrived in her station wagon to pick us and our bikes up, or the ride to the emergency room. (Did we go to the emergency room? I have no idea.) But I do remember that our mailman was at the house when we pulled up in the station wagon.

Donald was our mailman for many years. He must have come in the late afternoons, when I was home from school. He delivered tons of letters to me from my various penpals over the years. I was penpals with our next-door neighbor's niece. I was penpals with kids I went to camp with. I was penpals with my grandmother. I even wrote away for a penpal from a magazine. I also got magazines and birthday presents and cards in the mail. I would open whatever was addressed to the whole family, even if it was junk mail. I was extremely interested in the mail being delivered, and even jealous when all the mail was for my parents, even if it was all bills (though as my mom promised, that feeling faded when I started getting my own bills). I'm sure Donald and I had conversations about my penpals and whether there was anything for me. Mostly I remember that he seemed to look forward to talking to me and the words we exchanged each time were pleasant and funny and made each of our days better.

So Donald was just crossing our lawn that May day when Sarah's mom pulled into the driveway to drop off a slightly mangled girl and bike. I don't remember what I said to him, but I'm sure I was hysterical and crying and dreading telling my mom I had broken a rule. I don't remember what Donald said to me, but he seemed genuinely concerned about me and for the following month or so we talked about my wrist. I realize now not only how long he had been part of my life, but also that I had been part of his life, intersecting it in this very specific context. Now that I'm an adult with somewhat regular interactions with some kids, I understand this better and wonder if the kids will remember me at all, or if Donald wonders if I remember him. I do.

The Tushy Song

One of the little monsters I used to spend my days with was a little guy still in diapers. We had a rocky beginning where we would spend a large part of the day distracting him from realizing he was away from his parents, sister and former nanny. As with many kids, one of the most traumatic parts of being little was having his diaper changed. Frankly, I don't blame him - you're wet and smelly, and then all of a sudden you're cold too, and all things below the belt (above too, if you're wearing the kind of overalls that just kill me with cuteness) are exposed. Not my idea of a good time, either.

So I started coming up with all sorts of ways to keep this little one from screaming his head off, especially during one of the least pleasant parts of the day for both of us: the cleaning up of the poop. One day when changing him, I started singing the first song that popped into my head, which is called Tishialuk Girls, an Irish Canadian tune. I honestly can't remember if I thought of it because Tishialuk sounds a bit like tushy, but anyway I sang it and he quieted down. I started calling it the Tushy song and we sang it whenever I changed him. Most of the lyrics aren't anything that would make sense to a 20-month-old (or to me either, if you must know), but here are the last four lines:

Aunt Rae wants me to wed her daughter
Takes me from my heart's delight
Give me a girl from down in Tishialuk
Shines in me eyes like diamonds bright

I would substitute "Benny" for "girl from" and would pause after "shines in me eyes like" and after a while he would grin and say "diamonds bright!" I heard this song on the way home tonight. I still can't hear it without putting Benny's name in there and pausing before "diamonds bright"! Gets me every time.

Signs

About 2 weeks ago, not long after I emailed my friend Anna about my new writing resolutions, a very curious thing happened. I voluntarily copyedit Anna's blog - because I'm anal, and because I love her enough to want to slay her typos ninja-style (and yes, I fancy myself a grammar ninja - far better than a grammar nazi, which I am on my crankier days), on a blog that is part of her professional life as a freelancer. I copyedit for her because I love it, and would never ask for anything in return, yet she insists on sending me something every year as a thank you. Often it's a novel, but perhaps she's caught on to the fact that, despite her picking out really interesting-sounding books, I really don't have much time to read stuff I've never heard of, when school and three book clubs and my own, ever-growing book list are clamoring for my limited attention. (The one exception was two years ago, right after Helen died and completely unaware of that fact, she sent me Let's Take the Long Way Home, which I devoured in one very sad, but ultimately cathartic, evening.) So this year, I had just sent Anna a whole email about my New Year's resolutions to write more and asking her advice as a friend who makes a living from writing. She wrote back a lengthy, thoughtful response, and concluded with an offer to treat me to, instead of a book, a subscription to Poets & Writers magazine this year. Wonderful! I responded. So it was settled.

Less than a week later, I received a little love note in the mail from Poets & Writers, offering me 75% off a one-year subscription. To my knowledge, I have never corresponded with this magazine before, so I found it very curious that, just at the time we had been talking about them, they sent me something asking me to subscribe. I asked Anna (among asking her if she wanted me to take advantage of this fantastic offer, which she declined) if she had anything to do with it. Our best guess is that they now have my information from her buying the subscription and mixed it up in their mailing department by mistake. If that wasn't the explanation... then it's just serendipitous!

Today at the library I came across another magazine I have occasionally perused, called Writer's Digest. It happened to be last February's issue, whose cover story is titled "How to Submit Anything (& Everything!): Your step-by-step guide to getting published: novels, short stories, freelance articles, nonfiction, memoirs, scripts, poems, picture books & more!" This magazine is not normally so targeted to my needs and interests, especially when I had just been wondering about how I was going to figure all this out on my own and have written things that fall into more than half of these categories. I take this to be another sign.

The third sign was reading an article from a friend's Facebook post entitled "6 Harsh Truths that Will Make You a Better Person," in which the author makes an example of, among other aspirations, writers who don't write. Wong says:

"Being in the business I'm in, I know dozens of aspiring writers. They think of themselves as writers, they introduce themselves as writers at parties, they know that deep inside, they have the heart of a writer. The only thing they're missing is that minor final step, where they actually fucking write things.

"But really, does that matter? Is 'writing things' all that important when deciding who is and who is not truly a 'writer'?

"For the love of God, yes."

My new mantra. Thanks, Universe!