An expatriate in my own land
In the last year that I went to work, on almost every Monday, I wore the same item of clothing — a pair of red, Royal Stewart tartan trousers that I bought in London. I was not there for vacation, but to attend a memorial service for my husband.
Continue reading “The Magic of Monday Pants”
First of all, know that these sounds are normal: birds very close to the house, the way our cat belts out torch songs of boredom in the middle of the night.
The car horns and sanitation workers you have in New York will be replaced by a throbbing chorus of cicadas. You may call a friend and hold the phone in the air. Just try to imagine, you will say, what I am going through.
When you tell your parents of your plan to take up residence in Alabama for three weeks, as our dogsitter, they fear for your safety in this place where anyone and everyone could be carrying a gun. Manhattan, the devil you know, has its dangers to be sure, but out there, in wild America, you can’t be sure of anything, only that you are an outsider.
Your mother reminds you that you are Jewish, that you might have car trouble, and that this is a place with storms and snakes. Or maybe they don’t know about the snakes. My daughter mentioned the other day that she sees them pop out of holes in the ground on her way to school. I don’t think I will tell you about the snakes.
My husband, who understands what people from New York City can be like, because he is married to one, emphasizes that people in the South are friendly. It is customary to nod or wave as you drive down our street or even speak to people in the supermarket. You ask me about this later and I confirm that it is true. You don’t need an exit strategy.
Even as I tell you that we live on a suburban street, I know that you are picturing a swamp, the only means of escape a rusted out truck with manual ignition. As you pull repeatedly on the clutch the cicadas drown out all other sounds.
As I write the instructions for how to look after the dog and where to find things, you ask questions I hadn’t anticipated. I am trying to tell you how to navigate my life while you are busy inventing your own.
In one email you ask if I own a mandolin and where to go to an open mic night to sing. I know where to find a cigar box banjo, but I am not even sure these are real questions. Since when are you a musician?
You clarify that the mandolin is for slicing cucumbers from the farmers market and that you have a fantasy where you will unleash your inner cabaret persona. You imagine a nearly empty nightclub—I am picturing a raucous table of missile defense engineers drinking Monkeynaut, a local brew, cheering you on. This is not a place where we celebrate loneliness.
You ask what to bring. How can I tell you? A bathing suit. A sweater for the supermarket. But maybe also a cape and a tricornered hat.
What time does the dog go to bed? You ask. Does he like to chase balls? The questions keep coming: ziplining, manicures, health food. I am researching a new life rather than instructing in my own. You are free from the burden of being me. All I ask in return is that you let me know how it goes.
This piece was written last spring in answer to a writing prompt of Operating Instructions. My friend did come here and became good enough friends with some of our friends that she returned. She could have been the only person in all of NYC to visit for New Year’s. She found the experience broadening in some ways and the experience of having to drive everywhere oppressive, which I think very few Americans get. People think cars are freedom, but if you have grown up being able to walk out the door and get anywhere on foot or public transportation a car is a big, needy beast with its own agenda. You have to negotiate with it to get anywhere. You have to pay attention to it and to “the road” first thing in the morning. She has drafted her own version of the experience, which I will share here as a companion piece.
Drive south for 300 miles.
I was anti-GPS when they first started appearing on the dashboard of SUVs everywhere. I saw them as just another way to use technology to insulate us from the uncertainty of actual experience. Expat drivers who feared public transportation on suburban principle used them to navigate London. As someone who had had her share of frantically consulting an A-to-Z map at stoplights, you would think that I would have jumped at the chance to use one, but instead I saw them as a vote for ignorance. I don’t need to know where I am because the machine will tell me where to go. La la la.
There were stories in the news about drivers being commanded to traverse streams due to mapping errors. Using her new iPhone, my friend found herself down an alley in Baltimore while being told that she had arrived at the museum.
But that was a few years ago. Technology improves and now there is the talking Google maps app, which I prefer over the Siri/Safari one, where it shows you and your route only. If you miss your turn, there you are as a blue dot traveling away from the blue line while your husband snaps at you. With the talking map, your husband won’t even know you have missed the turn because it adjusts and reroutes. It anticipates your questions and says things like, in 500 feet, slight right to stay on whatever road it is.
It’s not perfect, but in general I like it. It is a good thing to use in Dothan, Alabama.
I am in Dothan for a tennis tournament. I don’t know my teammates very well and we don’t know our way around Dothan, a large town with a huge ring road. We have four key places we need to get to and go between and the talking map is a big help.
In 200 feet turn right.
I become the map girl. We get into the car and I punch in whichever court we’re going to. Because we don’t know each other that well, they don’t know about my love of photographing old signs. I am shooting out of the car window, toggling between camera and map.
On our last day, I ask D. if we can stop on the way out so I can get a shot of the oyster bar/nightclub. The other car is following us. They stop, too. Now there are two cars of tennis ladies outside of a nightclub. A guy comes out to see what’s going on. Get the mural over there, too, someone says. It becomes kind of a team effort.
On our way home, it’s just D. and me. If there’s anything you want to stop for, just tell me, she says.
Leaving Dothan, I shoot the sign for the Hobo Pantry convenience store out of the window and am amazed to find out, further along the road to Montgomery, that it is some kind of chain because there is another one, another Hobo Pantry, what were they thinking??, between Ozark and Troy, when we stopped for gas. If you do a search for Hobo Pantry, you find surveillance camera stills and videos of robberies, mug shots, QR codes and Juggalos, but no corporate presence, no explanation of when, why and how this became the name for a business.
Furthermore, the guy working there, this enormous, heavyset black man, is in the midst of a transformation, his massive forearms hairless, his eyebrows redrawn and his voice low and melodious. What must it be like to be a transgender Hobo Pantry employee in Ozark, Alabama? One hopes he has a community that is larger and more diverse than what we would imagine he might find there. I ask D. if she noticed him and she did.
She tells me about a girl she knows who, at 10, who despairs of the conservative views of her family and their town, which has a population of about 15,000 and is in a dry county. A church sign there bears the message “Dusty bibles lead to dirty lives.” This is the town I wrote about, where we collected our side of grass-fed beef from the deer processing place the first summer we lived here and each packet of beef came with a sticker that said “Smile, Jesus Loves You.” It has a main street you could fall in love with, like a movie set version of what a small town should look like.
The girl finds the disapproving attitudes of her family and peers about same-sex marriage stifling. She wants them to see things differently. I don’t know what D.’s views are, but she tells the girl to hang in there and that when she goes to away to college she will find lots of people who think as she does. The girl, she says, is just thinking about things at a different level and the world is a bigger place.
We turn back for this amazing motel sign. As in Dothan, a man ambles out of the office, just to check. Do we look like troublemakers, still in our tennis clothes? I wave, get in car. Later, there is a big aluminum sign with holes riddled through it to read “Ye need to be born again.” A little ways on, we pass a large wooden water wheel, which I remark on. Oh, she says, somewhere along here there’s that sign about the devil. And as she says it, there’s a second water wheel, smaller, and a huge sign, which says “Go to church or the Devil will get you!” It makes dusty bibles sound euphemistic. This is the real deal: a devil with curling toes and his scythe out to harvest souls, never mind with the symbolism of housework. The water wheels suggest Blake’s satanic mills and also an unforgiving and relentless faith that fashions signs for motorists with the word Ye in them.
Drive north for 800 miles.
Do you want to go back? But I figure enough people will have stopped already (and they have) and we will never get home, driving in loops.
The world is a bigger place, but are the small towns only for the conservative? People ask us about the move from London to Alabama, as if one is stuffing an inflatable pool dolphin into a matchbox. Why must the girl leave? Can’t a place expand in its own way? Maybe the transforming clerk is happy where he is. Isn’t it a matter of perspective?
In a quarter mile, exit right.
Your destination is all around you
Screenshot of the devil sign from this blog.
Ever since we moved to Huntsville, I have been curious about our public transportation, both by the blatant lack of it and its actual existence in the form of a bus network. Some of the buses are fitted with bike racks, suggesting a kind of Northern European progressiveness, when in fact walking or cycling as a mode of actual transport denotes economic catastrophe. Most buses advertise a local bail bondsmen.
Our city’s transportation system is a shuttle bus that runs in a loop, a closed circuit, a journey of back of and forth with no promise of progress. You see the shuttle stop signs here and there, but seldom passengers waiting to board. There are not, generally, any bus shelters, no signs to indicate when a bus will come and where it might take you.
I find the maps on the city’s website and decide that I have some kind of moral duty as a citizen to ride one, just to know what it is like, where it goes, who rides, even though I have a pretty good idea, because I see the people who wait for it at the Bad Wal-Mart.
But what else compels me to ride? It is my epiphanitis, a disease invented by the Older Daughter as she studied English and science vocabulary in the weeks leading up to her midterms, turning each of the words into conditions.
If you were to read about what she’s got, playing with language would not be one of the attributes. Language would be listed as a deficit, as would sociability, whereas she is the most outgoing member of our family. Even our dog is an introvert.
I wait for the bus in one of the city’s few bus shelters, in the mall parking lot. The buses run on an hourly schedule. As soon as I sit down on the bench I join a community. People nod and wave to me, but discreetly, and the mall, on this overcast Monday, becomes more sociable than I have ever known it to be. Not everyone says hello, though, not the older people who come in workout clothes for walking laps in the atrium, but the workers do, the people who are in less of a hurry, including the lady who joins me on the bench, who will, fifteen minutes later, hold the passengers in the front of the bus rapt with her warnings that wireless fraudsters are stealing your credit card information right out of your pocket on this bus.
I had thought I was getting on a core loop bus but it is soon clear that my map had not indicated that there were other buses that stopped there. There are loops off of the main loop and this is one of those.
When I see the buses around town, they look empty but when I board, nearly every seat is taken. A man moves his bag off a seat so I can sit. The seats feel like they have been taken as parts out of other vehicles. They are tilted back too far so that either you have to slide down in them or sit up somewhat awkwardly.
The woman occupying three seats with duffel bags and a powerful smell and the pregnant, something-a-little-off girl get off at the hospital. More people get on. At the Nice Wal-Mart we pick up a gaunt man with long greying hair who I sometimes see walking along the roads and think of, therefore, as Walking Jesus. We pick up adults with disabilities. A woman and some too-young-for-school children. The ad racks inside the bus are empty, with only one poster, which is coming loose, with information about having a collapsed lung.
The bus takes us into modest developments with optimistic names, like Malibu. How strange it is to travel along these familiar roads as if I had dropped entirely out of my own life, where we meet inconvenience with a sarcastic, deadpan, “Really?” and into one of disenfranchised resignation and the obedient punctuality of those who know that what could be a 10-minute drive is an hour’s journey plus the time to get to the bus stop and go from it to wherever you’re going and repeat the whole thing to get back and whaddya gonna do about it. No one runs for the bus. People who ride the bus know the schedule.
A middle class looking retiree in a wind breaker gets on. At the Target mall, the bus pulls into the center of a section of parking lot, at the way opposite end of where the Target is, and waits for several minutes. A guy wearing a stonewashed jeans and jacket combo and Devo glasses gets on. Later, when my seatmate starts to tell me about a shooting on the number 4 bus and about all the enemies in the world and technology, but there’s only one true enemy and we know who that is, the man in the Devo glasses raises his eyebrows and gives me a half-smile.
1) You assume there will be more to it than that.
2) You turn to books.
When you, as a parent, first catch a whiff of a developmental issue you dive headfirst into the literature. If you can figure out what they have maybe someone will tell you how to fix it. You go to appointments and answer a lot of questions, you fill out hundreds of surveys. You keep thinking that at the end of all the questions there will be some answers, some light at the end of the tunnel, but there is always just the tunnel, the fattening file.
3) You find the answer in people.
After a while you start looking for different things: a program, a service, something for the next stage, a resource. Each experience yields something unexpected. Through the block of six sessions of language therapy we meet T., who told us about the school the older daughter would go to for seven years.
We lived two lives, one at the private international school, another at the state-run primary school. I went to parenting groups on housing estates and to Harley Street for speech therapy, sensory-integration therapy. Parents are parents. Kids are kids. Resources vary.
Over the years, I got good at locating programs. Once you have school placement figured out, you need activities. Summers are challenging. There will not be a program for your child, but maybe we can try it out. You will have to list their deficits on more forms and describe them as truthfully, hopefully, protectively as you can stand to. You leave out the humor and lyricism, though on a daily basis I can’t imagine what we would do without it. Epiphanitis is not an affliction, but a gift.
Now we are trying to find a summer camp. Ah, the application process for a kid with a disability. Does an attempt to be more honest mean that your child might miss out on something, losing her place to a child who has been more victorious in their battle to kick the ass of what would otherwise define her?
We’re not looking for answers, but for the right person.
4) You overthink it.
5) You weren’t expecting this.
Sometime before the Older Daughter was born I bought a big box of crayons because having them was like looking down the road to childhood. I didn’t know anything about the first couple of years. What’s a receiving blanket? Why do I need this or that? I didn’t know how far off crayons were, how many discussions I would have about pincer grip and shoulder stability and fine and gross motor skills. That what had come easily for me as a child would be a struggle for her. And anyway, I had found crayons frustrating, too. Once applied to paper their intense colors were thin and insubstantial and I gave them up for oil pastels and then watercolor markers. A fresh box of crayons is what childhood is supposed to be like and then how it isn’t.
6) You keep looking for answers.
You realize that epiphanitis by another name might be hope.
7) You live for epiphany.
Riding the bus here is like being the parent of a child who is different, or maybe being like a person who is different. The bus is a slower vehicle in a restricted path moving through its route, while the cars travel an easier, more efficient path. When the man tires of telling me about Satan he starts speaking to a man nearby, Haven’t seen you for while, been off the buses, getting rides with my brother.
You are in a community, you recognize each other, members of the tribe, the particular hurdles you share, like the way people were nodding hello at the bus shelter. Hard times, we know. There are more people on the bus than you would have thought. So you will always be on the bus, but the bus doesn’t have to be the way it is. The bus could better integrated into the city. The bus could be happier. The bus could be better understood by those who only notice it in passing and never stop to think, that could be me, or wonder what it’s like to not be them. Really? Yes, really.
When we finish up our work thing, we should drive out into the country to look for the Coon Dog Cemetery, I say, hopefully, to my friend. Alternatively, I say, because I have done a little research, we could go the Billy Reid store. There is a shoe sale on. Men’s shoes, really cute Oxfords, and these T-shirts for storm relief that say Alabama Forever.
One can also visit the WC Handy birthplace. Or visit the revolving restaurant with its river view. No one mentioned all the old signage. If you are headed to Florence, Alabama anytime soon I recommend you go shootin’.
It is a goldmine out here. You see stores with names like Lock ‘n’ Load Ammo, but you would expect that in a place which has a burial ground for hunting dogs.
And dogs it is. She even pulls over in the parking lot of a McDonald’s on the way there, which has an original Golden Arch, saying, You must take a picture.
Driving past the penitentiary, we see that next door to it is a Chuck E. Cheese’s, the grinning mouse springing up behind rolls of barbed wire. Oh, imagine the party mothers joking, Y’all behave…
The directions indicate that the cemetery is only 15 minutes out of town but it is much further. It could be another 30 minutes. There is no turning back. We are driving down an empty road, cell coverage dropping in and out.
The blue GPS dot on my phone, indicates that we are sailing right past it in on a gravelly gray road with no markings, twisting its way further into the woods. What have I gotten us into?, I wonder briefly, but then there it is.
I sign the guest book. In case I am murdered, this will be my final proof of existence.
It is a graveyard in miniature, with tiny bouquets next to all the little headstones, some carved, some welded. One grave has a dog bowl next to it. There are collars, looped over wooden crosses. To be buried here one needs to be a certified coon hound and your friend needs to swear to it, too, but of the dog’s own merits to qualify I guess it’s just up to the owner as to whether they want to do it.
At our work retreat we had talked about what we wanted to do with our professional selves in the year ahead. We had read books in trios and shared things we found relevant. One group had us each write a one-sentence epitaph on the premise that in so doing you can identify your purpose and then make more of the days in between now and then.
I photograph 26 graves and none of them were the ones that solely listed the credentials and awards of the deceased. But the dust in a bowl, the awkward wording, that’s the beauty of it.
Dogs live in the present and they don’t have stuff. They don’t dwell on things. They love a car trip. You see them skittering precariously in truck beds on highways all over the state, running in frantic little circles to bark over both sides at once, leaping onto the silver toolbox, barking at your dog, your dog barking back.
And to lose them is inevitable. You get about decade, most of a childhood. Here is this place where they are carved barking up trees and remembered in an elegy that involves a raccoon trapped in a mailbox.
There need to be places like this in the world, that are universal and specific; that are detours and destinations; where a friend humors you and your husband holds down the fort for a few extra hours. The days fly by in a blur of doing, trying to reach a state where nothing is broken, no one is sick, all appointments have been made, everything is taken care of and dinner will happen as if by magic.
Be like the dog who is just happy to see you when you get home and makes you stop and say hello and be, like they say in the books you have raced to get through this summer, fully present.
The state motto of Alabama is no longer “Here We Rest,” as I was told by my husband’s aunt the other weekend. We were in the small town where she and my mother-in-law grew up.
Now that we live in Alabama, we think of this town as real Alabama, without the fondue restaurants and the landscaping and the monogrammed SUVs. There is no television in the house, no wireless, no newspaper. There is a radio in the kitchen and cookbooks from the 1950s that feature terrifying foods involving gelatin and canned seafood. Or worse.
Here We Rest, I thought, as we walked, as the dogs in the yards went wild with our passing. How could something so poetic, so apt, have eluded me? It would make a good title for something. I tuck it away, like the name of a person you encounter on Main Street. People here engrave these facts in their memories, the family connections and idiosyncrasies, in way that humbles and astounds me.
“Here We Rest” as it turns out, sadly, when I look into that later, was discontinued as the state motto in 1939 and replaced by the less poetic, antagonistic, quite possibly facetious, “We Dare Defend Our Rights.” I don’t blame her for disremembering it, refusing it. “We Dare Defend Our Rights,” is the kind of thing my dog would say to the UPS man if the dog grasped irony and spoke of himself in the first-person plural.
You can hear a drunk slurring these words while being trundled off to bed. The neighbors understood that some personal tragedy was playing itself out in the form of aggression towards squirrels that were eating from the deceased wife’s birdfeeder, but the gunshots had terrified them and their children. Nor did one’s rights trump those of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s tree surgeons’ who descend with a kind of vengeance to hack away at trees and shrubs that threaten their power lines, spraypainting an orange X on their intended victims.
One imagines my fictional widower setting down his glass and cursing them for the destruction of his crepe myrtle trees, the branches of which had stretched toward the wrong power lines. Senseless bastards. Destroyers of all that is good. Bringers of more electricity than we need to power our 72″ televisions on perpetual standby in rooms we never enter in our enormous houses chilled like morgues.
“She planted those trees,” he says. The highball glass sits atop the stump. The neighbors take the gun with them. You never know when you might have to defend your rights to live peacefully.
Here are the family graves. Here is some other family’s Victorian tomb. Here is a plot with all the infants flanking the elders and the central character. My husband and his aunt find the military school cadet cousin who died of typhoid. They read the worn inscription on my husband’s great-grandfather’s grave, which she had assumed was Shakespeare, but turns out to be from the bible.
Last Christmas I saw a hipster walking down the long residential road that connects our house to the mall and an arterial road. He was carrying a large cutout of a cactus under his arm, edged in fairy lights. Ironic yard decoration. Holiday fun for the single and/or childless. This road is a street lined with 60s or 70s one-story detached houses, the A40 of Huntsville, (the A40 being the road between Heathrow and Central London, lined by mock Tudor semis; if you want to read a great book about how people are affected by their street turning into a highway, read Leadville.) The Christmas cactus is for someone who is saying, Dude, I’m not resting; I’m not even here.
But watch out, Dude, because, maybe now the cactus is funny, but time will pass and your girlfriend will be like, we gotta have the cactus, and you’ll be joining the pool and shit, and one day you’ll love the cactus when you find it in the garage.
Or maybe you are from the Southwest and this is a thing from home. Or it is something you stole from a Mexican restaurant with your friends one night because you guys were laughing about it and someone is using it for a party.
Here We Rest, I find out, is also an album by a sort-of local musician called Jason Isbell, who explains how the motto fit into his conception of his home state:
What starts out as peaceful idyll descends into a defensive posture with the threat of bellicosity just beneath the surface. That’s what tough times will do to a people. Jason Isbell’s home is northern Alabama, a region that has been hit especially hard in the recent economic downturn. “The mood here has darkened considerably,” says Jason. “There is a real culture around Muscle Shoals, Florence and Sheffield of family, of people taking care of their own. When people lose their ability to do that, their sense of self dissolves. It has a devastating effect on personal relationships, and mine were not immune.”
And then:
Our military draws disproportionately from areas that are economically depressed, and northern Alabama has more than its share of those that have served, not only out of a deep sense of patriotism, but also because of shrinking employment options. In “Tour Of Duty,” Jason writes of a soldier that is coming home from war for the last time, and will try, more than likely in vain, to assimilate back into civilian life. His soldier is voracious for normalcy. He admits to not knowing or caring how his loved one has changed and dreams of eating chicken wings and starting a family. But there’s a subtle sense that this craving for normalcy will cause him to suppress the damage done to him during wartime.
In the time that it has taken to gather my wits to finish this post, Jason Isbell hit the pages New York Times Magazine today, so most of you will even be able to picture the guy, but in case not, here’s a link.
The old motto makes a good album title. The new motto is a blockbuster movie I will never see. We are neither hipsters passing through with cacti under our arms nor in a state of eternal rest. We are here.
Several years ago I started a photography project on garages. I invited myself over to my friends’ houses and followed leads about interesting garages. Gradually people sent me pictures of their garages. The blog is now international, she says grandly.
How are you using the space? Do you have plans for your garage? Does your garage have potential? Are you ashamed of it? Proud of it?
What do you do in your garage? Do kids still play drums in there? Somewhere in our neighborhood a man was sitting in an easy chair in front of his. I would like to take a picture of that.
This is an amateur, labor of love project, so there’s no money in it, only the post secrets thrill of talking about the space.
I’m not going to identify the garage’s owners or vehicles (unless they want that). I’d rather photograph the space without a car in it, if possible.
If your garage is willing to participate in this project, please email me at “the.wertis AT gmail.com.”
My friend in New York City called one day last fall to say that she was thinking of moving here. I think it was because of a picture I had posted on Facebook of a local apartment complex: clean, modest and mid-century fabulous.
Why am I taking grief from people in this crazy a place when I could just go somewhere quiet and affordable? is how one’s line of thought goes in NYC. I don’t need this. And so begin the fantasies of cheesemaking in Vermont or moving to a small city in the South.
When we lived in New York, people were always threatening to leave. The irony? I was never one of them.
Two weeks, a family friend said, was how long it would take to reacclimate if we moved back from London. When you were back, people weren’t too concerned about where you’d been (true of people everywhere). The city you returned to, like a self-absorbed friend, had its own issues and needs. Whatever exotic little habits you might have picked up from wherever were swept away by some new trauma about how they didn’t have that same particular muffin/soy drink/bartender at that place you always went to.
My friend is picturing a university town and thinking liberal and I’m saying not so liberal. International, yes. Educated, yes. It’s… conservative, I tell her. I mention one thing that had taken me aback when we arrived, Choose Life car tags. When I had last lived in America, your license plate said your state and maybe the state slogan, but not your college or your social or religious beliefs. Maybe other states all do this now, too, but I hadn’t seen it before. There was a pause. She was like, I’m going to have to think about this.
That pause, that slamming on of mental brakes, told us that one should not rush out of Manhattan. Maybe it was right to toss out something a little scary, like a test, but I reeled back from the force of the detail as it rebounded.
When we were looking at houses here I was shocked by a gun cabinet in the family room. There are a lot of ancient people driving beige Mercury sedans. Our area has a high incidence of tornadoes, low crime, most people own dogs. Do we base our decisions on statistics, observation or anecdote? We say that we have weighed up the pros and cons, but really we liked the way the color of the leaves went with the color of the paint, very Prada, very college housing, and we figure the people that go with this idea must be here, too. And they probably are, but so are people who use their cars to advertise lots of ideas you don’t agree with.
Do you remember the prophets of doom in the NYC subway, in those vast corridors between platforms at the 34th or 42nd Street stations, passing out slips of paper with densely written bits of scripture or poetry. Most of us did not share our beliefs or art so readily. There were men in signboards with the same close text inscribed, back and front, who held megaphones through which they foretold of the apocalypse, of our sins, at busy intersections, so we formed a river of the unrepentant that flowed around them. Your need to use your car to tell me who you voted for and why reminds me of them.
It is easy to imagine your life, simplified, in a bungalow or, as I imagine my friend’s life, minus the expense and hassle of the city, in a river-view apartment, on a floor that is three times higher than any building in this town, with space to think if not to move. There could well be a bicycle on the wall, a too-full closet, or things packed tightly under the bed. But I hear only a charming symphony of horns from overheated taxis and imagine a life decadent with choice and Shakespeare in the Park, overheard gems, parties at restaurants, readings at independent bookstores.
She does not move to Alabama. Not yet. Months go by. A bumper sticker makes me laugh: six zombies—two adults, two children, dog, cat—and the words, “Our family ate your stick family.”
Now come the Supreme Court hearings for the Defense of Marriage Act. A meme strikes. People are changing their avatars to show support for same-sex marriage. I support same-sex marriage, but I have my initial bumper sticker reaction to the avatar change.
In an article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell is quoted saying Facebook activism is for people who aren’t motivated to make a real sacrifice, on the other hand, the idea with the avatars is to show that there is popular support for equality in marriage and to make the abstract personal. As a person who grew up practically on Christopher Street and then attended college at Ivy League Whorehouse, one would not be surprised to find me sporting the red and pink equal sign avatar but, as a person living in the deep South, it’s more important to represent my region and in this region to stick up for what I believe, if only quietly and abstractly.
Alabama has red dirt and it is an agrarian place where people believe in the land. I placed some pebbles in the tire tracks of a red dirt road and made my own avatar. It’s indigenous. And, like choosing who you love, it’s natural and it’s personal. Like my friend grasping the social significance of the Choose Life car tag, symbols have power. Adopting a meme for your avatar is not much in the face of a much more profound issue, but there is a force in the aggregation of these images. Looks matter. One turquoise wall could contain a portal to a new life. Sitting in our cars, scrolling through Facebook, we notice these things, these small but telling details that could change your mind in an instant.
“Oh,” says the man in the fedora when we are introduced, “You were on the radio yesterday.”
What a great way to enter a party, especially when you have come alone and you are not sure who else will be there.
He has just recorded a couple of spots for the same program and writes a column for the paper and a blog about restoring a 1954 Chevy truck. He doesn’t mention it, but he has a day job with an international engineering and geospatial software firm. Now, if we hadn’t started off talking about writing we might have chatted about our jobs and left it at that. When meeting people at parties I am not extending my urbane, tabby paw and declaring myself to be The Wertis.
The great thing about social media, my husband jokes, is that nobody knows you’re a dog.
Yeah, says the dog, before there was Twitter, no one would talk to me about anything of substance.
Social media blurs all the lines between your professional, family and private life. And while it is important in, say, marketing to connect your brand across platforms, I am not wanting, personally, to become this seamless online entity. I don’t want to log in to news media through my Facebook account or Tweet my Amazon purchases or be the same six people everywhere I turn up. I don’t want people to read this blog because I am the mother of the older or younger daughter. I want there to be a little opacity even if it is an illusion.
The cat’s mother: she has followers.
The world being flattened by social media is good for education, health, the arts, technology, maybe democracy, but all the facets of your life and all your social groups merged into one avatar is a bit horrible and tedious. You don’t need to know me as the charming professional that I might be. This blog is where I get to be grumpy or go off topic or be uncertain. If I felt that I were writing for people I see every day it might be a bit weird. I like to think of my readership as mostly far-flung. And not everyone at work wants to know about my obsession with keeping the scissors in the kitchen or what I think about when I drive.
On the second Saturday in December, 5,000 glowing paper bags line the roads of the historic districts of our small city.
But I didn’t know about this and so, when driving to my friend’s open house, my first thought was that, as I turned off an arterial road into the dark residential one, these were little stone plinths to help drivers avoid running onto lawns. Or to warn them off. The neighborhood association had gone a bit bonkers I thought, baring their teeth at me. These white markers extended all the way down the street, in an endless maw.
As my eyes adjusted, I realized that the brutal white teeth were paper not concrete. This transformation and their impermanence made them beautiful. I had the idea that they were there to guide the runners of whatever race had taken place during day, for the stragglers, to light their way to the finish line.
When the network of light expanded at the first cross-street, I saw that it was too complex to be part of the race. As a marathon route, this would have been like one of those puzzles where you have to trace a design without lifting your pencil or retracing any segment, which, town of engineers that we are, would go down a treat. They could call it The Mental Mile.
I tell the man in the hat about a post I have been trying to write about a friend, how I think that both of us consider each others’ lives to be a form of writer’s colony. Is that fair? It is so hard it is to write about people you know. Other people will read what you have written, if you’re lucky. You will have made your friend both larger and smaller than real life. You have reduced them to fit the form of your writing, but at the same time you have made them a larger character with whom more people might identify. You expose them to interpretation.
Dotted around the room, I see people I know. I run the course between them, without lifting my pen. The night, the bags of light, the people walking on the street are all part of an evening called Luminaries, which involves house tours and people being expected to decorate.
On my way home, I see a set of blue upholstered French Regency chairs arranged in a front parlor. The room behind them is alight and the light falls on the cushions so that they take on an air of mystery and importance, like a cat disappearing into the shadows.
I was thankful to snap this picture in the waiting area at the airport. There were two groups of people I had been watching and the urge to photograph was strong.
I had had my eye on the ladies first. They were not identical twins but they had matching hair styles, curly and auburn (you know you’re from Alabama when you automatically capitalize the word “auburn”) and matching jackets.
The one in the black slacks was worried that they weren’t in the right place. She kept asking her sister, friend, if they were and what if they weren’t. The one in the purple would say that they were. I piped up that this was the only place in the entire airport that one could meet people getting off a flight. They were waiting on someone from the same flight I was. Her face was heavily powdered and her eyeshadow was green.
But even after this, the worrying continued. You can see it in the way they are standing. The sanguine one at the front, hands folded in front; the anxious one peering over her shoulder, one hand gripping her bag.
Where were they from, I wondered, if they had reached this age and and didn’t understand the simplicity of our airport? And why were they dressed so similarly and who were they meeting? My hands itched to take their picture. I shaped the question I might ask and considered my motives in wanting to photograph them.
The crew with signs started to assemble. The first few people off the plane joked to those meeting them that they had not brought a sign. Of the welcome party there are two signs, one waving flag, one camera to catch the face of the returning soldier. This is the day before Thanksgiving.
The ladies see that people are starting to deplane and they go to stand at the foot of the stairs, placing themselves in front of the lady with the camera. This was the first picture I took. The camera lady is already in motion, going ahead of them. They are not her intended subject.
The soldier’s face puffs up into tears as the family crowds around her. The woman with the camera, her mother probably, groups them together for a photo, which is when I step in, and offer to take the picture. With her camera. Then my mother appears. I didn’t get to see who the twins were meeting.
The Other Side 