Writing At Starbucks

I get writer's block a lot. Not that it was ever easy, but I am so easily distracted. Like I'll be sitting at my desk, my document open, and then it hits me. I have to check my email. Or, call someone. Make a list of things to do. Just when the muse hits me, I get an urge to smoke a cigarette. Oh yeah, I don't smoke. Not any more. Maybe that's why I can't write.

Your own home can be a death of creativity. I had a writing teacher say, write at the same place, same time, every day. Another said, if you're having problems writing at home, go somewhere else, somewhere that's quiet enough to write and think but has a little white noise activity to lull you into your creative muse.

And I came upon this great idea for a place for a writer to write. Shhh, don't tell anyone. Starbucks. It's perfect, because they have nice blonde tables, an easy flow of traffic and mildly hip music to lull you into a white noise concentration. And they have coffee. Coffee, the great incanter of the Muse.

Last week I had a couple of hours to kill between appointments, so instead of going home, I went to the Starbucks to write. Actually it was the one in Barnes & Noble. I figured I'd double my chances at finding a good spot. Head up to the non fiction stacks, find a Craftsman-knock off table, sit down with a nice nonfat latte, let the caffeine buzz kick in, and let the muse do the work.

Okay, wrong. First of all, Starbucks heats their milk to a tepid, just above botulism growing warm. When I get there, all the tables are full. So I hit BN. Every table desk and chair is taken there too. Two big black mama's with bags from Jamba Juice reading Ebony. A college couple holding hands and smooching over their biology textbooks. A man and woman doing a table read of And Miss Reardon Drinks a little. Apparently when Miss Reardon gets drunk, she also gets very loud. And there is one guy just sitting there. He's got a book on the desk, "the Big Cats of North America." But it's not even open. And he hasn't fallen asleep over it. He's sitting straight up, eyes adrift in some trance. None of these people have bought anything, they're just sitting there taking up space. I want to scream, what is wrong with you guys? Don't you have jobs?
Oh yeah, I don't either. So I head back to Starbucks, cold latte in my sweaty hands.

Now I really get a look at the torsos taking up space. A couple of Section 8 looking guys. An old man reading the New York Times, apparently from Front Page to Personals. Two guys playing chess. Go to the Park, already. Another guy with gelled hair and a vaguely actory face is giving his guest a booklet on the four spiritual laws.

The best table in the room is in the corner, against the window but out of the way of the afternoon sun. And it's taken up by some young white guy of a nebbish-frat mix, with a PowerBook G4 and a script open on the table. A screenwriter.

So I am forced to take a seat on the black pleather banquette cushions within earshot of Mr. Screenwriter. I settle, adjust the angle of tabletop and pull out my pen.

Mr. Screenwriter is on his cell phone. Has been on it since I got here. He is talking in a nervous staccato rhythm, dropping kind of words you hear in film school. Like, Production Costs and development deals. I overhear him say, "Well if you get in, I'd like to come in on the pitch as your producer." Well, he certainly isn't going to come in as the writer.

A table opens up in the full glare of the sun. But there is a narrow sliver of shade cast from a support column. I pull the table toward me on the banquette. But the chair is in the wrong place. I have to move further to the left. Move my latté. Business cards fall out of my bag so I put those back in. I move my bag down the banquette. Crumbs from a croissant on the banquette and my bag picks them up like a lint roller. Who eats here, Shreck?

I look up. In the three seconds that I was preoccupied with croissant droppings, a table has opened up! A table in the shade, away from Mr. Talking Screenwriter. And an old lady in a velvet baseball cap snags it. She sits down. She has a library book! Hey wont' someone police this place. She can't even buy something here. What's next? A thermos? Lo and behold. She brings out her thermos.

So, I am forced to accept my round table in the shade strip. I open my notebook. And Mr. Talking Screenwriter is on the phone again, talking to someone else. I hear the words "Barry Diller." He has an urgency in his voice now. The desperation of a writer trying to make a deal without a SCRIPT! What? He is getting off his phone. Praise Jesus.

I must have said this out-loud because the Four Spiritual Laws guys look up at me. I go back to my work. But now the sun has moved, and so has my column of shade. My notebook sits in blinding sunlight now. I move further down the pleather, then move the table, then readjust my things. In moving, I have given room for two men to sit near me. They are loud and gesticulative.

"What do you think you bring to the craft?"
"Well, as an actor, my craft is my emotion, and I practice accessing my emotions every day, like a pianist practices his scales."
"Mmm. Very well spoken."

I realize these are the Four Spiritual Law guys. Great. I give them the "One Way" sign. Using the wrong finger.

They are getting up. They're getting up to move to another isolated table in the shade that just opened up! And now that they're gone, Mr. Talking Screenwriter is back in view and earshot.

Mr. T.S.: (nervous). Whssup? I'm at Starbucks. Santa Monica. Cross from Banana. Writing.

I want to grab his T Mobile, shove it down his throat and send the guy on the other end a digital photo of Talker's esophagus.

Just then, the old man reading the New York Times folds up the paper, gets up and puts it back on the Newspapers For Sale rack. He didn't buy it. But he is leaving! Yay Hooray! I slip into his still-warm chair. I sit. Ah! A table in the shade. A column blocks out the view of Mr. Talking Screenwriter. I settle. Press my pen to the paper. The table wobbles a bit but adjust it calmly. All is well. At last, truly at last, I can write!
….

I'm all out of ideas now. Wish I could hear Talking Screenwriter. I'd have something to write about. So, I get out my cell phone and call a friend.
"Whssup? … Nothing, just writing."

What I'd Let Go Of; What I'd Keep

There is something cleansing about moving every few years. It forces you to streamline, to decide what is really precious to you, and what should be thrown out: like last year's velour J Lo tracksuit. It's like giving your house a colonic.

I've had to do this a few times in the last years. In 1998, I moved to New York. Almost everything I accumulated in my rent-controlled bungalow had to go. Furniture, house wares, those peculiar items that made friends gasp, "What great taste you have! And on such a budget!" I parceled out my personal effects like an estate sale. The entry hall table I never refinished. The wood entertainment center I decoupaged. When I visited my friends as a New Yorker, I'd spy them again. Like that wicker basket in Meredith's bathroom I sponge painted. So Y1K. Seeing my things at someone else's place was like seeing a ghost. A ghost of my former life. Maybe that's why dead haunt the living. They want to visit their things.

Just a couple months ago I moved back to LA and the whole process started over again. I shipped five boxes to LA. Pictures, a few thrift store suede coats. Actually, a whole box was devoted to suede coats. Another, business files. I left a few things in the basement of my New York house. A parka. A crappy ten-speed. Tax returns. Well, some things aren't worth going back for.

Of course, I've always had my parents' house to store a few things. But Dad died two years ago, and Mom is putting the house on the market. We were there 38 years. It's the only house I've known as a home.

So I've had to go through those things as well. Yearbooks. A china tea set I saved from my rent controlled bungalow. The tax returns. I don't know what the half-life of a 1040 is, but I'm going to have a celebratory cremation when they expire.

Then there are the childhood keepsakes. A Scottish doll in a kilt. A wristband from a summer camp. A diary from when age 11. "Kirsten O’Reilly is making everyone go against me. Linda met me under the bleachers and said she wasn't going to go along with it. I was going to ride my bike to the beach after summer school, but I went home and ate salami and watched General Hospital. I hate my hair. Alan + Susie = Love."

I remember puberty. I don't need to read about it. Into the dumpster.

My sister and I had a box of stuffed animals in our closet. We each kept one toy and gave the rest away. I had boxes of slides and photos I had taken of high school trips and plays. I kept a handful of photos and threw away the slides. After all, I never looked at this stuff except every Christmas, when I'd go through the box and think, "I should throw this away." But it stayed in the closet until the next Christmas. Next Christmas I wont' have the closet. Into the dumpster.

As for me, I'd like to let go of my anger.I know anger can be a good thing. A therapist once said, "Anger is your inner child's way of saying, hey, stop! You're violating my boundaries." But children also throw tantrums when they can't have Jujubes for breakfast.

My mom said I was an angry child. "Susie, I hear you say you're angry a lot. And if you're angry, people won't like you." I spent many years trying to be a good girl, but that anger still came up. In starving myself, throwing up, and becoming a religious nut. Eventually, about the time that therapist told me anger was okay, I became very very very angry. And it wasn't a good thing. Like screaming at the idiot at Sprint PCS for selling me a five-year cell phone contract. Or the time I tried to key a car that cut in front of me on a New York crosswalk. Then learning the driver was a thug. Which I found out when he got out of the car with a club.

Another thing I would like to let go of. Regret. I remember the first time I felt the weight of an irreversible decision. I pledged a sorority I thought my best friend Amy was going to get into, even though it wasn't my first choice. Even though I hated sorority life. But I was at UC Irvine, a school I hated in a sterile town of houses all painted taupe. I remember driving back home, speeding past the colorless condos and deserted streets, feeling this horrible pit in my stomach. Go back! Tell them you made a mistake! But I was too afraid to listen to that inner child saying, "Stop!" The next morning I found out Amy was rejected, and so I ended up with a bunch of cute, vacant premed girls. I hated it. My pledge advisor tried to keep me in. "At least you'll always have something to do every Friday night." With a bunch of premed idiots? I never went back.

But my life has been riddled with decisions I regret. At least it seems that way. Like never taking a full time career job because it interfered with acting auditions. But what auditions? A pampers commercial. Playing Woman Number One on a bad WB sitcom. Sure I have the measly residual checks to show I have worked. But here I am, moving back to the town I grew up in, with no viable job or career to make me a full-fledged adult. No mortgage, not even a rent controlled bungalow, and none of my tasteful knick-knacks.

But in fact, if I had made the other "better" choice, I might be sitting on a chaise lounge in my own back yard, wondering what my life had been if I hadn't decided to take the job as a legal secretary. I might not even be sitting in a back yard. I might be working on a Saturday, wishing I had the freedom I have now. Regret will kill you. Because you will spend the rest of your life living in a nightmare of what could have been.

What I would like to Keep

The one thing in myself I'd like to keep is faith. Faith in God. But that's not easy to hold onto in the face of family disintegration, personal disappointment and despair, world war. I've hated him sometimes.
"Go to hell!"
Sorry Susan. Already did that. Came back.
Well leave me alone!
Sorry, promised you I'd never leave you or forsake you."
Okay, then why won't you help me get a career and a love life?"
"Well, you know I help those who help themselves."

I cannot shake Him. I've heard it say, "if you don't' like your god, fire him and hire another." Right, like God is at a job interview and I'm the one behind the desk. "Hmm, it says here you are omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. And you love everyone. Explain Hitler. How hard would it have been to let a rock drop on his head? Really, the Red Sea. Why not a rock? And why not that Pampers commercial?

I know he's always been there. When I was a child and felt alone, like no one loved me, I always had Jesus. He seemed kind of wimpy sometimes. God and Jesus played this kind of Good-Cop, Bad-cop routine with me. God was the mean-assed drill sergeant, criticizing me, reminding me of all the ways I failed him, or just plain ignoring me. But then Jesus would come in and say, hey, it's cool. I still like you. But he didn't fix my problems. Like helping me kill Kirsten O’Reilly, the bully at school. Or making Billy Woldreck like me. Later when I'd ask for direction or success or a parking space, he was outta there. Too busy. Guess he had more important things to do. Like visit Mother Theresa.

But then I had to admit my idea of God was just a reflection of my father, who really was a mean-assed drill sergeant, and Jesus was like my Mom, who was full of sympathy but was too scared to stand up to my father in my defense. I'm a grown woman now but those images are hard to get rid of.

And when I really do think about it, it was never God who moved away or ignored me, it was me who moved away from Him. And when I do think about it, there's that thing about free will. God really couldn't kill Kirsten O’Reilly for me. But he brought me friends. Like my favorite cat, Tig, who showed up the same year Lisa did, and lived until the very month I went away to college. Tig saved my childhood life from despair. And I guess I have to admit he was a divine gift. Even before that, God worked a small miracle like saving Fuzzy, my favorite stuffed animal from sure death.

I got Fuzzy when I was four, before I was Fuzzy was a cat to me, through my brothers teased that she was really a Bunny. Just because Mom got her in a sale bin after Easter at Sears. I was only four, before my parents allowed me to get, in my words, "a cat that moved by itself." I had a string of cats that died on the street outside our house, but Fuzzy endured. I took her everywhere, and eventually her fuzzy fur wore into nubs. Nubby my brothers teased. Nubby the Bunny! Stop! You're' violating my boundaries! I would cry. Actually I threw a tantrum. Fuzzy's pink ears turned gray, lost an eye, and her neck split in so many places and she lost all the stuffing. I cried when my mother tried to throw her away. But Jim rescued her, restuffed her neck and painted her ears pink with shoe polish. Her neck slumped over, but she stayed with me.

One summer vacation we went to Washington. After a day trip to an island, we were going to take a train ride through the longest tunnel in the Pacific Northwest. The boys were thrilled. Trains were the one thing they and my father still had on common, and Dad saw it as his last chance to bond with them, as they were quickly reaching puberty and distancing themselves from him. We rode the hour-long ferry ride back to the mainland and went to the portside diner to wait for the train. That's when I felt it. That horror. I had left Fuzzy on the ferry. I had already left her in a hardware store in Eugene Oregon, and I caught hell for it. I was afraid to tell Dad. But he coaxed it out of me. Dad had the operator radio the ferry. The found her. We waited an hour and a half. We missed the train.

Dad drove the family, silent in the car, out to a promontory to watch the train pass. The boys stood out closer to the tracks, my father a few feet behind on a mound of dirt. I watched from the car. The train flew by, majestic and cruel. The boys watched the train fly by without them, full of resentment. And Dad watched the boys, their backs turned from him, as they would do for the rest of their lives. Dad is dead and buried. But as he lay dying, I bridged the gap that had grown between us over the years, and told him he was a hero to me that day.

I still have Fuzzy. She's the one stuffed animal I saved. She reminds me of what I was like as a child, when my parents were still all-good and all-powerful, when the future was just what summer vacation promised. She reminds me of simple things like kindness. After all, despite the fact she made Jim miss that train, he rescued Fuzzy from the garbage can and doctored her up for me. I guess she reminds me of myself. Worn out, just holding on by a thread. But still I manage to escape the trashcan. Okay God, forget the Hitler episode. I'm still here, obviously you're looking out for me.

Hi I just started my blog. Here's my first entry. Actually it's from a journal piece two years ago. I just moved back to LA from NYC. Here's a piece I wrote there. More to come

Suz
New York Journal #16: Summer 2000

I am not that wild about summer. I don't like the heat, I don't like tourists, I don't like I'm not rich enough to be a tourist. And I grew up in LA, where it is always summer; where there are no changes of seasons, seasons except when Neiman Marcus changes its windows. LA is an endless traffic jam of convertibles and tourists and uppity agents on cell phones; a culture of RayBans and Venice Beach T-shirts and dry cleaners with headshots on the wall. It's not my season.

It wasn't like that when I was a girl. I loved summer then. I could swim in the ocean for hours and go to sleep at night feeling the tide still listing in my blood. I loved summer: not just because it meant no homework, or that my best friend Linda and I could ride the cul-de-sacs on her banana seat longer since the sun didn't set till 8:30. Not just because the peach tree would give us hundreds of peaches for pies and cobbler, or because my favorite cousin Jan and I would harangue our moms till they brought one of us to the other's house to spend a week. "You gotta come down!" Jan would say. Which I never understood because she lived in the Mojave Desert, 300 miles north of me.

The main reason I loved summer was because my father would take us on long vacations for three weeks at a time. For 49 weeks out of the year he would stalk in from work and throw his briefcase down against the wall and curse the Russians or the Democrats or the stock market. We'd sneak away, resentful or frightened. He could never say sorry so he would say, let's take the dogs for a walk. We would walk them around the block and count how many times they went pee, and dad would tell us about the big vacation we were going to take. We would forget the yelling and the scuff marks where his briefcase landed. For those three weeks we were all buddies and the only thing he got angry at were the cops who gave him speeding tickets.

~~~~~

By the time I was ten years old I had seen 36 states, four Canadian provinces and two cities in Mexico. We visited national parks and historical monuments: Bryce Canyon and Yellowstone, the White House and Gettysburg. We were like pioneers in a land rush, racing against a clock. Maybe Dad knew that, because when his kids got older the last thing we wanted to do was to be stuck with him in a car for weeks on end.

Wherever we went, there was a piece of history or geography to learn about, and Dad knew all of it. Yellowstone blew geysers because of the gasses below the earth's surface. The Grand Canyon was made from a river etching itself into the sand for millions of years. We hiked down a huge crater made by a meteor that hit the earth millions of years ago. It was all so big, trying to wrap myself around that sense of time. But Dad explained it and I understood.

When I was five and we had money, Dad bought a new station wagon with cash and the next day we drove to Canada. We sailed to Alaska and rode the train as far as Winnipeg, watching the expanse of country and alien towns speeding by like pages of a flip book. We stayed in a Victorian hotel that had elevators so old a man had to stand inside and take you where you wanted to go. They sold Lifesavers in Lemon Only and Cherry Only, and the wrappers were printed in English and French. The elevator man took my sister and me to the basement, where we walked down a hallway that snaked with air ducts and smelled of laundry drying, until we came to a massive indoor pool. The room echoed from voices and paddling. Nancy cried, it was to big. It spooked me too, it made me think of Victorian ladies in white dresses, sinking to the bottom of the pool like the Titanic. I stood silent, sucking Lemon Lifesavers, hearing the echo of paddling and the smell of laundry drying.

Dad's summer vacations gave me a sense of how big the world was, how different. Once we stopped at an Amish general store that sold feed and Plain Clothes. I asked dad what that meant. He pointed to a group of ugly women in black dresses. Dad said they couldn't have things like zippers because their religion forbade it. I was taken with an idea: if my parents forgot me and drove away, what would my life be like? Would I have a dad with a strange beard who forbade me ride a bike with a banana seat? It fascinated me. It was all America: everyone ate McDonalds and watched the Brady Bunch; but it was a foreign country every time we got out of the car. Here the kids here walked to school through pine trees. There, they watched the sun set over desert. Some played in fields where Confederates died; maybe there were still Union bullets in the ground. I felt like my sister in the pool room: small and sinking like the Titanic.

~~~~~

The last good trip we took was Back East. I was eight, I still idolized Dad. But my older brothers were in high school, they had discovered sarcasm. Dad tried to keep us together with car games and stories about the Civil War, like how the reason Gettysburg happened was because the Confederates wandered into town looking for a shoe factory. But Rob and Jim didn't want to listen or play. This was bad; Dad was taking us to Pittsburgh, his childhood home. He wanted us to make a good impression on his brother. Uncle Jim worked for the Pentagon, he lived in a hi-rise and had a new wife and a blue phone with push buttons. My brothers didn't talk. It was just Uncle Jim bragging about his hi-rise apartment and his blue phone with push buttons. We didn't stay long.

We drove west past corn fields and silos and water tanks that looked like giant daddy long legs. But when we stopped to take a picture, only my sister and I got out. Rob and Jim stayed in the back seat. We drove through Iowa and saw the place where my mom was born. We'd been going all morning when we reached a town with only a few streets and a filling station. Mom pointed the car down a lane. Dad slowed halfway down the block. Mom stared at a house with an oval stained glass window in the front door. She cried a little and we drove away.

We drove on, playing License Plate and I Spy and Animal Vegetable Mineral. Every time my sister and I saw a dead rabbit on the road we made a raspberry sound. Mom hated that game. Three hours outside of Custer's Last Stand my brother Jim got out and started screaming. "I don't want to drive any further! We get up and drive. We eat and drive. We piss and drive some more, just to reach some motel and go to sleep and get up and drive again! I'm sick of it! Sick sick sick!" We got to Dodge City, hopped on the Super Chief and got home a day early. That was the last good vacation we ever took.

The next year my oldest brother Rob went to South Africa. He came home speaking another language, eating curry and disagreeing with everything my father said. Jim was off somewhere playing Neil Young on his guitar. We didn't know where he was much of the time.

The next summer was our last family vacation. Dad rented a motor home and we took the dog and went to New Mexico and Arizona. It was the same trip we had taken five years earlier. I think dad wanted to recapture the time when we all loved him and saw him as God. But everything had changed. My brothers were at that age where they didn't truck with my dad. Rob left the day after graduation to bike across country. Jim hiked to the bottom of Grand Canyon with his stoner friends. He only agreed to let us pick him up at the South Rim after he hiked out. He took his time getting to the top. And everything else was different: my sister brought her friend Jane, she wanted to play with her and not me. We didn't stay at motels and collect miniature soaps. We stayed in campgrounds with greasy people and angry dogs. Mom hated cooking on one burner. And my father. He cursed every time we had to empty the septic tank or gas up the motor home. He hated the man who rented it to him. He'd brought his briefcase and his Russians with him. There was no escaping anymore. The next summer I went to camp. We never took a family vacation again.

My junior year in high school I asked my parents if I could go with my drama department to London and Paris. My dad got angry. "Why do you want to go there? It's unfair for the drama kids who can't afford it. If one of you is going to go, all of you should be able to go!" As if Dad had ever been a socialist. I wanted to go to NYU or Columbia for college. I had the grades for it. Dad wouldn't pay. "No child of mine is going to New York." Or Berkeley. Or Yale. Or anywhere where people were richer, smarter or more educated than he. I took my junior year abroad. I paid for it myself and I didn't asked his permission. He still managed to complain, "what is the point of going there?" I answered, "to get away from here."

I was furious that a man who had given me such a curiosity about the world would want to squelch that curiosity. It was evil, I could hear it in the scrape of his voice. I decided those family vacations were never about showing us the world, they were all about keeping his world together and us in it. Everything was about keeping his world together and us in it. But one by one we all left. My eldest brother never looked back.

~~~~~

It takes a child years to learn that her parent is not God. It takes her even longer to forgive him for it. In the ensuing years -- in between crying, journaling, beating a pillow with a bat -- my therapist asked me what good things my father had done for me. That was easy, the family vacations. "No not things, Susan. Do you remember any time in which he saw you in trouble and came to help? A time when you were sad and he comforted you? Was he ever your hero? Did he ever sacrifice himself for your sake?"

Yes, I repeated. "Summer vacation." Sitting on my bookshelf is a stuffed animal from my chilhood: Fuzzy. Every bit of fuzz has been worn off. One of her glass eyes is just a socket with blue ink painted over the threadbare cloth. Her pink ears have been painted over with shoe polish. I loved her, I took her everywhere. She was my security blanket. Mother Deprivation most likely. On a trip through Oregon, Dad stopped at a hardware store in Eugene. I followed him in. I remember looking at wrenches. Thirty minutes later on the road, I panicked. I had left Fuzzy in the hardware store. With much groaning and reprimand, the car was turned around and we collected Fuzzy on top of the wrench table.

A week later we were due to take a train: a much-anticipated ride that included an eight-mile tunnel. It was all by brothers had talked about. They were on the cusp of puberty, and Dad had begun to feel them pull away from him. But they still loved trains, and this ride was going to bond them. We had taken a long ferry ride across Lake Chelan and were due to meet the train in a few minutes. Dad took me to the dockside diner to wait while he collected the rest of the family from a gift shop. I sat on a bar stool, watching the ferry boat pull out across the lake. I turned around to watch a man pulling at a nob on the cigarette machine. My skin went clammy. The noise in the room faded. My stomach dropped. I had left Fuzzy on the ferry boat. And the ferry boat was gone. My father came back to collect me, he asked what was wrong. I said nothing, He asked me again and I said nothing. I could not move. He took me down from the stool and made me tell him. Fuzzy.

He made us wait for the ferry to return to collect her. We never got on that train. Dad pulled the car to the side of a road that fronted the train tracks. My brothers stood up on a rise and watched it pass. I can still see their backs, erect and pitched forward in disappointment; my father standing off to the side, watching them seethe. I wonder if it was a choice between losing them or me. If he knew. He did know how much that stuffed animal meant to me.

I realized that both were true: Dad wanted so much to keep his world together and to keep us in it. But even more so, Dad was afraid of us leaving him behind. That I could understand. I felt it in that Amish General store. I felt it standing in that dockside diner.

~~~~~

I fell in love this summer. A guy I met at a wedding. He is moving to the east coast, and we have been corresponding via email. You know those initial emails where you try to impress the other person with your intelligence and wit, reveal enough of your heart to make them love you; but not too much to send them running. He emailed me about his upcoming move back to New Jersey where he grew up. He is excited about the cross-country drive. He wrote me, "you get awestruck by the totality of America and the vast possibilities and the endless Kansas nights and all of it ... " I read his words, and all those summer nights came bleeding back. I saw a twilight sky, and remembered one night in some nameless Midwest town, my sister and I sat with Dad on the edge of a motel pool, drying in the night heat, squinting until our eyelashes blurred circular rainbows around the moon. The sun had set long before but the sky wasn't yet dark. How come it stayed light so long? I asked him. Dad explained that light hung in the dust particles. There was more dust in the air here in the midwest, not like where we lived near to the ocean. Then I saw a dashboard, and remembered those nights driving through Utah or Montana, Dad searching the AM dial for a station coming from far away. Maybe another state. Dad explained that at night the atmosphere cooled off and got smooth, so the sound waves could bounce off the atmosphere and travel further. I looked up at the night sky and imagined the stars smoothing out before us. I was in awe of my father. But that was long before I realized he was just a man, an imperfect one; and before he realized I was my own person, not someone he could control.
~~~~~

My parents had an anniversary this summer. I wouldn't say celebrate, my father can't get out of bed. His childhood polio finally claimed every muscle and tendon in his legs. He had a big day last week, he got to sit at the kitchen table for lunch. I asked Dad if the gift for Year 53 was a bag of Depends. Touché, he answered.

He asked what I had done this summer. I told him I had gone to Vermont for two weeks, where I saw fireflies, and how I first saw fireflies that summer Back East. He didn't say much I could understand. His speech is slurred and he can't sit up in bed. But I heard him quite clearly when he said the words he always had a hard time saying: I love you. I think about you often.

I actually am enjoying summer this year. So what if I can't be a tourist in Paris: I have been a tourist in Coney Island. And Vermont. I've spent Sundays in Central Park with a Frisbee, and did swing dancing in Lincoln Center. I have seen foreign films and fell in love, and stayed up til 2 AM talking long distance. Just the other night I heard a live saxophone drifting out of an open window. I marveled, even sound sounds different in the summer; almost thicker and louder and more lazy. Maybe sound waves travel differently in the heat. I should call my dad and ask him, I bet he has an answer.