Seattle Memory Underground

Memory is a layered thing built from accretions of time. I was reminded of this on a recent conference trip to Seattle, a place I had long wanted to visit. A writer friend who knew the city educated me about it over dinner one evening during my stay. What we saw rising around us on steeply angled hills had been a build-over. An older Seattle she encouraged me to see existed, invisible as a ghost, beneath our feet.

There had been a fire, she said, the Great Fire of 1889 . In its aftermath city officials had decided to rebuild, but not before raising the city floor between twelve and twenty-four feet depending on location. The fire had been a blessing in disguise, one that allowed engineers to tackle a more entrenched problem: periodic flooding from Elliott Bay. While a new city emerged, an old one was transformed into a shady underground warren almost immediately colonized by opium parlors, pre-Prohibition bars and homeless people seeking refuge from the wet, the cold and the gray.

Seattle, it seemed, sat on den of memories, an urban unconscious. In the days that followed my dinner, I would remember what my friend told me as I processed my experiences, some of which astonished me for their strangeness. I did not know Seattle; nothing and no one tied me to it in any way. Yet from the day I arrived, memories rose up from the depths of my mind and washed over me like ocean tides.  

It began with the appearance of a girl at the budget digs I’d found off Pike’s Place and First Avenue. Climbing up entrance stairs that inclined at a knee-cracking forty-five degrees, suitcases in tow, a shadow flickered on the edge of my vision. I paused and looked up. A girl tripped past me, carrying no baggage at all, her long brown hair hanging loosely around her shoulders. The wire-framed glasses perched on her nose caught the light and glittered. Welcome to your past, the wry smile on her face seemed to say. Enjoy it.

The girl was me; and—so I thought—a product of travel fatigue and disorientation. Years before, during the restlessness of early adulthood that took me on two railway tours of Western Europe, I had been the girl with long brown hair, one young hosteler among many. Now, her older counterpart had taken to the hosteling scene again, a middle-aged outlier among the twenty and thirty-somethings around her. Practicality had dictated lodging choice. But that choice had also catapulted that older woman back in time.

I checked in and climbed another flight of stairs to the room where I would be sharing with five strangers. Small and stuffy with padlocked locked cubbies instead of closets, sheets that slid off plastic-covered mattresses and curtained beds that felt like train couchettes, the room smelled of closeness and human contact. There was no curfew; people seeped in from clubs and pubs at all hours of the night and shambled up bunk bed ladders, regardless of whether you were trying to sleep or not. It felt like college. 

If the first day jarred with its strangeness, the second day shocked through its sense of utter normality. Though I was a tourist in a new city as much as I was also one in a space of youth. Sprawling on my bed between panel sessions and book fair crawls, I listened to the street musician under my window picking chords on an electric guitar and thought of street musicians who played for passers-by in my old college town. Chatting with my young suite mates—most of whom were also MFA student conference goers—I realized that once upon a time, they could have been the young people I used to teach. As physically uncomfortable as my accommodations were, they also spoke to a part of me that recognized them as iterations of my own history.

As I mused on my experiences, I realized that the interplay of past and present infused almost everything. The old friends I had come to see at this conference had come from different phases in my life: the mentor who knew me when all I had were fragmented narratives and more words than I knew what to do with; the poet who knew me when we were both struggling to towards new professional identities in the aftermath of academia. Even the setting, though new, called to mind a time and place when I lived by the sea. The ocean was itself a memory, one that contained everything and everyone I had ever known growing up in California.

By the third day of my visit, I could feel the flood of it all overwhelm me. I loved the city, loved  being around people who loved words and craft as much as I did. But I needed time away from the things and people I had invited into my life. To reflect. Digest. Incorporate. And so it I ventured east of the city to sit alone in the green of Viretta Park—this time, deliberately so—with more recollections of youth. Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s memorial bench was there; and I wanted to be there, too, filling my lungs with frigid air and remembering music that had actually spoken to me.

The park surprised me with its stillness, its smallness. I took out the candle I’d brought with me, lit it and slowly circled the bench, humming bars from “Come as You Are.” And I remembered the girl with long brown hair. Once she had followed arrows spray painted on tombs in the Père Lachaise Cemetery to Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris. She listened to his music on the radio and like it well enough. But the visit was all surface gesture, a morbidly romantic way to celebrate a rebel musician from a generation she could only admire from a distance.

Now the girl had become me, the older woman who moved with purpose. Everything, right down to  candle in her hand, had been planned. Once I had worshipped Nirvana’s Nevermind album by lying on the floor of my apartment, the better to feel the crash and scream of guitars shiver my spine. Three years after that, Cobain overdosed one month before he took a shotgun to his head and died. I was just 28; still innocent, but on the verge of real adulthood. In the decades that followed, I saw things, did things, felt things—very dark things—the girl with long brown hair could never have imagined. But unlike the musician whose life I had come to celebrate, I survived mostly intact, but never quite the same.

Sitting in that park afterward, alone save for the occasional passing car or jogger, it came to me that nothing could ever be a blank slate for anyone who lived long enough. Everything had history; but the older I got, the more things followed rules of cause and effect I could not always see or understand. I was in Seattle because of a conference, because of friends, because I loved of words. And while there, was making new memories to coexist simultaneously with old ones Just the way the invisible underground labyrinths my friend had described co-existed with beauty my eyes could see and the wonder my heart could feel.

Domesticity 101

The living room window is the best place in my house to watch the emergence of Austin’s month-early spring. Taller than it is wide, that window overlooks a tiny garden gone wild with exuberant heads of broccoli, kale and lettuce. But on a recent Saturday, I noticed the fine patina of dust that clung to the outside panes. It had been there for a while; but something about the way the morning sunlight struck the window made that grime look more blatant. And made me realize with some consternation that I could not remember the last time I had given those widows a good cleaning.

I wasn’t in the mood to interrupt my morning tea, but that dirt irritated me. Grumbling, I rolled up my sleeves and Windexed the inside window panes. Grumbling some more, I went outside, scrubbed down the outside panes with soap and water, hosed them down, then rubbed then dry. My tea was getting cold so I went back into my house to finish it. The grumbling stopped dead when I saw how much the light had brightened. Then vanished entirely when I saw the view from my newly cleaned windows. The cheerful tangle of garden sprouts, the sidewalk and street just beyond it, the blue-green house facing mine—all of it shined with the clarity and freshness of a newborn miracle.

Cleaning windows had washed away the bother and dismay. As I finished my tea, though, I couldn’t help wondering why I’d even felt those things to begin with. When I lived in apartments it didn’t matter that windows went unwashed and that closets were left to gather dusty cobwebs. And that countertops, stoves, refrigerators and bathrooms saw only light, infrequent cleanings with a purple liquid that smelled incongruously of pine and roses.

Catch-as-catch-can was good enough. That is, of course, until the carpenter ants invaded and the bedbugs bit, which happened when summer heat combined with the carbon dioxide of human exhalations turned insects mean. But I was a migratory animal, the wild thing who absolutely could not be bothered with anything that smacked of too much domesticity. Besides which, if the space wasn’t mine, why bother? Why make the investment of time and energy?

I can’t say I feel the same anymore. Not because I particularly care what neighbors think of me or my dirty windows. Or because some innate housewifing instinct that not even the most scrupulous avoidance of matrimony could suppress has finally surfaced. But because things like home space matter to me now that I’ve opted for a more settled life. And because, having lived on the edge for too many decades, I can appreciate how much that space, fragile as glass, is really worth. Wiping away the dirt that inevitably collects honors both the space and the struggle that made it mine.

There’s something, too, that I enjoy about the pleasure of clean. No matter how much I detest routine chores, I know that my grime-wrangling will yield a temporary—but no less coveted—peace. The only down side is that the cycle will begin immediately after the last clean-up, when the cat spills food onto the floor and the shoes I clean off at the entrance still bring dirt into the house. But the effort and fight are worth it. In an increasingly messy world, small things like cleaning windows feels like a radical act of self-preservation. A way of staving off the shadows and chaos that press against the edges of the well-ordered little community where I live.

I doubt that any of this would have made sense to me before and especially not during the restless years of youth and early midlife. Age, it seems, has brought redefinition of pleasure and what constitutes reward. The hyper-mobility and an excess of freedom I craved no longer suit the person I’ve become. I was reminded of this when I stumbled across the manic Facebook reel musings of another fifty-something who wondered how in hell he’d gone from adrenaline junkie addicted to constant change to the homeowner who loved watching wild birds peck at the grain feeder in his yard.

Like my fellow Gen-X gray-hair, I would never have guessed that doing things I hated like cleaning my house would bring contentment. Or that the ordinariness of my life—which in global terms, is exceptional for its relative stability, safety and abundance—would give me satisfaction. It’s like the view from new-cleaned window panes: you look and look and do not find until you realize it’s right in front of you.

Finding the Shaggy

I’d been wanting to go for a long walk somewhere good and remote for a good long time. But because I am chronically over-scheduled like everyone else I know, finding time to get away for a few hours requires the skill of a circus contortionist. So when the chance came to escape on Martin Luther King day, I grabbed it. It was time to get out of my little planned—and increasingly built-up and population-dense— community and disappear into a winter-stark prairie landscape.

My first choice was the Barton Springs Greenbelt on the southwest side of the city, not far from Lady Bird Lake. There was nostalgia in that choice, not just for the tangled limestone beauty of a place with rocky trails that twist and climb and two tiny waterfalls. But for the broke scholar’s life I led before the workaday life I lead now, when time was all I had. With only a few hours to indulge, I needed someplace closer. Google Maps told me I could find another, smaller space—the Boggy Creek Greenbelt—three miles from my house instead of eight.

I took a Lyft to the main Boggy Creek trailhead, a backpack on my shoulder and red-laced hiking boots on my feet. There was a creek and small tributary here, and some sparse winter green. But my face furrowed in disappointment when I saw the neatly paved roads for joggers, bikers and walkers in the running shoes I should have worn. I had just come from a manicured place; I wanted more roughness, more wildness. But I walked anyway because there was a road that led through a stand of trees and I wanted to follow it. When I saw a little trail quietly veer off into a small thicket, my spirits lifted. Perhaps it would take me into the unkempt natural world I had been missing.

I wish I could say that I took only a bottle of water and one of my small film cameras. The water was there, sloshing in my backpack. But in my hand I grasped a (temporarily silenced) iPhone to call back a Lyft, take pictures—and, if I’m being honest, call for help. I was still in the city after all, and things happen. It was fantasy to believe I could go without my phone and remain untraceable for a few hours. You can turn off the Significant Locations function deep in your Privacy settings and erase the history of where you’ve been. But do that and you also won’t be able to use the phone map to determine your location, find places or label your pictures. And camera phone? The convenience is stunning—every image you take is available to you, instantly, with a tap of finger.

I kept walking, deeper and deeper into a landscape covered in trees, now gray and brown but still showing traces of the red and gold of autumn. The path was well-worn, easy and pleasant. In no time, I was pushing deeper into the silence of trees until I came to a grove of the great cane bamboo some disparage with the name “damn-boo” for the way it can overrun a landscape. The bamboo proclaimed its difference from the rough-barked live oaks and pecan trees around it with stalks that looked like segmented evergreen exclamation points. Though as much a native as those trees, it was still an alien, and in that alienness, everything I could love.

What I could not love were the things others had left behind: clothes snarled in branches, decaying campsites. And in the sickly green stream running by the trail, empty cans, plastic bottles old toys and broken furniture. The sight of so much refuse made me think of words from an essay by Wendell Berry: people cannot live in nature without changing it. But neither can we live apart from it. We long for natural spaces and need them for our health and well-being. Yet rather than respect them, too often we use those spaces as receptacles for what we do not want or can no longer use.

Yet as much as I hated the trash, it was still strangely comforting to dead-end into a set of railroad tracks, just as it was to see another walker and fellow solitary picking his way along the graveled ballast with his dog. There’s romance in trains: they come from a slower-moving age but have survived and adapted, just like the humans who made them. Of course I had to take pictures—of the tracks, the electric poles and towers, the graffitied concrete canyon into which the unnaturally green stream trickled—with my iPhone. Standing in that half-natural, half-man-made space where past and present intersected, I noticed my high-tech phone was steadily losing its charge, almost as if to remind me that my enjoyment of this place was on borrowed time.

There was more walking after that, down into the concrete canyon to look at the graffiti that covered the walls. But the colors did not hide the urban baldness and hard angles and edges I had been trying to escape and so like an animal seeking shelter, I turned tail for the  thicket. I took a different trail this time, one flanked by ash trees with branches that interlaced above my head into a canopy. Thick piles of leaves muffled sounds from the paved road I had left a few hours before; and above my head, the low white light of a late afternoon in winter filtered through the trees. There was peace here, peace to balance the onslaughts of a fast-moving, hyper-connected world of too damn much of everything. That small forest—its shagginess, its simplicity—felt nothing short of sacred.

We go to nature to be restored. But more often than not, we are chastened by what we see and learn. Perhaps that’s part of the point: While our ever-evolving technologies have created comforts and conveniences beyond our wildest imaginings, they have trapped us, too. Not just into believing we can be happy within man-made realms, but also into believing we can exist outside the natural continuum that mirrors—and heals—us at the same time.

A Woman of Greens

Vegetarianism has been a way of life for me for almost twelve years. But once upon a time I had an almost pathological hatred of vegetables. So much so that I’d gather them up from whatever plate of food I might be eating and hurl them from me, shrieking like a midget banshee. My mother learned to extort a measure of compliance by telling me stories about a trio of vegetable friends—a carrot, potato and tomato—that lived in an enchanted garden. The more engaged my imagination, the less likely those tiny championship hands would lob veggie grenades onto her clean linoleum floor.

It’s hard to say why I was so greens-defiant. My mother only ever cooked whole fresh foods so my behavior certainly couldn’t be blamed on lack of exposure. More than likely it had something to do with a congenital need to rebel. Which explains in part why I committed to a plant-based diet in the first place. The beef-chicken-pork-heavy American diet never sat well with me; neither did the glorification of over-processed foods my mother refused to let me eat (she really did teach me something after all!). By 2011, the jig was up and I was ready for a culinary revolution.

There were other reasons, too. By my mid-forties chronic fatigue and other health problems had made day-to-day functioning extremely difficult. My body needed attention; and the more I read about vegetarianism, the more it struck me as a way to not only keep my freezer clear of meats I knew I’d never eat but also cleanse my body and help protect it from a genetic history that included hypertension and hyperlipidemia on one or both sides of my family.

And so the veggie revolution— what passed for it at the time—began. I watched Joe Cross juice his to health in Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead and learned to enjoy kale juice cocktails (mellowed with apples, grapes and kiwi) which I downed along with homemade fruit-rich frothy juice drinks. I ate more spinach, salads, rice and beans. And because I loved grains, I ate more pasta and baked my own breads, cookies and muffins. I tried a variety of nut-based beverages which I drank alongside gallon jugs of low-fat milk. There was yogurt, too, of the kind that came in the cheerful, red-topped Yoplait containers that made me feel I was giving my body the best.

I was on the right track but there was more work that needed doing. Like breaking up a quietly scandalous two-timing romance with sugar and its equally diabolic cousin carbohydrates. The triglycerides in my blood—fat derived from sugar and stored in cells for energy— flirted with much higher numbers than was healthy. My doctors, though, never seemed too concerned about it so I didn’t worry either. Cholesterol—fat used to make cells, vitamins and hormones, partially derived from sugar—was the real villain and mine was better than normal, just like everything else on the blood panel my doctor ordered a year after I did away with meat.

All those sugars and carbohydrates would eventually catch up to me, especially as my metabolism entered the great mid-life slowdown. But I didn’t start to notice the changes until about a year ago. By then I had replaced the Yoplait with plain Greek yogurt but also eating more pasta and bread, which I was now making with organic flours. I had also stopped juicing and begun drinking “low sugar” Honest juice fruit punches. The result? A bloated, slightly overweight body, sluggishness and irritability. Worse, my cholesterol had shot up along with my triglycerides and blood pressure.

I blamed it on age; my holistic hippie doctor told me a different story. Vegetarianism was good but what I needed were more infusions of healthy fats and a closer eye kept on all sugar consumption. Because now I had all the symptoms of metabolic syndrome which at its worst was a precursor to heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Green as I had believed myself to be, the part that unrepentantly craved sugar had been sabotaging all my efforts. Like an addict I had been hunting down whatever sources of the stuff I could find—pasta, bread, dried fruit and fruit juices—that masqueraded as healthy food. Now that addiction was finally taking a toll on my body.

It took me one very hard month to break up with sugar and accept that my body could no longer tolerate carbohydrates in the amounts I had been eating. I leaned into a mostly veggie keto diet—occasionally complemented by small pieces of fish—to lose the bloat, the gut, the high triglycerides and blood pressure and all my extra weight, then gradually worked a few carefully-selected whole grain carbohydrates into my diet while upping my intake of greens, legumes and low-glycemic fruits and vegetables. And to quell that untamed sweet tooth, I baked almond flour shortbreads with non-sugar sweeteners like monkfruit.

None of these changes were easy. The urge to go back to old habits is always there because the addict never forgets: but neither does the rebel. In the daily battle against the twin tyranny of genetics and a wasteful—and ultimately unsustainable—processed food industry, she reminds me that eating a plant-based diet is one of the most powerful and life-affirming things I can do.

The Poverty of Being Middle Class

Two years ago I moved into a townhouse on the northeast side of Austin. And not a day passes that I’m not on-my-knees grateful for my little yuppie house on the prairie. The neighborhood—quiet and green, with cute kids on bikes and an even cuter assortment of dogs (smashed-face Frenchies are especially popular)—is within walking distance of a small shopping center. It’s also just five miles to downtown which is especially important for me because I don’t own a car. I can’t fucking afford one.

Most of the places I want to go I can get to by bus, bicycle or Lyft. But there’s a lot of Austin—or Texas and the U.S. for that matter—out of easy reach. That’s not as bad as it sounds since I’m quite happy in the house I’ll likely be paying off until I die. But some days I do feel the lack of personal transportation more than others. Those are the days when I notice the differences between my home and those of my upper income neighbors. The trees and gardens that owners, rather than our HOA, planted with gorgeous finds from expensive local nurseries. The extra space and fenced-in yards. The hybrid and electric cars or expensive gas-run models that don’t look more than a few years old. On those days, I really feel it: the poverty of being just middle class.

A recent U.S. News and World Report article says that $52,500 is considered the lowest end of middle class for a family of three. My income is slightly under that, but I am also single. Which keeps me hanging in the middle class by the skin of my aging Gen X toes. The scary thing is that I can still remember a time not so long ago when the low cash end of middle class was enough to take care of a family of four. A time (circa 1990) when a $50K/year salary had the same buying power as a $114K/year one does now.

I’m not alone in feeling left out. Or, as some of the others who came into their homes the way I did—through an affordable housing program—have said, less than. They spit and grouse that their townhouses weren’t built with the same options for customization or the same attention to detail as full-priced properties. But you’d never really be able to tell that differences exist from the outside unless you lived here. Or counted windows and square footage and looked at the fine print. Our contracts tell us we can’t ever profit on our homes because when they sell, they will go to someone else on the (insanely long) waiting list for affordable homes.

That my fellow affordable homeowners are noticing what they don’t have (rather than what they do) is significant. Not because it outs them as complainers. But because it reveals an awareness of class, the one thing Americans rarely discuss. Because once upon a time everyone bought into the idea that they were middle class; and that middle classness, now gutted into oblivion, was the apex of everything good, true and beautiful. Here, people don’t like to talk about income or class because it makes them nervous. Once I said something about the poor/working class areas around us in an online community forum. Someone had mentioned criminal activity in the neighborhood and I observed that perhaps it might be coming from those areas. My post was promptly removed for assigning bad intent on the basis of socio-economic status.

The silencing—because that’s what it was—angered me. Equating poverty with criminality had never been my aim; most of the incidents I knew about did tend to involve people who were homeless or otherwise economically compromised. Was the "“disappearing” of my comment a manifestation of liberal elite guilt for having profited from a system that has ignored the needs of so many others? A way to fortify the walls of our sweet little urban bubble and deny that all of us in this community—and despite the economic differences no one talks about—live lives of privilege? Because the reality is we do. Austin is now one of the top 20 American cities with properties beyond the reach of middle income earners.

So living here in my little yuppie house on the prairie has at times felt problematic. But choosing to buy it over a vehicle? That was the best thing I could have done. Yes, I could finally have ditched public transportation and kept living in the bohemian east side apartment complex I loved. Then follow in the footsteps of outraged friends who saw their rents spike into the stratosphere this past year, hoping and praying I could find a place close enough to Austin that wouldn’t bankrupt either my housing or—in these inflationary times—my food and gas budget.

For now I’ll just ride my bicycle or join the great unwashed on Cap Metro buses. Most are clean energy vehicles because that’s how this town rolls and how I’d like to roll, too. If I can ever afford it.

Ballot Box Slacker

I have voted exactly three times in my life. The first was in 1984 when I was a college sophomore. I knew I didn’t like Ronald Reagan and the trickle-down theories he claimed would save America. But his challenger, Michael Dukakis, was about as appealing as cold canned soup. Still, I voted for Dukakis as a registered democrat despite an openly verbalized threat to register as communist. A ROTC student who overhead me didn’t think my attempt at Cold War humor was especially funny. That shit could come back and haunt you.

I did not vote again for a long time after that. But I did change my registration to independent. I liked the indeterminacy, the way it telegraphed my I’m-no-joiner beliefs. While also suggesting my disdain for the two-party system, the lack of meaningful candidate choices, and the lesser-of-two-evils attitude so many took when voting. I was of the system (because what the hell else was there) but not partaking in it. If I had a political statement, abstention was it.

The next time I voted was in 2012. A lot had happened between then and 1984. We were in a new millennium; I was now middle-aged and living in Dallas, still wondering how I wound up in Texas. I had been working as an adjunct professor for a year and scrapping by. It wasn’t my idea of success. But it was a damn sight better than the 18 months of unemployment I’d seen and survived because I’d written for spare change tossed from newspapers and marketing firms.

That time I voted because was grateful to the man running for a second term. I’d liked him in 2008 but remained skeptical enough that I stayed on the sidelines. This time was different. Yes there had been the debacles in Afghanistan and Libya. And yes, the Obama administration had managed to drive up the national debt. But part of that debt had come from helping people during the Great Recession who lost jobs and homes. People like me. I had come back to the US after a job I’d taken abroad had disappeared. And had the bad luck to become ill enough to need surgery. The organization that helped find me get back up again had received funds from government grant money. On Election Day 2012, I walked to the polling place near the downtown community college campus where I worked and hit the button for Barack Obama.

I stayed out of all the elections that followed; my Obama vote in 2012 had been a one off. Then things got strange. In 2016 an idiot orange clown managed to get on the ballot. Like a lot of people, I didn’t take the clown seriously. The other candidate, a smart, competent woman—but also one with an unfortunate vapor trail of scandal following her—would win. I still didn’t believe in the system but felt sure things would be just fine without me; surely everyone could see just how ridiculous the idiot clown was. Until he got elected and all the people we thought we knew let loose the crazy and joined his circus from hell.

But did I vote in 2020 when the orange man ran again? No. I liked Joe Biden and his decency. But his age scared me: could a man born before the Baby Boom really have the kind of vision needed to face the challenges of a new world? Two years into Biden’s presidency and the never-ending crises that continue to plague America and the world, I woke up. Biden meant well. But the everything including the earth had changed; former rules—and attitudes—no longer applied. I could remain uninvolved because the country had stability to spare. Whatever else I chose to believe, the democracy that had helped create that stability had been savaged from within the United States and without. Voting had been the taken-for-granted thing I believed would always be there. Until I witnessed the imposition of voting rights restrictions on poor, dark-skinned Texans. Then saw Texas women lose their right to abortion after the Supreme Court gutted Roe v. Wade in 2022.

It was too much, even for a Generation X political unbeliever. And so, days after the fall of Roe, I registered to vote. And when I didn’t hear back from the County Registrar after more than a month, I registered again. Another Gen Xer, Beto O’Rourke, was trying to unseat the man who had signed the voter restriction laws into place. And done other things, like refuse to take action on the vulnerable state power grid after Winter Storm Uri turned Texas into a national disaster and disgrace. Or reconsider his second amendment purism after the 2022 Uvalde school massacre.

The press conference held after Uvalde, where an outraged O’Rourke stood up and told Abbott not once but several times that this is on you, stayed with me like the hangover from a nightmare. The image of the Texas governor, wearing a dark law enforcement-style shirt and his entourage, wearing uniforms, badges and other symbols of police power, seemed too-horribly surreal. This is America not a totalitarian state. So I voted the hell out a 52-issue ballot, feeling powerful in my rebellion against Abbott’s quiet show of authoritarianism. I celebrated with a photo that went up on my Facebook page; and that I’d captioned Generation X’s finest hour. I had entered the fray and left my apathy behind.

The allusion to Winston Churchill had been an accident: in the moment it had made sense. And sounded oh so hip and fierce. Later I realized that it was far more apt than I realized. Churchill had spoken of Britain entering its “finest hour” four days before France officially became Nazi-occupied territory in 1940. With no continental power as ally, Britain stood alone to face Hitler’s incursions. Yet Churchill persevered with almost impossible optimism: During the first four years of the last war the Allies experienced,...nothing but disaster and disappointment…During that war we repeatedly asked ourselves the question, ‘How are we going to win?’ and no one was able ever to answer it with much precision, until at the end, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, our terrible foe collapsed before us.

I don’t like to think of Republicans/conservatives like Abbott as “foes.” If there are enemies among us, it’s the extremists on both the right and the left. Together they have helped deepen the divides among Americans to the point where no one trusts anyone else. Where the moderation of reason and civil discourse has become past tense. I don’t have an answer for how to get us out of all the trouble we’re in, both here at home and across the globe. But it comforts me to know that Churchill didn’t, either. All he had was his trademark bulldog tenacity and faith in the democratic system. Which he once said was actually the worst form of government “except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Yes, democracy can be a godawful mess because nothing is perfect including the human beings that created it. But—and speaking as a cynical Gen Xer looking for something worthwhile enough to believe in—it’s the closest thing we’ve got to hope. And the thing most worth saving in a troubled world.

Cat Ladies & Me

I am a more or less well-adjusted—if at times slightly neurotic—cat lady. The feisty two-year old tabby who turned me into one steals socks and rubber doorstop bumpers and annoys the hell out of me on a daily basis. She’s laid waste to shoes, curtains and doorjambs with claws that grow back as fast as I can cut them. And she talks back whenever I scold her. But I freely chose this tender and conniving little savage as a companion and wouldn’t have it any other way.

The stereotypical cat lady is middle-aged or older, though sometimes she can be young. She is childless and without husband or partner; almost always she lives alone, a social outcast. Like the two down-at-the-heel Edies in Grey Gardens, she has several cats she smothers with cooing, cloying affection. If she isn’t lonely and bitter, she’s usually half mad or worse and almost always the butt of jokes. Of course, the cat lady intrigues me; she’s the ultimate contrarian who descends from a long line of female disruptors of the status quo.

I wonder if she doesn’t exist as a reminder of lost power. Or power contained but forgotten. Egyptians saw felines as bringers of good fortune to anyone who housed them and worshipped a cat-headed domestic goddess named Bastet  The Vikings used felines to keep their ships free of rodents; their war goddess Freya used two cats to pull her chariot. In ancient China the cat-goddess Li Shou symbolized fertility and ruled the world after it was first created. When she stepped away from that responsibility and lost the power of speech, her purring remained, a reminder that she controlled the machinery that moved the earth.

Christianity is largely to blame for demonizing both women and cats. The thirteenth century pope Gregory IX claimed Satan often assumed the form of a cat. Not surprisingly, single females, widows and other marginalized females—many of whom owned felines—became targets of medieval/early modern European and colonial American witch hunters. Women after all were descendants of Eve, the one who first gave ear to Satan. How could they and their evil, slant-eyed pets ever be trusted?

The hysteria and persecution went on for centuries. After the last witch-burning in 1811, single women with cats became figures of contempt. They were social rule-breakers, financial liabilities to their relatives. Jane Austen, who chose spinsterhood, knew this well. So did her female characters: in a society where women had few rights to call their own, it was marriage or bust. By the late nineteenth century, the suffrage movement once again called attention to the woman-feline connection. In Britain, anti-female suffrage groups used cat images to belittle suffragettes. Voting women—who by that time were also demanding greater economic equality—was as ridiculous a concept as voting cats.

Selena Kyle—the 80-year-old comic book character also known as Catwoman—is one figure that complicates the stereotype. Most know her as an infamous thief and one of Batman’s long-time Gotham City adversaries. But beneath the skin-tight black suit and mask  is an adoring cat lady who has cared for everything from giant panthers to strays. She even named one of her favorite females Hecate after the Greek goddess of sorcery. I like to think Selina Kyle remembers witches, remembers their fate, finding ways to charm or evade those who mean her harm.

Her alter-ego Catwoman exists on the fringes of society not as a pitiable outcast but as a thief and virtuoso criminal. Rather than keep to herself and her cats, she engages with the world, albeit in violent ways, often wielding a bullwhip. She is the cat lady who has reclaimed power and her sexuality, which she does not hesitate to use to get what—or who—she wants, including Batman, the man she eternally loves and hates. Modern in her complexity, she represents the struggles of women living in a world that still does not see or respect them as whole human beings.

These days it’s actually males who are more likely to own cats than women. And they are in good company. Abraham Lincoln and T.S. Eliot were also self-professed also cat lovers. Lincoln was the first American president to bring cats—and not a few strays— into the White House. He also made a habit of talking to them. Eliot dedicated an entire book of verse, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, to musings on the multiple faces of feline roguery. Yet neither of these men—nor any other I’ve known who’ve kept felines—were ever called cat men. Let alone crazy cat men.

And that’s very fine. There’s strength in claiming scorned titles, in knowing something about the histories no one ever discusses. And knowing that beneath the most seemingly harmless exterior lies a fury and wildness not even the most placid of lives can ever fully domesticate.

Something Like Home

An old Texan I know told me once that some Texas natives consider transplants like me to be immigrants. The state had been an independent republic at one time so this otherwise ultra-rational woman wasn’t as bat-shit crazy as she sounded. But not everyone living within its debt-ridden borders had wanted to go it alone. So when Washington eventually offered debt repayment in exchange for statehood, Texas accepted. Fussing and rumbling—no doubt—at what it had sacrificed to its balance bleeding ledgers.

Texas pride amuses me to no end. Everything really is bigger here, including the propensity to exaggerate. Yet outrageous as her point had been, it made an ironic kind of sense to me, less for the history behind it and more because my parents were bona fide immigrants. Now here I was, their second generation American daughter, being told that some saw me as a foreigner in my adopted state.

No flag-waving Texas nationalist, the woman had only meant to offer insight into the beliefs of her fellow Texans who’ve watched their state get overrun by newcomers for more than a decade. Between 2012 and 2022, over four million Americans moved to Texas seeking post-recession opportunities and— if they were among the almost one million from California—a lower cost of living. And that isn’t even counting those other immigrants. The poor ones risking everything to cross hostile borders, also in search of better, more secure lives. The ones Texas governor Greg Abbott now sends north to tell Washington exactly what he thinks of federal immigration laws. And—I suspect—the federalism he’d rather do without.

I came to Texas by a chance invitation and did not expect to stay. But it grew on me for its laid-back Southern hospitality. And then repelled me for its second amendment purism, racist voter registration laws and cruel abortion ban. I’ve managed to tolerate it overall because of Austin, one of the few cities in Texas most likely to defy Governor Abbott and the conservative state legislature. And because other Californians are here, though natives often blame us—and the big California tech companies that followed—for making the city unaffordable. I’ve managed to make a comfortable life for myself here by luck and by grace. Though even after more than a decade in the Lone Star State—nine of them in Austin—I still can’t quite call it home.

I tell anyone who asks that I live in Texas. But when they ask where home is, there’s hesitation. I own a house in Austin; I will probably live here indefinitely. But home? Somehow it feels wrong to say Texas. Almost as wrong as it would be to say California, where I was born and spent the first twenty-odd years of my life. My immigrant parents were European tumbleweeds with no real ties to communities. They had a home on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the one where I grew up. But that home was in many ways a satellite to the European cities where they came from. Because home was always there and never here. In the same way that now, in the twenty-first century, the Internet has become my elsewhere community. Maybe that’s why my parents poured themselves into that house, planting trees and grass everywhere. To create the roots and ties reminding them that home really was where they had landed.

The white stucco house they renovated and that I still see in my dreams is a memory now that belongs to someone else. Santa Monica, the city in Southern California where I was born, disorients me with its pricey crowded newness. Berkeley, where I studied then lived for almost a decade, is still recognizable despite the gentrification but now untouchable for anyone earning less than six-figures. Then there’s the green and gold landscape I remember so well. Water shortages, wildfires, floods and mudslides will reshape it if the earthquake predicted to rip the state apart, does not. One day—perhaps in my lifetime—I may not recognize California or the cities I knew there at all.

So while I may not really be an immigrant to Texas, I might as well be one. I speak without drawl or lilt, but always with a hint of slack-jawed West Coast slowness; and like an immigrant, I exist between worlds, unable to return to the place I knew because it no longer exists. Yet not quite able to fully integrate into where I am despite my fondness for it. Even the plants in the tiny garden outside my living room do not burrow into native soil. They sit atop it in raised beds or pots. Thriving, yes, above the poor soil over which they grow and sometimes brutal heat. The way I have managed to grow on landlocked prairie subject to fits of humid heat to which I will never become accustomed. Not after years taking the cooling vastness of the Pacific into every cell of my body.

It’s a small comfort that 10% of the people who have arrived in Austin since the rush started a decade ago are from my state. As is knowing that Trader Joe’s, the iconic California grocery chain, moved here the same year I did. I never bothered shopping there when I lived on the West Coast; now I love just visiting and roaming the aisles. In the way my father loved spending time at his favorite French restaurant in Santa Monica reminiscing about France. And the way my mother gushed over pasta she could find only at the Italian deli on the city’s east side. Just like we make it in Italy. The best. Separated—voluntarily and not—from what we know, we tumbleweed immigrants create homes from what we find. Because home is not a place. It is everything that keeps us close to the memories that make us who we are.

A Broken Earth & Her Mirrors

Women. The earth. I think about both these days because both weigh on me with heaviness and urgency. Each is mirroring cracks and stresses in the other like a physical call and response. I chide myself. None of this is fact. Only the intuitive leaps of a mind over-trained in the poetics of literature.

Yet still I leap. And now that habit is working overtime and particularly when I engage with the news. The same week CNN headlines proclaimed that rivers all over the world were drying up, on quieter pages it shared the insights of eight American women living in overspent bodies. Exhausted as the rivers, they’re facing challenges and demands that exceed them. Yet they carry on and will continue to carry on. Until they can’t.

It didn’t surprise me to see women and rivers featured in the same week. I live with a form of madness that sees everything connected to everything else in one way or another. Besides—and as indigenous people believe—we are the children of the earth. The Great Mother. So as the earth suffers, so do those who like the Mother also bear children. Both have bodies that make life possible. Both are governed by the same systems control the earth and created this age we now live in: the anthropocene.

The Greek root anthrop speaks to the human; the suffix -cene to our current geologic time. To the recent and new. Taken together, the word speaks of humanity. How humans have become the dominant factor in planetary evolution. But does not say that this evolution is man-made devolution, emphasis on the “man.” Industry and the pillaging of natural resources for profit has been the province of men, of patriarchy. And like women too often have, the earth has surrendered to abuse, mostly without complaint. No longer. Now the earth responds with monstrous rages. Of drought, flood and fire. With loss of life and a catastrophic rate of species extinction 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural rate. The planet is out of balance. And all beings must pay the price.

For centuries, we could more—or less—rely on climate patterns we could read in the stars, wind, sky and earth. While never 100% predictable, were predictable enough. We could say with more or less certainty that rivers—like the Colorado, the Rhine, the Loire, the Yangtze—would flow on all continents. Other watery bodies, created and natural, like Lake Powell in Arizona and the Great Salt Lake in Utah, would fill. If not from rain, then from the melted runoff of high mountain snows. Variances would never be so extreme as to vaporize those bodies into the atmosphere and leave behind a dry, brittle earth unable to support life. The Mother could withhold, for a season, sometimes more. Or during Ice Ages, for millennia. But that withholding always came to an end; balance would return.

That reliability is gone. But climate change is not real, say some. Science is a fraud. These nay-sayers and deniers: these are the people who are most likely to believe that life-giving human bodies exist solely to benefit others. Offer comfort and pleasure. Provide labor for the industries that abuse the earth. Serve those who control those industries and society itself. Their justification? Ideologies rooted in Darwin, in the naturally-ordained dominance of males. Or beliefs built around a white-skinned God created in the image of men. A God too often used by men to justify their supremacy over all living beings, including the earth. And their dismissal or calculated disappearance of what does not suit them.

In the United States, the law that protected uterine-bearing people, gave us final say over our bodies has also vanished. What remains is imbalance. This is what I see now when I look at a map of the United States. Only ten of fifty states offer unrestricted access to the abortions that were once our right. Eleven have banned it outright and the rest offer conditional access that could be revoked by legislative fiat at any time.

Knowing this, I feel the imbalance in my body as an anger that will not go away. I think of the eight CNN interviewees and read their words over and over again. The already overwhelming challenges of the many roles women play—worker/breadwinner, mother, daughter, sister, wife—have been compounded by those created by systems in post-pandemic chaos. Now we feel the despair of disempowerment. Confesses one 35-year-old, I’m fragile as a piece of china. I am cracked, broken and tired. Just like the earth.

If anti-climate change advocates rely on denial, pro-life advocates rely on wilful scientific misreadings. Or rather, transforming scientific doubt about when life begins into absolutes, like this pro-life Wisconsin website: “[Human embryologists have concluded that] embryos are very young human beings. Pre-born children.” The movement claims to liberate women—transmen never enter the conversation—by offering “life” as an alternative to “murder.” But that only enslaves uterine bodies to the violence of state coercion and the lie of unlimited resources. Climate change is not real. Science is a fraud. Without speaking its name, these wilful misreaders of science act for patriarchy. And for a system that “tamed” the rawness of America through dispossession and human exploitation then dared to call itself a democracy.

This disruption of nature will alter life as we know it. Through migration away from the ravages of flood, fire and drought. Through conflicts over water and eventually, temperate, arable land. The question isn’t how these changes will break us but how much. And the disruption of the American body politic through the battle over abortion? No doubt that will break apart a union that once appeared whole. Not that it was ever perfect or without other perennial divides like race and class. But uterine bodies will only deepen the divides that already exist.

Indeed, the disharmony we have created in her rhythms are no mere inconvenience. They threaten us and our blue-green planet home. We look into the rivers and lakes of this earth, the bodies that offer us the water with which we cannot survive. Rather take comfort in the abundance of nature, we see man-made destruction, like the drying of the world’s rivers, everywhere around us. Nature is reflecting the very worst of us back to ourselves. Teaching us—or trying to—that the way forward is not through the narcissism of patriarchy. But through the humility of self-recognition in nature. And in every living thing on earth.

Paddling Alone

A bird watching club got me into my first kayak seven years ago. Someone, a member, had posted a Meetup promising an over-the-water tour of bird habitats on the local lake named for Ladybird Johnson, a woman who loved wild places enough to help protect them. Neon-colored kayaks often skimmed across that lake, the V’s they cut on the surface reminding me of the figures children and artists often drew to represent birds in flight. So I went, lured by the gravity-defying possibilities that water might hold.

I donned a life vest, butt-flopped from the dock into a kayak and buried an enthusiastic paddle into the water. I did not yet know to hold my elbow at a 45-degree angle. Or that dipping rather than digging my paddle would get me where I wanted to go faster and also keep me drier. Swimmer’s muscle memory made me pull my arms hard against the lake and scoop water straight into my kayak. Following the other birdwatchers—mostly women and a few men—I craned my neck to watch geese, ducks swans and the grackles I mistook for crows. But it was a lone silver egret that stole the show and my attention. Rapt at the sight of the egret beating its wings over the lake as it moved from tree to tree, I forgot the wetness that pooled at the bottom of my boat and soaked my clothes to the skin.

Of course I returned again not long after that first time, undeterred, this time without my gaggle of birdwatchers. They’d decided to meet on land and I wanted to be on the lake again because I’d fallen in love with kayaking and wanted to learn to enjoy the surface of water, the way it interacted with other spaces. The swimmer in me already understood the underside well. It was a space that demanded focus and a willingness to let go of smell and every sound except that of your own breathing. The surface was a different matter, a space where all senses could engage.

I rented another one-person kayak. The time before, I’d had the choice to take a double but declined. A single would let me stay with the group and follow or break off, as I knew my contrarian spirit would demand. Seeing birds, learning their names and learning to distinguish which cry or call belonged to which bird—all that had its pleasures. But what I really wanted was to test my own wings, finesse my strokes and turns, paddle upstream and glide under the bridges and in and out of the small green coves along the shore. And that meant a level of physical engagement with the water I could not have following binocular-eyed birdwatchers. For all their inexperience with kayaks, still managed to stay drier than I did by allowing the current push them along.

Paddling more deliberately and taking in less water into my boat, I passed a Southern gothic tangle of cedar elms sycamores and cypress, catching sight of nests that belonged to birds. Under bridges and on them, colorful graffiti—like the blind yellow Pac-Man on the Lamar Boulevard Bridge that vowed to Never Give Up—reminded me of other forms of wildlife. The hairless, mammalian kind that build as relentlessly as beavers, but didn’t always live in harmony with nature. These other animals that looked like me—they were more numerous than birds. And try as I might, I could not avoid them. As the temperatures rose, they sought the water, too. Some paddled in tandem with varying degrees of finesse. Others paddled past me alone or with canine companions in life jackets, front paws perched on the bow, noses tipped to the wind, reveling in scents no human could detect.

This time, I watched the tandem kayakers with particular interest. Men paired with men and women with women; but it was the male/female pairs I watched most closely, especially the ones where the men steered and the women sat behind. Some moved along well, if slowly; others not so much. I wondered if those couples, especially the more obviously inexperienced ones that relied on the current more than their paddles to push them along, knew that brawn didn’t matter here. What did was skill level, with the more experienced kayaker in front and the less experienced one in back. I wondered, too, how these pairs—any of them—could stand sitting between the someone’s splayed legs or having someone sit between their own. Kayaks are compact spaces; and while some might take comfort in contact, to me it would feel like too much constraint.

In a single kayak and despite the relative immobility of my legs, I could still push the boat as fast as the muscles in my core, shoulders and arms would allow. And that my less-freighted kayak would always move more quickly than tandems. I could go where I wanted when I wanted, without seeking permission or consensus. And I could own every last act and decision, for better or worse, like going too far up or down the river and getting fined for not returning to the dock on time. Or forgetting sunscreen. Or water to drink. And if I invited the lake into my kayak from sloppy strokes, I could still enjoy the cool wetness on my skin and through my clothes like the blessing it ultimately was.

I don’t know that I’ll ever try tandem kayaking. There’s pleasure—or comfort or security or all three—being among others. Ducks know this. So do geese and swans, who rarely swim the lake alone. So did my father, another bird I could neither catch nor keep, who desired the company of others but also paddled his own way. He’d tell me, the child too much like him, that I would end up alone if I didn’t learn to compromise. Of course, he rarely did and didn’t have to because he was a man; and I’d laugh at the irony he did not see, knowing he was probably right. But knowing, too, it was my choice.

And so I’ll keep paddling my kayak built for one because I prefer it like the silver egret prefers its solitude. An airy thing, it sometimes drags the big yellow feet at the end of its backward-bending legs in the water. The birdwatchers told me it does this to stir up the water and attract the fish it will eat, but I imagine more: that somehow, some way, those crazy feet keep the egret connected to what also feeds its soul.

Flowers for a Requiem

Cherry blossoms are sacred to the Japanese, who call them sakura. Pink, white, yellow and sometimes green, the flowers symbolize a natural world that is pure divinity; and in their fleeting softness, the way of all living things. Like the sakura that bloom for no more than two weeks every spring, life is briefly beautiful.

They’ve long since come and gone this year. They need cool winters to flower in March and April so they’re not a common sight in Texas. If they come to mind now, in the baking heat of a Central Plains summer, it’s because someone I knew, someone who used to be a friend, passed away less than a month before the first sakura bloomed in his adopted city of Tokyo.

Had he lived, he might have told people on Facebook about going on a hanami or cherry blossom viewing. I wouldn’t have seen that post though, or any other. Four years earlier, I’d severed every connection that had kept us tied together.

Our last contact had been by phone in 2018. I wasn’t in good place then and neither was he so I stepped away for a while. Then that while, which felt like the greatest relief, solidified into permanence. Meanness had become his habit as helplessness had become mine and the friendship had become this badly broken thing neither of us knew how to fix. He and I had known each other so long we couldn’t imagine our lives without each other. Unless I let go we’d continue to circle the drain like the bitter wedlocked couple we weren’t.

Things got better for me after that but slowly. Hand over hand, I pulled myself up and out of the hard place that nearly consumed me. But my former friend continued the slip-slide down. Two years after I cut the cord, a mutual acquaintance asked if I could put money into a fund she’d created to help him pay for cardiac surgery. He was a different man now, with a new heart powered by a pacemaker. I donated, glad to help. But the other thing she tacitly asked for—that I talk to him again—I could not do. He stopped trying to get me back into his life afterward.

I only learned about his death on social media. The mutual friend who’d advocated for his heart fund had not told me; at the time he died, she was too stunned to say anything to anyone beyond immediate friends and family. But thoughts of his passing stayed with me for days that turned into weeks then months. There was grief there, for an aborted friendship I believed I’d take with me to the end. But there was something else there, too, another sadness I’d not known before. In my youth I had not understand death or its finality; only that dying was something people— mostly the old—occasionally did. His death was different. With no ifs, ands or buts, his end swept away an invisible generational shield. Others would follow him because now death was not a matter of if but when.

He did not leave this world as my friend; but he is still the first among my contemporaries to pass into history. Which is significant not just because I will miss him, no matter the differences we had. But because he was there to witness moments with me that in their singularity, would not repeat again. Like turning twenty-one. Like leaving my college life for the great unknown. Like seeing the heart I’d held back from love shatter into more pieces than I could count. Then time passed and he himself became another kind of first: the one person to remain in my orbit for longer than a few months or years.

This man, this former friend, was a Berkeley drop-out who still ghosted campus the year I met him. His acquaintances were people I lived with at the student co-op. Stubbornly persistent, he called me, made me laugh and wheedled me for greater closeness so many times that the wheedling itself became a joke. Give it up, man, you’re crazy. It wasn’t funny though, at least not to him. I listened to him in a way few did, including the ex-Air Force father who bullied and beat him and the mother who let it happen because that’s what fathers did to sons. So he held on to the hope. And when, many years later, he came into his parents’ money—not much but a good sum—he offered what I, a broke adjunct professor, could never repay: a two-week trip east to enjoy the pleasures of a Manhattan Christmas.

He scoffed at my protests for almost a year before I finally consented to go with him, not thinking for a moment that our vacation was anything more than just a friendly excursion. Until he proved me wrong. Two nights before we left New York, he told me the strange truth: that he had intended the visit to be “the world’s longest date.” I said no again to a relationship; looking at me like an angry child, he demanded to know why. I explained what I thought he already knew. He was my friend for life, nothing more, nothing less. Though outwardly conciliatory, inwardly I fumed at his deception. The last time we had ever talked about his wish for a relationship had been more than twenty years before.

Nothing was the same after that. He became more irascible than ever. There was more I did that displeased than pleased and felt eggshells under my feet though I said nothing. Then my life went into upheaval and I turned to him. No matter what, he was still my friend…until the passive-aggressive rages became brutal enough I finally had to walk away. He became desperate after that, using every channel he could to reconnect. But I was done. Enough so that when my website tracker logged a visit from Japan just ten days before he passed away, a visit I knew was his, this ex-friend I had once loved like family felt like a stranger from another life.

He died of a disease that claims the aged and infirm, a middle-aged man who had reached the last season of his life. Now he is a signpost that tells me I am approaching the autumn of my days in a body that, though I no longer take this for granted, will likely grow older than his. These things I know and for these things I grieve. Yet I accept them like the lessons of the sakura: all things in their season, even friendships unable to withstand the inexorable test of human time.

Strange Carnival

It’s a circus out there. A bear-wrestling dictator doubles down on his invasion of country he says has been overrun with Nazis. A Supreme Court Justice-cum-theocrat cites thirteenth-century English law to justify overturning a fifty-year-old legal precedent. A British Prime Minister resigns his post while the Benny Hill theme song plays outside Parliament. Bizarre, ridiculous and just plain unsettling, these stories belong in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not rather than the daily news.

On days when I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about the state of the world, I think of Kurt Vonnegut who chose laughter over tears (there was less cleaning up to do afterward), watch Real Time with Bill Maher like it’s the last salvation and seek escapes where I can, like the Sixth Street Museum of Weird. I wandered into the place the day after July fourth. The holiday that hadn’t felt like a holiday; someone had opened fire on a Chicago Independence Day parade and rained on everyone else’s festivities.

I ducked inside, bought my ticket at the gift shop, and headed for museum entrance turnstile, which stood next to a swami encased inside a broken fortune telling machine. The kitsch was straight up old-school. Visitors—who could easily find freak show entertainment online—were only too happy to pay for a glimpse at past-tense weird. As one of the last American dime show-style attractions, the kind of entertainment the museum represents has become rare as a UFO sighting.

The first exhibit was of P.T. Barnum, whose wax likeness stood in the anteroom adjoining the narrow first-floor exhibit hall. In 2000, savvy local businesses took a tip from Barnum’s freak show playbook and made the slogan “Keep Austin Weird” part of the city’s hugely successful marketing campaign. Two other cities, Portland and Louisville, stole the slogan for themselves a few years later. Because human beings are curious and gullible. And because crazy—like the antler-wearing stuffed “jackalope” on the wall across from Barnum’s statue—always gets people’s attention.

The grotesque greeted me everywhere I looked. Shrunken heads stared blindly from inside glass cases, as did skeletons, grinning skulls, mummies and the frozen remains of a creature called the Ice Man. He was actually my favorite, less because he was the star attraction and more because he sat in a dark, refrigerated room that offered relief from the blistering Texas heat. A two-bodied lamb, two-headed chicken and a three-eyed calf had their own display in a small second floor room. Natural deviations in and of themselves, their forcibly preserved state brought to mind the undead creepiness of taxidermy shops.

The paranormal or otherwise unexplained also had their own corners in this strange little museum. On one wall, a photo exhibit of Austin’s Driskill Hotel told the story of murders, suicides and restless ghosts, like that of the hotel’s one-time cigar-chomping owner, Colonel Jesse Driskill. And further into the main gallery, past the skulls and skeletons and shrunken heads, an exhibit featuring plaster casts of feet and skulls argued for the existence of Sasquatch and a Texas Bigfoot.

I willingly suspended my disbelief. It didn’t matter if those shrunken heads were real or clever fakes. Everything was entertainment. As if to emphasize the point, the museum also had a small third-floor gallery dedicated to classic horror films and film stars. Images or wax figures—like Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein and Lon Chaney’s Quasimodo—filled a dark slightly stuffy room along with memorabilia from the silent era horror films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. There were even mock-ups of King Kong’s killer hands and man-eating mouth.

Walking out of that final exhibit and down the stairs to the exit, I realized that although all the displays inevitably gestured to dark unknowns in both humans and the world, nothing frightened or shocked me. Like all of the museum’s many visitors, I’d seen all of these artifacts before or had known they existed through popular culture. In the controlled glass-boxed world of the museum, they could me no harm. Until I saw the slippers, tiny as doll shoes.

I’d missed them my first time through the main gallery. A sign said they’d been made in the late nineteenth century and been destined for—and perhaps worn by—a full-grown flesh-and-blood Chinese woman. She’d had her feet broken and bound in childhood. Told, perhaps, that this thing done to her body would create a beauty delicate as the golden lotus her new feet were meant to represent. But that this beauty came at a price of uncomplaining submission.

I imagined the shoe’s owner as a ghost, one among many that haunted a quaint museum I’d only visited because it was summer, because I had time, because I needed a break. What isn’t dead and still rises like a zombie from on old Hollywood horror film, is the brute stupidity behind to that thousand-year-old tradition that didn’t end until the mid-twentieth century. The same stupidity that had just stripped American women of rights to their own bodies.

I hurried out the exit, the skin on my back suddenly clammy. I’d welcomed the chance to be distracted. But the amusement had been a fraud. Reality had still found me even as I’d fled, forcing me to confront a real-life carnival of chaos I’d paid to forget.

How My Garden Grows

Ask anyone who gardens in Austin and they will tell you: the soil is poor, piss-poor. Too much clay, not enough minerals, poor drainage. My autumn sage plants and pink-flowering desert willow tolerate it well; so do the maiden grass plants I nicknamed the Hair Twins. But things like tender-leafed herbs and salads will struggle—if they grow at all. You need to shovel down into the stickiness and gradually amend it with compost and other nutrients. Or buy raised bed planters and fill them up with good gardening soil.

I know more about these things now that I have some land to work. Six years ago, when I first started trying to grow things, I was living in a tiny studio with an outsized porch with the splintering wood floor that got just two hours of late morning sun. That wasn’t so bad, especially deep in the doggiest of Texas summer days. But what I didn’t know is that little bit of light would never be enough to grow the herbs I wanted for my soups, sauces and breads.

The plant deaths wouldn’t stop. I killed three or four rosemary seedlings and a mint plants the nursery said were too tough to die. I couldn’t understand it. My one potted houseplant did well but maybe that was luck. Maybe I had a black thumb.. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if that black thumb hadn’t also blighted the life I was living. I could start with the best intentions and water them with all my sweat and all my tears. The end result would always be the same: a life where nothing—except perhaps a root-bound pothos plant—grew as it should.

A more experienced gardener would have seen it right away: the conditions were all wrong. I wanted herbs that loved the sun and needed space to thrive. But all I could give them was shade and small pots to live in. It was the perfect recipe for disappointment and one I kept repeating again and again. Always hoping for better, without looking at why what I’d been doing hadn’t gotten me where I wanted to go. Never realizing that how I grew the plants in my container garden was how I was growing my life.

Two years after I started collecting pots and killing seedlings on my oversized porch, everything changed. I bailed out of college teaching and romantic disappointment over a professor who loved himself too much to love anyone else and jumped into the first 9 to 5 job I could find. This was my great uprooting; and for the next year I wondered: can I grow here? Sitting in a gray cube under fluorescent lights I dove into the pixelated natural worlds of YouTube and immersed myself in the sounds of streams, rivers and oceans. That helped. So did the money that showed up in my bank account every month, money I used to rent a one-bedroom apartment with a west-facing outdoor deck that got filtered afternoon sun.

I bought more bags of gardening soil and bigger containers to grow rosemary (again), lavender and tomatoes. The rosemary got so bushy and the lavender so big I could smell both every time I opened the sliding glass door that separated the deck from my living room. The tomato plants, grown from seeds spooned out of fruit from the local market, sprang up tall and green. But tomatoes need space and depth to produce more than the few fruits I picked. I didn’t know that, just as I didn’t know that lavender needed sandy soil to throw out the violet spears I longed to see. But it was progress. Now I realized my gardening thumb was just inexperienced and not naturally prone to murder.

In the meantime I kept going to my job in the gray cube and imagined what it would be like to live in a house again after twenty years of apartments. Someone I knew told me about a housing program for moderate income people and I looked into it, sure that something would trip me up. I was wrong. A year later and mid-pandemic, I moved into a condominium with the 60 square foot garden pre-planted with cacti, autumn sage and maiden grass. I’d have to wait until winter had passed to do anything. But for the first time I had land, real land, with sunlight: six hours in summer and four in winter.

The following spring, my red-handled trowel didn’t have to go too far down into the dirt to hit clay. So I bought bigger pots and more garden soil and grew basil in a wooden raised bed planter that fell apart three months after I put it up. In its place I built an enclosed mini-berm with extra dirt and wood salvaged from the planter, re-homed the basil. The experiment worked: soon I was making more pesto than I knew what to do with. Emboldened by my success, I grew bell peppers, thyme, parsley and sage from seed in buckets and barrel planters. I bought flowering yellow purslane to keep by the door and ordered a blackberry plant and tiny pomegranate seedling. Urban homogeneity had slowly given way to something that felt like home.

And by God, everything grew. Even when the gray job went away the second summer into the pandemic. Even as people walked in and out of my life. The garden took root in all my containers as I took root in my small house. All those green lives now helped me to forget that the world—and for a time, my own life—had devolved into chaos. But like the seasons, we weathered the disorder together. I watered them each night to protect them against withering heat then covered them under big blue tarps after the first frost killed a quarter of my plants. All while waiting for the next job I never thought would come. And learning to enjoy the simple fact of its presence on my porch or in the living room that overlooked it.

There’s a brief passage at the end of Voltaire’s novella Candide that goes like this: il fault cultiver notre jardin—we must tend our gardens. If we focus on what is before our eyes rather than on the invisible and intangible, we can manage. These words were never far from my mind as I cleared my tiny plot. And as I learned the rhythm of the seasons and how to work with the elements: the sun and shade, the rain (or lack of it); and the soil. The world beyond my garden would go on its madness, just as it had two-and-a-half centuries ago for Voltaire and his hero Candide. But I could still find my peace in greenness I’d grown on difficult earth.

These days, my green things are thriving in big steel planters a friend jokingly called Texas bathtubs. But they’re sturdy, like the brick walls of my house and give my plants what they need: sun, room and a healthy place to grow. Not that I’ve become any kind of gardening expert by any means. I’m still figuring things out one day at a time, watching for the signs—the leaves that yellow too quickly or droop or get eaten by unseen insect mouths; the buds that fall off before they can flower or fruit— that say my garden needs attention. But for now it’s enough.

What Now, Generation X?

When the Generation X cult classic Reality Bites first came out in 1994, I did a very Gen X thing and swore off seeing it. It didn’t matter that all the cool actors I loved—Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke and Janeane Garofalo—had starring roles. I didn’t want Hollywood telling me who I was or trying to define what I believed. Of course, that was just a pose. The real reason I skipped out on the film about young college grads was because it cut too close. I was finishing up graduate school then and about to face the real world I could no longer avoid.

Twenty-eight years later, I finally saw the film twice in one sitting. It wasn’t just a nostalgia fix; I was looking for insight into a generation in hiding. We Xers—in sociological terms, those Americans born between 1965 and 1980— seem to have gone socially extinct. We don’t get talked about a lot. Nor do we seem to engage much in the social conversation, unlike Boomers or Millennials. These two cohorts seem locked in a battle for attention and relevance while everything of substance falls apart around them and us and everyone else. Our attitude seems to be: we didn’t make the world. We just live in it.

Generation X has made its presence felt in the tech world. Google’s Sergey Brin (1972) and Twiter’s Jack Dorsey (1976)are Xers. But elsewhere? We have no leaders to show for ourselves, except perhaps Tarana Burke (1973) who founded the #MeToo movement. And we have yet to elect a Gen X president. Kamala Harris, a cusp Xer born in late 1964, may be our one chance. If she’s able to run in 2024 and win, she will have to contend with a host of internal and external threats to stability and democracy, including a trio of reactionary Gen X Supreme Court justices: Neil Gorsuch (1967), Brett Kavanaugh (1965) and Amy Coney Barrett (1972). The three have already ruled with the conservative majority on cases that have dismantled provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; now they stand poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Back when the media called us “slackers,” we had no politics to define us, largely because we had no causes to fight for. What we had was luxury of not caring what a more less coherent government did and often didn’t vote. Now no one can agree who we are politically. A Pew Research Center poll shows Gen Xers lean slightly left depending on where we live. Politco magazine, however, suggests that older Xers born before 1970 or tilt decidedly to the right. We may never have been demonstrably progressive. But now we’re becoming a generation that will be remembered for reflecting the ideologies of those in power rather than standing our own political ground.

The young people in Reality Bites aren’t particularly political. But they are disaffected. In the opening scene, Lelaina (Winona Ryder), is giving the college valedictory speech. She’s an aspiring documentarian who’d like do something to better the world and criticizes Boomers for“disembowel[ing] their own revolution just to buy a pair of running shoes.” She doesn’t know how to make things better. Neither does Troy (Ethan Hawke). Rather than finish a philosophy degree, he leaves. He doesn’t want to be part of a system that would reward a lifetime of sacrifice with a “gold watch and balls full of tumors.” Instead, he would rather jam with his band in the same café where they’ve been playing for the last five years. Vicki (Jeneane Garofalo) opts to make do with a Gap store manager job. At least it keeps college loan repayment goons off her back.

These characters represent the moral paralysis that’s become the scourge of my generation. Hypocrite Boomers fucked everything up. We can’t fix things so we’ll just drop out or deal with what is and not think about how we could change the system. And take the hits that would come with trying to make those changes happen. Now we’re watching Rome burn, reaping what we’d like to think we didn’t help sow. But maybe we can still turn things around enough to begin redeeming ourselves in the eyes of future generations.

Surprisingly, one Xer journalist has actually called Generation X “our last, best hope” because, like Leialana and her friends, we are the spiritual and “market correction” to Boomer excesses. The last generation to know non-tech childhoods, we are the skeptics and doubters, the ones willing to say we don’t have the answers. Cohen even goes so far as to compare us to the world-weary Rick Blaine from Casablanca. If Xers have withdrawn from the world, it’s because we have seen enough of it to want no part of the madness and say in knowing chorus with Rick, I don’t stick my neck out for nobody.

What Cohen doesn’t say is that Rick was once an idealist who acted on his beliefs; who ran guns to Ethiopian patriots battling their Italian occupiers and fought alongside the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. His Café Américain is a refuge from the disillusionment of having fought on the side that deserved to win but didn’t. There’s heroism in him, but one tarnished by a profound cynicism. Only one thing rescues him from his own bitterness: love for his old flame Ilsa. Thinking beyond the selfishness of his passion for her, he saves not only Ilsa but her anti-Nazi husband from the German soldiers hunting them down, making himself a target in the process. By the end he’s making plans with his former antagonist, police chief Louis Renault, to go to Brazzaville and help the French Resistance.

So what is it that we will decide to love enough to sacrifice for? Democracy? The Earth? Social equality? Or will it be young people, many of whom who are the children of Gen Xers? There are causes in bewildering abundance now; we can take our pick. If not for our own self-respect then for those who will fight harder than we ever did to repair even bigger messes they never asked to inherit.

Resurrection in the Cathedral

I cursed my luck when I recently discovered that my dentist and his temple of oral hygiene had hightailed it to cheaper digs in the way-down south of Austin during the pandemic. In search of dental salvation, I grabbed my iPhone and looked up his address on Google Maps. Tracing the route to his office with my finger, my eye caught site of a name so outrageously miraculous that I forgot all about the absconded dentist and the sheets of plaque covering my teeth.

The Cathedral of Junk—all 60 tons of it—is actually part of a backyard art installation by Vince Hannemann, an oddball-and-proud local who calls himself the Junk King. It’s a phrase he had tattooed, one green letter per finger, on the hands that started building the Cathedral back in 1989. This otherwise self-effacing gent will gladly let you into his sanctum sanctorum. But only if you make an appointment and park in his driveway. It’s for his long-suffering neighbors who’ve had to deal with tourist wolf packs, all-might music jams, hipster weddings and television news crews in big white vans.

Standing 33 feet tall, the Cathedral seems like a random pile of objects you can find at the Austin city dump—tires, circuit boards, toys, bottles, toilets, shopping carts, furniture, bicycles and car parts—and a few things you can’t, like a NASA nosecone. Poke around a little and ask a few questions, though, and you’ll start to see method in the madness. The material Vince collects or that gets donated to him often doesn’t make the final cut. What remains gets loosely “organized” by color, theme and form, then woven together with wire or set into place with hot glue or cement.

I took a Saturday bus from the northeast side to get to it. That meant traveling through the great glass maze of downtown I’ve come to loathe. It’s a crowded mess now, dominated by futuristic-looking high-rises and building projects that Manhattanize every square inch of land available. Traffic snarls easily here on two-lane streets not built to carry so many vehicles. The south side area where Vince lives—lush, low-rise, spacious and quiet—immediately made me feel nostalgic. This was the Austin I remembered from a decade ago, the decade I moved here. Not the postmodern monstrosity it’s become.

Entering Vince’s backyard from the side gate of his house, the nostalgia only grew stronger. This wasn’t just old Austin on display; it was the entirety of modern American life. “There’s no right or wrong way to see it,” he said after giving me a summary of the Cathedral’s three levels. “The experience is yours.” You can go in the front entrance or a side one. You can climb stairs made of tires, concrete and inlaid tools to the top first before you go in. Or spend your time examining the ancillary structures first, like the A-frame meditation mini-hut, the more-slippery-than-you think ceramic slide or the great stone cairn Vince created to honor his dead pets. It’s all very surreal; and as with all surrealist art, no single truth explains it. What does is the meaning a spectator chooses to bring to the art itself.

The heat of a cloudless day bore down on me. I circled the Cathedral first before going up to the vine-covered top. The view of the neighborhood was spectacular, but I was sweating so I took the staircase down to ground-level. It was there I realized that I’d entered more than the interior of a gloriously demented playhouse. Now I was in Dr. Who’s TARDIS, the time machine that magically enlarges the moment you step inside. It was the vaulted ceilings, the patches of sky I could see through the junk. In place of buttons to push and levers to pull, I saw more objects than I could visually process, but which Vince assured me represented every decade of the twentieth century.

What catches your eye--and there’s plenty—depends on you. My own gaze was immediately drawn to Big Bird, who watches over a flotilla of rubber ducks; and then to a bunch of Barbie dolls suspended from nearby wall. In a hollow near one of the Cathedral stairwells, I caught sight of a turn-of-the-century iMac sitting next to a plastic Frosty the Snowman and Virgin Mary. A bust of Beethoven stands in its own ground-level hutch wearing headphones and a pair of women’s sunglasses.There’s an overwhelming density here, not just of objects but of untold stories. Where did that Beethoven come from? And what was the person who donated all those rubber ducks—Vince says they were a gift—doing with so many? It’s pop culture heaven touched by gravitas. And not a little insanity.

Taken all together the objects in the Cathedral create a sense of compressed time. The very old, like a collection of rusted flat irons, are mixed in with the older, like typewriters, rotary telephones and bicycle rims. There’s literally something for every memory, which helps in part to explain the Cathedral’s enduring popularity. It’s a tribute to a past that, like Big Bird and his rubber duck army, comforts. Especially during a time when everything is changing. We’ve been there, done that. But what happens next nobody knows.

For something grounded so completely in the gospel of capitalism, the Cathedral, which Vince without any plan in mind, nevertheless struck me as quite moving. Every object had been condemned to death by landfill. Yet all had been resurrected to live as part of a strangely harmonious —and still decaying—whole. All while reminding those who cared to think about it that that humans produce almost 3.5 million tons of plastics and solid waste a day, most of which will end up in soil, the water and eventually, our own bodies. We made this place; and we are making it still, to our detriment.

Toward the end of my visit, when the heat forced me into the cool ground floor rooms, I closed my eyes, picked at my teeth with my fingernails and listened to the chimes hanging from the ceiling. Another visitor, a stylish young thing who looked like sweat wasn’t something she did shot a video she later told Vince she wanted to post on Tik-Tok. Smiling beatifically, he thanked her. Vince doesn’t do social media—it’s too twenty-first century. He’s just a simple guy who makes art he never realized would not only feed nostalgia-hungry seekers looking for encounters with the past. But with an Austin soul that somehow got junked on the great frogmarch to progress.

How Dare We

We live in perilous times. But I feel especially terrified because I’m female. It’s not just the dystopian prospect of women losing the right to control our own bodies. It’s the implication that loss could have for what women’s bodies can do besides reproduce, like speak our truths in public spaces without getting shouted down or silenced. Reading Rebecca Solnit’s 2020 memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, recently brought out how that’s yet another battle we’ve been fighting forever despite the feminist gains of the last 60 years.

In 1984, a semester after Solnit graduated from the Berkeley School of Journalism, I was unlearning academic objectivity and embracing the power of own first-person narrative voice in a women’s studies class on the other side of the same university campus. Acknowledging subjectivity was an act of radical integrity. A small but necessary rebellion against that insidious thing called patriarchy. A child who grew up in a home “where everything feminine and female …was hated,“ Solnit no doubt understood this idea, though she had yet to find her way to her own maverick brand of feminist-inflected cultural criticism.

I’d be lying if I said I came to writing my own memoir with the same feminist intention so clearly evident in Solnit’s book. Feminism was not even on my mind; that only came later, when I realized how so much of my life had been deformed by the abuses of sexism. I wrote to break nearly half a century of silences I thought would protect me but only suffocated, I wrote to save myself, my sanity and my soul. Which I suppose, in this brewing home-front war against women, amounts to more or less the same thing.

Solnit keeps me company in this plastic-elastic space of memoir that I inhabit. But she and I, the journalist and the ex-academic, we’re not alone. One 2015 article estimates that seventy percent of those who enroll in writing programs that specifically teach the craft of memoir (and its elegantly compact twin, the essay), are female. I’ll wager that’s at least the percentage of memoirs written by women I read as a professional book critic. Modern memoir, it would seem, is a “women’s” genre. But why the draw?

First-person narrative beckons with the promise of truth-telling. The straight shit. And in a world tending more and more towards enforced homogeneity, that’s powerful. If you can’t be yourself enough to tell your truth in the world, you can do it between the covers of a book. Memoir is about emotional honesty, the act of voicing difficult emotions, like rage, despair, disgust. But also celebrating the unabashed joy of being who you are, flaws, weaknesses, quirks and all.

For women, that emotional honesty is critical. Almost as critical as experiencing the intimacy of reading the details of someone’s else’s life. Whether innate or learned or both, intimacy is something girls learn—and learn to appreciate—from childhood. I think of the secrets shared between girls. Whispered in ears. Written on sheets of notebook paper, then passed in class. A female-authored memoir is another kind of note, one that not only offers escape into the privacy of another woman’s internal world. But also the opportunity for other “secret sharers” to find each other and create bonds among themselves.

A memoir is therefore as public as it is private. All writers want others to know their words; but for some writers, achieving that goal is critical, less for the spotlight, and more for the light it casts on subjects not discussed. Not only about the details of one’s life. But also to shed light on subjects beyond the standard fare of the mundane. The subjects deemed taboo: Trauma. Abuse. Rape. Incest. Mental illness. Addiction. “Deviant” (non-binary) sexuality. And have others bear dignify truths through the act of witness.

I am a member of a virtual collective of memoirists. It numbers in the thousands, and membership is only open to women and non-binary people. All members must follow a strict code of conduct, which means respecting all differences like gender, race sexuality and age. This may sound like an absolutism of political correctness. But there are reasons for these rules. Reasons like the #Metoo movement that showed the world just how widespread sexual abuse—and the myriad micro- and macro-aggressions that go alone with it—was.

I can say nothing specific about our discussions; only that members speak of struggles and successes, ask questions of or help from the collective. The group reminds me of the no-boys-allowed clubs of childhood. Back then, girls separated from boys because boys carried an invisible disease we called cooties. But now those boys have become men vested with the kind of damaging power wielded by a lying, orange-haired lech of a president. And by a now imprisoned Hollywood mogul who also thought that he could grab as much pussy and wreck as many lives as he wanted without consequences.

That’s how it is for women/non-binary people living under a patriarchal regime. We all know that any of us can become targets at any time, both in the real and virtual worlds. Of bullying. stalking, gaslighting, shaming. Anything and everything that might possibly silence us, make us question ourselves and our own self-worth. Because we are women/non-binary people who speak rather than hold our tongues like children told to be seen but not heard. Because what we do and say often involves others who have a vested interest in keeping us silent. But more than that, to maintain a status quo that has rewarded the defenders of male privilege from blotting everything that differs from truths they call “universal” and “sacred.”

Sometimes I revel in that hiddenness, that shelter that allows for open exchange. Yet I am also profoundly bothered that such a space even needs to exist. Or that women who speak about female experiences under patriarchy still find themselves the targets of mansplaining males who will not listen and seek only hear the sound of their own voices. Like Rebecca Solnit. who remembered how one conservative commentator who said “to go fuck [your]self” for speaking out about the many ways professional men—some of whom had far less expertise —had dismissed, ignored, belittled her.

Whether it’s about reversing laws that respect female autonomy or forcing women’s voices back into their throats, the endgame of patriarchy is the same. But since my days in that Berkeley classroom forty years ago, too many consciousnesses have been raised. The wheel will not stop moving forward. How dare you, said our current Vice President this past month to conservative lawmakers supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Though never having borne children herself, this Vice President still lives in a female body. A body that made her the target of a man who unquestioningly served the orange lech almost to the very end. And who, in his ignorant arrogance, claimed to speak for 62 million unborn children and their grieving mothers: How dare you, Madame Vice President?

To which I reply. Oh, yes Mr. ex-Vice-President. How dare WE.

Water Baby

I swim. Not as much as I used to and not as often as I’d like. But it’s a near-lifelong habit of which didn’t really start until I was a teenager. Before then, I mostly tread water because once the Pacific Ocean nearly swallowed me whole. I was a child when it happened, a child chasing small waves that crashed like long sandy cylinders on Point Dume beach. Suddenly a rip current summoned the water back to the sea so fast I lost my footing. Another wave broke over my head and rolled me over and over, weighing my bathing suit down with grit. As I struggled to move my limbs and breathe, suddenly, as if monumentally bored with me, the ocean flung me onto the shore just long enough that I was able to get up off my knees, gulp down some air into my starving lungs and drag myself back up the beach and my unsuspecting mother, newly afraid of water and its wildness.

In junior high summer school, we had swim lessons in the domesticated watery spaces of pools. Most kids swam easy as fish. Others—all arms and legs and jutting bones beneath tanned skins—raced on swim teams. The shallow end was my home, the place where I did some sloppy homemade version of a dog-paddle. Something that could keep my head above water. The deep end was like the ocean: something I didn’t trust. We learned to float, kick, and breathe. And then to twist our bodies and spin our arms like propellers or scoop them toward our chests while moving our faces in and out of the water. Those lessons never seemed to stick, though. I could never get the hang of twisting my neck to from side to side for air. So I thrash-swam with my head above the water, my eyelids closed against the sting of chlorine. Then went right back to treading water.

I wonder now if some part of me remembered that day when the ocean wrapped itself around me with such ferocity. The ocean covers 70% of the earth; water comprises up to 60% of our bodies. The blood that runs the human internal machine is almost all water, but also contains salt and ions in concentrations  similar to those found in the sea; the same is true of amniotic fluid. I needed the earth under my feet to feel safe, not yet aware that the water was where I and every other human came from. And that if the earth was the mother of all living organisms, then, the ocean was her amnion. So however terrifying she seemed, the ocean not a mile from my house, the same one that covered nearly one-third of the earth, was simply embracing me, unaware of her strength. Recognizing as I did not, the ancient bond between us.

Not that I stopped going to the beach. There were other ways to enjoy the water, like boogie boards which floated me on my stomach and kept my head above water. I started riding shore breakers then gradually moved out to where the three to four foot swells began to curl. I didn’t always catch them, but when I did, I savored the movement that sometimes felt like flying and that the wet-suited surfers I knew called the most radical feeling in the world. Unaware that all the arm and leg work it took to catch a wave was also building my confidence as swimmer. Enough so that once, after a late summer Pacific hurricane had churned up swells twice the size of what I usually rode, I went for it. Wearing only a two-piece bathing suit and paddling into sea without a wrist leash for my boogie, I moved up the face of a foaming white-headed wave, only to be met by an even bigger one that crashed over my head. Ripping the boogie from my hands, the wave dragged me, prone and helpless, over a spiny reef before spitting me up on land, cuts all over my feet. This time the ocean had left her mark. You do not master me. I master you.

College took me to Bay Area where, living in the shadow of the Berkeley Hills, I could look north to San Francisco and see the Pacific every day. But where I never seemed to find time for the water. But swimming found me anyway through my freshman roommate, a free-spirited Master Class swimmer. She took me to a beach in Marin where she swam in 55-degree water I avoided then hounded me ever after to get out of the library and into a heated university pool. I did, sometimes, especially during summers. But swimming only became a habit when I discovered it could counter things I could not control on dry land. Like uncertainty: where would I go after so many years of being a student, what would I do, who would I become? Those questions ate at me, bore into my core without my knowing it. Then returned my senior year as shivering sensations that rattled along the San Andreas fault line of my spine and left me feeling breathless and disoriented and my muscles cold and rigid.

College was ending; and I was learning that graduation meant swimming in another kind of sea. A sea that a life of the mind had left me ill-prepared to face. It was then I remembered swimming, the way it softened and warmed my body from the inside. Water slowed and resisted; perhaps I needed something against which to safely crash the mad energy of my own terror. So I grabbed the one faded suit I’d had since freshman year and leapt into the blue. The first time in, I was barely able to move my arms and legs in rhythm. Even my breathing was wrong. In my land-walking nerviness, I had stopped breathing into my lungs and took shallow, half-apologetic breaths instead. It was faster that way, because I was moving faster, or my brain was. Flying off into the future, I stopped feeling the earth beneath me. I emerged an hour later exhausted; but for a short time, free of the inner tremors that shook me. The endorphin rush and parasympathetic relaxation response so much rhythmic breathing had triggered in my nervous system had calmed me. But I didn’t know that then. Only that I now, for a brief moment, I existed in the present tense, feet on the ground.

The water had mastered me again. But this time because I came to it somehow understanding that in mastering me, the water might also heal what years of worry and overthinking had thrown into chaos. Which makes me wonder now what lessons could be had for all of us, feeling the collective anxiety of this strange new world we live in. A world unmasked by disease and unmade by war on a planet we have damaged with our great, oversized mammalian brains. What if we could look into the water and see not just a reflection of ourselves and our desires, but kin? And what if we could understand that no one, not even multi multi-billionaires, will ever have even a fraction of the power nature has? So much now is out of anyone’s control. We are swamped and swimming, any way we can. But perhaps this is the lesson, the lesson of water. You do not master me. But learn my rhythms and become me and maybe you can master yourself and survive.

Drag Day Afternoon

June is Pride month. It’s also when I escaped Dallas for Austin in 2013. When I decided to do an early celebration of both events by taking in a Saturday afternoon drag show at the Halcyon, it felt like early, post-Easter liberation. It was the first time I had gone maskless in a public place and not been overwhelmed by the fear of my imminent demise.

 The atmosphere was relaxed, with doors wide open to the sidewalk, humidity, heat and people—mostly laughing, goggle-eyed UT college students—on daytime bar crawls. Every minute of color, chatter, song and self-expression was a rainbow tonic to a woman dying of thirst. I already knew how potent that elixir could be from my days living a heartbeat away from Dallas gay community and working as a part-time contributor for the for the local LGBT paper, the Dallas Voice. What I didn’t realize was just how much I missed it.

A regal, purple-haired mistress of ceremonies named Alizae Brooks hailed all of us, queer, bi, trans and straight. This was a space of diversity, though more than 80% of the people there were cis-gendered females, with a smattering of gay men and a single grinning lesbian. The composition didn’t surprise me. Gay bars—or gay-friendly ones like the Halcyon—were straight-girl heaven. A place where groups of young women could feel safe. Empowered, even, enough that they could boldly push dollar bills into performer bras and keep bar tabs wide open for round after round of the drinks that would have made them far more vulnerable elsewhere.

The show was classic drag. In their bushy big hair and outrageous costumes, performers shimmied around tables and dropped into crowd-pleasing splits while lip-synching gay anthems by Cher, Whitney Houston and Keala Settle. No one could mistake them for Ru Paul’s Drag Race contestants. The skill levels varied. Smaller performers like Gomez moved lithe as snakes while larger ones, like six-and-a-half foot tall Maxine, twisted and thrashed powerful limbs. Bodies and breasts hadn’t been strategically poured into figure-molding spandex shapers. And stocking runs, padded bras, cheap gowns and wigs and less than Sherwin Williams perfect makeup? They were par for the course. But that was the point. The performers were amateurs, doing what they did for the love of drag.

My favorite performer was one who likely was not a gay man. Iris had breasts and soft features, though neither meant she was—or identified as—female. With a high-hair wig of Dolly Partonesque blondeness and the Cabaret-style eyelashes of a young Liza Minnelli, she swept across the floor on the balls of small feet with a grace that defied the rolls of flesh she did not hide. I liked her difference from the others. And that she moved and lip-synched to Abba’s “Dancing Queen,” showing that if she was a woman or woman-identified, it was a song for everyone, not just gay male drag artists.

 I’d seen other, more guerilla-style spectacles before, like the ones put on by my sweet genderfucked girls, the DFW Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. But where drag queens call what they do performance art, SPIs call their public appearances manifestations. The Sisters will tell you they don’t do drag because they are do-gooder queer nuns—male, female, trans and everything in between—who also happen to love white face and glitter makeup, high heels, sequins, feathers, spangles and general fashion hijinks. When they aren’t fundraising or spreading smiles through bawdy irreverence, they’re doing the rounds at Dallas gay bars, where they talk safe sex with patrons and had out condom-and-lube bliss kits to the amorously inclined.

Friends in the gay community introduced me to them, the same friends who, without thinking looked after me when I had nowhere else to turn. When I first talked to them in late 2010, they were scrambling to figure themselves out; so was I. But problems with an autocratic leader led to an internal coup then a glittering, more democratic re-formation. The second time we spoke in 2011, they’d gotten their act together—so had I, more or less—enough to be granted trial status by the San Francisco Mother House. They became a fully professed house a year later. I visited them again at Dallas Pride 2012 to congratulate them with hugs, photos and whoops of joy.

Drag, or queer spectacles resembling, them garner a variety of responses from cis-gendered women and feminists. I love them but many don’t. Or if they do, they critique it for leaving out female/female identified performers or drag kings, those badass females/trans people butch enough to perform male camp. Still others—like Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney’s lesbian sister Mary—has called them the gender-demeaning equivalent of blackface performances.

For me, it comes down to intent. Nineteenth century minstrel show performers used blackface to caricature African Americans, one of many cruel racist blunders that continues to haunt the American consciousness. But whiteface has a different history. In Japanese Kabuki theater, actors wear whiteface, which began as a theatrical practicality that evolved into tradition. Not only did whiteface make the colored paints actors used indicate age, emotion and personality stand out. It also prevented oil and sweat from running all the colors together and ruining an otherwise impeccable look.

This isn’t to say whiteface can’t be abused as well. And that all drag queens exaggerate femininity without misogynist intent. The best performances use gender parody to move beyond the binary to which we have all been confined and show that other possibilities for how to be in the world can and do exist. But like so much these days, open spaces of possibility are under fire. A leaflet someone at the Halcyon distributed during intermission informed patrons that the city plans to demolish the low-rise gay bar district. No one quite knows why, but I can guess, Austin will likely use the land to feed the skyscraper addiction it got from Dallas.

The LGBTQ community nothing if not resilient. They lived through AIDS long before everyone else had to deal with COVID. It’s not for nothing that another of its most beloved anthems is Gloria Gaynor’s 1977 hit, “I Will Survive.” The bars and drag performers will reappear elsewhere after the storm, colors intact. Because like rainbows that’s what they do.  

Mothers of the Revolution

The January evening I saw Paramount Theatre events newsletter that advertised discussion between Margaret Atwood and Gloria Steinem, I stopped scrolling. A voice in my head spoke. Don’t miss this. The last time I had been in Austin’s most revered performance venue at the end of 2019 to see the one-man comedy revue, A John Waters’ Christmas. I needed the laughs; God knows we all did. Global upheavals, a splintering democracy and the specter of climate change had made it a difficult three years for everyone. What none of us knew was that it would be the last time most would chance going into a closed public space with large, freely-breathing crowds for the next two years.

An ice storm named Landon—of the kind Texans had never seen until Uri nearly shut down the state’s power grid in 2021—pushed a February show to April. That made me impatient. I’d long been a reader of Atwood’s poetry and frighteningly prescient fiction. And Steinem, one of the original founders of Ms. magazine, had been among the many dynamic feminist activist-intellectuals I had followed since college. Steinem had identified as feminist from the beginning. Atwood did not. It would take the better part of an almost sixty-year career to realize that writing meaningful novels about women was anything but an apolitical act.  

I won’t lie. Going into a small downtown venue that had been sold out for weeks gave me a raging case of the willies. Especially when I saw how few people were wearing masks. But infection numbers were lower than they’d been since the COVID outbreak; we were clearly in some kind of remission, and the excitement of being out and about was visible in the animated chattiness of everyone—women and men, young and old—standing in line to get into the show. And it was a fine, mild spring to boot, better than any we’d had in years.

I sat perched in the mezzanine, the energy sizzling and popping around me. Voices buzzed, bodies buzzed. It was as though I had stumbled into a revival meeting for liberals, minus the tents and laying-on of healing hands. Not that I minded. People were filled with a joyful exuberance I’d not seen in a long time, their anticipation stoked like fire by each of the speakers who introduced the show. And never let us forget that the spectacle about to take place was not just a parley between two octogenarian village elders but a historic event.

The crowd roared appreciation when Atwood and Steinem took the stage. They moved slowly, these age-bent sisters, their hands interlaced before them. The trademark silver concho belt around Steinem’s slight waist nodded to the trademark stylishness that had made her a feminist fashion icon, as did the elegant red scarf around her neck. But it was Atwood I loved. Gray curls flying, she seemed less a prophetess of doom and more a crazy great-aunt who’d pulled on red and white socks to recall the colors of the Canadian flag but forgotten they were mismatched.

Almost all topics discussed were grounded in Texas politics—a clear message, it seemed, that the state had evolved into a bellwether for American democracy. Leading off with the state’s controversial abortion bill-turned-law, the pair took aim and fired. The decision wasn’t just about limiting a woman’s right to choose. It was also a warning shot across the bow of democracy.

Both drew historical parallels between that decision—which has since become a model for other conservative state legislatures seeking similar restrictions—and decisions made by three twentieth century dictators: Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini and the Romanian autocrat, Nicolae Ceaușescu. The day after Hitler was elected, his first act was to close down all abortion centers and declare abortion itself a crime against the state; Mussolini would follow suit. And when Ceaușescu came to power in the mid-60s, he not only mandated that women have more children, but that they take pregnancy tests every month.

It was about the body, specifically, the female body. It always is. I knew this from my own work on this topic as a literary historian of colonial empires. Democracy and the lack of it reveals itself in what laws say a woman can do with her body. Especially when it comes to reproduction. Steinem knew this from first-hand experience as a young woman coming of age during the McCarthy era, when she took her future—and life— into her own hands by seeking a then-outlawed abortion. Atwood, whose chilling bestseller The Handmaid’s Tale, did too, basing much of the novel on her study of Ceaușescu’s draconian policies.

With what’s happened here in Texas, and now Idaho and places throughout the south, challenges to Roe v. Wade are imminent. Atwood and Steinem await this next phase with horror and hope. With the Supreme Court’s current—and unbalanced—composition of three liberals, five hard righters, and one conservative moderate, the outcome seems a foregone conclusion. Unless there is a counter-movement that perhaps revives the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), that needs only congressional ratification to become law. As it stands, the United States is the only one of the twenty-six democratic nations in the world that has not yet included women in its constitution.

That wasn’t all these women had to say. They talked about the Texas school library book ban that, since the beginning of February, has forced school districts across the state to pull 850 titles that, like Atwood’s novel, deal with race, gender and/or sexuality issues. I knew about this, of course. But hearing it spoken aloud in a packed theater with every ear attuned listening in rapt attention made it seem too real. So did statistics from the American Library Association that revealed how 2021 had been the worst year yet for challenges to the freedom to read. And ultimately, express oneself.

In restricting access to books, it mirrors actions it took regarding who can vote.  In September 2021, the legislature passed a law that targets mail-in ballots. A law that, as the results from the most recent Texas primary have shown, disproportionately affects people of color, especially those who live in rural areas. Neither speaker seemed surprised. “It’s the exacerbation of an existing tendency,” Atwood said. A tendency she meant but did not say included the racism and income inequality that are destroying the country just as surely as the COVID pandemic.

Despite the gravity of these topics and their concern that the chaos in American politics and society would blind the US to external and internal threats to its existence, both still expressed guarded optimism. “Hope is a form of planning,” Steinem said. A necessary life-affirming vision of what could be. Nodding her grizzled head, Atwood concurred. From the humanist perspective I understood so well, she expressed belief that hope is something all people have from the very beginning. A kind of in-built programming to protect us against ourselves. Against the destructive impulses that continue to devastate the Ukraine, create worldwide chaos, and threaten both our species and the fragile blue marble of a world it continues to abuse.

No one, including myself, wanted to see them leave the stage. But as they stood up to receive the standing ovation they deserved, they used each other as braces. Even from where I sat, I could see they were tired. Pulling each other up by the shoulders, they pushed the sides of their smiling faces together and squeezed. Strong as truth, they were still two frail old women who needed each other’s strength to speak. And say the words that too many people outside the walls of a small Austin theater refuse to hear.

Bone Digger

Most people shudder at their family’s skeletons, those broken bones of past indiscretions they wished would disappear. But mine are so much my passion I sometimes wonder whether I shouldn’t have become an archeologist. Then again, memoirists like me are archeologists of a kind. We track down dead things, dig up remains, speculate on meaning, evolve theories. Where or when this mania started I can’t say. Only that as a child I never failed to exasperate my parents for asking too many questions. So I learned to listen and observe to find my answers. And when that wasn’t enough, use the stealth of thieves to root through drawers, cabinets and closets I had no business looking in whatsoever.

 The family member who interested me most was Papa. My blue-blood mother had a pedigree she could trace back for centuries; but he had been a child with a Dickensian past. The little boy his foster mother never wanted enough to adopt. Born in Paris to a nameless woman who abandoned him at birth, the only thing he had besides an incomplete birth certificate was a Middle-Eastern sounding last name from a man he swore up and down wasn’t his father. I’m English, he’d say. My mother just snickered and called my father a liar. He doesn’t know who his parents are. He’s just saying that.

 The freebooting child in me didn’t forget. Which is why, more than forty years later, I spit into a tube from an Ancestry DNA kit and waited eagerly for the results. The child had not succeeded in finding answers, but perhaps the adult could. The test results excited me—at first. There was British blood mixed with blood from Germanic Europe that explained Papa’s translucent white skin. There was Armenian blood, too; but that result mysteriously vanished when Ancestry recalibrated the results several years later. Skepticism creeped in. I didn’t doubt that Papa was English. But had the bias in the laboratory—perhaps because of my name—“created” incorrect data?

 Skeptical as I was about the test, the genealogical database into which my results were entered did eventually yield a first-cousin match to an elderly man named Martin who lived in the West of England. I did not bother to contact him. Too often the other people I had contacted, the second and third cousin matches who answered my feverish queries could not help. Then the tables turned and an amateur genealogist and ex-priest who shared a connection to both me and Martin became the one to ply me with questions. Do you know Martin? Where are you on the family tree?

 I had only my father’s strange, fragmented story to offer him in return. So he looked at the amount of shared DNA I had with Martin and concluded I was a half-first cousin, the child of a relative born out of wedlock. That wasn’t all. Because he had studied Martin’s family history, he was able to offer a theory about the parent who had given Papa his English bloodline. Papa’s English parent wasn’t a man. It was a woman named Ethel Maud, the sister of the man who became Martin’s father. Her name was unsettlingly ironic; naming me had been my mother’s business, not Papa’s.

 Ethel’s story stuck with me. A spinster, she came from a respected West Country farming family. She kept house for an uncle who lived in Bristol, living there until both he—and eventually she—died. My imagination began spinning stories. Had this placid woman taken a lover in secret, perhaps—for whatever reason—not the taste of her family? One thing was for sure. If she was indeed Papa’s mother, she went to great lengths to hide her pregnancy, going to Paris to have the child, then abandoning it. Perhaps it was the very British need to keep up appearances that drove her. That and the fact that as a middle class woman of the 1920s, she had everything to lose from being a single mother.

 Despite my DNA test skepticism, I decided to take a second test just to confirm there was no Armenian connection. I would not know who Papa’s father was; but perhaps I could lay that piece of the puzzle to rest. This one, by CRI Genetics, promised insights into a deeper past that went back thousands of years. I swabbed the inside of a cheek: three weeks later, I received confirmation of British, Northern and Southern European ancestry along with a huge surprise. Weaving in and out of Northern European and Tuscan Italian bloodlines was an Asian one stemming not from the Asia Minor of Armenia, but the Asia of the Far East. The line itself was split into others that came from Bengal, the Punjab, Southern China. And even Japan.

 The romantic side of my imagination whether one of Papa’s relatives, perhaps someone on his still-unknown paternal side, was a gypsy. The Romani people originated in Northern India, mostly the Punjab region; their descendants live all over Europe and the world. But the Chinese connection? Before 1900, Asians (and Southeast Asians), came to Britain as servants or sailors, usually in service of the infamous East India Company. Those who stayed in Britain lived in London or big port cities like Liverpool; most lived in poverty or at best, working class. Perhaps a Britisher in Papa’s history had worked in India or China, perhaps for the East India Company or even as a colonial official; perhaps had a liaison with a woman there. And the child that resulted wound up in Britain, probably London. Whoever they were, these relatives, they were travelers. People on the move…just like Papa, a restless man who could never stay in one place for long.

 Going back even further, to the 1600s, the test revealed another surprise: a Taino connection from Puerto Rico. CRI Genetics had found connections to Spain; so had the first version of Ancestry DNA. It was clear now that if the test was correct, my ancestors had been part of the Spanish Conquest…and that this Taino had more than likely been a woman. I had read enough history to know that this was how empire worked: kill the men or work them until they die. Enslave the women and turn them into concubines. It doesn’t matter which side, maternal or paternal, she came from. Only that she existed and that one or more of her children had followed their father to Europe.

 With so many unknowns in my paternal ancestry (and a few on my mother’s side), I am tempted to further speculate that these people, these other ancestors, had no wish to be known, desiring instead to lose themselves in whitewash of Europeanness just to survive. One of the things I remember my father telling me over and over was how glad I should be for who I was. Which in his parlance meant white and middle class. But the curious child who didn’t obey her parents had already learned what was important to her and remains important to her still: knowing where her skeletons come from. And understanding them—loving them, even—rules be damned.