Travelogue 261, February 14
A Valentine’s Toast

In conversation, a friend refers to Valentine’s Day as a holiday, and I laugh. But later I consider the point: yes, it is a holiday. Judge by the way people celebrate. We’re downtown, and people are as sloppy as I’ve ever seen them. The bars are rammed. Block E roars with chaotic good cheer.

Block E is a block-sized entertainment mall downtown, occupied by bars and movie theaters, and a five-star hotel. It’s been a mall since 2001, despised from its inception by all city hipsters, especially those with long enough memories to recall the seedy legacy of the block before its demolition in 1988 -- when it was home to such classic mid-century establishments as the Moby Dick, Brady’s Pub, the Rifle Sport Gallery, and Shinders. And truly, how is one supposed to feel about the complex that houses a Hard Rock Café downtown? But I have to confess to a lot of time spent at Block E. What are my options? I don’t have a car, and I can’t see a movie unless it’s on a huge screen with blasting sound.

In any case, the mall and the street are in an uproar. People are shouting, even if they’re strolling right next to each other. A beggar is asking passers-by for a stimulus package. Limos with dark windows cruise by. Excitement levels are high: isn’t this a holiday? It’s an odd one if it is. Are we celebrating love in the middle of winter? I’m not seeing much that I would recognize as romance.

Holidays are platforms for the collective voice of a people to speak. So what are our holidays? I don’t mean the empty spots on the calendar, the long weekends and days to sleep in. I mean the ones we truly celebrate. In the U.S., would they be Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, July 4th, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s? With the exception of Thanksgiving and Christmas, they all look the same, don’t they? Get drunk and be loud. Throw in birthdays as another holiday, then. The two exceptions are sweet but tedious celebrations of family. Sure, there are people who commemorate MLK or Veteran’s Day, but they are usually bound by some experience or conviction that separates them from the herd.

So where is the mass civic mindedness that quotes poets, poets like Henry Timrod, who wrote,

Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause

though he himself is now memorialized by marble in a park on Broad Street in Charleston. He wrote these lines just before his death in 1867, about the laying of wreaths for the Confederate dead. The park is entirely devoted to Civil War memories, and is empty of visitors on the day I stop by. Aside from the monument to Timrod, there’s one to General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, who oversaw the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbor in April, 1861, the first engagement of the war. And there’s a column erected in memory of all the men who lost life’s breath in support of the Confederacy. A plaque declaims South Carolina’s motto, ‘Dum spiro, spero’, which means while I breathe, I hope.

‘Carolina!’ Timrod wrote at the beginning of the war,

Fling down thy gauntlet to the Huns,

And roar the challenge from thy guns;

Then leave the future to thy sons,

Across the street is St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, a church orginally founded in the late seventeenth century, though most of the current building dates to the mid-eighteenth century. Its graveyard is the real item of interest. Walk its peaceful grounds and gaze at stones carved centuries ago.

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies
By mourning beauty crowned!

Anyway, the graveyards are quiet now, and the monuments are unattended. Let’s head down to the mall for some brewskies.

Travelogue 260, February 5
Oysters and Gumbo

Howard corrects me immediately, before we’ve driven a mile. ‘They’re palmettos,’ he says with the smug authority of a local, though he’s only been living here for five years. I stand corrected. They’re not palm trees, they’re palmettos. It is the Palmetto State, after all. How callous am I? But really, the names are not what matters. What is outstandingly urgent right now is the GREEN. There is green grass by the side of the road. There are oak trees reaching over the road with branches full of green leaves. Moss – not so green this time of year – hangs from those branches like stockings blown from the clothesline. Sunshine warms my cheek through the car window.

It’s late afternoon, and Howard drives us straight to his favorite Mexican place, where he orders us two 46-ounce margaritas. We launch into reminiscences. It’s been six years since we’ve seen each other. The memories become funnier as the big, round glasses empty.

It’s night by the time we drive into downtown Charleston. We cross the Ashley River, over some sleeping yachts, and drive down the east side of the city’s central peninsula. We arrive at Battery Park and take a walk along the harbor-side. The water is calm. The night is wonderfully comfortable, with only the hint of a southern chill in the air – something Howard calls ‘cold’. What are the evening sights waterside in Charleston? To the left you’ll see the new Ravenel Bridge lit brightly, its cables spread like delicate fans. Behind you, you’ll enjoy a row of nineteenth century beauties, residences of the rich and genteel, all columns and balconies, Renaissance and Colonial, redolent of plantation culture. Out to sea, you’ll be able to pick out the lights of Fort Sumter, squatting out in the harbor, protecting memories of the war that still seems to define this city.

Walk east and you’ll enter the French Quarter, where the oldest architectural relics of Charleston stand firm against time, relics of the city that was one of the first ports of the British colonies, founded in 1670, and one of the biggest cities of the early republic. Keep going; you’ll find some nice bars and restaurants.

This vacation is destined to be a culinary excursion. Everything Southern, I want to try. That includes ‘Firefly’, an inimitably Charleston liquor: vodka brewed with iced tea. That includes grits and succotash with breakfast, and barbequed ribs for dinner. My favorite meal, consumed with delight on my last night in Charleston, is gumbo complemented by ‘oyster shooters’. An oyster shooter is a shot of vodka with a raw oyster, horse radish, and hot sauce. The bartender and Howard nearly had me convinced that I was supposed to slide the whole concoction down my throat without a gag, but these oysters are not the rubbery little nuggets I’m used to in northern ports. These are like whole eggs swimming in vodka and hot sauce. I savor each shot.

My second favorite meal is more than food. It’s sitting in the full afternoon sun on the highest deck of a bar called Red’s in Mt. Pleasant, set right beside Shem Creek, a wide, marshy creek that sluggishly flows toward the harbor. The meal is a basket of fried scallops and a basket of huge, delicious shrimp. Howard and I catch up on politics and religion, and we work our way through beers and food just about as slowly as the sun is dragged toward the earth. About five degrees from sunset, we clear out and drive to Sullivan’s Beach, crossing over the Intracoastal Waterway, which looks like any other creek in these marshy lands, just wider and straighter. Humble creek, it’s part of a venerable American institution that stretches uninterrupted from New Jersey to Texas.

Access to the beach is between rambling beach houses, wooden and bleached, and over some dunes populated with reeds and low scrub. The beach slopes down very gently to the calm ocean. Gentle describes everything about this landscape, flat and warm and watery. The view is not striking; its beauty is spacious and calming. The sands are not dazzling, tawny rather than white. The ocean is not sparkling, but dull and sleepy. We stroll contentedly among the wet sands for a mile or so, until we’re ready for the next meal.

Travelogue 259, January 26
One Piece at a Time, Part Three

I have a cold. I’m riding the bus downtown. The rarified atmosphere of slight fevers and sniffles awakens a sentiment in me like nostalgia. It’s been so many years since I’ve enjoyed the peculiar combination of deep winter and mass transit. The head cold makes it all shine with reflected contentment. ‘Such nice people!’

There’s a moment in deadest winter, in late January, after the bare bough of temperatures has swung slowly among chill breezes and white skies, below zero and back up to twenty, below zero and above, when the still soul of the winter citizen surrenders. I walk up the sidewalk, clotted with hard snow and old ice, crunchy with salt, and I look for the sun, hanging low over the apartment blocks already at four. I breathe the crisp air deeply into my lungs. It feels so clean. Above is the wan and distressed blue of space, and I feel the power of the cold. It could void the atmosphere and carry us all away. And like Jehovah or Winston Smith I declare it good. That breath of refrigerated air connects me to moments spanning many winters, all before I ever went to Ethiopia. I love it.

Or so it seems in the sentiment of my cold, and the sentiment of the moment. At any given time, one is suspended in a value that seems absolute, even as it’s changing. Winter is peaking, and soon it will break. The winter citizen’s resolve breaks with the first thaw. So, what’s reality then, the sentiment or the facts? Which is the real life you’ve led, the nostalgic one or something objective?

A black woman on the bus has bought a sketch of Obama today, and it lies in her lap. Just about every person sitting nearby has to comment on the portrait. ‘Is that Obama?’ She doesn’t mind conversing. She tells about the artist, who was at the Inauguration. She talks about Obama. ‘I have four sons. For the first time, I feel like things will be all right for them. There’s been so much negativity.’ That statement is heart-warming.

Then somehow the discussion turns to O.J. ‘Nobody talking about Nicole, about all her boyfriends. If she been black, nobody of cared. It’s like Michael Jackson. We grew up with him! We know he didn’t do that.’ An Asian guy takes a seat. ‘You heard about the Obama clone?’ There’s a look-alike from Indonesia doing the rounds of talk shows. ‘Could be his brother!’

What will history say? That Obama had a look-alike in Indonesia? That he vindicated O.J. and Michael? If these represent the hopes and dreams of a nation, who am I to protest?

They say that one heyday of the jigsaw puzzle was the era of the Depression. Cardboard puzzles were cheap, and they could be swapped with other families. It was a fun activity that absorbed time in the evenings, and it was something to entertain everyone in the home. It was educational for the kids. Make a picture; make the world whole again.

In the 60s, during times of prosperity, the lords of puzzles came up with the hardest one ever: a thousand-piece jigsaw of Jackson Pollock’s painting ‘Convergence’. What makes it difficult is the high degree of abstraction, the colors twisting round upon themselves, the chaos of paint.

Bob, our puzzle master, tries his hand at the Convergence puzzle. He turns over the piece, enjoying the bright colors. He tries to match it in a dozen, a couple dozen places. The next day, there’s another piece. It’s a labor of months, but he does finish. When it’s done, Bob stares at the completed piece for long stretches. He returns to it for several days and stares at it, but he never once brandishes the fist. He can make out nothing there to break up. Instead, he takes it apart one evening, piece by piece, and puts in back in the box.

Travelogue 258, January 21
One Piece at a Time, Part Two

Is it just me or is there new purpose in everyone’s step, a confident smile on people’s lips, a spark in the eyes? I think people are happy. More than that, the world makes sense again. Work is joyful when the world makes sense. Our new president said last night, ‘there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.’

And here we all are, moving through the city like adults again, it seems to me, with strength and purpose. And doing so despite the dreary fog and wet snow-drizzle. Who says politics don’t matter? The human psyche responds to challenges. Human societies respond to leadership that makes order of chaos.

Bob’s working his puzzle again, rubbing the smooth side of a piece with his finger, turning it over to see the rough, grey cardboard of the other side, turning it again to examine the picture. The piece is a picture in itself. It’s a fragment torn from a few green boughs, shaken by the wind, and behind them a distant mountain crevasse. He contemplates it, a story all its own.

Bob slowly lowers the piece. It will join the greater perspective, a photo of a fine chateau, but first Bob must turn the rounded extremities so they match, sort of like a safecracker might turn the dial. It fits, and he gently pats it down. When the puzzle is finished, he will invite staff to admire it; he will warm his roommates away from it. Then one day, when he seems to be lost in meditation of the chateau’s grandeur, he will suddenly slam a fist into the tabletop and the pieces will jump. He will look at the disorder with astonishment.

Puzzles are made for this, aren’t they, as much as for cognitive processing? They lend a child power over chaos. He or she becomes Brahma and Shiva, unleashing chaos, curbing it, unleashing it, and healing it. What better fun than to create universes, and then rub them out?

It seems fitting that the first jigsaw puzzles manufactured for commercial consumption were wooden maps, cut apart into their constituent kingdoms. Yes, it teaches proper geography, but it also allows Bob’s fist effect. France will border Russia now: I declare it so!

Obama says it’s time to join the world community again. The fist has had its day. Now comes the fun of putting pieces back in order. He warns to fellow leaders: ‘your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.’ He acclaims ‘sturdy alliances’. He commits to peace in the Middle East at the beginning of his administration, rather than as a legacy ploy. Hmm. Enter little boy Brahma.

I start Inauguration Day in an unlikely place. I’m to address the Rotary Club in Maple Grove, a suburb I would label Republican. Mercifully, not a word is spoken about politics, though I do have to struggle through the Pledge of Allegiance, and ‘America the Beautiful’.

It turns out to be a commendable group: lively, caring, and thoughtful. As I watch the sun rise outside the window of Champps, sports bar chain, regular Rotary Club meeting place, and purveyor of bland breakfast buffets, the meeting moves through its weekly rituals. I’ve noticed there are teenagers in the meeting. I find out, first, that there are junior Rotarians in this club. Bravo! And I discover that the club finances a program in one of the large local high schools in which select juniors and seniors are recruited into a school club, the entire purpose of which is to welcome incoming sophomores. (Sophomore year is the first year in this school.) They learn sophomore’s names and make themselves available for support during school days.

They demonstrate a name game, gathering the Rotarians in circles. It’s a fast-moving game with one person in the middle. Everyone’s laughing, and the teens are the bosses. After the demonstration, one senior Rotarian stands up and tells the teens that when he graduated from their school, there were 33 in his class. They find this amazing. The pieces have reunited, seniors and sophomores, teens and elders. It’s remarkably harmonious and hopeful.

Outside, the sun has risen. I’m alone and set adrift among miles square of new malls and meandering roads in good repair. I’m reminded of the time years ago when Troy and I got off on the wrong exit when we saw a movie theater that looked exactly like the one we were aiming for. We watched the movie at the same time we had intended to, and didn’t realize we were in the wrong place until the ride back. They say the hardest jigsaw puzzles to solve are the ones without pictures, or where details echo in mirror-like repetition. I wander a while, looking for the highway. Steam rises from the parking lots, as the sun climbs higher overhead. The roads are luxurious, wide and clean. I find the signs; I’m guided on.

Travelogue 257, January 10
One Piece at a Time, Part One

So life is a jigsaw puzzle that solves itself, one piece at a time. How does the great puzzle amuse itself? I can’t say. I’ve never been a puzzle. But I can travel in my mind back to when I worked at the group home, and I can watch Bob. He has something to teach us about puzzles.

I would check in on Bob while he sat for hours at his jigsaw puzzle, and the rest of us watched TV or cooked or cleaned. He would take one piece in his shaky fingers and examine it. And his examination was thorough. I don’t know what he was measuring, but it was profound. He would glance at the puzzle, and then study the piece some more. There was a tenderness to his attentions.

Let’s just say, taking a page from the Book of Bob, that there’s beauty in the piece itself. It’s just fun to pick it up and turn it over and over. It is a wonder of engineering all on its own, popped out of the picture like cookies from dough. Then we measure the piece against the sum and ponder where it might fit in. There’s one place for it. The tabletop world won’t be complete without it. And then there’s the joy of its fusion into the panorama, not to mention the satisfaction of pushing the piece in snugly. So we have piece, method, and the wide lens.

For example, how did I live in Minnesota for so many years without ever ice skating? I grew up in LA; it wasn’t on most kids’ agendas. But, living here, I knew that I would have to concede to winter and some day pick up a snow-and-ice activity. My first choice was always ice skating. It’s graceful. It’s fast or slow, simple or showy, as you like. It looks like roller skating, which I often did in San Francisco.

But beginning was like an ugly initiation. Locals would explain at length how tricky it is. The hardest thing to do is to stand up. You’ll probably break your ankles. And be prepared to fall: often and hard. Frankly, the falling part didn’t intimidate me. It sounded fun. But I’d rather keep my ankles, thank you. And the trouble with winter sports is that you have to go out in the cold. And you have to arrange for equipment.

The teacher wants to learn ice skating. Who will teach the teacher? Why, a student, of course. Toward the end of this semester, I happened to mention in class that I had never ice skated. To a Minnesotan, I suppose that is tragic. One of my students graciously offers to take me. In a friendly and noncommittal way, I say it sounds nice. Yes, yes, we must do that. She brings it up a few times, and finally I think, why not?

It’s New Year’s Day. The sun is bright. Temperatures are hanging around 20. Kayla has brought two pair of skates. She says a friend of hers works at a sporting goods store. I’m cheerful and feeling very ready. We drive around the city looking for ice rinks outdoors. We drive first by Peavey Plaza downtown. I remember there being a rink there. But because we’re passing on Eleventh Street, I can’t see anyone. We drive on. There’s nothing at Loring Park. We drive up behind the Walker and through Kenwood to Lake of the Isles. We see the figures on ice as we come down the hill.

Lake of the Isles has one slender finger that points toward downtown. Somewhere around the knuckle this finger is transformed into a rink. Today, there’s a crowd. We park beside one of the mansions that line this happy lake. We march down through the snow to lakeside. Here’s where I get nervous. I stare at the surface of the ice, and suddenly the concept makes no sense. My eyes tell me it can be done; there are children out there skating. But common sense tells me the human body wasn’t made for this.

But I do it. I step shakily onto the surface. As JC counsels, ‘Except ye become as a little child,’ and so on. So I do, and I find myself coasting along, with my arms outstretched and my legs wobbling. I haven’t broken my ankles! In fact, I’m able to slide my feet a little from side to side and move forward. It’s exhilarating! I lean into it and find a way to build up speed. I’m cruising around just fine! Okay, so I’m hanging on to my balance only by jerking and flailing like I have a nervous disorder, and so I do take a few spectacular spills; I’m ice skating!

One’s perspective changes on the ice. For one thing, the ice itself is like another world. One or two of my spills may be attributable to ice hypnosis, staring down into the blackness, charting the sharp lines of cracks. It’s fascinating.

Above the ice, things go on like they have in Minnesota for many years. Parents are teaching their little ones how to skate. Boys are dashing around with hockey sticks. Nothing I haven’t seen, but now I’m among them. The motion of the boys playing hockey is mesmerizing. How do they do that? I wave my arms around like I’m on a tightrope, but inside I’m contemplating: here’s another piece of the world. And Minnesota is a little more complete. That night, at the bar, I’m watching the hockey game with new eyes.

Travelogue 256, December 27
Spinning Wheel, Part Four

Winter wears a different face every day.
Yesterday temperatures rose to 37 and then dropped back below freezing at night, so now the sidewalks are a mess. I must get out for a morning walk, but it’s not a walk. It’s a shuffle, slide, slide, shuffle.

The sky is overcast, but aside from having to negotiate the frozen soup, it’s a pleasant day. The city has come back to life. We have returned from the abyss of miraculous birth, and we hold steady our course toward salvation.

I very slowly wend my way to Lake Street. I’ve been hanging out at the Midtown Global Market at the corner of Lake and Chicago. It’s the perfect distance for a winter walk, and the market is colorful. It inhabits the old Sears building, which has dominated this stretch of Lake Street since 1928, a brown brick monolith of Chicago art deco that was abandoned by the Sears company in 1994. A local group of community organizations was allowed to redevelop the site, and the Global Market opened in 2006.

Inside, you walk among the stalls. You’ve got your coffee and sweets shops. You’ve got your restaurants of every flavor. You’ve got your African and Latin and Asian goods. You’ve got Mexican groceries. It’s divertido for the whole family.

Renan has followed Jesus to the River Jordan, where he meets up with John the Baptist. Followers of each gather on coffee breaks, and exchange tips on pleasing God. John and Jesus are roughly the same age, but John has the edge in fire, following, and history. Jesus studies his friend; there’s much to learn. Jesus has created a buzz among the religious communities in northern Israel, and the Jordan becomes his Rubicon. Is it time to step into the hot spotlight, or shall he return to the peaceful Sea of Galilee where he can grow old as the friendly local rabbi and guru? It’s an unforgiving business, though. How long can one pooh-pooh the national circuit as a preacher before the locals begin to wonder about you? It isn’t long before Salome has her way with the young Baptiste, and Jesus is the obvious heir. From there, events accelerate.

Christ is born, and I’m already thinking about Easter. I’m wondering about those three heady, feverish years, the years of his ministry. We’re probably not supposed to speculate what Jesus might have felt, but I can’t help feeling some compassion.

I’m thinking about this movie, ‘Milk’. If comparing Jesus’s life with that of a gay activist doesn’t get me shot, I’m not sure what will, but really: if it helps me to understand or feel compassion, then what’s the sin? Sean Penn, of course, does a marvelous job portraying the big-hearted man whose eyes are open to suffering, and whose every action in the interest of others leads him toward his destruction. Eventually, his path leads him into the spotlight of public life. Once you’re in that arena, it seems like your life is less and less your own. Your story belongs to a dozen others, and then a hundred, and then a thousand. You are borne forward on the feet of a mob, and there is barely time for a sigh.

This is where I say, as Voltaire might have done were he sitting at this laptop, ‘If there were no heaven, it would be necessary to invent one.’ I would wish for a place of rest and reflection for people like this. Isn’t that what lies behind our yearnings for a heaven? Isn’t it just the chance for a breath and a glance back over what we’ve done? Life eternal, our just reward, etc., fine, but I’d say the heart of the matter is simply reflection.

I’d like to summon that tunnel of light, and I’d like to be there when Jesus checks in. Now, I know a lot of people would say the same thing with malicious intent: ‘I want Jesus to see what he hath wrought, all the wars in his name, etc.’ But that’s not my intention. Time takes hold of him; events tumble one after another with dizzying speed. He stands firm, staying true to his teachings, and staying true to his disciples. The end comes quickly. Tears and applause. He gives them an encore. The house empties; all is silent. The rest is up to the disciples. That’s a scary thought, but it’s how it has to be. Okay, we turn toward the light. The dust settles. The mind quiets down. It’s Jesus’s turn in the screening room. What does he say? Is he happy with how everything went down, seen now in the light of heaven? Are there regrets – the picnics he missed, the noli me tangere thing, some hasty sermons, hasty resurrections, whatever? Would he wish he had had more time to think things through?

Oh well, it’s a private moment. Let’s leave him to his reflections. As the Muslims say, peace be upon him. There are some tasty enchiladas here at the Global Market to distract us. Bon appetit!

Travelogue 255, December 24
Spinning Wheel, Part Three

Winter wears a different face every day.
I have to venture out on Christmas Eve, if only to dilute the intense joy of the season. The forecasts had suggested clear skies and warming. The sky says something different, though by noon, there is some blue peeking through. I have no car, so today will be the test of our trusty bus system.

There’s a crowd waiting at the station at Lake and Chicago. We wait while our bus is lowered and a ramp unfolded for a woman in her little four-wheeler. There’s a problem with the ramp. It gets stuck at ninety degrees, blocking the bus door.

The driver works the ramp loose. That’s three minutes. She boards, and the bus driver straps her in. There’s another three minutes. We finally board. Two men sit behind me. This is their opening dialogue: ‘I’m eighty and I live alone.’ ‘I just got kicked out of my halfway house, and I’m homeless.’ We cruise along, one happy family of deprivation inside our bubble of conveyance, suspended inside a moment of warmth.

Six blocks later, it’s the four-wheeler’s stop. The ramp works fine, but the bus won’t go back into gear. The driver has to repeatedly lower and raise the right side of the bus. He looks into the mirror and says, ‘This is what we pay for.’ The homeless guy shouts, ‘Can you turn up the heat?’ He was hoping for a cozy nap on the bus.

‘So, America, poverty,’ he says in his monologue. I’m reaching back to that foreign film again, the one that showcases the dried up martial arts star. He gets a monologue in the middle of the movie. The story halts, he’s elevated into the set lighting, and he fills the screen. He feels he owes his audience an explanation. Where did he come from? How does he explain his success? ‘…stealing to eat,’ he’s saying, ‘stalking producers, actors, movie stars, going to clubs hoping to see a star with my pictures, karate magazines. It’s all I had. I didn’t speak English, but I did twenty years of karate. I used to be small and scrawny.’ These are his first steps toward Golgotha.

After the monologue he must be lowered back into the story, where the pitch of the movie plot carries him away immediately and effectively; the innocent led to sacrifice. The beast of narrative must be fed.

‘So, Galilee, poverty…’ Peeking in on the other JC, Renan sets a scene for us. ‘The North [of Israel] alone has made Christianity; Jerusalem, on the contrary, is the true home of … obstinate Judaism. … Galilee … was a very green, shady, smiling district, the true home of the Song of Songs…. The whole history of infant Christianity has become [thanks to the backdrop of Galilee] a delightful pastoral. A Messiah at the marriage festival – the courtezan and the good Zaccheus called to his feasts – the founders of the kingdom of heaven like a bridal procession ….’ Enter the star: ‘As often happens in very elevated natures, tenderness of the heart was transformed in him into an infinite sweetness, a vague poetry, and a universal charm. … Jesus had no visions; God did not speak to him as to one outside himself; God was in him; he felt himself with God.’

And we’re on our way to Golgotha. He sets out to preach. He sets out for the hills, the Sea, the River, leaving what was home. So what is shelter to those born under the symbol of JC? Maybe that’s what it’s all about: where you where you lay your head. Ambition comes home at the end of the day. JC never clocks out.

Our homeless guy on the bus is in for a disappointment. The bus route ends at Hennepin. There’s no time for a nap. He grumbles as he disembarks, and I’m a little disconcerted to see that he’s better dressed than I am. I shouldn’t complain. I mean, if anyone should have quality clothing, it’s the homeless person. But stylish, too? He starts pacing the station platform, waiting for the next state of suspense, and I’m on my way to browse a few warm spaces before everything closes. Fa la la.

Travelogue 254, December 20
Spinning Wheel, Part Two


Winter wears a different face every day.
Today it’s snowing all day long, piling up quickly in its quiet, pristine way. The average temperature for the day is six above. And on the day before the solstice, we have less than nine hours of daylight.

A certain friend and I – a friend who has requested anonymity, so let’s call her Rosanne – Rosanne and I have agreed to meet at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the afternoon. I decide to walk, so I put on my long underwear and my sturdy old Red Wing boots, and I launch out into the blizzard. It’s fun. The shredded sky is right on top of us. The roads are reduced to dirty ruts in the snow. For twenty minutes I am the king of snow. I am winter. But the wind is in my face, and I make it to the museum just in time. My chin and cheeks are bright red and numb.

The exhibit is a small one – prints and engravings by a variety of old-timers, Rembrandt, Matisse, and others from a smattering of eras, from the Renaissance to the 19th century. We’re ready to go to dinner before my body has completely warmed up. That’s all right; we’re driving. At least, that’s what I think.

Rosanne is directionally challenged. Fortunately, she has memorized the intersection where she has parked. Unfortunately, she hasn’t memorized her car yet. I direct us to the intersection. ‘There it is!’ she cries, and we stand at the driver’s door, jiggling the key in the lock. It won’t open.

It’s common enough that locks freeze in these temperatures and, since I believe her when she declares this is her car, we make a quick call to AAA. They say it will take them an hour, so we start walking. The nearest decent restaurant is about six blocks away. The snow is diminishing and the temperatures are dropping quickly. I’m suffering. By the time we reach the restaurant, my face is raw and my body aches. I have been overthrown as king of winter.

We sit in the restaurant for a good long time before I’m willing to move, so we miss the early show time for our movie. (The AAA called and said the lock was fine. Of course it was!)

Wait. Before I review tonight’s movie, I have to recommend another one that is still on my mind. (Yes, I’ve been seeing a lot of movies. It’s Christmas time.) In this one, a famous martial arts movie star plays himself in a kind of fictional biopic that is both funny and sorrowful, and well worth seeing.

There’s a monologue in the middle of the movie that’s winning acclaim for the ageing athlete. Who knew he could act? It’s a bit mawkish in the style of a middle-aged alcoholic, but it’s heart-felt and dispatched in one cut that segues seamlessly into the next. He’s a pro. He was born to it. Is it because he was baptized with the initials J.C. that he is born to rule – though he was born a Libra like myself, and not a solstice Capricorn? Is it the season that makes the man, or the initials in his name? ‘When you’re thirteen,’ he says in the monologue, though more elegantly in his native tongue, ‘you believe in your dream. It’s not my fault if I was cut out to be a star. I asked for it, really believed in it. It came true for me.’ ‘I’m a citizen of the world,’ he says.

I’m led to think of the real J.C., J.C. the First, or J.C. fils, as we must always know him – son of Man and God alike. It’s his season, Son of Winter, so I’ve been reading The Life of Jesus by the nineteenth-century philologist, Ernest Renan. Renan’s book was published in France with great controversy in the year 1863. His humble goal was to write a ‘history’, rather than a work of devotion, so he analyzes and compares texts, and he edits out miracles because he wishes ‘to make the observations of facts our groundwork.’ His technique made him notorious. It also made him the hero of a generation of scholars.

Renan writes beautifully; his prose is strong even in translation. He has this to say about Jesus: ‘God, conceived simply as Father, was all the theology of Jesus. … He did not preach his opinions; he preached himself. … This exaltation of self is not egotism; for such men, possessed by their idea, give their lives freely, in order to seal their work; it is the identification of self with the object it has embraced, carried to its utmost limit. It is regarded as vain-glory by those who see in the new teaching only the personal phantasy of the founder; but it is the finger of God to those who see the result. The fool stands side by side here with the inspired man; only the fool never succeeds.’

Be the winter, I tell myself, as we trek back to the car. Be the winter. But the winter is being me, instead. I’m a hollow shell by the time we get there, burning on the outside, unconscious on the inside. ‘There’s my car!’ Rosanne, you realize that’s not the car we tried to open earlier. ‘It is so.’ Be the winter, be the winter.

Travelogue 253, December 19
Spinning Wheel, Part One

Winter wears a different face every day.
12.13 I’m out with my soul mate on a little promenade. The skies have relented and allowed us a thaw of 37 degrees. We’ve made our way down to the river. It’s a lovely day. The sun behind those permanent clouds radiates benignly, to such a degree that light meters are triggered and street lights switch off. It radiates from its noontime high, just above the treetops, its vague white glow finally topping that of Tycho Brahe’s famous supernova of 1572.

Arm in arm, metaphorically speaking, we step lightly across the university’s pedestrian bridge, gazing down at the friendly Mississippi. It’s as though we’re cruising at high altitude above Greenland, studying the effects of carbon emissions. Old Man Water’s stern complexion is crackling from the thaw. The ice is fracturing in jagged, baby-blue lines. The surface becomes complex, chunks of ice beginning to jostle in slow motion where angry blue-black water struggles for breath, while smooth snow sweats peacefully over the quieter waters of the river’s elbows.

We’re on our way to the doctor’s office in Dinkytown. We have taken a terrible spill together on the ice a few days previously, and now my mate’s gears are not working properly. The doctor works in a tiny, crowded shop in Dinkytown. He comes to the counter, wiping his greasy hands on a hand towel. ‘May I help you?’ It only takes a minute: a bit of fine work with a screwdriver, and we are coasting happily back across the bridge.

That night I see ‘The Day the Condor Stood Still’ by Keanu Reeves. It’s a forgettable movie, though I can still picture Keanu staring sternly-blankly-quizzically at me and the human race. But isn’t that simply because he has stared at us that way in so many movies? The film did leave me with one question. If he came to earth to save the planet from the human race, why would he change his mind when he sees a human mother embrace her son, or when he listens to human music? What does that prove? Humans take care of each other: he knows that. Maybe if Will Smith’s little boy (who needs a few more acting lessons, if you ask me) had saved Bambi from Dick Cheney that might logically call for revisiting the mission. Otherwise, hit ‘delete’!

More interesting is Keanu on Letterman, which I catch a few nights later. Does anyone recall seeing Keanu smile? There’s a reason for that: he has smoker’s teeth. And it comes to me: we have elected Keanu Reeves. Obama smokes. Obama is Hawaiian. Obama stares coldly and speaks woodenly sometimes. Yes, he does. He’ll never play an alien as well as Keanu, but he does. And they both speak in the same halting, resonant bass. It will be a most excellent eight years.

12.14 I’m in a café for exactly one hour just after midday. When I emerge, the sidewalk is icy. I look at the bank’s clock and thermometer. The temperature has dropped twelve degrees while I was indoors! You have to walk with sliding steps. Cars are sliding to and fro.

By nightfall, we’ve hit zero Farhenheit. In the morning, the final set of winter body memories are released: the way your nose hairs freeze when you breathe; the tension as you listen to the ignition whine; the way everything crackles; the panicky feeling after only a few hundred yards across the parking lot: your fingers are stinging, even inside the gloves. The sky looks metallic and unfriendly. Ah, yes: it all comes back to me.

Travelogue 252, December 9
Christmas Heroes

I do battle. Indoors, I face down the Christmas music. And if once in a while, the somber ones like Silent Night or Little Drummer Boy elicit a tear – it HAS been five years since I’ve been in America for Christmas, after all, – well, I swallow it back and I grit my teeth. I will not give in to the despair inherent in it all. I am bigger than that. March a hundred Santas by me; launch a thousand cartoon classics against me; sound a million tinkling chimes, I will not buckle.

Outdoors, I stand firm against the persistent dirty white: the blank clouds day after day, the slushy piles, the unrelenting temperatures in the teens. It takes about five minutes or more just to dress for going outside – more if I’ll be traveling by bike. I patiently spend the time necessary getting the car ready for motion: warming up, brushing snow off the windshield, chiseling through any ice, waiting for the defroster to clear the fog on the inside of the windows.

I enjoy complaining to Menna in Ethiopia about my cold weather travails. She’s never felt temperatures remotely Minnesotan, and never seen snow. Meanwhile, Ethiopia is in its finest season, with clear blue skies and mild temperatures.

However, my good news is: the temperatures and the snow do not stop the worthy progress of Education in America. We do not waver, pause, or whimper before the white tide of menace, (nor red and green one, either).We take tests.

I have a contribution to make to the study of group psychology, or of group thaumaturgy. It is a mystery. In a lapse of discipline, or in a fit of sentimental weakness, I stop and look over a lost one’s messy paper. I point my pen to the question, suggest a re-assessment, guide again to the appropriate passage in the reading. On my next round, she has the correct answer. And so does everyone else. I swear I’m watching them. I swear! This particular class is composed almost entirely of kids who knew each other in high school. There’s a bond of telepathic swindling among them.

It’s in this class that young Mr. B is submitted to an unusual rite of repentance. Young Mr. B has missed a test, and he soberly informs me he will miss another. Young Mr. B is a massive boy with pink cheeks and the blue-eyed stare of a Boy Scout listening to ghost stories. He studies criminal justice. Why did he miss the first test? ‘I slept in. … I swear I did!’

‘Do you hear that class?’ I say. ‘He slept in.’ There are catcalls. Why is he missing the next test? Because he’s having surgery on his overgrown knee. ‘Hm! What do you say, class? Shall we let him make up these tests?’ His classmates insist that he leave the room while they deliberate. Young Mr. B sits on a bench in the hallway, bent over clasped hands. We gather around the classroom door’s little window and laugh at him. He is absolved.

Brittany is in the same class. She’s excited because she got called for an informational interview at a Minneapolis music college. She wants to be a music agent. She looks as though she might once have been goth, and it takes a long time to purge. But she has wonderfully clear and innocent blue eyes. She also has a twitch, like a sudden, slight nod.

She tells me she’s scared. She has heard that Minneapolis is dangerous. ‘I’ve heard of this place called Broadway,’ slight pause with a teenage questioning tone, and a twitch of the head, ‘where people are always getting shot …’, another questioning note. Young Mr. B chimes in with tales of mayhem from his student rides with Minneapolis cops that sound to me like skits from the Simpsons: there’s a bus load of drunks that arrive at a bar at closing time, and they start a riot when they can’t buy drinks. There’s a cell phone left to recharge in a car that prompts a bomb scare. We’re well past reassuring Brittany.

The only real solution is the strategic use of funny sound effects. Several of the students in my evening class bring laptops instead of dictionaries – weren’t you asking me how today’s students differ from students five years ago? Incredible as it may seem, one of my students doesn’t know what a loon is – a loon! the Minnesota state bird!

Sidebar: as many of you already know, the Mansi, an indigenous people in Siberia, believe that it was a pair of loons who brought mud from the bottom of the primeval waters to create the earth’s land masses.

In order to bring that ancient, magical moment to life for the class, I insist that one of my laptop boys retrieve the cry of the loon. It was either that or listen to Cody continue to imitate it over and over again.

There’s one more occasion for the laptop’s services that evening, when we read an excerpt from a story that features characters dancing the waltz. In response to the frightening assertion by one student that the waltz is the same as the Texas two-step, I instructed my laptop pilot to bring up a Polish waltz. The entire class stares at the machine as though we are receiving Morse Code from the sinking Titanic.

‘It is NOT the Texas two-step,’ I declare and shut the book for the evening, satisfied that at least one significant lesson has been delivered on that day.

Travelogue 251, December 5
Pins and Needles

The day starts with news on the car radio. The car, by the way, is Alison’s very nice Honda Civic, which she has kindly lent me while she is in Europe. It’s a luxury, a car that runs so well, and poses besides a powerful and profound koan: is it green or is it blue? That is a most impressive feat of modern technology: an object that works but eludes naming at such a fundamental level.

The radio sure works. The first item of news today is that all ballots have been tallied in the recount in our Senate race – all except 133 ballots from one Minneapolis precinct. Mine. Out of 4,132 precincts in Minnesota, 133 ballots were lost at the University Lutheran Church of Hope in Dinkytown.

I know mine is among the shipwrecked ballots. It is out reading the stars, searching for true north, exploring the desert island. I feel it, my disembodied voice, its ardent Democratic song stilled.

The next item on the radio is a new high in unemployment. After that is looming budget cuts across the board in education. The journalist really wants to zoom in on higher education. Colleges like the one I’m teaching for are in for stormy weather, she insists. I think she even mentions my tenuous temporary position by name.

That’s all right. My job – extinct as my ballot, apparently – has been heavy lifting. Students are awakening to the semester’s end, and to the dire state of their grades. Finals are coming, and that leads to more complaining: ‘You didn’t’ and ‘I can’t’. I say, ‘Gee whiz,’ and ‘Oh by gosh, by golly,’ my morale chilled by the radio-prophet’s approaching abyss.

The day gets better, though. Margaret has given me the gift of an appointment with her acupuncturist. Her name is Jala. She is pretty, and she speaks very slowly. I’ve always wanted to try acupuncture. If I believe in any metaphysics of the body, it’s the idea that there are streams of energy running through the human apparatus, cascading smoothly or blocked up behind ugly beaver dams, according to each individual case.

The part about the needles I haven’t figured out yet, but I’m certainly open to any new concept that smacks so charmingly of the Absurd. I imagine myself with fine whisker-like needles standing from my skin, and I laugh.

Today, the vision is realized, and I do indeed laugh. It’s a good day when a healthy action is cause for a giggle. I’m not sure Jala shares in my amusement, or even notices it. Her serenity seems impenetrable. Maybe Serenity resides within the eye of the Absurd, and therefore all humor is invisible. Or maybe Serenity breathes humor like oxygen and needs no external show of enjoyment. Either way, I’m not being Serene when I laugh, and in fact it stings a little if I jiggle one of those needles.

I lie with needles in me, a kind of temporary cyborg, enhanced by chi. But I can only use my super powers in repose, which actually suits me quite well. Aside from a passing headache, I experience no effects from the needles, no buzz beyond the simple fun of it. I’m either too obtuse or too backed up with beaver dams for subtle, esoteric cures.

The day ends with another wade into Wes’s fan pool. He’s gigging as much as possible this winter in order to plug his CD. Tonight it’s Big V’s. That’s a seedy, old-time bar on University in the Midway, famous among Wes’s friends for a raucous gig some eight to ten years ago, when a guy with a fresh hatchet wound in the back of his head was trying to mack on our friend Therese.

There’s a quality to the nights in December, a kind of dream-like timelessness. It’s been darks for hours and hours by the time you go out for the night’s entertainment. You float along slushy streets, among your layers of clothing, as though you’ve set out for Russia and you’ll be traveling for months. Everything is the color of street lamps and neon.

The highlights of the evening are Wes’s performance, as strong as I’ve ever heard, and pounding Roxana in foosball. Okay, so that doesn’t require much. Okay, so Wes defeats me until he’s bored. My men have trouble tracking the ball, striking out in sychronized, swinging kicks long after the ball has sailed by, often after the clunk that signals the opponent’s score. But, hey, by the time we reach Russia, my moves will be smooth, smooth, smooth.

Travelogue 250, November 30
Elliott Park

I’m just a block or two away from my neighborhood, the one I want to live in. My address is on Elliott Avenue, so I had assumed I was in Elliott Park. If I’d only landed on the other side of the highway, I’d be there.

That’s Interstate 94 I’m speaking of, the muscle-bound silver river god separating me from downtown. Yes, the cold, white water 94 that conveys me to work every morning. When I get up, I glance out the window to measure the mood of the insomniac beast, watching the tops of trucks being swept along by the flood.

This morning, when I look, Nature’s pulled a prank. I’d been looking forward to a brisk Sunday morning cycle ride at first light through empty downtown streets. But snow has fallen. Everything’s white. My will fails me.

The streets are dry yesterday when I get my urban geography lesson. There’s a café just down Portland, across the great river bed, Father of Carbons, down Portland to Tenth Street. It has an inviting green awning among anonymous, barren blocks of proud new housing and stuttering old housing, all of them signs of the neighborhood’s fortunes.

Apparently, the café is a kind of hinge between old and new. Things were a lot better five years ago, says the café’s co-owner, who is working the counter. She classifies herself as a hippie. Five years ago, Elliott Park stood up to a hippie’s most stringent standards: diversity, arts, a history of neighborhood action, and a lot of potential for improvement.

She looks the part of a hippie, with untamed graying hair, frumpy sweater, and sleepy ways. The café features a tiny, ad hoc shop, partitioned off by its displays, where you can buy locally crafted, beaded and knitted gifts.

There are shelves of used books along the length of one wall. There’s a small stage with a piano in one corner by the window. On most days, the main feature onstage is a TV, usually tuned into permanent jazz. Today it features the concert to celebrate John Mayall’s seventieth birthday party five years ago. Mick Taylor makes a sullen appearance. Clapton shows up. On and on it goes.

So the hippie and friends open this café. They join the Elliott Park community organization. They are players in the heyday of Renaissance planning for this historic district, neglected for so many years, after it was stage-by-stage walled off from the rest of downtown – by General Hospital, which grew into the huge county medical center; by our glorious interstate; and finally by the Metrodome.

Integral to revitalization plans were a couple high-profile condo high-rises. Sadly, condos were everyone’s antidote for the neighborhood blues. So, while the first building has turned out very nicely, and adds a warm touch to a southern view of the skyline, sales in the second development, (right across the street from our café, coincidentally,) have slumped. These days, the café-owner has a dim view of the state of the neighborhood.

She has no plans to move out. In fact, she’s shopping a plan for a non-profit to be based in Elliott Park. This will be called ‘SOMA’, Sounds of Mid-America, and it will be ‘a non-profit museum founded to recognize, celebrate and preserve the diverse music community of Middle America’. It will be home to classes, events and archives.

Let’s wish her well. More power to our cities’ forgotten neighborhoods.

Travelogue 249, November 23
The Shade of Dharma at Dusk

It’s dark by five. The clouds are brooding in week-long fits. Temperatures hold at prime number 29. Flurries come and go. Snow stuck just once, yesterday. I wobbled through it on my bike, happy it was melting.

When darkness gathers and moods are plunging, head down Eleventh Avenue. A swarm of crows is swirling chaotically over the park in front of the restored Strutwear Building on 7th Street, pausing in the bare branches only to launch again. They’re calling to some unsanitary power.

Holidays are approaching while sunshine and warmth retreat. The winter star of stoic duty rises, and we hunker down into our fates. Our lives are grim shadows of the super-ego at our shoulders.

After one of my Tuesday classes, a clownish kid named Nicky lingers after the others dash out. He hunches forward with a shit-eating grin, hands in his pockets, and he issues giggling insults at me. He has no audience. I don’t understand. ‘Is there something on your mind?’ I ask him, sitting wearily on the edge of my desk. He giggles, looking at his shoes, and delivers another mumbled insult. ‘Right. I’ve got to get going now, Nicky.’ He finds that hilarious. I pat him on the back and turn out the lights as we depart.

Wednesdays start with the class lost in slack-jawed trance, moves into my Mardi Gras class in which the bright-eyed gay couple ask if it’s time to undress, tumbles into the roar of my pre-lunch Homecoming bunch, and rounds off with the too-dark-for-Goth young’uns and their frank confessions of talk-show-standard bathos.

Thursday, the one angry rash hanging on as a caution from Hell is changing colors from instant to instant like a TV during solar flares. I watch it with wonder and dread instead of working, while the crows call down the Furies outside.

While I’m counting the foundation’s dwindling pennies, contemplating my life in the afterglow of the dreary demiday, Menna is stranded in Bahir Dar waiting for father farmers who break appointments with our lawyer, stalling the process to create for them a non-profit entity for their own advocacy. We hope that NGO status will get them land, more schools, and work. When Menna first visits the school that we’ve funded, she’s shepherded off the premises by an unfamiliar ‘supervisor’. She waits.

And yes, I’m contemplating my life. I have space! That means a large subletted living space to myself, where I can pull together my possessions, condensed into boxes carrying five years of dust from several friends’ houses. It’s an odd experience to exhume the past this way. It seems like the first time my gaze back through time has broken through the barrier of Leeza’s passing. Feelings are released, as though from jars unsealed.

I think about Leeza. Ours was a romance born in November, now that I think of it. I’m finding notebooks from our time together, thoughts and daily events and dreams like notes from beyond my grave. I’m collecting and arranging them, and I’m haunted by a story: Leeza and I dream about Ethiopia. In the dream, children gather in a schoolyard, singing and clapping their hands. It seems so real. I’d like to record it.

Travelogue 248, November 7
Vessels of Porcelain

Kayla is one of my students at the college. She’s telling us how she went to a strip club for her birthday. She has pictures of her lap dance. The boys are telling hunting stories. They have lots of absences this semester because of all the season openers. Kyle shows me photos of the carcasses. This is Kyle who writes in the margin of his test, ‘Hitler wanted change, too’. Pretty Samantha wants to tell us about scraping the poop out of a dead deer’s anus. I ask wide-eyed Katya is she’s happy she immigrated from Russia.

These are the suburban 18 and 19 year-olds of our time. Journal paragraphs are harrowing to read, not so much for their stories as for the consistency in the story elements: drug rehab, violence at home, a restless wheel of trivial employment and trivial passions. And there’s a strange innocence about what happens in a classroom, an almost charming void where once might have been reserve or dignity. Grades are too abstract, and the classroom is fundamentally no different than any other room: part of the revolving set for frivolous conversations.

But I have to admit that I do enjoy them, and it’s precisely because they are so innocent. They would like to include me in their rumpus room fun. Their smiles are warm and eager, and admit no resentment. When I scold, it rings false. There’s a note of indulgence. There’s recognition. In America, we’re all jokers. It’s why God loves us best.

Cassie stands unsteadily before us, and declares, “I’m twenty-one! Can you believe it?” No one in the bar can, to judge by their vocalizations. She sways before us, grinning silently for another ten seconds before a male friend leads her away to the other side of bar, where she doesn’t hear the band’s tribute to her, changing the name of the protagonist in their song, ‘Meg Likes the Weed.’

The band is Scottie’s. The night is Wes’s. Wes is releasing a CD and he’s lined up four bands, including his own, for the celebration. It’s Northeast Minneapolis on a gloomy night of icy rain. I’ve biked across town again. I’m happy. The crowd, the music, and the gin are cheering.

Scottie’s band is guitar, bass, drums, and … oboe. Scottie’s girlfriend is on guitar. She disappears during solos: the plug to her amp keeps falling out of the wall. She’s a good player when she’s plugged in. She was the nun in a band of local repute, the Sandwiches. My favorite song of this band’s is ‘Some people are dumb.’ The next band is a young trio with lots of energy. The bass player has an instrument crafted by a violin-maker. It has a pretty scrolling head at the top of its long, sleek neck. Wes’s band, the Middle States comes out of the gate at 12:30 rocking. They have a powerful and likeable sound. It’s Friday night, and Wes sings about Friday night. There’s a girl leaning against the pool table mouthing the words.

At that late hour, everything is a still life, especially the music, like a wave caught rolling through the bar’s dim light and the haze of everyone’s alcohol. Time is blessedly compromised. It could be any year, and nothing has ever happened in life. This is Stasiu’s, one of those working class bars in Northeast, small and cozy, where the drinks are strong and cheap. Everything looks like Christmas colors now. Maybe it’s the glimpses of snow outside.

Stasiu’s has two of the most impressive urinals in town, monoliths of porcelain, massive. Scottie says they’re from a train station. I make Todd take a photo of them for me on his iPhone. I tell everyone I want my ashes to be sent into space inside one of those urinals.

The sound is finished, and I find myself back on the bicycle, chill wind in my face. Icy pellets strike my cheeks. The sky is no color. It’s the void, gathering up all our breath in swirling blue vapors. But the new 35W bridge is lit brightly with turquoise. That’s a cheery sight just for me as I labor across the Stone Arch Bridge, the catastrophic sound of the waterfall on my right. On the other side of the river is the midnight blue of the sleek walls of the Guthrie. The playwrights are stern, their faces blown up into photographic walls. And next door, in the new park, the benches glow with cobalt lamps inside. I’m huffing and puffing home through a silent, capsized season. When I make it, my cheeks are damp and red. I look at the clock in my mirror.

Travelogue 247, October 31
Hallo, Eve

It’s Halloween, and winter has withdrawn under fire from summer’s rear guard. We gather at the graves of the martyrs in shirtsleeves, and we remark that terror has less bite among the mild breezes. But season of terror it is. Why did the Founding Fathers choose a time when the ghosts are walking for elections? It must be a message.

The martyrs we honor are benevolent Saints Humor and Humble. I’ve taken to telling people that I’m voting for Palin. It would be the act of an aesthete. She’s perfect. She defeats the imagination. She’s archetype and transcendent being, an incarnation of the Absurd. I’ve suggested to her campaign that we make her the centerpiece of a new American Existentialist Party, APE. The acronym doesn’t work, of course, and even if it did it might offend the governor’s religion, but it’s a good idea. In any case, none of my acquaintances are amused. When matters are this Important, little is amusing that doesn’t flatter the moment’s mission.

I’m on my way to the doctor’s. Old Ethiopian symptoms are resurfacing, and I’m hoping for the unlikely, that doctors here have answers that doctors in England don’t. I live next to the highway nerve center of Minnesota, dozens of sweeping lanes of asphalt, held aloft or dug into the earth, consuming miles of city real estate, generating a cyclone of heat. I’m cycling over an arching pedestrian overpass. There’s a collection of school children at the crest, rattling the chain link fence protecting them from the roaring abyss. Many are holding up signs that scream ‘Vote!’ in vibrant colors, and they’re shouting their message at the deaf winds below. A few vehicles honk encouragements, but otherwise it’s the eeriest Halloween display yet: blushing, gleeful and wide-eyed innocence – defenseless, armed with no vote of its own – standing on a ribbon of concrete above the world of power, laughing and pleading into the mad, crushing onslaught of the species.

The routine at the doctors is universal: fill in forms and wait. The best part is the magazines. I get to catch up on my gossip. This time it’s a story about a double suicide among darlings of the arts scene. Beck’s involved, as are Scientologists, so the tale is entertaining.

After I’m called, I spend hours in a gown in a whitewashed cube. There are no magazines. Doctors and nurses visit me. I’m recognized as the cipher – either irritating or refreshing, depending on the attendant – that I represent in doctor’s offices around the globe. The role is tiresome. When doctors are perplexed, they become apocalyptic. The diagnosis is quickly reduced to the blanket HIV virus, though I tell them I’ve been tested. This doesn’t deter them: there are apparently windows of viral invisibility. I promise to get tested again.

By the time I’m released, my first doctors have left for the day. The drugs and referrals they promised have evaporated. I mount the old bike as the daylight wanes. The children have abandoned the bridge, and I pedal slowly across alone. The perpetual onrush doesn’t slacken. The windshields are blank. Towers downtown recoil from the last sunlight, splashing it back into the unsettled air where it drifts toward yellow dissolution. Night is coming. Children are dressing as monsters.

Travelogue 246, October 28
A Close Call

Sunday morning, I take a spill. Urban cyclists are used to these petty disasters. If we’re a jittery sort, skittering along the margins of the road like water bugs, it’s because we’ve become too familiar with peril.

Minnesota autumns are capricious as Sunday drivers. This morning, it brings our first snow, and with it a powerful wind that throws stinging ice into my face. The snow melts on impact, streaming across the wet street, and within minutes my ass is soaked from the jet of icy water from my rear tire.

I’m meeting friends for breakfast downtown in a place called Hell’s Kitchen. It takes out-of-towners to re-acquaint us with our own towns: I’ve never heard of this place. It’s a basement-level orange novelty, furnished with gospel music – literally. Onstage a gospel duo belts it out for the brunch crowd. The combination makes for indigestion, I can tell you: the garish colors with eggs benedict with lounge gospel. Nevertheless, I’m present, wet behind seated on the chair and ice-blown hair standing on end.

Back on the bike, full and cold, I’m cruising along Ninth Street toward home. A van slows as he approaches an intersection, preparing for a turn. I’m past the corner where I assume he’s turning, but he has his eye on the driveway into a parking lot and suddenly swerves in front of me when I’m about five yards away. I grab the brakes, but calculate that I can’t stop in time. I can at least soften the impact, turning as I brake. He finally sees me and halts. I’m able to stop, but so hard that the bike starts to upend, and I execute a little bicycle pirouette on the front tire, managing to stay upright at last by planting one foot ankle-deep in an icy puddle.

The funny thing about this little episode is that the only other car on the road is being piloted by an old friend, Marc. Across the street, a guy is opening his driver’s side door, and I figure it’s just a Good Samaritan checking on us. But as the van driver emerges and begins a meek apology, I’m recognizing my friend. I cross over and we have a good little catch-up. All’s well that upends well.

A few days later, I visit Roxana at work. I want to see the ‘Day of the Dead’ exhibit. She works at Centro, a cultural center for Twin Cities Hispanics. It’s a beautiful exhibit – and even more beautiful for me because Roxana and one of her pre-school teachers has very thoughtfully constructed an altar for Hannah, the Ethiopian girl who died last summer.

The altar is stunning, not only beautiful as art, wonderful and awful to contemplate – fleeting as life, built for a day of memory, – but somehow it radiates compassion. It captures a love for this girl, whom no one here has met, so strongly that the woman standing next to me murmurs a question, ‘Who is that?’ and says she thinks she’s heard of Hannah. Is it cheesy in this day and age to wonder aloud whether love has this kind of power, some charge or blood to it that crosses over?

Travelogue 245, October 12
Fear and Trembling

So maybe Angst IS the unifying field that Einstein sought, the force that links the Big Bang to anti-matter and lucky charms.

We stagger about on our weekend break from one of the biggest free falls for Wall Street on record. Everyone has a look of panic about them. Who was ever secure in the current corporate climate? But now that it’s clear that jobs will be evaporating like dew on a summer morn, we’re all stricken by the shadows of monsters.

What looked and felt like an historic presidential election suddenly has a whiff of the Absurd about it. Clearly neither man has any clue what is going on or how to stop it. And even the comedy that is Sarah Palin palls. (At the mention of Palin, my students all chuckle cynically. Hmm.)

Last week, I experienced an odd little footnote to my apartment switch. I walk out the back door of my apartment building in the early morning. I’ve gotten used to heading to work while it’s still dark out. A part of my tired brain takes note of a figure leaning against the corner of a small garage structure in the alley, his back turned to me. I know what kind of neighborhood I’ve moved into; I write him off as a drunk slumped against a handy wall.

I approach the drunk. I sniff. The figure whirls around and it’s a cop with a handgun trained on me, two steady hands wrapped around the handle. The hole in the muzzle is set on my eye. The cop leans heavily into the wall. He’s a short man, sturdily built. His eyes are dilated with intensity. If I were to be shot, it would have happened before I saw the blacks of his eyes.

‘Where did you come from?’ he shouts. I live here. ‘Go the other way!’ He shouts that several times, his aim never wavering. I take his advice and back away.

The strange thing is, I’m unmoved by the episode. I don’t think my pulse even fluttered. Is it knowledge that death would have been instantaneous? By the time both of us had registered what was happening, danger had passed. I doubt that I could have been that astute. Is it my familiarity with guns in East Africa? Never was one drawn on me that suddenly in Africa. Or rather than that, maybe it’s the constant tension during the Ethiopian years, like a low-frequency current of danger. Or perhaps it was just too sudden at too early an hour for any normal reflex.

The knights of infinite resignation have taken over the movie theaters. Ridley Scott, master of Blade Runner, releases a film featuring Leonardo with brown contacts and supernatural resilience under torture. The message seems to be that the world is trapped in a Zoroastrian struggle between high-tech ignorance and intelligent but feral primitives. Somehow the moral high-ground is surrendered to the blood-thirsty dwellers among rocks and open-air markets.

Find at the same theaters a film starring a thin and doe-eyed boy named Shia, whom my female students find dreamy. He finds himself in a similarly perilous battle between forces, though in this case encased in one rather unappealing entity, which I won’t reveal to the reader. But again, we’re a curiously childish, high-tech race in the thrall of a ten year-old’s strident morality.

We people on the pavement look on, going without the petrol, and cursing the bread, working out our salvation, dodging bullets in our dread.

Travelogue 244, October 1
Half a Game Away

I found a place to live. Things were getting desperate at Luis’s. I was able to move into my new place two days after finding it, and it’s just on moving day that a fist-sized hole opens up in the ceiling of my room at Luis’s, dumping a bucket’s worth of rancid water on the floor.

I move into a neighborhood called Elliott Park downtown. It’s just across the 94 from downtown and, as you see in the photo, offers me a romantic view of city lights through my heavily-shuttered windows. They are heavily-shuttered because the neighborhood is not the most upscale. One day, coming home in mid-afternoon, I spot a very large black man mounting a very large white woman in quaint, prehistoric style in the grass just below my windows.

The place is roomy and pleasant. The truth is I’m paying too much, but after five years of couch-surfing (at least stateside), I feel comfortable choosing comfort. And still, the weather accommodates bicycling. Every chance I get, I jump on the old steed and race through downtown. I cross over the highway, I pass the Metrodome, I head for the Mississippi.

1987: It’s my second time in Minneapolis. The first time, I fled approaching winter, running off to Frisco. This time I’m determined to weather the long, cold months. I’m temping to survive. One of my first jobs stations me in the loading docks of the Star Tribune downtown, selling Homer Hankies. The Twins have won the pennant race, and are going on to the World Series. Excited locals are rushing out to buy up the little red and white hankies, despite the cold. I clearly remember flurries during those days. Twins fever was high; temperatures were low. Black Monday dropped its bomb and scurried off into history, leaving everyone to scratch their heads. The Twins won it all.

October, 1991: I move back to Minnesota, this time from New York City, just in time to see the Twins head back to the World Series. Spirits and hankies high, Minnesotans celebrate another historic victory, according to some the best World Series ever played. And a few days later, Minneapolis was smothered in the famous Halloween snowstorm. I was working overnights in the group home. I emerged at dawn into an eerie and silent city buried in white. Buses were buried; I walked home several miles through the snow, the town a ghostly wreck.

Just a week or so ago, I’ve claimed my bar stool at Grumpy’s on Washington Avenue. I’m grumpy myself tonight because they have an events menu, and my favorite tuna melt isn’t on it. The event that pre-empted my melt is unfolding just two blocks away in the Metrodome. The Twins have been closely trailing the White Sox all season in the contest for division title, and now with the season’s end in sight, we have a crack at the White Sox here at home. We’ve won two of the three games, and tonight could put us ahead. I’ve enjoyed this season. The team is young and spirited. I can’t help wishing them a shot at the playoffs.

The first pitch of the game has just taken flight when a noisy trio bursts into the bar. There’s a tall guy with sarcasm etched indelibly into his long face. There’s a heavy guy with a ghetto blaster on his shoulder. He can barely walk, but every few steps he lets out a whoop. There’s a blonde in a tight blue bikini and a fur cap. They take positions at the bar and issue random war cries. The large guy tries to balance the radio on his shoulder and almost pitches backward off his stool.

The game goes ten innings. The bar is crowded with excitables, though bikini girl has vanished. The air is dense with anticipation and blood-alcohol condensation. When the Twins claim the victory, the bar erupts in cheers. Within minutes, fans are streaming in the door from the Metrodome.

I mistakenly think the contest is decided that night: the Twins are going to the playoffs. But then I hear that the White Sox have an extra game to their season to even it up. Sure enough, over the next week, both teams lose two, win one, and the Sox win their last game. The two teams have to meet one more time, in Chicago. I’m teaching an evening class, and can’t get out until the seventh inning. Craig and I make it to Manning’s just in time to see the last pitches to the Twins in the ninth. The last one is a pop fly to center field, caught by a jubilant Soxer in a sliding dive, and it’s over. No one says a word at Manning’s, but turns back to table companions with a sad shrug. Half a game!

Travelogue 243, September 30
Evoluting Man

We’ve been around a while, and I have proof. Not proof in hand, held by opposable thumb, but proof in the brain – passing the reptiles in the left lane, gaining on mammalian and monkey – proof in the lobe of the brain that preserves pretty pictures in grey amber.

7.17 They stand silently and humbly in a green plain, a decaying circle suspended in Big Time, where the solstices ring like hours. We the creators can’t hear Big Time.

Mark and I have taken the train west out of London. We’re visiting a teacher in Salisbury. Her husband has the day off because of a strike, and he takes us for a drive, speeding down curving lanes that can barely accommodate two European-size cars. Whenever a car appears coming the other way, we have to swerve under the trees, half onto the shoulder. But it doesn’t mean Gareth slows down.

We arrive at the place suddenly. The old priests are not very tall. They don’t dominate the landscape – even a landscape as bare as this one. It’s an odd little site. Humans have built the road, a major thoroughfare, right next to it. And they have enclosed the old ones in chain link fences, encircling them with little footpaths. They charge visitors to enter. Gareth refuses for all of us. He’s correct in saying that we can see the stones almost as well from outside the compound and save ourselves some dosh. Gareth is tall, so he takes a few shots for me over the barrier. Then he demonstrates how to shoot through the diamond-shaped spaces of the fence.

It’s a holy site. We’ll never know why, except that some pious pagan families started burying their dead there. But there are no distinguishing characteristics to the spot. Is that the very logic that led our hirsute ancestors to haul massive stones across miles of western England – just to liven up this bland bit of green space? Or maybe the henge commemorates the unique degree of unremarkability. Either way, they did it, adding ditches and blocks of bluestone or sarsen for over a thousand years, the last touches put in place a good 1,500 years before Lord Caesar ever set foot in Britain.

Now we can stop in storefronts for God. No lights or shadows line up at the solstices but maybe that’s more comfortable anyway. Our gods don’t need to show off.

A quick poll of my Ethiopian staff reveals that most of them do not believe in evolution. ‘We come from God,’ they say, wrinkling their noses at the idea that we come from monkeys. How can Westerners buy that guff?

OK, but what about Lucy? Humans first stood on two legs in Ethiopia. Shouldn’t Ethiopians be the preeminent advocates for evolution? Lucy’s not a monkey, they’ll point out. She’s three foot tall and hairy, I retort. There’s more than a family resemblance here. Chimps are genetically 99% human. No, my staff says. They can be family, but not mom and dad.

Maybe the Ethiopes are closer to Big Time than Westerners. Shades of distinction don’t register. Life is a few major keys that resonate across the centuries. Before the big notes were sounded lurks a lot of matter that doesn’t matter.

Then again ... somehow Johnny Cash comes up in one of my Minnesota classes, and about half of my students said, ‘Who?’ and I was crushed. It’s one thing to dismiss a few bands of unusually smart apes in the Rift Valley some fifty thousand years ago, but the Man in Black?

I’m explaining fiction and stories. I want examples of movies that everyone can relate to. The movie shouted out almost universally is ‘Lion King’. (Big pause …) ‘Okay. Lion King. Who’s the protagonist?’ Simba. Right. And the setting? Picture yourself wandering the wild savanna….

Travelogue 242, September 21
Notes for a Season

Those flighty calendar numbers trip along forward: it’s autumn. The sun was out all week; everyone was in shirtsleeves. The cicadas are still singing. I logged lots of miles on the bicycle, until I got a flat in back. It’s time to take my soul mate in for an overhaul, true the wheels, spice up the brakes. She’ll be ready for some sweet city sailing for the last few pleasant weekends.

Yesterday I got to fly over the new bridge. It opened up mid-week, and I’ve been eye-balling it from other bridges. It’s white and sleek, and the cars coast across it like marbles along a gentle, curving track. I’ve had occasion to bike over the highway that feeds it. Seeing the cars stream by was comforting in a life-goes-on kind of way. Rather a silly reaction to one more day’s mass commute and the restoration of concrete, but there you go. I drive over it smiling, recalling lots of other days compacted into one blurry picture: swing over toward the University exit while stealing glimpses of the Mississippi, the foliage of its banks, and the mute old structures of Academe.

9.13 I’m so tired it’s painful. The body and mind are aching. I must keep moving. This morning, I’m invited into special places. I’m going to the University Club in St. Paul. That’s the beautiful and historic building that commands the eastern end of Summit Avenue, an avenue that functions like a museum of St. Paul’s nineteenth-century aristocracy. It stands on a bluff that overlooks the cathedral and downtown.

At midnight the night before, the lights are on all over the house. Luis is working on the plumbing. I’ve been up late every night this week, and I want to be awake for the University Club brunch. But Luis is working on some ganglion of pipes located beneath my room. It takes nearly until two in the morning to bang something into place.

Some critical conduit has escaped its punishment. At 7am, there’s no hot water. There’s only a trickle of cold water in the tub. I’m alone in the house and disoriented. Am I in America? No matter: I revert to Ethiopian methods. I crouch down in the tub to gather water in my hands like early man in a porcelain jungle. I splash cold water over my head.

Outdoors is more watery refreshment in the form of a chilly rain. The streets of St. Paul are desolate. I stop at a health-foods chain and have healthy espresso with healthy yogurt. I cling to the waking state, so similar this morning to an ebbing state of shock.

The brunch at the University Club celebrates twenty years for Books for Africa, a large St. Paul charity. Standing in line for the buffet and sitting together at round tables in the beautiful gallery are about one hundred local worthies, donors and board members, representatives from partner agencies, and visitors from Botswana, Tanzania, Togo, and Senegal. At my table is the ambassador to the U.S. from Tanzania. An alarming number of people at my table have climbed Kilimanjaro. They compare figures in the hundreds of thousands of dollars that they raised for charity by arranging junkets to the famous mountain. I don’t say a word.

I’m introduced to a group just back from Malawi. Much praise of Malawi is tossed among new acquaintances, and I can’t be sure but I think I’m witness to a school being born there during a two-minute exchange among strangers.

The mayor of St. Paul addresses us, a tall and amiable man, fresh from hosting the Republican Convention, and looking no worse for wear. He speaks simply, sincerely, and well, without notes. The founder of Books for Africa speaks, an ageing Brit with wild hair and a bow tie. He accepts a check for ninety thousand from a guy in sandals who was standing quietly among the Malawi crew earlier. He could be the bass man in a surfer band. Instead he raises thousands of dollars re-selling college textbooks for charity, and he travels the world. Next at the podium is the ambassador, speaking with gratitude and a gentle humility that is as refreshing as an evening on the savanna.

I survive the morning, and what’s more, I have enough residual consciousness to register pleasure. ‘What nice people’, I muse as I doze off on the highway home.

Travelogue 241, September 17
For Hannah

A breach of blog conduct, I suppose, to publish a poem, but my students tell me that poetry is the language of emotion. They can’t cite a reason for that, no matter how I browbeat them. In the end, I just have to give in.

Here’s a poem for Hannah:

She’s seven when she dies.
At the school we are shocked to silence.
Her mother hadn’t told a soul

while the girl lay helpless
in the one room, on the one bed,
sweating out a life into the mattress,
sodden straw underneath the soiled sheet,

her last sight spent on mud
walls and floor one window
only dimly illuminates,
no moment’s eye allowed
for lasts, for friends, for farewells.

She features on the head of a penny
now, settling through one sleepy stratum
of water into another, sight bleeding
into the green of blindness.

And also tossed, mels spinning a copper
shade of fertile clay, she spies a barren crystal
distance, she spies with delighted eyes.
She drifts unseen, flown alone too far.

Imaye! Mother: the egg-white tenderness
of sight won’t see. It’s a furious blindness
That notes only the yellow hills.
Children are skipping ghosts,
late for the harvest.

Two hues converge in grey,
and sorry to have lost them both,
long as living we look and we look.

A child has died.

Travelogue 240, September 11
Inconclusions

Happy Ethiopian New Year! Perhaps the relentless prattle about the Millennium will ebb in Ethiopia, like it eventually did here, … leaving what? A residue that chafes like Sarah Palin’s voice, like the nasal whinging of tall, unblinking birds tied to microphones? Is that the new millennium? Maybe the year 2000 wasn’t so bad.

Let’s call him Jim. He lingers after class today. This is my first session of the day for three days a week. The students are a good bunch, if a bit sleepy. My pedagogic strategy is simply to overwhelm them with good cheer. I know that’s not strictly fair, but what is fair in love and war is doubly so within the precincts of schoolhouses. The students blink at my bright smile painfully as if they share the same brown hangover. They glare at me with grim skepticism.

Jim lingers by my side, and he turns his face away from the few other students who are still packing up their backpacks as he murmurs, ‘Can you help me?’ Jim is a young white kid with close-cropped hair, a round ruddy face, and a big, sarcastic grin. He’s one of those guys who gather in twos in threes in class, issuing comments like breath, comments that are actually funny. They leave class and work on cars, watch violent movies, and plan the next kegger. They scare novice teachers, but a glance at their work shows they’re doing just fine. Banter is class participation.

It seems Jim isn’t too comfortable on computers yet. Can I show him how to use email? I sense his embarrassment: Minnesota boy, descendent of farmers, maybe very recently, born to an age in which it must be excruciatingly isolating to not understand the hum and sizzle of our type-and-talk boxes.

It’s a teacher’s moment, the time to turn squarely toward the student and drop the role. It’s human to human, and what teaching is all about. Of course I’ll help, but I have two more classes right after this one. We can meet after the last class or any day this week. He shyly says he’ll stop by my office. I hate to let him go. He’ll drift out and into the day of every day deferrals. People who can help say some day, and that’s the way of the world. That’s what his resigned steps say.

We’ve seen another movie. It’s a vehicle for Nicholas Cage, and that’s what it is. There’s a passable story. The production is attractive, if a bit blue. Blue like someone forgot to take off the ‘moonlight’ lens. Maybe it was just the print. Many shots are beautiful. The lead character, a moody assassin, is suitably haunted and solitary. Romance has been loaded into its chamber. But we slam into that ‘vehicle’ problem before the weapon is out of its holster. The actor’s posing is the preeminent motif, swallowing whole the character. The film swallows its own romance and dies heart-sick, much as the character is doomed to fail in an anticlimactic (no matter how explosive) way. Why do so many movies leave one with this taste? Good idea, good start….

There’s another boy’s face in my mind’s eye. That’s Abiyu. His features are teenage lopsided. He’s tall, and his feet and hands are outsized, as is his nose. His hair is untrimmed. He wears the same old flannel shirt against the cold of rainy season. His feet look to never have felt the embrace of shoes. He has a sunny, unpredictable smile. His deer’s eyes are deep and unflinching and friendly. But often they are turned away focused on nothing, sight abandoned in favor of long daydreams. I wonder what the dreams are.

8.5 Menna and I arrive in Bahir Dar on graduation day, and there are no hotel rooms available. We hire a bajaj to drive us from hotel to pension to hotel. At one stop, we are mobbed by boys, from small and scruffy to tall and unshaven. What they share is their calling to the noble occupation of hospitality. They hang off the sides of the bajaj as the driver yells at them and tries to pull away. That’s how badly they want to serve.

We ask Abiyu to come along and help us find a room. Eventually we do find one, and we hire Abiyu for more errands. Over the next few days, he proves to be a big help. We have a lot to get done. He comes with us out to Gobame.

‘What do you think of Gobame, Abiyu? What do you think of the school?’ He shrugs. He’s not a boy of many words. Only one time he’s chatty. He tells us Bahir Dar is tenth in Africa. Tenth what I don’t know. He says Bahir Dar’s famous Lake T’ana is 83,000 feet deep. He loves his region. He wants to know where I’m from, and he guesses England right away because I speak English. He never comes up with America because he doesn’t know what language Americans speak.

Abiyu is proud to be graduating high school next year. We want to help him. We offer to pay tuition if he wants to study in Bahir Dar, but he loves his little village of Debre Tabol. He says everyone there is so clever. Some farmers have tractors. We tell him we want him to work for us some day. He doesn’t even seem to hear. He’s daydreaming about Debre Tabol.