Travelogue 267 – March 18
Perugia

Allow me to introduce to you my old friend and home town in Italia, Perugia, my Umbrian hill town of pink stone, Etruscan acropolis, Porta Sole, my gruff and introverted little Perugia.

Perugia è una città di 164.782 abitanti dell’Italia centrale, capoluogo dell’omonima provincia e della regione Umbria. Sorge su un colle, nella valle del Tevere. Right, that just about covers it. Perugia is situated dead in the center of Italy, about two hours northeast from Rome, among the lovely hills of Umbria, and just above the Tiber river valley. It’s the capital of Umbria. It was first an Etruscan city, but only appears in history when the Romans took notice of it, right around 300 BC. Afterward it’s Roman, of course. In the Middle Ages, (after some rough times with those silly barbarians), it’s an autonomous city-state, until Papal Rome takes her back into the fold in the sixteenth century or so.

This isn’t Rome or Milano. The train won’t deposit you in the center. The reason for that is simple enough. Perugia is one of those hilltop towns that are common in the interior of Italy, situated snugly and precipitously above the perilous lowlands. So do not despair when you disembark and exit the station only to see the bland visage of modern Europe. Head upward. If you’re determined to make it on foot, allow 45 minutes and follow just about any road that goes uphill. Eventually you must emerge at the pinnacle, on the Corso Vannucci, named after Perugia’s most famous native son, the artist Perugino. This is the central artery of the historical center. You can see from one end to the other. Its flagstones are prohibited to auto traffic, so join the passegiata.

If you turn toward the head of the Corso, you’ll come to the Piazza IV Novembre, around which are gathered some of the architectural jewels of medieval Italy, including the Palazzo dei Priori, (city hall, basically) a tall and stately fourteenth century construction of rose and white stone, erected in three elegant layers of classic medieval design, with rosettes and mullioned windows and a grand arched doorway that is set with ghostly and delicate figures, almost cartoonish in that high medieval way that somehow fuses dignity with simplicity, figures that include two guardian griffins subduing, in an odd show of power, two terrified bulls. In the center of the piazza is the Fontana Maggiore, also of pink stone, embellished with two levels of allegorical, religious and mythical characters in relief. On the north side of the piazza is the Cathedral of San Lorenzo (yes, another one, coincidentally – see mention of Genova’s in the previous blog,) the bishop’s seat for the region. It was built during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and exists today as a curious amalgam of styles and bits, including a Renaissance loggio along one side, a beautiful outdoor pulpit decorated with mosaics set in one of the walls (a pulpit from which San Bernardino of Siena himself preached,) and a large bronze of a pope popular in Perugia for relaxing papal rule after brutal wars in the sixteenth century.

Walk up past the cathedral, toward the north, and you will discover the Porta Sole, the cliff-top site of an ancient Etruscan temple to a sun god, long ago destroyed, where you will be confronted by a sudden, breath-taking vista of the red-tiled roofs of the town below, set along narrow, zig-zagging streets, and of green hills rolling toward the horizon. The fact is, you can find these vistas at each point of the compass in historical Perugia. Most dramatic are those at northern and southern ends of the acropolis. The southern counterpart is at the other end of the Corso, where couples gather at sunset in the Giardino Carducci , where you can stand at the long stone balustrade and gaze out over valleys that lead south toward Roma. On the eastern side of this prospect, you can spot Assisi, a patch of medieval stone suspended on a hillside across the Tiber River Valley.

These are just some highlights, but choose any of the high-walled alleyways leading down and away from the Corso and you’ll stumble upon travertine, marble, and cobblestone treasures left for us by the centuries of cittadini-believers, who want to tell you about their city, about their wars, about Saints Francis and Bernardino, or about the Roman Catholic God and His works.

Here are some personal recommendations for must-see leisure stops while you’re in Perugia:
First, of course, my specialty: a few cafes. I’ll restrict myself to two. Just north of the cathedral and beyond the Piazza IV Novembre, you’ll spot the Caffe Turreno. Here you’ll experience a touch of old world class. There are tables out front and a few rooms in the back where you can sit and study some photos of Perugia from the days just after the Second World War, Perugia in ruins. Sip your coffee and watch Perugia’s equivalent of the ‘Via Veneto’ set, the upscale socialites and artists. If your taste in self-consciousness tends more toward the young and grungy, be sure to stop by the Caffe Morlacchi, where you’ll enjoy hippie chic under low vaults of brick. This is also a good spot for nighttime entertainment, they often bring in DJs and bands.

Please stop by the Oratorio di San Bernardino on the western side of the city, behind the university, down by the old city gate at the end of the Via dei Priori. It’s a beautiful little Renaissance chapel, with a colorful and remarkable façade. The spare interior is worth a look, too, if only for the late Roman sarcophagus being used as an altar.

And, at sunset, try to be on the eastern side of town, at the Chiesa di San Domenico. The colors on its vast and empty western wall are gorgeous. Take a minute to peek inside the cloister to the left, where there is a nice collections of Etruscan urns arranged around the cloister walls.

Travelogue 266 – March 11
Calvary by the Sea

I think of Milano as the city of balconies. I really haven’t seen much of Milan yet, but the hundreds of balconies above the streets have become symbolic of the city. I stay in the neighborhoods near the train station, and I’ve strolled around the centro. In these areas, the architecture is all similar, a heavy but elegant imperial style that I quite like, a style that features lovely, carven stone balconies. Milano is the base for my Genova trip this time around, so I have seen a lot of the massive, Fascist-era train station, (recently featured prominently, by the way, in the film ‘The International’). I’ve exited and entered and exited again from underneath those high, arched shelters in the back of the station.

If Milano is the city of balconies, Genova is the city of stairs. The city has the feeling of having been precariously built on a tiny strip of flat land by the sea, mountains right at its back. When it grows, it grows up. Off every street are steep and narrow staircases heading up those looming hills.

Five years ago, I have a day to kill in Genova. (See the previous blog.) I’ve missed my boat and I’m catching a night train to Perugia. I’ve been up since 3 or 4am, and I’m stuck with my XXL backpack, stuffed with supplies for several months’ travel. What does one do in Genova? One goes to sea, or one climbs stairs. I’ve turned my back on the sea already, so I climb. And climb and climb.

I’m in a state of mind one could understate as ‘distressed’. The physical labor with the load on my back feels just. My thoughts are stilled. The future is as blank as my mind. There are only the hills and the work. I will sweat out my grief. I will push through the pain of being adrift.

Up I go, staircase after staircase, shoulders and thighs aching. Back and forth I hike, across the steep and concave hillside above downtown, sometimes up long series of steps, sometimes following curving lanes past houses and gardens, past tenements of the earners and the rich, stopping occasionally for increasingly dramatic vistas of the city and the sea. I can see the old port and beyond. In the old port are monstrous ferries, these for the luxury voyages going anywhere but Tunisia. I see the whole, rumpled topography of the city, red tile, towers and spires built on the shoulders of neighbors. The sea gleams with dull sunlight.

Eventually, I reach the top of the ridge. I achieve the summit of the final staircase … only to look to my right and see the terminal stop of the funicular. Ah well, it was all about the pain of the climb, wasn’t it, the cleansing labor of it? I cross the road and look out over valley-burbs of greater Genova. The day is reaching its last hours. I stop in the bar next to the funicular station. The several grey-haired regulars are already unsteady with drink.

This time I take the funicular up. It’s one euro twenty and the funicular departs at fifteen-minute intervals. A few bored kids are waiting with me. The funicular arrives, a tired looking set of silver boxes, built at a slant, so my orange plastic seat and its partner are about a meter higher than the next set, etc. The first half of the ride is through tunnels. After that, the view opens up a bit, and I see some familiar neighborhoods, one precarious house after another, some with gardens. In one garden, a pair of floppy-eared sheep watch us go by. At the top, we emerge on top of that old, tame ridge with the wild view. The sea winks at me from its silver, misty peace.

Back in the centro, I make time to see the sights, some of the things I missed the first time around. I head toward the old town. The streets narrow and they meander. The ubiquitous staircases diminish into mere cracks between high walls, vanishing quickly into shadow. In fact, most of the intersecting vie shrink into Genovese vicoli, passageways about a shoulder’s width across. I want to run up every one of them. There’s something compelling, like the lure of mazes, about the vicoli.

Stop by the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, around which the old town seems to organize itself. It’s a beautiful medieval structure, dating back to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The façade is a fun example of medieval design, with horizontal stripes in colored stone, and a grand doorway telling many stories in sculpture, framed in groovy twisting marble columns. Huge marble lions guard the wide stairway, though with a meek Christian demeanor.

It’s nighttime when I make it back down the hill five years ago. I wander among streets that seem dark and murderous until the time my first train leaves. I’m beyond exhaustion in both mind and body, but I can’t sleep, even on the train. The first train goes to Firenze. I arrive there in the dead of early morning. In the time between trains, I make my way into the heart of the old town. I stand alone beneath the bizarre façade of the Duomo in the darkness of a winter night, just before dawn.

Travelogue 265 – March 10
By the Sea

One of your first sights in Genova – provide you travel there by train – will be a massive white monument to Cristoforo Colombo. He stands high above the central train station, facing the sea and brooding with lowered brow. Shall we say he’s plotting the overthrow of everything sane and righteous – just so we conform to the intellectual spirit of our times?

Genova certainly looks different my second time around. Granted, the first time I saw it I was in some distress. This was after my first trip to Ethiopia, five years ago. I was only ten days in Ethiopia – a wise bit of planning on my part. First exposure to Addis Ababa is traumatic in the best of times. But this was six months after Leeza had died. I had met her family for the first time. I had visited her grave. By the time I reached Genova, I was quite heart-broken.

I’m back. I’m retracing my steps. These Italian adventures took place just prior to launching the ‘jarvistravels’ blog in 2004. Think of this as investigative journalism – no, let’s call it subjective or even subjunctive journalism. I’m researching for a possible memoir.

I went to Genova in order to catch a boat. I wasn’t in search of a passage to India. I was looking for the thing that Colombo’s sailors must have feared most, the edge of the world. I wanted to disappear. I wanted a break from an unendurable story. New chapter: I had planned a trip to Tunisia, thinking that somehow Tunisia was just the anonymous little oasis of desert that I needed. It’s hard to say why now, although it still seems like it would be a nice vacation.

When you catch a ferry to Tunis from Genova, you find yourself on the very last dock in the west wing of the old harbor, a desolate place. The western docks are all function. There’s no danger of confusing this with the Riviera: lots of concrete, cranes, and lorries. In fact, just to underscore the Genovese concept of their friend, the sea, any view of the harbor from this side of town is blocked by a crazy motorway, many lanes wide and several levels high. Hardly the boardwalk.

You loiter with hundreds of people and autos on the concrete dock beside the ferry. It’s no luxury cruise ahead of you. The boat is blank and beat. The people themselves are blank and beat. They mill around restlessly and smoke, most of them Tunisian and poor. It’s almost dawn. The scene is bleak.

Something in me snaps. The ferry starts loading, but I stand aside. I’m rooted to the spot. I watch everyone embark. Gangplanks are clanked into place. The anchoring lines are stowed away. The engines rumble, churning the harbor water, and the ferry drifts free, moves, accelerates.

What was wrong? Maybe it was the thought of returning to Africa. Maybe it was the specter of poverty and depression on my holiday away from grief and depression. I couldn’t face another round. I wanted to be Nowhere, but try to find it. It always turns into Somewhere.

I’m not thinking. I have no reasons for watching the boat go. All I feel is lost, absolutely lost. I was supposed to be out there, on the water. What am I doing? The sun rises in the Genovese sky, but I am wrapped in a fog of disappointment and renewed grief. I stumble off the dock, out of the port, and off into the bitter streets of town. I throw my backpack down on the steps of a busy bank, and people are staring at me. I must have had a wild glint in my eye.

So this is where she finds me, forsaken by Self and Fate in a trashy foreign town, nowhere to go, and my extra tall backpack tossed aside for bank customers to step over on their way to get money. When I say ‘she’, I refer to Leeza, my angel. She visits me then, and I don’t mean white light and a hush over the street. I mean something like a memory as vivid as presence, or vice versa. I can’t argue scholastically about it but she was there, and she believes in me.

Why has she found me? Is the question absurd? I’m in about as desperate a state as I’ve ever been. She’s come with a message. Translated from near-presence into plain newsprint, it’s something like, ‘Dana, you have dreams. Look where you are!’ Like: maybe it’s not about rest and nowheres and gardens by the sea. It’s about being alive. ‘You’ve been to Ethiopia to tend to my dreams. Now look after yours!’ It’s so like Leeza. She knew about my love of everything Italian.

An artisan in Perugia shares with me a phrase of D’Anniunzio’s: Memento Audere Semper. Remember to dare.

I imagine it’s what resuscitation must feel like, those plates against your chest, heart punched into motion, the sensation of blood coursing again, lungs seizing oxygen, and the eyes seeing. My mind pulses with ideas. I pick up the old backpack.

I know immediately where I’m going: Perugia. I march to the train station. I choose an overnight train to save myself a hotel bill. I set out into old Colombo City to kill the day.

Travelogue 264 – March 4
By the River Thames

In the Victoria Embankment there’s another statue of Brunel, and a much finer piece of art than the one in the Temple District of Bristol. This I discover on a stroll through the riverside park today. I’m making my way from Leicester Square to the Temple Tube Station. Isambard in London looks as though he might have lived, which is a contrast to the Bristol likeness that suggests he was a character in Alice in Wonderland. No doubt it’s tempting to treat a man named Isambard Kingdom in just that way. But in the end, he must have been as opaquely physical as his creations, which were some of the critical gears in the clockwork machine that was imperial Britain.

In fact, a lot of eighteenth and nineteenth century Brittania comes alive in the Victoria Embankment. That includes Arthur Sullivan, whose memorial statue is morbidly arousing, with a glorious, mourning bronze nude draped around the pedestal of his bust. It must be that his Italian blood guided the sculptor.

I’m meeting Felicity at the Temple Tube Station. Once we’ve identified each other – it’s our first meeting – she leads us back up toward her office. We choose a cafe on Fleet Street for our meeting. Across the street is the marvelous building belonging to the Royal Courts of Justice. Here’s another Temple District, inspired by yet another circular temple erected by the Knights Templar. (Oh, the sweet aura of mysticism evoked in our times by those feisty Templars!) The temple still exists, more or less. It serves as the chapel for the Inner and Middle Temple Inns of Court.

After the meeting, I carry on up Fleet Street toward St. Paul’s. I cross the Thames on the pedestrian Millennium Bridge – otherwise known as the Wobbly Bridge, reflecting its early performance. On the southern bank, I walk east toward London Bridge. This is a neighborhood I very much enjoy. It includes the Tate Modern, the Globe and Southwark Cathedral. This church has a fascinating texture to it, faced almost entirely in grey flint. But be sure NOT to pronounce Southwark as it looks. Say ‘Suvvok’. The neighborhood includes a Gibraltar’s-worth of cobblestone, and veritable stacks of bars along the riverfront. It includes the Borough Market, which fits snugly in among a tangle of little alleyways underneath a tangle of railroad tracks overhead. They say the market dates back to the Roman times. In any case, it makes for a fun stroll.

Travelogue 263, February 26
The Matthew

The day is a replica of the last, grey with a chilly breeze. Jet lag has
kept me up until 3am. I’ve got that cold medicine-like buzzy feeling
from lack of sleep. But this is our only free afternoon to sightsee.

Pey and I take the train to Bristol. This will be my first visit to that
town, though it’s only about fifteen minutes on the train, and it’s where
Giles has his office. Disembarking from the train, a difference is immediately evident. We’re in a real city. The population is about five times that of Bath.

The train station in Bristol is named Temple Meads. The entire district is called the Temple district because there was once a circular temple of the Knights Templar here. That was built over by a large Catholic church, but even the church retained the memory, being called Temple Church. It stood for almost six hundred years before the Germans bombed it. And it still stands, though gutted.

Bristol was the fifth largest target of the German blitz because of its harbor and the airplane industry. So today you see a relatively bland modern city. Not that there aren’t vestiges of the old. Not far from the train station, you’ll pass a crude statue of a local hero, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who contributed much to the old city which we can still catch glimpses of. Personally, I think he deserves a statue for just his name, let alone his achievements. The old town owed much to this 19th century architect and engineer. Perhaps his primary claim to fame is the Clifton Suspension Bridge high above the Avon River as it heads toward the Severn estuary, that huge waterway separating England and southern Wales. Brunel designed the bridge, but never saw it completed. Construction took over thirty years.

Brunel also spent some time working on the locks and the docks of Bristol. This city has been a major port for England since the time of the Normans. Earlier port towns were closer to the great estuary. Bristol is a few miles inland on the Avon, presumably because of the powerful tides of the Bristol Channel and estuary. Locks built in the 19th century created the stable ‘Floating Harbor’, Bristol’s calm waters for docking ships. Walk along the Avon today and see calm waters. The river has been so engineered and supplemented with canals that it hardly seems a river. Does a river take neat ninety-degree turns?

Here you can ogle boats and visit history. Another famous product of Isambard’s genius floats here, the SS Great Britain, built in 1843 and once the largest ship afloat. It was not the first ship built of iron, but the first iron ship to employ a screw propeller and take to the open seas.

I admit, it’s not the SS Britain that attracts my attention. It’s the Matthew, symbol of an earlier age. It is the replica of John Cabot’s vessel, which crossed the Atlantic and discovered – for his age and his people – North America. The replica followed the same path some ten years ago. It’s a beauty, built in late medieval style, square-rigged with a high forecastle and aftcastle. And the gangplank is down! It happens that the crew is on board for a luncheon that has finished by the time we arrive. We are able to board.

The first thought in boarding a ship like that is: my God this is small! Nineteen people spent seven weeks on this vessel, crossing the ocean? It boggles the imagination. One of the old crew members spends some time talking with me. ‘When I grew up,’ he says, ‘I was taught to pronounce Cabot in the French way, dropping the ‘t’. But of course that was wrong.’

Approaching the Matthew, reading that it was a replica of Cabot’s ship, the date 1497 leaps into my mind. I turn out to be right, and Pey graciously acknowledges my boast. It’s a child’s number, and for the first time I reflect upon it with an adult’s mind. Wow, that’s only five years after Columbus set sail. Friendly competition?

Cabot’s real name was Caboto, which apparently means ‘seaman’ in Italian. He was Italian, as were many captains and seafarers at the end of the fifteenth century. Many of them were farming themselves out to the new sea powers: Spain, Portugal, England, and France. The Atlantic was the new sea to be working.

The old man on the boat says Columbus spent some time in Bristol. I haven’t seen that corroborated anywhere, but it’s certainly possible. He travelled widely in his youth, and could easily have stopped here. What if they met? What if they shared ideas? Small world: isn’t it always?

Travelogue 262, February 23
Signs (NOT directed by Shamalamadingdong)

Four signs that you’ve arrived in England...
Indoor Birds: Disembark from the Northwest jet airliner after three movies and a protracted battle over the armrest with an oversized and twitchy man, and make your way to the Tube for a lift across the sprawling suburb called Heathrow Airport. Follow the signs to the Central Bus Station. Stand in line for fifteen minutes for the only functioning elevator.

The bus terminal isn’t huge. It’s a sales window, a WH Smith, a digital departures board, rows of benches for several hundred, and most importantly a Caffe Nero, where you go to exorcise the phantoms of sleep deprivation and close range video imagery.

There’s something ad hoc about the terminal space, like it was a convenient, if awkward, quadrangle of concrete that was converted by one of those balloon roofs and some glass doorways into an interior space. The doors are propped open day by day, allowing hungry, grey pigeons free access. Watch your pan au raisin; they might launch from that chair back. Pigeons are just as ubiquitous in, say, New York City, but in Europe they are real citizens, as essential an ingredient to any plaza or piazza as the timeworn flagstones themselves. Now they’ve been invited in.

Complexions: Scan the faces; listen to the voices. The musical scales have shifted, and so has the spectrum of complexions. The Anglos bustle by in their restraints, singing their light and rounded syllables. At the cafe counter, meet the Eastern Europeans issuing questions as orders in nasal curlicues that never stray far from sarcasm. South Asians add spice to the swirl of pink cheeks and blondes, translating motion itself into diffidence, turning wide eyes on the clock, on the clerks, on the walls.

Buckles: Board the ‘coach’. It’s tidy. The seats are high. The driver is a friendly chap with a warm and booming voice, a shaggy coif, and a well-aged cardigan. Before setting out, he cheerfully fulfills his duty of addressing the customers, much like an airline stewardess: seat belts are mandated; exits are at front and back; the lavatory is in the rear of the coach; and please come up front if there is any way I can make your ride more comfortable -- I’m up here, on the right.

The Press: Pick up the abandoned ‘Metro’, a free London rag, handed out at Tube stations. Two stories will stand out, one on the front page and one in the back among sports news. The latter story concerns a world celeb that registers negligibly in the American consciousness. (This is itself a jarring phenomenon. How do Americans manage this kind of blithe impenetrability?) Said celeb is the unflappable and eminently photogenic Jose Mourinho, once invincible coach of Chelsea and now generale at Inter Milan. A Champions League match approacheth: Inter vs. Manchester United. Mourinho has a few wonderful quotes to offer us, wonderful for their luminous vacuity, poetic indications of nothing, reminiscent of JCVD in his youth. Mourinho is confident of winning. Beyond that, we have only zen color: the match will be a sensation on several etheric planes.

The front page celeb is none other than our faltering PM, Gordon Brown, portrayed in exaggerated toad-like glory as he puckers up to kiss the cheek of cousin toad Angela Merkel. The accompanying photo captures Ms. Merkel wrinkling up in disgust, presumably post-contact, though the paper is suitably ambiguous on that point. You’ve got to love the British press -- though God preserve us all from their attentions.

The evidence is in: I’m in England.

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.