If his stories can be trusted, I don’t think Pop graduated from middle school. His vocabulary wasn’t stellar to begin with, studded as it is with slang and slanted by a heavy New York accent. Even before dropping out, he skipped school more often than he went and followed his uncles to their jobs on construction sites and the boat docks, studying instead small gears and arching wood beams that he could puzzle apart in a tangible way.

For every birthday and anniversary, Nan composed long poems on her typewriter. She would read them proudly in front of whomever was in earshot while Pop sat by, blushing and shaking his head. Pop searched the aisles for a storebought card that he thought expressed what was on his mind and simply sign, “Love, Artie” at the bottom.

Nana’s hands were small birds.  This is how I remember her: talking, always excitedly, her thin hands fluttering with the emotions that even the rise and pitch of her voice could not contain. And they were always freezing. Doctors would eventually call it “Reinart’s Disease,” but in my family it was diagnosed long before as simply, “Nana’s cold hands.”

They were amphibians, icicles even, the way they’d creep along the exposed napes of our necks. It was a game. Nan would say, “Do you want to feel how cold they are?” And we’d say, “No!” and try to get out of there as fast as possible because we knew that next she would grab our soft arms with one frog and brush the other along our neck and shoulders. Squealing with giggles we would wriggle away. Nan laughed and put her gloves back on.

After her funeral, in the days when Pop was most exhausted and searching for his syllables, each word that he uttered held behind it all of those he couldn’t, in that moment, get hold of.

She was a good woman, he said to me as we left the church and the casket had been closed. And I marveled at how much those five simple words could mean.

I imagine us picking words out of the sky like apples, and wonder how language would be different if it were a physical thing I could tease apart with my fingers. Like a round ball stuck in the throat, what if I could pick my words out and place them in a bowl on the table, or line them up end-to-end?

Words are bodies. We are envelopes that contain much more beneath the surface than we might assume or think possible in passing. Each definition holds a history, a trail that asks to be unraveled. We have stories to tell, we are always whispering in voices not always articulated. Our language aches. Just as our bones might run sore with weight or age or experience.

In the days before Nan died, when she was in the hospital unable to speak or open her eyes, it was her hands that did the talking. Pulling each of us close, bringing our fingers to touch the soft skin by her mouth, the rosary in her lap. Pop held one of them constantly.

She: searching for the finger on his right hand that is partly missing, a remnant from an accident with a car door in the late 1950s. He: fingering gently the soft underside of her wrist. I’m here, don’t worry, I’m here. It took us all a while to pick up on it, but soon it was obvious: Nan and Pop had a language between them, one which did not depend on words. Two hands and the proximity of their bodies in a hospital bed were enough.

Lover of words as I am, I like to believe that it’s possible for us to bypass spoken language. That time or sensitivity or necessity of the moment might allow us to transcend these awkward boxes of definition. That we might be heard and understood, regardless.

Because of Nan’s “cold hands,” for years she walked around wearing mittens in the house, two thermal packets tucked inside. Pop, ever resourceful and puttering, sewed two cloth pouches for the hot packs, to shield her bare skin from the plastic and chemicals.

This is how I like to think of her: mittened and smiling. Inside of her gloves, her fingers are moving like braille over Pop’s painstaking yet clumsy stitching. Something communicated, though small and unsaid.

There are places where the menu is written in chalk on the front door. Where we drank coffee in the morning while the garbage collector came to empty the barrels in the piazza, and seagulls dove over the clay rooftops and still-shuttered windows.

In this place with the chalk/door menu, you don’t ask questions, at least not about the food. Instead, you ask the chef how his family is. Unless of course they’re all working in the restaurant, in which case you walk up to each of them for a kiss on both cheeks, and to give them a bit of a hard time.

Or, if you’re a newcomer, if you’re an American newcomer, you smile and nod a lot and over-react to every course, to be sure that your appreciation makes it across the language barrier. You nod and ask for more even when you are bursting, wiping your lips and the wine on a napkin, and with every empty plate you turn bright eyes onto everyone there, everyone waiting to be sure you have been fed.

Waiting to see how deeply you have appreciated each flavor, sending you tottering into the night down the narrow stone alley, where you see a moon and three men repairing light fixtures. Hoping that somehow the salt air and the cool night will turn your fullness into a story.

There’s something about making physical things—following inspiration and idea through to concrete completion—that trains me bit by bit to shape and mold my life into what I most enjoy.

It’s all about breaking through the 20 minutes just before I get started, when I’m staring at the materials spread out on my floor and thinking, “Really?”  (I just wrote more about this in my blog about the herb garden for elephant.)

Yes, really. And then I get started and slip in, like a long run or 30 minutes on the mediation cushion. The repetitive movement of hands and breath and focus on minute details, which makes everything else fade. The best kind of creativity.

I’m proud of my vertical herb garden, which started out as a packing pallet that I found on Christopher’s back porch. My favorite part is walking by and leaning in close, smelling the sage and basil and mint. (And yes, I’ve seen some random passersby stop to do the same while they cut through our alley.)

* Garden inspiration via The Improvised Life, detailed how-to at Life on the Balcony

I found it and sat down in a cubicle between two homeless men to read. But then, wedged in the binding between pages 102 and 103, I found a small envelope:

The kind of envelope that accompanies wedding invitations—already addressed, stamped and ready for an RSVP. To a Ms. Carol M. Bustros, of New York’s Upper West Side. A bookmark pregnant with possibility. What could I do but take it? With the plan of sending a letter to this stranger who had once also read Amy Hempel. Or knew someone who did.

I still have the envelope, and am determined to send it off this summer.

What does one say to a woman named Carol, who may or may not still live in New York? What kind of letter would you like to receive from a strange girl in Colorado, who can’t resist a game of penpal?

–

“I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and over again: Is this the truth, or not?” ~ Amy Hempel

Then stepping outside this afternoon, post-rain, the strip of land alongside the creek very green, and bright in the sun that slanted at just the right angle between the clouds and the top of Mt. Sanitas, the soil dark and puddles swirling copper when I walked through them in my boots.

Most of our houses, our apartments, our offices and buildings—they are too box-y, too much involved with themselves and the people who made and live in them. The outside world is unpredictable and influences us, if we let it, will pull us quite naturally out of the minds that we occupy so much of the time.

Perhaps then, the best space would be one that invites in as much of the outside as possible. That does not shelter the live-r, but allows the elements (or at least the experience of the elements), into interior spaces.

What would it feel like to live this way?

“I should like my house to be similar to that of the ocean wind, all quivering with gulls.” ~ Georges Spyridaki

* That last photo, of the tent on the beach in Morocco, comes via Peggy Markel

Did you know that there is a branch of behavioral psychology, of philosophy, and of sociology, devoted to the study of “Being in Place”?

They ask questions about community, about landscape and belonging. What is it about a physical location that makes us say, “home”? That makes us feel, “here”?

These are the questions I’m asking these days. I don’t have the words to answer them yet. For now I have a handful of images, which make me feel something close to what it is I eventually want to say.

An Excerpt:

Dear M,

I woke up thinking about you this morning. Missing you in a very real way, like there was a space in my kitchen while I was boiling water for maté and unwrapping a thick piece of bread from its tinfoil, where it seemed you should be.

What is it about certain places that make us say ‘home’? Do you know? Do you think the places feel the same way about us when we arrive?

Love,
me

~
Re: here

I like to live as if they do. As if those places that I sink into like home also come a little bit more alive with my exhale. Like every time we somehow shape around each other a little more like rivers and rocks and wind.

See you soon.

Question: How do you know when you are home?

It’s obvious of course, but somehow I didn’t realize before: when someone retells the same stories over and over, there are other stories that are never told at all. In retelling my grandmother’s history, I realize that there are pieces that I know nothing about.

For example, the story of her first pregnancy. Her mother had been saying novenas for months, praying for a baby. When Nan found out that a baby was on the way, she rushed to tell her. But when she reached the house, her father opened the door. “Your mother’s not here,” he said, “She dropped dead this morning.”

Certain details of this story—Nana’s excitement, the running to her mother’s house, the exact wording that her father used to break the news, dropped dead—I have heard many times. I am certain of them.

But what happened after her father said these words? What did Nana reply? Did she turn around and go home, or did he invite her inside? These are details that I have never heard. Never, until I began constructing the scene, even thought to consider.

In what details does the story lie—in the pieces that people emphasize in their retelling? Or the negative space around them?

Every family has legends—the stories that we know to expect, either hopefully or with dread, at every holiday and gathering. (The time Nan and Pop were traveling in India, and she fell into a waist-deep latrine. Pop was laughing too hard to help her out. When they were 17 and Pop convinced her to play hooky from school—and her mother happened to run into them in downtown Manhattan.) These are the stories we ask for, again and again, even when we know their endings, because they are part of the larger narration of who we are and where we come from, how we see ourselves and where we fit. They are our myths.

But is it sometimes helpful to dig deeper, is it ever helpful to dismantle the myths?

As I craft these stories of my grandmother’s life, making choices as a writer, what are the implications of telling only the pieces that Nana has chosen to remember and relate? Her personality—the way she sees her own life and the story that she tells about herself, to herself and to others—is conveyed more fully by the omissions that she consciously or unconsciously makes. Or should I ask questions that will give the grey area surrounding these events a more substantial shape?

Either way, it’s true that a story is shaped as much by the silence that surrounds it, as it is by the details that find their way to the foreground.

In Washington DC two days before Thanksgiving (ten minutes before looking at my watch and making a mad dash for the train station), I saw a collection of photos at the Hirshhorn, “Geographical Analogies” by French photographer Cyprien Gaillard.

They’re Polaroids. Squares of wall or plant or architectural corner—mostly texture or shape, though sometimes scrawled graffiti or a word appears—arranged in diamonds of four or eight.

I could have look at them for hours. The shapes in each photo built off of the ones surrounding it, like bricks in a wall, cemented by the contrast and symmetry of colors.

But what captured me most was the way that—as humans with language—we instinctively string the disparate images together to create a story, to construct a time or a place.

I walked away with pieces of imagery, like disjointed memories from a dream. The kind that we think, if we try really hard, will eventually come back to us and make sense. But they never do. They fade as we are further entrenched in the day.

I found the nearest security guard and asked him to help me locate the artist’s nameplate (oddly situated about six feet away). Now that I had a guard looming over my shoulder, snapshots of the actual collection were out of the question, so I took a photo of the nameplate, and then turned to the guard (who also had a namplate pinned to his shirt. These are the details I wish I could remember.) and asked, “Which one is your favorite?”

He pointed to a diamond of dilapidated-beach-motel photos. Palm trees aching towards the stormy water, a rusty pool gate swinging. I nodded and continued down the hall.

Three months later, it’s cold and I’m spending free time with my scissors and old magazines, on the floor, cutting squares of texture and color from fashion spreads. It makes for pretty good stress relief, post-work, since I haven’t yet joined the gym. It has also resulted in some nice Cyprien Gallard-inspired cards:

The one on the right is a I’m-sorry-I-forgot-to-send-your-Christmas card to a San Francisco friend.

A birthday card to Seattle friend M., who is really good at rolling down hills.

The one on the left is a Thank You for a pair of knitted wrist-warmers.

The one on the right is still blank.

This week, my online and library explorations have uncovered the unusual lives of three women.

I’ve always been fascinated by people and their un-told stories, and do believe that everyone—even the seemingly most rational and mundane—has some incongruent or impulsive detail in his or her past. Everyone has a bit of crazy in them. And I mean that in the best way possible.

These three women grabbed my attention, in particular, simply because the unusual roads that their lives took seemed so natural, so obvious. As in, why would you consider living any other way? It’s not that any of them intentionally set out to be different, to shun the normal or accepted route—they seem to have not even known that route existed.

Why would anyone want to sit around and gossip at cocktail parties? When there are horses to wrangle and animal herds to be stalked, streets to be walked? I admire the confidence with which they each flung themselves into the unknown, or followed their creative impulses, without asking or waiting for anyone else’s permission. Moreso because all three grew up during an era when women were praised for their modesty, rather than their spunk or ingenuity.

It’s no coincidence, I think, that each of them grew up either straddling two cultures, or on land that was wild and and far from any city or finishing school. For Beryl Markham and Lily Casey, their fathers were their main role models and encouragers of all adventures. They did not go to school in their youngest years and had parents who encouraged them to take failure gracefully, rather than trying to shelter them from risk. (Future notes for raising children?)

Whether or not my descendants choose to tell stories about me, I’d like to know that I am living life on my own terms, guided by my own interests and instincts, and not limited by anyone else’s ideas about what’s possible. That I’m squeazing from each day, each place that I live or visit, the maximum amount of experiences and stories that are possible. Sometimes this means sitting still—I know that I absorb more, notice more when I am quiet. And sometimes this means driving a 17-year-old Honda over mountain passes and sleeping in the backseat. Either way, it requires being pushed to the edge of what I know.

And so, I pass you off to the lives of these three women who have landed in my lap this wintery month. Lives to investigate and be inspired by—to fuel your own schemes and raise your heart rate. I’m sure if we each do a little digging, we can find other lives like these, in our own families, our own towns. Or—why not—ourselves? Lives that remind us of what is possible:

Beryl Markham

Hunted gazelles in Africa at the age of 7, trained and raced horses, became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, from England to Nova Scotia.

Even Hemingway admitted that she “has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer.”

“Night flying over charted country by the air of instruments and radio guidance can still be a lonely business, but to fly in unbroken darkness without even the cold companionship of a pair of ear-phones or the knowledge that somewhere ahead are lights and life and a well-marked airport is something more than just lonely. It is at times unreal to the point where the existence of other people  seems not even a reasonable probability. The hills, the forests, the rocks, and the plains are one with the darkness, and the darkness is infinite. The earth is no more your planet than is a distant star—if a star is shining; the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant.”

Lily Casey

(as told by Jeanette Walls in the true-life novel, Half-Broke Horses)

Rancher, schoolteacher, mother.

“I crossed into Arizona at the painted cliffs, red sandstone bluffs that rose straight up out of the desert floor. After another ten days of steady riding, I reached Flagstaff. It’s hotel advertised a bathtub, and since I was feeling pretty ripe at that point, it was mighty tempting, but I kept going and two days later arrived at Red Lake.

I’d been on the road, out in the sun and sleeping in the open, for twenty-eight days. I was tired and caked with dirt. I’d lost weight, my clothes were heavy with grime and hung loosely, and when I looked in the mirror, my face seemed harder. My skin had darkened, and I had the beginnings of squint lines around my eyes. But I had made it, made it through that darned door.”

Vivien Maier

Nanny, street-walker, dedicated and un-discovered genius photographer.

In college I took a semester of letterpress printing.

My instructor, having spent much of his life picking perfect fonts and dealing with tiny pieces of lettering, was a design-obsessed, DIY kind of guy. He required us to lay out our homework assignments in InDesign, rather than type them in Word, so that even our reading notes became projects worthy of printing as posters.

One night in December, we were both in the shop working late—me to finish my end-of-semester project (poems printed on the backs of paper dolls) and he to work on a batch of hand-printed holiday greeting cards—when he told me about the Christmas gift he and his wife were building for their four-year-old daughter. It was a homemade puppet theater, with stitched red velvet curtains and rotating backdrops, built from scratch, each puppet with a delicately painted face and hand-sewn clothes.

Every year, he told me as he pounded the metal typeface into place with a wooden hammer, they handmade one gift for their daughter. That was her Christmas. No plastic pieces lying across the rug. No puzzling over Made-in-China instruction manuals written in broken English. No worries about lead-poisoning or leaking batteries. It was simple, and so heartfelt, and amazed me.

I imagine the way she might have exclaimed when she saw it on Christmas morning, and how I hope she explored each crevice and detail of the theater, her entire world absorbed into the 3 x 4 feet of its plywood walls, the hundreds of possible stories and acts that it would draw out of her over the years.

In this article that I just wrote for elephant journal, I write about the Buddhist concept of yun, or wealth. During this holiday season, the messages I encounter seem to be either overly obsessed with accumulating things, or completely adverse to any material possessions at all. But, true to its moniker as “the middle path,” Buddhism (or at least my take on it) tells us that it doesn’t really matter whether we have things or not. What matters is how we relate to them, how our things make us feel.

What I fail to mention in this article are the few Christmas gifts that I remember quite vividly—a guinea pig one year, named Oreo. My first laptop computer, when I was in high school. I remember the guitar that my mom gave to my dad, and how it made him start playing again.

But mostly, I remember the pink and purple dollhouse that my parents assembled from a kit—sneaking off to our neighbor’s basement to work on it, since I had a reputation for snooping and ruining surprises. It was wall-papered and furnished, with battery-powered electricity and a tiny garden hose glued below the kitchen window, just like the house that I grew up in.

Even now, I love thinking about how my parents snuck around to finish the dollhouse, how they made me close my eyes until I was standing face-to-face with it in our kitchen on Christmas morning. This reminds me that things have the power not only to convey generosity and surprise, but to create a world.

The dollhouse, much like the puppet theater my instructor was building for his daughter, was the kind of gift that a girl could live into.

Happy Holidays!