20s

Living in Colour

About a week ago, I was absent-mindedly surfing around late one night and got to thinking about my friend Rebecca. We were great friends when we were both living in DC but then we’d both moved on to other places and other things. I’d kept in touch with her sporadically but our paths hadn’t crossed in quite a while.

The last place I’d known her to be wasn’t really all that far away from me and I was thinking that I should get in touch and see if she had time to meet up some weekend afternoon this fall. When I didn’t find her listed among the faculty members of the university I figured she might be on leave or maybe she had taken a position at a different school and did a search for her name.

The search results puzzled me for a second. It was her, but why was it written in the past tense? I clicked into one, then another, and felt the blood rush from my head. These were obituaries. I did another search. Same results. How was this possible?

I must have read those tributes to her a dozen times each, looking for some indication that this wasn’t real. I couldn’t believe it. I was just going to see if she wanted to meet for coffee and now I was reading that she died in July from pancreatic cancer. She was three years younger than me. I swore it hadn’t been that long since I’d last done a search for her and seen her faculty profile and thought, wow, great for her! I’ll have to send her a note and catch up!

Only I never did send that note. I thought about it but then got busy, as you do, with work, the kids, etc. She’d pursued her PhD and followed her passion and was teaching at a great university. My life, married with two kids, living in a small town, seemed so ordinary compared to what I imagined hers was like. I easily talked myself out of contacting her because I thought, she’ll be busy, she has her academic friends and probably won’t have time.

When I read the obituaries, they all told about her contributions in her field and how talented she was and what a gifted teacher and how much students loved her classes. They were wonderful, beautiful portraits of my friend, and while I certainly recognized her qualities and traits, they all more or less began from the point when our paths diverged.

I’ve spent the days since learning of her death thinking about her and how much I admired her perseverance and passion. There are only a handful of people in my life about whom I can say they did what they always set out to do and Rebecca was one of those people.

Rebecca (left) and me in 1993?

Rebecca (left) and me in 1993(?)

I met Rebecca back in the early 90s when she came to DC after graduating college and had an internship at the museum where I worked. The internships were all unpaid so usually our interns either had some scholarship to support themselves or parents who funded their way. But Rebecca was supporting herself so she had taken a job working at the gift shop in the National Air and Space Museum. Have you ever been there? Let me tell you, it takes real dedication to your ideals to spend eight hours a day selling freeze-dried ice cream pouches and pens with the space shuttle floating back and forth to teeming hordes of kids and worn-out parents, so that you can have the opportunity to spend your off days cataloging slides with me in a photographic archive two floors underground.

Rebecca had a great laugh and a beautiful smile. I was always impressed with how well put together she looked. Even though she was just as cash-strapped as I was (more so maybe) she looked much more professional and stylish then I ever will (the picture is proof of this). She was the best whisperer I have ever met. You could be sitting three feet away from her and have no clue that she was carrying on a phone conversation but if you were the person on the other end of the phone, you had no trouble understanding her. Once she moved on to another opportunity at the National Gallery of Art, I didn’t see her as often but we got together outside of work frequently. We had orphans’ Thanksgivings together and we’d meet up for lunch or go grab drinks in the evening. We hung around together often enough that eventually my roommate and one of her roommates started dating.

I remember when she took her first trip to Italy and how excited she was to finally see things she’d only been able to read about. I remember how excited she was for me when I quit my job to go to Europe. A lot of people thought it was a foolish idea but she understood why I felt I had to do it. I went to visit her when she moved on to graduate school at Williams and was struck again by her dedication to her goals. Williams seemed so remote to me but she saw great opportunities and took advantage of everything the program had to offer. But mostly I’ve been thinking about what a great friend she was. I think about her warmth and her support and trust. Once the miles and the months separated us and I saw her less often, we were always able to pick right back up where we left off when we would get together or talk on the phone.

There is never enough time in life for all of the things we want to do. I am so deeply saddened that Rebecca is gone already and that I squandered the chance to see her more often. But as sad as I feel, thinking about her leaves me with a smile on my face. My only consolation, in reading those obituaries, is to know that she really did live her life in color, vibrant color, and that she shared that passion with so many other people. That is how I am going to remember her and I will try to honor her by carrying her spirit of fun and warmth with me and sharing that with others.

Letter Never Sent

R.E.M. – Letter Never Sent

This past weekend we were up visiting my mother so I took the opportunity to go up to her attic and have a look for some things I thought I might have left there. My mom was thrilled at the prospect of getting more junk out of the house. We hauled two big boxes down and four or five small boxes (old 8×10 B&W photographic paper boxes) that I knew were mine. One of the big boxes turned out to be my mother’s stuff so we sat on the screened porch and went through our old things together.

My boxes were full of old letters and postcards from college and my early 20s. I also found a dozen or more concert stubs that I’ve been wondering where I’d put them. My mother’s box also had old letters and pictures from her college years and early 20s. It was fun looking through them and we’d stop and show each other some of the pictures or read aloud funny parts of letters. I found a postcard from my DC days with a Victorian illustration of a Valentine’s Day card on it and on the back, written in red ink and all capital letters it said only, “THE CAPITOL CUPID HAS HIS EYES ON YOU. BE PREPARED.”

Her one box was dispensed with relatively quickly but I needed more time for all of mine. The next morning I woke up before everyone else, took some boxes out to the porch and started going through them again. Tons of old bank statements and pay stubs and college records that I have no idea why I kept but they all need to be shredded. I divided things into piles; trash, shred, keep.

The keep pile quickly took over the table. I got an empty plastic bin and started filling it up. On several occasions I opened some old letters to see what was inside and found myself taking a seat on the porch swing, reveling in these wonderful old letters. My friends and I used to write really great letters. Even the envelopes got in on the action. I have many that are hand made, true works of art, or that are covered in quotes from songs or books we were reading. Things like, “Sometimes, at a certain point in your life, you come across an artist—or anything; it could be a pastrami sandwich, I guess—and it takes on incredible significance.” – Hubert Selby. Or, “Keep away from hairdos altogether. A hairdo, by definition, always makes you look like someone else. Or think you do.” – Cynthia Heimel. I have no idea who those people are, not then nor now, but reading them today makes me smile and think of the friend that felt they were just the right finishing touch or last thought to include on a letter that had already been sealed.

And the letters themselves, filled with observations, feelings, doubts and fears, emotions and dreams, are a glorious tribute to a time when communication wasn’t instant. Several letters I re-read mentioned missing a phone call, or being unable to reach someone by phone and the resulting regret or worry it caused. No cell phones, no email, no text messages or status updates. We wrote long letters with little notes in the margins documenting time or place. One letter might cover several days, with thoughts being dropped in favor of recounting something that had just transpired then coming back to that thought a day or two later, maybe with some new perspective.

I love that they are also to and from all kinds of different addresses. There were many sent to me c/o a relative or friend I stayed with for short stints while job hunting. Return addresses from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Montreal, Philadelphia, New Hampshire, Tennessee, North Carolina. We were young and moving around a lot but we stayed in touch the only way possible.

I miss the letter writing days. I miss the time we took, the time we had, to sit down and put pen to paper, to ponder things and write it down to share with someone far away. Whether they were really important life decisions or tales of the ordinary day-to-day, these letters are something that tell me more than just what we were up to twenty-odd years ago. There is a large measure of our personalities in them. There is trust and truth. I see what made us click.

I’ve decided to write letters again. I was once a really great correspondent, if I may be so bold, and I want to try to rediscover that pace of writing and that level of attention and observation. I may not get any in return or I may fizzle out and they’d all become letters never sent, but I think it’s worth a try.

The Music Vault has this full concert on video. The quality is amazing. Do yourself a favor and check it out on their site.

Uprising

Muse – Uprising

I am done being depressed. I am done being disappointed. The fight is on.

I remember being in my early 20s, living in Washington, D.C., the first George Bush was still president and I couldn’t imagine a day when I would feel confident that Roe v. Wade was not constantly under attack and when we could rest easy that women’s reproductive rights weren’t threatened. I went to protests and counter-protests, sometimes even on my lunch break (I worked right on the Mall).

Then Clinton was elected. It was a week-long party on the Mall. There was hope in the air. They built this “town square wall” where they encouraged people to leave notes about their hopes for the country. I wrote “Keep abortion safe, legal, available.” That was over 20 years ago, but you wouldn’t know it based on current events.

Today’s Supreme Court ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby has infuriated me. There are so many things wrong with it that I hardly know where to begin. Winning the case doesn’t even make good business sense for them. It’s way more expensive to pay for someone’s pre-natal care and then pay for the resultant child’s medical expenses on their dime than it is to pay for birth control pills. But it was never about that. Not really. It was about control, don’t kid yourselves.

I’m not normally very outspoken about my political views, though I think they’re pretty obvious, but it’s time to get back in the fray. I have children now and as long as we’re living in this country I’m going to fight to make the country they inherit be one that respects all its citizens. Crazy idea, I know!

Except it’s not. It shouldn’t be. Take a fucking stand, everyone. At the very least boycott businesses like Hobby Lobby. “Be a conscientious consumer.” That was some parting advice I received at a concert (yes!) when I was 20 and it has stuck with me and it’s still true. Think before you shop. We’re all busy and tired and money is tight, but there are so many more of us that if we all really put our minds to it, really tried, things could move.

Look, I’m not an especially big Muse fan and I don’t like big arena shows but I love this song and video. I love the way it gets the crowd pumped. I love the message in the song. My one hope after this debacle of a ruling is that it will propel people to get off the sidelines. I never thought my daughter would face the same struggles I did, and more, but it’s time to show the next generation how to use their voices as well as their votes.

She Bangs the Drums

The Stone Roses – She Bangs the Drums

I’m reading Peter Hook’s The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club and I’m up to 1993. In addition to recording how horribly mismanaged the club was, especially financially, from its very inception, it’s full of tales of the Madchester scene.

The movie 24 Hour Party People covered some of this, and how much of that film or Hooky’s account of events can be really accurate is something he even acknowledges in the beginning of the book. With the kind of rampant drug use depicted in both and the intervening years blurring memories, I’m sure there are holes in some of these stories. Still, I believe it was a wild time and that crazy things were going on in Manchester back then.

For Tape Deck Tuesday I decided to pop in my Stone Roses Fools Gold cassingle. Do you remember the cassingle? It seems like such a joke of a format. This one was even some kind of maxi cassingle because it was the cassette version of a double A side. Both sides of the cassette were the same, the full version of Fools Gold, followed by What the World is Waiting For, then the short version of Fools Gold. Even though I bought the thing, this seemed stupid to me. So I pulled the old, piece of tape over the little hole on the top, move and recorded a bunch of other Stone Roses songs over the short Fools Gold and all of side B. Blasphemy? It’s a cassingle, how much worse can it get?

Fools Gold

I used this tape for the first test of the tape deck, because cassingle.

Side A
Fools Gold
What the World is Waiting For
She Bangs the Drums

Side B
Elephant Stone
Waterfall
Shoot You Down
This Is The One

There’s the visual from Instagram for you.

I liked the Stone Roses and the Charlatans (UK) but I didn’t get into the whole scene. Maybe you needed to be on ecstasy to really appreciate them all but that wasn’t my thing. I rather liked being in control and I never really saw the appeal. I remember going to a Grateful Dead concert with a bunch of friends in high school and one guy in our group became truly green (I’d never seen a person actually turn green before) and passed out. These were some pretty hard partying kids but they were usually drinking beer and smoking pot and he had taken god only knows what. He was a big guy too, fell like a tree being chopped down. If he couldn’t handle that, little old me, who didn’t even smoke cigarettes, had better not take any risks. I wasn’t a total goody-two-shoes but I didn’t see the need to lose myself either.

I used to think I would really have loved to have been able to go to the Haçienda. Now I know that I would have been happy to have been there during the early days when it was a split of dance nights and live bands, and I probably would only have gone on the band nights, but I’d leave the ecstasy-fueled raves to others. The music is enough of a high for me.

The Noise of Carpet

Stereolab – The Noise of Carpet

Another unmarked tape. This time it was in a soft plastic case with a small picture of Ralph Fiennes from the movie Strange Days taped onto the cover. I thought at first that it must have been a tape with the Strange Days soundtrack on one side but no. Chances are there’s another tape floating around with that on it and I just mixed up the boxes. After all, it hardly matters when there’s nothing written on the box.

I am pretty sure this tape comes from summer 1996 since a bunch of the songs were on albums released that year but it doesn’t have any songs from the Luscious Jackson release later that year so it only makes sense that I made this compilation before that came out.

1996 would put it at a time when I was living up in Maine, trying to save up money for my next move (which wound up being graduate school in Wales a year later). I worked at an insurance company, very boring work, and I didn’t have a lot in common with most of my co-workers. I had bought my first car to get back and forth to the job. It was the most bare bones model they had. It didn’t come with a stereo, not even an antenna, just holes for where the equipment could go if you paid for the upgrade. I figured a car company stereo was probably pretty shitty anyway and I would just go to a local car stereo store and set myself up.

Well, I dropped a huge chunk of change on the stereo at the local place. I got a six-CD changer installed in the trunk, which was controlled by the unit in the car that had a tape deck as well, and a detachable faceplate. This was the height of sophistication in car stereos at the time. I really liked the detachable faceplate feature because I tried to go down to New York, Philadelphia, and DC as often as possible to visit friends and go to shows. So popping off the faceplate made my otherwise very basic car look like it had already been stripped down and not worth breaking into. At least that’s what I told myself and, whether the lack of a noticeable stereo had anything to do with it or not, my car was left alone.

The drive from where I lived in Maine to New York is at least six hours, more if you stop along the way or hit traffic. Usually I would load up the disc changer with six discs that would help kill all that time. However, once you get right down into the heavy traffic area, you can’t be fiddling with the stereo and I would have already burned through all six discs on the way down. I needed a tape that was fast paced to match that last stretch of the drive. I’ve found that the key to driving in cities is to drive as the locals do. This means it’s usually a lot faster and more aggressive than you might otherwise be comfortable doing. Add in unfamiliar territory, frequent lane switches, pothole-ridden pavement, construction detours, and that’s just on the BQE. I made this tape for just those kind of drives.

Side A
Wrong – Everything But the Girl
Shu Zulu Za – Poi Dog Pondering
City Song – Luscious Jackson
Spark Plug – Stereolab
The Noise of Carpet – Stereolab
Stutter – Elastica
Surprise – Luscious Jackson
Waking Up – Elastica
Diamonds and Buttermilk (Matt Warren remix) – Poi Dog Pondering
Big Deal – Everything But the Girl
Flipside – Everything But the Girl
The Chain – Poi Dog Pondering

Side B
Carnival – The Cardigans
Here – Luscious Jackson
Hard Sometimes (M-Theory remix) – Poi Dog Pondering
Before Today – Everything But the Girl
Percolator – Stereolab
Cybele’s Reverie – Stereolab
Wrong (Todd Terry remix edit) – Everything But the Girl
God’s Gallipoli (Arqueen remix) – Poi Dog Pondering
Platetectonic – Poi Dog Pondering
Complicated (Berlin remix) – Poi Dog Pondering
Rise and Shine – The Cardigans
Zap Disco (House-O-Magic mix) – Poi Dog Pondering

Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

Billy Bragg – Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

It’s May 1st, International Workers’ Day. I thought I’d take the opportunity to post a Billy Bragg song. Not his version of the Internationale, though I thought about it, but this song always brings a smile to my face even while it entices you to be active with the activists.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen Billy Bragg but each time I’ve seen him perform this song he changes some of the lyrics to put it in context with events that are relevant to the current time. I looked at a bunch of live clips on YouTube but I’ll leave it to you to look some up if you’re interested. They’re like little historical snapshots. For myself, I’ll always remember the time he sang, “In a perfect world we’d all sing in tune but as we’re all Smiths fans give us some room!” That was the same show where he covered Deee-Lite’s “Groove is in the Heart” with help from the opening band, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, on the pretext of proving that Billy Bragg fans could dance.

I love the rousing end of this song. I don’t know how you can not feel fired up. When I start feeling pretty discouraged about the state of the world, and lately that’s really easy to do, I need to remember to play this song. One of the live clips I watched was from the City Winery in Chicago about a year ago and I really love how he talked about fighting cynicism, more than anything else. I’m pretty jaded but he’s right.

“So join the struggle while you may, the revolution is just a t-shirt away!”

My Billy Bragg t-shirt from the Internationale tour.

My Billy Bragg t-shirt from the Internationale tour.

The back! Were you at one of these shows?

The back! Were you at one of these shows?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A little t-shirt #tbt with your musical interlude.

Can I Kick It?

A Tribe Called Quest – Can I Kick It?

Today for Tape Deck Tuesday we have one of the many tapes lacking any kind of identification. It stood out to me because it has purple on the (blank) cover and it’s only a 60-minute tape. Normally I would have chosen a 90-minute or I’m finding some 100- or even 120-minute ones, but 60? That’s not nearly long enough for most of my taping purposes.

I put the tape in and it started up about half a minute into “Interesting Drug” by Morrissey. Ok, I thought, this must be a copy of Bona Drag. But then next came “Groove is in the Heart” by Deee-Lite. I laughed out loud, both because that song always makes me laugh and because it was not what I was expecting. What was this tape?

The third song was 52 Girls by the B-52s. Now I was beginning to remember. When I graduated from college I didn’t have a job lined up or any grad school plans, nor any clue what I wanted to do. I went back home to Maine and, eventually, got a job at the new record store in town. It seemed like a pretty good gig while I figured out my next steps. Listen to music all day long, order new releases, talk to other music lovers, there are worse ways to spend your day. I got to know some of the regular customers pretty well, some of them college students with radio shows.

Which is how, by the fourth track, I knew what this tape was. Shazam didn’t recognize the song, and I wasn’t 100% sure myself, but I had a strong feeling it was the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies*. I had gone over to the college radio station with a friend who had an early morning show and he helped me make a tape for a party since I wanted a bunch of songs I didn’t have.

My brother and sister were sharing a big old farm house with a couple of other friends about 20 miles away out in the sticks. I’d go over there once or twice a month just to hang out. They were going to have a party and I thought it could use a little new music. I picked some songs I knew they would know, some I liked that they wouldn’t know and a guilty pleasure or two.

Not remembering what was coming next meant I laughed most of the way to work this morning. It’s exactly what I was hoping for with this little project. Reminiscing in the car and enjoying some old songs I might not have listened to in a long time. This seems pretty 1990 to me. Here’s the complete track listing, which I will finally write down on the cover.

Side A
Interesting Drug – Morrissey
Groove is in the Heart – Deee-Lite
52 Girls – B-52s
Do You Remember – Chickasaw Mudd Puppies
Been Caught Stealing – Jane’s Addiction
U Can’t Touch This – MC Hammer
Can I Kick It? – A Tribe Called Quest
The Only One I Know – The Charlatans (UK)
We Saw Jerry’s Daughter – Camper Van Beethoven

Side B
Temptation – New Order
Love Vigilantes – Poi Dog Pondering (cover of New Order song)
What the World is Waiting For – The Stone Roses
Ugly – Fishbone
Life During Wartime – Talking Heads (Stop Making Sense version)
Look Alive – Pylon
Ask – The Smiths

It was pretty rare for me to make a tape just for a party. Mostly I made tapes that had some deeper meaning, a hidden message, or a theme perhaps. I might make a tape for biking or for a road trip, but even those usually had more going on than met the casual listener. This tape is not trying to say anything more than Can I Kick It? Yes, you can.

*YouTube to the rescue. Also, I think there is one more track on side B but Shazam didn’t know it and I forgot once I got inside what it had been.

Pump It Up

Elvis Costello – Pump It Up

Whew, what a day. Week, actually. Did you ever have one of those weeks where nothing particularly bad happened, no work crises, nothing horrible on the home front, just a series of frustrations and disappointments that pile on top of each other until you feel like you just can’t take anymore? Yeah. That’s when you need to blast this song as you go peeling out of the parking lot.

When we were teenagers, all the Elvis Costello records belonged to my older sister. I have a 7″ now, I’m not sure where or when I got it, but she owned all the LPs. I taped some of them way back when but I have a hole in my collection where all the Elvis should be.

Tomorrow is Record Store Day and I’ll be hitting my local record store, just down the street. Or as my son once called it, The Most Forgotten Place on Earth. He was only seven at the time and it is down a little pedestrian-only alleyway, but I’m sure it will be busy. Most Saturdays there is some regular traffic through there but it’s not crowded. Tomorrow will be bumping elbows, waiting your turn busy. I may not end up buying any of the special RSD releases but I might pick up an old Elvis Costello album. It’s going to be tough to top my great find from RSD last year.

It’s also Easter weekend and my kids have been off from school all week so I contemplated going up to Maine to visit my mother. We could spend Easter with her and I could go to an event at a branch of the record store where I had my first post-college job. I had too much going on at work though, and didn’t really want to spend that many hours driving up and back for what would end up being a day and a half there. It’s also just as well we stayed put because I’m close to securing a new (to me) car and I need to do some things to get that all lined up.

Have a fun Record Store Day!

Jack Ass Ginger

Poi Dog Pondering – Jack Ass Ginger*

#WhereILivedWednesday – Mt. Pleasant, Washington, D.C.

This is part of a series about places where you’ve lived, started by Ann Imig of Ann’s Rants. I highly recommend checking out her site for more people’s stories.

For two years in the early 90s I lived in what was commonly called a group house in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C. My three housemates were like me, young women with jobs that didn’t pay all that well but that looked great on your résumé. D.C. was full of young people and it was an exciting time to be there, the end of the Reagan/Bush era and the start of the Clinton years.

Our house was a row house with four bedrooms and only one full bathroom upstairs, then a kitchen, dining room, living room, and a tiny little half bath on the first floor. A back deck no one ever used, just like the front porch, and a basement where the laundry machines were. The neighborhood was pretty mixed, some group houses, some old timers, some new young families, some of the houses had been fixed up, others were sagging a bit around the edges. Mt. Pleasant backs up to the National Zoo and Rock Creek Park on the western edge, Columbia Heights to the east, Adams Morgan is to its south, and sort of nothing to the north. Back then, the Green line of the Metro stopped at 14th and U St. and that wasn’t a neighborhood where you really wanted to spend much time (my how things have changed), so we generally walked across the park and caught the Red line from Cleveland Park.

Mt. Pleasant didn’t really have many stores that sold stuff you actually needed. There was a 7-11, where I would go for my Ben & Jerry’s fix during that period of time when I had my pint-a-day habit. It was summer and we didn’t really have air conditioning. It was too hot to cook anything and invariably I’d suggest to one of my housemates that we hit up the 7-11 for something cold. I admit, I was addicted to Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream. You know how when you dig in, there are these chunks of cookie dough, and then when you get down near the bottom, you think, well, I’ll just get that little chunk there. But when you move that one out of the way, a new little chunk would be revealed and eventually there wasn’t really enough to bother putting it back in the freezer so you might as well just polish it off. That was my dinner for a good three weeks straight. It worked out all right though since I rode my bike to work down at the Smithsonian and in that heat I easily burned off all the calories.

Mt. Pleasant wasn’t a great neighborhood but it felt moderately safe, especially when you consider D.C. had the reputation at the time of being the murder capital of the country. It had been the scene of the Cinco de Mayo riots in 1991 (and the anniversary mini-riots in 1992) and we jokingly called it Mt. Unpleasant. It was certainly better than Columbia Heights but if you were sensible you could get off the bus on 16th street and walk home without trouble.

That all changed though on the night of St. Patrick’s Day in 1993. Three of us were home, I was up, the other two were already asleep, and our fourth housemate, who had a car, had double parked to unload stuff and then went back out to try and find a parking spot. Shortly after she left I heard a loud bang and a car screeching off. I looked out the window but couldn’t really see anything. I told myself that screeching car must have backfired. But she didn’t come back, and it shouldn’t take that long to park the car. Then I saw flashing police and ambulance lights. I was too scared to move. One of my other housemates woke up to use the bathroom so I ran up and told her what was going on and convinced her to walk down the street with me to see what was happening.

A small crowd had gathered down the street where police had blocked off an area with crime scene tape. The ambulance had already left and after determining no one had seen anything, the cops tried to get people to leave. The crime scene tape was encircling her car and the sidewalk leading up to a neighbor’s house. Feeling like I was about to faint, I stepped forward and told one of the officers that it was my housemate’s car.

She had been shot in the head by an insane person with a shotgun, driving around our neighborhood looking for people walking alone. As we later learned, there had been previous victims but as they were men of color and those incidents had happened closer to the eastern edge of the neighborhood, they didn’t see any connection. They wanted to know if she did drugs or had an abusive boyfriend. No and no.

She lost an eye but otherwise pulled through amazingly well. Her father came down from NY and we moved my bed down to the dining room of the house where he lived for the next six weeks. I borrowed a foam fold out sofa from a friend and had that in my room. It seemed like the least I could do. Her mother had died only a year or so beforehand and her brother also lived in the area so their dad wanted (and needed) to be there.

A week after our housemate was shot, a white woman was killed by the same shooter about a block away while she was out walking her dog. Only then did they piece it all together and a curfew was imposed on our neighborhood. You had to be inside your house by dark. Things were bleak. I spent a lot of time holed up in my room listening to music. I was outraged about the cops just dismissing the first shootings as symptomatic of the area. I was worried about my housemate, and I hated being cooped up in the house. Headphones on. “Breathe deep, fill up with relief…”

I forget now how long this all lasted. It felt endless while we were living through it. Sometime in the spring she sent her dad back home and told us she wanted to move across town to be nearer to her friends and her brother. The rest of us didn’t really want to be there anymore either, even though the shooter had been caught. While I have fond memories of my years in D.C. and of all the things I did and people I knew, I can’t say I miss that house.

*This video is from a live show in 2006 but this song comes from their 1992 album and I saw them a lot back then and this song kicks ass live.

Ages of You

R.E.M. – Ages of You

Today I found out about the Amtrak Residencies for writers. I can’t tell you how perfect that is. I might cry. Right now I am listening to the train tape I made in college (the digital edition on my iPod) and I can see the backyards of America in my head, obscured now and then by the blur of greenery; interrupted by the occasional overpass. I always thought that would make an excellent anthropology thesis, America’s Backyards as Seen from the Train. That’s where the truth hangs out. The discarded bicycles, rusted red wagons, trampolines, and clotheslines.

Close by the cities, the scenery is much more industrial. Warehouses. Graffiti covered brick buildings and cement walls. Trenton Makes The World Takes. The cities give way to the suburbs, where the backyards and cemeteries make up the scenery. Depending on what train you’re taking, you might get far enough away from the built up areas to see more traditionally scenic views. I always try to sit on the right side of the train in a window seat. If you always sit on the right, you’ll see what’s on the left on your way back.

I love everything about train travel. I love the big, beautiful, historic stations. I love the smells of the engine, some kind of weird mix of diesel and electric, hot and metallic. I love the rhythm of the train swaying gently as it clatters along the tracks. I love the tracks! I have two rusted and discarded old railroad spikes saved in a bin. I have several Amtrak train ticket stubs saved alongside concert tickets. I love leaning my head against the window and trying to find a spot to put your feet that gives you just the right amount of ‘please don’t talk to me’ body language or trying to sit in such a way as to invite a little conversation. I love watching my fellow passengers, listening to them chat with their seatmate or talk with their children about what’s passing by the window. I like to sneak a peak at the book they’re reading. Watching as people meet them when they get off the train, and others saying goodbye as someone gets on.

I have taken the train as far north as Montreal, as far south as Georgia. The Adirondack. Southern Crescent. Overnight trains. Commuter trains. Sightseeing trains. Subways. I’ve been to Zoo Station. Paddington Station. Two of my proudest foreign language moments were giving directions to Salzburg’s train station in German and confirming in Czech that someone was waiting for the correct subway train in Prague. The only Czech words I can still remember are the words for beer and ‘next stop’ which is what they would announce as the subway pulled into every station.

It is hands down my favorite mode of travel. It’s not the fastest, there are usually delays on the line somewhere, but when I take the train, at least half the reason is just being on the train. It’s not the most convenient, being at the mercy of someone else’s schedule. A few years ago, Amtrak started running a train up to Maine, the Downeaster. I am dying to take that train. In order to get the train from my house to my mother’s house up in Maine would involve me getting on a train when it’s still dark in the morning and switching stations in Boston. It would take more time than driving but I’m actually contemplating buying a used car up near my mother just so I have an excuse to make that trip.

There is just something about the train that brings up all kinds of emotions for me. It’s like I feel a tiny shred of what everyone else in my car is feeling. Some people are excited, some are sad, some are hopeful, some are worried, some are exhausted, some can’t sit still. I know all those feelings and have, at different times in my life, been one of those people sitting there. So now I look around and see me on my first solo train trip, me going to visit a sister or a friend, me with my best friend on an adventure, me trying to hold it together when things aren’t working out, me on my way to a job interview, me seeing new places and remembering all my old favorite haunts. I don’t get that from any other form of travel.

This is the fourth song on the train tape. My vinyl copy of this song has a longer finger-snapping intro. I really wanted to use this version but I couldn’t get it to only play the first part.