The Reader Travels

My husband and I adopted a new baby girl two weeks ago, and it’s a whole new adventure for the three of us. Well, actually, there are four of us counting the dog, who’s really had to adjust to having a new member in the pack.

All the while, I’ve changed jobs after 13 stable years, and I’m meeting new people from different parts of the world. While I’ve never traveled to the places where my new friends dwelled, I am learning about history and rubber plantations in Malaysia, agave farming and tequila making in Jalisco, Mexico, and what it’s like for people growing up in Karachi, Pakistan.

Now this new person has come to me with a history and heritage all her own, and I want to know more about where she came from and what she has written in her DNA and her collective soul.

I see the slightly slanted eyes, and I think about pre-historic migrants from China and Russia traveling across the Bering Strait to Alaska and down through Canada, the US and Mexico. I look at her dark hair and creamy skin, and I think of my grandmother, whose Spanish ancestors landed in the new world and joined families with some of the locals. And I stare at her eyes and smile at her smile, and wonder at what journey she will take me on today.

Here’s to new adventures!

Speaking of cannibalism, some families tend to eat each other alive. Three books come to mind when I think about some of my extended family: Little Altars Everywhere and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells, and A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Theirs are the types of secrets that make siblings scatter and look back at each other with anger and disgust.

But then it’s real food, not sibling-steak, that connects across physical and emotional miles. My grandmother’s funeral service was rushed, and the only personal words spoken were about her wonderful cooking. But then it was a topic that everyone could agree on, this love for good food and the sharing of kitchen knowledge.

After the funeral, one of my aunt’s friends asked about her favorite meals cooked by her mother — stewed chicken and crawfish etouffee were her answers. My aunt is more likely to buy me a good meal than to make it these days, but she knows good food and she knows how to cook it. One of the last meals she made for me was a delicious roast beef po-boy, its roots in her mother’s kitchen, its finesse learned from her daughter’s tour at culinary school. Nearing her husband’s retirement, she ponders moving to the condo in the city and selling the house in the suburbs, but she hasn’t figured out where she’ll put all her pots.

As brash as he is, my oldest uncle will light up when he talks about cooking. He visited a year ago, and stood in my mother’s kitchen describing the arduous, three-day process of making a good crawfish bisque. He’s a master of the crawfish boil and is not stingy with the knowledge. His son-in-law conducted his first crawfish boil last year, and it was a huge success.

My youngest uncle said to me last time I visited that he had cooked his father’s final meal, an omelette, something his mother had taught him to cook, just as she had taught my mother, who in turn taught me. I will make omelettes for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, doesn’t matter.

Although she did not teach me directly, I think of my grandmother every time I make spaghetti sauce. My mother used to cut her tomatoes in the can with a butter knife clicking against the tin. She told me her mother would always crush the tomatoes in her fingers to break them up, but she didn’t really like the squishy feeling, so she did it this way instead. I gently remove the bald tomatoes one-by-one from the can and stick my fingers into them. They shred with ease, leaving fleshy edges that feel good in the mouth. And as I feel the cool tomato juice in my fingers, I thank her for this gift of food.

Forget the rest.

I see her as the sailboat that was her namesake, her sails blown by the wind, toward the western horizon, toward the setting sun. For nearly twenty years, she’s been mostly silent, and I have missed her all this time.

For these long years, I have thought that God should have mercy and let her die, that perhaps this slow death was punishment for sins. But today, I believe that the stillness he granted her these last years was a mercy of its own, a mercy that stilled the pain of memory, that stilled the lashing tongue.

My grandmother inspired me to write. She said so many times, “You should write the family history, Ann Marie.” Her stories seemed more a soap opera than things that would happen in real life. But when I finally reached an age where I was ready to write the stories, she was no longer able to tell them. Her history became a fiction, but I’m alright with that. As objective as the historian tries to be, the truth is colored by his opinions and perceptions, and fiction taints fact the moment he takes pen to paper.

So my memory of her remains incomplete and bittersweet. I see her as that sailboat, and as the magnolia tree, chopped down, but living still, all these years. Goodbye, Grandma.

It seems like all I ever go to New Orleans for is funerals. Last time it was my step-grandmother, and now her husband has followed. Even getting remarried didn’t save him from dying three years after losing his wife of forty years. And his new wife Mary has known her share of loss, saying farewell to yet another man she loved.  People get old and they die. God takes care of the rest.

The Saints are in the Super Bowl today, an exciting and historic event, and Mardi Gras season is in full swing. We head out for the crescent city on Thursday, and the town will be filled with jubilation even if the Colts win the ball game. But we go to mourn.

I have never known a kinder man than Alan Temple Sparkman. He loved so much he had eight different wives in his lifetime. When he married my grandmother and adopted her son, it was the best thing that ever happened to my dad. Pop taught him one of the most valuable lessons in life. He taught him about love, honor and respect, and these are things my dad passed on to his own children.

With so many divorces and marriages, there must be casualties along the way. Broken homes are like sunken ships with the survivors grasping hold of flotsam and swimming for far reaching islands, surviving yet searching for ways back home, often unable to bridge the miles between them.

My father and his younger brother both met and married women from unbroken families and built their own sturdy islands of honored marriage vows and children who stay close beyond the miles. They learned love, honor and respect, and they also learned from a few of their father’s mistakes.

So we will have our own funeral parade, our headlights on, weaving through Mardi Gras traffic, as life and celebration roll on. Farewell honored husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, friend.

My friend M made a 3200 mile bicycle tour from Seattle to Delaware ten years ago with a group called Wandering Wheels. They’re a Christian-based organization, and the trip is like some sort of pilgrimage, connecting with the beauty of nature and stopping to rest at various churches along the way.

I recently got a hold of her scrap book from the trip. She took pains to collect her journal entries, photographs, maps, letters and postcards into a very nice hard-bound volume called, “Are We There Yet?” It was by no means an easy trip, made more a pilgrimage by the hardships endured and the 40-day duration of their travels. At the end, they baptized themselves in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, washing their bodies and their spirits clean.

I’ll share a few things that came to mind as I read her story:

• Horatio’s Drive - The story about Horatio Nelson Jackson and the very first coast-to-coast automobile trip had a lot of similarities to the bicycle tour, lots of flat tires and vehicle repairs along the way. Every leg of the journey was a trial, and his companions made all the difference. 
• Travels with Charley - In John Steinbeck’s classic memoir of his travels across America, he mentions briefly that he went to church every Sunday in a different town. He was most fond of the fire and brimstone sermon, where being told he was a foul sinner somehow made him feel better about himself.
• Wade’s Review of the Camelbak - A few week’s ago, I read a review of the Camelbak hydration system on the Vagabond Journey Travelogue, where Wade said that the thing leaks. When I saw in the beginning of M’s book that she was using this piece of equipment, I wondered what she thought of it. Near the end, she writes, “My CamelBak plug came off and stuff started spraying everywhere. I don’t think I’m going to use that anymore.” So there you have it.

My dear friend L spent the last nine months walking, preparing herself for the Breast Cancer 3-Day, held this past weekend. She was the very symbol of struggle and determination, walking so much that at one point she broke her foot, just from all the walking.

But she didn’t let it stop her. She got her boot and her physical therapy, and she kept working out even when she couldn’t walk. Then as soon as she was able, she started walking again. She raised her money, she trained and trained, and the excitement mounted as the day drew near.

She started her 60-mile walk on the morning of Friday November 6. She made it through a whole day of walking, exhausted and footsore. She was camping out Friday night when her body told her she needed to stop. Sick and vomitting Friday night and all day Saturday, she had to nurse herself back to health, while her fellow walkers walked on. But she was back on the road Sunday, determined to finish what she started.

This grueling walk is meant to symbolize a struggle, a fight, determination to defeat death, disease and hardship. It was 3000 people walking strong, leaning on each other, for life. I just don’t know how anyone’s struggle could have been more symbolic than my L’s, that she would start strong, then get sick, then come out strong in the end.

Linster, you are my hero.

The story in Breathing Lessons centers around a day trip to an old high school friend’s funeral. The couple taking the trip isn’t all that old, but the wife is having some major empty nest issues. That same weekend, she would be saying good-bye to her daughter, who was heading out for college. And driving out for her best friend’s husband’s funeral wasn’t making her feel any younger.

The older we get, the more we find ourselves attending funerals. Funerals for grandparents give way to funerals for parents, and when your spouses and friends start dropping, it just goes downhill from there. I’m at the age where it’s the parents who are going. Three friends at work lost their fathers this summer, including one of my best friends who flew home to China to be with her father in his final days.

Around the time I read Breathing Lessons, I was taking a road trip to a funeral myself. My husband’s uncle had passed, a year and a half after we watched my father-in-law die. I found myself singing again, standing in front of a church full of people who would truly miss Bob, standing in front of his wife and his daughter who thanked me with their eyes and their tears. I took a deep breath, and I sang, so much more for the breathing than for the dead.

As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve been itching to go road tripping. But when I wrote the title of this entry, my mind went instantly to my maternal grandmother. Willy Nelson’s “On the Road Again” was one of her favorite songs, and we sang it for her on her 80th birthday. Her eyes lit up in recognition, though her words and mind have failed her for over a decade past.

There was always music in my mother’s house, in my grandmother’s house. Dad played uke and guitar, and Mom played piano. Uncle Sonny played saxophone in high school and now reigns as the Frank Sinatra karaoke king of Slidell, Louisiana.  Uncle Joey played guitar, and shared his love of music with his two boys. Uncle Jeff has followed in Joey’s footsteps, singing and playing guitar and writing his own songs, clinging harder to music as his sight fails him. 

My grandmother Nola loved Liberace, and she played on her organ with her Big Note Songbook in the late afternoons. But I wonder about her love for “On the Road Again.” I guess it’s just the music and the way it made her feel, more than the sentiment, for she rarely left the comfort of her home state. And perhaps now she can dream that she’s somewhere adventuring on the road instead of being trapped in her nursing home, taking only the brief journey from bed to day room and back again.

I’m currently reading Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, set in modern day Mumbai.  It’s led me to research the geography of India, to see which state Mumbai is in and what languages they speak.  There’s a glossary at the back of the book to teach me words I do not understand. I feel the tensions between the birds of different feathers, lines drawn between people of different faiths and those from different states and countries. I would love to see a Mumbai version of the movie Crash. It is perhaps a more apt setting even than Los Angeles.

When I saw the first story on Yahoo!’s home page about the attacks, I was drawn immediately, connected in a way I never expected to be.  My heart doesn’t often bleed.  I usually see things through a logical eye that accepts that humans will wreak suffering upon each other out of hatred and insecurity, in the name of their god or their country.  Sad, but inevitable.  Yet I still imagined myself there, since the literary word had already brought me to this land a half a world away.

So, even though there is violence and suffering the world over, tonight my warm wishes go out to the city of Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra, in the land of India. May the waters of the Arabian Sea bring comfort and healing.

Bruce Ogilvie wasn’t anything like Willy Loman. He was successful and popular, a football star in high school who grew up to be a star on the local golf courses. He only sold a product if he believed in it. And he didn’t outlive his usefulness as a salesman, a father, husband, provider, or human being.

I worked for Bruce during some pretty formative years in my life. Straight out of college, I didn’t know what I was going to be when I grew up.  So I worked for Bruce six years until I figured it out. He just laughed at me, this young idealistic hippy chick, watching me figure stuff out, while he listened to Rush Limbaugh, knowing I’d eventually become the capitalist he expected me to be. He watched me go through phases where I wanted to be an air traffic controller, a librarian, a teacher, a novelist, until I figured out I just wanted people to pay me to write, anything.

Bruce was a mighty good man. He loved his wife and his kids so much. I loved hearing him talk about Patty as an East Texas princess, and how he met her at the Byron Nelson.  His kids were so beautiful.  They would come to the office, and we’d make art and play with the copy machine. Now the oldest is going off to college, and she never expected she’d be starting this new life without her daddy to fall back on. And Patty and Bruce should be comforting each other as their nest starts to empty, but that won’t work out as expected either.

Ten years have passed since I worked for Bruce. He just turned 60 a few weeks after I turned 40. I keep thinking I’m going to call and have lunch with him, but it’s too late now. God bless you, Bruce, in your heaven. You will be missed.