The New Rambler

A drear-nighted December may not be the best time to listen to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. Then again, is there ever really a bad time to listen to Bob Dylan? (Dylan haters to the side; this post’s not for you.)

I first heard the album in its entirety sometime between my sophomore and junior years of college. Sophomore year is when the Indigo Girls’ live album 1200 Curfews came out. I got a copy for my birthday, and we all listened to it incessantly on my hall and argued late into the night about just what Italian poet was being referenced in “Tangled Up in Blue,” which they cover on that album. At some point, it must have dawned on me that I needed to hear the real thing, and so on some trip home to Iowa City, I picked up cassettes (yes, I still bought cassettes in those days — my car then had a tape deck — as, for that matter, does my car now) of Blood on the Tracks as well as Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited.

(It should be noted here for those who are unaware that I was raised almost entirely without popular music. I did not hear the Beatles until I was a teenager. I knew “Blowin’ in the Wind” from singing it at camp, but Dylan was as unfamiliar to me growing up as I suspect Bach’s collected organ works are to most people.)

I don’t believe that my repeated listenings to all three albums that fall actually precipitated my first major depressive episode, although I suppose there are those who would argue that repeated exposure to “Desolation Row” and “Visions of Johanna” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” not to mention “Simple Twist of Fate” and “You’re a Big Girl Now” and “If You See Her, Say Hello,” are not really good for anyone suffering from unrequited love, perceived poverty, and ensuing clinical depression. But so it goes. Along with Elizabeth Wurtzel, I’ve always believed that the sound of Dylan’s “ragged, edgy vocal cords” is actually the sound of redemption.

I also spent a lot of time that fall sitting at a table at Chan’s, a Chinese place a few blocks from campus, eating chicken fried rice (I never ordered anything else) and reading exclusively books not actually assigned for any of my classes. I had gone that fall from seeing the cafeteria as a wondrous place wherein food appeared magically and dishes were swept away on a conveyor belt to seeing it as a place of overcooked pasta, stale cigarette smoke, putrid cooking smells, and social isolation. My best friends were living abroad or off campus or had become biochemistry majors and chained themselves to their desks, and so I mostly ate alone. Doing so at Chan’s, with the neon lights and the rain and the company of some Beatnik tome seemed infinitely preferable to doing so at the cafeteria. I worked more hours at patrol to make up for the expense.

I’ve always credited another Romantic poet — Coleridge — with saving my life that semester, later that December, when I was alone in my dorm room with nothing but some clothes and a handful of books I needed for my last finals (everything else was packed and stored for a month for my impending move off campus). Among those books was an anthology of the Romantic poets, and one night I opened it to “Frost at Midnight,” and somehow it had on me the same effect that the music William Styron describes listening to in Darkness Visible had on him: I decided to live.

But that was just one moment, one little, though crucial time. Dylan was a constant, and if he didn’t make me happy, exactly, he sustained me in some way, much the way those plates of chicken fried rice did. And now, tonight, with the rain coming down outside, that’s what I remember.

This post is adapted slightly from the beginning of this month’s The Stage column for Little Village. The online version is not available yet, but those of you who are local can pick up a free copy of the print publication at numerous venues around town.

My father never made it to the war. Like many in his generation — he was born in 1923 — he wanted badly to fight in World War II. Having learned there were only two standard eye charts used in induction exams, he memorized both, figuring he could read enough of the first row to figure out which one it was. The ruse worked. He joined the army, but he was honorably discharged partway through basic training and told “not to come back even if we are invaded.”

The exact events leading up to his discharge are lost to his memory and to a fire that destroyed a great many military records in Kansas in the 1970s. But he was not forgotten: at his funeral in 1981, some forty years after his short tenure in the Army, two military officials showed up with an American flag, a headstone and a hundred dollars. The oldest local living veteran came to the burial to read “In Flanders Field.” He was even offered burial in a national cemetery and the American Legion in Enosburg Falls, Vermont, where he is buried, still keeps a fresh flag at his grave, along with those of all the other veterans buried in that tiny town.

The military does a much better job than most of us at remembering and honoring the people who served, even those, like my father, who gave nothing more than a few weeks of their lives. As a society, we do not do so well. This month we have Veterans Day. Some of us will get the day off work. Most of us will notice that no mail is delivered that day. My grandmother will tell me about observing a minute of silence in her grade school classroom at 11:11 on November 11 for Armistice Day, as it was originally called. But even though we are fighting two wars, Americans won’t take more than that moment or two to remember, perhaps only noticing when they go to the bank or the post office or the library and find it closed.

This year, however, Iowa City area residents have a chance to do much more: They have a chance to hear from veterans themselves at Working Group Theatre’s latest production, called Telling: Iowa City. Nine actors, all of them veterans, will put on a performance based on the stories of many more Iowa veterans from World War II through the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This past August, Working Group Theatre and the UI Veterans Association interviewed dozens of veterans from Iowa. Working from those stories, playwrights Jennifer Fawcett and Jonathan Wei crafted the script of this production. Wei is a founder of The Telling Project, which has produced shows in Eugene and Portland, OR, Sacramento, CA, Starkville, MS, Washington, D.C., Seattle, WA and Baltimore, MD.

Whether or not you know someone in the service personally, you owe it to yourself to go and hear some of these stories. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 8-10 in Theatre B at The University of Iowa’s Theatre Building and Dec. 2-4 at Riverside Theatre.

Working Group Theatre is also soliciting more stories from veterans. To submit yours, or to read more, visit workinggrouptheatre.org and look for the links for Telling: Iowa City.

Two weeks ago I killed my cat. Well, technically, the vet did it, and it’s not called killing, it’s called euthanasia or putting down or, most euphemistically, putting to sleep. I did this because he was old and sick. He weighed only 4.6 pounds, down from his eight pound prime. He had an infection in both eyes and one paw. He was almost completely dehydrated. Shrunken is how the vet described him. He gave him only another twenty-four hours to live, but then said he was such a tough cat he might hang on for another week, getting weaker and weaker. Everyone at the office was amazed he could still stand. I told them that the day before he had jumped on my bed. Twice. But I killed him, or I let him be killed, and then I buried him in the backyard, with the help of a friend. It was dark by the time I got started, and I was digging by the light of a railroad lantern, digging finally sitting down, with a trowel, because my six-months pregnant body could no longer manage the balancing act of digging down into the hole and pulling the shovel up carrying dirt. I was a poor lever operator.

Five months ago I nearly killed the thing that will become my baby. Technically again I would not have killed it. And they don’t call it killing, not unless they are the sort of people who hold signs outside of clinics with bloody fetuses. They call it abortion, or D&C, or, most euphemistically, termination. I decided not to kill the six-week old collection of cells, though. I decided to keep them and let them grow. This week I read that they now weigh two and a half pounds and have five senses and a full complement of body parts. This seems rather impossible, but apparently it is true.

Nobody ever criticizes you for putting your cat down. Even the most rabid anti-abortion people I know are okay with, as they say, putting an animal out of its suffering. Of course, no one says it’s easy, either. Go out and tell people that you had to put your cat or dog to sleep, and you will gain instant sympathy. Post it on a social network and people you barely even know will offer hugs and condolences.

Nobody posts on the internet that she put her embryo down. Many of us, of course, would support her, would offer her strength, would recognize that this, too, may have been a hard decision, or it may have been an easy one, but that the telling of it would not be easy. Because of course many people would not offer such support. They would tell her that she was wrong, that such decisions were not hers to make, that they should be beyond her control.

If you believe that God gave man dominion over all the animals, I suppose it stands to reason that you also feel no particular qualms about having control over their life and death. I never thought I had any particular qualms about it myself. It’s true that I don’t hunt, but it’s also true that I’m not a vegetarian. I kill flies and mosquitoes with impunity, and I feel little regret when I step on ants. Two of my cats died at home, before I had to make any decisions about whether to excercise my control over their lives, or at least over their death. I exercise control over my cats’ lives every day: I decide when to feed them; I tell them where they can and cannot go; I clip their claws and give them drugs when the vet prescribes them. But I’d never exercised this particular kind of control before: not the saying yes to the large does of anesthesia, not the petting and holding the cat for the last time while the vet left me alone in the room with him, not the praying that the baby inside me wouldn’t choose that moment, the moment when the syringe hit the cat’s leg, as a moment to kick or turn a somersault. That life and death intersect is something I know. But I didn’t want them to right then.

A great many people believe that you should not have control over human life, and in some instances, I am one of them — your typical pro-choice, anti-death penalty tax and spend bleeding heart liberal pacifist. No one — least of all the state — should be able to control the ending of another person’s life. But the beginning of life — that’s where everyone gets hung up.

The issue is often framed as that of who controls a woman’s body — the woman, her doctor, the church, the state? The belief, among those I consort with, is that the woman should be in charge. I believe that still, and I will continue to fight for it, but the past six months have led me to understand how little control one actually has.

I used birth control, but it did not work. As a friend of mine says, birth control is a misnomer. You’re not really in control of the situaiton. Contraception is better — you are trying to prevent something from happening, but it may or may not actually work. To be in the tiny, tiny percentage for whom it does not work is an odd experience, especially at age thirty-five, when you have a professional job and a savings account and are about to become a homeowner. But there you have it: you’re not in control. And if you decide, as I did, not to take a certain kind of control at that point, you lose control completely, not only of your body but also of yourself.

I am twenty-eight weeks pregnant. I weigh thirty-six pounds more than I did six months ago. In those six months, I have been nauseated, fatigued, and dehydrated. My blood sugar has dropped to the point that I’ve fainted. My whole body has at one or another time hurt, often several parts of it at once. I cannot remember the last time I woke up and felt good, or the last time I leaned over to pick something up or got up from sitting on the floor with anything resembling grace or ease. One goes in that time from pregnancy being a secret that nobody knows — at first, not even you — to a fact on display for everyone, a thing everyone sees and comments on. The baby — and it is a baby now — swims around and kicks and punches, and it is supposed to. At the hospital they lecture you: if the baby doesn’t move ten times every two hours, something is wrong. That is but one of a long list of things you are instructed to watch out for. If you get a headache or a fever, if you bleed or have stomach pain, if you vomit: all these things are out of your control, and all of them mean you must call the hospital, go in and be put under the control of the machines, the blood pressure cuff, the fetal heart monitor, the ultrasound, the people in scrubs and the people in white coats.

When I fainted, they took me away in an ambulance and put a needle in my arm. Around the other arm they put a blood pressure cuff, and it inflated and deflated every ten minutes. Around my wrist they put a band with my name and hospital number, the same one that was given to me when I was born. Somewhere the very first band with that number is in a baby book my mother made. Eventually, only when they knew that someone was coming to pick me up, they unhooked me and let me go, let me put my own clothes on and walk out the door.

I live now in a house that I bought myself, with money I earned. My old cat is buried here between two trees, where I imagine he watches the birds and feels the squirrels and chipmunks and gazes West toward the sunset, toward the place he came from, where I used to live, and where my other cat is buried. This past week I got two new cats to share my house with me. They have taken control. They jump on tables and counters, investigate behind and underneath the furniture. They run and jump and pounce, sometimes on each other and sometimes on things only they can see. They are, at times, even more active than my baby, who rarely stops moving in my womb. I do not bother to count his kicks — I can tell he is there and doing well.

In twelve more weeks, give or take, I’ll be back at the hospital, and my son will be born and get a number of his own. I will not control when that happens, although I hope to control a little bit how it happens: I hope to be there at the hospital with my mother and my doula and some friends. I hope not to be hooked up to machines the whole time, or to be made to lie flat on a bed. I hope to be able to see my son as soon as he is born, perhaps in a fog of pain, but not a fog of painkillers. I hope that my body will perform the way it was made to do, making milk for my baby to drink, but many years ago now I decided to exercise another sort of control: I had a breast reduction to ease the strain on my back, and to have the body that was more like the one I imagined and less like the one I was given. So I don’t know yet if the ducts that need to be there for the milk to come have managed to regrow from their severing, or if that particular control I tried to exercise so long ago will mean giving up another thing now.

Let go and let God, say the twelve-step people, whose Serenity Prayer is perhaps the clearest distillation of control that we have. They pray for the strength to change the things one cannot accept and to accept the things they cannot change, and they pray for the wisdom to know the difference.

I walk through life now wondering if there is a difference, or if the surest form of control is simply to accept change. I pray for my son and for myself, for my family and for my friends, but I rarely know any more what to ask for. Peace, I say. Change. Something. Whatever it is we need, if only we could know.

I do not care if you do not like poetry.

People often ask me if I like children. The question always cracks me up. “Sure,” I say. “I like some children.” I mean, really. Would you say to someone, “Do you like people in their 40s?” I like some children just the way I like some people. I don’t really see them as a separate category.

I also like some poetry although, as a matter of shorthand, I am often apt to say simply that I like poetry. But that’s untrue as a whole.

I do not like Wordsworth.

I do not like Robert Frost or Robert Lowell or A.E. Housman or W.H. Auden very much.

I do not like Jorie Graham, though God knows I tried to for a long time.

There are a ton of poets I have never read and whose work I thus can’t comment on at all. And my like or dislike has nothing to do with whether or not the poet in question is any good. I have very little notion of what that means, and one of the beauties of giving up writing for librarianship is that I no longer have to know what it means, or get into arguments with people about it. My job is (among other things) to find books that people like, books they are in the mood for, books that work in some way for them. I’ve always loved Sam Johnson’s line that a man ought to read just as his inclination leads him, for what he reads as a duty will do him little good. I just didn’t realize until I got to library school how closely Johnson’s views mirrored the second and third laws of library science:

Every reader his or her book.

Every book its reader.

And there’s the wonderful essay by C.S. Lewis in which he talks about how if someone goes back again and again to the same book, no matter how terrible you may think it, you may be sure that for him “it contains a kind of poetry.”

I’ve been unpacking my books in my new house, but I’m not done. Yesterday I was hit by a sudden and intense desire to reread some of Diving into the Wreck, which I own but can’t currently find. A normal person, I suppose, would see this as a good reason to unpack some more boxes, but of course I am not a normal person, and I work in the library, so my first inclination was to see what all we had by Adrienne Rich (and thank you, library selectors of years past — there was The Fact of a Doorframe just sitting there waiting for me to check it out).

I regard a sudden and intense desire to read a particular bit of poetry — or to read poetry at all — as highly peculiar, but perhaps it is no more peculiar than pregnancy cravings. (I don’t have cravings, just aversions. Please, whatever you do, don’t offer me chocolate.) And as things go, there are certainly worse vices, and things that are much harder to obtain.

I read poems, but I never write them. I thus blame the following entirely on my friend Aliki, who convinced me this weekend to play something called The Poetry Game*. I should know better than to fall for such traps. Make of it what you will.

Range

Crow, titmouse, lilac, blossom:
the hillside in spring as you ride
up the cablecar
and see the things that are there
and the things you only imagine
ephemera
the canon of spring
the shoots that rise from underground
as the creek rises
the engines starting,
John, Jennifer
the speed of approaching summer
when everything will bloom
when love will run out of control
everything quicker and quicker
the green overwhelming.

It is early spring.
The worlds now hover in your throat.
You cannot speak, only wail
cry,
climb as the cablecar climbs
to reach an altitude where you may
look at the hillside below
as down at an auditorium
empty
afraid only of what might come.

*The game, should you want to play it, involves taking turns naming a list of words. Then everyone has to write a poem (see, I didn’t realize this part before we started) using some, all, or none of the words. We had 30 words total, and I think I used 23 of them.

I said to someone online yesterday that third grade was awesome. And indeed it was.

It was the year my best friend showed up at Lincoln, because the alternative school she’d been going to closed. I had an excellent homeroom teacher, and Dan and Tim and Aaron all sat behind me, and one day I figured out one of Aaron’s puzzle tricks faster than he did. All of us were terrible at remembering to bring things for Show and Tell, and so we resorted each week to our pockets. In those years, I always kept things in the pockets of my windbreaker — stones and pieces of string and bits of balsa wood and my first jackknife and the acorn caps that we colored in with pencils until we’d worn the pencil lead down to a nub and the inside of the acorn cap looked like dark pewter. And of course marbles. That was the year we played marbles. Every day at recess we were up in the corner of the field, where no grass grew, drawing circles in the dirt and explaining the rules to newcomers: two in the game to shoot, and you got to keep any you shot out. I lost a great many marbles. But it was worth it, even when Dan showed up with his cheater marbles — miniscule white things that were impossible to move. He never lost any of them.

It was one of the years another friend and I went creeking after school. I still always wore dresses in those days, and we were convinced creeking was probably illegal in some fashion, and so whenever a car passed by us on River Street, we’d duck down to avoid being seen, me with my legs spread in a wide squat to keep my skirts out of the water. It was also the year we decided to go as Little Women for Halloween. We both checked the book out of the library in September, and every night we’d call each other up. “I’m on chapter five — what chapter are you on?” I got to be Jo, of course, because I had the brown hair. My mother sewed a dress for me — red calico with green ribbon and off-white plain eyelet trim, which came out less Christmasy than it sounds. (“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents!” I practiced my lines a lot.)

I kept D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths in my desk that year and read bits of it every day during silent reading. My mother still read to me every night. I’d settled in well at our new house, and I no longer got lost walking home. Walking to school in the morning still involved the shortcut past the pipe that was, according to my friend, actually a Civil War cannon, and through several backyards, whose owners had thoughtfully provided us with stepping stones, and through the valley that, in the spring, was nothing but violets. It was a good year.

That’s what I say about it now, anyway. Those are the parts I like to remember.

It’s also the year I started getting dragged to therapists once a week. I was a bad liar and never knew what to say every week when the same kid asked me why I got to leave school early that day. It was the year someone first called me fat. It was the year I began to have doubts about that Civil War cannon and the year I started to perceive, more than ever, that class divisions were something that some people actually cared about, and that those people were going to make my friends’ lives miserable as a result.

I always think of myself as having had a happy childhood. My grandmother always says I was miserable as a child. It’s hard to know whose sets of memories to believe, or even which ones of one’s own to choose. But this autumn, back in the city of my childhood, I’m going to cling to pieces of string and bits of balsa wood and go looking for some acorn caps.

I was born back east.

Anyone with an ordinary understanding of the geography of the United States will, upon hearing I was born Iowa, immediately wonder about my grasp on reality, and they might be right: a lot of people here question the grip on reality of the greater population of Wyoming, where I used to live. You see, out there, “back east” means anything east of Cheyenne. I lived there for five years, and the sky over the Big Horn Basin shook me loose from my previous understandings of time and space and a whole lot more. I don’t live there any more, but I will never be the same.

I moved back to Iowa to be closer to my family, and, as it turns out, to have a kid, although that wasn’t part of the initial plan. I’m unwrapping the dishes in my house now and getting the news of seven months ago in Wyoming, when I packed them up in the pages of the Casper Star Tribune, the Billings Gazette Wyoming Edition, the Powell Tribune, the Cody Enterprise, and the Northern Wyoming Daily News (sadly no longer called the Worland Grit). I have a canister of bear spray and boots with Wyoming dirt engrained in them. I have a calendar of pictures from the Shoshone National Forest and enough topo maps to paper a room in my new house. I still subscribe to High Country News. But I can hardly bear to look at these things.

Outside my window now I see giant maples, and crickets sing all night, loudly enough that it keeps me awake, loudly enough to drown out the memory of the trucks on WY120, the calves crying for their mamas, the coyotes laughing. I say that word with two syllables now: cuy-yote, not cuy-yote-ee. I don’t look up at the sky at night because I can no longer see the Milky Way. People at work tell me they’re going hiking this weekend, and I’m baffled. Where? How? There is no wilderness here. I keep leaving my car windows rolled down and then riding home with my skirt getting wet, because I forgot that back east, it rains.

Everything is smaller here except for the parking lots. The sun isn’t as bright, and the people all move close together. Only the Amish use horses for work.

It sounds like I hate Iowa, and that’s not true. I was born here; my son will be born here. We will eat tomatoes with our hands in the summer and grow them in our backyard without a greenhouse. We’ll canoe in lazy rivers and dance to music downtown all summer long. We’ll have excellent medical care and all the books we could ever want. But we won’t have stars, or lodgepole pines, or cabins miles from anywhere, or encounter moose or elk.

Some people are born in the place they are meant to be from: it’s as if they got to skip the step where they are merely half a person, floating around waiting to meet their other half. They were made from whole cloth, and they root where they are planted. Others of us, though, are more like the sea creature fossils you can still find here in Iowa (and in Wyoming). I imagine they are dug up from underground and face the light of day and wonder where the water is. They are dried out and at home now on the ground, but surely they remember the ocean.

Queen Anne’s Lace
corn
cattails

Oxford
Montezuma
Brooklyn
go

West, young man
the man once said once

upon a time
this was the West

That’s what I wrote in my head on the way to Ministries Retreat. I was there to make a little video.

My grandfather, who had left my grandmother many years before, killed himself when I was three months old. I never met him, though I’m told he heard my babbling over the phone. My father killed himself when I was five and a half. I have two friends I’ve known long enough that they remember my father, at least a bit. One has never met her father, as her mother left him before she was born. The other has a father who barely acknowledges her and who was never married to her mother, though he has been married to a number of other people over the years.

I’ve never been too keen on Father’s Day as a result. I pass it off as part of my eternal hatred of holidays perpetuated by the greeting card industry, but in point of fact, I have perhaps understandably mixed feelings about the whole notion of fatherhood, and precious little experience with it myself.

When I was in fourth grade, there was a girl in our school whose mother was dying of cancer. We all made cards for her, at the instruction of our teachers, and everyone was terribly solicitous toward her. It was terrible for her — I knew that even then — but at the time my primary emotion was envy. She had a parent dying and people knew about it and understood it. Her mother was dying for a reason. I thought nobody knew how my father died, and I didn’t want anyone to find out. I was convinced it would simply brand me as crazy.

In years since, of course, I’ve come to know many good fathers — fathers of friends, and, now that I am older, friends who are fathers. They are to a man good men and good fathers, and I’m honored to have their friendship.

And I was lucky in many ways: I did not have my father for long, but for the five and a half years he was here, I had the best father a little girl could ever have wanted. He was never the dependable parent — he was famous for running out of gas, or for getting on the wrong bus, or for forgetting crucial things like my breakfast — but he was good and true in many other ways, and he loved me and he loved my friends, and he did some of the things their fathers were not there to do, giving them rides home and taking us to story time at the public library, and buying us rainbow sherbet afterwards.

But on this Father’s Day I’d like to take a moment to remember absent fathers, difficult fathers, even bad fathers. We carry their genes with us, even if we don’t know how or what they mean. I’ve been told I wash my hands the way my father did, for instance, and I know that I got his hair, and his temper. Who knows what other bits of him are lodged within me, or what bits of the fathers they never knew are lodged within my friends?

Those of us without fathers still, somewhere, had a father, and I believe we still honor that, or that we have to find some way to, because you can’t, as Malcolm X once said, hate the root of the thing and not hate the thing itself. I can’t, of course, actually speak for anyone else here, but I cannot hate my father. He was difficult at the best of times, and of course he left me in the most final way possible. But I cannot, and do not, hate him.

And so today I remember John M. Crossett Jr., professor, printer, doubles tennis player, drinker, pipe smoker, tyrant, and, most importantly, father. Much love to you, Daddy, wherever you are.

I was taught to swim crawl in 6/8 time. Your legs were to be ramrod straight, working up and down like a pair of metronomes. ONE two three FOUR five six. On one your right arm hit the water; on two and three it pulled you forward until suddenly on four your left arm hit, and all the while your legs were beating away, one two three, four five six, one two three, four five six. Your arms came up in a particular way, too: elbow first out of the water, and then hand arching forward. You turned just your head to breathe, not your shoulders or any of the rest of your body. And your legs kept going in time, one two three, four five six, one two three, four five six.

I have a hard time referring to crawl as freestyle.

After age twelve, I stopped taking swimming classes at camp and just swam laps on my own. For several years, I stopped swimming crawl at all. It was all breaststroke all the time for me, with occasional lapses into sidestroke or my very favorite swimming guilty pleasure, elementary backstroke. (That had instructions, too: monkey! airplane! soldier! monkey! airplane! soldier! But you got to lie on your back when you did it, and the instructions were fun.)

Somehow, though, I got tempted back into crawl. Tempted might be the wrong word. I felt I should swim it. I was ashamed of not being able to do it. There I was, down at the docks every day, logging in ten or even twenty miles in a summer, and I wasn’t swimming crawl? It seemed terrible. So I started thinking about it again.

Then I tried to do it.

It was horrible. I was out of breath and just yards from the dock (we swam between two docks that were far enough apart that it took three laps to cover a quarter mile. It was wonderful, except of course when you were running out of breath). I must have given up for awhile.

Then I tried again but decided to maybe ditch the whole 6/8 kicking thing. No one was watching me, and I wasn’t in class. Maybe they wouldn’t notice if I didn’t kick in time, or if I kicked less. Then one day I wondered what would happen if I didn’t kick at all. That was the day I discovered what is now my very favorite nonexistent stroke: crawl arms. You just do the arms for crawl, and you don’t kick. I swam that way for years. I still swim that way a lot of the time. A lap of crawl arms, a lap of breaststroke: that’s my pool routine these days. I’m a grownup now, and really nobody cares how I swim.

I was thinking about all of this as I was swimming this morning, trying, as I occasionally do, a little of the old 6/8 time crawl and scoffing silently to myself at the people who bend their knees when doing flutter kick. (Of course they’re all faster than I am — everyone is — but I have to do something to maintain my sense of swimming prowess.) I love crawl arms, and it’s how I mostly swim, but I know in my heart of hearts it isn’t really enough for me. Back when I was a teenager, I gradually worked my way up from crawl arms to something more like real crawl. My goal was to do a quarter mile of real crawl, which was one of the requirements for the next swimming and canoeing honor, the one I wasn’t going for because it involved diving, which I knew I couldn’t do, and canoeing with a single partner all summer, and I didn’t have any friends. But I wanted to see if I could do this part.

I did, finally, one summer. One quarter mile of crawl. Not in 6/8 time, but kicking all the way. I wanted some notice or some recognition, but I’m not sure I even ever told anyone. I’d never done it before, and I’ve never done it since. I’ve slacked off, instead. There were years when I didn’t swim at all.

Now I’m a regular — well, as regular as I am about anything. One or two or three days a week I’m at the pool, doing my half mile. Crawl arms, breaststroke, crawl arms, breaststroke, and once in a great while a foray into actual crawl. This morning, after my 6/8 time experiment, I decided to do a breathing-on-the-other-side experiment, because I also do yoga, and you’re always supposed to do everything on each side there. It was a disaster. I stopped before they’d think I was drowning. I simply cannot breathe turning my head to the left. Somehow, though I can easily look over my left should here on dry land, I cannot do it in the water.

I am not heavily into challenging myself. I live again in the place I grew up in part because, when thinking about moving back to the Midwest, I thought that at least then I could go back to using the same tire place and the same coop and going to the same DMV that I’m used to, and I wouldn’t have to find all those things all over again in yet another new town. I’ve never been one to push on to bag a peak when hiking, and I almost undoubtedly ride the clutch too much when driving stick shift. (I want to be one of those people who prefers driving stick, but I think really I’m just not.)

I’ve been swimming again regularly now for a few years, and once in awhile I get the idea that I ought to try to accomplish something: swim a certain distance, learn butterfly, get back up to a quarter mile of crawl. But I don’t. But I do keep swimming, getting back in the pool, pulling myself back and forth through the water with my own arms and legs, never getting really much faster or much slower, just going back and back and back again, like Camus’s happy version of Sisyphus, who always has something to do, in a place where no one can ask me to do anything else.

I’ve been driving around town — specifically my town, my home town, this town of Iowa City that I so recently moved back to after seven years away. I’ve been driving around town, and I’ve been thinking of how to answer the question posed to me by a friend recently — posed by a lot of people, actually — about what it’s like to be back, and how it’s different from Wyoming. I haven’t had much of an answer for them. I drive more places here. Things are more available and yet strangely more trouble to get, perhaps because the possibility of getting them is easier, and so it seems harder to do without. It is not nearly as sunny. But these didn’t seem like answers. Then yesterday, while not driving, I heard — that is really heard — this Dresden Dolls song [bonus: excellent live version on YouTube].

i’ve been driving around town
with my head spinning around
everywhere i look i see
your ’96 jeep cherokee. . . .

the number of them is insane
every exit’s an
ex-boyfriend memory lane
every major street’s
a minor heart attack. . . .

The singer is talking about being haunted by an old relationship in the form of a Jeep. Coming back to your home town is just like that, except that instead of a single relationship, it’s almost everything that happened in the first twenty-seven years of your life, and instead of a Jeep, it’s every fucking house and building and alley and tree you pass.

It’s not all bad. I’ve had many good times in this town — more good than bad, on the whole. But it’s all so there. It’s like having an Advent calendar where every day you open a door, but instead of an unknown surprise you get the surprise of recognition, the thing you’ve known but not thought about, or the thing you used to know but don’t quite any more because the color has changed, or the thing that you keep trying to forget. Everyone drives the same truck, but of course it’s not the same truck, because though they all remind you of the truck, none of them is it. Even the truck itself is no longer the truck it once was. And yet they all have an emotional impact like being hit by a truck. There’s philosophy in all of this, of course — the pleasure of recognition and the same river twice and something about reality and illusion and the idea of objects and memory and maybe even mechanical reproduction and other things that I don’t really understand because I never actually studied philosophy or literary theory and all I got out of reading Foucault is people have come up with some pretty appalling ways to treat other human beings.

But I’m a primary text kind of girl, and this city seems to be my primary text, for all that it changes.

When she was pregnant with me, my mother spent a lot of time in this city trying to pin down a text about a river. (That the irony and the symbolism of this is only now striking me is perhaps as good an argument as any for why we must come back over and over to these texts before they exhaust what they have to teach us.) The river was the Mississippi; the text was Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. Her job was to find every version of the text she could and figure out whether Twain meant to use a semi colon or a comma, whether he preferred school house or school-house or schoolhouse, whether he meant blackness or darkness. The result was this three volume behemoth that you can get from the University of Iowa library (it was supposed to be published as part of a big project, but the big project ran out of money). She found out — or decided — what Twain meant to write in all those instances, and now that text is fixed, very much unlike the river he wrote about, which, as he acknowledged, was changing even as he wrote.

My town has a river that feeds into the Mississippi, and like the Mississippi, it has changed. And it has changed my town, flooding badly twice in my life, once in the summer of 1993, when I lived here, and once just a few years ago, when I was in Wyoming. That second flood in particular changed things. The whole music and art complex at the University was flooded, and many of those departments are still in temporary quarters, some of which have become semi-permanent. The buildings are still there, but they may never again be the buildings I used to run around in as a kid, pounding on pianos and reading the graffiti in open practice rooms and writing melodies on the chalkboards pre-printed with musical staffs.

The old houses around downtown that have been divided up into apartments are still there, but I can no longer aspire to be a twentysomething graduate student living in one of them, because I’ve done that, and I am older now, and changed.

So I just drive around, looking at the houses where I once knew people and the buildings I once ran around in and the things that ought to be there that aren’t there any more and the things that never were there that have now appeared. And I run into people whom I knew, or who knew me, or know my mother, whose lives intersected with mine back when both our lives were different. And people say to me, “Oh, small world!” or sometimes, “Small town,” and those are true, of course, but the feeling is not that. It’s that I’m continually surprised that the past is not prologue, as someone in Shakespeare said, or not just prologue. It is also present.

When I was seventeen, I read Mrs. Dalloway for the first time, and I was floored by it. Floored for a lot of reasons, but floored mostly that there was Mrs. Dalloway, fifty years old, with a husband and a daughter and a house and a party to throw, and she spends a big chunk of the book thinking about the summer she was eighteen. Grown ups were so dismissive of teenagers when I was one that I assumed they must be dismissive of their own teenage years as well. And yet here was proof — proof at least that in fiction, at least in this case, those years were still there. You can go home again. You do go home again, like it or not, or home comes back to you, willy-nilly.

A lot of people move away from their home towns for just this reason. It keeps you, at least, from seeing the Jeep. But I can’t seem to do that. I keep looking — looking at those houses and alleys and buildings and trees. So yeah. Don’t tell me if you get another girl, baby. Just tell me if you get another car. I’ll be looking.