sea salt

Last Tuesday I got behind the wheel of my car and drove to Florida.* 24 hours. 1,400 miles. 11 states. 0 requests for passports, 0 check points, 0 guards inspecting the trunk, 0 inquisitive looks at an unmarried woman travelling with two men. During my 11pm-2am shift on the return trip, I looked up at the quiet, starry sky over North Carolina and realized for the first time in my easy American life, I'm free . I'm surprised this never occurred to me sooner, considering how many long road trips I've taken. Some trips have been for fun, a car full of college students en route to my home in Florida for spring break; other trips were somber and dutiful, travelling from Boston to Philadelphia to share the final days of a dear friend's father; my favorite trips were the ones I took alone, driving myself to and from college, 13 uninterrupted hours on I-95 with the windows down and my ponytail blowing wildly against my neck. As a young girl and then a young woman, travell...

Writing success!  Oh for joy!  My second publication ("Mt. Auburn") has made it to the Web.  You can read it at  http://falling-apart.net/ .  My first published essay was featured online at http://www.paradigmjournal.com/ (the mitchell issue); Paradigm is now publishing a printed anthology of some of the year's best work, and my essay "What I Think My Grandmother is Thinking" is going to be included.  This anthology will be available for purchase through Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.  In the grand scheme of the world, and specifically the writing world, these small feats aren't worth a hill of beans.  But in my world they're magic beans, and I'll do anything I can for another handful.  The only thing I can really do, of course, is to write.  And right now, that's all I want to do...

At Government Center train station, where I transfer from the green line of work to the blue line of home, I am privileged to hear free performances by a few of Boston's growing number of train station musicians. Some of these are quite talented (a guitar player at Park Street who sings country songs, a trumpeter at Davis Square who plays Beatles and Van Morrison tunes); others simply play and sing because they know how. Either way, they are hard to ignore - they are singing to get your attention, and hopefully, your money. A few weeks ago someone got my attention - he was softly playing the guitar, looking down, not singing. Yet when I heard the notes my heart stood at attention, this familiar melody calling me to a deep peace that I'd known since childhood. The song was "Trust and Obey," a hymn composed by Daniel Brink Towner in the late 1880s. I have known every word of this song since I was a child, though I have never sung it in church. My mother used to si...

  (published in Evergreen Review, Issue No. 125) Last week I was detained at a border crossing in the Middle East. (1) I realize this sounds to many of you like the first sentence in an editorial that you might see in U.S. News and World Report .  And prior to my trip, I would have thought stories that began like this were rare, or isolated to tall, dark, bearded men foolishly trying to smuggle guns across the border.  This time, it's my story. (2) To get to the Israeli border in the first place, my friend and I drove to the Jordanian border check, where our bags were scanned for weapons, our passports were checked and stamped, and we boarded a bus where our passports were collected, inspected again, and returned once we reached the Israeli border.  At the Israeli border, teenagers in khaki pants and polo shirts held massive guns over their shoulders, talking to each other and texting on their phones.  When our bus pulled up they watched us, hands...

On Saturday, I had my fortune read.  I was part of a group celebrating a friend's upcoming wedding, and the bachelorette festivities included a reading at Regina Russell's Tea Room in Quincy.  I'll admit, this is not usually my thing.  As a child I was not allowed to own a Ouija board, I was afraid when girls at sleepovers wanted to play "light as a feather, stiff as a board," and I was told in Sunday school that people who read horoscopes were agents of sorcery and evil. However, I also made countless paper fortune tellers in school, with fortunes like, "You will get kissed this year" and "You will marry the class nerd ."  I had fun reading the daily horoscopes in the newspaper, which were featured on the page adjacent to the advice columns, which I also read daily.  I never thought these games and interest in the future were evil - it was fun to suppose what if...? So I agreed to a Tarot card reading.  It was fifteen minute...

I am currently reading Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King, an historical narrative about the building of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore (known as the Duomo) in Florence, Italy.  It tells the complicated, inventive, and seemingly impossible story of how Filippo Brunelleschi designed, engineered, and created one of the most significant architectural wonders of the world. Throughout construction of the dome, Brunelleschi was forced to invent new machinery for hoisting, placing, and transporting massive amounts of brick, sandstone, marble, and mortar.  It was the 15th century, and by today's standards, these inventions seem primitive (for an example, conduct a Google image search for "ox-hoist").  Most of Brunelleschi's inventions worked perfectly, and he continued to astound the people of Florence with his ingenuity.  However, one invention failed.  It functioned like a 15th-century duck boat, designed to transport marble across land, ...

This morning I made a very conscious decision not to help someone.  This is, I'm proud to say, fairly out of character for me, as I really try to keep an eye out for people who need a hand with the door, people with one too many bags in their arms, parents trying to maneuver their strollers on and off the train.  This kind of active helping and awareness has been modeled for me my entire life, and is now almost an instinctual reaction - someone needs help, so let it be me. This morning, I did not help.  I looked at him long and hard, lingered for a moment, and kept going. I didn't see him right away.  I exited the blue line train at Government Center, where I transfer to the green line.  There was a crowd of people backed up on one side of the staircase, and the clog seemed to be halfway up the stairs.  Slowly the people moved to the left and weaved between the people coming down the stairs to make their way up.  I followed them until I sa...

Winthrop is not known as a surfing community.  We have the ocean, beautiful and active, but it is cold, and the waves are not remarkably big, except during storms.  We're no California. This morning I went for a chilly run along the beach.  It was a gray morning, and the low cloud cover swallowed up the tiny orange flash of sun at the edge of the horizon.  A thin stripe of pink stretched between the clouds and the ocean, and the water was calm.  Seagulls whined as they trolled the beach for food, and a black Labrador ran in and out of the surf.  I haven't seen my iPod since the first week after my move to the new apartment, so I've been running to the tune of the sea, the wind, the gulls, the "good morning"s of other runners, the cars, the stomp of my feet as they hit the sidewalk.  Strangely, opening my ears has allowed me to see better, my vision constantly directed to the subtle noises of life around me. As I jogged south towards Po...

I'm a seedling in the dirt.  I'm ready to root, and I want to grow - want more than anything to blossom, yawning my petals away from the bud to finally show the world what I am.  But until then, I'm in the dirt. I recently submitted a profile to mediabistro.com, an online networking site for freelance work.  After completing my profile and listing my experience with freelance writing/editing/media, I nestled into a small, dark cave of soil, hoping to enrich myself with the contributions of other, more experienced matter.  That's a nice enough idea, as I appreciate the way flowers and plants blossom, and I'm constantly aware of the deeper significance of this process in daily life.  Growth is good.  But before you grow, you dive into the cold dirt and sit there with other people's roots, bulbs, decaying leaves, and earthworms.  The beauty of this growth underworld is that the truly great growers - the redwoods, the dahlias, the orchid...

I wrote a book.  A personal, complicated book.  A memoir.  I began it in college, under the guise of fiction (I figured since I changed the names of my family members, they were fictional characters).  Then I went to graduate school and wrote enough for a creative thesis (for an MFA, this is a book-length work in your chosen genre).  And two years after graduating, I finished it.* If you are not a writer, this is probably impressive.  If you are a writer, you know that this is much like a runner finally tying his sneakers.  It's the beginning - now you must run somewhere. The process of publishing a book, unless you choose to self-publish, is like dating, applying to a job, trying to make a new friend, or, really, anything that requires connection with another human.  This makes it exciting, exhausting, and often defeating.  You put yourself out there.  You wait.  Sometimes you receive a return call ...

This morning the beach was gone.  High tide and a weekend of storms in New England forced giant slaps of ocean to the shore, covering the sand and splashing over the height of the seawall.  One wetsuit-clad surfer paddled around in the violent waves, but the rest of us walked along the sidewalk, sometimes shielded by the seawall, sometimes getting sprayed or doused as stories-high waves leapt over, bringing rocks, seaweed, and sand to the street.  Rocks collected between the cars parked along the seawall, and we shivered in our coats and hats as we picked up a few stones, to remember the day the ocean spoke. It said, "Stop condescending me.  I'm not just beautiful, calming, and picturesque - I'm alive, and I am restless." To prove its life, and power, and force, and choice, it threw things back on the beach that had once been thrown in: a sneaker, a child's shoe, dozens of pieces of Styrofoam, and several mangled lobster traps.  It didn't ...

This weekend I met a poet. I met him in Concord, where I had gone to hear the poetry of one of my co-workers. It was a quintessential fall day in New England: we sat on a blanket, wrapped another around us, and ate pecorino cheese and pepperoni slices on ciabatta bread as yellow, red, and orange leaves blew across the lawn of the Old Manse (www.oldmanse.org). Even in the sunlight it was chilly, but no use complaining - winter will be here soon. The poet told me that Sylvia Plath lived in Winthrop for several years of her life, and penned "Point Shirley" for the part of Winthrop where her grandmother lived.*  I am not very familiar with Plath's poetry, but as a writer I am mysteriously affected by the knowledge that she once lived where I do now. It's not that I think Main Street is haunted, or that the rocks on the shoreline hold unspeakable secrets of the true Sylvia Plath, or even that her grandmother's house (which is still standing) will inspire me to wr...

"There is no character flaw in ignorance. The character flaw is the willingness to remain ignorant." My mother and I had a conversation today about our students.  She teaches high school, I teach college, and we both at times feel we are losing the battle against apathy, laziness, and a lack of intellectual curiosity.  I knew I would face this when I signed my first teaching contract in September, but in my mind it was simply ignorance, a tragic character flaw.  What my mother revealed to me in one simple statement is that ignorance isn't what makes a student - or anyone - tragically flawed.  The tragic flaw is the willingness to remain ignorant, the refusal to change. My concept of ignorance has always been directly associated with people who are racist, uneducated, irrational, intolerant, extremist in any way (leftist, rightist, elitist, supremacist...).  I don't think my associations are unique: hyper-educated New Englanders pick on the "ignor...

For the second time in my city life, I am living in a third floor apartment.  For the first time, however, I live above an accordion player.  She is friendly, helpful, and currently practicing her scales while I write.  Also, she sings Italian ballads while she plays. Many people might be turned off by the idea of living above the owner of Gondola di Venezia ( http://www.bostongondolas.com/ ), but I was thrilled to move in.  She plays, she sings, she stores gondolas in the basement of the house, and she has a parakeet so vocal that I first mistook it for ten parakeets.  But hearing her play the accordion makes me turn off my music, stop what I'm doing, and remain as still as possible so I don't miss a note. I love Italy.  I spent five months studying abroad in Florence in 2004 ("Firenze" to the Italian speaker), and every day I wish I were still there.  The smallest reminder takes me back: a piece of dried fruit, the smell ...

I am at home now.  I am on a plush couch listening to planes leave Logan airport, with two cats wandering around, occasionally brushing against my ankles.  My apartment is quiet, except for the small playlist I have been listening to on repeat.  The songs on the playlist are stripped down - a piano and a male voice singing songs to God.  I am at peace now. The peace of the lake began at the shoreline, where a children's paddleboat waited patiently for use (my sister and I paddled out on it early in the day, making a loop around one of the many small islands in Belleau Lake).  The peace stretched out along the dock, into the pontoon boat where we lounged in the sun, bundled in coats but still drinking cold water and beer, nestled into the cushions of the bench seats while the brothers fished off the sides of the boat.  Classic rock radio was on, but not too loudly, since not even Led Zeppelin would try to outdo the lake.  The peace slipped in...