In the summer of 1988, I was a stringer working the copy desk at the Associated Press West Africa bureau in Cote d’Ivoire. One afternoon I answered the phone to hear an editor in New York. His southern lilt sharpened his annoyance across the Atlantic Ocean. “You guys just sent out a story about a bus crash,” he said, referring to a 300-word news item I’d written and placed on the AP world news wire twenty minutes earlier.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s mine.”

“Well, it’s got more holes than Swiss cheese.” His drawl stretched the words in a way that made his opinion seem personal. I blinked at “Swiss cheese.” Apparently, my work was not worth a more original image. “A bus carrying fifty people flips on a highway and you don’t tell us if anyone was injured or killed.” He went on. Where was the bus going? What kind of bus was it? “Jesus, son, didn’t you ask anyone how the accident happened?” Every syllable felt like a rap to my forehead.

In journalism, a stringer is an adjunct: Poor pay, no benefits, no job security. I was grateful for the experience. I was the only one in the office when I heard about the bus crash on Ivorian state radio and called police in the town near the accident for more details. I had other stories to edit from stringers around the region—student protests in Senegal, locust swarms in Mali, a profile of a woman banker in Ghana, a piece about petrol smugglers in Nigeria. On the phone I took down the location of the wreck and that the bus was carrying women who’d been at a village market. Police said the bus had been loaded with trade goods—bolts of cloth, sacks of grain, wire cages full of live chickens, a few goats, their hooves bundled in twine. Most of it was piled on the roof.

But after the editor’s call, I got the police back on the line. The bus, an old 1970s Mercedes coach, was headed north to the border with Mali and had been going too fast around a curve when the laws of physics kicked in and the top heavy bus tipped over. They confirmed three dead and a handful of injured. Three dead in an auto accident anywhere in the world is not a high enough body count to make the world news wire. The editor pulled the story. “I’m sorry,” he said. This one’s not going to fly.”

I can still hear his voice—a mix of my Aunt Mary from Detroit, defender of the King’s English, and Lyndon Johnson, ruler of the first Texas White House, who, his biographers say, loved to invent brutal metaphors about political opponents, his Texas twang dripping in the air. Johnson said of a speech by Richard Nixon: “I may not know much, but I know the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad.” My aunt’s opinion of my work cut deeper. I once wrote her a letter from Africa, describing the small desert village that was my Peace Corps post. She sent the letter back across the great ocean with pencil edits, entire paragraphs crossed out, and a reminder about the difference between subject and object pronouns. She signed off with this: “Too many words. Get rid of your adjectives. Love, Aunt Mary.”

*

I have many editorial memories like that—lessons from workplace and workshop, and startling encounters with readers. Expressions of laughter and anger and doubt and earnestness. Painful as these experiences are, I’m thankful for the direct clarity editors have offered about my work. Like Betsy Marson, retired longtime editor of High Country News, whose exasperation with my writing still plucks at my nerves. She once stood over my desk in Paonia, Colorado with a hardcopy of a story rattling in her hand: “Look, every story has an arc, a beginning and middle and end…You should know this by now.” And there was the late novelist Paul West, my graduate school writing teacher—a former RAF flight lieutenant, author of some fifty books, including twenty-three novels—who roughed me up in my first writing workshop. He groaned at a story I submitted about an African bar. Forearms crossed on the table, he gazed down at my work and said: “This reads like so much dribbling mud.” He was right. Still, his words angered me, which was West’s aim. The subtext of his workshop was this: Commit to doing your best work or go away.

Now, as a university teacher of writing and literature, I’m careful of how I deal with student work for fear of harming a young artist’s ambitions. But I tell stories about Paul West to prepare a workshop and I find myself channeling West and my Aunt Mary when editing fellow writers who value a close line edit. I also confess to using the “more holes than Swiss cheese” cliché about a badly written proposal that landed in a faculty meeting. In class, though, I encourage specific and constructive feedback—emphasis on constructive—because such critique resonates in positive ways, especially when backed up by detailed pencil edits, which Paul West also gave his students, line for line. West became my major professor in graduate school at Pennsylvania State University. I took four workshops from him, during which I kept a notebook of Westisms, including his favorite words of praise. “You’re in good form today,” he’d say when he liked something you said in class. He loved “purple prose” that pushed the boundaries of what language could do, often to the irritation of editors who’d bought into what he called “the minimalist craze.” He defended purple style in a 1985 New York Times Book Review essay:

Purple…is the world written up, intensified and made pleasurably palpable, not only to suggest the impetuous abundance of Creation, but also to add to it by showing – showing off – the expansive power of the mind itself, its unique knack for making itself at home among trees, dawns, viruses, and then turning them into something else: a word, a daub, a sonata. 

I’m amazed how that sentence winds through multiple clauses and lists to deliver meaning smoothly, with the slightly subversive “viruses” dropped in at the end of the first list. West loved playful juxtapositions of words, things that slow or even stop a reader, asking for a moment to think.

He marked our work in heavy black felt ink as if to reinforce that he’d been there, asking open-ended questions in the margins. Beside sweeping generalizations, he’d write, “Do you really think so?” or “Well, is that right?” For a badly written passage he’d underline the offending language and write something like, “Rewire this!” I got his British up once when I mistakenly wrote that “Rule Britannia” was the English national anthem. “Don’t bloody think so, Yank!” he scrawled. He line edited our pages in his shorthand of check marks, exclamation points, underlines, question marks, occasional inserted commas, and mysterious little dots between the lines that left me bent over my work trying to determine what he was getting at. Which was his intent, to push the writer to closer scrutiny. He’d pepper some pages with his marks and then a page or two might go by with only a light edit or nothing at all. Then, just when I thought I’d escaped, I’d see a black line through a sentence or more with no comment or maybe a suggested rewording. If he really didn’t like something, he’d leave a margin note like, “Drop this one over the side, and let it sink.” His comments snuck up as if he were whispering over your shoulder, “Oh yes, I’m still here.” Then he’d sign off with a page of notes typed out single-spaced on a manual type writer and paperclipped to the last page like a subpoena. I received high praise only once. Beside a character description in one story he wrote, “Bravo!” I fed on that word for weeks.

*

My undergraduates seem surprised and mostly pleased a teacher is paying attention with edits. My graduate students, on the other hand, having arrived at a career point where more is at stake, aren’t so thrilled. “He’s mean,” one complained about me to a colleague. The student’s words stung more than I was willing to admit, leaving me wondering what it was I had said in class or written on her papers. I try to balance pro and con comments with line edits. But when students complain that I am harsh I take comfort in listening to an interview with a poet I admire, the late Philip Levine, who grew up rough in Detroit and who was for a time a harsh teacher, “capable of being very, very funny when he was ripping students to shreds,” according to a former student. But when Levine was named U.S. Poet Laureate at age 83, he told an interviewer that the worst thing a writing teacher can do is regard students with “disdain” marked by “cultivated boredom.”

A good teacher or editor knows that to give bold, specific comments on the work of a student, colleague, or family member is the opposite of disdain. The late Simone Weil, a writer, teacher and political activist, wrote that “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” To which I add that to challenge diction, syntax, style and voice, logic and the quality of one’s evidence—even a simple gesture such as to bracket a few lines in the margin and write, “I’m not sure what this means”—might be the purest form of love expressed between writers. The novelist and critic Nick Ripatrazone writes: “Line editing is the ultimate union of writer and editor…it is a gift of trust, and it must go both ways.” The sub-text of a close edit is not that the writing in question isn’t good (sometimes that’s the case), but that this is part of a process and you, the student or colleague, should rethink the work. As New Yorker editor David Remnick once said, “Revision is all there is.”

On newspapers there’s never time to revise, which is why we have editors, though they don’t catch everything. In 1984, just out of college, I worked for The Watertown Daily Times in upstate New York in a bureau in Canton, near the great Saint Lawrence River. One morning my editor called to say he’d heard the local pet store was selling a piranha, the razor-toothed fish native to the Amazon. He wanted a feature story. I visited the store, which was a block from my office. “Oh yeah,” the owner said, “I have a piranha.” He pointed to this greenish oval shaped fish by itself in a tank. It looked about the size of my hand with my fingers spread. “Here, let me show you.” Using a ladle, he scooped a tiny goldfish from another tank and dropped it in with the piranha. Sure enough, the bigger fish ate the goldfish in a single gulp. Yep, I thought, scribbling notes. Must be a piranha. The man was all smiles and explained how he’d bought the piranha through an exotic fish catalog. I snapped a picture. My story made the next day’s paper.

Two days after that a local high school biology teacher stopped by my office. She was bespectacled and wore jeans and boots and polar fleece, and a filthy fisherman’s ballcap with an elongated bill like the one Hemingway wears in those pictures of him fishing off the coast of Cuba. She stood at my desk, holding a copy of the paper and smiling a bit too broadly. “You know,” she said, “I loved your article about the piranha. There’s just one problem.” She tapped a finger on the photograph. Her eyebrows twitched to accent her smile. “This is a yellow perch. They eat smaller fish and perch are common in the Saint Lawrence River.” I gripped the armrests of my chair as she went on, smiling and chatting like someone who loved her work, loved correcting people like me. “Perch have tiny teeth, but they’ll eat anything they can fit in their mouths.” Then she took from her daypack a marine biology book with a picture of a piranha with scary-looking and well-defined triangular teeth obvious from the front and side. “See?” she said. “But a perch’s teeth are hard to see.” She plopped the book on my desk, turning the pages to a picture of a perch, the same kind of fish I saw in the pet shop: not much wider than the width of my hand and oval shaped like a piranha, but with larger dorsal and tail fins.

Later, I saw the pet shop owner on the street. He winked at me.

I wish an editor had been paying attention that day to save me from myself. The best editors are tough to please. After I returned from Africa in 1989, I worked as an AP staffer in the Hartford, Connecticut bureau under an editor named Brent Laymon. One hot July day he sent me off to cover a murder-suicide in the wealthy township of West Hartford. A man, possibly distraught over his business dealings, had shot to death his wife and two children, before turning a pistol on himself. Police had strung yellow tape around a stately red brick house and closed the street because of the crush of media and curious onlookers. With the investigation ongoing, they gave the barest details. I learned what I could from the neighbors and filed a short news brief from the landline in a neighbor’s living room. Then I headed back to the office to make more calls and write the longer story. It was a good day, with the brief filed on deadline under my byline followed by a news feature with more from the police, background about the family, and the smell on the street after police opened the windows of the house where the bodies had lain four days in the summer heat.

“Nice work,” Laymon said. He made some edits and put the story on the state wire ahead of the 6 pm deadline for the morning papers. I sat at my desk, shuffling my notes as I got ready to leave. Although what happened to this family sickened me, I felt good about the work I’d done on deadline and stopped by Laymon’s office on my way out. I told him about this dog, a black poodle that raced out of the house after a cop opened the front door. The dog was squealing and trailing a leather leash as the cop lumbered after it across the lawn. His cap flew off as he dove on top of the animal.

Laymon studied me through horn-rimmed glasses, his brow pinched and lips pressed together in a slight grimace. “Why didn’t you put that in the story?” He spoke so softly I had to lean forward. “Don’t you see? The dog was the last surviving member of the family.” He shook his head and turned back to his computer. “Rewrite it,” he said. “Add the bit about the dog. Maybe it’ll make the afternoon papers, if we’re lucky.” Then he said, “Too bad. It was a good story.”

*

To this day I think about that lost opportunity and about the hard words Paul West and Betsy Marston. They were lessons that involved shame and maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

I work with all kinds of students, including many who write better than I. And others whose abilities awaken with time, and still others who come in day after day just because they love to read, they love the back and forth of workshop and talking about literature. One student named Ted came to me a few years ago with a personal essay about losing his mother to cancer. The early drafts were disorganized and self-indulgent, with sentences that trailed off into the stratosphere. But the story was deep and specific, and we worked through five or so drafts, each one a significant rewrite. He never missed a class or appointment. I was as direct and specific with him as I’ve been with any student. He was hungry for it even as tears rimmed his eyes as he recalled his mother’s pain. Over a semester he worked his memoir into something sharp and wonderful, which is to say he just kept at it draft after draft. He respected the process and I like to think he learned from it.

Ted was also part of a campus comedy troupe and did stand up in local bars, where feedback is immediate and brutal, propelled by alcohol-fueled Get-the-hell-off-the-stage vulgarity and wet popcorn to the face. I witnessed his performances. Ted taught me about rhetoric and about what it means to deeply feel the thin line between hurt and laughter. He threw himself into stand-up with the same untidy energy he did his writing. I’m not sure I taught Ted anything he didn’t already know instinctively or would not have realized on his own. Thinking of him brings to mind something the writer Lynn Freed once wrote in Harper’s. “The best I can do as a teacher is to function as a good editor, to help a student train his ear so that he can come to edit himself.” A few years after Ted left our campus, he joined Second City, the famed Chicago comedy troupe, and later landed a job producing comedy for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

I think of the writing and editing process—all the drafting, the workshops and critiques, the line edits and even the unwanted, uninvited feedback—as a necessary, painful messiness, like democracy. And until our democracy crumbles, ordinary people still have the right to stand up and speak as comedians and as citizens, to complain to news media about the reporting of a story; or to any government office or police agency if the citizen finds some fault in their work; and to his or her own workplace colleagues and bosses if the citizen finds something amiss. But to do this, to put yourself out there as a writer or critic, even in an established democracy, takes courage and willingness to face ridicule or worse. For a writer this means being able to take criticism for what you’re hoping other people will read.

I’m thinking of something that happened years ago at a bookstore in Bellingham, Washington. I was giving a reading from a new book of short fiction that included a story called “American Food,” written from the point of view of an African biologist raising his family in the United States. In the audience a woman who came from the same region of West Africa as my fictional biologist sat politely in the front row, my book in her lap. Her face looked a bit clouded. When questions began, she was nervous, shifting in her seat and looking around the room. She raised her hand and I gestured to her but she was interrupted by another questioner. When her turn finally came, she stood up and said she was from Senegal. “How can you, a white man, write this?” she asked. “How can you know what this man’s life is like in his country?”

Stumbling and halting, I said that after many years living in both Africa and the U.S. I felt kinship with people struggling to live in a culture not their own. I based the biologist character on an African scientist friend with whom I’d worked and traveled in Africa, and whose family I’d gotten to know over a decade. Africa and the United States, I said, are full of displaced souls—Pakistanis and Indians, Vietnamese, Turks, Chinese, French, Lebanese, Japanese, Germans, Syrians, Mexicans, Iraqis and many more. I tried to explain that my book was about people who cross racial, cultural and political boundaries for a thousand reasons all over the world. People live in their own countries but beyond their own cultural borders—such as in Niger, where Hausa traders work markets in Arab villages, or in America where New York City native teaches in a rural Texas high school. The woman smiled thinly but said nothing more.

Afterward, I looked for her in vain. I wanted her to read the rest of the book and write me her thoughts. I wanted to know if I’d done my homework. After all, I’d just been challenged by the toughest of readers and her questions pushed me to revisit the work, searching for where I’d gone wrong. I believe in the story I wrote, but I also believe in hard conversations about writing as much as I also insist on the writer’s freedom to explore ideas across all boundaries through imagination and real experience, mistakes and all.

*

My thing for straight forward feedback has gotten me in trouble at work, a university where my editor with the southern lilt might be reprimanded, or worse, for daring to be Swiss-cheese blunt about someone’s writing, not to mention my teacher, Paul West. At a faculty meeting not long ago, I encountered a proposal for a student writing award. The thing was eaten through by typos, grammar errors, half formed ideas and leaps of logic, plenty of righteousness but few facts, and no criteria for how winners would be chosen. I pointed this out with line edits and questions that stirred anger but no answers. Finally, I said, “This thing has more holes in it than Swiss cheese.”

This earned me a trip to the dean’s office to answer a complaint that my edits and the Swiss cheese comment had been too harsh. The thing fizzled, though I hope my feedback gave my colleagues their own piranha-in-the-pet-store moment. The experience also made me realize that in so many workplaces no one is expected to pay close attention to written documents and if we do, we are supposed to shut up as if the writing in question were a deal done in the shadows, like a crime in progress. Best look away. My job, however, is not to pretend a piece of writing is something it is not.

My spirits improved when a magazine accepted an essay I submitted about the civil war in Mali, a subject I’ve been writing about since the war began eight years ago. They sent a contract. Then the editor sent me back an attachment of my essay with detailed questions, fact-checks, challenges about narrative chronology. He included a note with kind words about the work, and a caveat: “There is still the need for edits. Always edits.”

A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. 
—Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie.

The tradition goes like this:  if you find the almond in the risgrynsgröt, the rice pudding, you’ll be the next one married.  One Christmas, as the story goes, my great-grandfather’s family tried to engineer the serving of the rice pudding so that the youngest daughter—the youngest of nine, who was finally of marrying age—would get the almond.  She got the almond, I assume, because it was not long before she was married.

In this house, among these people, in the eating of the risgrynsgröt that isn’t how she knows how to make it, I imagine that my beautiful great-grandmother is sitting back in her chair, feeling more loss than she does the gain of her husband’s family. I imagine her sitting quietly in the midst of all that family noise and I imagine she’s thinking about risgrynsgröt, about marriage, and I imagine that she’s wanting to tell Little Ethel what she’s in for when she marries. 

Florence traded the lovely Swedish Shoberg for the more pedestrian-sounding Swedish Olson when she married, but she’d lost her given name as well, the melody of Florence Ida Dorothea to be known as Harry’s Florence, heavy on the Swedish Haa–rry, to differentiate her from Harry’s sister Florence.  Even Harry’s sister Little Ethel needed to be somebody different from her sister-in-law, who was known in the family as Big Ethel. 

Maybe when Florence and Harry met, blinded by the beauty of each other, they didn’t care about the reality of married life.  Maybe all that mattered was love and desire, a Minnesotan-Swedish fairy tale, the kind that took into account the heat of Midsommar Dag and what happens on the longest day of the year in a place like Minnesota, with twilight that lasts forever.  A love story that grew in that Chisago County soil, told in the language their grandparents had brought from Sweden decades ago, a language that people would still be more comfortable speaking on the street than English, well into the last decades of the 20th century.  One that would linger after death, the way that it’s rumored her husband’s grandmother still haunts the big brick house in Shafer where Florence is currently eating her rice pudding. 

Harry and Florence married in September 1918 and he left for the Great War five days later; their first child was born nine months to the day later. 

Maybe the bedbugs on their honeymoon should have been a sign, she thinks.

Florence has a good marriage to Harry, even though it’s far from perfect.  But it could be worse.  She could have her mother’s life.

One day in the very last of the winter Pa said to Ma, ‘Seeing you don’t object, I’ve decided to go see the West…’  ‘Oh, Charles, must we go now?’ Ma said.  The weather was so cold and the snug house was so comfortable.  ‘If we are going this year, we must go now,’ said Pa.  —Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie.

We are a family of transplants and farmers who know what to do with roots.  With the exception of my grandfather’s family, none of us have been born in the place our parents were.  In hindsight, the distance and the movement matters.  The Swedish language that my grandmother grew up speaking was 1860s Swedish, transplanted from Ostra Torsas, Sweden into Chisago County, where it grew again, separate from the roots it had been clipped from—and it was nearly incomprehensible, yet highly amusing, to the woman I took a Swedish class from in college.  When my grandparents retired in the 1990s, they moved from the prairie of southern Minnesota to the pine forests of northern Minnesota to be closer to us and my grandmother, Florence’s younger daughter, became locally famous for her risgrynsgröt in a place more Norwegian than Swedish. And when my grandmother died and we gathered in the church’s fellowship hall for lunch after the funeral, her rice pudding was served alongside the sandwiches and bars, the recipe in her handwriting having been photocopied for anyone who wanted to take it home, and people told stories of her rice pudding.

My hometown of three hundred people was a place of potluck dinners every third Sunday at our church, a place where the bake sales were as much a religious experience as what happened on Sunday mornings, a place where the unfortunate Norwegian tradition of lutefisk transmuted itself into a more palatable autumn tradition of the Hunter’s Supper, which included other Scandinavian delicacies, a place where the Building Fund for the church addition was funded as much by lefse and fruit soup and rommegröt as it was by other donations.  My grandmother’s Swedish rice pudding was as much a legend in the community as the thirty-foot fiberglass statue of a muskie on the main road through town.  This was a place that if she showed up to a potluck without a double-batch of rice pudding, people complained. 

The 2005 Holy Hanna’s Manna cookbook from Bethany Lutheran Church may be the first time that my grandmother has put her recipe for rice pudding into print.  She’ll write down the recipe for anyone who asks, but her handwriting is near to unintelligible.  This is a recipe that doesn’t belong in print—it belongs in the cadence of my grandmother’s voice, spoken directly into your ear, as she stands behind you at the stove, watching to see if you’re stirring right.

The exacting nature of the recipe is part of the problem.  Voice doesn’t translate well to font, even the swish of italics here that echoes the tone of my grandmother’s voice.  In its written precision, it omits too much.  When the directions are to “[stir] frequently,” there’s no mention of scraping the rice off the bottom of the pot—which would be the scorching she wants us to avoid—and there’s no opportunity for her to wax poetic about her flat-bottomed spoon.  But she also doesn’t include the trick of setting the kitchen timer for ten minutes, so you don’t have to stand over the pot for an hour.  She doesn’t warn the cook about tempering the egg before adding it to the hot rice mixture.  Maybe she assumes that the cook will already know this.  When the pudding is warmed through, the correct measure of doneness is not when “it bubbles once or twice”—the right term is “when it blups twice, it’s done.”  There’s more history and tradition in that verb blup that could never be translated to bubble. 

The missing almond is a tragic omission, because that’s the most important part: the tradition of the risgrynsgröt is not just in the making, but also the eating and the tradition of the culture it carries on, which is one of traditional, monogamous, nuclear families.  Marriage is important.  Children are important.  Part of it is simple societal expectations, which almost never live up to themselves, but part has to do with the procreation necessary to keep a farm running, to bolster against infant mortality, to pass down the land to the next generation, because it’s not just important to keep the land in the family, it’s important that the land stays in the family’s name.  The naming is just as important as the blood.  The culture depends on it, so it’s not too far to suggest that the culture depends on the rice pudding.

Here I stand, on a Christmas morning, over Florence’s silver Wearever, making the rice pudding for our dessert later that evening, flat-bottomed wooden spoon in my hand, and wondering if it means anything that it’s the one who has always eschewed marriage and children who’s making the rice pudding, if it means anything that my nephew is allergic to dairy and eggs.

[Mrs. Scott] said she hoped to goodness they would have no trouble with Indians.  Mr. Scott had heard rumors of trouble.  She said, “Land knows, they’d never do anything with this country themselves.  All they do is roam around over it like wild animals.  Treaties or no treaties, the land belongs to folks that’ll farm it.  That’s only common sense and justice.”  —Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie.

Florence must have learned to make risgrynsgröt from her mother-in-law, not her mother, because the recipe I know has come down that way, through this matrilineal line of Swedes I claim as mine, even though the line zigs and zags somewhat.  Florence might have known how to make rice pudding, but as she was born in Nebraska to two lines of Swedes who had been living in Chisago County, Minnesota for twenty years, what she knew of rice pudding didn’t exactly translate.  It, too, was a transplant.  Her mother’s family had left Chisago County in 1878, to take advantage of new land, opened up when the last Pawnee was moved off their last Nebraska reservation in 1875.  At least that’s what I assume, since the story has been left behind.  But the timing seems to suggest a very good reason to leave where they’d established themselves in Minnesota for twenty years. 

This is what happens when people and traditions are forced into landscapes where they don’t belong.  When things begin to break down, other things get pushed harder and break in a different way.  The soil in Nebraska, in Boone County, where Florence’s parents ended up, was not the same as what they’d left in Chisago County.  Crops didn’t grow here in the same way they grew in Minnesota.  There weren’t many trees, not enough to build a house from, not like the sturdy house they left in Minnesota.  It wasn’t bad here in Nebraska, but it was different, and it required different ways of thinking, different ways of thinking what it means to live and what it means to survive.

Florence’s mother, Carolina, cahr-o-leena in its lovely Swedish lilt, was one of her parents’ three children who survived to adulthood.  There’s a story about Carolina’s father, Oke Dahlberg, who went to town with a sack of grain on his back to have it milled into flour.  While he was gone, two of his sons died of diphtheria.  Their mother put the children in the woodshed until he got home.

In Nebraska, they call it rice pudding, but in Swedish, it’s risgrynskaka—rice-grain-cake.  What’s interesting, though, is that a recipe from this place does not match its Minnesotan equivalent.  Every Nebraska cookbook I’ve found that contains a recipe for rice pudding calls for it to be baked.  It’s this way in every old cookbook I’ve found, whether it’s a church cookbook, a pioneer cookbook, or any other. Every Minnesota cookbook I’ve found that contains a recipe for rice pudding calls for a stovetop cooking.  (Recipes in Minnesota are split between those that call for the rice to be cooked first in water and then milk added after, usually also calling for eggs to thicken, and our risgrynsgröt, which calls for the rice to be cooked in the milk and cream, something closer to an Italian risotto.) My grandmother would tell stories of her mother putting the rice pudding on the back of the stove as she went about her day; when Harry came in from the fields, he liked his risgrynsgröt with cranberries from the local cranberry bog.

From the 1967 Nebraska Centennial Cookbook comes this recipe and it makes me smile:  measuring by teacups, definitions of “small” and “little” that can only truly be understood if you know Mrs. Donald Rystrom’s family, if you know the size of her hands, her mother’s hands, her grandmother’s hands.  I can see her grandmother pinching a bit of salt between her thumb and index finger, and then dropping it into the palm of her other hand, showing her granddaughter how much “a little” looks like.  I can see the little girl standing on a chair, so she can reach the counter.  I can hear the grandmother telling her granddaughter the tricks she’s learned about making risgrynskaka, why it’s important, maybe even that when the granddaughter is grown up and married, it’ll be her responsibility to make this for her family.  I wonder how old Mrs. Rystrom is when her grandmother lets the little girl carry the risgrynskaka to the Christmas table and brag about how she did it all by herself.

What was not lost, as Mrs. Donald Rystrom’s rice pudding recipe was transplanted from her family’s voices to print, was the story she included with the recipe.  She begins by establishing her family’s legitimacy in a place stolen from its original inhabitants, through the stories probably passed down in her family about the grasshoppers and the rickets.  Since this is a centennial cookbook, it feels important for this family to establish that they have been a part of this place very nearly since the beginning of statehood.  Every settler culture must quickly establish roots and home in any place was of utmost importance.  Emotional survival, as well as political survival, depended on it.  Most settler families have stories like this, stories that not only offer entertainment, but serve as cautionary tales or education for future generations, so they don’t make the same mistakes.  Hardships seem to solidify one’s commitment to and understanding of a place.  To ignore the importance of roots and legitimacy meant not belonging and not belonging was one step away from the grave.  Nobody could survive on their own.  It could not be done.  The only way to survive was to be part of a community—a family, a culture, a tradition.  This is the difference between merely surviving and making a life. 

But to ignore the native roots that had spanned centuries in this place, solidifying the sod into something incredible to chop through to make way for crops, is terribly ironic.  The metaphor of destroying those root systems to make way for the plow as the Pawnee were transplanted to another place does not escape me.  There was a community in this place before the Shobergs and the Dahlbergs arrived, a land that was not empty, waiting for people who would do something with it.  There was a community here that understood the moods and tantrums of this particular place, a community that understood what it meant to live and what it meant to survive, probably better than the settlers did.

That Mrs. Rystrom wrote the story about her family including an uncooked bean in their rice pudding is what links the two traditions and this is the moment that feels important to me.  At one time, these two traditions were much more closely related than they were now.  Rice pudding was usually a Christmas tradition among the Swedes, one that was inexpensive to make, satisfyingly rich, and offered the added benefit of being filling. Of all the recipes and stories and traditions that my Swedish ancestors passed down, the best ones are dessert and the best of the best are Christmas desserts, the best example of making something special out of the ordinary.  Right now, the important thing is that bean or almond—and not just that it was there, but what it represented for that Swedish pioneer culture.

The best possible wish one could grant on a day such as Christmas would be marriage, the kind of stability that comes with life in a community.

Mary and Laura looked at each other.  They knew it was no use to ask questions.  They would only be told again that children must not speak at table until they were spoken to.  Or that children should be seen and not heard.  That afternoon Laura asked Ma what a stockade was.  Ma said it was something to make little girls ask questions.  That meant that grown-ups would not tell you what it was.  And Mary looked a look at Laura that said, “I told you so.”  —Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie.

Florence’s mother, Carolina Dahlberg, was twelve years old when she moved with her family to Boone County, Nebraska.  She was the only girl in a family of seven children, of whom only three survived until adulthood.  Carolina was not an attractive girl, nor did she grow into an attractive woman, and I wonder if her parents worried if she would ever marry.  She might have been kindly described as “sturdy,” not the delicate beauty of her two eldest daughters, Adelia and Florence.  She had curly hair that obeyed no dictates but its own, eyes that were a little close together.  She was not fat, but she was heavy of bone and jaw, the kind of figure that would have required massive strength on the corset strings to curve an hourglass out of her.  She was the type of woman whose body was not designed to wear such things, but the only picture I have of her has Carolina looking unhappy—or, at the very least, uncomfortable—wrapped tightly into a dress that looks like something fancier than a simple farmer’s daughter would wear.  Someone in her family must have had some money, to pay for both the elegant clothes and the professional photograph.

I don’t exactly know how she began a written correspondence with the man who would become her husband—three years her junior—but I wonder when the doubts surfaced, that maybe this man, this marriage wouldn’t be a good idea.  The two families were neighbors and had moved from Minnesota together, so maybe their parents saw the marriage as a way to keep the family’s land together.  Maybe she was pressured into it, because she wasn’t attracting other suitors and she was getting close to spinsterhood.  Maybe John Edward Shoberg cornered her in the barn, backed her up against the wall, and told her that it was unlikely that anybody else would want to marry her.  Maybe she worried about being a burden. Maybe her mother said to her, “You can’t live with us forever.”  Maybe her father, a Civil War veteran, talked to her about duty.  Maybe her family engineered the rice pudding at Christmas so that she would get the almond. 

But when she decided that she would not marry him, J.E. Shoberg threatened to nail her letters to every fence post along the road.  Whether that was the only threat that caused her to agree to marry him, she did, at the age of twenty-six. In their wedding photograph, neither of them look happy.  I don’t know how long it was after their wedding that he started to beat her.

Her two brothers, Oscar and Emmanuel, never married. They always lived close to Carolina and her brutal husband, and their six children, and all the stories my grandmother tells are of how protective they were of their sister, how they secretly made sure that she and the children had enough money to survive. J.E. was a mean drunk, my grandmother remembers, and I imagine that without the money from Carolina’s brothers, the family probably would not have survived. I imagine that Florence looked at her parents’ marriage, what came with the risgrynsgröt, saw that Harry was nothing like her father, and took her chance to get out of the house.

Carolina died in 1938 at the age of 71, to be outlived by both of her brothers and her husband, who died at the age of 95. It’s hard for me not to wonder if he killed her, pushed her down the stairs, choked her. I wonder if Oscar and Emmanuel ever discussed the quiet disappearance of their brother-in-law, a convenient farm accident. I wonder if they ever asked Carolina if she’d like them to take care of her husband. J.E. and Carolina had seven children and I wonder how many of those children were the product of rape. Their youngest, Grace, died at the age of five, and why do I wonder if he killed her? Florence would have been thirteen when Grace died—and fourteen years later, Florence gave her name to my grandmother, Phyllis Grace. It’s easy to forget that these people of my blood were real, that they had lives just like mine, that their circumstances formed how they thought about the world, in a time much tougher and closer to the bone than mine is.

When I asked my mother what Florence was like as a person, my mother struggled to find a description I could understand, finally describing her grandmother in relation to her oldest daughter, my great-aunt Harriet:  exacting, hard, could find fault with God, and fiercely competitive.  My mother described Florence as trying to outdo the neighbors when threshing time came around, cooking up meat and potatoes because the men expected it at dinnertime—pork, because beef was expensive and didn’t last as long, potatoes, vegetables.  Even though they had no refrigeration, Florence still would make five pies in the mornings—my grandmother remembers lemon meringue—her crusts made with lard, meringue whipped by hand, but where they got the money for lemons in Minnesota, I don’t know.  This was a landscape of berries and rhubarb and cranberries, not citrus.  In the afternoon, the men would expect lunch and Harry’s Florence needed to have meat and coffee ready for them and she did.  Those women who weren’t able to feed the threshers well, from a house that was spotlessly clean, were obviously not raised right. It didn’t matter that this was the Depression. It didn’t matter that Harry would drink away the money on the way home from selling milk at the creamery.  Some things were just not done.

When my sisters and I were growing up, my grandmother was in charge of our kitchen during the late-summer canning and freezing marathons, preserving our large garden for the winter, to be packed into two large freezers alongside the venison my father brought home every fall.  We weren’t poor, especially in the context of my rural hometown, but living on one income was not possible without a garden.  It still baffles my grandmother that her grandchildren, educated and employed, can food by choice, not necessity—and we do, bushels of tomatoes in the fall, applesauce, food that we buy from local farmers, so we know where it comes from, what goes into it, because we’re fortunate for the privilege of doing so.  We’re the children who consider pantries and room for freezers non-negotiables of housing.  We’re the children who choose not to buy baby food for our next generation, preferring to mash and freeze our own vegetables for those few short months when babies move from liquid to solid food.  We’re the children who have returned to ways of thinking and living that our grandparents were happy to leave behind. We’re the children who look back at the line of women in the family and do not wonder how we got to be where we are. We are Carolina, who had to be stronger than anyone could imagine, to live for 44 years with a man who abused her, her children, to survive the death of her five year old daughter, but who found the absolute beauty in her life, the music of her children’s names: Adelia Ruth Theresia, Edna Olivia Sophia, Roy Edward Victor, Florence Ida Dorothea, Melvin George Arthur, and Grace Estella Viola. We are Florence, who made pie during the Depression, who spent five dollars for kitchen chairs one day, because they did not have chairs, and this almost caused a divorce, because they didn’t have five dollars for chairs. We are Phyllis, the first woman in her family to graduate from a four-year college in the midst of a World War. We are my mother, Barb, who passed away a year ago from cancer only found in children. 

This Christmas, I wonder if it’s time to teach my niece to wield the flat-bottomed spoon and her great-great grandmother’s Wearever.

Children learn what they are taught.  But genetics can only go so far—evolution works here too.  It’s true that marriages in my family only turned happy after we left the land.  My grandparents were married for 58 years before my grandfather died.  My parents have been married for 39 years.  But what’s even more interesting is that somewhere along the line, the almond in the rice pudding ceased to be about marriage.  In our family, for as long as I can remember, the almond has been about a wish.  Any wish.

On my niece’s first Christmas, she got her first taste of rice pudding and was not particularly impressed.  She was teething, so the large carrot she’d been chewing on was more interesting.  Even though she’s too young to understand, we’ll teach her about food and what it means to this family and to the community around us.  Her brother, who came along three years later, is allergic to dairy and eggs, so he’ll likely never be able to taste the risgrynsgröt.  Maybe, while we’re canning tomatoes, we’ll tell her about our childhood memories of canning, maybe we’ll tell her about our grandmother and her sister, maybe we’ll tell her about Harry’s Florence cooking for the threshers.  Maybe we’ll tell her the story of Carolina and J.E. Shoberg.  Maybe we won’t.  Maybe someday we’ll tell her about what the almond used to mean in our family, but it doesn’t mean that anymore.  Marriage doesn’t mean the same thing in this family that it once did, even a generation ago. 

Her parents only legally married after marriage equality passed in Minnesota and her father took her mother’s name. Her aunt chooses not to marry and prefers to travel alone. Her other aunt refuses to settle for anything less than exactly what she wants.

Each of them found an almond in their rice pudding this year.

From the get-go I insisted that the tombstone had to say Grace. Not Lois or even Lois G – the way it appeared on the paper mock-up my parents first showed me—but Grace—spelled out so that all the people who knew me by that name, which is pretty much everyone I’ve met since I was eighteen, could find me if they ever come looking, though I knew that most of them never would. Unlike my family, who take cemetery maintenance seriously, showing up on a regular basis to plant flowers, pull weeds, place wreaths, or just dust off the slabs that bear their dearly departeds’ names, most of my friends whistle past graveyards, rarely stopping in to visit. But I wanted Grace on the tombstone anyway, just in case one of them ever did. So they could find me if they ever get the urge to drop off a bouquet, maybe toast me with a bottle of cheap champagne. I was okay with Lois being there too, since that was the name on my birth and baptismal certificates and passport, the name my parents bestowed on me at the start, but I wanted the name I’d grown into as well, and thought Lois Grace was the reasonable compromise. It’s what was on my driver’s license and monthly paycheck, on my credit cards and most of my bills, but my mom said that might be too many letters. It might not fit.

“What if my name was Theresa?” I asked. “Or Marianne? Or Theodosia?”  I was invoking my maternal great grandmother with that last one—a name I knew had been suggested for me by my Nana, but rejected as too hard to pronounce, too “old country.” Still, they managed to get it spelled out on her tombstone. All nine letters.

I said the engraver might just need to use a smaller font. Then I had to explain what a font was. There had to be a way, I insisted, to get some version of my whole name on the tombstone, squeezing the entirety of “Lois Grace” in between “Sonny” and “Jeff.”

The mock-up showed that my parents had already decided to forego my older brother’s official “Joseph,” since almost no one ever called him that, and the “r-e-y” of my younger brother, for the more colloquial name we all commonly used. I didn’t want to be hogging space or more than my fair share of letters, and it did occur to me that I probably shouldn’t give a damn what the tombstone said. I’ll be dead, after all, so what will it matter to me what’s written on some rock positioned above the box that will contain whatever is left of my body after it’s burned? But somehow, this planning ahead made it matter. If you can’t have what you want on your own tombstone, what’s the point of having one? 

Frankly, I’d never thought much about my grave. I don’t think many healthy people do. I’ve always liked cemeteries—had, in fact, played as a kid in the one we were now discussing—but I hadn’t considered being buried there, or anywhere, for that matter. Scattered ashes might be appropriate for someone who has moved around as much as I have—the only one in my immediate family who wandered geographically far away from this place I still referred to as home. But then my mom called one day and asked, as casually as if she were asking what I wanted for my birthday, if I planned on getting buried, and if so, where.

If we all agreed to get cremated, she said, our entire nuclear family would fit in the plot her parents had purchased before I was even born, the plot where we had buried my older brother’s ashes a few months before. He’d succumbed, at sixty-one, to lymphoma complicated by thirty years of heroin use that had rendered him too weak to fight the disease, or the infections that came after chemo, or the demons of addiction that rode his back right into the plot of ground where he was now laid to rest, as they say, hopefully resting in more peace than he ever found in this world. My parents were in the process of purchasing a permanent marker to replace the temporary cross that had been placed on his grave after the funeral. While they were at it, they were buying one for themselves, and so it occurred to them—and why the hell not—to include my kid brother and me in the deal, if we were agreeable to the arrangement.  It seemed like an efficient plan. A sensible family affair. 

They weren’t talking about anything fancy—just a modest upright granite square for themselves, and for us kids, a rectangle raised a few inches above the ground with a bold BAUER headline and then our given names, or nicknames or, in my case—if I had my way, a name I had sort of adopted—and the dates that marked our comings and eventual goings. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Three peas in a pod planted in Our Lady of Hungary cemetery, surrounded by related Bauers and Bilders and Wesloks and Feichtls and a vast field of other Catholics, though both my brothers and I had given up on that faith long ago.

I said yes, and in the next few weeks announced tofriends, “Hey, my mom and dad are buying me a tombstone.”

This elicited a combination of horror and maudlin humor, but I felt a vague sense of satisfaction in knowing where I’d eventually end up. Though I had no idea where I’ll be living when I die, I now had a final destination, somewhere they could send what they’ll call my remains. There would be one less decision for me—or some survivor—to make when the time came to make those decisions. One less thing to worry about. But now I was looking that proverbial gift horse in the mouth, insisting that Grace had to be on the tombstone.

“But,” my mom insisted, “Everyone here knows you as Lois.”

This, I pointed out, was not exactly true. To my family, I have always been (full and embarrassing disclosure here) Honey. Cousin Honey. Aunt Honey. Just plain Honey. I’d like to be able to claim the nickname indicated a sweet disposition that was evident the moment I exited my mother’s womb, but it had more to do with the word rhyming with my older brother, who’d been around for three years before I arrived and was firmly established as Sonny. Sonny and Honey. It was cute when we were kids, but for an adult woman, Honey Bauer sounds like a porn star pseudonym, so there was no way I wanted that on the tombstone. Not over my dead body.

“The relatives will know it’s me,” I said, “and no one else I knew from way-back-when is really going to care much.”

This was a fact. Most of the friends who will really mourn my passing were post high school, post hometown, scattered across the parts of the country where I’ve lived: Philadelphia, New Orleans, Montana, Massachusetts, Virginia, Nebraska. Though people from my childhood and teenage years would, I thought, remember me more fondly than not, I had long ceased to be part of their community, the circle of what they’d call real friends. They’d all been happy to see me when I showed up at our high school reunion for the first time in thirty years; recalled some amusing anecdotes from grade school and high school that included me. A few had introduced me to their spouses as “our class’s first hippy.” Some knew I was a writer. But while I enjoyed reconnecting with them on that occasion, I knew those connections were tenuous, based more on nostalgia for our shared histories than our present and on-going lives. A few might show up out of respect if a funeral service were held in town, but none of them were going to maintain my grave or festoon it with mums or vigil candles for All Souls’ Day, even if that ritual survives another generation. And besides, most of them had heard about the Grace thing by now, thanks to Facebook, Wikipedia, and more old- fashioned versions of gossip.

So Grace had to be part of the deal. I was firm on this. If I couldn’t have Grace on the tombstone, I really didn’t want it. I’d just arrange to have my ashes scattered to the winds or maybe donate my body to science. The more I thought about it, the stronger I felt. If there was going to be a marker to commemorate my life, a permanent record of my time on this earth, I wanted the record to be accurate—set straight—the story told as it had truly unfolded, whatever kind of character I’d ended up being, represented as—or at least called—what she was. Laid to rest with the name she had come to call hers. A name she didn’t exactly choose, any more than she had chosen the one her parents had given her at birth, but a name that had evolved, as she had, the one she’d grown accustomed to answering to.

*

Yes, I do realize that in the above paragraph, I have begun to talk about myself in the third person, something I’ve always found pretentious, or a little creepy, when other people do it. But how does one talk about one’s deceased self?  Is “one” better or worse than “she?” Self as gone gets complicated. Who are you when you are no more, no longer living in the body you think of as yours?  Or you?  When others begin to speak of you in the permanently past tense?

One can get downright existential in these circumstances. Or, perhaps, she can. This me who will someday be no more in the flesh, no matter what she calls herself. Or what other people call her. This Grace or Lois or Honey who will live on only in a few people’s memories, and perhaps—a bit of ego here—a few of her poems that may survive.

It occurs to me that this vague, and probably futile, hope may be part of why I’m insisting on Grace. Because Grace is the name I publish under. The name I live—with? in? behind?—as a writer.The name I am known by, poetically speaking, though I’m fully, and sometimes painfully, aware of the fact that I’m a far cry from being “known” as a poet—well or otherwise. I’ve labored in relative obscurity in life, so am I really going to entertain the fantasy that years after I’m gone some devoted reader is going to seek out my final resting place, stand above my simple “Grace” the way readers have stood above Dickinson’s “Called Back,” Yeats’s “Horseman, pass by,” Keats’s “Name Writ in Water,” and the like?  I mean—really! This is clearly delusional.

And yet, what harm in such a delusion? Am I hurting anyone or anything by allowing for this possibility? Isn’t the desire for a bit of immortality at least one of the driving forces behind all creative efforts—not to mention, tombstones? Would I be the first obscure artist or writer rediscovered long after they were gone? Might insisting on Grace be doing some future reader—perhaps an earnest graduate student—a favor, making it easier for them to track down the final resting place of this forgotten poet they stumbled upon in some library’s stacks, blowing dust off a book that had not been checked out in years to discover a poem that moved or delighted them and taking it upon themselves to find out more about the woman who’d written it?

Or maybe they spot a slim volume in a used bookstore (if such establishments survive longer than I do). The image on the cover catches their eye (I have been blessed with some damn good covers), though the writer’s name doesn’t ring even the faintest bell. A quick Google or Bing (or whatever engine might take over searches in this fantasy future) yields several possible me’s—an actress, an interior decorator turned chef and cook book author, an advocate for incarcerated children, a champion swimmer and—oh, yes, a poet—all coexisting on the planet at the same time, engaged in their varied pursuits, living their not famous but hopefully fulfilling lives with whatever measure of grace being named Grace allowed them.                                           

*                            

My own transformation into Grace happened more or less as a joke. It began when a girl who lived down the hall from me in the dorms my freshman year in college—a black woman whose name I do not now remember and who may never have known my “real” one—started calling me Grace Slick after hearing me sing along to the albums that were often blaring in my room. Feed your head was a refrain I especially liked belting out—mostly to shock my conservative roommate. Other girls took to calling me Slick too, and when, half-way through the semester, I managed to severely sprain my ankle in a freak accident while merely dancing in my room (and slipping on a slick spot on the floor, ha ha)—grace took on an ironic twist and stuck.

This was a time when many in the counter-culture I aimed to be part of were renaming themselves right and left—mostly left. Hippy chicks transformed from Cindys and Barbaras and Karens into Lunas and Sages and Skys. Feminists rejected their patriarchal surnames in favor of their mother’s maiden names or neologisms like Womynfire. Given time, I might very well have come up with something in that order, but fate—or dumb luck—beat me to it. Grace I became, as I hobbled, oh, so gracelessly, across campus on my crutches. And Grace I have been ever since—though I still answer to Honey, and the occasional Lois, as the situation demands. In print, though, it’s always been Grace, except for some embarrassing high school stuff I hope no one— not even that fantasy grad student of the future—ever digs up. Many people who know me these days, both personally and professionally, have never even heard of Lois.

*

Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but it would confuse the hell out of gardeners if we suddenly started calling roses petunias or dandelions. I have lived with three different names in eight different states. I’ve worked a variety of jobs, been labeled as a sale’s girl, telephone solicitor, waitress, office clerk, barmaid, librarian, and, finally, professor. The academic world is light years away from the steel and cement and clothing mill culture in which I grew up, but I still feel conscious of myself as, fundamentally, the same person who grew up there—not like a series of fluid selves, as post-modern theory suggests, but more like the same self who has taken on different roles—like an actor playing whatever parts the situations I have found myself in have called for, but always vaguely aware of the fact that I am playing. Underneath it all, on some very basic level, I have a sense of a stable something—call it self or soul, personality or spirit, whatever—that is just an older, evolving version of that kid from the Lehigh Valley, still shaped, and possibly warped, by the forces of my so-called formative years—which I suspect are still occurring. If that is a delusion of ego, as Buddhists believe, it’s a delusion I’ve yet to escape. And I don’t think I’d want to. Whatever this entity I call me is feels like something I inhabit. Maybe I’ll call it my own state of grace.

*

And speaking of Grace—that’s the name now chiseled on the tombstone. No tiny font. No Lois at all. Just five letters to identify what will, on some future day, become my former existence. My past life.

At some point, my parents decided to give me the name I wanted. The letters fit quite nicely between the names of my brothers, who will bookmark me in death as they did in life—Sonny three years older; Jeff eight years younger. Me, the middle child. The only girl. All that future history summed up in a few words and numbers now written in stone. Though I personally would not have chosen the two little crosses that flank the upper corners, they’re a decoration I think I can live with after I’m dead.

Sonny already lies in the ground—buried in a box so small it was hard to believe, as I dropped my single carnation into the hole in which it rested, that it contained what had once been my big brother. The body of a living, breathing man. To the left of him, my maternal grandparents and a great aunt and uncle; a little farther back, my parents’ plot. We’re within spitting distance of other relatives—either here in what locals call the “Hunky” cemetery or across the way in the “Ukie” section—surrounded by dearly departed relatives, friends, and neighbors who will all someday be neighbors, of a different sort, again.

No predicting how long it will be before I join them. I mean, it’s not like I’m in any hurry! I may have a pre-arranged grave, but I’m hoping to stay out of it for as long as possible, to keep working and playing and paying taxes till that other unavoidable comes along and renders me eternally exempt.

When it comes to eternity, I’m not sure what I think about that long haul of time. I’ve given up belief in a literal heaven and hell, though I still harbor vague notions of some kind of on-going-ness that might be called an after-life. What form that might take? I haven’t a clue.

As a child I accepted every word I was taught about gold-lined streets above the clouds awaiting the righteous faithful, and fire and brimstone below us ready to consume all sinners. When the nuns at Our Lady described The Last Judgment, as they often did with great flare and what strikes me now as rather ghoulish anticipation, I always pictured it happening in this very cemetery, the only place I knew for the dead to go. God would be perched on his throne right here on the corner of 2nd and Main, surrounded by choirs of white-robed angels, with stairways to heaven and hell to his right and left. Actually, I imagined them more like escalators—and I, of course, would be gliding effortlessly skyward while any enemies that may have tormented me at school or on the playground (this might include a few of those nuns) would be futilely trying to back-pedal away from the flames they so clearly had earned. I saw it all in Technicolor clarity. A hallelujah cartoon.

These days I tend to see most judgments as less black and white/ all or nothing, and the hereafter as the ultimate que sera. Whatever’s in store after my earthly remains are stored, I’ll find out sooner or later. I’ll understand—or at very least experience it—all by and by, as the old hymn proclaims. Or maybe there will be one big nada.

Some might see a tombstone as a rather macabre gift, but it’s one I know I will, someday, have a use for—and when the time comes, I know it will fit just fine, even if what it fits is no longer really me—just the ash and bone that was once the part of me called body. I have visited my future final place of rest several times now—placed a stone of remembrance on my brother’s name, deadheaded the geraniums my mom plants on all the family graves each Spring, pulled a few weeds, done a little dance—for the hell of it. I’m not sure how I’ll get there when the time comes. I don’t think I can count on a gentleman in a carriage—ala Emily D—to kindly stop and drive me past the setting sun, so I suppose I’ll have to make more practical arrangements, remind the executor of my will that this little square of real estate exists, maybe pre-purchase a box to match my brother’s and set aside some money for shipping and handling—no return to sender allowed. All in good time, as they say.  All by and by. The stone awaits—my birthdate already recorded, room for the date of my death a blank waiting to be filled, the dash between representing whatever time constitutes the rest of my life. At this point my future is, no doubt, shorter than my past, but it is my future. I am alive for another day. With things to do this side of the grave.

 

My mother used to say she hated wind.  I’ve found myself saying it too, whether from internal iterations of her or from genuine dislike, I’m not sure.

But today there’s a soft pink wind, a wind that films around my body just as sweat balances at the pores on a humid August morning before the sun has heaved itself high in the sky and melted the clouds.  The wind is soft cotton, coral pink, soundless.

I learned two days ago that my daughter is five weeks pregnant.  Two cells, locked together in an embrace more intimate and enduring than any conscious one, adrift inside her, somewhere, gently moving like this pink wind.  I can’t see either.  Both remind me of life continuing with or without me.

I’m watching sassafras leaves jiggle and spears of salvia waver as bumblebees weave among them stopping here and there for fuel.  The upper limbs of oaks shift indecisively.  They don’t reveal if the wind comes from the north, south, east, or west.  They don’t conform in any way.  They signal a presence only, a slight push of molecules of air.

We wouldn’t know if spirits moved among us, or God massaged the petals of a peony. We wouldn’t recognize the divine, how could we?  I can’t see the wind or the beating of my heart or the making of a heart in my child’s uterus.

I wonder about the dependency of embryo to uterus to mother, of wind to sun and the earth’s rotation, of the divine to our conception.

If the earth didn’t rotate, the wind would blow north and south from the poles.  If the sun didn’t heat the air, there would be no pressure differentials, and cool air would sit static and languid as an overweight grandfather.  If we hadn’t poured carbon monoxide into the atmosphere, breezes could play on the streets of New York, and I wouldn’t hear warnings to keep your child inside, don’t run. Air quality hazardous, clogged as the Uber-clogged streets.

If my daughter had not so passionately wanted a child, this embryo would not be.  My husband worries that if she runs on concrete it will fall out.  I disabuse him of this but wonder about other reasons it could.

At midday the wind blows a bit brighter, almost green.  I don’t know where it came from or how far it flew.  All I can count is time, time till I know the pregnancy is not ectopic, time to find shade, time to watch the clematis that outgrew its frame so that now two feet of vine bearing shiny leaves and white flowers veers off at a horizontal angle in search of support, the thin tip dipping despondently.  Where to go from here?

I go to the hardware store and buy bamboo stakes and green twists, and concoct a makeshift extension to the frame on which the plant is growing.  I don’t know if the plant is any happier, reaching vertically to the sky, but it doesn’t look so vulnerable and unsure.

 

***

 

Today the wind is translucent blue, open and undirected as a newborn’s eyes, my daughter’s eyes, before they turned dark as walnuts.  Hot air over driveways and back decks has lifted leaving a gateway for cooler air from Peconic Bay to glide in, poised and unannounced, amorphous yet steady, steady as the flap and shush of small waves on pebbles and empty clams.  I don’t know if any language has words that precisely mimic this sound.

In the city my daughter is gazing into a screen, looking for her child for the first time.  A pomegranate seed, a lentil, an eraser tip.  Did it travel to the uterus as charted or get stranded in the channel en route, abruptly becalmed, snagged on a scar?  Does she see dark shadows where its eyes will grow, the spot where a heart is beating in quick silent iambs twice as fast as hers or mine—to live, to live, to live?

Once I dreamt that I floated somewhere outside the earth and looked back at an azure globe, inner lit, luminous, loosely swaddled in clouds.  More than anything I remember color (have I ever again dreamt in color?)  stately blue like the wind today.  Blue that gives nothing away, reveals nothing, is not uncalm.   Little embryo.  Who was I to glimpse it?  And had I had words, they would have vanished the instant they formed, swallowed by space where such things have no life.

 

***

 

I used to curse the wind when it spun off the Hudson and knifed between high rises as I trudged west to my apartment after work.  It would be early evening though already dark for three hours as I wrapped a scarf around my head and across my face, tightened my fists in my pockets, and leaned against the massive, muscular hand raised against me.  The wind felt like the sound of my boot heels scraping and crunching on salt.  It curried all that energy on so many nights whose days under electric lights I don’t remember. It blows like that still though I’m not there to record it.  It blows though I don’t bother to find out why.

My Ithacas have shifted.  The steady west wind (that had pummeled me) brought Odysseus so close he could see cooking fires on his island, so close he shut his eyes and breathed the yellow wind and drifted dreaming of his son and wife while his men opened the precious bag that Aeolus had given them.  Treasure! they imagined, dipping in their hands and feeling not the cool touch of gold and jewels,  but air, dark violet fistfuls of air, furious squalls that blew them helter-skelter like so many fallen leaves in November when the wind swirls them into a column rising, splintering, peeling outward like the outer wheel of a cyclone.  So we wander, inadvertently.  So we find other Ithacas.  We’ve long forgotten the first, that slow vital landing on the uterine wall.

 

***

 

I don’t know why my mother hated wind and now she has died and I can’t ask her. Maybe it messed up her hair, which she had set every week by the same hairdresser in the same style.  Maybe she found it invasive, deaf to her wishes.

Erratic winds this summer are feeding wildfires in Mendocino that leap across creeks, roads and fire lines, rage three hundred feet in the air, refuse to settle at night, and voraciously gobble tens of thousands of acres a day of dry timber and brittle grass and homes. Winds reach 140 miles per hour fueling fire whirls, which suck air at the base and rocket into vertical columns that strip bark off trees, pluck them out of the ground, toss firetrucks like toys.  Winds pick up embers and spit them miles ahead of the fire.  Experts say the fires will burn all summer, and ash-laden wind is coating the state with carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, chemicals, and soot.  Shots from space show fulminating gray clouds chaotically growing and enclosing the earth below, an earth already charred dark chocolate and missing visible evidence of life.

Here on the other coast an untelling sky and monochromatic cloud cover obscure the horizon.  Faint rain hisses in the leaves. The static morning offers no information about the rapid formation of liver, lungs, feet, or the rapacious destruction of sun-hot leaves, no hint of process which is life force, life force which is process.  Silver wind. Cool and indifferent.  Wait, it says, wait.

 

***

 

My daughter’s body is not subject to her will (or mine) to safeguard the fetus, to not feel acid skinning her stomach, to not bleed, to determine gender, to carry the baby high or low, to deliver swiftly, safely.  The body is its own engine now, and the fetus both dependent and terrifyingly not.

There is never that silence of the womb we imagine when subways screech to a halt and off we go to another day.  There never was.  A fetus of just over four months hears mass transit in action: blood pumping through its life line, a huge heart beating, stomach gurgling and twisting as enzymes go to work.  My daughter’s baby will hear air soughing in and out of her lungs as she sleeps, waterfalls of air as she races to catch a train, green zephyrs, orange gusts.  Molecules of that air will travel to the baby through a single vein.

Tonight thunder explodes directly overhead, knocks out the power, sounds like a bomb.  The dog breaks through the screen door and barks inanely at the night.  I’m touched that he thinks he can protect us.  I dash from window to window with towels as rain puddles on floorboards and bleeds across rugs.  In the morning I learn that two inches came down, but pine needles hang listless, slimy petals strew the deck, air refuses to move—everything is in conspiracy to conceal the violence of the night—while high in the atmosphere mother-of-pearl clouds glide against a steel backdrop of clouds whose depth I can’t measure. They lighten the sky here and there but leave no wake in the darker gray that stays. Their movement is scarcely perceptible, the only perceivable sign of wind. It is not the silence of life beginning, though I’d like to think so, but the gracious silence of inevitability as they scud one place to another.

 

 

 

 

1

Rainy and cool, as April often is, with new snow in the mountains. My wife Cara and I have come to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to join a group of writers, artists, and activists, many of whom we have known for years as neighbors of sorts in our shared place. Others are from as far away as Nigeria, albeit by way of Nebraska. Marking the publication of an anthology called Hearth, we gather in Paradise Valley, at Chico Hot Springs—for more than a century a regional hub—to break bread, listen, and engage in what the anthology’s subtitle terms “A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place.” Each of us has burned gasoline to get here, about 130 miles’ worth in our case. That’s not counting the hundred we added driving into the park before the event, or what we’ll rack up tomorrow before returning home to Billings.

Perhaps a word is in order about how Yellowstone people conceive of home. The nature of the landscape and the patterns of human habitation, some established in prehistory, have birthed an expansive sense of place. My neighborhood encompasses mountains and watersheds on both sides of the Continental Divide. Everything between the Yellowstone Valley and the Tetons is what locals mean when we say here. My late office neighbor, a legendary scholar of western literature, was married to an equally legendary novelist who lived a hundred miles away. It worked for them, she explained.

We’ve spent this early spring day with wolves, elk, bighorn sheep, migrant cranes and ducks. Our RAV4 followed small platoons of bison trailing the melting snow into Lamar Valley, a few new calves—called “red dogs” for their russet juvenile coats—already bold enough to kick up divots of vernal mud. They’ll soon be joined by pronghorn antelope clambering across the windswept Mt. Everts scarp into the northern range, as pronghorn have for millennia. It’s all so redolent of the wildness that was, for Thoreau in less compromised days, “the preservation of the world.”  

Not that the Yellowstone country is always, or even usually, serenely stable. With cataclysmic wildfires, sudden blizzards, and hail-sputtering thunderstorms echoing from granite crags and basalt canyons across parts of three states, Greater Yellowstone is big, sometimes dangerous, generally given to extremes. After all, it surrounds a supervolcano—the very word is hyperbolic. It is upheaval, earth in the making, always, like the eruption patterns of the geyser basins, changing. That’s where I live, or, to be honest, what I live near. The Beartooth Mountains, the northeast rampart of the ecosystem, loom on my everyday horizon, but it takes an hour to track the Yellowstone River, Clark’s Fork, and Rock Creek to Red Lodge, my closest gateway to the Beartooths.

Despite being armored by a full complement of protective designations—National Park, World Heritage Site, Biosphere Reserve—and beloved by millions across America and the World, Yellowstone is not impervious to the planetary disruptions of our time. The ecosystem responds to harmonies and patterns orchestrated by long frigid winters and generous if inconsistent snowfall. To fend off tree-killing beetles, for example, whitebark pines need spring and fall cold snaps—very cold but within the expected range—which grow less frequent as the seasons shift. Skeletal whitebarks, such as those along the switchbacks leading to Beartooth Pass, constitute one of the most obvious, least ambiguous, signs of climate change in the region. Experimental poet Jody Gladding, author of Translations from Bark Beetle, is not the only one channeling forest insects into a poetry of destruction. Maybe the beetles are translating us.

2

Almost alone on the Grand Loop Road, we have our pick of haphazardly plowed pulloffs edged by eroding snowbanks. Below our chosen vantage, sandhill cranes stride across icy sloughs like Giacometti skaters, while ducks claim patches of open water. In a couple of months, sun and snowmelt will ring these ponds with nesting cranes, waterfowl, and blackbirds, and tangle roadways with the hubbub of summer tourism. At the height of the annual invasion of visitors, Yellowstone’s wild denizens withdraw into the backcountry or endure the crowds with varying degrees of resignation and patience. Laying claim to busy park roads, they occasionally demand patience in return.

An August evening finds a stymied line of park patrons rubbernecking from sunroofs or leaning cross-armed against car doors. Though we don’t know this yet, a mile or two ahead bison sprawl across the road, spurred by the rut’s imperatives despite the clicks and whirs of cameras and phones. With traffic backed up, Cara and I might as well pull over, turn the car off, and wander around the high sage meadow veined with sedge-laced depressions. We look for animal sign. And there it is! Not tracks or scat, but the animal in the flesh, an inch-long boreal chorus frog—glistening greenish-brown with broken stripes—the only one I’ve ever seen, though I look forward to their comb-strumming calls, an anthem of resurgent life, each spring.

A summer stop at Phantom Lake in the northern range or by a placid Hayden Valley swale reveals a vibrant world of small-scale life. Seasonal by nature, many park wetlands dissipate to damp mud sometime in July or August, their resident amphibians sheltering in the reedy shade of residual pools. But since the late twentieth century, a persistent trend toward reduced snowpack and accelerated melting has been nudging evaporation just a little earlier decade by decade. And the frogs, still common enough in Yellowstone at present, will likely grow gradually rarer, may already be doing so, as they have in other parts of their range. In the current issue of Yellowstone Science, a team of researchers concludes that “The establishment of warmer, drier weather patterns would have consequences for snowpacks, wetlands, and boreal chorus frogs, profoundly changing YNP’s spring and early summer soundscape.”

The Hearth event at Chico has brought us to this slushy pulloff, but we would soon have been drawn to Yellowstone anyway, true to our own compelling if vestigial migratory impulse. Summoning another generation to the promised feast of invertebrates, small fish, and frogs, sandhill cranes call an ancient farewell to the flyway and dance in the silver light of an April afternoon. We stay with them as long as we can, till drizzle turns to steady rain with a hint of snow to come, and we, like passage birds, resume our journey.

3

Towering over the chorus frogs and cranes that share their summer ponds, moose are more clearly at risk, in the midst of a long decline in Yellowstone, as elsewhere. Hiking the Beartooths around Red Lodge, we sometimes encounter a cow and calf browsing new growth in an open burn. Winter is another story. During the snowy months, moose seek food and shelter in dense conifer stands. When these are lost to insects or megafires like those that torched the park in 1988, a moose might take to an ancestral trail traversing the Green River Valley to Utah’s Uinta Mountains. South, however, is an increasingly hazardous direction for moose. Cold-weather animals, they may be subject to heat stress crossing the shadeless high desert country south of Greater Yellowstone. Winter ticks, a more insidious peril, thrive through milder seasons; as many as forty thousand have been found on a single anemic calf. When ticks overwhelm a moose, the fur can thin to baldness, the afflicted animals referred to as “ghost moose.” Jackson Hole, at the south end of Greater Yellowstone, is already seeing the effects of these parasites.  Recent survival rates show a counterintuitive trend—mild weather is better for ticks and thus worse for moose, the arachnids’ toll more than offsetting any gains the mammals might get from better winter forage and ease of movement during less snowbound years.

In January, we accompany our dog Luke along creekside ski/snowshoe trails in the foothills above Red Lodge, weaving through scraggly lodgepole pine and Douglas fir to Basin Creek Falls. These riparian coverts often host a wintering moose or two, and we’re alert, not wanting to either miss or surprise one. “Don’t expect her,” warns poet Lee Sharkey in “How to See Moose,” “and she may bolt from the woods / not ten feet before you.”

To encounter a creature as grand as a moose—even slumped for a midday nap by an icebound creek—is always a kind of miracle. To miss these surprisingly elusive giants is more likely than not. When they keep to themselves, as they do today, we worry about the local population, individual animals we’ve undoubtedly met before. We take solace in a scatter of fresh moose sign, and a Red Lodge regular we pass says he saw two the day before.

4

This year, at least, frogs will call, moose will browse the burned slopes between pine seedlings. Summer will be opulent, messy, and wonderful. People come here, people like me live here, to belong to a world big enough to inhabit without feeling as if you’re suffocating it. In our time, though, a human shadow drifts across the land like wildfire smoke, which in part it is.

That shadow is too central to our experience to ignore. Lodged like Blake’s invisible worm in the concept of pristine wilderness, nature’s end shades everything nature means to us. One of Greater Yellowstone’s most eloquent contemporary writers, Gary Ferguson, until recently a Red Lodge resident, has said that the ability to perceive oneself immersed in a larger whole is essential to psychological and cultural health. Today, however, the numinous reflects our presence like a hall of mirrors, as much a part of us as we are of it.

We’ve long understood national parks as islands rimmed by the tamed, humanized places where we spend most of our lives. For Yellowstone, this is true geographically as well as culturally. Shouldered aloft by high mountains, the plateaus that make up the park’s core lift above a sea of towns, mining claims, grazing allotments, and irrigated farmland like an unfallen Eden, a beckoning if challenging Bali Ha’i. As is true of both gardens and islands, Yellowstone is besieged by everything that is not it.

Political neglect, increasing visitation, invasive species, and encroaching development wear against the region’s littoral margins. Climate change exacerbates wildfires throughout the West, scrimming the Big Sky with a pall of smoke for days or weeks each summer, shattering the illusion that setting even an entire ecosystem aside will ensure its future. Moose, boreal chorus frogs, whitebark pine—these are already on the line in Yellowstone, and the high islands of the Rockies, as surely as ocean islands elsewhere, wash away as our human tide rises.

5

On the road through the northern range, we’re forced to a stop, literally being buffaloed. A herd of about a dozen bison ambles slowly but purposefully ahead of us toward Lamar Valley, led by two experienced cows. The first shoves rangy adolescents through lingering snow, nudging her oblivious wards onto the pavement where rocky ravines narrow their path. The second directs auto traffic, blocking the way until the last straggler has passed, sweeping the herd forward, then repeating the routine at the next bottleneck. These two have done this before, obviously. Dealing with humans and our tools has become, for them, second nature.

Left to their own devices, Yellowstone bison could repopulate the Great Plains. Though they can’t be expected to conceptualize, much less respond to, global disruptions like climate change, they will do their part to keep prairies healthy, watered, and fertilized for the “red dogs” to come. Tempered by a recent brush with extinction, theirs is an adaptive, mobile culture, a synergy of instinct, tradition, and the resourcefulness of wise migrant leaders for whom the practical and ethical—would it be too much to say spiritual?—are nothing more or less than intertwined responses to the same necessities.

In their introduction to the Hearth anthology, editors Annick Smith and Susan O’Connor propose that “humans, like whales and monarch butterflies, are programmed to return to, or to seek, places of refuge, nurture, and deep connection.” Like whales and butterflies, like cranes and bison, people trace ancestral paths and blaze original trails, guided by water and stars to havens sometimes continents away from where we started. Such journeys are never without peril. Even a hundred mile highway trip reveals skid marks and broken glass, remnants left behind by unfortunate travelers. If we’re lucky our wandering brings us to hearthside conversation at familiar waystations like Chico Hot Springs.

Despite its dangers, migration across the earth’s expanses has long been a common survival strategy for the planet’s creatures, ourselves included. Any attempt to traverse time, however, beats against a theoretically permeable but practically impregnable border wall of physics. Our time travel limited to the seasonal round and the inevitable forward momentum of biology, none of us escapes the era of our birth. Our troubled age is poised to strand whole nations in disappearing homelands, place itself become a kind of refugee, unhomed by climate change, resource exhaustion, the potential extinction of entire ecosystems.

This April, sun and earth once more prod cranes and bison into Yellowstone’s lush valleys. Longer days pry edges of snow and ice. Perhaps frogs are already stirring in their muddy beds, and moose may be roaming upslope from streamsides. Greater Yellowstone’s wild inhabitants glory in the planetary rhythms they depend on. Having forfeited that faith, their human neighbors light a literary hearth in a place called Paradise Valley, an apt name for all we have lost and are losing—still so close at hand, and still the only world we’ll ever know.

I watched the training video at a desk wedged between two metal racks of summer sweaters waiting to be tagged and taken to the floor. The store room was cold and dark in contrast to the fluorescent lights out front that sparked the chrome fixtures and suggested to potential criminals they were being watched. Just old enough, at the age of sixteen, to have a job, I had never been officially trained to do anything before. Now I was being taught to sell clothes. The woman on the television, dressed in a tight fitting mauve suit that hit below her knees and a cream-colored blouse adorned with a floppy bow, stuttered in her delivery of information, a result not of a speech impediment but of the quality of VHS tape and the number of times this particular video had been played.

Floppy Bow Woman had already addressed the fact that while Brook’s Fashions did not work on commission per say, it did track and value each retail assistant’s efforts to achieve her personal best. “To help you reach your Daily Sales Total, your DST, we at Brook’s have created a way to remember the steps to a successful sale. It’s called GET SALES!”

Two weeks earlier, I had listened to my mother and worn a skirt, blouse, hose and heels to the nearby shopping mall. Even though I was just handing in my resume or asking for applications, I was told by her, “You need to look like you’re already working there.” Thin pile of resumes in hand, I had walked from one clothing store to the next asking if they had any openings: Merry-Go-Round, County Seat, Brook’s, Ups & Downs, Casual Corner, Contempo Casuals. The summer was fast approaching and most of the managers were happy to take my application. A few even asked me the hours I would be available. “Full time once school is done,” I responded, just as my father had coached me the night before.

I knew nothing, including what it meant to stand on your feet for eight hours, or to work forty, or how minimum minimum age was, or how the twenty-percent discount offered to employees would take from my paycheck whatever taxes hadn’t already. I knew the least, it seems to me now, about fashion itself. For the previous five years, I had attended a Catholic school in Hawaii and worn a uniform. Outback Red, Guess, and Benneton meant nothing to me. Arriving in wealthy northern Virginia after back-to-back tours of duty on Oahu where we lived in military housing and wore shorts and flip flops all year long, I had only recently come to understand that labels even existed, that you would, for example, wear them on the outside rather than tuck them under the collar of your shirt.  For the past six months, after our return to Virginia, I had worn what was on sale at Kmart, all my parents could afford given the cost of living near DC.  My clothes were ill fitting and without shape, the polyester slacks and acrylic sweaters akin to what a geriatric would wear. And, more to the point, I didn’t really care. The distance between me and the cheerleaders bounding down the halls on game days was so vast it never occurred to me that the space could be traversed. Only now do I wonder why I had chosen to apply for apparel jobs that spring, rather than, say, the Hallmark store where I would at least be working with paper and words, materials I understood. Perhaps, on some level, I recognized my ignorance and my need to catch up to those who not only wore Forenza sweaters but knew to wear them backwards. Or maybe I was influenced by the novels I read where characters had adventures while life guarding or working at the local ice cream shop. Or maybe I thought a job in clothing could eventually transform me into the kind of girl that floated through the halls of Oakton High with boys like bobbers in her wake.  Whatever the reason, I only walked into clothing stores that spring, and, of those, only Brook’s called me back for an interview.

The move to Virginia had been hard. Oakton High burst at the seams with close to 3,000 students. And when I wasn’t navigating the endless intestines of its giant brick body, I was outside in the damp cold, trying to find a stretch of sky amid the relentless press of oak, ash, and maple. Gone were the bright colors of the islands, the salt-softened air, the long afternoons spent riding high in the boughs of mango and plumeria. Gone were my friends, my bike ride to school, weekends at the beach floating in water warmed by the sun. Now I rode the bus to school every day, sitting at the front and by myself; every lunch period I would take my sack lunch and find a table filled with the few others at Oakton who also seemed content to read their way through high school. I was lonely and unmoored.

Every morning that first fall, I walked down the hill from my house to the bus stop on busy Nutley Street. With each passing week, the daylight decreased, and the mornings were often foggy and thick. A kid from across the street, Ross, also caught the bus. He would arrive at the stop minutes after me, having timed the departure from his warm house perfectly so as to arrive just when the long yellow bus did. We were the last two on the route to be picked up, and, after we found our seats, the bus would drive another block before making a U-turn and heading back toward the school along the other side of the divided highway. Just as I watched the cheerleaders swivel in their chairs so their hair swung just right, I watched Ross and did whatever he did. I stood where he stood and moved when he moved. Because I knew I would never fit in, my goal was only not to stand out. To be invisible.

One morning, I arrived at the stop before Ross. When I looked back up the hill toward my house, I couldn’t see his rounded shape anywhere on the street. Usually he wasn’t far behind. Even in the gray light of morning, though, it was clear he wasn’t coming. The air around me, the birds, the traffic, all seemed to quiet. Even the acorns did not fall. Standing in this vacuum of silence, I realized I had missed the bus.

The panic that rose in me from knowing I would have to tell my mom, witness her anger, and hear about it in the car on our drive was short-lived because within seconds I saw the bus on the other side of the road, having already made its U-turn and heading back to school. Seeing me, the bus driver opened her narrow window and yelled across the highway, waving her hand and nodding vigorously.

“Just stay there,” she called. “We are coming!”

Soon the giant bus lumbered to the curb, stopping the traffic behind, so that I could climb the stairs. Kids opened their windows to cry down to me,” Special delivery! Special delivery!”  Even though the fall air was cool, my face grew hot, my hands tingled. I entered the bus, the giant heater blowing air at my feet, and climbed the stairs into the ruckus. Kids were laughing. In my memory, they jeered and pointed from behind cupped palms. I was anything but invisible.

From that day on, I took to hiding behind the bushes every morning until I was sure I had not missed the bus. Only when I saw its grilled yellow snout barreling toward me would I step from the leaves.

Amanda was the manager. Tall and thin, she kept the store keys on a neon telephone cord coil that spiraled around her bare bicep. At Brook’s, keys gripping your arm were what separated the managers from those on the floor. Otherwise, there was very little difference. Everyone who worked at Brook’s was white, young, female, and passing through.

“Imagine you’re going on a one-week cruise,” Amanda told me after she had clicked through my barely-a-page resume, tapping her pen next to my high school, the honor roll, and my two-year stint as a paper carrier for the Navy News. She wore a bright turquoise sweater dress with yellow plastic beads knotted at her heart. “I want you to go through the store and find the items you would take. Then bring them to me.”

I had never been on a cruise. In the military, ships were for war. I had toured submarines and Navy destroyers, had sat on the shores of Pearl Harbor to watch frigates and tugs move up and down the channel, stood beneath aircraft carriers that could block the sun, but I had never cruised. I had no idea what one would pack, though I noticed almost immediately that Brook’s Fashions did not sell bathing suits or beach towels.

I spent the next half hour poring over the racks of clothes like they were holy scripture: pale yellow Bermuda shorts, and slightly longer capris that buttoned at the knee, polos in every pastel shade possible, earrings and silver bangles, knock off Wayfarers. A white sweater for the evenings on the imaginary ship. Another pair of shorts. Another polo. I debated over color combinations, sensing on some level that one wore light colors in the tropics and that cruises went to tropical places. I channeled my mother who had preached the gospel of layers that first winter back on the mainland when the weather grew wet and cold and the skies fell leaden and gray toward the ground. Each outfit I laid atop the rounders, the metal clothing racks in the center of the narrow store, trying not to bother the actual shoppers. In the late spring of 1984, the look was preppy, with turned up collars and layered polos. Above me, Dead or Alive’s, “You Spin Me Round,” played from unseen speakers. Shoppers filed through hangers next to me, holding the occasional skirt to the light in appraisal. Finally, after excruciating consideration, I hauled my cruise line wardrobe to the counter to show Amanda. Another manager, band of keys around her elbow, looked up from where she was untangling hangers.

“Are you ready to check out?”

I explained that I had my clothing choices ready for Amanda.

“She’s at lunch.”

When I asked what I should do, the second manager told me to leave the pile on the counter and someone else would put them away.

“Julie,” she called to a teenager no older than me who was racking cards of earrings, “Can you restock these?”

I left the store masticating the missed chance to explain my decision to go with the white sweater even though it risked soiling because it matched both the shorts and the denim mini. Plus my mother always said vinegar could get anything out.

The following day Amanda called and offered me forty hours a week at minimum wage starting June first. Two weeks later, I sat in the storeroom where another Jennifer, one who could wear jeans and t-shirts because she “worked the back,” unpacked cardboard cartons of tank tops. A clothes steamer stood near me, burbling plumes of vapor that rose to the ceiling before turning into a crowd of water droplets.

I have been a worker my entire life. In the third grade, I became a mother’s helper for the woman down the street; in the fourth grade, I tried to sell my poetry to classmates who preferred buying rock candy. In the sixth grade, I learned from my friend Suzette that I could deliver the Navy News on Wednesdays to the military housing areas near me. On those days, I would come home and shed my plaid uniform skirt, shorts worn underneath to keep anyone from seeing my underwear, and roll papers on the lanai. My palms would turn black from the ink, cover my white uniform top, mark my knees and shins. Once I had folded and rubber banded a few hundred papers, I would pile them into the red wagon and take them around Maloelap and Catlin-Halsey. When I started the job, I had to run each paper to the door, but my throwing arm developed and soon I could fling each paper from the sidewalk, listen for the satisfying smack when it met with concrete.

Once a month, I would “collect” the voluntary donation of $1.00. Even though I rarely crossed the transom of anyone’s home, collecting for the Navy News provided my first lessons in humanity. I learned that old people were lonely by the way they kept me at the door, offering me cookies or pennies; that mothers were overwhelmed and often brought lids from pans or long wooden spoons to the door with their dollar bills; that fathers, on the rare times one of them answered, never understood why I was there. “We don’t subscribe to The Navy News,” they would say. “I deliver it to your house every week,” I would respond.

And I learned about class, though I could not have articulated this at the time. My route included an officer’s housing area and a larger enlisted housing area. And while today I understand that the same things were happening inside both houses, the officer’s families hid it better so they always seemed quieter, cleaner, and more refined. If I was going to receive a tip, though, it would be from someone in the enlisted housing. That I learned as well.

Brook’s Fashions was my first full-time job, and I took the training seriously. “GET SALES. This is all you need to know,” Floppy Bow assured me. “Look at your training materials and find the pamphlet that reads GET SALES. Press pause if you need more time to locate your pamphlet.”

I waited for her to continue, smoothed the skirt my mother had insisted I wear again, pamphlet in hand. I had already marked my other training materials in ball point pen, underlining the requirement to carry all personal belongings in a clear purse and the need to respect the two fifteen minute breaks and the half hour for lunch, punching in and out. The yellow time cards stood like soldiers nearby, and I had punched the one with my name on it for the first time that morning. “You will be paid for training,” Amanda had assured me, while I tried to keep the shock off my face when I realized one could be paid to learn.  That morning, I hovered at the black time clock until the time read exactly 10AM, having already been told I could punch in neither early nor late. My heart had tightened with the need for exactitude. Even after working at Brook’s for the entire summer, I would stand at the time clock, just waiting for the stamp that affirmed I had measured perfectly. That I had done well.

“We begin with G. Greet every customer. Everyone who comes into the store. Welcome to Brook’s, we might say, or ask if they are looking for anything special. You can give them your name. First name only. We want everyone to feel welcome at Brook’s”

I thought of sullen Julie, the one racking the earring cards. How she remained near the registers and chatted with the managers as one customer after another came into the store. I would not be Julie.

“Then E, engage in conversation,” Floppy Bow continued. She suggested a comment about weather or complimenting a customer’s clothing or purse. To this day, I remain baffled at what kind of conversations they imagined their salespeople were having with their customers. In the years I worked at Brook’s, I rarely engaged these strangers in any real conversation. I would ask if they needed help and they would say they were “just looking.” Then I would hover nearby and straighten racks.

But I did have long conversations with the other sales girls on the floor, mostly at closing when we would have to move through the store from front to back and make sure all racks were even, the clothes well hung. Julie proved to be the most willing to share. A fan of Duran Duran, she wore her bangs long over her forehead and lined her eyes in black. Her pale white skin was accented by leather cords and necklaces puckered with silver studs. While I stayed home on weekend nights and played board games with my family, Julie went to parties, drank too much, and passed out regularly. She rolled her eyes at me a lot, but since we were often the only two on the floor, she took it upon herself to educate me rather than ignore me.

“The sweeter the punch the more Everclear in it,” she told me one day as we madly untangled the vacuum cleaner cord in an attempt to close on time.

“Is that a good thing?” I asked.

“Well, duh,” she said. She wore a white t-shirt that slid off her shoulders every time she moved and a black-checked mini skirt.  Most of us wore the clothes we bought from Brook’s. We each had hangerfulls on “layaway” in the closet behind the register. When payday arrived, we would blow our checks on the same jeans and skirts we spent our days trying to convince customers to buy with the promise of what was hot or, better yet, just trending. Julie rarely put anything on layaway. Her clothes seemed to come from the rag bin, tattered and mismatched. The one item Julie bought by the dozen where the colored “Madonna” bracelets we sold. You could not see her forearm through the stacks of black and silver and neon.

“And what is Everclear again?” I asked.

“It’s what they drink at college,” Julie reminded me. “You get higher faster.” She then told me about the party she had gone to the night before from which she could not remember how she got home.

As she talked, she slowly worked on unwinding the vacuum cord.

“Here, let me do that,” I said. I would get the entire store vacuumed while she was trying to recall how it must have happened that she made it to her own bed.

“Next, ‘T,’ make a tag-line statement like ‘Tanks are hot at two for $10.90’”

In that first summer, that would become my tag-line, mostly because I understood how to wear a tank. I had studied the girls at the high school and seen how they wore them under their Forenza sweaters and mint-striped blouses. Flashdance had been released almost exactly a year earlier, and my dad had taken me to my first R-rated movie where I sat uncomfortably by his side as water fell from the ceiling onto a thinly-clad, Jennifer Beals.  She played Alex, the strip dancing, deep feeling, steel worker whose torn sweatshirts set off a fashion frenzy. A tank strap across a bare shoulder was a look I knew and could suggest to my recently-engaged customers with some sense of authority. I sold a lot of tanks that summer. They were, it turned out, hot.

Floppy Bow pointed back to the pamphlet, having reiterated the G, E and T, and moved to S. “Show and suggest multiple items,” she continued. “The customer doesn’t know what she wants and it’s your job to show her. You know your merchandise. Keep the suggestions coming, even if she says she’s just looking. Offer to start a dressing room for her. Don’t make her carry the clothes around the store.”

Brook’s had three dressing rooms, all at the very back of the store. They did not lock, but the doors were solid and the walls without advertisement or message. Floppy Bow suggested that the dressing room was where it all happened. You wanted to get them to the dressing room.

I wrote down “Dressing Room” at the top of the pamphlet.

Jennifer had moved from unboxing tanks to steaming Gunne Sax-like dresses. They were all strapless and floraled with thin wires than ran up the bodice. My stomach rolled over. I knew I would never be able to sell those dresses because I couldn’t wear them. I didn’t have the chest necessary to hold them up. What did I know about pouring yourself into those wire-filled cups?

It turns out, though, that you didn’t need to actually wear or even like what you were selling. That first summer, I sold more black leather skirts and tiger-printed t’s than imaginable, even though my parents would never have let me leave the house wearing either. Within a few weeks, I began to understand that I wasn’t selling customers what they already had. I was selling them what they wanted to become. They came in wearing a pastel oxford, but they left with a chain belt that slung perfectly over a leopard top. We kept the leather locked, with thin gold chains that ran through the sleeves of the jackets and attached to the rounders. I think this was more for show than anything. Nothing at Brook’s cost more than a hundred dollars. But customers loved buying anything that was locked up. It made them feel superior to those other shoppers who were content to buy what could be freely lifted from the racks.

The leather rounders sat near the registers, and I had to ask the manager for her elastic key chain whenever a customer wanted to look at the minis. Whole days would pass when I would just keep the keys glued to my own bicep. I wore them like a badge.

“Accompany them to the dressing room,” Floppy Bow intoned for the A in SALES and then, she paused, looked directly into the camera, and “L, Leave them undressed.”

I stopped writing. Leave them undressed?

Floppy Bow continued, discussing the importance of vulnerability and nakedness in making a sale. “Ideally,” she said, “you want them naked the entire time, while you keep bringing them clothes.” She stopped short of suggesting that we hide the clothes they wore into the dressing room, but burying them beneath hangers of skirts and dresses was not a bad way to go. “Just keep bringing them more and more.”

If I knew nothing about fashion, I knew even less about being naked. At the age of sixteen, I had never been kissed. I had never held hands with a boy. I wore a one-piece bathing suit to the pool and preferred a cover-up over that. The idea that you would want to leave someone undressed in order to increase your daily sales horrified me, but Floppy Bow was telling me to do it. It was very clear: get them naked. Because I could only see the customers from the shins down, I made it my goal to keep those shins bare as long as possible by bringing as many options to them as I could. And I got good at it. “This will look adorable on you!” “I found this top on the sale rack.” “You must have missed these new prairie skirts. Try them with this web belt.” Because Floppy Bow was right. The more you kept them naked, the more you sold. After all, they were basically trapped in a closet. Just never let them put on shoes.

When they would crack the door, maybe to look for a friend or a mother or consider the walk toward the full-length mirror, I was there ready with compliments. Customers wanted to like their clothes. They wanted to buy something new. They wanted to be whatever that bustier dress suggested or that Laura Ashley-like skirt or that bleached-out denim torn at the knees. Trapped and naked, they really just wanted some clothes.

The rest of GET SALES passed in a rush. End the sale with a coat or leather try-on and Say so long. I stayed in the store room, dressed but exposed, the cool air piped through the ducts above circulating.

“All done?” Amanda asked me. I am not sure how long ago the tape had clicked off.

I nodded.

“Great! If you don’t have any questions, then you can start tomorrow.”

I nodded again and gathered my belongings, which included a new clear bag with a zipper across the top. The next day, I greeted my first customer. My DST was always the highest in the store.

In the three years that I worked in apparel, I embraced GET SALES. I liked the orderliness of it, the memorability, and the fact that it resulted in just what it promised: sales. Each day, I would add up my DST and feel a sense of accomplishment. I had sold all of this. But in all that time, I never really considered what was being sold, the cost, and to whom. I’m a writer now, one who hawks the value of vulnerability to her students and seeks it in her writing. I am forever telling students about the etymology of the word—that it comes to us from the Latin for wound and that memoir, in particular, demands a kind of nakedness on the page. It’s not the deep dark secret kind of nakedness either, I say to them. You don’t need to write about trauma or abuse. Rather it is the revelation of the ordinary ways our humanity gets revealed.

As a salesperson at Brook’s, I always thought it was the customer who was the naked one, the customer who was in need, but I realize now how much of myself I sold, how hard I worked to follow others, watch them, never disappoint. Floppy Bow told me to leave them naked and I did. When denim jackets returned one fall, I bought several. When the western-look became the rage, I wore cowboy boots even though I lived on the east coast and had never ridden a horse. I clocked in and out perfectly, never took another’s sales, and kept my clear plastic purse where everyone could see it. Vulnerability of the body was something to be leveraged, not something to honor.

I undress for the reader now. No one has to lock me in a room or offer me a different size. I do it willingly, and I try not to reach for my pants by hiding behind the tiger-print of metaphor or the denim of fact. To be naked in writing is not sexy. True vulnerability does not result in sales. As anyone who has seen a lot of naked bodies will tell you, naked isn’t often pretty but it is always real. Floppy Bow Woman wanted me to leave customers naked in the hopes that their exposure would cause discomfort, enough discomfort that they would reach for every available shield. In writing, I have learned that the more we can reveal our humanity, strip away the various outfits we so often choose to wear, the more readers will recognize themselves in the story we tell. After all, we all arrived in this world naked and we all know the desire to hide in the bushes.