November

Danielle showed up when I needed her most. I was living in Munich in a large, raggedy student housing complex. It was beautiful but it was lonely; my neighbors were all German boys who meant well, but spoke rapidly and confused me with their requests. When she showed up that first day and rang my apartment’s nasal doorbell, I assumed she was German too, an impression that continued after we started talking, since she introduced herself in absolutely flawless Deutsch, said she’d moved in across the hall, and asked to borrow a cup of milk.

Natuerlich, I said, and poured it out for her, wanting to be friends but not knowing how to make small talk, exactly. But Danielle saved things, like always: she squinted at me, cocked her head, and said, in English, Wait. Are you American? 

And all at once everything was better. I so badly wish she could tell me whether I’m being accurate, whether it was really milk she wanted or a screwdriver or what, could laugh about it with me now. Danielle’s giggle consumed rooms – it filled the cement halls of that apartment building, along with the jingling of Bruno’s collar as he ran up and down the hall, turning a series of toys into fluff. My boyfriend Nader and I went on walks with them in the English Gardens, and occasionally Bruno would spend the night with us, drooling on the bedsheets as he waited for Danielle to return. When she appeared at the door, his tail would thwack the sides of it in violent paroxysms of happiness. 

It’s rare to have someone who you’re always so happy to see. She was game for everything; we went to both Oktoberfest and Fruehlingsfest together. We giggled in our dirndls when strange men asked if we were sisters; we semi-ironically rode through the haunted house roller coaster, our mixture of shrieks and laughter filling the place. She came to my improv troupe’s practice once and slyly whispered one-liners that brought down the house. Over curry or pancakes or cocktails, we could talk for hours. 

Although our friendship began because we were the two Amis at the end of the hall, I think we would have had just as much fun in other towns. And we will, I guess – I really do believe she’s still around, part of the grass and the woods and the trees, the wilderness she loved so well.

Baxterian Wonderland

"Happiness is tough to write about," says Charlie Baxter, peering over the top of his little glasses in our literature seminar. "Happy stories resist standard storytelling practice - happiness here doesn't arise from the characters willing themselves into action, but from happy accidents, from wandering into things. Characters don't search - they find. Events can seem haphazard because they're not linear, but still, something happens that the protagonists need."

Yesterday, hearing this, I had to resist the temptation to throw my hand into the air, Hermione Granger style. In lieu of turning his seminar into a lengthy ramble, here's the story of my happy accident this weekend, of our haphazard wandering.

This Saturday in Iowa was particularly balmy. As I stood in a tank top, hanging wet laundry on a rack in the sun, I wasn't sure exactly what to do with it: beautiful days have that effect on me, especially ones so close to the dead of winter. "It's going to blizzard soon," I'd been warning non-winter-natives darkly all week. "Just you watch." This unearthly beautiful day wanted something, but I couldn't think what.

My phone rang then, thank God, and it was Christine. "Can Justin and I come hang out on your back porch?" That's a start, I thought. Soon they were sitting on my rickety lawn chairs, sipping coffee. But they had the same feeling: the day demanded action.

"Let's go look at cows," I said. "Of course," they said, God bless them, and we headed out up the driveway.

A half-mile or so from my house, the suburbs break away into rolling hills dotted by little dark cows. "I'm warning you guys, we're not supposed to be in this field," I said, "but I think if we're sneaky about it it's going to be okay."  I didn't know who this little trail belonged to -  still, it was worth being shot at, it was that beautiful.

I turned around to look at Christine after she'd snapped this picture of us. "We're almost here, the cows are over there," I said, then finished with "- Oh my God a deer!"

Two does, startled by our appearance, were bounding hell-for-leather out of the field and across the road. We stood in horror as one leapt a low barbed-wire fence and sprinted across: as the other one attempted to follow, a little black car motored up, and we made frantic "Stop!" motions with our hands at it. Could they see us from the top of the hill? They could; it stopped to let the deer cross safely, and as it drove on, hands waved at us out of the car's windows.

Baxter has a theory that he calls "Wonderland" - that sometimes, like Alice, characters enter a place where the normal rules don't apply. Generally this is triggered by some sort of strange happening, like the white rabbit bounding across the lawn muttering at its watch. Those deer were our white rabbits, and Wonderland was about to follow; as we stood there laughing in happiness, a white truck puttered towards us.

I froze. Its low rumbling was an implication that we were not on public property. As the farmer inside got out, all dusty jeans and suspenders, I chattered apologies. "I am so sorry," I said, "we just wanted to look at your cows, I live right over there, I just love cows so much..."

"Those aren't my cows," he said, "but we are on my land." He seemed pretty jovial about the whole thing. His blue eyes watered and twinkled over a sharp nose. "I'm building a sculpture, see?" and he waved his hand at the concrete square I'd noticed on walks. "Come on over and take a look." Our group threw anxious glances back and forth, but followed.

The four of us stood on the perfect square and gazed out over the road to another hill, upon which perched a big distant rock. "Now, look at that boulder," he said. "It's a visionary stone, see, and the sculpture's going to be a big old giant, just sitting here contemplating it."

It looked like a normal boulder to us, but we nodded. "What's it made out of?" Justin said.

"It's a rock," he said.

"No, this," Justin said.

"This is concrete," the man said.

"No, the sculpture."

"Oh - limestone," and he scratched his head. "Big old blocks of limestone, just as soon as they dig them up from the quarry."

Apparently this was serious business. "Cool," Christine said. "We're from the Writers' Workshop."

"Good God," and the man got visibly excited, "I've been trying to get you out here for years! It's just never come together, is all - Well, look, if you're from the Workshop, where are you parked? There's something you really gotta see."

"We walked," I said, eyeing him.

"All right," he said, "you gotta see Whitman's Glade. Come out with me. Come in my truck." He waved a hand at his large white pickup. "Come on!"

We're three people, I think we thought, we can take him, but Christine was already running for the truck. "I have always wanted to do this," she said, and she leapt into the back, where she sat amidst tools and wire. Justin followed, and they perched there, giggling at the Midwestern-ness of it.

"You know, I have four seats in the cab..." the man said.

"They're too excited," I told him, and I clambered into the front seat so I could snap a picture of them through the back window.

 

On the mile-long drive there, I learned that the man's name is Doug, that he owns the four hundred acres of rolling hills near my house, and that he is not in fact insane but a genius (or maybe a little bit of both). "This is sacred ground," he said. "Don't know what happened here, but it's something big. It shouldn't be built on." 

I was reminded of the woods behind my house when I was a kid, and the cookie-cutter developments that moved in immediately after we did. I'll never live in the suburbs when I'm a grownup, I said then: how relieved I was when I moved to Iowa to find that my barn was surrounded by woodlands and hills. How unspoiled, I'd thought then, and "Thanks," I said now.

We drove past a wild, ramshackle barn covered in Halloween decorations - a spooky goblin hung out the upper loft window, its black robes streaming in the breeze - and pulled through a gate and into a parking lot, where three or four cars rested. "Must be a visitation going on today," he said. "You need a code to get in, see."Christine and Justin clambered out of the back, still laughing, and together we walked into the property.

A tiny lake with a little seashore greeted us, along with about a dozen children in baseball gear, who'd apparently come to take pictures.

"You can swim in it," Doug called over his shoulder, and "There are stepping stones over there. Hey, ring the bell!"

I ran up to it and swung on the rope. It donged throughout the property, and as soon as we left to walk into the woods, the baseball players swarmed it; throughout the visit, I could hear its loud, solemn rings and their laughter. "Come on," Doug said, "let's go see Whitman's Glade."

From the far shore of the lake, the cabin near the bell-tower watched us while the tiny baseball players frolicked in the sand. "It's a contemplation place." It was a small, well-built little thing, a lot like my own red barn; the ceilings inside were built from the beams of an old Iowa City church that'd been torn down. "Everything is sacred."

Doug led us onto a little trail - it was something less than a road and something more than a deer trail. The ground was full of fallen leaves, my sandals rustling through them; the trees were stark and bare and lovely above us.

These four-hundred-acre woods are the closest thing to Wonderland that I've ever experienced. They're like a haunted trail without the haunting, or with a good kind of haunting. The interstate fades to a distant roar, like the ocean; the birds have gone south for the winter, and the only signs of people are the little enigmatic signs, hand-painted arrows leading to God knows what. "Whitman's Glade," said one, and soon we were in a sort of paved courtyard, covered in fallen leaves and ringed by rocks. At the far end, three sculptures waited for us. (Thanks Justin for letting me steal your pictures.)

A white mailbox stood off to one side, packed with books, a lone pink crocheted hat, a dried-up teabag, a small container of nutmeg, and a few odd chain links. Doug cleaned it of the chain links and teabag, put the nutmeg in his pocket, and left the hat; Christine took out the abridged poems of Walt Whitman, and for a few minutes we all stood gazing in different directions as her voice read "Song of Myself".

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands,
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

There was a silence, and then, "Well," said Doug, "let's go see the stones."

I'm not even going to attempt to explain the backstory - I suspect you wouldn't believe me if I said it here, or rambled it out as I have been. These are old stones, though, older than the New Testament; they weren't carved in Iowa City, but were rather brought across the ocean on a boat; nor is their height their full height, since they're rooted half in the earth, half out of it.

I honestly don't know how long we sat there, separate but together. As Doug said, "If you come here alone, and sit, you'll be in Iowa City - but you'll be a million miles away." For a day, we were.

http://www.harvestpreserve.org/

We're going to try to hold a reading or an event there, either in the winter or as soon as it gets warm; if you're interested in visiting on your own, they request a day or two of notice, and then they can unlock the gate for you. It's not an open park, exactly, but they are interested in fostering writing of all kinds - and it's definitely worth a walk, any bit of it, the stones or the statues or the lake. It's a Wonderland, all of it.

Potential Literary Cat Names

I am having a devil of a time deciding what to name this little kitty.

So far, I can only come up with puns or thinly-veiled literary references.

1. Meowgaret Catwood

2. Sylvia Cat-th (although I do hope she doesn't stick her head in the oven while I'm away)

3. Catnip / Catniss Tabbydeen

4. Virginia Meowlf (... or drown herself in the toilet)

5. Hester (or become pregnant)

6. Morwen (THIS WOULD BE ADORABLE)

Thoughts?

Dream Journal

This weekend in Milwaukee, my parents revealed that they usually always remember their dreams. "Do you?" they asked me and I had to say "no, generally not, but mostly because I roll out of bed full of panic in the mornings for no real reason and that is not an environment conducive to remembering dreams".

No worries, the panic generally subsides after about a minute, but it's true - this urgency replaces all other thoughts in my brain when I open my eyes. Why? I have no idea. I'm getting a kitten this week though and I'm hoping that will help.

This morning was different, though. Last night I fell suddenly asleep at about midnight and slept for about 10 hours, but it doesn't feel like it, because my subconscious spent that time DOING EVERYTHING. Normally I neither remember my dreams nor share them with people, but today is different, because you guys: Dream Nazis stole my purse. I am not kidding.

I was on a bus trip, riding past the Alps with two friends, who were a few seats ahead. The bus was packed with people and their stuff, and I had a vague notion that we had long passed the place where I was supposed to get off. "Stop, you guys," I said, "we've got to get off here and look for another route, this one isn't going where we need to be," and my friends acquiesced - we pulled the chain and the bus pulled into a station, and basically slowed down long enough to push us out. We hopped through the doors, our luggage was tossed out the side, and the bus rolled merrily on its way.

"Wait," I said, "WHERE IS MY BAG."

The friends shrugged. Theirs was here! They stood, enjoying cigarettes, while I pawed through the heap of luggage, and still - no backpack or purse. Oh my god, where was it? Had I left it on the bus? I paced back and forth, searching madly.

"Everything is in there, you guys," I said.

"No big deal," faceless friend 1 said. "I have a purse you can borrow."

"YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, I NEED MY WALLET," I howled, and combed and combed again, and off to the side I saw a cave, and I marched in and asked if anyone in there knew where my bag was.

The enchantress inside - who resembled Carmen, another fiction writer here - said, "No, but I have a glass in which we can search for it."

"A glass," I said, "a scrimshaw glass?"

"Certainly," she said, and we concentrated on it and it produced the most magical series of colors.

"I know where it is," she said suddenly, and we were outside a shack, and it was 1941. Outside, the villagers were buried up to their waists in sand, while indoors a group of blonde Nazis, their boots up on the desk, played cards and drank whiskey.

"Do you know where my purse is?" I whispered to a grandfather and little girl, who stared at me, silty and somber, and nodded, pointing indoors. I barreled in, leaving Carmen the enchantress outside to guard my friends and their bags, who'd wandered over to 1941 as well.

I don't know why my purse was the most important thing in all of this, but I do know that I found it easily, in the laundry room. Everything seemed to be in order! My clothes had been pawed through, but I rescued them from the Nazi laundry room and shoved them into a garbage bag, for easier transportation. A bottle of tequila was half-drunk, but you know those Nazis, always drinking everything. I wandered into the room where the Nazis were playing cards and said,

"Damn it, Nazis, why'd you take my purse?"

and the soldiers shrugged, sort of guitily, caught in the act. They understood what was going on, but didn't quite understand my words, and I wanted to shame them properly, so I barked it at them in German.

"WARUM HABT IHR MEINE WERTSACHEN GESTOHLEN?"

Then they were somber, and impressed, and they apologized, they said they didn't realize I'd be so serious about wanting it. I nodded and marched out to thank the silty villagers, shaking with righteousness. Then I took further stock of my valuables. Everything else was there, but the only thing missing was my smartphone. Oh god - had the Nazis had used the superior future technology to build some kind of bomb? I stared back at the shed, worried.

Luckily, no. Yaa, another fiction writer, wandered out from the shack, where she'd apparently been taking part in the card game, and she told me, "It's there, in the bottom of your bag, the way it always is. You know, it sort of gets lost in there, and I made sure they didn't notice it..."

I felt for it - yes, there it was. The Nazis had plainly missed out. I said, "Thanks, Yaa," and we all high-fived, and then I woke up, and laughed out loud in my cold bedroom.

Lessons learned: beware of Nazis, keep track of your valuables, and if you think you've lost your phone it's probably just buried beneath all the crap in your purse. Thanks, dreams.

How to Celebrate

We'd invited friends but they couldn't find us, sequestered as we were under my favorite wooden bridge. As it turned out, they wouldn't have fit anyway.

"It's September 11th, Nader," I'd said, "as an American I deserve to go to that faraway spot by the river with the fire-pit between the two streams," and so we had made the trip, our bikes piled optimistically high with meat and potato salad. When we arrived, we found that two German families had already taken it over, and that if we wanted to remain, we'd be reduced to the stones by the river instead.

"The stones are always so hard to sit on," Nader said. But still he spread our blanket over them and put two beers in the river - we were here, for the time being, and we'd make the best of it.

It was warm, then, and the Isar was sluggish with late-summer heat. "I'm going to swim," Nader said, and he wandered out up to his calves in it and stood blinking out at me, not quite knowing what to do next, whether to take the plunge or come back to the blanket. I watched the trees flutter beyond him, heard the German families laugh. The air smelled of cooked flesh and river-water.

In the woods, we gathered little half-wet branches and rested them on the coals we'd brought. Nader lit a fire, fanning and blowing it into submission. When the sticks had burnt down enough, we rested our wiry oily little metal grate on top of them, pried the Aldi Nackensteak out of its casing and let it sizzle as we drank the beers and stared at the sky.

It wasn't as blue as a September 11th sky should be. We'd started out a bit too late and now it was touched with evening, grazed with clouds. It was a German sky and we were an American and an Iranian beneath it, drinking German steaks and German beers (though the potato salad was thoroughly American - I'd found mayonnaise and mustard and celery and made a whole big Ikea bowl of it, which we demolished throughout the night, food poisoning be damned).

"How do you even celebrate this holiday?" I wondered. "What exactly are we supposed to be doing?"

"Maybe this," Nader said. "Another steak?" and so we sat, and ate, and drank. A child wandered over and we let him feed too-big sticks to our dying fire.

Later, a storm would come. Navy-blue clouds would loom in like Luftwaffe forces and would unleash an ominous bombing that started slowly: first a few drops, then rain. Being reasonable, the German family in our spot would pack it in, dashing for civilization, but we would remain on the stones, let our fire sizzle out, let ourselves sit together under his rain-jacket on the earthy cut-bank by the tree-roots. What I remember best is how, beneath that imperfect shield of soaked cotton, we would smoke cigarettes and laugh as the ice-pellets dashed our heads and wrought the day into something rough, imperfectly beautiful and stubbornly alive.

Adventures in Democracy

Yesterday we spent six hours waiting for Obama. We started off sitting on the curb next to a woman with curiously stubby arms and eyelinered eyes. She was friendly and polite, but told the volunteers who came around every four minutes with registration slips that she couldn't vote because she was on parole – I had to stop myself from asking what she was in for, or out for, or disenfranchised for. She was accompanied by her son, a skinny teenager with a moptop who was constantly a mixture of pensive and searching for food.“I got strawberries, grapes, two donuts, some trail mix, and a sandwich,” he boasted. “Iowans are great.”

“We got here at 9:45,” his mom said. “I thought it started at 10. Turns out we’re early.”

Jorge had also been there since 10. When I arrived, he had a neat little sit-upon going, a tidy area of curb, delineated by his plastic baggie full of fruits, the novel he’d been reading, the Naked juice he would later chug in a single gulp when the line actually started to move. He seemed much better prepared than the woman and her son, who’d shown up with nothing but the clothes on their backs and an umbrella, which, as Jorge told them, wasn’t allowed inside the grassy area where Obama would be speaking…

“Oh,” the woman said. “Well, this is a three-dollar umbrella! I’m not going to just throw it away!”

“I can take it back to my apartment!” Jorge said. “It’s right here.” So she handed it over happily and Jorge ran it back to his house, then returned to sit in his area and munch strawberries and collect stickers from the constant stream of volunteers. (None of us considered the fact that we would inevitably be separated in the crowd, and that nobody had exchanged phone numbers - up in Jorge’s apartment that three-dollar umbrella will likely sit until the end of time, or until someone needs it, anyway.)

Once we were eventually let inside the barriers, I was surprised by the fact that, in twenty-first century America, people were this willing to sit in line, then literally stand on a grassy knoll for five hours. Mal and her girlfriend wound up being shoved to the tightest-packed corner of the area in which Obama would be speaking. The arrangement wasn't quite fair. They’d been there similarly early, and had also been one of the first groups let into the area by security, only to be told, when they clustered around the stage, that “You’ve got to MOVE TO THE CORNER." This from someone’s dad in a fishing hat, a glassy look on his mustached face. “You gotta MOVE. People are going to come in here and we’ve gotta FILL UP THE SPACE.”

People stared at him, their faces a strange combination of liberal Democrat and stubborn as hell.

“You gotta MOVE,” he said again, making bulldozerish movements with his palms at us, as if he could use the Force to shift us from our hard-won positions to much, much crappier spots. “You can move now, or security’s gonna come in and move you later, but either way you gotta MOVE.”

Mal and her girlfriend, being polite, did move, and ended up having zero room in that corner. They literally stood, one behind the other, for four hours – there was no sitting or squatting for them. We were more fortunate – we had the good luck to be standing directly behind a tough-looking little woman who looked back at us, her green eyes enraged like a horse being mounted, and said, “No WAY. I been in line since 8:30. If security wants to come in and move me, sure, but I am not taking this from some volunteer.”

“Yeah, it’s totally unfair!” I said righteously, and so Jorge and I disregarded the imperious dad’s warnings and stayed put, and security did not show up to herd us like cattle to a shittier spot. For some reason, German phrases like “So eine Frechheit” and “total unverschaemt” and “Es macht doch gar keinen Sinn” kept creeping into my head – I put it down to the fact that Germans wouldn’t have moved either, but as it turns out it was a simple case of overhearing rather than thinking: we’d somehow collided with the two German tourists who’d wound up at this rally, two blonde young men who stood, out of their element, in rain slickers. In conversation over the next four hours, I put much energy in trying not to mention “You know, when I lived in Germany” or “Well, in German…”, so I wouldn’t have to make German small talk while stuck in a crowd all afternoon. 

In this and in many ways, it was like being on a plane, except worse. Going to the bathroom was an awkward affair, full of “Oh god excuse me” and “Could I please get by? We’re coming back…”, and the bathroom itself, when encountered, was a sticky Porta Potti with nowhere to put your purse and strange crap on the seat. We were dehydrated, but luckily there was Liz, a second-year Workshop student, who moved in the front of the crowd behind the barricade like a patient stewardess, passing out topless bottles to the masses. We keened, “Liz!!!” and she sent some our way, though drinking the stuff was torture because you knew it’d just go directly to your bladder.

Although we stood in denial for a good hour at the beginning of it, eventually our legs gave out, it began to rain, and the three of us sat under jackets, bemoaning our fate. God bless Nana, who’d somehow made her way into the stadium and as the crowd began to form had just casually walked up to us, like, “Oh hey guys! Cool to see you here!”, no planning, nothing. Moreover, she had brought in not just a giant purse – which we’d been told we weren’t allowed  – but a bag with food, little gingersnaps, and an umbrella, and reading materials. I felt like she was my mother. “Mom, can I read your Hemingway? Can I have a cookie?” God bless her.

Finally, at around 4, things started to happen. It got a lot lighter – the clouds hadn't rolled away, but spotlights had rolled in, big white beams of light that illuminated the crowd. Rising from our seated, cookie-induced stupor, we noticed that the media was lined up behind us on a stage, looking a familiar combination of bored and excited. People began to point to rooftops – look, a sniper! Look, a lady sniper! There they'd appeared, these black foreign figures with binoculars and no fear of falling. Something was happening. 

And then, and then, a man and a woman in suits came on and began uncovering The Podium. It was here that I realized how close I actually would be to The President, and I shrieked a little bit when they painstakingly, with much tape, put up a blue “Forward” sign on the front of the Podium. One man came out and set a cup of water on a shelf beneath; another acolyte set a binder of speech upon it.

After that, things happened in a blur. People took the Podium: a reverend, a large black man with a booming voice, delivered the opening address – a boy choir (man choir, okay) sang the national anthem  – a blonde corn-fed Iowa student spoke, since apparently she was in charge of this sort of thing - 

And then all of a sudden there was Joe Biden, who I’d never previously been excited about, but who, in person, was quite sandy-haired and handsome. He spoke - we freaked out - and then he waved a hand towards the left and who should come out but Obama. 

Seeing him in person was swoon-inducing. I jumped up and down shamelessly, in either a parody or real echo of a teenage girl meeting the Beatles, and then noticed that around me people were doing the exact same thing. It was unreal: for so long his features had been mere images to me, but now they were three-dimensional. 

From thirty feet away, though, I could feel the exhaustion radiating from him. His voice was gravelly and he didn’t speak about Hope anymore, or Change, but rather tax cuts for the middle class, no dependence on foreign oil, hooray. I'd gone from bored to jubilant to a bit sad; it was as if four years in the world’s most interesting job had made him, by turn, much more boring. 

But then:

“Four more years! Four more years!” started in one corner and spread across the crowd into a pumping chant that rang through the city. Slowly, too, you could see real genuine happy start to bloom on Obama’s face. instead of just exhaustion – as the crowd pumped its fists, he smiled out at us.

“You, in Iowa City, you did it,” he said. “I wasn’t the change – you did it.” It seemed true, at that moment – as if we’d sapped him of his life-force and drawn it into ourselves, and now here we were, a campus full of young people, ready to do something anything to hope. Because we were seeing the president, in person, and so we knew that anything was possible – and so we chanted, and we forgave him the boringness and the negativity of his speech, because he was our Obama and we wanted him to be happy, goddamnit. 

At the end, Michelle Obama walked out for just a second, waved to us, and he put his hand on her back – and strangely, just that action made me hope so much more than anything he’d said. It was like after all this would be over it would be just them again, and it would be okay, whether it was four more years or none at all. 

Adjustment Phase

So: in almost exactly a month, I have gone from living very much together with my boyfriend / having a job / not having a car / having bunches of money to writerdom, which is pretty much the opposite of all of that. It is absolutely amazing how much things change.

Here I sit in my brand new apartment (which honestly really looks brand new - I was amazed when I walked in and saw the butter-colored walls and the perfectly-washed hardwood floors and the bathroom that looks like a hotel bathroom, albeit is handicapped accessible and has this strange walk-in shower with a tile floor and three showerheads - it's like being at the gym, I keep expecting someone else to be showering awkwardly next to me), and I have nothing to do today but just write.

Seriously. That was my assignment. I was originally supposed to have a meeting, but then Anders the TA guy said, "You'd better have a day to yourself to just write," so the meeting was switched to Wednesday, and now Thursday is my day in which to be completely alone and do exactly what I want to do, nothing else.

I actually, surprisingly, have not yet squandered this day. I have written. I just wrote a story and it is heartfelt and lovely and involves otters. (Thank you, Chelsea Collins, for your otter and your hospitality - it has made its way into a tale several years later, on another continent. I will show you sometime if you want to see it). But now I feel like writing twenty pages has been all too much, and I deserve a kickback, so I sit, wondering what to do next. Do I unfreeze some frozen chili? Do I unload the dishwasher? Do I dare to eat a peach?

 I just... is this how Neil Gaiman feels all the time? The startling sense of possibility? The realization that it is just you, alone with a laptop, who has been assigned to create worlds and make things happen? It is both empowering and isolating.

I think my writer friends feel the same way. They are lovely, funny people, easy to bond with over food and drink, with a similar propensity towards storytelling and silly hand gestures. I occasionally describe them as "Muppetish", and it is accurate. Everyone at the Workshop is bizarrely easy to talk to, even the semi-famous ones, even my teacher, who is at the moment 'evaluating stories for a certain semi-famous prize. Not the Pulitzer, but... you know. Something like that.' he said vaguely in class on Tuesday, and we all thrilled with guessing which, omg which??

I find it strange, how easy it is to sit next to people who are relating their tales of publication, how the New Yorker sometimes calls them and asks them to cut lines out of their stories and they go 'NO I AM AN ARTIST' and the New Yorker goes 'Well, yes, but could you trim fifty words?' and they acquiesce and then find that it's a better story for their caving-in. At the same time that you are marvelling at their words you are also thinking how easy it all seems when they say it, how human they look to you. (With the exception of Marilynne Robinson, who still seems like an angel. I mean for real the woman has, like, an aura. It comes up at least once in any conversation here.)

Even if after this I don't become some prizewinning fiction writer I will not regret it, these two years where the impossible seems real, where someone will pay me to sit at home and think and write stupid stories about otters. This place is oddly magical and I am so excited to have been accepted here, and I think everyone else is too.

In fact, the only thing that could make it better is a certain super-hot Persian. But there's something to that delayed gratification: to knowing that somewhere out across the Atlantic, there's a beautiful man who is busily working his way through a terrible thesis and into my fickle constantly-typing arms.

poli oreo

In Ikaria, in Greece, in the nursing home, the first thing we saw when we walked in was this old woman with milky eyes and hands like bent chicken claws grasping at the air. She frightened us; we did not think this was what we'd signed up for. Her mandibles chewed a set of words over and over, Greek words, and we college students huddled in the doorway. We were both terrified of going near her and terrified of ending up like her, alone and demented in a piss-smelling fluorescent nursing home on a rocky wind-swept island.

And then Argie walked over and put a hand on the old woman's nightgowned back. "This is Stamatoula," she smiled at us, and the old woman reached up to touch Argie's face. We shrank away in sympathy, but Argie stood as Stamatoula caressed her cheeks, repeating the phrase. Her whitened eyes stared at something in the corner as her hands saw.

"What's she saying?" we whispered, embarrassed at our fear.

Argie listened, and then: "The Virgin Mary bless you."

And then: "Very beautiful."

This, over and over. The Virgin Mary bless you; very beautiful. 

We crept to her, eventually, and learned not to fear as she bent her head in our direction, seized our hands with one bent cold papery claw and saw our faces with the other. Her gums smiled as she blessed us. "Poli oreo." She would hold on for hours, and luckily, we learned to let her.

However often Stamatoula repeated it in those two weeks the group spent at the nursing home, I can't remember how to ask for the Virgin's blessing. Still, "Poli oreo", being shorter, has stuck with me. Very beautiful - it comes to mind at times like today, when, oppressively aware of my 24 hours left in Munich, I walked up the train stairs into Marienplatz and was greeted by the leaves, lit by sun and dancing against the clouds.

Poli oreo, I thought, and then it hit me why this was what she'd gotten stuck on - why Stamatoula, so Alzheimer's-riddled and close to death, could only repeat it again and again until her voice grew scratchy.

When you know you'll be leaving a place soon, you don't have a choice. You can only say how beautiful it is,  all of it, all the faces and trees and moods, and give it your blessing. You grasp it close, see as much of it as you can, and then let it go, however hard it is to disentangle your fingers.

The Virgin Mary bless you.

In which I gloat about my birthday.

On the Sunday before my birthday, my highly evolved boyfriend

took me on a magical journey to that most German-sounding of cities, Garmisch-Partenkirchen! I had no real reason for wanting to go to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, apart from wanting to say the name repeatedly in a German accent. I had heard there were mountains, but apart from that it was just a passing fancy, which Nader indulged because - as I reminded him repeatedly - it was my birthday.

It's about an hour and a half south of Munich, on the Austrian border. It's a straight, easy journey by train, and we spent it drinking coffee and not-very-sneakily eavesdropping on the loud American tourist boys in front of us. 

When we got there, we sort of just aimed ourselves at the mountains and started walking. We had no clear goal (unlike the tourist boys, who were going to CLIMB THE HELL OUT OF THAT ZUGSPITZE), and I think that's why the journey turned out to be so, well, cinematic and epic. (That or the copious amounts of alcohol we consumed on the way. But, I mean, the pictures are pretty great, so we can't be making all of it up, right?)

It would seem like it'd be pretty easy to find a mountain to climb - you just aim yourself at it and ascend - but we had some difficulties finding ze nature at first. The signs pointing to the hiking path seemed to have been messed with by small children, and we actually wound up wandering through a cemetery at one point, our hope slowly dying as we pondered the tombstones and sought in vain for the path. 

And then this cat wandered out, and we knew we'd be okay.

When the cat moseyed off to do whatever errand it'd set out, that morning, to accomplish, we abandoned the cemetery and came across a fit little old German lady. 

"Um, excuse us," Nader asked all politely and young German man - ically. "Is there a hiking path around here?"

"Oh, many," the lady said, and looked at us like, You idiots. She told us we were pretty close - that if we'd just gone left instead of right at one junction, we'd be out of the town and on our way up, and then she told us that there was a beautiful lake up there, too.

A lake sounded awesome. It was hot, and we had backpacks packed too tightly with provisions, and swimming sounded like the best. "Yes," we said, "yes. How far?"

"Oh, thirty minutes," she said.

When little old German ladies say "thirty minutes", they mean thirty minutes for them, not for us. After an hour of hiking uphill, we were absolutely exhausted, our calves nowhere near used to this level of exercise. Little old German women kept passing us, whistling as they swung their walking poles, but we were pooped and ready for the lake - and thank God, it was finally there. 

"I'm just going to dive in," I said. "I will swim in my clothes. I don't care. I totally can't wait." I was picturing a pristine, blue mountain reservoir, you know, exactly like everything else in Germany.

It was kind of murky, but it would do - we scanned the shores, looking for a free place to spread our blanket and crack open our picnic backpacks. We were right up against that wooden fence in the picture, leaning our arms on it and planning the afternoon, when all of a sudden I happened to look down.

"Nader," I said, attempting to control my voice so IT wouldn't sense fear, "look at that fish..."

A massive brown fish had just swum up. Far from avoiding us, it was looking at us. It expected something. It was waiting. I could only assume it knew of our plans to jump in, and had in turn planned to devour us, toe by toe.

"Oh god," Nader said, "they're coming..."

And all of a sudden there was another fish, and another, and suddenly there were hundreds of them. Their fins cut the water like sharks', and their mouths gaped at the surface of the water, fist-sized orifices with big yellowed lips and (I think) teeth that gnashed.

We started to giggle, this "Amadeus"-type mad fear giggle, and threw bits of sandwich at them to placate them. It only encouraged them, of course, and despite their lack of legs, we were convinced that they'd soon climb out of the water and mug us for the contents of our backpacks. We must have been there for half an hour - it was horribly amusing. 

 We wandered on, and eventually did find a picnic spot. I can't believe we didn't take any pictures of it, but it was incredibly magical - a waterfall, a pond, a fallen tree making a curtain of leaves. Here is Nader with part of our lunch:

Inspired by that part of our lunch, I felt obligated to explain him the plot of "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider", which, as a German-Iranian, he had never ever previously encountered. I believe his world expanded that day.

 ("Down came the rain and washed the spider out!")

We stayed there for I think two hours, just talking and eyeing the ground for snakes, before the sun started to set and we decided to head back down the mountain, belting Monty Python songs as we attempted to brace ourselves on the slopey trail. 

A lot of things happened on the way down, too.

(TINY F***ING FROG) 

Halfway down the mountain, inspired by nature, we took it upon ourselves to shoot a Timothy Treadwell-inspired documentary video. (I tried to upload it here, but it wouldn't work, which is probably a good thing for my online reputation and future career.) Here is a screenshot instead, along with one of TT himself, so you can compare:

If you've never seen Grizzly Man (and you should!), Timothy Treadwell is this guy who would repeatedly go into the Alaskan wilderness and just shoot documentary footage of the bears / monologues about himself being the sole protector of the bears. He often wore sunglasses and had the best bangs I have ever seen. Of course, the bears he was protecting eventually ate him, but his spirit lives on in people who take it upon themselves to shoot parody videos of himself talking about himself.

Just as I, as TT, reached the height of my speech - "I am, like, the fearless protector of all wildlife!" a German couple and their dog, striding happily along, appeared from out of nowhere. I froze, and the woman just said, "Es muss sein!" which I think translates to "You gotta do what you gotta do."

We didn't see any snakes while we were actually in the woods, but on our way back, we passed the lake and saw a ten-year-old child (poised eagerly in the picture) go, "Papa! Papa, I've caught something!" Aw, a fish, we thought, and watched eagerly to see one of those fishes get their comeuppance. 

Instead, his father reached into the child's net and pulled out a meter-long freaking water snake. The only reason I didn't go running and screaming was that we were behind a chain-link fence. The kid's mother came out of the house and went, "Are you, like, a hundred-percent sure you want to be doing that?" and the kid's father just sort of waved the snake around as its head tried fitfully to bite something, anything, off of that guy. He did eventually throw it back, and I'm sure the snakes and the fish are now planning their terrifying revenge.

When we eventually made it down the mountain, we ate some well-deserved spaetzle and drank some well-deserved bier.

The mountains, ever-obliging, were perfect and Lord-of-the-Ringsey for our train ride home.

All in all, it was a lovely lovely day, and because I've blogged so much about it I'm going to shut up about it now. The fact is though that all birthdays should be an epic adventure filled with too much food and booze, and mine, this year, certainly was.