One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

-Elizabeth Bishop

If nothing else, in this, the first half of my trip (well nearly), I've become a good loser.

To recap: it's been a busy three months. Standing in a crowd at Minneapolis-St.Paul International Airport, I said goodbye to my parents. I was amazed at how little I cried. The confusion of where do I stand/where is my group/do I still have my passport? had kind of taken hold of me, numbed me, as well as the impossibility of leaving -- complicating matters, Lisa had, at that point, not seen me for three weeks, and was busily and lovingly hugging my left arm as I awkwardly patted my father's.

"You'll be fine," Mom said, and "Sei gut, Tochter," Dad said, and I said "mmhmm", and we teared up briefly but not histrionically and then they left.

Then suddenly we were in Chicago, holding heavy, heavy bags, and then the group from the tiny Minnesotan college was sailing over the ocean, waking up to the stewardess asking us if we would like red wine with our dinners and enjoying in that instant this thrilling sort of flash of not being in Kansas anymore. And then we were in Athens, which was definitely not Kansas, or Minnesota, or Germany, and just as I'd learned to read a map we were on a tiny plane out of there.

And then Ikaria, where Lisa and I spent our days walking around Agios-Kirikos, suddenly two very-foreign foreigners wandering the streets, marveling at the cliffs and letting the waves wash over our feet. We were the two girls outside the fish shop petting the stray cats and occasionally whispering harshly to each other, desperate to not make a scene in front of the Greeks.

And then -- too soon -- we got in the plane, said goodbye to the cliffs and the waves and the cats and the goats -- then we were in the Athenian airport, and I was saying goodbye again, which this time meant letting them go, letting the quirks of the sixteen people I'd been with for the past three weeks stop mattering and grow into moot points as they walked through the checkpoint towards their gate.

And Lisa was hugging me again, zombie-like and soft in a pre-dawn haze; "We'll miss you, we love you, but of course you know that," said Argie, and then I had to do it, had to walk right while they walked left, and then there was no we anymore. I cried bitterly in the bathroom.

I arrived in London, said goodbye. I arrived in Bray, said hello, found myself in a house full of individuals again -- some were familiar campus faces, but some were from far away, whose names I (at this point exhausted with names) had trouble remembering even a week later. I was placed in one school, learned some names, was taken out, was placed in another school, learned more names (first and last, and some utterly unfamiliar to me -- Aoife, Dan-Ben, Venji?), had blurry evenings, laughed a lot, argued bitterly, wrote terrible poems, baked a pie, crafted some essays in a flurry, cooked a farewell dinner, then left again.

Having called the taxi, I flung my backpack on my shoulder, woke her up. "Make sure it's okay," my roommate Olivia said blurrily in the (again) far-too-morning-light-ness of my leaving --- "make sure they're nice, and call me," and then she fell asleep again.

They were nice, though. I was picked up from a bus station by a woman in a blue van and driven to an uncertain future, and I've gotten lucky. The Collinses are not axe murderers. They are kind people. They, like the school, wish I could stay later (I think), and are looking forward to seeing me again.

Because the thing about losing is (I hope) that the things we lose come back to us.

On Saturday my parents and my brother will fly in, exhausted, excited. We will visit the school -- we will meet the children, and I will remember their names, because after a month they're stuck in my head forever -- then later maybe we will come here, to Cork, and they will meet this family, and pet these goats, and laugh at these children.

And then they will leave, and although it will be hard to see them go, I will be off to Barcelona for a week, and then to Germany, and I will find more things, and I will lose them, and then after it all I will be back, and failing a giant bump on the head, everything I've found on this trip will be in there still.

Cause part of you pours out of me

In these lines from time to time
Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you, darling
Still, I'd be on my feet.

-Joni Mitchell

Terrible Things I Have Said to Children, Take 2

Sophie, age four, has had a sore throat all day. Not only that, her nose is running, her tonsils are huge, and she has a fever. Understandably, at dinner, she is a little whiny, entirely unable to eat her sausages "because it huwts my fwoat when I swawwow", nor to drink her milk because "it's too cowd, Daddy".

It may have been a little grating, but it doesn't excuse my response.

Sophie: Mommy, will I go to school tomorrow?

Me, sitting across from her, cheerfully: Not if you die in the night!

....

We'll see what morning brings.

My Life as TV

I'm not sure why, but recently I've been all about the 90s.

Last night, a trailer pulled up to the Collinses, and a rather large goat was dragged blinking out of it and shoved into their chicken coop by her horns. When released in the morning, it was revealed that said goat has white fur, peaceful marble-like eyes, longish hooves, and a predilection for barging past me into the kitchen. Her voice is constant and omnipresent -- she talks in her goaty voice when the pigs get too close to her, when a hunk of ivy is too far away for her little teeth to reach, and often for no reason at all.

Names for this animal vary. The predominant nomenclature is "Noreen", which I like, since she is very personable and it is after all a human name. Maybe too human; Noreen is also the name of fourteen-year-old-Nadia's friend -- excuse me, ex-friend -- who also likes to bleat. "If Noreen finds out that we named a GOAT after her, she'll be telling it all over town, you know she will," says Nadia ominously. We asked Sophie, the four-year-old who had named her, to think of a different name. She came up with "Daffodil", which has less of a negative connotation, but is sort of boring.

Since there's been such a bother about it, I'm in favor of scrapping both names and putting something more allusive in their stead. Think it over: not only is a female goat called a nanny, but the goat's excessive bleating sounds rather like a certain Ms. Drescher's, and so I'd like to call her either "The Nanny" or "Fran". I'm aware that I have a friend named Fran, but we're cool, and I think she would view it as an honor rather than a slur.

My suggestion has been greeted not with serious consideration, but with laughs. It's okay, though -- my last animal-naming was a great success.

Until recently, two ducks shared an increasingly-cramped cage in the laundry room, talking cliqueishly to each other whenever I came in with their food. They're skinny white animals who are too scared to eat. One is indistinguishable from the other; while they were cute when they were babies, now, nobody's quite sure why they're around. I felt that it was only fitting to, upon their release into the yard, begin calling them Mary-Kate and Ashley.

Additionally, today, I burned branches with a man whose name was James.

"Jessie and James really did a lot," said Chelsea to her husband as he came in the door today. Then she turned to me, and winked.

"....Did you really just make a Pokemon allusion?" I said. She cackled.

She may think of me as half of a crime-creating duo with awesome hair. I, however, beg to differ. The family I'm working with is large, and blended -- Chelsea's two teenage children from prior relationships are combined with her two Mel-made kids to make one very full house, especially if you include the goat. Since I haven't got much in the way of clothes, I'm rather zany-looking a lot of the time. I also occasionally wear scrunchies (even if they call them bobbles here) and look confused.

If this were Full House, I'd be Kimmy Gibbler.

"Gee, Mr. C, where'd the dead goose in the mud room go?"

Cillion

This is one of the kids in the house I'm WWOOFing in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW-ts0mj158

Funny video, right? Funny enough to have seventeen thousand views?... Apparently.

Cillion is 10, I think. The video was made a few years ago, but he still looks like that -- he's little, and weedy, and looks intense, and smiles a lot. At dinner last night, we were discussing his youtube video, and the fact that the web site offered him a cut of the advertising funds because of the amount of hits he's gotten.

"I think it's only funny because you fall off the chair midway through," I said.

"I did it on purpose," he insisted.

"Riiight, Cill," his sister, who was working the camera, said, rolling her eyes. "You totally didn't."

"I did!" he insisted.

"You realize it's way less funny if you fell on purpose, you know," Nadia said primly.

I don't believe him because toppling cheerfully off a rolling chair is exactly the sort of thing he would do. This kid constantly overestimates his own physical capabilities -- whether rolling a go-cart onto its side while going thirty miles an hour down the hill in the churchyard or inhaling the noxious chemicals he's combining for his science experiment, Cillion pushes the limits.

He lives way out in the country, so he doesn't have many friends close to home -- he's too old to babysit, but too young to drive. As a result, he's left to his own devices a lot of the time. This has resulted in him watching a lot of Mythbusters on the Discovery channel, then attempting to apply the principles of the show to everyday life, and disregarding common sense in the process.

Today, we were stoking a bonfire I'd made from spare brush and an old armchair; I was attempting to nurse the flames into eating a twenty-foot stack of brambles. I was sweating, snapping twigs, throwing gasoline-soaked children's socks onto the fire. Cillion was standing on a discarded footstool, wearing a 'highly flammable' (as he told me) jacket, poking it with a stick and sporadically saying, "Hey! Watch this!"

"I wonder what happens when you throw ice in it," he said gleefully, trotting over to some trash in the corner of the yard.

"Hm, gee," I said idly as I dragged a mile-long half of a tree onto the weak flames. "I wonder."

He stopped. "Actually, MythBusters did an episode on the act of putting ice in a very hot fire, and it turns out it explodes." With that, he threw the sheet of ice he'd picked out of the bucket into the coals, and stood closely by watching it. "You might want to get out of the way, just in case. I'll stay here."

I admired his protective ten-year-old manliness, but really wished it would extend to throwing giant branches on the fire instead of just trying to make it as dangerous as possible. If he had, perhaps our fire would have exploded that ice instead of merely melting it, causing Cillion to wilt in a disappointed manner, his stick drooping.

Summer in Morris

I miss late-afternoon dinner parties with copious wine and vegan dishes spread out covertly in a backyard or on a front porch, food all of which is delicious, all of which made by us, consumed in the shade -- then sweaters on and night-time wandering around town with nothing to do and with friends who have to work so very early but are out all the same.

If you have the opportunity to do it, do.

Mr. Rogers

I met my neighbor yesterday.

He isn't really my neighbor, since he doesn't actually live in the house across the street -- it is rather simply his workshop. Also, it isn't really a house. I live in a place that used to be a pub, and he builds doors and bookshelves and stools in an abandoned-looking stone structure that was once the schoolhouse.

His name is Jerry. He is either a youthful sixty or a poorly-preserved fifty; like his building, he is weathered and gray, with skeletal legs, fluttery hand movements, high cheekbones over unshaven cheeks, full of elegant disdain. When I pulled up to the house yesterday on my bike, he was outside, unloading wood from his red van.

"Hello, Jessie," he said. I was surprised -- we'd only met once, and I really hadn't talked. I'd simply been introduced to him, answered "Oh it's lovely!" to his obligatory "How do you like Ireland?" question, and gone inside. I was impressed that he remembered me at all, much less said this:

"Have you ever been inside this building?" he motioned elegantly, a toolbox in his hand.

"..No?" I said. When I'd thought that the building was abandoned, I'd definitely entertained the idea of breaking and entering, but as soon as I approached it, I saw that there were wires going into a window and fresh boards by the door, so even if it were falling down, someone definitely owned it.

"Would you like to come in? Have a cup of coffee?" Jerry asked intently.

The me before WWOOFing would have probably made some excuse -- here was an older man, who I didn't know really, inviting me into his house; even if it wasn't going to be him hitting on me, it would at least be awkward. I now, however, was just bored enough and trusting enough -- what with the whole Chelsea turning out to not be an ax murderer thing -- to enter, and so I did.

"Sure," I said, and stepped after his jacketed back, missing a step and falling on my hands as I followed him up the crumbling mossy steps. He didn't notice, being I suppose preoccupied with the problem of entertaining in a workshop without heat or water. (That was another reason I'd followed him -- I wanted to know how on earth he was going to make the coffee. I also love coffee.)

We entered into a cluttered garage-like part of the building, and as my eyes adjusted to the light I waited for him to go downstairs or wherever it was we were going to drink beverages. He didn't. Instead, he lit a sketchy-smelling gas stove and motioned to a sawdust-covered, object-strewn table. "Sit!"

So apparently this was it then. Jerry was intently pouring a jug into a teakettle, his back to me. Elegantly, he muttered, "Here we are. I steal holy water from the church."

I smiled widely and laughed uncertainly, then coughed in the sawdust. I looked down and brushed it off my leggings, where it had already settled in dandruffy flakes. Jerry clapped his hands. "Would you like to come and see my porch?"

I hadn't noticed any kind of a porch on the outside of the building, so yes, I did. I followed him to an open doorway on the other side of the room, and we walked out onto five cedar planks scaffolded to the outside of the building. He stopped me with his hand. "I'd be careful, there, I haven't got much of a railing..." I stared down at the twenty-foot drop, and wondered if he was about to make a move on me..

"See the view?" and I did -- the valley spread out below us, first our creek and then some trees and then further on the man-made lake opened, and on the other side more mountains. The sky was blue with turbulent clouds. It would, if finished, make a lovely porch -- perhaps he wasn't after all completely crazy.

Back in the sawdust-clogged workshop, he motioned to the cluttered walls. "I get all this stuff from skips." Skips? What were skips? I dimly assumed it was some sort of ship -- there were certainly a lot of wooden bits. I was however hard-pressed to explain the angelic thirties-ish painting of a girl, the stuffed stag head, and the nine-foot-tall decrepit Jesus oil painting.

"Where do you find the ships?" I said politely.

"No, skips," he said, and frowned.

"What are..."

"Sales," he said impatiently, "where people throw huge lots of stuff away. That's where all these bits of wood are from. Him," he thumped the stag head, "he came from a friend who bought a pair, only wanted one. He painted the other."

"Painted?" I said, imagining a Romanticism-like nature painting, only with a stuffed and mounted stag's head instead of a frolicking baby deer.

"Yeah, covered it in blue and made it some papier-mache antlers and sold it for four grand," he said.

"Oh," I said. "Of course."

It turned out that the Jesus painting had been tossed out of the neighboring church. "Think it's valuable, you know, Italian-school 1830s religious art..." Jesus peeked out mournfully from under a layer of filth. "I'm antireligious myself."

A cart of tools had come from a skip, too. "See that drill? It works! Got a hammer, a whole bundle of power tools..." he snorted disdainfully. "Old lady whose husband had died just threw the whole bunch out."

Finally I too could sound interesting. "Isn't it amazing what people throw away?", I said intently, and I told him about my friend Matt who only ate garbage and had for oh at least a year now. He snorted, didn't say anything. I was used to that now; I read in my Intercultural Competence textbook that Americans like me talk about themselves far more often than the rest of the world. Far from deciding to be less fond of self-disclosure, I have instead resigned myself to a semester of sharing anecdotes and receiving none in return, so I simply smiled and brushed sawdust off my pants again.

The coffee was ready -- canned espresso in a semi-clean French press poured into two mugs. "Found you a clean one," he said brandishing one free of dirt triumphantly. "D'you take sugar?"

I said I did. He rummaged through a closet and found me one single sugar packet. "It's damp, but it'll work."

It was indeed damp, and dirty; God knows what it had been through. "I do this too, collect sugar packets from restaurants," I told him, and he nodded, saying, "I stopped a while ago though." At that, old me would have politely declined the packet, but current me shrugged, ripped the top open, and dumped it into my coffee. It came out in one large lump -- bloop. I laughed, and sipped it -- despite everything it was good.

We talked awkwardly for half an hour, me offering muted and semi-unintelligible tidbits about myself in exchange for his colorful stories of how this neighborhood used to be, the pub open from midnight to six am, the schoolhouse a town hall then a ton of bricks with a fallen-through floor. After I finished the coffee, and he said, "Well, two o' clock's a good time to start work," and I said, "What time is it now?" and he said, "Two," I left him. Last I saw, he was two weeks past deadline, fretting over an as-yet-unassembled bookshelf that was 1/16th of an inch too high.

Later, I learned from Chelsea that he'd built all the beautiful doors in our house, and that sometimes he slept in the schoolhouse in a little bunk when he was on deadline. Both tidbits meshed nicely with what I'd learned about him, and both made me once again aware that I wasn't in the suburbs anymore.

Damn.

Three weeks ago, I was having some serious anxiety about going to the home of someone I'd never met, sleeping under their roof, and working for them for four long weeks. This was aside from my usual nervousness about meeting new people, too. I'd had multiple very kind email exchanges with the woman who'd posted the advertisement on the web page -- she'd been incredibly willing to have me, and even more willing to pick me up.

This Internet kindness threw me. All the other hosts I'd encountered were people with short, clipped, late, grammatically incorrect responses to my querulous queries; I'd been left with no doubt that these people had better things to do, vegetable patches to weed, organic feed to produce. This woman was not only kind and funny, she responded swiftly and knew how to use punctuation. Unnerved by this, I'd searched the WWOOFing web site and found that WWOOF hosts submitted to no tests, no inspections. There was no requirement for stopping anyone registering as one apart from their ability to pay the Web site fifteen dollars. In short, there was nothing to keep The Old Pub from being the wooded home of axe murderers.

Vaughan, the principal of the school I was helping teach English as a Second Language at, really wasn't helping. He kept stopping me in the hallway and looking worried; regularly he placed a hand on my shoulder in a fatherly way. "If you get there, and it's odd, and you want to come back to us," he would say, his kindly crinkly six-foot form staring at me from underneath his toupee-like hair, "just call. If anything's wrong..." he paused, "anything, anything at all..." and his eyes would grow distant.

On the web site's forum, I posted: "Hey, the lady I've been talking to seems really, really nice. She has a bunch of animals -- baby chicks, ducks, maybe even a hedgehog -- and a passel of children. They seem funny and kind.... they're almost too good to be true. How do I know I'm not going to the home of people who will murder me?"

Swiftly, a WWOOFing board member responded. WWOOF was working on it, but no, as of yet, there was no way to make sure that the Collinses were not serial killers murdering young hippies systematically. Still, he could plainly deduce from my description of the place that it was the Old Pub I would be staying at, and they seemed like pretty nice hosts. If it didn't work out, the board member told me, he could certainly find me another placement, in fact he was even a farmer himself. He ended by telling me to 'Trust people! They're inviting you into their home, too! You might be an axe murderer yourself!'

Chastened, I deleted my post, resolved to just suck it up and either get slain or not, and assumed that was the end of it.

Until yesterday, when driving with Chelsea, the kind, funny, grammatically correct host who is pretty much the same as her Internet persona, in her minivan the other day, I happened to mention it. "You know, I was so worried about this... I even posted on the web site..."

She started to laugh. "I... I know."

Oh god. "What?"

"My friend saw it on the forum. I don't usually monitor them, but she saw the thing about the hedgehogs and called me right away." She was enjoying my clear discomfort, chuckling slightly as she drove with her injured wrists placed delicately about the steering wheel. We were on the deserted, winding road that leads to their wooded home, with a car full of groceries.

"I'm so sorry! I deleted it -- I had no idea that people would know it was you so easily..." I was giggling nervously, counting the miles until we were home.

"Yeah, Mel and I were debating what to do. My friend said she'd write me a character reference, but for a while I was pretty set on picking you up from the bus station, acting all normal, then, calmly, right about here..." (I stared out at the gray, foreboding woods) "pulling the minivan over, opening the back hatch, hauling out a black garbage bag, a bunch of chains, and a pair of rubber gloves."

Although I'm sure the possibility was tempting, I'm really glad she didn't. Either I would have started just speed-dialing Vaughan straightaway, or I would have probably killed her in self-defense.