From SR to NYC

To: August 24, 2009
From: May 23, 2009 / Marble Composition Notebook No. ? / NYC

It’s May 23rd and I’m back in NYC. Nine months gone and it’s still home, still very much the same, and yet not so as well. Washington Square Park has been rebuilt and unveiled and it still has as much open space, as much potential as a meeting ground for hundreds, and so I know now that what I’d heard, what I’d feared, has not come to pass, either because the threats of monitoring, of rearrangement of boundaries and parts to keep the people corralled, was untrue or—what I hope, or, more likely—the threat of constraint drove the neighborhood, the New Yorkers, my New Yorkers, to put heads together and throw a fit until they made themselves not just heard, not just known, but a force that promised to be a mule-stubborn and a permanent, itchy thorn. God bless the thorns in sides.

And so now I’m here on this concrete wall, back against the light post, Northeast corner of things, first place I talked enough to Abby Durden to freak her out, listening to this woman in a black dress—Summertime! Summertime!—play guitar, sing her and others’ songs, and the light is through the leaves and I am walking through a dream, woke up in Siem Reap 30-odd hours ago, the world mine and also off, also alien, behind gauze, and I love it here. It is what I know, the drunks on the bench in front of this gal, singing along to Floyd, lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, this everything bagel well-toasted with olive cream cheese, strong iced coffee, just a dash of milk, no sugar, these folks playing chess, the taxis and it’s greener too, artful bike racks around St. Mark’s cube, quieter traffic, or am I just clouded behind that gauze, behind last night’s blunt, jet lag and dregs of airplane sake still in me?

You get in between worlds and you get that new vantage, get clear of the personal plagues that are site-specific, and with that distance see how quickly the fabric is rewoven, always decomposing and re-growing, always torn down, always rebuilt. And of course things aren’t always rebuilt, but here, man, here where I live, where I learned how to live with myself, how to be an adult, this Rome keeps breathing, rebuilding, and I like to think We the People are the red blood cells, the antioxidants, my people, and I miss this all because I see now how it changed without me and, though this is irrational and silly, my feelings are hurt a little.

And I guess that’s how I know I can never fully leave here. A growing, glowing understanding, even with all this gauze in between, that I am of this place, that Asia will be a way of experience, a particular lens or specimen for a set amount of time, but I am very much and forever American, forever a New Yorker and a Southern boy too, and that growing glowing, that is a knowledge of just how lucky that makes me, and all of the responsibility that comes with that, I know it and accept it and love it too because it’s a gift to be chosen by Fate to have the time and the means of gestating this kind of consciousness. We get to carry each other—indeed, Mr. Hewson. And, man, the guitar gal has just started up ‘High and Dry’ and I’ll go back to Brooklyn and hit the pavement with Tony, and this is the United States of America, with all its crippled government and culture of consumption, but so much more too, so much of the twenty different cultures embodied in these strangers collected around me on this Washington Square concrete, listening to this melody beneath these trees, in this lick of breeze, so much fallible potential.

You leave to look back and see. The world of the last generation mutating profoundly, this generation’s lives the axle upon which this Past will turn under to drive up this new and coming Present.

So much in such little time. The gauze will be cut away at some point. What kind of new sight will I be blessed with?

This Old House

The House

2635 Bella Vista Ave.

Lexington, Ohio 44904

Dear House,

Do you remember the fit that my siblings and I threw when we were told that we were going to move out of you?  You would have thought that my parents were torturing us by daring to build a newer, bigger house about five miles away.  I remember sitting in my brother’s room for a miniature protest meeting and resolving together that we simply wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t leave.

But we did, of course, just as I’ve moved away from a whole string of places since—the beige carpets and cozy basement of junior high and high school, my claustrophobic college dorm rooms, that first strange attic apartment that I shared with three other girls, the honey-colored floorboards of the little Chicago studio on the lake, the exposed brick and low ceilings in Jersey City.  Leaving a place behind always fills me with the sad slippery feeling of time getting away from me, but each move, truth be told, has been easier than the last, and when I move out of my current Cambodian abode, it may be the easiest one yet.

I do not mean to imply that it is not a nice house.  It is large (enormous to my eyes that had become calibrated to New York apartment sizes) and far more comfortable than what I had envisioned before I left the U.S.  And yet, there is something weirdly forbidding about the place, something elusively Cambodian.  Maybe it is the small windows or swollen intractable doors or the way the stuffy rooms hold heat.  Maybe it is the glue-sniffing teenagers who occasionally jump our fences and pilfer things out of our windows.  Maybe it is the memories of the time that all the cheap plastic plumbing fixtures broke at once and flooded the place in the middle of the night.  Whatever it is, the house has always seemed to give us more of a polite handshake instead of a warm embrace.

Occasionally, expat friends in Siem Reap will ask us to housesit, and we usually jump at the chance, not because they are nicer, more luxurious houses (though that is certainly the case) but because they feel so much more lived-in than our own house.  During housesitting stints, I go around absentmindedly touching things—children’s toys, expired medications, family snapshots, the worn corners of books.  These are families who have decided to stay in Siem Reap for much longer than I will, and the spaces where they live have a warmth and permanence that I sometimes forget can exist.

Now, our lease almost up, we are looking for a new place of our own, though it is still uncertain if we will be able to find anything better than our current rental.  Cambodian houses, at least the ones that Khmer build to rent out to Westerners, are weird.  They are candy-colored concrete monstrosities with cavernous tiled rooms and no closets and kitchens without stoves.  It is as though one person made a sketchy blueprint of what he thought a Westerner would want and hundreds of Khmer landlords have been blindly following suit ever since.  What’s strange is that most of them wouldn’t think of living in a place like that themselves.  Many of the houses that we looked at had tiny wooden shacks in the back or side yards where the landlord lived with his or her family.  Sometimes we would gaze wistfully out of a back window in some bubble-gum pink rental to these little houses with dogs and cooking fires and laundry drying on the line—they looked so real compared to the buildings we were standing in.

Maybe it is because they were built by and for the people who inhabit them.  There is a photo I think of sometimes (either real or somehow created in my mind from stories my parents told me) of my mother smiling in front of you, a half-finished house, holding Dawn’s hand and carrying Ryan around like a little bundled papoose.  My father, a junior high guidance counselor at the time, did the electrical work and put up drywall in the evenings to save money.  Though none of us could remember them, perhaps it was those evenings that made you feel so much like ours that, seventeen years later, my siblings and I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving.  It has been years since I have thought much about you, old house, or taken the time to miss you, but now, on an orange tiled porch thousands of miles away, I remember you and remember what it feels like to be home.

Fondly,

Shannon

Re: Kentucky Fried Cambodia

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