The chir of nighttime insects and the wide dark blue of the moonlight sky over the Texas Hill Country is not nearly as pleasant as a long, late-night conversation with my brother on our parents’ back deck.
(Oops! I missed last week’s “small stone”! But I forgive myself, because I was preparing to fly across an ocean at the time.)
Next week, my popular culture conference begins, which means this is your last chance to overwork a teacher: go to my PCA/ACA schedule under the Teaching tab and use the polls to assign me homework!
Next week: reporting from the conference! 🙂
This is a true story. For now.
The taxi driver’s name was Muhammad. He is from Pakistan.
He has warm, kind eyes, something between hazel and blue in the dim passing light of the street lamps on the highway. A faint downturn at the outer edges, where his dark olive skin creases in fans from decades of smiling. He has coarse gray hair and a finely groomed beard, trimmed short against the skin. And an easy smile. A fine, strong nose, a manly angle from the face before a slight bend downward. His head lolls relaxed on his neck, easy and self-confident but humbly so. He is a man who knows who he is and is perfectly comfortable with himself.
Muhammad has a degree in English language and has lived in the UAE since 1977. He’s worked different jobs over the last 34 years, but he has driven a taxi since 1985. He talked about how cheap it used to be to live in the city: “Before, a two-bedroom flat, a nice flat in a good location, would cost 16, maybe 17,000 dirhams. Now, a two-bedroom flat costs one leg!” We both laughed at his joke.
Muhammad has seven children: a daughter is a high school teacher, one son is a nurse, two more sons are studying to be engineers (one civil, one undecided). His 17-year-old son, who wants to study civil engineering, hopes to come live with his father in the UAE so he can study the buildings there. He also is a new grandfather: his school-teacher daughter recently gave birth to twin girls. Muhammad’s wife, who is still in Pakistan, watches after one of the girls during the day while his daughter teaches. (I’m not sure what happens with the other girl — I think perhaps a neighbor watches her?)
One of Muhammad’s friends is a doctor (that man is one of five children; four of them are doctors) and the doctor friend owns a clinic in Abu Dhabi. He is opening a new clinic just outside Abu Dhabi, in the Musafa area, he hopes to bring over Muhammad’s nurse son to work at the new clinic.
We talked about our families. He asked if my father or grandfather or my whole family was from Texas. I told him how my grandfather’s father come to Texas from Holland. Then Muhammad told me he’d spent a few years in the `90s working with a Dutch company on an environmental engineering project in the forests of northern Pakistan, near his home village. He loved the Dutch: they brought him to meet their families, and he brought the Dutch to meet his family. “Back then, it was very nice, everyone was welcome, many people came to northern Pakistan. Dutch, UK, Americans, French, everyone was welcome, everyone was safe. None of this trouble. Other parts, sometimes, but not in my area. Now, no people come. Only bombs.”
This is not a character sketch, though it could become one. Rather, these are the notes I wrote in the airport this past Monday, as soon as I cleared security and was able to sit down for a few moments. Muhammad was my taxi driver to the airport and, fittingly, as my last taxi driver in the UAE, he was the best driver I’d ever had, eager to talk but calm and professional in his demeanor, not someone after a bigger tip but simply a man who wanted to share lives with the guests he invited into his car. He was so rich and warm and inviting that I had to write about him.
I don’t know if I’ll ever use any of these notes, or, if I do, whether I’ll write Muhammad into an essay or a short story. If he appears in fiction it will almost certainly be piecemeal, just little details here and there that might color a whole spectrum of characters. I’m not really in the habit of lifting real people into fictional stories unless they exist for historical or regional context. But people like Muhammad, people I meet casually on the street or observe surreptitiously in coffee shops, these people almost never turn up whole in stories. Instead, they become rich veins of raw material for any number of characters. And this taxi driver was one of the coolest such people I’ve met.
Maybe you like personal narratives and insightful, meaningful memoirs. Or maybe you like political editorials. Or maybe you’re just a concerned citizen of the world who wants to stay informed but is sick of the same old news cycle, the same cold, indifferent data used to sell advertising.
Maybe you just love really, really good writing.
Whatever your reason, you need to start reading the blog Rima the Arab Girl. Subscribe to her RSS feeds. And keep tissues handy — a few of her posts have been so heartbreakingly excellent that they’d made me cry. But it’s the most literary kind of crying you can do, a purging, cleansing flood of guilt and joy and sorrow and anger and joy — oh, the joy, both at what Rima says and at how she says it. Her blog posts are often genuinely, classically cathartic.
This blog is not always easy to read, but it’s always beautiful and always brilliant.
So I’m serious: start reading this blog RIGHT NOW.
[Full disclosure: Rima is a friend of mine. And I am extremely fortunate to know her even a little bit. Read her blog, and you will know her a little bit too, and you’ll feel just as fortunate.]
This past Tuesday, I visited Zayed University to speak to an education class studying youth literature and preparing to write young adult stories of their own. (I’ll write a fuller post on this experience later this weekend.) We talked about books they were reading and how they might begin to write their own stories. The students’ assignment, which they begin next week, will be rooted in their own past, based on their memories, their own culture, their own unique identities as young Emirati women.
Many of them have never written creatively before, and those who have primarily work in poetry (a great foundation, I told them!). So before I left their class on Tuesday, I promised I’d use this week’s Writer’s Notebook to try an exercise similar to the assignment they’re preparing for: I’d find an exercise based on personal memory and write a story rooted in that.
This small essay/story is that exercise.
The first girl I thought I might kiss was my back yard neighbor, Kay. We were both in the third grade, and while I certainly wasn’t in love with her, she was a great friend and, as I was increasingly becoming aware, a girl. So why shouldn’t I kiss her? We’d done a lot together in the few short years I’d lived in Port Neches, Texas: we ate bitter, wild grapes off the vine we found in her back yard, we smoked the poisonous butt of a discarded cigarette we’d picked from the dirt in the alley between our back yards, we waved at each other when I climbed the big tree in my backyard and sometimes, after my father built me an epic two-story wooden playhouse next to the tree, Kay would come over to climb the ladder to the second level and peer out across the neighborhood.
On humid summer nights we’d walked across the street to the shallow canals that lined one end of our neighborhood, watching for fireflies. When my father took me down to those canals on the Fourth of July and showed me how to throw cheap cork smoke bombs into the canals to leave an eerie, multicolored fog over the dark water, Kay came out to join us.
I had given up riding my old red bike after a nasty spill when I was five, and it was partly to hang out with Kay that I braved the bicycle again at age seven. She rode her banana-seated bike from the canal end of the street clear down to the bustling traffic and fast food joints and tiny corner stores along the main street at the other end of our neighborhood. I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike down to that end of the street — my mother worried about the traffic — but I longed to join my friend on tours of 5th Street.
So it wasn’t terribly surprising that afternoon in third grade when I found myself in Kay’s bedroom, noticing for the first time just how pink and lacy the bedspread was, how many dolls she had, how decidedly GIRLY she was, that I decided I might want to kiss her. I wondered how I might go about it: should I just lean in and go for it? Should I ask her first? Should I try to make a game of it? I knew some kids played doctor, but I wasn’t at all certain what the rules were. I knew on TV that people would tilt their heads in opposite directions as they pressed their faces together — and sometimes they would switch directions mid-kiss — but I never really understood why. Should we sit on her bed, or should we stand in the middle of the room?
It’s a sign of just how young we both were that I never thought of more practical concerns, like, did I actually think of Kay in that way, or how did my breath smell, or would she taste of wild grapes.
But what I remember most of that day was how long I took to make up my mind. We’d been in her room for ages, and things were starting to get awkward. In my child’s memory, I swear I must have sat there for 30 minutes or more, but in reality we might have been in Kay’s room for only 10 minutes. Either way, neither of us had said anything the whole time, and I could tell even then that I was starting to make Kay nervous. Which is when I realized how nervous I was, too, and how maybe, in the end, I didn’t really want to kiss Kay after all. If I’d been older — maybe 12, or maybe 35 — I’d have said I didn’t want an experimental kiss to get in the way of our friendship. But I was only eight, and I just knew that while the idea of kissing Kay felt exciting, it also felt a bit icky, and maybe I wasn’t quite ready to kiss girls after all.
Not long after that, my dad took a job halfway across Texas and we all packed up and moved. I don’t even remember saying goodbye to Kay. Maybe I’d forgotten in the hustle and confusion of the move, or maybe, like tiny adults, we’d somehow drifted apart after the awkwardness of that almost-kiss.
Years later, when I was on a road trip during my college years, I passed through Port Neches and found my old neighborhood. I stopped outside my house but I didn’t knock on the door or peer into the back yard. It had been someone else’s home for more than a decade, and I didn’t want to disturb my memories of it. But I did peek into the alley behind my house. It looked the same. I even found an old cigarette butt in the dirt. I leaned on the fence and looked into Kay’s back yard. The wild grape vine was gone. The concrete on the back patio had cracked several years ago. The window of what used to be Kay’s bedroom was dark, her bright floral curtains gone. But somewhere in the neighborhood I heard children laughing, and when I returned to my car and drove back up 5th Street to the old main drag, the traffic and bustle there far less dangerous now than my mother had ever made it out to be, I had to brake once to let a small gang of kids ride past on their bikes.
This exercise is actually in two parts, both from the chapter on memory in Bill Roorbach‘s excellent writing guide, Writing Life Stories.
Exercise One: Mapmaking. Please make a map of the earliest neighborhood you can remember. Include as much detail as you can. Who lived there? What were the secret places? Where were your friends? Where did the weird people live? Where were the friends of your brothers and sisters? Where were the off-limits places? And so forth.
This is my map:
Exercise Two: Map Story. Once you’ve made your map, it’s time to write. Here’s the assignment: Tell us a story from your map. “One day back in Anchorage….” — and off you go, elaborating on your recollection [. . .]. Don’t edit yourself much; don’t try for anything finished. The story needn’t be long. A couple of pages is fine (but keep going if you get inspired).
I don’t know where this story would go — it still doesn’t feel finished — nor could I swear to just how true this story is. A lot of what I’ve written here is based on my memories, but as a fiction writer, I’ve gotten into the habit of embellishing my memories and filling in gaps with details that FEEL right but might not be 100% true, and if I were to develop this story more fully, I’d probably turn it into fiction.
But that’s the beauty of this exercise: it can result in fiction or nonfiction alike. And in fact, half the class I spoke to is reading Ibtisam Barakat‘s Tasting the Sky, a memoir; and the other half is reading Naomi Shihab Nye‘s Habibi, a work of semi-autobiographical fiction (Nye was kind enough to exchange some e-mails with me regarding her book and some questions the students had asked during my visit, and she’s agreed to let me share some of that exchange in my blog post later, so keep an eye out for it).
So there you have it, Zayed University students: here is one way to use your personal memories to lead to a story, either fiction or nonfiction. I hope it works for you and for all my readers! And, as always, feel free to share your results!
“Ma’salama.” Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2 April 2011.
One of the first things I did when I arrived in the UAE more than two years ago was to visit the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. People here like to throw around the superlatives — largest pearl sold at auction, tallest building, most expensive Christmas tree — and while all these superlatives are well earned, they still sometimes feel gratuitous. But the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque serenely transcends the hype and is indeed a remarkable marvel of architecture, at once classical and modern, a perfect stylistic balance of ornate and meditative, massive but inviting. It’s a beautiful building.
Shortly after my first visit, as a tourist, I accompanied a group of my students on a field trip to the Grand Mosque so they could compare its architecture and functionality to the Mughal architecture of the Taj Mahal, which served as one inspiration for the Grand Mosque. The mosque looked no less impressive on a second viewing than it had on the first. And in these past two years, I never failed to crane my neck and gaze at it as we passed on the highway or ate dinner at one of the restaurants across the water from it.
But in these two years, I had yet to visit the mosque at night, when its polished marble domes are illuminated in a soft, ethereal blue light and the huge inner courtyard gleams under the floodlights on the minarets.
This is my final week in Abu Dhabi. Next week, I’ll fly back to the States, ahead of my wife, to start the next chapter in our lives. And so my wife and I agreed that my farewell to the city that has been our home these past few years could not be complete without a final visit to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, and what better way to bid this magnificent building goodbye than to see it at night?
In case you’re curious, the Arabic word “ma’salama” means goodbye, but I understand that its more literal translation is “go with safety.” In usage, it’s something very like the English word “farewell.” And so Abu Dhabi and I bid each other farewell.
Thanks for all the great memories, UAE. I look forward to sharing what I’ve experienced here with all my friends and family back in the US. Especially the beauty of this wonderful mosque.
An afternoon on the couch, back flat and knees bent, the dry pulpy scent of paper and ink, the rich texture of a world unfolding in fine brushstrokes of words.
I’ve done photo stories before (here, here, and here), but this one is a little different: this one involves two photos.
I’ll explain more below, but just so you know up front why I’m using two pictures, the idea here is to get from the picture on the left to the picture on the right — the suitcases to the kid.
So, here we go.
I was eight when I first came up with the idea, but I’d turned nine before I realized I could actually do it. It started when I found the old suitcases wedged into the hall closet between my bedroom and my mother’s. They were behind the vacuum cleaner, under a coat and an old wool blanket that made my small forearms itch. Boxy things, cracked leather and half-rusted catches. One of them was missing a handle. But they were sturdy, made for moving — for moving on. Those two suitcases were hope that smelled like mildew, and I loved them.
But it was just an idea, the same childish dream any kid has from time to time. I was more interested in the suitcases themselves than in the freedom they hinted at, which is why I kept returning to them on the weekends, while my mother was off at one job or another. I couldn’t do much but look at them, because the catches on one were rusted shut, and the other one was locked. But after a few months, I started spending my weekends rummaging through drawers in the kitchen, the bathroom, my mother’s bedroom, and eventually, I found a small glass candy dish full of old keys. I took them out one afternoon a little after my ninth birthday and started on the locked suitcase, one key at a time. It took me ten minutes to find the right key, but then the case fell open like an old book, and inside was the most remarkable thing I’d ever seen: a round leather cap lined in fur and attached to a pair and thick round goggles.
I touched the cap — it felt like an old glove, soft as a pillowcase and pliant as a handkerchief. I lifted it over my head. the weight of the goggles pulled the cap forward over my face so my nose smelled soft wool and sweat. I lifted the goggles over my eyes but they were huge, spanned halfway to my ears. I studied them until I figured out how to adjust the straps, and soon I had the lenses snug across my nose and the strap tight over cap on my head. I went into the bathroom and stood on the stool at the sink to behold myself. I looked fierce, like a crazy person, some antique combination of an astronaut and one of those insane bikers on the Mad Max movies. I felt daring, reckless, powerful, prepared for anything. I ran into my bedroom with the goggles and cap still on, whipped through the hangers in my closet and found the leather jacket my uncle had given me the year before. I put it on and raced back into the hall, across to the bathroom. I put my hands on my hips, my elbows jutting courageously outward. I sucked in air and pushed out my chest. I was a freaking superhero. I could face anything, go anywhere, escape it all.
From then on I spent all my spare time researching and planning. The school librarians loved me, then decided I was a little strange, and finally stopped paying me any attention. I learned that the cap I’d found was an aviator helmet from one of the World Wars; they called it a Snoopy Hat, and sure enough, I did remember seeing the dog wearing one in those cartoons. I figured my grandfather wore it, though I still don’t know which grandfather — both had been dead for ages. But I had inherited adventure, I knew that much, and I was ready to fly.
I made my mom buy me spiral notebooks in bulk — I said I had a lot of homework, and she never believed otherwise. I filled those things with supply lists, sketches, maps, timelines, anything I could think of. I was methodical. I was detailed. I was going to be prepared.
So I was eleven by the time I actually started the process. Most of the plan was mental preparedness: knowing where I was going, how I’d get there, what to do in various emergencies. But the hard work was collecting the supplies. I didn’t get much of an allowance, and it’s not like I had much time to shop by myself. I was alone plenty — that was part of the problem — but getting around by myself meant riding my bike or my skateboard, and there’s only so much I can carry on either of those things.
Still, a lot of the gear I was able to pick up in junk shops, root from trash bins, or dig out of my own mother’s utility room, where she kept some of the things my dad or my uncle had left behind, stashed up on the shelves over the washing machine and the water heater.
You’re probably thinking I was just another runaway, that I couldn’t possibly need all that much anyway. I’d be like those Calvin & Hobbes cartoons, where I’d stuff my backpack with comic books and tuna fish sandwiches and take off for an afternoon, maybe a night out under the stars, shuddering in my back yard. In some respects, you’re right — I did spend some evenings hiding under the back deck of our trailer, and one time I stayed out the whole night, the soft cap on with the goggles pushed up onto my forehead, my mother frantic on the old boards above my head, crying into the darkness and hoping I could hear her over the traffic on the nearby highway. Hoping I hadn’t wandered that direction and gotten hit or picked up by a pervert. But I’d had no intention of doing that, really. For one thing, the highway was too obvious an escape route. I would need to sneak through the woods and along the creek bed and get far enough away from town that passing cars wouldn’t potentially contain a someone who would recognize me. And for another thing, this night out under the deck was just a practice run: I’d wanted to see if I could sleep on the ground, just an old jacket for a pillow, huddled in woodrot and dirt.
I could. I was a pro. I had aviator blood. And my mother fed me cinnamon rolls, not those crap honey buns from the grocery store but real homemade rolls fresh from the Pilsbury can.
This was in the early spring, I think March — I forget what day, but it around the time of my birthday. The weather was great, a little windy but nice and warm in the day and not too cold at night, at least not once I packed that itchy wool blanket from the closet. So I decided to wait just another week or so. I would leave in April, warm enough at night to sleep comfortably but long before the exhausting heat of summer. That would give me maybe two good months on the road before I had to escape the Texas sun during the day. And by then, I figured, I’d be almost to Canada, so I could just keep on going if I wanted to. It was colder in Canada, even in the summer.
That year, Easter was in April, and our school let off for Good Friday but my mom still had to work. It was perfect. I had pried open the catches on the other suitcase and figured a way to tie it shut with shoelaces, and I’d already packed both the suitcases with most of what I’d need: a map of North America I cut out of an atlas at school, a flashlight and two extra batteries, a set of silverware from the kitchen and a few paper plates, one of my mom’s lighters, the pocket knife my uncle had given me, about fifteen dollars I’d collected from my mom’s purse and coins in the couch, and yeah, a few Hardy Boys books, because even though books are heavy, those Hardy Boys seemed to know a thing or two about surviving.
I’d been asking my mom to pack granola bars in my lunches since the beginning of the school year, and half the time I’d skip them and bring them back home, so I had a good stockpile built up. I filled my thermos with kool-aid and took a bottle of water from the fridge. I had my pillow, that old wool blanket, a change of clothes, my leather jacket even though I wouldn’t need it until Canada, and the Snoopy Hat and goggles. I was ready.
On Good Friday, I hauled out everything and dragged it to the front door. I had thought to ride my bike because I figured I’d make better time that way, but I couldn’t balance both those suitcases on the handlebars, so I gave up and leaned the bike against the trailer and got my skateboard instead.
It was rough walking that first day, the board tucked under my arm and a heavy suitcase in each hand. I could handle them fine dragging them around the house, but carrying them across the street from our trailer and down into the woods was a lot harder than I’d counted on. By the afternoon, I was soaked in sweat and had to take off the aviator cap. I sat on a rock and opened both suitcases, wondering how to lighten the load. I drank the kool-aid and left the thermos by the rock. I left the pillow there, too — what had I been think? I would sleep on my rolled-up jacket like I’d always planned — and after a long consideration, flipping through the pages and considering the scrapes I might get into compared with the adventures of the Hardy Boys, I left behind two of the three books I’d brought.
The suitcases were a bit lighter then, but they were still each half my size and cumbersome as hell to lug around in the woods, so by the time it grew dark I hadn’t even made it to the first backroad I’d hoped to find. I sat on my skateboard in the hard dirt, no rocks in sight, and used the flashlight to look at my map from the atlas. It was huge, but so was North America, and peering in the dim light down at Texas, that little speck just northwest of San Antonio where I’d started out from, I figured I should have reached Amarillo by then, or at least Lubbock, but if that were true, I would have had to cross at least one of the bright blue highways marked on the map. I was still in the middle of nowhere.
For a while, yes, I wanted to cry. Maybe I did a little — I’ll admit it. I worried about how much I’d miscalculated, how much heavier the bags were and how much further I might have to walk. Eventually I would try hitching rides, sure, but I needed to get far enough away to do it, at least out of Texas. And now I wondered, too, how long my granola bars would last, though I still had the fifteen dollars.
When it got really dark and I switched off the flashlight — better not to risk a fire, and it was still warm enough, though a breeze was picking up — I looked around in the night and discovered lights through the trees. For a long time I huddled between the upright suitcases like walls, flinching at every twig snap and bird call, because I had no idea what those lights might be. But after several minutes I heard a door open and a man spit and a trash can lid bang, and I knew I was in some neighborhood. I almost switched on the flashlight to check the map again, but then I realized that this close to people, I might draw attention, and maybe someone would send me home again. Still, it felt good knowing I remained in the midst of civilization, just in case.
I opened one of the cases and balled up my jacket and slept in the dirt.
When I woke the next morning I was wet and itchy, balled up underneath the heavy wool blanket but still shivering in the cold. A front had moved in overnight. Later, I learned to recognize the patterns, that a final sharp cold front always pushed through Texas around Easter, but this was my first direct experience with it. I pulled on my jacket, twisting like an escape artist under the blanket, and then I poked out one blue hand to feel blind through the luggage for the aviator hat and goggles, and I pulled them on under the blanket, too.
I stayed under the blanket for a few hours, I think, waiting for the sun to rise high enough to warm me, but before I had decided to try peeking outside, I heard heavy breathing out in the trees and I pulled my knees into my chest. I held my breath, listening hard, trying to figure out who might be approaching. I thought of the man the night before. I thought of police. I thought of those perverts my mother worried about out on the highway. If I were a pervert, I’d probably stay away from the main highways, actually — I’d hunt the woods, looking for stupid kids who couldn’t read a map right and had just a pocket knife for protection.
I pulled the knife from my pocket and opened the long blade, just in case.
When the blanket moved I thought I would scream or kick out against my attacker, lash expertly with the knife, but instead I curled up tighter, like I might swallow myself and just disappear. The blanket slid off me and I felt the hot breath on my cheek, rank and wet, and then a tongue across my cheek. I squirmed away and rolled to my knees and this dog was just staring at me, panting and stupid with his tongue out, his breath in little puffs of fog. I cussed, and then I laughed a little. The dog was nosing into one of the suitcases, the one with the granola bars, but I stood shooed him away and then packed everything up.
With houses so near, I decided to risk the road, at least until I could get my bearings, so I headed up toward where I’d seen the lights the night before and found a back yard, then a house, and then the rough old asphalt road. I stayed in the back yards for a while, following the road at a distance the way you might follow a river. I heard cars out on some larger road and I walked that direction. When I came out of the trees I was on the access road beside the highway. I looked up and down the access road, trying to find a sign, some locator to tell me where to look on the map. I set down my suitcase and skateboard, which is when I realized I’d left the other suitcase back in the woods. I turned quick circles, panicking a little, then I ripped open the suitcase — it was the one with the key — to see what I still had and what I’d lost. I’d left behind the bottle of water, the granola bars, the extra clothes. I still had the map and the books and the eating utensils and a few other things, but like a damned idiot, I’d left behind the blanket. It was a bit warmer now in the sunshine, but I knew when night fell I’d want that blanket.
I was screwed. Even with the fifteen dollars in my pocket, I couldn’t buy a new blanket and enough food to get me to Canada.
I sat on the suitcase and thought. I looked up the access road, down it. I wanted to say parts of the road looked familiar, but I wanted just as much to say I was in foreign territory, another country even. For all I knew I’d headed south instead of north and might be in Mexico by now, which wouldn’t be so bad if this was the weather I had to look forward to. But then I saw the sign for the city lake, and I knew I was less than two miles from my house.
I looked at the road, I looked at my skateboard.
I’d come so far, but I’d gotten nowhere.
I just wanted to be free, to get away from my trailer and everything bad that had ever happened there.
But I was starving, and as my mouth watered and I reached for a granola bar I knew I didn’t even have, what I really wanted was cinnamon rolls. Warm, gooey, fresh from the can to the oven.
I stood up and lifted the suitcase, but my arms were tired, I was hungry, and let’s face it, hopeless as my grand adventure had been, I didn’t really need anything in there anyway. Even the Hardy Boys book — what had I ever learned from them?
I left it there in the road, and I walked out onto the asphalt and aimed my skateboard south back toward home. My legs were wobbly, my ankles tired.
To heck with it, I thought, and I lay down on the board, belly first, my head aimed toward home. I started swimming along the asphalt, pulling myself along, slowly for a while but then I hit a shallow decline and started picking up speed, no arms needed. The wind was so cold on my face that my eyes started to water, and I pulled the aviator goggles over my face. When I reached for the road again I was rolling too fast to touch it, gravity doing all the work, and my hands hovered over the blur of the asphalt. I held them out at my sides, palms flat and waving in the wind the way they did when I stuck my arm out the window of my uncle’s truck. They were lifting up on their own, that same mysterious force of the air that carried airplanes into the sky. I opened my mouth to the cold, cold air, a grin beginning in the lips, and I flew.
Well, that was unexpected. I hadn’t planned to write a whole short story when I started this exercise, but there it is. It’s not very good (yet), but it’s there, and maybe it could turn into something interesting, who knows.
Anyway, here’s the exercise: Like most photo exercises, I’m writing a story that I see in the pictures, but unlike most, I have two photos to look at, and what I’m supposed to do is consider them in dialogue with each other. The exercise comes from the literary journal Camera Obscura and is part of a small, regular contest they run called “Bridge the Gap.” On Camera Obscura‘s website, they explain the rules like this: “The current photographs above are the ingress and egress of a story born when these two images meet, celebrating the synergy of words and images. Take the reader on an unexpected journey from the image on the left to the one on the right in 1000 words or less.”
Okay, I broke the rules something fierce — my story is more than 3,000 words, not a mere 1,000! — but whatever. This wasn’t for competition anyway; the two photos I used were from an older contest, back in October 2010 (the winner was Marissa Coon, for her story “Runner,” and while I didn’t read her story before I wrote my own, I’ve read it since and it’s a great little piece — much better than my first attempt here! — so go read it online).
The deadline for the current “Bridge the Gap” contest is today, but keep an eye on Camera Obscura for the next pair of photos and take a crack at this yourself! I know I’m planning to give it a shot soon.
I have so much to say on these topics that I’m actually bursting (ew?), which is why I’m not going to write more about them just yet — too many things to say, not yet enough distance or coherence with which to say them all. But I’ve had teaching on a brain a lot lately and these articles just keep coming, so I felt I ought to at least share a few links to things I’ve been reading:
The first is something I’ve touched on many times here already (here, here, and here, for starters), but in the current political climate in the US, it’s becoming more topical each day. It’s a short piece at Care2 about why US teachers aren’t taken more seriously, and is itself a riff off a recent Washington Post blog article comparing the treatment of teachers in the US to the treatment of teachers in other countries.
On a related note, the second piece is another politically relevant topic I’ve also danced around here, though I haven’t tackled it in quite this way before, which is why I’m linking you to the post: it’s a thought-provoking (and generally provocative) piece over at Worst Professor Ever about the “serfdom” of the teaching profession. Making clever use of a CNN article about “why unpaid jobs are the new normal,” WoPro does a fantastic (if bleak) job of highlighting not only just how thankless a job teaching is, but how it’s becoming practically the poster-profession for how to squeeze more work from already overburdened employees and still make them feel grateful for the burden. Grim, but disturbingly accurate.
Which is why, to brighten the mood a bit, I also wanted to share this delightful third piece: one teacher’s transition from “The Strict Teacher [to] The Fun Teacher” without sacrificing pragmatism or standards. It’s not only a fun, quick read, it’s also a helpful guide to more compassionate teaching, which is something I’m HIGHLY in favor of.
Samuel Snoek-Brown