"Ae fond kiss, and then we sever": When is a story done?

It's cold here in Casper. I have hot cider. It seemed correct to start with a Robert Burns line, then. But the Burns line is purposeful in that I have reached what I consider to be a rare thing: the place of being finished with a story.

I have many times had stories be finished with me before I was finished with them (the ones that never quite went anywhere, the fragments in computer folders and notebooks where the relationship ended on a note of mutual ambivalence), and there are many stories that aren't quite there yet, something shoe still waiting to drop (as soon as I find the damn shoe--maybe waiting for the shoe to be thrown). There are the stories, too, that are only pretending to be stories, that are really just novels waiting to leap. To them, I crack my whip and brandish my chair: back! back! (Or at least admonish them to queue up in an orderly fashion.)

But sometimes, the piece and I have said all we have to say to each other, and the story goes out into the wide world and finds its right home, and once it's there, there's no reason for me to meddle with it. I'm speaking mostly of publication, which has traditionally been the marker of done (not always, of course, but oftener than not). I've had the good fortune of placing a short story that I wrote a eight years ago (it doesn't feel like that long ago) in Stymie Magazine, and so now I can talk about writing with actual concrete referents, rather than vague hand-waving at the book-in-progress.

So this is putting "Middle Infield" to rest. Walking away. Saying a fond farewell.

There is a particular pleasure in finding a journal for a story that feels right for it, and because of the specificity of this story's major pieces--baseball, queerness, teenaged characters--it was not an easy fit. Any one of those things seems to have a number of markets, but the Venn diagrams seldom overlap. And so I am especially pleased to have it homed in Stymie, where so many facets of sport (and a lot of various and interesting hybridities) are showcased.

I wrote this story in one of my MA program workshops, and I owe, of course, a great deal to a small group of excellent workshop colleagues that I had there. I remember, though, that even in its shitty first draft, it was the first short story that I'd written as a short story, all self-contained, with no lingering desires to become a novel, that I was even remotely happy with. Because I hadn't written it as the obligatory workshop submission (because workshopping novel chapters in a short story workshop is seldom productive)--I'd written the story on its own terms, and it went quickly because so much of it was so dear to me. False and fictional and all of the things I stole from the world of the real had been dragged through algae and sunflower seed shells by the end, but dear to me still.

I was in Ohio at the time. Most people don't think of Ohio as markedly different from central Pennsylvania (or any of the other mid-Atlantic states), but it was the furthest I'd been from home in the long term, in a way that was truly on my own. Campus housing, during my BA, even if I seldom went home, certainly didn't count. As a TA in graduate school, I had a job, a regular paycheck, the first semblance of a functional adult life. Gone were the thousand activities and club meetings of yesterdegree--now onto serious academic study. Now into an actual college town, which is all that town was: bars (a perilous lot of bars), great music, independent restaurants, and twenty thousand twenty-somethings. Nothing at all like my no-horse childhood home or my unfriendly, working-class city and its idyllic campus island that we seldom left.

I think now that some of this story was born of homesickness. Maybe a way to pay homage to where I'd come from because everyone else I knew seemed to be from a much more recognizable version of somewhere. Maybe a way to hold up small things I loved about a place where I no longer fit myself. No matter the reason, and I didn't know it then, but Cal and Brendan and the smaller details of their lives were ways of reaching out to the place that I'd left. That's completely contradictory in that it is all firmly fiction--it's set in upstate New York, even, years before I lived there or ever knew that I would--but the characters play out on the landscapes of memory.

A list:

1. The snapping turtle was real. My brother and a friend of his fished them out of a farm pond, though never so big. I remember them showing me the hook they used for it, three inches long and the wire of it too stiff to bend. They did bait it with a raw chicken wing. Stevie's mother did not make soup from the turtles they caught. The turtles did eat ducklings. But I don't know how they killed them after catching them. 


2. I harbor no ill will toward turtles, snapping or otherwise. In a visiting writer's talk while I was in Ohio, though, Clint McCown read from his novel, War Memorials, in which a lizard meets a dire end via a window sash, if I remember correctly. I remember feeling more guilty about killing off that snapping turtle in the story than I did for any number of other injustices I'd committed against characters. I do not remember if McCown felt similar remorse. I know the question came up.


3. The pond Cal and Brendan stand beside is not in upstate New York. It is in my parents' neighbor's pasture, and the pond is roughly the size of a regulation ice hockey rink. It was fed by a small stream, though, and it never froze hard enough to skate on it. Or we never knew how deep it really was and my parents said no to our desire to skate on it. Both are true. It did house a number of fish, though, and we caught bluegills and sunnies there, on small, flimsy rods. There were turtles, snappers in that pond (as in so many ponds where I grew up), and they would have cut our four-pound test with no effort if we'd fished with any bait that tempted them.


4. Cal's grandparents' basement belongs to my friend Bill, who was also my middle school boyfriend. Its ceilings were too low for Bill, who was already nearly six feet tall in those gangly years. In high school, a whole knot of us hung out there, stooped over the small pool and air hockey tables, and we didn't drink, even though we knew we could have. We played terrible nineties music and there was often a strobe light on because why not. There was a fat plastic barrel of pretzel sticks. One of my grandfathers still keeps them beside his chair. The basement had its own bathroom, too, one where the concrete block hadn't even been painted. It was always cold. The cold was a good excuse, and it often lead to some pair of people making out on the couch. 


5. Ted Williams hitting walnuts with a broomstick may be apocryphal. I feel like I remember my dad telling me about it. It feels true. That's what matters.


6. Regarding a tiny reference buried in a paragraph--a guy who went to my high school, Dominic Rich, who played baseball with my brother--did rip it up playing for Auburn. The Blue Jays drafted him in the second round in 2000. The whole valley was kind of gutted, I think, when he didn't make it past AA ball. (My hometown was blessed with excellent baseball players while my three-years-older brother was in high school. I wouldn't love the sport the way I do if I hadn't been raised on such a beautiful version of it.)


7. The high school I imagine here is my own. Rural. Conservative. Full of people who would not let neighbors go hungry or leave anyone to change a flat tire on one's own. Full of the kind of silence, though, too, that lets Brendan say, of the possibility of queer athletes (and really, for his context, queer anyone, queer him, queer them), "No one talks about it." The silence that makes Cal continue with the affirmation that what cannot be said cannot be done. Queerness is not an option. 

This is the place where I want to say goodbye to this story. It ends with some hope because I believe in hope and I am an optimist. But this story was written years before the You Can Play Project, most of a decade before, and it was written in the fullest sense of Brendan's wishful thinking. (I am reminded of Oscar Wilde and Miss Prism's famous line: "The good end happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means." Because Oscar Wilde didn't have the luxury of that wishful thinking.) I say goodbye to this story on Spirit Day, in hopes that Brendan and Cal, wherever they are, whatever they are doing, together or alone (because characters, in my mind, keep moving forward in their worlds, aren't stuck where the last sentence leaves them--they have trajectories and there is no friction great enough to bring story to a complete halt), are well and happy and no longer in a place where they feel that hard weight of silence.

I have more hope still for the real LGBT youth because of the many organizations and individuals who are speaking out, who are acting, who are changing this landscape of silence. 

Jaywalking in Montréal: A Meditation on Home and Belonging

I'm a big fan of making overly dramatic statements about fairly inconsequential happenings. Last weekend, I was in Montréal in the first part of a week-long vacation that included that city, Utica/Cooperstown & Buffalo, New York, and two days of Phillies baseball in Denver before heading back to Casper. In the course of walking toward the Métro station near our little hotel, I said something to my husband that went something like "Death before looking like a tourist." I had just jaywalked through an empty, but orange-hand-marked crosswalk, though at least twenty seconds after all of the native Montréal folks had gone through it. My husband is not a jaywalker.


People in Montréal do not wait for walk signs. I didn't see anyone defy death and step out into traffic or anything like that--the issue was just that if there was no reason to wait for the signal, if the streets were empty, why, in fact, should anyone wait? (This makes perfect sense to me.) At busier intersections, it almost seemed as if there was a silent competition to see who could cross first. No one dashed out--people in Montréal seem to only run when they mean to, particularly on the paths of Mont Royal, in terribly attractive running shorts and coordinated shoes and with appropriate and attractive accessories. (The citizens of Montréal are collectively at least sixty percent more gorgeous than people in other places, excepting maybe Brazil. I had heard Montréal was full of beautiful people. I admit I hadn't believed it, but I should never have doubted.) But all of this is to say that people jaywalk there. Not stupidly, at least in my estimation, but with a decided lack of patience for the technicalities of timed lights in the face of stopped or absent traffic. 

I was doing likewise at the first intersection we came to after disembarking the bus from the airport at Berri-UQAM. I am not, on the whole, an impatient person, at least when it comes to things like that. I queue like a champion. If the necessity is to wait, I can wait, quite happily. But leaving that bus station, because it is the drop-off point from the airport and thus many tourists, I saw a lot of people with maps tiptoeing up to intersections. 

Let's not pretend: I had a map. It was definitely in my hand. I was dragging a suitcase. But I couldn't bring myself to tiptoe up to the intersection like I didn't know where I was going. Nevermind, of course, that I didn't know where I was going, not with terrible certainty. I'm just lucky with directions in the sense that luck favors the prepared (excepting that one time on the Tube when I was distraught over not getting to see the Beowulf manuscript and got myself and a friend going in the wholly wrong direction for a bit, but I blame acute emotional distress). The heart of it: it's not like anyone was fooled by my attempt at feigning nativeness. It's not like Montréal, at three in the afternoon on a Saturday, is one of those places where appearing to be a tourist is dangerous or ill-advised. 


And so I have to ask myself: what is so terrible about being the person on a journey? Why am I apparently so invested in not being that person, at least from the outside? Because I really am invested in it, it seems.


I've noticed it on the last several trips I've been on, this impulse to pretend I belong, to feign being a native. It didn't work on the trip to Sweden for many reasons (being short, dark-haired, and possessed of a striking lack of Swedish language skills being among them), but we did succeed in being taken for German tourists rather than American tourists (quite unintentionally and without speaking a word of German). It worked quite well in the UK, and I think it worked out all right in Vancouver. 


Since coming back from Montréal, I've tried to figure out why that is. It's not necessarily that it makes things easier. I actually got myself into several moments of intense awkwardness by replying to hellos in French (which is just about as far as my French can get me), and then having to backtrack and repeat the ensuing conversation in English. One of those happened over a pint of strawberries at the Marché Jean-Talon, and my apologies for being a doofus and my gratitude to the young woman who spoke with me for being kind. I want to participate even when I actually can't do it. I can't fake knowing a language. I know that. It was silly of me to do. Terribly silly. But it's become a reflex, a desire to respond in-kind.


Last summer, I spent two weeks in the UK and Ireland, and it included my third trip to Edinburgh, the only city that is currently vying for my affections the way Montréal did. There, of course, when I open my mouth, everyone knows I'm not From There. But it's not often that people can pinpoint where I am from because I'm a sponge and an Anglophile and I use strange syntax that's peppered with pieces of language from the things I've read and the places I've visited and the places I wish I lived. People often ask me where I'm from. 


I don't know how to answer the question. I feel obligated, always, to say that I am from Pennsylvania. I always specify that I'm from the middle of it, too. (The middle, of course, is quite different from the sides, culturally, linguistically, and so on.) But I haven't lived there since 2003, and I've been in Wyoming three years and have a career and a life here, and so I have to say Wyoming, too. But it's not possible to say that I'm from Wyoming--that's untrue. Even in the sense that people say they're from wherever they're living all the time--it's too untrue for this place. Being truly from Wyoming is a fairly rare thing; it's too disingenuous to own that to let even a perfect stranger leave with the wrong impression. (Maybe this is part of the root: if overtly identified as "not from here," I stand a likely chance of being asked, then, where I am from. The answer I am compelled to give is complicated and probably longer than the asker really wants to know. If I blend in, I save us all the trouble.)


On occasion, people will ask, instead, "Where's home?" Technically, that should be easier, shouldn't it?


But the word "home" is one I will use interchangeably. Central PA is "home" in that it is where I grew up, where the bulk of my family is. That home is the place that shaped so much of who I am. I "go home" at Christmas, and it takes three flights to do it. Home, though, is also any place to which I am returning. In the space of a weekend, I can refer to a hotel as "home." After Christmas visiting is complete, I also go home, to Casper, to this house. I've often wondered if this bothers my parents, to hear me call so many different places home, if it feels like a slight. (I used to call going back to college in my BA days "going home," too, even though I was also going home when my dad picked me up outside of Skeath Hall.) Home is wherever I happen to be. And there are a thousand clichés about that, and a Billy Joel song that connects home to another person, and so on. But there is a sense that home is the place that one misses most, maybe, the place one would rather be. It's the last part that I am missing, it seems.


I have never been homesick, not that I can remember. There was one morning--I think I was in the fifth grade--when I really desperately did not want to go to school. There wasn't any reason for it--I loved school until high school, and even then, it wasn't bad. I simply did not want to leave home (and I am often like that now). But when I am gone, once I leave for parts distant and/or unknown, I don't miss it. I would not rather be at home than in Montréal, or in Denver, or in Thermopolis, or in York, England.  

The altar of the Notre-Dame Basilica of  Montréal.
Everything is so lovely and blue.

That's a terrible thing to say. At least it feels like a terrible thing to say. There are people I love and adore in all of the places I call and have called home. But I don't generally ever want to be back. I often wish X person were where I am, but until the moment I get on the plane or in the car, the idea of a fixed home, of the place of belonging, evaporates*. Why should I be so happy to be gone from so much that I love?  It's a question I haven't found an answer to. Maybe it's because I love places easily. Especially places with public transportation and cassis beer and maple cotton candy and the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montréal**. But also places with no transportation and only the peanut butter sandwiches one has to carry in oneself.


But I have to see all of this as related: perhaps part of feeling at ease and at home almost anywhere, part of not missing home, is the sense that there is no home for me, no one true place. (I like to think Edinburgh could be it for me, and maybe someday, but I'm not there now.) I tried on the habits of those who call Montréal home, at least in crossing the streets, and it was grand. Even fooling no one at all--except maybe myself, for a little while--I was in one place where home was.

On the plaza of Kondiaronk Belvedere at the top of Mont Royal. 

*Once the trip back starts, though, I generally want to skip it. Usually because the route involves O'Hare or I-25 between Douglas and Casper***, which makes fifty miles feel like forever because it's always after at least four hours of driving. Sometimes it involves both.


**I should really do a post on the food of Montréal. I would use so many superlatives.


***The ninety miles between Casper and Shoshoni, though, is the longest distance I have ever driven. Nebraska is shorter than those particular ninety miles. Be careful in Wyoming. Time and space behave differently here.