Travel Dispatch: Looking for my Tribe

The term “tribe” has become a popular buzzword that refers to groups of like-minded people, often banded together in support of the same goal. There’s a social-networking service called tribe, and guru-of-the-moment Seth Godin has written a book called Tribes. (There’s also a bar called Tribe, billed as Nashville’s “best place to meet single men.” You’re welcome.)

I first encountered the term during my hippie days in Boulder, lo these twenty years ago, when there was a guy in town who looked so much like me that people would mistake us for each other on the street and at parties. He and I knew some of the same people, so eventually we met, our mutual reputations having preceded us. My twin was even more of a hippie than I was. Accordingly, he had a particularly hippiefied explanation for why our marked similarities had showed up at the same place and time: we were part of the same “tribe.”

“What tribe is that?” I said.

“You know, guys like us.”

Your faithful correspondent undergoes a phase. It is a colorful phase.

I was soon to learn that details and explanations were not my twin’s strong suits; but at the time, I felt like I knew what he was talking about. You could look at us both and see what our deal was: we were twentysomething guys from middle-class backgrounds who were exploring a particularly outdoorsy version of the neo-hippie lifestyle. We were probably liberal, possibly vegetarian, definitely getting high. We were letting our hair grow, having fun, experimenting. He was right: we were part of the same tribe.

I left that tribe long ago, although significant vestiges of it remain, as those of you who know me can attest. And that was my second lesson to learn about tribes (after learning that they existed): you can leave a tribe. My third lesson was that there are lots and lots of tribes. And all three lessons together lead me now to this question: Is the whole notion of the tribe just spurious shorthand for commonalities that people want to blow out of proportion? Are people ginning up a thinly sourced sense of belonging because they want to belong to something? Or is it really valid and useful to talk about which tribes you’re in, and which ones you’re not?

I’ve been thinking about tribes because I have to decide whether to go to the upcoming yearly conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, to be held in February 2011 in Washington, DC. The AWP conference is the closest thing to a yearly trade conference that literary writers have, although they have to share it with lots of academic types who are mainly concerned with university creative writing and with a minority of genre writers who care little about mainstream literary writing.

So, should I go? I’ve got an MFA in creative writing, which gives me a little academic cred; and I’ve had a poem published in a literary journal, so that might give me some basis for claiming to be a literary writer. But when I went to AWP in New York in 2008 and in Denver in 2010, I didn’t feel like I had much in common with the literary writers or the academics. Most of them seemed more nervous and introverted than I am (no offense, just saying). Plus, I’ve only got one literary publication to my credit, and no desire to pursue a tenure-track job. And the very recent rejection of my poems by Sentence is making me feel less “literary” than I have in a long time.

When it comes to genre writing, I’ve had a ghost story published in one newspaper and a vampire story published in another, and I’m working on a genre screenplay; but if I’m really a genre writer, shouldn’t I be going to the Science Fiction Writers of America conference, or the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, or the Fairies and Vampires and Robots Oh My conference? (Sorry, no link for that one.) And besides, many of the genre fans and writers of my acquaintance have had little use for literary writing, which is definitely not my attitude. I got more out of For Whom the Bell Tolls, all by itself, than I’ve gotten out of 90 percent of all the genre writing I’ve ever read put together.

So where does that leave me? Where do I belong? Where is my tribe?

Such thoughts were on my mind in San Francisco when, the Sentence rejection still stinging fresh, I left Grace Cathedral with Angela and Alison. We walked downtown to meet Alison’s husband for dinner, and we had some time to kill, so we popped into a restaurant along the way and sat at the bar. I told Alison about my screenplay, and she’s working on a play, so it felt good to compare notes on similar genres. It also felt good to talk about an area of my writing where I felt more secure, or perhaps just less insecure. We drank wine, ate bread, and asked the barback if he could find out who was doing the cool cover of the MGMT song “Electric Feel.” (Turned out it was Katy Perry. Who knew.)

Later, when we were paying up and getting ready to leave, the barback said to me, “I couldn’t help but overhear that you’re working on a screenplay. I am too.”

I perked right up. “Really? That’s awesome! Good for you. How far into it are you?” We started comparing notes, just as Alison and I had done, and as we talked I felt touched that this young man–he had to be fifteen or twenty years younger than I was–had extended himself to me, a customer, a stranger; yet we had something in common, something important. I don’t know how much to make of that commonality, but I will say it felt quite good to be talking about screenwriting so unexpectedly, with that guy at that time and place.

During our conversation, I recommended my favorite screenwriting book (Robert McKee’s Story) to him, and he got a pen and a coaster and wrote it down. Then I reached across the bar and shook his hand, and just like that, the pain of the rejection was—well, it wasn’t gone, but at least it was contextualized. It was placed within a larger perspective. I’m still not sure what the core of my writing will be about in the long term, but for now it’s the screenplay. If, along the way, some poems get rejected, that sucks; but that’s not my main concern. My main concern, just like the barback’s, is my screenplay. Good luck to him, and good luck to me. We need it.

Travel Dispatch: Rejection at the Heart of the Labyrinth

After Angela and I left Vesuvio in San Francisco’s North Beach, we looked for a restaurant in Chinatown that (a) was veggie-friendly, and (b) looked navigable by the non-Chinese, and (c) looked like it wouldn’t suck. We passed very few restaurants, and none met our criteria until we found a sushi place—yes, a Japanese restaurant—on the edge of Chinatown. It looked like it would suck in the boring, Americanized way, instead of in the hyper-salty, mega-oily way, but we had to meet our friend Alison soon, so we chose the lesser of the evils and ducked inside.

One slight bonus was the free WiFi, so I checked my e-mail and found this delightful message:

Dear Sentence Supporter:

Thanks for allowing us to consider your work. As usual, we have received an overwhelming amount of excellent work recently.

I’m sorry to say that we have decided not to use the work that you sent us. . . .

Again, thank you for sending your work.

Despite my avowals to no longer complain about rejection, to no longer be attached to the outcome, to no longer be invested in a certain image of myself as a writer, that hurt. Perhaps it hurt even more because we had just come from City Lights Books and Vesuvio. I tried to shrug it off and let it go and just be, but for me right then, to “just be” meant to dully ache.

We met up with Alison and saw some very good art in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but with almost every piece I looked at, I thought: Not good enough. Meaning me. These artists had somehow managed to create artworks of significant value. I had tried to do the same, and failed. I was a spectator, a perennial apprentice, a wannabe. Not good enough. All my carefully constructed affirmations about attachment and intentionality were useless. Worse than useless: they were devices employed by those who weren’t good enough. The true artists, the ones whose works hung on the walls before me, had no need of such elaborate justifications for failure.

My favorite piece at San Francisco MOMA: The Oracle and the Green Bird, by Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam

We left the museum and went to Grace Cathedral, an Episcopal church known for its gorgeous Gothic architecture and its extensive service ministries among people with HIV and AIDS. One of the church’s salient features is its labyrinth, which is based on the labyrinth at the cathedral at Chartres in France. All who enter the church are welcome to walk the labyrinth, and when we entered, the hushed, reverent atmosphere encouraged us to do just that.

We took off our shoes and began padding silently along the twists and turns of the elaborate diagram. Alison went first, and then Angela; I went last because I wanted to go slow and take my time. As I walked, I did not feel that I had entered some sort of mystical state. I was distracted by people entering and leaving the sanctuary; by a harried-looking guy who was quickly striding along the labyrinth and sighing as he walked; by my own unruly thoughts and feelings. But as I neared the center, one thought did emerge into prominence: when I got to the center, I would pause, and there would be something for me to deal with. Perhaps I would achieve a realization, or perhaps I would just come to a new understanding of something I already knew. When I got there, I would wait and see.

The labyrinth at Grace Cathedral.

The labyrinth sprinter got to the finish line and hurried out. Alison got to the center and began winding her way back outward, exiting the way she had entered. Angela got to the middle and left. And then it was my turn.

I stood in the center and waited for about a second before I realized that I had placed far more importance on that Sentence submission than I had realized. I had done a good job of forgetting about the poems after I had submitted them; but once the rejection came, all the old attachment and anxiety came roaring back, strong as ever. And it wasn’t even about the poems themselves; it was about me as a writer. It was about me wanting to believe that I could still be some sort of literary writer. If I couldn’t be a short-story writer or an essayist, then maybe I could still be a poet. I’d already had a poem published; I should be able to do it again, right?

But so far, no. I haven’t been able to do it again. And as I go deeper into this screenplay and the strange places it’s taking me, and deeper into my freelance editing and writing, I find that I’m being invited—forcibly invited—to relinquish my image of myself as a literary writer. The day before I got the rejection from Sentence, I got an e-mail from a potential new freelance copyediting client to whom I had sent my résumé. She was writing back to say they liked my résumé very much and wanted to send me an editing test. This is the equivalent of getting an interview in the job world, except that it almost always leads to getting the gig. [And while I was writing this blog post, I got an e-mail from a likely new freelance writing client who wants me to write some copy for his Web site.]

The universe is speaking pretty clearly. It’s telling me that certain endeavors are succeeding, and others are not. It’s telling me to quit being attached to an idea of myself as a literary writer, or perhaps as any kind of writer. It’s telling me just to write. And I am.

But, apparently, I still have attachments to let go of. And sometimes it hurts to do that.

I padded out of the labyrinth on sock feet and put on my shoes, which felt good after the smooth, cold concrete floor.

Travel Dispatch: Writing and Drinking with the Beats

In what is becoming a yearly ritual, I flew out to California to spend time with Angela after she finished directing a weekend writing conference at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. I met her at Esalen after the last session of the conference, and we spent the afternoon soaking in Esalen’s spring-fed hot tubs and gabbing with conference attendees and faculty. I enjoyed myself—the people at the conference were generally nice, and always interesting—but I also felt insecure in the company of so many accomplished editors and writers, some of whom are quite successful. All afternoon I felt a nagging sense of my unrealized potential.

That sense faded away as the writing faculty left, and it disappeared completely for the next couple of days as Angela and I vacationed in Big Sur. (I even got a little writing done, interspersed with tub-soaking, wine-drinking, and hiking.) Then we spent a couple of days in San Francisco. A conference attendee had told Angela about a bar in the North Beach neighborhood called Vesuvio, where Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other Beat figures used to hang out. Vesuvio is right next to City Lights, a bookstore and publishing company founded by Beat author Lawrence Ferlinghetti, so it made sense that the Beats would repair to such a convenient location when the time came to put down the pen and raise a glass. The attendee said Vesuvio was a great place and we should check out, so we put it on our list.

When we got to Vesuvio, Angela suggested we go in City Lights first. On the inside City Lights just looks like a normal independent bookstore, but after you wander around the stacks for a while you begin to feel something. Maybe it’s just how you think you ought to feel if you know anything about the history of the place. Maybe something about the Beats rubbed off on the furniture, the walls, the windows, like a literary aroma. Or maybe there was something special about that place before the Beats got there, drawing the Beats to it for reasons they didn’t know of or understand.

All the customers were silent and serious, but one woman drew my eye. She had a nerdy pageboy haircut, and she was wearing a blue vintage dress with white polka dots, blue Keds, cat’s-eye glasses, and a bright red overcoat. She was a little more vibrant, a little more salient, than everyone else in there, but in a completely bookish way. She walked around with a half-smile on her face and a notebook under her arm. I wondered what her story was. She had to be a writer, but what did she write? She was alone in the store; did she come here by herself all the time, or was she usually with friends? Or had she come here alone from far away, a literary pilgrim making a solo voyage to the shrine of her gurus?

The employee who checked us out at the cash register was even more sober and clipped than any of the customers. He seemed to be taking his duty as a City Lights representative very seriously. We got our purchases (an issue of Poetry for me) and decamped to Vesuvio, where we started with espresso before progressing to beer. Tiffany lamps hung over the tables, and wide windows gave a view of the flash and hustle of North Beach: Italian restaurants, jazz clubs, apartments, topless bars. The walls were covered with pictures of Beats and other disreputable figures enjoying themselves.

Soon the woman in the red coat walked by outside. She passed by without coming in, and I was disappointed; I wanted her to soak up the atmosphere of a Beat bar the same way she had imbibed the essence of the Beat bookstore. But then I saw a flash of red again, and in she came. I guess she had to make up her mind first.

A few minutes later, I got up to use the bathroom, and I walked past her table, where she sat with a drink in front of her, writing in that notebook of hers. That sight made me so happy. I wanted to buy her another drink; I wanted to sit and talk with her about writing; I wanted to know if she ever felt a nagging sense of her own unrealized potential; I wanted to know what she wrote, and why, and what it all meant to her. I wanted her to tell me what it all meant. But I just walked past her table, silent and serious.

P.S. The next night, we went back to Vesuvio, and who did we see but the City Lights employee from the day before. He was in there having a beer. When he saw us, he pointed at us and got a big smile on his face and called out, “You’re the folks who came in the store yesterday!” We smiled at him and waved back. What a change a beer—and about fifty feet of distance—can make.

Travel Dispatch: In the Groove

I have just arrived fifteen minutes late for the last reading I will attend at this conference. Coincidentally, this reading is being held at the same funky cafe where I attended my first reading at this conference, three days ago. My wife and I weren’t trying to go to a reading that first night; we were just looking for a place to have dinner, and the cafe staff put us in the only room that had a free table, which happened to be one of the cafe’s performance spaces. If we had come here a month earlier or later, we might have seen a cellist or an open-mic blues jam, but we were here during a writing conference, and a poet was reading her work on a stage at the front of the room. I didn’t particularly want to go to a reading that night, especially while eating dinner, but I figured what the hell. I looked at it as an immersive experience. I saw myself swimming in literature, breathing poetry in like a gilled creature underwater.

Tonight I am arriving after the last reading of the conference has already begun. A memoirist is reading a personal essay up on stage, a piece about winter and fathers and guns. I sidle apologetically past a very nice young man and squeeze into the last empty chair, where I collect myself and try to pick up the thread of the essay. But before I can even catch my breath from the brisk walk to the cafe, I am distracted by a flurry of motion on my right.

I glance over and see that the very nice young man sitting next to me is shaking his head vigorously from left to right. Then he stops shaking his head and wiggles his shoulders several times, also left to right. Then he pats his thighs a few times. Then he starts up with his head again.

I glance away because I don’t want to be rude, but I continue to covertly observe the young man from my peripheral vision. He wiggles and shakes and pats and twitches, a study in perpetual motion. He pushes one finger forward as if he’s pressing a button, and at the same time he makes a neat, distinct click with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Shakes his head, wiggles his shoulders. Makes a loose fist and pulls it into his gut, where he makes the same click. At one point he whistles softly, and I experience my first surge of actual irritation: no fucking with the reading, man, I don’t care what the reason is. But he seems to agree with me, because as soon as the whistle escapes his lips, he puts one hand over his mouth, as if to trap any straggling whistles that might have their hearts set on freedom. Soon he lets his hand fall, perhaps assured that no more rogue sounds are forthcoming, and then he snaps his fingers closed against his palm with a gentle clap.

After a few minutes, I get used to the young man, and I am able to pay attention to the reading. I have fully situated myself in the memoirist’s narrative when the young man gets up out of his chair and leaves the room. I am relieved when this happens, because bizarre behavior in public stresses me out; and then I am ashamed of my relief, ashamed of how my desire to be comfortable sometimes makes me less tolerant of unusual people. I remind myself that at least I was polite to the guy, as he was to me; and just as I have achieved some semblance of equilibrium, the guy comes back in, sits back down, and pats his thighs, wiggles his shoulders, shakes his head again and again.

He gets up, leaves, and returns several more times during the reading. I wonder why he would go to a reading if he can’t sit still for the whole thing. I’m having a hard enough time paying attention, and I’m just sitting next to him; how much attention could he possibly be paying? I do get used to him, though, and once the reading is over, he gets up and does not return. I’m relieved again, although less relieved than before, and also I find that I miss him just a little.

A friend of mine is sitting on my left, and we begin talking amid the general mellow hubbub that pervades the room after the reading ends. After a while my friend points to my right and says, “Did you see that guy?” We talk about him a little bit, and we agree that he must have had Tourette’s syndrome. My friend says, “He was really in the groove.”

“What do you mean?”

“He really had a good groove going, with all his patting and shaking and stuff.” I think about it, and I realize that my friend is right; the guy was expressing a subterranean rhythm the entire time. And sometimes that rhythm propelled him right out of his chair and out the door, where he probably let loose with a few hoots and whistles, like a person with a tickle in her throat stepping outside to cough. And once he had himself back under control, he came back in and heard some more literature read to him by an author who spent the time and invested the effort to make something beautiful out of words.

Literature always feeds us, even when we can only take it in sips.

Travel Dispatch: Seen, Heard, and Frantically Scribbled in a Moleskine

Writers are thieves. If you don’t know this already, it’s time you learned the sad truth. We’re constantly on the lookout for an unguarded personal disclosure, a comment casually tossed off, a shrug or frown or glance that will reveal dark grottoes of the human condition, which we will then mine for gems, precious and otherwise.

That’s kind of a harsh way to put it. How about this: Writers are whales. Writers are whales that eat by just cruising through the water and ingesting whatever kind of marine life finds itself in the whale’s path. A whale is constantly on the make, constantly looking for more krill to eat. Because whales, and writers, are constantly hungry.

My point is that I’ve been eavesdropping continuously since I got here. I now share with you some of the juiciest bits of language that I’ve gleaned from the 9,000 or so people at this conference. I never got any of the names—wham, bam, thank you krill—so the innocent, and the guilty, shall remain that way.

A line of poetry overheard at a reading: “They dragged fistfuls of dirt down our limbs.”

One poet introducing another: “She’s published a shit-ton of books.”

Another line of poetry: “I followed the cord but could not find its end.”

Another introduction of a poet: “She also has published a shit-ton of books.”

Author Michael Chabon describing himself in his twenties: “I was bouncy and callow. I gave off the moral equivalent of that new-car smell.”

Poet John Keats, as quoted by another poet: “That which is creative must create itself.”

My wife, after hearing a woman read a poem in which the only vowel used was the letter a: “Slap that gal.”

A guy with a beer in his hand, talking to a woman outside a poetry reading: “You gotta find what you wanna be in life.”

Me, about halfway through my first poetry reading at this conference: “I hate it when poets explain the poem before they read it. Just fucking read the goddamn poem, all right?”

Travel Dispatch: Pink

I’m on the rental-car shuttle sitting across from two young women who are obviously going to the same writing conference I am. the nerdy glasses are a dead giveaway. I saw a few pairs of nerdy glasses on the flight from Raleigh to Chicago, but the nerdy-glasses quotient went through the roof on the flight from Chicago to Denver. As a wearer of nerdy glasses myself—a friend of mine once said my glasses made me look like “the edgy professor”—I recognize my tribe when I see them.

One of the young women is wearing a fleece jacket emblazoned with the logo of a college in Iowa. The other young woman is Asian, but when she starts talking on her cell phone, her accent is purest midwestern. She reminds me of the Asian guy in Fargo who has dinner with Frances McDormand. The guy asks her, “So, how is old Norm son-of-a-Gunderson?” and he sounds just as bland and Norwegian as everyone else in that movie. That’s the power of the Midwest: it flattens everything in its path, even vowels.

The young Asian woman says, “I know, Daaaad, but I didn’t want a pink phone because I didn’t want to be a real girly-girl.” My wife nudges me and whispers, “This from someone with pink toenails.” I look down, and sure enough, the young woman’s toenails are painted a bright Pepto-Bismol pink. Her flip-flops are hot pink. Her glasses are a dark, plum-tinged pink. The phone, however, is steely gray.

I catalogue all this information in the time it takes to notice it, and I decide this woman is going in the blog. I briefly wonder if I should feel bad about putting her in here, even though there’s no way anyone but her father and her friend could recognize her. I conclude that as long as I protect her identity, it’s okay. She’s one of my tribe. She’d understand. She’d understaaaaand.

Travel Dispatch: Purple

The flight attendant has come over the intercom to tell us to turn off all electronic devices because we are beginning our descent into Denver. That means I can’t do freelance work, can’t write a blog entry, can’t read Pride and Prejudice on a 3.5-inch screen. Nor do I have in my possession one of those antiquated stacks of processed wood fibers with blobs of vegetable juice on them in patterns that follow a system used to convey meaning.

No, I have to content myself with spying on my fellow passengers. Fortunately, a woman in the seat just in front of me is reading a letter. The letter is handwritten in dark purple ink, on sheets of light purple paper. The page she’s reading says, “So what I want to say is . . . I think you should come back to Boulder.” She folds the letter up and puts it away. Looks like the letter writer is getting his or her wish.

I used to live in Boulder. Right after I moved there, I asked one of my coworkers what the big deal was about Boulder, why so many people considered it such a mecca. She said, “Well, the thing about Boulder is that you can find yourself here, or you can lose yourself here.” I wonder which of these paths the woman in front of me will take. Good luck to you, reader of the purple letter.

Travel Dispatch: “This Is Lao’s Time”

March 22, 11:20 p.m.: I spent several hours this evening catching up with my old friend C., whom I met sixteen years ago when we worked together here in Atlanta. (I’m old enough to have had friends for sixteen years, and young enough to be amazed by that fact.) C. and I used to do timed writings together (similar to the ones for Five-Minute Friday), and we both happen to have a pronounced hedonistic streak, so we’ve shared many an epic night in various states of altered consciousness. Then we both got married—we were groomsmen in each other’s weddings—and he moved to an outlying town, and I moved to another state, and he had a couple of kids, and we hadn’t seen each other in quite a while.

But as soon as I saw him and hugged him, the old emotions came flooding back, and all I wanted to do was sit with him and talk and talk and talk. And eat and drink, of course, for which purpose we repaired to the taproom that replaced the Jamaican restaurant in Little Five Points.

He brought his composition book along, just in case we decided to do some writing. It did my heart a world of good to see that battered green and white cardboard cover. Turns out that C.’s still writing—writing more than ever, stories and script ideas and a book outline—and he’s in a writing group, too. He’s taking this shit pretty seriously, as far as I can tell. When I found all this out, I flirted with feelings of envy and inferiority, but I quashed them with the firm resolve to instead use C. as a role model and learn from him. Sounds very noble and humble, doesn’t it? We’ll see how well I follow through.

We were about halfway through our huge stainless-steel bowl of salt-and-vinegar popcorn when C.’s phone rang. He looked at it and said, “It’s a customer . . . but I’m not gonna get it. This is my time.”

I said, “‘This is Lao’s time,’” which is something that C. used to say; it’s a line from the Bruce Lee movie Enter the Dragon. C. is the only person I know who has both a black belt in karate and a profound love of cheesy movies, and he used to quote martial-arts films at opportune moments. C. smiled at me and said, in a ridiculous approximation of Bruce Lee’s accent, “It is like a finger pointing away to the moon: don’t concentrate on the finger.”

I’m not big into martial arts or cheesy films, but I do have a degree in philosophy, and so did Bruce Lee. The warning against focusing on the finger instead of the moon comes from the Zen Buddhist tradition. The idea is that we must be careful not to focus so intently on a sign that we lose sight of the message it conveys. Bruce Lee wanted Enter the Dragon to have even more philosophical content than it had; my understanding is that the “finger pointing to the moon” line is in there entirely at his behest.

C. and I kept talking, kept eating, kept drinking, and by the end of the night I felt that I had gotten my writing partner and friend back, or that I had never lost him—or, perhaps more accurately, that I now had a new friend and partner, the man he is today, in relationship with the man I am today.

We finally called it quits around 11, and I came back to the B&B, where I got in bed and turned on the TV. It was still on the AMC channel from the night before, when I had watched an old episode of Mad Men. Now there was a movie on—and my whole body broke out in stupefied chills when I saw which movie it was: Enter the Dragon.

A tiny voice in my head was saying, What are the odds, what are the odds, but I ignored it and focused on the movie, since apparently I was supposed to see this. It was still near the beginning; Bruce Lee was sitting outside and talking to a distinguished-looking British gent who asked Bruce to enter an upcoming martial-arts tournament so he could defeat some bad guy. They talked for about a minute, and then Bruce broke off the conversation by saying, “This is Lao’s time.” I got chills again.

Bruce stood up and walked a few paces away to where his student, Lao, awaited him. Bruce said to Lao, “Kick me.” Lao tried to kick Bruce but couldn’t even touch him. Bruce said, “What was that? An exhibition? We need emotional content.” They sparred a little more, and Bruce said, “Don’t think! Feel. It is like a finger pointing away to the moon: don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory. Do you understand?” Lao nodded, and so did I.

Travel Dispatch: The Old, the New, and Ron

March 22, 11:48 a.m.: I’m drenched in powerful waves of nostalgia as I walk the streets of Inman Park, the Atlanta neighborhood where I used to live. I’m staying at a bed and breakfast in Inman Park because I love this neighborhood. For that matter, I love this town. I know my feelings on this matter are not entirely rational. Maybe it’s because Atlanta is where I was born, where I met my wife, where I got my first professional job and went back to school. Or maybe the reasons run deeper than that. When I drove in from the airport and pulled up outside the bed and breakfast where I’m staying, I took one look at it and realized that this B&B provided the template for the B&B in the dream I blogged about (“The Transvestite, the Dune Buggy, and the B&B”).

The Peach House bed and breakfast in Atlanta: backdrop for the theater of my mind.

The gracious Victorian homes and painstakingly remodeled Craftsman bungalows that I remember from ten years ago are still here. The sidewalks are still made of the same hexagonal blocks of concrete, jumbled and upended by the roots of oak trees. But then I turn a corner and see a new house that wasn’t here before, a pseudo-Victorian laid out much more squarely and rationally than the hundred-year-old homes surrounding it. On the next block is a new bungalow, semi-Craftsman in style, with paint so bright in the midday sun that I have to squint against it.

A short walk away, the Little Five Points business district is still a gathering place for hippies and punkers and rastas, tattooed girls and rockabilly boys. The biker bar, the piercing studio, and the new age store are still here. But now there’s a taproom where the Jamaican restaurant used to be, an American Apparel store where the alternative video store was, a new coffee shop next to the old community theater. I wish I could spend days rooting around here and sorting the old from the new, but I’ll only be in town for less than seventy hours, and I have freelance deadlines to meet. The new coffee shop has free WiFi, so I decide to go in there and do some work.

The coffee shop may be new, but it’s pure Little Five: shabby decor, thoroughly used furniture, a naked female mannequin wearing a necktie that depicts the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. There’s one other customer in the shop, and to my surprise, I recognize him: a homeless, mentally ill man who was a reliable fixture of this neighborhood when I lived here. I always used to see him striding swiftly down the sidewalks and haunting the little concrete park at the corner of Euclid and Moreland, a dark, lurking presence with matted dreads and a frown on his face. Occasionally I heard his angry voice raised in accusation or denunciation. Sometimes I could tell who he was yelling at; sometimes I couldn’t. He used to make me nervous, and apparently he still does. I wonder if I should leave. I say to myself, Well, here’s that Little Five flavor I was supposedly missing. Have I grown complacent in my degree-having, homeowning years? But the man seems quiescent, sitting still at the rear of the shop, staring at nothing, so I decide to stay put and see what happens.

When the man hears the unzipping of my laptop bag, he looks around at me and then away, as anyone else might. I get to work. Other customers come in; the morning becomes a normal coffee shop morning. After about an hour, a fiftyish woman with vividly hennaed hair walks to the rear and says, “Ron?” The homeless man looks up at her, and she says, “I’m only gonna eat half of my bagel. Do you want the other half?” She holds the bagel out to him.

His voice is rough, but he speaks softly as he says, “Oh, no thank you. But thank you anyway.” I never heard him talk that way when I lived here before. The woman leaves, and Ron resumes staring at nothing.

Later, I leave the coffee shop to go get some lunch. Afterward I’m walking through the little concrete park at the corner of Euclid and Moreland when I cross paths with Ron again. He looks me in the eye and nods. He never used to do that either. I nod back, and we go our separate ways.

Travel Dispatch: Vampire Literature and a Hidden Star

March 21, 10:38 a.m.: I’m on an oversold flight, waiting to depart, wondering why we’re still on the ground and why the seat next to me is empty, when a family—mom, dad, two small kids—comes trundling down the aisle. The mom sits down next to me, huffing and puffing, her upper lip glistening with sweat. She seems nice, so I ask her if they had to make a run for it.

“Oh, yeah,” she says, in a midwestern accent. “We went to the wrong gate, and we were already running late, and it’s our first time traveling with both our kids, and the little one started crying, and then I almost started up; it was crazy. But we made it.” But we maaaade it.

The plane takes off, and she tells me she’s a teacher just wrapping up spring break, which she spent taking her kids to theme parks around Orlando. “It’s a good thing we made our flight,” she says; “it wouldn’t look right for the teacher to be a day late coming back from spring break.” She asks her husband if he wants the magazine she has in her bag. He says no, so she proffers a Charlayne Harris novel and says, “Or I have some vampire literature you can read.” He turns that down too, so she digs right in.

When we begin our final descent, she says to her husband, “I hope there’s no snow on the ground when we get back.” No snoooow on the ground. I start playing amateur linguist with her accent: Michigan? Wisconsin? Probably Michigan. I ask her where she’s from that there might be snow on the ground in the third week of March, and she says, “Fort Worth, Texas. Lived there my whole life. Never seen snow like this. I’m afraid that my kids are gonna be disappointed with every single winter for the rest of their lives.” And I think, Fort Worth? Really? Reeeeally?

When the plane has landed and it’s time to get our luggage, she stands up first because she’s got the aisle seat, and I remain seated. Her pants ride down for a second, and she pulls them up almost immediately, but before she does, I get a momentary eye-level glimpse of ink on the pale skin of her lower back. It looks like part of a star. I’m sure she would have preferred that I didn’t see it, but I’m glad I saw it. I’m glad I’m alive in a time and place where teachers have tattoos. I try not to read too much into it, but I can’t help seeing that tattoo on that teacher as some sort of tiny step in a generally right direction.