Where the Fellers Chew Tobaccy...*

If you count the circles on a tree stump, you can tell how old it was when it died.

In 1879, Ulysses S. Grant arrived in Japan on the penultimate leg of a tour around the world. On June 22, he wrote, "At the request of Governor Utsumi Tadakatsu Mrs. Grant and I each planted a tree in the Nagasaki park I hope that both trees may prosper, grow large, live long, and in their growth, prosperity and long life be emblematic of the future of Japan." He visited several cities throughout Japan, then sailed across the Pacific to San Francisco. There, he reminisced about his early days in the military, when he was stationed in the west. On his journey home to Illinois, he allowed rumors to circulate that he would run for a third presidential term.

Later that year, Gov. Utsumi updated Grant on affairs of state since his visit. His letter also included a mention of that tree: "It gives me the greatest pleasure to inform you that the Banyan tree planted by Mrs Grant and yourself, is growing fast and is in a most flourishing condition. The monument is erected near the middle of the group of trees, with the inscription engraved, after your autograph, and especial care will be taken that the monument may endure for myriads of years. I beg to enclose herewith, a lithographic copy of the inscription on the monument."

The tree survived for sixty six years, one month, and two and a half weeks.

* "Back in Nagasaki"

Nightmares

This is my nightmare.

During my last semester of library school, I took a technology class that was supposed to be one of the actual practical classes of that phase of my education. The instructor was a new hire. The class eventually learned that she had left a tenured position and moved half-way across the country to take a year-long appointment in the hopes that the department would eventually hire her on the tenure track. Two weeks before the semester began, she moved to New England and bought a house located about an hour, by train, outside of the city. Then, she proceeded to have the worst semester of her entire life.

In the early hours of the morning of the first day of class, she learned that her sister “had been killed.” Not “died.” “Had been killed.” Her phrasing suggested a trauma, although none of us in the class wanted to ask about specifics. Needless to say, she missed the first day of class (which, since the class only met once a week, meant that we started out a week behind schedule.). This trauma was probably directly responsible for some of her problems for the rest of the semester.

As the semester progressed, she became physically ill and missed two more classes. When she attended class, she was constantly on the verge of a total emotional meltdown. I’m pretty certain that she was crying once or twice. I sat at the back of the class, so couldn’t see very well, but her body language suggested as such. The class became increasingly worried, then hostile, as her ability to teach (and we did wonder if she actually did have a grasp of the subject matter) deteriorated. Most of the class spoke either to their “advisors,” other instructors, or the dean, uncertain of how to handle an instructor who did not seem to know her subject, and who was clearly in the those of a breakdown.

The administration failed to respond to our complaints until the entire class revolted. Instead, we were told that the faculty and administration was aware of her emotional distress, but wouldn’t offer help because it wasn’t their business. One student said that one of her instructors said that all of the faculty were sitting back waiting for our instructor to self-destruct. This suggested to me that she was also isolated within a faculty that had little compassion for her.

Not, of course, that we the class were brimming with empathy for her. Instead, we were pissed that the $3000 per semester hour that we were paying (yeah, we were all big suckers, given our earning potential after graduation) to get an instructor who didn't seem to know her subject and whose personal life had become so disastrous that she was unable to teach.

Eventually, the class forced an administrator to sit in on the last two classes, and the six students who attended the final class were ones who desperately wanted to fill out negative evaluations. She was not asked back for the next semester, let alone the next year, or for a tenure-track position.

Her experience is my nightmare. That I will have moved across country, leaving a fairly comfortable situation, just before the start of the semester, get sick (as I did earlier this year after a big move), alienate all of my students, and be fired for the spring semester. I know that this is irrational, but still, I worry.

My other nightmare comes from my fear of repeating the social situation of That Place. I went to That Place wanting to become part of the community, to make friends, to contribute to life there, and to learn everything that I could from the job. Heck, I even hung pictures on the wall and set out tchotchkes. I went to parties. I joined co-workers on their Friday after-work drink. I volunteered for projects at work.

Instead, my job was reduced to the point that a volunteer replaced me. I was treated like the "Strange," the New Vagina, unfucked by the local men and therefore a threat to the local women. I was told, to my face, that historians don’t know how to research and that getting a PhD in the humanities is easy (that from two people who did not have to write a thesis for their master’s degree, but I digress into bitterness). I’m terrified that the same will happen again when I move to the Zoo.

Now, both of these nightmares are like any ordinary nightmare. They represent fragments of experience floating just on the surface of my subconscious, and are put together by my overly paranoid brain to create a narrative of disaster. The fact that they are based on observed or experienced events only makes my brain tell me that they aren’t just figments.

You see, because of that second experience, at least, I moved here, to the middle of nowhere, with no hopes or expectations. I decided to consider being here a period of exile, during which I would become very quiet and plot my next move. Now, my next move has come to pass; but I seem to be an expert at raining on my own parade.

My problem with the Zoo is that I do have hopes for it; and I have, over the past decade, learned to hate hope. Hope has become a thing with its wings plucked off and crushed by the side of the highway. Hope is roadkill. My Human once said that I wasn’t so much cynical as disappointed; and he was right [yes, Human, I said that you were right!] . My nightmares are the reason that I’m afraid to hope.

I reall must find a better way to cope with good news and possibility.

Moving and moving

When my grandfather died, and my aunt found the trunk of letters from him to my granmother, my aunt also unearthed photos from my grandfather's side of the family. Among those photos was a picture of a little girl, maybe about 10 years old, who came from the strain of the family that migrated from somewhere in France to somewhere in Canada, and finally into the United States through Michigan and Ohio. Although the photo is black-and-white, I imagine her skin to be olive-toned because her hair is a mass of tight, natural curls and her features suggest a heretofore unmentioned Semitic gene in the Bluestocking family pool. Indeed, she in some ways looks exactly as my aunt did, minus the curly hair, when she was about that age.

Is this girl directly related to me? I wondered. How? Why does she look so, so, so not-Northern European? Were there Jews in the family? Or, perhaps, Gypsies? I want to beleive Gypsies, because that might be a poetic, biologically-deterministic, explanation of my life for these past few years.

As a small child, my father says, my brother and I used to play "moving." We would gather our toys into one corner of our room, then methodically move them to another corner of the room. I actually have no memory of this game, although I have about a million memories from the first three years of my life that constantly amaze my mother with their accuracy. Nevertheless, I am inclined to believe that my brother and I played this game because our family moved a total of seven times in my first nine years of life.

My dad was in the service, but he and my mother moved far less freuqenly during his time in the service than we did during those first nine years of my life. I was born on a base in West Texas, but my dad, facing a tour as chief of military police in Saigon after Tet, with a small daughter, a newborn son, and a wife in the throes of postpartum depression, resigned his commission. He took a job as a civilian employee of the Navy, investigating "defectors" and "draft dodgers," and conducting background checks on applicants for admission to Officer Candidate School. That brought us to Minnesota.

We moved twice in Minnesota, then moved to Iowa when my dad transferred to another governmental bureaucractic office. That office then transferred him to Louisiana, where we first lived on one side of the river from New Orleans, then on the other. My grandparents, my father's in-laws, lived around the corner from us in the second location, which contributed to the last move, to Texas.

I once asked my dad, "why Texas?" The "of all places" was implied. "Well," he said. "I heard your brother say that he wanted to go to the 'turlit.' He sounded just like a Y'at. I wasn't going to let my kids become Y'ats."

"So Texas was better?" I asked. After all, doesn't common knowlege dictate that any type of a southern accent, without regard to specific local variance, will automatically lower your I.Q. by at least twenty points? Plus, as far as being a "y'at" was concerned, a redneck's a redneck, wherever you are.

"Then, there was your grandmother," he said. "We were grateful for all that you grandparents did for us, watching your brother when your mother went back to work after he was born and babysitting ya'll so much; but, GOD!, your grandmother would not mind her own damn business. Texas was just far enough away for reasonable visits on holidays, but not close enough for her to meddle."

That, I believed. The woman has to be in charge, and stirs shit when she isn't. She has this uncanny ability to turn my own mother into a ten year old within about fifteen minutes, which does nothing for the already screwed up dynamics of our family. So, having Ole Ola Mae a seven hour drive away was a wise choice on my dad's part.

Then, my dad got serious. We moved to Texas, he said, because "people in New Orleans were so goddamn backwards."

Again, I asked "Texas was better?" Actually, I think my dad was right on this one to some tiny degree, regardless of the redneck-rule, which doesn't say much for Louisiana. I later discovered, to my undying horror, that we had lived in David Duke's district in New Orleans, while it was his district. Of course, my parents now live in Tom DeLay's district. (Oops! make that former district!) Mercifully, my parents may have voted for Nixon, but they thought Duke and DeLay were evil incarnate.

So, we moved to Texas, in the middle of a school year, and there I stayed for the next 25 years. Naturally, as an adult, I moved out of their house and into four different apartments; but moving from one apartment to another, in the same city, is not really a huge change. I knew that even then.

Mostly, I spent 25 years plotting my liberation from Texas. Indeed, my machinations consumed so much of my time that I didn't actually get around to escaping until 2001. Now, although I haven't lived in Texas since then, I still claim it as a nebulous sort of "home," as in "where I came from" rather than "where I currently live and plan to stay for a while."

I haven't had a home "where I currently live and plan to stay for a while" since 2001. You might even argue that I didn't before then, what with all of my plotting to leave. Nevertheless, since leaving Texas, nowhere has felt as like "home" as Texas did when I lived there. By "home" I mean where you are part of the place, whether you love it or hate it, where you give a real good goddamn about what happens there, and where you have groups of people who give a real good goddamn about what happens to you.

Since 2001, I have stayed in a lot of places. I have lived in two mid-western states and two New England states, and have had had seven different addresses. I don't count extended stays in motels, of which there have been many (an average of two weeks between each different address). Indeed, the places that have felt most like a home have been hotel rooms, because they are so familiar in their sameness, and My Human's house, because it was the most consistent place that I stayed, although only for weekends over a two year period and because it was and extension and expression of him. His home, like the hotels, were never bone-deep mine, nor could it ever be. Both were just familiar for me.

Now, I'm into this moving fray again. I'm packing everything up, and hiring movers, trying to find a new place, and just going through the whole emotional and psychological ordeal of placing all of my worldly belongings into the hands of strangers. I have no future address, and my current one is now temporary, not really mine any longer. I begin to wonder if I shouldn't just buy a Winnebago and live out of that.

Still, what I really want, and for which I am so deathly afraid to hope, is to have a home, wherever that home might be.

I just have to stay in one place long enough.