Ships

My sophomore year of college I had to write a play for my Introduction to Creative Writing class. It was titled “Ships” and explored that middle ground between friendships and relationships, that crush/attraction/fascination that seems to embody most high school and early college romances. The characters were named Alex, Sam, Nic, Morgan, Jody, and Taylor and I made a note that “they can be played as either gender, or preferably as neither gender and just as.” Most of the scenes were snip bits from the melodrama of shifting and unbalanced affections amongst the characters. The dialogue could have been (and much of it was) copied word for word from the melodrama of my life at that point, none of which feels very relevant to my life at this point now. But there is a quieter scene between Nic and Sam that I return to throughout the play and that I found myself connecting with as I returned to it today.

* * *

(Lights down on stage right and up on Nic stage left. S/he is lying on his/her back on a blanket, looking up at the sky. Sam enters.)

SAM: Are you going to share some of that pillow?

(Nic moves over, they lay down together, both heads on one pillow, on top of one blanket, but still managing to only brush limbs.)

SAM: Do you know any constellations?

NIC: Yeah. A few. My dad and I used to stand outside together in our yard when the stars were bright and he would point out different ones. I can always pick out Orion. See those three bright stars in a line? That’s his belt. And then the line of fainter stars coming off the side? That’s a sword. Wait never mind, I think it’s supposed to be a knife ‘cause he’s a hunter. And he’s supposed to be holding a bow and arrow, but I can only ever pick out the bright star that makes the tip of the arrow.

SAM: Hot damn, I see it. I wonder who came up with that. Like couldn’t you just connect those dots any which way and draw a dog or a naked lady or something?

NIC: Once when I was little I was looking at the stars with my Dad and we were lying down in the grass and I had just gotten Oscar then and she was laying on my stomach purring up a storm. I found three kind of faint lines of stars on the horizon and named them after her whiskers.

SAM: Can you still find them?

NIC: I always look for it, but I’ve never been able to find it again. Sometimes I think I might see it, but I don’t have any one to verify it.

* * *

(Lights back up on stage left—Sam and Nic in similar pose from before looking at the sky.)

SAM: Nic! I just saw a shooting star! I’ve never seen a shooting star.

NIC: Are you sure it wasn’t a satellite?

SAM: No. I’ve seen a satellite before.

NIC: Well, I don’t know. I thought everyone had seen a shooting star before too.

SAM: I can’t believe I just saw a shooting star.

NIC: Did you make a wish?

SAM: No. Should I?

NIC: I’m not really convinced it makes any difference.

SAM: I just saw another one! Did you see it?

NIC: No, but I bet there’ll be more. It’s probably the beginning of a meteor shower or something

SAM: If the stars all start falling at once. Do everyone’s wishes all come true at the same time?

NIC: Like I said, I don’t really believe in it to begin with.

* * *

(Lights up on stage left. Back to Sam and Nic.)

SAM: The stars were never really that good growing up. The smog only allowed the very brightest to shine through. You were lucky if you could see the moon. But you didn’t need moonlight. The streetlamps seemed to illuminate the whole world. It’s funny. I always thought that everything seemed so big in the city, with so many buildings and cars and people and that when I came to college out here in the country it would feel so small. And it does feel small during the day. I mean, I can walk three blocks and cover the whole down town. But at night, lying here like this, I look up and it is so huge—bigger than I could ever have imagined while I was in the city.

* * *

(Stage left. Sam and Nic.)

NIC: Sometimes it’s comforting to feel so small, so insignificant. You know? Like you can fuck up and everything is still going to continue and the sky is still going to be there with its dots of light. And you can look up at the three stars that make Orion’s belt and be like “I know you. You are so fuckin’ far away—farther than I can even comprehend, and I know you.” I spent a semester in Australia and even there I could find Orion in the sky. It was upside-down, because I was in the southern hemisphere, but even upside-down or backwards, I could still step outside at night and see him.

* * *

(Lights switch to stage left, Sam and Nic.)

SAM: What’s that light, near the horizon? It’s moving but it’s just sort of shifting around in its own little area. It can’t be a star.

NIC: I think it must be the light at the top of sailboat. They probably just dropped anchor out there to sleep and the waves are rocking the boat, so the light is rocking too.

SAM: Yeah, I can kind of make out a shape under it.

NIC: We should probably go to sleep to.

SAM: I’ve never slept on a dock before. I’m afraid I’ll roll off.

NIC: You’ll be fine.

a beautiful campaign

(an Italian Sonnet)

“I think you are a beautiful campaign,”
he said to us, this boy from Italy,
as we explained how we had come to be—
an Italian, German, and American,
three girls who’d met as students on exchange

and under an Australian sun had schemed
to trade goodbye for the next lazy season,
our plan traced eagerly into the sand.

We fashioned a collective map of homes
and homes away from homes with open doors
connected by a path to be explored.
First marks on where we’d soon return alone:
a city, small for Germany, near Koln,
a farm on shores of Lake Superior,
a white Stucco in Brecsia, (north of Florence).
Then Lisbon, Canada, Sicily, Rome...

Land circled. Money saved, to execute.
We named our first adventure with a date
and talked of it so often it became
a mantra: Summer 2002.
That summer we would meet in Bonn and prove
the smallness of the world by conquering
Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, Italia

(at least the north), and Salzburg too.

He said campaign and we assumed he meant
“a company,” or group, not like the sort
of military term once used in France,
translated “open country”: Armies spent
the winter in the comfort of their quarters
and in the summer took to the campagne.

mapping minneapolis

I’d wanted a good map of the cities for awhile. “The Cities” are the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Growing up, my family would make weekend trips down to the cities from our farm in rural northern Wisconsin. We would usually stay with the Beyer’s. Bill was my dad’s best friend from college. His family lived in a little stucco house on a fairly quiet street in St. Paul, just a few blocks away from the Lutheran Seminary my dad had entered after college and subsequently dropped out of. This is the piece of the cities I know best—the soft blues and cream of their combined living room and dining room, the little wooden bench that my mom and I would share pulled up to one end of dining room table, the bread and cheese and wine at every meal, the little staircase leading down to the basement a multi-purpose guest room slash t.v. room slash office slash library with bookshelves living every wall and big red cushions that could fold into couches or be pulled to create beds on the floor.

I can also remember the apartment where my older brother Chris and his wife Honey lived for three years, furnished with a lot of the same furniture they have now, but cramped into two bedrooms. I vaguely remember the two other apartments he lived in with friends before he and Honey got together and the dorm room he had at the U where I got high for the first time.

When we drive in the cities, there are bits of familiarity—the water tower near Beyer’s that marks St. Anthony park, the neighborhood my parent’s lived in when they were first married, and where my mom’s parent’s had lived when returned from eighteen years of missionary work in Papua New Guinea, the white pillow of the metro dome breaking up the skyline, the two towers of square apartment buildings with squares of primary colors where it seems there should be windows, another architectural experiment filled with poor people, I remember being told, the flashing pink sign for the Gay 90s that marked the existence of gay people, even though I later learned it wasn’t actually that gay.

More recently, I have traveled up to the cites from Chicago with my girlfriend Sarah. Her parents live thirty miles west of the cities, where farmland blends into suburbia. We drive into the city to meet up with her sister or friends from high school. We mainly hang out in uptown. From the dreadlocks and tattoos and mismatched clothes sported by the people on the street and filling the bars, I imagine it’s the Greenwich Village of the cites, although I’ve never actually been to Greenwich, just seen it described in books and movies.

Just two months ago, Cory, my best friend from high school, moved to Minneapolis. We talk on the phone and she tells me of the coffee shops she frequents and the bike ride she has started to take every night to the lake to sit and write and think.

The cities exist in my head only in pieces. A house, an apartment, a storefront, a story from my Grandma Dale that she would walk everyday from the hospital where she was in nursing school to the lake to swim. But I don’t know where the hospital is and I don’t know in what direction she had to walk to get to the lake. Unlike Bayfield, surrounded by Lake Superior, and Chicago, pushed up against Lake Michigan, the Twin Cities don’t have one huge body of water to rest against. Instead there is a river that snakes through the cites and over a dozen small lakes scattered through out.

Last Friday I rode up to the cities with Sarah in her beat up little teal green car. I told her, if we cut over into Minnesota at LaCrosse instead of taking the interstate, we can drive up along the river. Our little detour made the trip almost two hours longer, but it was one I would take again. There was something about following the flow of water instead of the flow of traffic that felt right. Even though I knew I couldn’t trust the river to run in a straight direction, I knew that this river cut through the cities, and following it would take us there.

A day later, after getting drinks with Sarah’s oldest sister Vic, sleeping in at her parent’s house, and then coming back into town to buy a bike map and split a pizza, Sarah dropped me off at the airport. I flew back to Chicago, leaving Sarah and her car behind. Ever since we had started dating, just over a year ago, I had known that Sarah would be moving back. She had done her undergrad in Chicago and then stayed on an extra year when she was invited into a MBA program. She had been counting the days until she could leave the big city for her smaller one before we had even met.

I took the map out this morning. I laid it on the floor. I stared at it, attempting to commit it to memory, starting with the blue line of the river and blobs of the lakes. I took out my address book. I wrote down the address for Beyer’s and the Chris and Honey’s old address. I texted Cory and asked her what her address was. I wrote down other places I wanted to look up: Bryant Lake Bowl, Northwestern Hospital, Luther Seminary. Then I went online to Google maps. I typed in an address or business name and it would bring up the map, a green arrow marking where two families sat around the table and passed a bowl of pasta, where Chris and I played darts on the porch and drank Apricot Ale, where Cory and I lay on navy blue sheets and dreamed about our futures, where Sarah and I kissed on the New Year, where Grandma Dale learned to check for a pulse, where my Dad had given up on the church. One by one I committed each intersection to memory and then returned to the map on the floor with a brown marker, drawing an X and a name.

I imagine Cory’s bike ride to the lake. I imagine Grandma’s walk to the same lake. I note that uptown is actually south of downtown. Everything makes more sense. I’m eager to make more Xs by digging up the old addresses of apartments and houses where my family has lived. I’m curious about the future, the Xs for homes that have yet to be discovered.