Erin Passons's Blog, page 4

Fear of Flying

I have a confession: I hate flying.

This hasn’t always been the case. I used to love to fly. I flew alone for the first time when I was seventeen, on my way to study abroad in Australia. I’ll never forget the moment Sydney came into view—after eighteen hours of lonely darkness, a shape-shifting landscape with a million moving dots of light appearing through the clouds—and how mesmerized I was, how unwilling I was to look away. I decided right then and there, flying was exciting. It was freedom. Life viewed from a distance. Large chunks of earth squeezed through a tiny slice of window.

Then, 9-11 happened. Now, I hate flying more than anything. I guess many Americans feel this way. I wouldn’t know.

“Why wouldn’t you know?” Merc once asked me. “You don’t talk about it with other Americans?”

“We don’t really talk about it with each other,” I corrected her. Because we don’t, do we? Not as much as we should—or perhaps, not as much as we need to, and certainly never at airports, where the horror began.

But it’s always with us, isn’t it? The weight of it. Sliding into the bar stool beside us or standing behind us in the restroom line; matching our brisk pace on moving walkways to our next connection or slipping between the glass and the frame of movie posters depicting grinning celebrities with unnaturally white teeth.

Escape for a while, the movie star suggests.

There is no escape, argues the space in between.

For whatever reason, the jumpers weigh on my mind more than the other lives taken that day. Some nights in months not even close to September, I stay suspended between awake and asleep and envision men and women falling from towers one-hundred-and-ten floors tall, and think, my god what a horrific dilemma, death by earth or fire or smoke, and how awful, how terrifying, the choice they had to make. It’s a thought I can never unthink; a sight I can never unsee.

And isn’t it cruel the way time strips us of the best moments of being alive—our children’s milestones, our personal achievements, a stranger’s random act of kindness—but leaves forever ingrained in our brains the dark and the deranged, like that of two towers on a clear summer day, eclipsed by the shadow of an oncoming plane?

Every anniversary, we are asked never to forget, and every anniversary I think, as if that were possible.

My kids weren’t alive in 2001. My daughter was born in 2004; my son in 2006. They didn’t know me before 9-11, and therefore, from their perspective, mommy has always had trouble flying. “Who is going to hold mommy’s hand when the plane takes off?” they ask each other. My son usually does the honors—my 12-year-old son, who’s often apathetic behavior has led me to google “signs your child is a psychopath” on more than one occasion. But when we’re flying, this stoic child with the compassion of a bean weevil sits beside me, holds my hand, watches me with eyes the same blue as mine and whispers, “It’s okay, Mom, I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” repeatedly until the plane reaches its cruising altitude. (Kids are great, aren’t they? I mean, when they’re not being obnoxious turds.)

I think 9-11 is the reason why we Americans (who, as a whole—let’s be honest—have never been known for our tolerance) put up with so much crap from airport security. Can you imagine having the security protocol that we have today without a historic, tragic event having triggered it? I can’t. The outrage would be palpable. We’d have protests in the street. Hell, I can pick members from my family tree who would be added to the No Fly List immediately. “No way in Sam Hill am I taking off my snake skin boots! Y’all are just gonna have to frisk me!” “Honey, I forked out twelve bucks at the CVS for this L’Oreal face cream. I’ll throw you away before I throw it away.” “God damnit, this is America. Our founding fathers did not write the Bill of Rights just so some pissant like yourself can keep me from bringing a full-size bottle of Jack Daniels on the plane.” (My family is from the South, in case you can’t tell.)

But 9-11 did happen, and I think most of us agree that tighter security regulations were needed. I just wish the regulations were enforced in a less adversarial way; that TSA agents didn’t make us feel like we were hardened criminals getting processed to serve a life term at the local penitentiary, instead of on our way to Las Vegas to gamble away all our savings or travelling to Boston to sleep through our kid’s college graduation. I mean, is a TSA agent’s rigidity really necessary? Are they told to be that way? Is antisocial personality disorder a requirement for the job, or has the stress of working long hours with bad pay and dealing with complaining travelers every day turned them into the sour-faced enforcers of arbitrary TSA regulations that we’ve all come to know and love today?

Probably the latter, I guess. It must be a demanding life, getting paid twelve bucks an hour to ensure our flights are safe from the hazards of homemade bombs and a regular-sized shampoo bottles. They probably have to enjoy the perks where they can find them, which is why I sometimes wonder if their stringent adherence to TSA policy is less about our safety and more about getting a kick out of ordering humans to perform the most humiliating tasks in front of other humans. It must be a power trip, having the authority to ask us to remove half their garments and walk barefoot on a dirty floor through a box that scans our gross insides. (And is there any place sadder than the benches placed directly outside security? It looks like the post-surgical wing of an illegal organ operation—all those travelers scrambling to redress, fumbling with the clasps of watches, hunched over retying shoes or stretching out their arms to re-add their sweaters and coats and thread their bags back onto their shoulders—all of that picking and prodding of their self, and now they’re expected to walk away and reemerge back into their day pretending everything is fine, as if their life’s most intimate contents hadn’t just been rifled through and examined by group of sourpuss strangers.)

It would be simpler if all airports had the same security standards, but alas, it’s different everywhere you go. This leads to an excess of confusion for travelers, as well insurmountable frustration for TSA agents, I imagine. “Sir, I said, put your carry-ons in the tray.” “Ma’am, read the sign. Carry-ons go directly on the conveyor belt.” “Carry-ons go in the tray with your keys. Shoes go in the tray with your belts and coat.” “Put your phone and keys in your coat and put your coat in the tray with your spare change.” “Put your coats and shoes in separate trays, then hand your spare change to Floyd. Say hi, Floyd.” “Listen up, people! Walk through the X-ray machine with your hands down!” “Walk through with your hands at your side.” “Walk through with your right hand in, then put your right hand out, then do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around.”

Some airports, like JFK, want you to take it all off. Your shoes, your belt, the whole shebang. “Sir, is that an artificial heart? Please put it on the conveyor belt.” Whereas other places (I won’t say where) are more relaxed about TSA policy, or perhaps developed their own interpretation. “Leave your phones in your bag, unless they are expensive and uninsured.” “If you’re wearing heels or Cole Haan moccasins, please take them off.” “You can leave your laptops in your bags unless you are using Windows Vista.” “Those traveling to Omaha, Nebraska, please bypass security and get professional help immediately.” “Sir, your AK-47 must go in your carry-on, otherwise we can’t let you take it on the plane.”

More disconcerting than strict airport security is, of course, the fear that airport security wasn’t strict enough. Any time I fly these days, I play a game called, “Who could be a terrorist?” And because I pride myself on being a good Democrat, I try to assert my unsubstantiated paranoia evenly among my fellow passengers. The Melissa McCarthy-lookalike in the cat sweater was just as likely to be carrying an exploding device as, say, the almond-skinned guy in a business suit. Was the zoned-out college kid in the Weezer shirt looking too zoned-out, perhaps? As if he was acting? Maybe the kid with the finger up his nose was digging for something more insidious than boogers.

Then, of course, there’s always the chance that the plane won’t be hijacked, but simply crash due to good ole mechanical failure. Sure, statically speaking, we’re more likely to die in a car accident (According to the National Safety Council, Americans had a 1 in 114 chance of dying in a car crash, whereas they had a 1 in 9,821 chance of dying midair—and that includes hot air balloons, sky diving, and space shuttles). But those statistics don’t really calm me much. It’s not death I’m worried about (I’m a realist, I quite aware that I’ll have to buy the farm sooner or later); it’s how I die that terrifies the piss out of me. And dying in a car crash sounds more pleasant then plummeting 1000 feet in the air and crashing into the Atlantic Ocean, only to die on impact, or drown, or be devoured by a shark, or spend years on a remote island growing a beard and talking to a volleyball.

Pieces of Dresden

"Let’s go on a day trip tomorrow,” I suggest.

“Where were you thinking?” Doug asks.

“Dresden,” I reply.

“Dresden?” Doug furrows his brows. “Didn’t it get bombed to hell and back?”

“Yes, but they rebuilt everything. It looks exactly how it did before the war.”

“Really? How?”

I shrug. “They’re Germans.”

#

The next morning, Doug and I wake up early and board a train to Dresden. It’s Sunday and it’s Germany, which means the usual shops are closed, but when we walk into the Altmarkt square through the Erzgebirge Christmas pyramid, we find the Striezelmarkt awake and lively.

The Striezelmarkt was first documented back in 1434, making it one of Germany’s oldest Christmas markets.

Almost as old as the market is the bread sold here—Stollen, a dense fruitcake-type bread coated with a light dusting of powdered sugar.

Here’s a nerdy culinary fact for you: before Stollen became available in the 15th century, bakers were only allowed to use oil (not butter) during the Advent season, which was a time when all good Catholics were expected to fast. This did not sit well with a certain Saxon prince whose name I can’t remember, so let’s call him Ed. Ed wrote to the Pope in Rome and begged him to allow butter during the holiday season. Because Ed couldn’t come right out and tell the Pope that bread baked without butter tasted like bird droppings, he had to argue his case with more palatable bullet points: oil was expensive, hard to come by, and had to be made from turnips (apparently no one liked turnips back then, either). Ed’s request was rejected five times before the Pope finally caved—but only partially. The verdict: only Ed and his noble family could use butter for bread. No one else. Let the peasants eat turnip bread, in other words. Thus, Stollen was born, and although it’s not the Stollen we know today (which is probably a good thing, despite the questionable decision to add raisins to the recipe somewhere along the way), it has, nevertheless, endured throughout the centuries. Stollen is so popular, in fact, that Dresden holds a Stollenfest every year, right before Christmas. The ceremony includes bringing the Stollen via carriage to the Striezelmarkt, where it is then cut into serviceable pieces by the Great Holy Stollen Knife of Dresden (or something to that effect).

The first thing I do at Striezelmarkt is find a booth selling Stollen and hand over my Euros to the disinterested girl manning the booth. The bread is heavy, thick, and wrapped in plastic sealed with a sticker picturing the city’s favorite king, Augustus II the Strong (the “Strong” moniker deriving from the king’s favorite pastime of breaking horseshoes with his bare hands—the eighteenth century’s version of crushing beer cans, I guess).

Bread in tow, Doug and I walk around the Striezelmarkt booths and peruse their other offerings—wood ornaments, candle pyramids, nutcrackers, mulled wine, and Pflaumentoffel, which are miniature men made out of prunes. The prune men are supposed to be chimney sweeps, but they look more like satanic clowns dressed in Goodyear tires. No thanks. Still, satanic prune clowns aside, it is a relief to be back at a German Christmas market with its handmade products and authentic cuisine. It has none of the phony baloney stuff like in Prague. It’s a night and day difference.

It’s more kid-friendly, too. At the center of the market is an area devoted entirely for children, with a puppet theater, a merry-go-round, a children’s railway, a prune chimney sweep’s cottage for arts and crafts, and a bakery for kneading dough. For the second time on our trip, I begin to wish my kids were here. Something tickles at my heart when I picture Kaya on the train, his blond head bobbing up and down as he waves with a mittened hand, or London in the cottage, piecing together scraps of construction paper to make an ornament.

Then, I remember that my kids aren’t really kids anymore, and would probably spend their time here doing what they did everywhere else—that is, looking at their phones and complaining about being hungry.

There is also the very real probability that my children would die of hypothermia before we ever made it to Striezelmarkt, because neither one of them, to the best of my knowledge, have ever voluntarily worn coats. It is an ongoing battle—albeit, not one that I fight often (we live in Texas, after all)—but one fought often enough to incite rage when I think about it.

For example, it could be thirty degrees and London will walk out of the house wearing Birkenstocks and booty shorts.

“London, wear pants.”

“It’s not cold!” she’ll argue through chattering teeth.

“Put your boots on!”

“I’m fine!” she’ll insist as her toes turn blue and fall off.

“Now!”

London will let out a big huff, walk back inside, and slam the door with the kind of exaggerated indignation that can only be yielded by perpetually menstruating teenage girls.

But at least London makes an attempt to leave the house. If you can get my son moving without repeatedly threatening his life or his access to WiFi, you’re a better parent than I.

“Kaya, put your shoes on, we’re about to go.”

“Okay,” he says, not moving.

Two minutes later. “Kaya, we’re leaving. Put your shoes on.”

“Okay.” (stays still as a rock)

Minutes later. “Kaya, now!”

He looks up. “What?”

“We’re leaving!”

“We are?” He looks confused, as if I had told him that a Russian SS-20 missile was being launched from his bedroom.

“Yes. Put your shoes on!” I insist.

“Oh. Okay.”

The struggle is real.

I remember all of this, and suddenly I am okay to be here without my children.

Bad at Math

I woke up from a nightmare that I was back in 5th grade taking a math test.

The reason this is significant is because my 5th grade teacher, Ms. Griffin, divided up the class in terms of how well we did at math. Group 1 rocked it, Group 2 needed additional help. It was humiliating after every math test, she made a list of kids who underperformed, and when she called out their names, they’d have to drag their desk over to Group 2, the metal legs screeching loudly on the way to Loserville.

I never left Group 2 until Ms. Griffin decided to put me in my own special group, Group 3. She pleaded weekly with the counselor, “put Erin in the dumb-dumb classes. She doesn’t belong here.” But they couldn’t bc I tested “gifted” and thus expected to attend all advanced classes. Thus Ms. Griffin was stuck with the sole occupant of Group 3 and I was stuck sitting isolated in the front of the classroom as if my close proximity to the chalkboard would somehow make up for my shitty math genes. It never occurred to Ms. Griffin that I was worth more than a test score.

Anyway whenever I’m about to embark on something in my life that I’ve never done before, or is outside my wheelhouse, I have dreams about taking a math test in fifth grade. I suppose it’s a scar that’s never gone away.

#GroupThree4Lyfe

Killing the Black Dog

I decided to kill myself while sleeping over at a friend’s house. This was ten years ago, when I was stuck in a bad marriage and fighting the blackest wave of what has become a lifelong battle with depression.

What I remember most about that night is all at once slipping from despair into a sense of joy and relief. Befriending the darkness made me no longer afraid of it, and the promise of my impending death became a security blanket, a silent friend promising peace at last. I realized that all of life’s misadventures - from the mundane to the dreadful - I no longer had to endure. Taxes, traffic, counting calories, the unexpected arrival of delayed hospital bills,  - weren’t my problems anymore. It was like someone once said, suicide is your way of telling God, “you can’t fire me, I quit.”

Obviously, my attempt failed, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this tonight. I’m happy to report that in the years since, I’ve taken the necessary medical and therapeutic precautions to keep the black dog’s barking at bay.

Tonight I’m back at my friend’s house again, babysitting her adorable kids while she and her husband spend a night on the town.

My friend has done well for herself. Her massive home is a three-dimensional canvas of soft patterns and silk creams, testaments of her success expressed among the polished oak floors and chiseled crown molding embellishments.

But I hate it here, and I hate that I hate it here, for it’s only in this beautiful home with its high ceilings and expansive rooms that I’m confronted with the ugliness of my disease and the reality that it almost consumed me. I can be anywhere else and fake it, be at home or on the street or in another country, and act completely at ease - but not here. This house, it knows my secrets.

So I hate it here, and now that the kids are asleep, I’m alone and the silence sharpens the past, brings old ghosts into focus, and the last ten years stretches open and waves at me with a dirty hand.

Then my phone chirps with a text.

It’s my daughter. It’s a video of her singing and playing a song that she wrote. It’s grainy and she’s out of frame and her voice is drowned out by the keyboard, but it’s the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard. Her short description, “Hey Mommy, here’s the song, I love you, goodnight,” is everything I’ve ever needed, and I’m going to hold it close to my heart as I drift to sleep tonight. Thank God. Thank God I am alive to hear my daughter’s messy, beautiful song.

And I hope somewhere out there if you’re reading this and the black dog is barking for you, that someone or something reaches out to you, and tells you that are redeemable. You are loved. That you are more than one moment, more than one verse - that your life is a song, and only you can sing it.

Taking Beto to Berlin: Intro

In the interim, there was the 2018 midterm election, and for the first time in over a decade, Texas had a chance of electing a non-amphibian creature to the senate.

His name was Beto O’Rourke. He was a handsome, forty-five-year-old state congressman from El Paso, and although he had an old-fashioned, Robert Kennedy air about him, he was very much a candidate for the modern age. He yielded the power of social media like a weapon, regularly going live on Facebook from town halls or rallies or the drive-thru at Whataburger, keeping his supporters in the loop as he doggedly campaigned throughout Texas, visiting every one of its 254 counties—even the red counties in the panhandle with only five voters all named Jed.

And Beto’s campaign was unique—he didn’t accept corporate money, he avoided negative attacks, and he refused to employ pollsters or consultants.

For this and many other reasons, Texans embraced him, and never more so than in Austin. True, our city was already bluer than a tongue after downing a packet of Pop Rocks, but no politician had ever had much luck getting our city of one million stoners to step out of our live music festivals and food trailers long enough to plant campaign signs in the sun-drenched, dying brown patches we called yards.

But for Beto, we planted thousands of them—in our yards, and everywhere else. All the way down MOPAC and up William Cannon, through Round Rock and into Georgetown, Beto’s midnight blue campaign signs dominated over the spring bluebonnets and summer Turk Caps that grew beside the sizzling black pavement of our roads.

We stuck Beto stickers on our bumpers too and hung Beto banners over the 360 bridge. We wore his shirt, “Beto for Senate” on hot summer day trips to farmer’s markets and parks and paddleboat tours on Lake Travis. I bought four Beto shirts for my family and myself at a Willie Nelson benefit concert for Beto—an event attended by 55,000 of his supporters, whose applause reached an astounding roar when he appeared on stage close to midnight, his characteristic blue button-down shirt sweat-soaked under the arms. Throughout Auditorium Shores and across the lake to the bars on 6th Street and the Warehouse District, onlookers and city dwellers alike repeatedly heard the cry, “Beto, Beto, Beto!”

Even out-of-staters got in on the action. On Twitter you could see pictures of Beto signs staked to yards across the country: a Beto sign surrounded with leaves in Maine, a Beto sign staked in sand on a Florida beach. Beto’s speech that praised NFL players kneeling during the national anthem went viral. “Protest is a form of patriotism,” he argued, causing Ellen DeGeneres to tweet at him, “Come to my show.” He did. He appeared on Late Night with Stephen Colbert too. The New York Times sent a reporter to follow his campaign in east Texas. The glowing article that followed depicted the Democrat candidate as a courageous knight on a heroic crusade through the unholy land of rednecks and hillbillies. “I wish I lived in Texas so I could vote for him!” my friends on Facebook would say.

The media called it Betomania. “Can anything stop the Beto train?” one headline asked.

No, it couldn’t, I concluded, sticking my Beto pin in my black blazer before heading to work. We weren’t supposed to wear candidate gear at my office, but it was election day and I had decided that morning, to hell with it. I was ten fingers and toes in. Finally, I had placed my bet on a winning team.

I was blind, of course. We all were.

Deaf and dumb and blind and way, waaay too confident.

Were there warning signs? Sure. My grandmother used to say, God doesn’t hand you a stone without handing you a pebble first. So yeah, there were warning signs. Tons of them, everywhere; little red flags that I chose to ignore until it was too late.

First red flag: I take a barre class every morning. As a white woman living in a city of overwhelming whiteness, it is probably the whitest thing I do (even the instructors’ names were straight out of a Baby Names for White Women book: Brook, Brittany, Rebecca, Kylie, etc.). If you’ve never heard of barre, let me enlighten you: barre is like yoga if yoga involved standing on your tip-toes and clenching your butt cheeks together like you’re holding in the world’s biggest fart (they call it “tucking”). It’s supposed to give you a nice booty and increase your metabolism, but no studies have proven that it has any lasting effect other than permanently lodging your ass into your kidneys.

Over the summer and throughout the fall, I spent my mornings performing this masochistic ritual and listening to the (mostly white) women chat before and after barre class. Their conversations spanned an array of tediously trivial topics—anything from Lulu Lemon sales to gluten-free recipes to recaps of The Voice. “I thought Gwen Stefani looked amazing,” one woman would say, stretching out her chicken thin legs along the yoga mats. Another woman would add, “It’s like she hasn’t aged!” The room would pipe up in agreement, and I’d think, yeah, it’s easy not to age when you have a gazillion dollars.

Not once was the election—Beto, the blue wave, the debates, the campaign ads—ever mentioned.

Finally, before class on the first day of early voting, and before Brook or Brittney or whoever could hit the switch on our workout playlist (which somehow always included a high-speed version of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Go Back”), I shouted, “Don’t forget to vote!”

The sole black woman in the class grinned. “I already did this morning,” she said.

The other women looked confused, or else put-off. They pushed their yoga mats far away from me, and I thought, it wouldn’t be ignorance that would cost Beto the election—it would be indifference.

Second red flag: My friend Marian, a nurse who lived on the border of Louisiana and Texas, had volunteered to canvas for Beto on the Texas side. I had met Marian on Facebook after the 2016 election, and had found her to be a dedicated, passionate woman and a good friend when she wasn’t scaring me to hell and back with her dedication and passion. “I knocked on thirty doors today. What did you do?” she would post on Facebook. “I knocked on eighty doors and registered fifteen voters and I called all my reps, what the hell did you people do?” “I haven’t slept in ten days because I knock on doors all damn day and night.” “Seriously if you’re sitting on your ass worried about the midterms but you haven’t done a lick to help, then go fuck yourself, some of us are out here knocking on doors!”

Marian would privately message me and confide, “I don’t know, Erin. A lot of these people don’t even know who Beto is.”

“What do you mean?” I’d write back. “His signs are everywhere.”

“Yeah, but the signs don’t mean anything to them. These east Texas people—they’re blue-collar, you know—they wake up, go to work, come home, and go to sleep. They live paycheck to paycheck. They don’t care about the election because they don’t think the outcome applies to them.”

Third red flag: this was Texas, and Texas would be Texas. When you get a chance, look at the electoral map of Texas. It looks like a smurf head with a giant blood clot. And sure, maybe the counties that made up that blood clot (i.e. the panhandle) were sparsely populated, but there were many of them, and they added up.

Fourth red flag: polls showed Cruz in the lead. A big lead, in some cases. On the night that the New York Times conducted their poll—a poll that I hoped would prove the other polls were good-for-nothing liars—my son and I sat on the couch for hours and watched results pop up, clenching our fists when a vote came in for Cruz, shouting with glee when a vote came in for Beto. But when it was over, the results mirrored all the other polls: 51% for Cruz, 43% for O’Rourke.

Fifth red flag: my own calculations. During early voting, I—a mathematically challenged moron who hadn’t been able to help her children with math homework since they graduated first grade—became a fanatical number cruncher. I kept a spreadsheet of the early tallies from the fifty largest counties in Texas. I compared the numbers and their demographics with data from past elections. I created “if/then” scenarios and weighted equations, and spent hours toiling with statistics—but no matter how I manipulated the data, Beto was always 200,000 votes short.

I hoped I was wrong. I convinced myself that I was wrong, anyway. I told myself: my numbers didn’t reflect the new voters or swing voters, or those infuriating Libertarian voters who would hopefully shut up about slashing bureaucratic regulation on businesses long enough to take one the team (news flash, we’re a two-party system, guys). It didn’t reflect the thousands of California refugees who fled to Texas over the last two years because of our affordable housing and far superior breakfast tacos, or the dormant voters who sat out most elections but who were (hopefully) reinvigorated with Betomania.

Some counties had me worried more than others. Williamson, home to Austin’s populous but more conservative suburbs (and home to my Trump-supporting sister); El Paso, who was reliably blue, but had a historically low voter turnout; Nueces County, another county that was home to a lot of blue voters who never voted.

Tarrant County had me the most worried. I called it, “The Florida of Texas.” The Fort Worth area was predominantly middle-class and whiter than a barre class, making it swing voter central. Even Beto said, “As Tarrant goes, so does Texas.”

On election night, I sat on the edge of my couch and nervously slurped on my P. Terry’s caramel shake, watching the results roll in: Beto ahead, Beto behind, ahead, behind, ahead. Thirty-two percent of Tarrant County’s votes were in at nine o’clock, and Beto was only ahead by a slim margin. Please, suburban white people, I prayed, don’t mess this up for us.

Shortly after ten o’clock, CNN announced the projected winner of the 2018 Texas race for the United States Senate. Cruz’s reptilian grin splashed across the screen.

…

…

Have you ever been mid-sip in a sugary beverage when it suddenly tasted like ash? Have you ever felt an enormous pressure barrel into your gut, like a ten-ton roof just fell in your lap? Have you ever stood up so suddenly that stars appear, and you have to grip the corners of your couch to keep from flipping out? Have you ever witnessed firsthand the obliteration of hope when it crashes into despair?

If you haven’t, meet me some time. Come down to Texas. We’ll have a drink and I’ll tell you all about it.

In the end, Tarrant County did go for Beto (by a slim margin), but it wasn’t enough. Beto lost by 2,000 votes—exactly as my calculations had predicted.

“You should poll for a living,” Doug suggested. “You missed your calling.”

I grunted and threw my caramel shake in the trash. This was the one occasion where I’d hoped to be proven wrong.

#

The next morning, I set a bouquet of yellow roses and a Whataburger cup next to my Beto sign. I taped a piece of paper over “For Senate” that read, “For President.”

Fast-forward a month later, and the sign is still there—and my sign isn’t the only one.

I, like many Texans, have refused to let Beto go. His campaign signs still dot our yards, and his stickers still adorn our car bumpers, proudly announcing our support to any S.O.B riding our ass in traffic. Collectively, we are like a rejected suiter still infatuated with a former lover who has run away, blocked our number, and eloped with a gargoyle.

Speculations about Beto’s next move remain the talk of the town—whispers about another Beto run, perhaps for John Cornyn’s seat when that ole sad sack of horse manure retires next session (fingers crossed).

Some say Beto should run for president. Why not, they argue. He has the nation’s attention. Had the nation’s attention, rather. But he could very easily have it again.

Why can’t we just let go? Was it because we, his supporters, were sore losers? I don’t think so. Hell, we’re Democrats, we’re used to losing (I mean, if the coup de gras of election night 2016 hadn’t numbed us to defeat, then what would?) No, it was something else. I think our unwavering allegiance to Beto has less to do with letting go and more to do with holding on—holding on to the hope he had inspired in our state, in our country, and in ourselves, and the crackling energy that came with the hope. For almost a year, our sleepy red giant came to life with the promise of turning blue. My fellow Texans and I didn’t want to forget that, and we didn’t want the world to forget it either.

#

It’s the night before we leave for Europe, and my carry-on is already packed to the brim, but I decide at the last minute to add one more item.

Doug watches by the door. “Why are you bringing your Beto shirt to Berlin?” he asks. “It’s short-sleeved, for fuck’s sake.”

“I don’t care, I’m bringing it.”

Doug sighs. “You get cold standing next to the refrigerator, Erin. You’re going to freeze wearing that thing in Europe.”

“I don’t care,” I repeat. “I’ll wear it over a long-sleeved shirt.” I look up at him. “I want to bring it because when people see me wearing it, they’ll know I’m one of the good guys.”

And because I still hope, I added silently to myself. Hope for my state, hope for my country, hope for myself. And I wanted to take hope with me to Europe.

7 Years and 5 Audrey Hepburns

Hollee brought five Audrey Hepburns back from North Carolina.


On our first afternoon together in 7 years

I nailed the Audreys to her bedroom wall while

she smoked in the corner and told me how

she drove with her son and a chihuahua from Raleigh to Austin in one day,

and how America looked like a ghost town on Christmas Eve,

with six lanes of empty highway riding in from the sea to Atlanta.


I cross the Sea of Gibraltar to her kitchen, knowing

when I open the refrigerator, I’ll find her Diet Coke cans

lined up like soldiers along the door like they were 7 years before—

because there are friendships where you can wade out for miles but

remain waist-deep in shallow water,

then there are friendships where you jump in half an inch

and suddenly you’re drowning.


Last time we were together, I flew up to Cape Fear and

we drove down to Myrtle Beach and spent 2 days in the sand sucking

in our stomachs and drinking plastic cups of

orange juice and vodka from the cooler.


I remember how I fell in the ocean and didn’t stand up,

just laid there laughing in a bed of salt water, until the lifeguard appeared

and said, “ma’am you should get back on the beach until you’re sober”

and I said, “sir, I would prefer if you not call me ma’am.”


And how, at the pier, the bland twenty-something-year-old boys

bought us beer, and when we refused to share our hotel details,

they said, “You should feel lucky that young bucks like us

pay you old hags any attention.”


And how we laughed and Irish goodbyed them,

and walked a mile back to our hotel barefoot

holding our stilettos, and how we passed out on the beach

when Hollee couldn’t find the key and woke up the next morning

with sand stuck to our crow’s feet and sun tangled in our hair,

and how I laughed and said this is a very Erin-Hollee thing to do,

to book a hotel room but wake up next to the Atlantic Ocean.

And how Hollee laughed before scrambling to the nearest

vending machine to wash away the taste of sea with her trusty bottle

of sugar-free caffeine and a lit Newport cigarette.


7 years and five Audrey Hepburns later,

I told Hollee next time she drives through Atlanta and it’s

not Christmas Eve, to stop by the coke museum, they serve

diet cokes for free with the price of admission.

“Maybe we can go together,” she suggests.

“Maybe,” I agree—because we’re not spring chickens,

but it didn’t matter. we were two old hens who had found each other,

and true friendships are rare and won’t drown you

if you know how to swim—meanwhile, anywhere in America, you can

always find six lanes of empty-headed fellas ready to buy a pretty lady a beer.



-EP, 1-15-2019

This is Prague

I should have known Prague wouldn’t be my kind of scene when the Trader Joe’s checkout girl —a punk rock millennial wearing the nametag “Star”—announced it was her favorite place on earth.

“A real party town!” Star exclaimed. “Makes Austin look like Lubbock. You’re gonna love it.”

Star began listing the best bars in Prague, ignoring the economy-sized bottle of pre-menopausal multivitamins in my cart that suggested I was not in the partying stage of my life.

“There’s the Hemingway, Black Angel’s, Tretter’s—they serve dollar shots on Tuesdays—”

A laugh erupted from behind me. My 14-year-old daughter. “You should check it out, Mom. Maybe they serve shots of Metamucil.”

I ignored her and asked Star, “What about the crowds?”

Star laughed. “Oh yeah, it’s crowded.”

“Like how crowded? Like 6th Street on a Saturday night crowded, or like a Gay Pride Parade and 6th Street on a Saturday night crowded?”

“Uhm…like a Gay Pride Parade and a UT football game just let out and 6th Street on a Saturday night crowded.”

Shit. I bit my lip.

“It’s a great chance to meet new people,” Star added encouragingly.

Behind me, my daughter snickered. “Obviously, you don’t know my mom.”

#

Deafening bass pumps through the speakers, rattling the windows on the Uber ride from the Prague airport to our hotel. I press my palms to my ears and share a pained glance with Doug. This wasn’t the first time our Uber lift felt like a mobilized nightclub from hell. I decide that either our Prague Uber driver was the same guy who drove us around in Berlin, or European house-techno cranked at full volume was an EU mandate for Uber rides.

I look out the rattling window to the scenery flying past. It’s nine at night and Prague is shrouded in darkness, illuminated here and there with green and red Christmas lights tangled in trees and the soft glow from windows of cafes and restaurants, where human silhouettes bundled in winterwear trickle out from the entrances. The Uber driver stops at a light, and I note a huge, Australian flag hanging low from the balcony of what looks like a frat house but was probably a Great Moravian palace now used as a youth hostel.

Doug waves a hand in front of me, redirecting my attention. “Prague is cheaper than the other places that we’re visiting, so I got us a nicer hotel. More bang for our buck.” he screams over an auto-tuned voice repeating, sit on my face, girl, sit on my face.

“Is it a boutique hotel?” I scream back.

Doug shakes his head. “Nah, it’s a chain. Fancy schmancy, but in an old school kind of way; not ‘trendy’—so to speak.”

Doug wasn’t lying. The lobby of the Alcron Hotel sparkled with an excessive parade of flair that seemed both elegant and classless, like something Donald Trump might conjure under heavy sedation. Screens of brushed gold partially obscure its lobby; its floor a perfect grid of smooth, white tiles. Columns of dark marble dissect the space, and to the side, tall vases of oversized flower arrangements mark the entrance to the hotel’s Michelin star restaurant.

Our spacious room greets us with mirrored walls, a king-sized bed draped in gold linen and matching gold tassels hanging low over the oak bedside tables.

The Alcron Hotel may not have been the hippest hotel in town, but what it lacked in trendiness, it made up for in garish luxury.

Still, being here, in the presence of such extravagance—garish or not—makes me uneasy. “I feel like a fraud,” I tell Doug. Our house back in South Austin was filled with my parents’ hand-me-down furniture and knick-knacks from charity shops and garage sales. I bought the generic brand of everything. I lied about my kids’ ages at Supercuts to get the “12 and Under” discount. We were decidedly middle-class; even with Doug’s fly miles spent, it would take us years to pay off this trip. We didn’t belong in a place like this.

“Erin, just relax and enjoy it,” Doug advises. “We don’t have to scrimp and save on everything.”

Yeah, just wait until we file our 2018 taxes, I want to say, but think better of it. Instead, I take his advice and relax. I begin unpacking and realize in horror that I am out of clean underwear. I spend the next thirty minutes washing my undies with warm water and hotel soap in the bathroom sink. By the time I exit the bathroom (Operation Clean Underwear complete), Doug is already softy snoring away on top of the gold bedspread.

#

As it turned out, the Trump Hotel: Prague Edition is in a great location—just around the corner from Wenceslas Square and the National Museum—and in the morning, after a long, much-needed sleep, it becomes our first destination.

The late morning sun reveals Prague’s charm: rows of 19th century buildings nestled together, their pewter facades and Rococo plasterwork capped off with deerstalker roofs painted rustic red; Baroque flourishes along the trim. For the first minutes of our walk, Doug and I enjoy this grimy, faery tale city virtually alone.

Then we turn into Wenceslas Square and are instantly ejected back into a crowded, claustrophobic reality.

Bundled hordes of humanity walk to and fro, circling us in every direction, waves upon waves of them, like fish in a whirlpool with no exit. In surround sound, I hear the shrill voices of Americans (“Daaayvid, did we leave the passports in the hotel? Do we need to tayyke them with us? Daaayvid?”) and fast-talking eastern Europeans. Burly, chapped-face Russians elbow past, followed by a gaggle of Japanese teenagers staring at their phones as they walk in somehow perfect synchronization.

Doug and I don’t need to share our dismay; I feel his and he feels mine. We decide that if we’re going to enjoy Prague, we’re going to need a little help. We make a beeline to a famous, historic Czech institution across the street.

Okay, maybe Starbucks isn’t Czech or historic, but it is certainly famous, and we need the caffeine. We also knew that America’s favorite drug pusher accepts credit cards—a fact that no American travelling abroad should take for granted.

We order the usual—a caramel macchiato for him, a soy matcha green latte for me. I load up my tea with sprinkles of vanilla because the matcha served at European Starbucks contains zero sweetness, and I wasn’t about to adjust my dependency on sugar, even temporarily. Speaking of sugar, we’re waiting for our order when I happen to glance at the breakfast options—a big mistake. My mouth begins to salivate. Fact: Starbucks Prague offers far superior breakfast options than the stale bran muffins and soggy egg sandwiches offered back home. Pastries and desserts like Red velvet cheesecake and chocolate cannolis line the display case. It takes every fiber of my being to remember the fat rolls tipping over my waistline—a new development from this trip—and not take the bait.

Doug and I look for a seat, which turns out to be an impossible mission. The store is crowded with—and I almost laugh at this—the sort of Starbucks regulars that you’d find back home and possibly any other Starbucks in the world—the tired-eyed students, the put-upon businessmen and women just passing through, the two white women having a chat (UGGs included), the wannabe writer, and the other wannabe writer (no judgement, I’m one of them).

Eventually, Doug and I discover there’s a second floor, and we march up the stairs to find a table warm and snug against a corner window overlooking the square.

Sometime later, the caffeinated versions of Doug and I exit the Starbucks and follow the scent of baked pies and roasting meats to the Christmas market located in the square’s center. We join the throng of shoppers lined up among the market’s red tents and begin perusing the inventory.

It doesn’t take long to realize that we’re not in Germany or Denmark anymore. The booths are not craft-specific, not aiming to scratch a single cultural or culinary itch. Instead, each booth offers a miscellany of touristy kitsch identical to the booth before it: snow globes and magnets that bear Prague’s name in its native spelling; “Praha”; chocolate bars wrapped in pictures of vintage cars; hats and t-shirts with glitterized images of Prague’s most famous landmarks. It may be pretty, but there’s no craftmanship in the threads, no originality in the machine, no sense I’m taking a piece of Prague back home with me.

In the end, I buy chocolates for my son and a magnet for my mom—both of whom were turning out to be the easiest family members to shop for. Sidenote: the hardest? My stepfather, John. A chain-smoking, soccer-loving, working-class Brit, who is…let’s just say…“unappreciative” of anything and anyone that isn’t English. Over the course of this trip, whenever I’d determine an item looked John-ish (Zippos, beer koozies, ashtrays), I would immediately hear him in my head, objecting in his thick, barely discernable Midlands accent, and I’d put the item down. An ashtray in Berlin—“Bloody Germans!” A cigarette lighter in Copenhagen—“Bloody Danes!” A beer mug in Prague—“Bloody Eastern Europeans!” I wasn’t even about to entertain the idea of buying him a gift in France, a country that—for reasons beknows only to him—deserved the majority of his contempt (“Bloody Frogs!”).

Doug consults Google Maps for directions to the Old Town Square. His arm juts out, his finger extending and pointing past me. “That way,” he says. “Not too far. It won’t take us long.”

But it does take a long time, because walking to Old Town from Wenceslas Square means squeezing past one gazillion groups of guided walking tours, bundles of oblivious teens taking selfies, large families with straggling children, overly affectionate couples stubbornly holding hands (unwilling to break apart, at the inconvenience of other pedestrians), displaced Yankee fans, the Russian mafia, the entire 10th grade class of some high school in Missouri, and a drunk guy dressed in an oversized polar bear costume.

The crowds thicken the closer we get, bottlenecking at the Old Town entrance before spilling out into its large, medieval square. Doug and I sludge through the masses to find a space where we can stand and admire the sites. To our right, the gothic Our Lady before Tyn Church, with its eighty-seven yards high towers capped by four spires poking the cerulean sky. Next to it, the St. Nicholas Church, its creamy front façade accentuated with the blackened statues of medieval heroes.

And of course, here is where we also find the famous Astronomical Clock, a favorite hot spot of the Prague tourist scene since its debut in the 15th century. It’s here where foot traffic comes to a screeching halt. Phones are extracted from purses and pockets and pointed upward to where some beautiful girl or begrudged teenager or a combination of friends pose at a distance, grinning or not grinning under the clock’s massive, adorned eye.

It’s circumventing the space between the amateur photographers and their models that proves the most infuriating part of our day so far. Each pairing seems indisposed to haste, as if under the impression that their spot is reserved, and they can take as long as needed to capture the perfect Instagram-worthy image; to hell with everyone else.

At first, Doug and I indulge this arrogance, stopping midstride whenever a fellow tourist aimed their phone at another in our path. After a while, however, we realize that our courtesy might rob us of precious daylight—not to mention sanity—and we soon become the king and queen of photobombs.

A Christmas Market is set up nearby, and I wander over and inspect it long enough to reassure myself that it’s selling the same cheap crap as the other market. Doug takes my hand and leads me to a platform beside the Jan Hus Memorial.

At this exalted height my view of the square becomes a panoramic postcard of medieval beauty, and it’s hard not to be wooed and won over by this city that time has forgotten. Yes, the major tourist attractions are breathtaking—the churches, the museums, that god damn clock—but also amazing are the little-known constructions and edifices surrounding them: Renaissance buildings painted yellow, pink, or eggshell blue, framed with sloping Mansard roofs; the Jewish Quarter synagogues with their flying buttresses and solemn, copper copulas; cafes and businesses with columns and pilasters adorning their entrances.

I could have come here and seen only the unheralded and still been perfectly content, I realize. Because here’s what European guide books and tour groups fail to understand about Americans—that to us, any building designed without a parking lot, a public bathroom, and an ATM is before our time and thereby ancient—thus making it amazing and swoon-worthy.

I’ll admit it: I’m in awe with the beauty and splendor of medieval Prague. But I’m conscious of another emotion trickling in, one that is dark and ugly, closely resembling resentment.

Many European cities crumbled under the weight of the second world war; capitals of once great empires reduced to mausoleums of death; their landmarks and places of worship—Coventry Cathedral in Coventry, the Brühl Palace in Warsaw, the Golden Rose Synagogue in Lviv, to name a few—burned to ashes or blasted to rubble, ravaged by the insatiable thirst of an invading enemy.

And yet, Prague endured. Why?

Because Czechoslovakia, unlike Poland or the Soviet Union, never felt the one-two punch of a Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe attack. A German Junker never nosedived through Czech clouds, delivering parcels of death. Prague’s cobblestone streets never rumbled under the weight of a Panzer armada bulldozing past, firing shells into hallways of the holy or offices of the governing, demanding an entire city to surrender their history or else. No. They hadn’t needed to, because Czechoslovakia had let the Nazis in through the front door. They never put up a fight.

And this was the reward for their gutlessness—the most beautiful medieval city in Europe.

I can hear my father, ever the history professor, silently admonish me.

“That’s not fair…they were trying to be diplomatic…they didn’t want bloodshed…the Munich Pact was Chamberlain’s folly…and Prague was bombed in the end, by American forces. The Emmaus Monastery, Faust House, the Vinohrady Synagogue—you don’t see those still standing, do you?”

Still, the resentment remains, and it stays with me as Doug and I make our way out of the town square to Prague’s most famous bridge.

According to my quick Google search this morning, the Charles Bridge straddles the Vltava River, linking the Lesser Town and the Old Town. Completed in 1390 and named after Charles IV, the bridge has played a crucial role in Prague's history—first in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, when the invading Swedes were halted here, then in 1744, when the Prussians met their defeat along its Bohemian sandstone surface.

Today, however, the bridge acts not as an obstruction, but a key destination for a different sort of invader. Tourists gather here en masse, stopping to taking pictures or buy junk merchandise from the kiosks stationed at the various statues of patrons and patron saints poised along the bridge.

It’s like the scene from the Astronomical Clock, but ten times worse and in a much more confined space.

Doug and I push our way through the crowd, pausing momentarily at the statue of St. John of Nepomuk. Now, I don’t know who the hell he is, but I had also read in my aforementioned Google search that it’s customary for tourists to place a hand on St. John and make a wish. I tell Doug this, and we take turns making wishes.

As we’re leaving, I ask Doug, “What did you wish for?”

“World peace. What about you?”

I wished everyone on the bridge would fall off and disappear into the river. “Same thing,” I say.

I come to a halt when my path is suddenly obstructed by a girl walking in the other direction. This scenario has become a common one on the trip—that is, me walking a straight path and intercepting someone walking the same path but in the opposite direction, followed by several embarrassing seconds of us performing a sort of macabre dance as we try to untangle and get the hell out of each other’s way.

I decided last night while I was washing my undies (hand-washing your undies gives you a lot of time to think) that the next time this happened, I was just going to stand there and let the other person move first.

But this girl must have also been hand-washing her undies or doing something else that gave her time to think, because she doesn’t move either. So we just stay here in a standoff for what feels like centuries, looking like assholes, like the North-going Zax and the South-going Zax, neither of us willing to budge.

Finally, the girl huffs loudly and moves to my left, accidentally-on-purpose nudging my side as she passes. “Americans!” I hear her complain loudly to a friend who had walked on without her.

I flinch and reach my hand to my lips. How did she know I was American? Was I smiling too much? I glance at Doug.

“Shake it off,” he advices. He motions with a wave to keep moving.

We cross the bridge without another incident and make our way to the Church of the Infant Jesus of Prague, which for some reason sounds creepy to me, like we’ll walk in there and see a baby with a withered face dressed in priest robes passing out bread wafers and milk bottles. But my mom, when hearing Prague was on the itinerary, insisted that we go. As she tells it, when she was a child, four-hundred years ago, she lived with a group of mean nuns, and she kept an infant Jesus amulet under her pillow for protection against their fury. That amulet was on its last leg these days, so my mom requested that I bring her back something similar.

By the time we reach the creepy baby infant church, the sky is already darkening, the three hours of winter daylight in Europe already dimming to a hazy glow. The clouds dip lower and the sky drains of birds. Doug and I enter the church and gaze at the white walls and archways long enough to say we’ve been here, we’ve seen it. Yeah, the sentiment is a tad discourteous, but that is the problem with seeing too much beauty at once—the enjoyment wanes, the appreciation reaches a tipping point. I know when I was back home to live among the depressing strip malls and dollar stores and Starbucks with the sad breakfasts, that I will look back and wish I had studied every pane of stained glass, every Baroque molding of this enchanting continent—but at this moment, all I wanted to do was relax in our big hotel bathtub with its fluffy gold towels and cheap body soap disguised in little silver containers and rinse myself of the day.

Last Day In Berlin

Twenty years ago, I sat in an Adelaide pub with my best friend Merc. We both lived in Melbourne at the time, but she grew up in Adelaide and wanted to show me her hometown while there was still time, i.e. before I moved back to America for good.

We were knocking back Carlton Colds with an Aussie bloke, who announced midway through our third round, “I have a way of telling Americans apart from the rest of the lot.” He pointed at me and leaned in closer. “It’s the way you bloody buggers smile. You’re all gums. The lot of you. Gums and teeth.”

Since then I’ve been conscious of smiling abroad.

Since then Merc got married to a German man and had two kids. Last summer she and her family moved to Berlin. “You should visit us,” she suggested.

I mentioned it offhandedly to Doug. “You know, if we can ever afford it,” I said. No pressure.

In September Doug presented me with an itinerary. Europe at Christmas. “I cashed in my frequent flyer miles,” he said, winking.

I spent the next three months standing in front of a mirror, practicing a subtler smile.

#

A dark tapestry of clouds unspools over the Berlin sky. Doug, Merc, and I exit the train station five minutes past eight and head toward the Reichstag building, where Kate is waiting for us, her hands tucked in the pockets of her green puff coat, her lavender scarf wrapped tightly against her throat. “Follow me,” she says through a chatter of teeth, and we do. Although Kate started out as a random liberal American—one of many—that I friended on Facebook on the night of the 2016 election, she had, over the past two years, become a dear friend, and over the last two days, become an invaluable guide in a city that she has adopted as her own—first as an exchange student and later, like Merc, through marriage.

After passing through security, we make our way up the steps and through the columns of the Reichstag’s Neo-Baroque entrance—the only vestige leftover from the original structure—and walk up the spiral platform inside the dome. From here the city is a 360 panoramic of monuments that survived the second world war and buildings that were born from its ashes. A man’s voice speaks English through a headset in my ear, pointing out the more notable landmarks—the Abgeordnetenhaus, the Rotes Rathous, the German Chancellery, the embassies of other nations. Droplets of rain begin trickling in through the dome, but I hardly notice. The gentle, cold drizzle of Europe is different from the thunderstorms back home. In Texas, the heavens roared, and lightning scourged the sky like the hammer of God swinging down, bruising the earth. But the rain in Berlin enters and exits without such theatrics, and I’ve come to accept it as a frequent, almost pleasant, backdrop to our vacation.

Beneath the dome, a large roundtable of images and text recall the Reichstag’s history. Merc and I walk around the circle together. She takes a step, I take a step. The Weimer Republic, the 1933 fire, the Berlin blockade and the unification—she reads, I read. We share our reactions without speaking a word. That’s the beauty of our twenty-year friendship—the ability to communicate in complete silence.

Outside, the rain has let up and Kate leads us through the Tiergarten, down its rock paths dotted with German heroes immortalized in marble statues. We cross a busy intersection and exit onto a sloping hill where at least two thousand slabs of concrete lie arranged along a grid of cement tiles. The sight immediately unnerves me, although I don’t know why. “This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” Kate explains. I lift my phone to take a picture. Kate continues, “Many people misuse the memorial—you see kids playing hide and seek, adults sitting on the slabs and eating lunch or talking on their phones. Someone created a Tumblr account and posted pictures of people treating the memorial so casually, but in the photos, the slabs were replaced with images of the Jews who were murdered.” Kate pauses, then adds, “The Tumblr account is down now, but when it was up…well, it made quite an impact.”

I understood. I drop my phone back in my pocket.

The four of us walk along the slabs. Kate warns us not to break away. “It’s easy to get lost,” she says, and after a few minutes, I understood why. The concrete slabs—all different in height—have a way of swallowing you whole. Suddenly I’m deep in the center and although I can still see the people passing by outside the memorial, they seem unreachable, as if existing in a parallel world that I can see but never enter. I tell Kate how I feel. She nods. “It impacts everyone differently,” she says. “But your reaction is common, I think.”

We leave the memorial and walk toward the train station. Along the way, Kate stops and points to a line of pinkish stone wedged within the sidewalk. “These stones mark the area where the wall used to be,” she explains. We take a train to Friedrichstraße station, where Eastern Germans said goodbye to visitors going back to West Germany during the Cold War. The station hosts a permanent exhibition of that era; displaying artifacts, documents, and even a recreation of the train station before the wall fell. I buy postcards and two pieces of the Berlin wall for my children, who will never appreciate it.

“Should we go to Checkpoint Charlie?” I ask. It’s only a kilometer away.

“The exhibit that we saw is much better than Checkpoint Charlie,” Merc tells me. “Less shock value. More reality, more of a human feel to it. You don’t really need to see Checkpoint Charlie after seeing this.” I take her word for it.

For lunch, Kate suggests the Clarchens Ballhaus, a famous Berlin ballroom founded in 1913 that has, according to online reviews, managed to stay mostly unchanged—a remarkable feat in a city perpetually changing.

We dine alone. Most patrons dine beside the smart wood trim and outdoor veranda downstairs, but Herr Restaurant Owner, perhaps charmed by our enthusiasm and Kate’s fluent German, has allowed us to eat in the ballroom upstairs.

The ballroom reminds me of Miss Havisham’s mansion in Great Expectations. It is a room frozen in time. Old photos show a space splendid with excess, a prized trophy of lavish showmanship; today, its charm is purely nostalgic; its beauty derides not from what it shows but what it conceals. It’s hard not to look around and imagine: what have the large, cracked mirrors along the wall seen? Whose hands have touched the peeling red paint of the entrance doors? What famous names have waltzed among its unpolished wood floors? What conversations were held under the half-lit chandeliers drooping from the gold-trimmed ceiling—what decisions were made over a plate of roasted duck and a glass of rot wein that would, ultimately, change history?

Even Kate, our Berlin expert, is impressed.

Our waiter brings our menus. Kate had opted for the German menu and looks down to read a short blurb about the restaurant’s history. “Wow,” she says, her eyes growing wide. “Josef Goebbels used to dine here.”

I study my menu. “Where does it say that?”

Kate reviews my menu, then glances at hers again. “Hmm,” she says. “It doesn’t mention it in the English menu.”

“Well, that’s a convenient oversight,” Merc quips.

Merc leaves after lunch; she has to pick her kids up from school. We say our goodbyes outside the ballroom. Doug and I promise that we wouldn’t be late coming back to her house, which is located in the Berlin suburb of Frohnau, far north of where we are now. For dinner, we’re ordering take-out from the same quintessentially German restaurant that we enjoyed on our first night in Berlin (“Potatoes to die for,” Doug says at least once an hour).

Kate has to leave soon too, but she wants us to see one last place—a Christmas Market at Gendarmenmarkt square, in the central Mitte district of Berlin.

On the way to the train station, we stop at an entrance to a building and Kate points to gold plaques plastered in the steps. One reads, “Here lived Hanna Kramer. Born 1896. Deported in 1941. Died 1942.”

Kate explains, “You’ll see these gold plaques at the entrance of any building where someone was deported to a concentration camp and murdered.” She pauses, then adds, “Sometimes it says where they died. But sometimes it doesn’t, because the location is unknown.”

A chill comes over me and I huddle close to Doug to stay warm. I had promised myself to enjoy this holiday—this “snow globe vacation” as Doug calls it—to visit Merc and the Christmas Markets and other fun places, and not get lost in Europe’s history, as I had on past trips.

But there’s really no way around it. History lives here, it breathes here, and to try and ignore it…

Well, just look at America.

We board a train. I watch Kate holding onto the rail, standing among other Berliners, her mouth upturned in a friendly smile that nevertheless is too subtle to ever be identified as American. She seems so accumulated, so content within her space. I want to ask her if she ever sits on these trains and gets lonely for America, the way I did during my five years living abroad in Australia—if there were days when even the rich culture and the socialized healthcare couldn’t silence the siren calls from the other side of the ocean.

But the train stops, and I lose my chance. We’re suddenly off again, down the street, walking against the wind and rain, not stopping until we reach Gendarmenmarkt square. We drink mugs of gluewein and wander among the white tent shops with festive gold stars at their tips. I stop to buy a bracelet for my daughter. The gluewein enters my blood and warms me over, loosening my limbs. A young couple walks by with wide, gummy smiles and I laugh when I hear them speak English with an accent I know too well.

A man on stage begins to sing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

Kate leans in and says, “It’s interesting watching Germans sing this song. Very intense. They put their whole bodies in it. It’s like they become the song.”

A Snow Fairy in stilts enters the crowd and begins tossing out white glitter from her feather pouch. The three of us pull out our phones and take pictures. The rain falls harder and I hear children’s laughter behind me. Doug takes my hand. His palm is warm, and I nuzzle my nose against chest. His coat smells like home, and suddenly I am where I want to be—not in the past or the future, but in the present, the in-between, my feet firmly planted in the best of both worlds.

where liberal is a dirty word for change

A few weeks ago, in barre class, I overheard a woman mention she was going home to Mississippi for the holidays.

I blurted out, “I’m from Mississippi too! Which part are you from?”

“Oxford.”

I smiled. “Oh, I love Oxford. I go there because my dad is an MSU fan…”

The woman snorted. “Yeah, my husband is an MSU fan. I feel your pain.”

We laughed together, enjoying the understanding that only those who grew up around the deep-seated rivalry of Mississippi football could fully comprehend.

I didn’t pursue the conversation further, however. I knew if we talked more, I’d learn we had nothing more in common other than our place of birth and the desire to reshape our flat, white asses. I could almost picture the prayer requests that she probably had plastered on her Facebook wall, and photos of her family decked out in camouflage, smiling above the decapitated head of a deer, along with a caption that read, “First kill of the season!”

Maybe I was wrong. My dad always said, “For a liberal, you’re the most judgmental person I know.” He’s probably right. Maybe the woman had left Mississippi for the same reason I did—because she didn’t belong.

Still, the South has a way of sleeping in Southerners long after they have left it…in some more than others.

“liberal” was a dirty word

I, too, went back to Mississippi for Thanksgiving.

I spent the first evening sitting with my dad across the TV as he nodded off to sleep every few minutes.

The attack ads came on every commercial break, like clockwork.

Cindy Hyde-Smith is a disaster for Mississippi.

Mike Espy was indicted on fraud charges while serving as Clinton’s Agriculture Secretary.

Cindy Hyde-Smith voted for junk insurance policies.

Mike Espy ordered a salad at Panera Bread and asked for extra croutons.

And so on.

I did the math while my dad snored beside me. There were 49 Democrats in the Senate. 50 Republicans. If Espy pulled this off…

I flinched. Did I, in my Beto shirt, really have the nerve to hope? Especially in Mississippi, where “liberal” was a dirty word?

Liberal. That’s the trigger word in the attack ads against Espy. He’s being funded by liberal money. He’s tight with out-of-state liberals. Espy, liberal, Espy, liberal, liberal, liberal.

I know what their use of "liberal" really implies, though:

“White Mississippians! Vote liberal, and all those white flight neighborhoods you moved to, the private schools where you send your children, the churches and shopping malls that you build in the suburbs to replace the ones in the city overtaken by blacks, will all be for naught! Dear white people of Mississippi, be afraid. Be very afraid. Voting liberal means voting for change!”

But it really doesn’t, I thought. Liberal doesn’t stand for change, but embracing change. It means welcoming change with open arms instead of clenched fists. It means acknowledging that everyone deserves a slice of the American pie.

Because change is coming, whether they liked it or not. One day, they’ll run out of suburbs to hide in. The only place they’ll have to flee is across the state lines, but change will be waiting for them there too. Then what will they do?

“When you choose love, everyone wins,” I said aloud.

My dad stirred awake at the sound of my voice and looked at the TV, grimacing. “Another damn campaign ad. I’ll be so glad when this election is over,” he said, and he fell back to sleep.

you can still see the bloodstains of the wounded and dying

There’s a church in Raymond that the Confederacy turned into a makeshift hospital during the Civil War, after the Battle of Raymond went on for days. If you look at the wood floors real close, you can still see the bloodstains of the wounded and dying.

A block away from those bloodstains, I sat by a fire and placed the last pieces of a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle into place. My son stood nearby, using a wire hanger to roast marshmallows over the flames. “This feels nice,” my son said. “Nice and cozy.”

“It does,” I agreed. “Makes me wish we were back in the time before electricity, when we had to sit by a fire to keep warm.”

My son scrunched up his nose. “I don’t think I would like that very much. People who weren’t white didn’t get treated very well back then.”

They’re not treated well now, I wanted to say, but stopped myself. Liberals liked to choke the sentiment out a statement until the words couldn’t breathe; to hell with the good intention underneath. Let empathy win tonight, I thought. My son had the rest of life to understand his privilege.

a bit flustered

The next day, I slipped on my Beto shirt and snuck away to Oxford with my mom and kids.

We ate lunch at City Grocery, a swanky restaurant in the square that served southern-style cuisine with a showy flare. The moment we entered, my daughter said, “Wow, I feel like I’m at a Trump rally.” I knew what she meant. Almost 40% of Mississippi’s population was African-American, but none of them were eating lunch that day at City Grocery in Oxford.

“Yeah, and I’m sure everyone here has been to a rally,” I said.

We were walking to our table when a woman suddenly waved at me. “I love your Beto shirt!” she said, giving me the thumbs-up.

“Thanks,” I said, a bit flustered, and for the first time, I regretted turning my back on the woman in my barre class.

I was Emmett Till’s killer. I was the ink on Faulkner’s page.

After lunch, we drove to William Faulkner’s house and walked the paths behind Rowan Oak. The air was cold, not like the icy cold they had up north, but a chilling, shiftless cold that spread across the red clay forests like a lost traveler searching, searching for a way home.

My son left my side and darted down a hill until he came to a dried-up riverbed. His hands gripped a tree branch, and he lifted himself up and began swinging in the air, his legs flying into a dusty sky where trees trembled and leaves of burnt orange and blood red rained down around him.

I watched until a gust of wind wrapped my hair around my eyes and roared in my ears, and for a moment,

(the South has a way of sleeping in Southerners)

I was no longer in Mississippi.

(long after they have left it)

I was Mississippi.

(in some more than others)

I was Emmett Till’s killer. I was the ink on Faulkner’s page. I was the broken wheel on a pioneer caravan traveling down the Natchez Trace. I was the gun driving the Choctaw brave west. I was Hurricane Camille grinding her teeth into the coast, ripping houses from the homed and streets from the homeless. I was the blood stains on the church floors that never went away and the ghosts of war that marched up and down the highway, holding signs that said, it’s about heritage, not hate. I was the driver who saw the signs and looked away. I was my father asleep and my children awaking. I was my son’s shaky legs swinging upward into the silvery sky and falling back among the changing leaves, and like the leaves, I was changing and Mississippi was changing too—morphing from color to color, every hue more beautiful and holy than the last.

November 5, 2018

In the past two years, how many of you have…

Donated when you didn’t have money?

Volunteered when you didn’t have time?

Drove across county lines?

Hitched your wagon to another state’s campaign?

Pounded pavement in the rain?

Had uncomfortable conversations with strangers?

Text/phone-banked in the free hours of your existence?

Took the path of most resistance?

Marched when it was too hot or too cold?

Marched sick or when you were in pain?

Stuck a sign in your yard, to hell what the neighbors say?

Called your representatives when you were afraid,

butterflies in your stomach?


How many of you never gave up,

despite the poll results,

despite the pundits’ thoughts,

despite “lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate”

scrawled on every voting booth

in every town redder than Mars,

despite the new wounds and the old scars –

how many of you saw this war as your lone peace,

at night when the beast was asleep,

and the only sound was a nation crying?


Whatever happens tomorrow, you are the sea to shining to sea.

You are the brave knight. You are the Valkyrie.