Rush’s Roll the Bones Helped Me Envision Life After Middle School

Rush’s Roll the Bones Helped Me Envision Life After Middle School

In late 1991, the USSR was dissolving, everyone was talking about Jeffrey Dahmer and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and I had just started seventh grade at a small Christian middle-and-high school in the American Midwest. And the Canadian progressive rock band Rush released Roll the Bones, which became a large part of my personal soundtrack for that school year.

At that time, long before the era of MP3s, I supplemented my musical enjoyment with the bounty offered by the public library’s cassette selection. That’s where I found Roll the Bones. I’d heard of Rush but was not familiar with their music—the nearest classic rock radio station did not come in well. I checked out Roll the Bones and listened to it over and over, entranced. When the cassette was due, I copied it. I can still remember how the songs sounded at high-speed dubbing. I did not know what progressive rock was. I did not know about Rush’s extensive back catalog. I did not know about the stereotype that “girls don’t listen to Rush.”

All of the songs on Roll the Bones revolve around ideas of luck, chance, risk, and adventure, expressed through gaming metaphors. Since I hadn’t heard many themed albums, I wondered if the band had a gambling obsession. The lyrics invited listeners to eschew complacency, take calculated risks, and pursue their dreams. I absorbed the message but, at age 13, I was not ready to take risks.

I had braces. Glasses too, though I rarely wore them and would soon convince my parents to let me get contact lenses. I wore my hair very long and straight when perms were still the trend. I was sensitive about my looks. At my new school, I looked around and found no place for me. Other kids, especially older students, made fun of my clothes and my taste in music. I got good grades and interacted with a few people I liked, but most of the time I sought refuge in my inner world. I felt little need for the approval of my peers. That’s not to say rejection did not hurt.

Drummer Neil Peart, who wrote most of the band’s lyrics, discussed the concept of “wild cards” in an interview conducted at the shooting of the title track’s music video, which features a dancing, card-playing skeleton. Peart explained that most of us do ridiculous things as teenagers but somehow survive. Like the characters in the album’s opening track, “Dreamline,” young people believe they are immortal. For musicians and those with artistic temperaments, he said, that phase may last longer.

Our school library displayed a collection of pamphlets proclaiming the dangers of rock music, citing the lyrics and lifestyles of mainly “hair metal” musicians. The tracts were obviously meant to dissuade students from listening to the musicians mentioned, but a few of us greedily passed them around, snickering at the alarmist tone and memorizing the lyrics. Though I did not note the omission at the time, Rush was never mentioned. I would later learn the pamphlets had no reason to mention Rush. Rush’s lyrics were philosophical and intelligent, and their lifestyles did not invite scandal.

I listened to the glamorous heavy metal bands of the era and enjoyed them. But though I did not take the stuffy pamphlets seriously, the truth was that I had my own scruples about their lyrics. Some of them were aggressively misogynistic, and I had grown progressively more uneasy with them. Rush was a welcome change, as were other bands I’d soon grow to love, such as Kansas and Metallica. To me, Rush was the “cool adult,” an intellectual and steadying presence that could still rock. In comparison, many of the hair bands looked like perpetual teenagers, and their lyrics about “partying” were perplexing and alienating to me, a wallflower. Rush’s music embodied who I wanted to be.

My favorite song on the album was “Bravado.” Its lyrics allude to the legend of Icarus, which fascinated me as a mythology fanatic. But in the myth, Icarus perished when his wings burned. “Bravado” instead proclaims there is life after failure, over an emotional melody and complex drumming.

Years later, I heard singer Geddy Lee say in an interview with a Toronto radio station that “Bravado” was one of his favorite songs. He said the same about other songs too, so I took his remarks as those of someone who loves his art and strongly believes in it. You don’t get the type of longevity Rush has enjoyed without a level of consummate professionalism. But one live performance from 2004, in my opinion, demonstrated a love for the song that cannot be feigned. In that video, all three musicians appear to lose themselves in their musicianship. They exhibit a mix of passion and professionalism I seek to embody too.

When I was in seventh grade, listening to music outside the Top 40 was not considered cool. Of course, 1991 was the year the grunge and alternative movements blew a hole in conformity culture, but they took their time chugging toward the small-town Midwest.

Aside from consuming off-trend music, I voraciously inhaled books, watched a lot of Nickelodeon, and created a frenzy of art projects using paint, chalk pastel, and colored pencil. In groups, I was the quiet one. People assumed—or said out loud—that I had nothing to say. This was true. I did not have much to add to the conversations around me. But I was sensitive to implications that this reticence made me boring. My inner world was not boring, but its entrances were guarded, their location secret to protect that world from invasion.

I signed my own yearbook. Three times, using three different styles of handwriting. A few students left nice comments, but most, including some I considered friends, used nicknames others had made for me and which I disliked. They had taken some part of me they found amusing and built the rest of me around it, then crushed their version of my identity into neat little nicknames. So I added my own words to the yearbook pages, addressing myself the way I wished others would address me.

It took decades, but I did eventually build a life for myself with people who love me, doing things I am somewhat good at, working toward that ideal of passion and professionalism. In the tour book for Roll the Bones, Neil Peart wrote “the essence of these songs is: if there’s a chance, you might as well take it. … A random universe doesn’t have to be futile; we can change the odds, load the dice, and roll again.” Like Icarus, we again attempt a flight to the sun. But we learn from past catastrophes and implement safety features into our wings.

I found Roll the Bones decades ago through what most people would interpret as chance. Neil Peart stated that pop music is “eminently disposable” and that a good album “should come along at the right time in [one’s] life,” and then one moves on to a new soundtrack.

I often wonder what my life would have been like with a different soundtrack. Rush’s song “Subdivisions” was released in 1982, but I first heard it as an adult. The song critiques the culture of conformity often found in insular societies such as suburbs and small towns. (In fact, a major thematic element in earlier Rush songs revolves around pursuing the freedom to walk one’s individual path.) What if “Subdivisions” had been part of my seventh-grade soundtrack? Would it have helped me name and better manage the sense of discontent that persistently gnawed at my insides?

The first song on Roll the Bones, “Dreamline,” aligned with my desire to leave my hometown and the deep-down conviction that I would do so. The song describes a magical road to adventure I would someday follow. Roll the Bones enriched my life during a tumultuous year and assured me the path forward could be better if I was willing to improve my odds and take the chances when they arose.

Half-Done Haft-Seen

Half-Done Haft-Seen

Partly in an attempt to expose my daughter to half of her heritage, and partly because I like it, I have assembled a haft-seen for Norouz for the last two years. Norouz is the Persian new year, celebrated by Iranians and Central Asians on the Spring Equinox. A haft-seen is a collection of at least seven (haft) objects beginning with the Persian letter seen, arranged in a decorative way.

Five of the objects proved easy for me: serkeh (vinegar), seeb (apple), seer (garlic), somagh (sumac), and sekkeh (coins). Other options for the haft-seen include sabzeh (sprouts), samanu (wheat germ pudding), senjed (oleaster), and sonbol (hyacinth). Last year, I struggled to choose two of those four to complete our haft-seen display. I didn’t, and still don’t, know what oleaster is and how to find it. I don’t know how to make samanu. I didn’t know where to find cut hyacinths. The sprouts featured in a haft-seen display are traditionally wheat germ, but I did not know where to find the seeds—besides, plants hate me.

I settled for a tiny potted succulent to represent the sabzeh. I went to the craft store and bought artificial hyacinths. I added other items that do not begin with seen but traditionally accompany the display: a candle, painted eggs (mine were wooden), sweets, and a book of Persian poetry. Bowls of live goldfish often adorn a haft-seen display; I filled a bowl with goldfish crackers.

While I felt my haft-seen was only half-done since the sabzeh was a succulent instead of sprouts and the hyacinths and goldfish were fake, I enjoyed looking at it those early spring days. Our Norouz was a mixed one.

My husband was born in a majority-Tajik region of what is now Uzbekistan, and later moved to Tajikistan, but both countries formed part of the USSR when he was growing up. Tajiks celebrated Norouz then but did not keep many of the old traditions. Therefore, my husband barely knows them. In recent years though, I have spotted numerous photos of haft-seen displays from Tajikistan on social media. As a white American enthusiast of Persian culture, I barely know the holiday traditions either, beyond brief explanations given during college Persian courses. I have been trying to learn more.

This year, I pulled out the green tablecloth, fake hyacinths, wooden eggs, and fancy little dishes to set the haft-seen once more. I placed apples and garlic on mirrored plates. I filled bowls with chocolate eggs and coins. Because last year’s succulent died many months ago, I bought a spearmint-sprouting kit to represent the sabzeh.

But the spearmint did not grow even though I followed all the instructions. Plants still hate me. So I went to the craft store again and bought a mat of plastic grass. I cleaned a translucent green glass tumbler that once held a candle, filled it with black yarn to emulate soil, placed the “grass” on top of the “soil,” and set it in the center of the table. Maybe someday I will learn to sprout sabzeh and make samanu, but until then I will enjoy my half-done haft-seen.

The Nightingales of Wilde and Hafez

The Nightingales of Wilde and Hafez

Oscar Wilde had the collected works of Hafez in his prison library. Hafez was a beloved fourteenth-century Persian poet who wrote ghazals about ecstasy, faith, and love, whether carnal or spiritual. But what did Wilde learn from Hafez?

In “The Rose and the Nightingale,” Wilde tells the story of a philosophy student who wants to give his beloved a red rose. The tree under his window has been damaged by the winter’s frost and has no flowers to give. The nightingale, moved by the student’s longing, pleads with the tree to give the student a rose. The tree replies that there is only one way it can produce a red rose: the nightingale must sing all night with her breast against a thorn so that her blood flows into the tree. She agrees, but  her sacrifice is in vain. The beloved spurns the gift. The student, who was never a true lover, tosses the rose into the street. The only lover in the story was the nightingale, and she is now dead.

Wilde must have come across numerous references to nightingales and roses in Hafez’s poetry. In Persian tradition, the nightingale takes the rose as his beloved and sings to her. In Farid ud-Din Attar’s masterpiece, The Conference of the Birds, the nightingale initially refuses to leave his rose to seek the Simorgh. A ghazal in Hafez’s Divan begins with a nightingale nourishing a rose with his or her blood. Other ghazals by Hafez portray the nightingale as the quintessential lover. Did Wilde, like so many others, weep at these verses?

The beloved of the nightingale is not named in Wilde’s story; we know only that the nightingale sings of love. She wrongly assumes the student has the same capacity for love that she does. For her, love is more important than life, and she gives her life so that the student’s love can be fulfilled. It is a mercy that she never learns that her sacrifice was in vain. Wilde’s nightingale story, while exquisite, is cynical compared to those of Hafez. That could have been the result of persecution Wilde endured or his sardonic personality.

A subspecies of nightingale that is common in Iran is called Luscinia megarhynchos hafizi—surely named after the poet who described them with such love and delicacy. This small unassuming bird is also called Luscinia megarhynchos golzii. Gol is the Persian word for flower or, more specifically, rose. Lover and lover united at last through the magic of language.

January 6, 2021

“Holy crap!” I involuntarily exclaimed.

“What?” My eight-year-old ran to where I sat, on the sofa that doubled as my office chair. “What holy crap?”

I hesitated. It’s history, right? Why shouldn’t she see?

I pointed to my laptop, resting on the high table that served as my desk. On the screen, swarming figures in red baseball caps pounded at the windows of the US Capitol building with fists, poles, and stolen riot shields. They had broken one window—the reason for the “holy crap”—and were climbing inside.

As I searched for more detailed coverage, I explained to my daughter what was happening. She already knew about the election and how much I had hoped to get rid of our loathsome forty-fifth president, and she was especially enthusiastic about Kamala Harris. But now I explained the election denial, the rally, and the march.

The last time I had checked the news, half an hour earlier, protesters were still arguing with Capitol police across the barricades. The idea that they could break into the building had never crossed my mind. It didn’t seem possible. If the Capitol building was not secure, what place is?

Over the next several days, I debated whether or not to watch the inauguration live. As this was the era of Covid, my daughter was attending school virtually, in the same room where I sat and worked. Much of the ceremony would occur over her lunchtime. What if someone got through the heavy security and assassinated someone? How would I handle the possibility of my daughter witnessing this?

I finally decided I was going to watch the inauguration no matter what, and I would find a way to deal with whatever my daughter saw. We made M&M cookies for the occasion, and nothing happened to derail the events. My daughter’s teacher must have had the same concerns. She showed the class parts of the ceremony later that week instead of on January 20.

My Life in a Filing Cabinet

My Life in a Filing Cabinet

Apt. Stuff

We live in a two-bedroom apartment not far from the center of Tallahassee. I love the location, and I love being able to call the leasing office when something goes wrong instead of having to find a plumber or electrician myself and pay for the repairs. I have better things to do than repair a basement, an activity I see friends discussing on social media. And I dislike yard work and gardening.

But as the economy spirals out of control and rents go up, it occurs to me that owning the structure in which we sleep would have its advantages.

Bank Stuff

We chose to keep our money in a small local bank because I heard the bigger banks invest in oil companies and I didn’t want to be connected to any of that, however indirectly. Shunning big banks is easier than tracing the origins of the components of my laptop, or even my clothes.

The role money plays in our society feels fundamentally wrong—a hulking colossus leading armies into war, a wraith lurking under the bed, whispering myriad ways you can lose everything, a hellhound howling that the world will end without fossil fuels.

Job Stuff

I first saw the term “ghostwriter” in Amy Tan’s novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter, which features a main character in that profession. I filed that information away in my mind as something I could someday do for a living, as I’d always written and I loved the alchemy of mixing and cooking common words until they transformed into a verbal elixir. It would not matter whether the ideas and final product were my own or not. The word “ghostwriter” haunted the margins of my imagination for years until, after a move, I decided I’d rather be self-employed than seek a new job.

For my first ghostwriting assignment, I wrote 30,000 words in three weeks for an embarrassingly low fee and greedily watched the reviews roll in on Goodreads and Amazon. And because I had edited friends’ writing for years, I acquired some training and added copy and line editing to my professional lineup.

At this point in my life, I wonder if working with words is the only thing I can ever do—if so, that is fine with me. I require autonomy. And I become antsy if I don’t have a piece of writing to craft, metabolize, and perfect.

Notes – conferences, research

In 2005, I attended the annual Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) conference as a grad student, having finished with my classes but working on my master’s thesis far from the university campus. Though my colleagues were always friendly to me and I enjoyed their company, I never felt I was one of them, for reasons I still don’t fully understand. The conference weekend I caught a terrible cold and found myself further isolated, enveloped in a fog of the strongest medicine I could find (which was preferable to having to blow my nose throughout the lectures). Starstruck by the presence of scholars whose works had been assigned to me in class, I was further baffled at hearing my fellow students address them by their first names, which made me feel much younger than my twenty-six years.

In 2020 and 2021, I attended the conferences virtually, even though I am neither a student, nor a public-sector ethnomusicologist, nor an academic. Again and again, as disembodied faces familiar and unfamiliar described their research onscreen, using vocabulary I barely remembered (and some that was new to me—when did people start saying “monograph” instead of “book”?), I questioned whether I belonged there. I respect these people more than words can express and find their work fascinating. But academia exudes a bloodlessness that has always stopped me cold no matter from which angle I approach. I want to write about music out of love.

I renewed my SEM membership last week.

Old Writing

In college I printed several poems onto colorful paper. When typing them up, I experimented with fonts, including the much-lampooned papyrus, and decorative borders. I have destroyed dozens—no, hundreds!—of poems over the years. Sometimes I wish I had kept them. Then I remind myself that the well is not dry.

Spiritual & Persian

Languages came to me easily when I was young. My talent in detecting patterns was enhanced by undergraduate courses in linguistics. I studied four different languages in college and later picked up more. While I became proficient in more than one, I never considered myself fluent in any. I took two and a half years of Persian—mainly out of love for the mystical poetry—and married a Tajik nearly a decade later.

Grammatical patterns still come easily, but my memory no longer retains vocabulary and case endings. I wish it did, so I didn’t have to work so hard to master the Tajik dialect of Persian—not to mention Bosnian, which is still important for me for research purposes, and keeping my proficiency in Spanish.

Because I came to Persian through mystical poetry and Bosnian through religious music, both languages are inextricably tied to spirituality in my mind. But they are living languages, endlessly shifting as I struggle to keep up. 

My mind constantly races with everything I need to do and everything I would like to do, commanding me to do this or that. Perhaps this is why I cannot sit for more than two minutes to meditate. My spiritual guide gave me meditation exercises over five years ago, and I still can’t get past “I’m sitting still and doing nothing.” Presence eludes me.

Magazines

I am a sensory avoider when it comes to sound and touch. I am a glutton when it comes to scent. Every time I discard or give away a magazine, I cut out the perfume samples to enjoy later. Sadly, most of my favorite perfumes are expensive, so I make do with small sample vials purchased on eBay. After applying them, I spend the rest of the day raptly sniffing my wrists. People mention having a “signature scent”—I’d never be able to choose just one.

Birth Certs, etc.

My birth certificate is egg-yolk yellow, half the size of a standard page, proclaiming my arrival in a small town in northern Indiana. His is pea green, watermarked with interconnected pale blue and pink zig-zagging lines and stylized flowers. The Cyrillic script denotes a village in a majority-Tajik region in what is now Uzbekistan and what was then the USSR.

We grew up a world apart and met in the middle.

Our daughter has a Czech birth certificate on plain white paper and a Consular Report of Birth Abroad of a US citizen.

Dr. Stuff

My daughter’s measurements at birth were recorded in grams and centimeters, which I converted into pounds and inches for my family back home. I have since forgotten those numbers, as well as her exact time of birth. Sometimes doubt pricks my mind, reminding me that those are details a good mother should remember. What I do recall is lying next to her at the hospital, gazing at her closed newborn eyelids and thinking they resembled perfect brushstrokes.

A’s Art

At four years old, my daughter, Arvaneh, filled several whole papers with azure crayon. I snapped a photo of her series of masterworks and posted it on social media next to Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome. Her later pieces featured blue edges and a lime green center. She started adding swathes of magenta, orange, and black among the blue sea, and moved on to a red epoch, covering squares of white cardboard in red marker. Inflated balloons proved an irresistible canvas, as her markers squeaked over the latex. Marker came off the balloons and stained her hands and mouth. Luckily for me, it was the type that washed out of clothing and carpet.

Arvaneh continued her artistic pursuits with pen, pencil, chalk, and paint. Two years after her blue series, she used a black pen to fill a paper with tiny circles. Her work reminded me of Yayoi Kusama’s infinity nets, so I pulled up some of Kusama’s pieces on the laptop to show her. I pointed out the similarities between Kusama’s infinity nets and Arvaneh’s drawing. We looked at photos of the artist, in her polka-dotted dresses and bobbed wigs, in front of her paintings and infinity mirror rooms.

My daughter pointed at the pieces she liked and asked to see more. She particularly wished to see photos of Kusama’s exhibition All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, a mirrored hall filled with glowing black and yellow gourds. Arvaneh liked the pumpkins because they had “spots like snakes.” Another favorite was a vivid yellow painting with black stripes from the My Eternal Soul series.

Yayoi Kusama’s mother used to rip up her drawings. Kusama learned to sketch fast, pouring her hallucinations onto the page, so that she could finish before her mother found her and destroyed her work.

Photos

Human eyes gazing out from a wall unsettle me, so I don’t display many photos at home. Most of them reside on my computer, backed up by an external hard drive, where I can click through years of memories anytime I please

From Baby

My daughter once made me a book. On the cover, “Lori in Space” is written in orange crayon on a teal background. Under the text, an orange rocket flies past white astral bodies and a blue and green Earth. There are three pages inside, all held together with cellophane tape, in which I visit Jupiter and come home, wearing an orange dress to match my rocket. Many words are misspelled, or have some letters backwards or upside down. Judging from the patterns in the crayon wax, she colored some of the pages on top of a jigsaw puzzle. 

School Stuff

For most of my daughter’s Pre-K school year, she did not speak—at school that is; she spoke normally at home. It’s possible she hadn’t spoken in preschool the previous year, either—we couldn’t be sure because that was in Prague and there was a language barrier. We did know that the teachers in her Prague preschool were frustrated that she didn’t behave like the other kids, and we, her fish-out-of-water foreigner first-time parents, struggled along the fuzzy border of “They’re professionals; they know what they’re doing; what do we know?” and “Something’s not right.” We should have taken her out.

But her Florida Pre-K teacher was the one who told us she wasn’t speaking. When my daughter and I entered a new space, and even some familiar places, I felt her freeze up beside me, her smile stiff.

“Selective mutism” was the terminology I found after hours of frantic Googling. The teacher agreed and referred us to a therapy center that would work with our budget and lack of insurance (the reality of many in the US). Its clients had left a medley of one-star and five-star reviews. I went through the process of signing her up. By then, my daughter had begun communicating at school in whispers, jerky nods, and short answers. The endless labyrinth of phone calls and paperwork plus a lifelong distrust of shrinks all combined to make me freak out and postpone pushing for an appointment. But my daughter started speaking and playing with friends, a development I credit entirely to her teacher, with whom we still keep in touch five years later.

School Work

Every few weeks my daughter brings home certificates proclaiming she is “college-bound”—probably an encouragement for many students who are catching up with their class curricula after the lengthy Covid-19 disruption. These colorful cardstock announcements are piling up, however, and I am contemplating artwork. Should I cut them up to create a collage or mosaic that would honor her accomplishments in a way that takes up less space? For now, I allow the papers to accumulate. They will, in time, tell me what form they should take. They include many art awards, after all—and I admit I am prouder of these accolades than the ones for math and reading.

Art

I’ve kept a few sketches I’m proud of from high school and beyond, mostly pencil, both colored and the standard charcoal. I also have a few pages of notes from a college class. Not because the lectures were interesting—they most definitely were not—but because I filled the margins with intricate ink doodles I cannot bear to throw away.

Old Misc. Cards

My last university ID card was issued shortly after 9/11. Before heading to the office to obtain it, I read in the student newspaper that those in charge were requiring Muslim women to remove their headscarves for the photos. I arrived ready to debate my rights. Unbeknownst to me, others had already performed that labor, and the rule had been lifted. In the photo, I wear a look of defiance, a slow-ebbing anticipation of a fight that never came.

Cards

My grandparents passed years ago, but I kept several birthday and holiday cards they sent to me, filled with their handwriting, their time, their love. Now I save my parents’ cards because they too are mortal.

Voting Stuff

When I was living in Fort Myers, Florida, I visited a meeting of the Lee County Democrats to see what I could do to help our country in an unstable time. This was in 2019, so many of us were frustrated by the previous year’s gubernatorial and senate election and worried about the coming year’s presidential election.

Turned out the sole purpose of the group was to get people registered to vote, by going door-to-door or calling them. Though I knew the importance of getting out the vote, I was skeptical. I hate getting phone calls from strangers. I hate getting text messages from strangers. I didn’t believe anyone else felt differently. But evidently the rest of the group thought calling people would do some good, so I took a list and reluctantly picked up the phone. Many were old numbers, and many did not answer. I don’t know if anyone I talked to registered to vote.

That same year, we moved to Tallahassee, and I breathed a sigh of guilt-laden relief as I told the group I was leaving. I had failed—I never retrieved the courage to call more people on my list, to express my doubts about the viability of the group’s strategy, and to bow out upon finding that their method of activism was incompatible with my personality and skill set.

I Am Weirdly Uncomfortable Listening to music Around Others

Music has been an immense passion of mine since I was very young. I don’t love all music; I have strong likes and dislikes. But I prefer listening to music I love alone, especially if it has lyrics.

Listening to my favorite songs and artists in the company of others makes me physically, mentally, and emotionally uncomfortable. I’ve noticed this for decades, and I’ve also noticed that others seem to lack these scruples, but it’s taken me years to figure out why. I still don’t completely understand, but I have uncovered a few possible reasons for my compulsions:

First, I do not want anyone to mock music I like in my vicinity in any way, or to sing along with it. Mocking or singing along to a song I truly love will kill the song for me, and I will struggle (and likely prove unable) to disentangle the song from the offender. If the person does a fabulous job, they might actually improve my experience of the song, but this is rare and mostly exclusive to some of my former ethnomusicology colleagues. Asking inane questions about the lyrics (or, in the case of Blue Öyster Cult, saying the word “cowbell”) also annoys me to no end. TV commercials and political campaigns have killed many a song, too.

Second, what I like is a huge part of who I am. But any given piece is just part of the picture, and I don’t want anyone to conflate it with me in its—or my—entirety. I do now realize not everyone thinks that way, but that knowledge doesn’t help much. Perhaps I am also reluctant to give people such an intimate window into my consciousness. Sharing music I love with a person is a sign of trust.

Conversely, what I dislike is also part of who I am, which means I can be quite loud about my opinions—heaven forbid someone should think I am a person who likes, say, Ed Sheeran, Blake Shelton, or the Jonas Brothers.

10/10/2023

As hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians pointlessly die on the other side of the Earth (over 1,700 at this time), I sit on the couch and struggle to finish Witchfinder General. The movie, starring the late Vincent Price, came highly recommended, but I cannot remember by whom or why. My blood freezes as the stony-faced actors watch women and a few men burn to death and asphyxiate at the end of a rope. It’s only a movie; these are only actors. But these events have happened thousands of times, continue to happen today.

I switch to another browser during the torture scenes, unable to watch, but I hear Price’s Matthew Hopkins say to his crony “You’re doing God’s work.”

Under a Washington Post article covering the earthquake near Herat, Afghanistan, which killed nearly three thousand people, dozens of commenters wrote things like “kind of on empty regarding sympathy for anything that happens in Afghanistan,” and “these stone-age monsters” deserved it.

The bodies of innocents absorb the hate. The bodies of innocents become sacrificial lambs on the altar of geopolitics and capitalism.

The witchfinder dies at the end of the movie, but not before the man who kills him is driven mad by his rage, and his latest victim by her trauma and terror.

The real Matthew Hopkins died at home of natural causes after ordering the deaths of up to three hundred women. In real life, over five thousand people have died violently in the past week.

Those who’ve shown compassion—for Palestinian schoolchildren, for Israeli festival-goers, for Afghan artisans, for Central Americans fleeing political violence resulting from foreign intervention, for food-insecure Americans, for the accused “witches” of Salem, East Anglia, and Bamberg—are dearer to me for their rarity.

My Crumbling Maps

My Crumbling Maps

I was there.

I know I was.

I remember hearing—by the automated voice on the bus or tram, perhaps—the name of that neighborhood. Often. I must have been there. But I don’t remember, and Google maps shows me nothing to spark specific memories.

*             *             *

I’ve always been fascinated by maps. I can stare at them for hours, even just a plan of the London Underground.

Before digital maps became ubiquitous, I carried a paper map into every new city I visited. Sometimes, I went for a walk and purposely got lost. Then I opened my trusty map, oriented myself within its big-picture grid of streets and landmarks, and easily found my way.

The two apartments I rented during my summer in Valencia, Spain, are marked with x’s on a map that has fallen apart. Its golden-orange background carries the places I once visited after work and on weekends as I squeezed every second of my free time to drink in the sun-drenched life of the city.

I don’t remember the hostels I slept in during my brief visits to Barcelona, Madrid, and Sevilla (the hotel in Granada I do remember, because the cheap hostels were full, forcing me to splurge on a cozy room with its own bathroom), but there they are, circled on each city’s map along with the myriad attractions I had planned to visit.

Likewise, my hostel and apartment in Sarajevo are both circled, along with the office where my friends worked.

I love digital maps as well because I can use the street view function to drop into any charted location worldwide. I can “walk” my little yellow avatar along the Baltic coast, a Japanese garden, or a mountain slope in New Zealand, allowing the real-world hours to course over me as I virtually explore.

*             *             *

I’ve fallen deeply in love with many cities and countries. When this happens, I absorb their geographies into my body, charting roads and rivers onto my bones and veins and transforming my being into a living map. Valencia, Sarajevo, and Prague exist within me, as does my university campus in southern Indiana. This way, I can close my eyes and return to a place whenever I wish.

But I cannot hold them all.

I can no longer name all of the stops along the metro and tram routes I traversed regularly over my eight years in Prague, including the stop on the Green Line with the long escalator and a much-loved gelato shop. Between my own explorations and my job, I visited nearly every part of the city and could mentally follow every route I took. But now I struggle to picture once-familiar neighborhoods, parks, and much-frequented shops.

I draw a blank on some of my favorite sites from Indiana University. Which building housed the music archives where I worked, and what was the path I took to get there? Was the library to the north or south? It also rankles me that my weakened mental map has been further undermined by the ethnomusicology department’s multiple-block move, away from the old house whose smell and atmosphere I absorbed through hours of seminars, conversation, and quiet study.

I have lost the ability to walk the dry riverbed that arches through Valencia. The interconnected parks where I rested in the sun with my sketchbook after work, now a brilliant green blank.

I cannot remember whether I walked east or west to get to the Sarajevan old town. Gaps widen in my memories of strolls along the river. I know my apartment was between two bakeries, where I indulged in chocolate pastries, but which grocery store did I shop at and where was it?

I close my eyes and grope my way down the shadowed streets of all my best-loved geographies, bumping up against now-unfamiliar landmarks. My body–map is failing me, and I must resort to paper and screens. 

If I lose a place within myself or forget a landmark, does it even matter that I was there? I worry that my wanderings have slipped the realm of reality, that my connections to beloved places are lost if my mind no longer produces pictures and maps.

I Want to Make Your Book the Best It Can Be

Are you an indie author or publisher who needs help with your book? I am currently available to edit (see the different levels of editing I do below) fiction or nonfiction. I love working on many types of nonfiction, from music and the arts to climate and history. The odder the topic, the better! As for fiction, I can edit fantasy, “soft” sci-fi, and YA. My passion is books, and I’d love to make your book the best it can be.

Rewriting: Have you written something but don’t like the way it flows? Or do you need more detail? I can rewrite your work, adding realistic dialog, sensory details, transitions, or extra scenes. This may also be the route you wish to take if you are not a native English speaker but want to sound like one.

Line Editing: Terms for editing processes vary, but I define line editing as going through your work and making your sentences and paragraphs sing. I will make sure the dialog in your story is realistic, eliminate “filler” words, and use verbs and sensory descriptions that draw the reader in.

Copy Editing: Copy editing, sometimes styled as copyediting, involves correcting grammar, spelling, and punctuation, as well as making sure your style remains consistent throughout your work. I am most familiar with Chicago Manual of Style and APA, but I can work with other style guides.

Proofreading: Proofreading is the very LAST step of the process, when the book is ready to go but just needs one final set of eyes before it is published. If you are using a traditional publisher, they will have their own proofreader, but if you are self-publishing you will need to hire one yourself. Again, this is the very LAST step, when you are not intending to change any text and only need to clean up the few typos and spelling errors that might have slipped through earlier processes or been introduced through revisions.

If you would like to discuss a ghostwriting or editing project, please use the contact form and I will get back to you promptly.

Panera Fed Me When I Was Broke

I don’t remember the first time I visited Panera Bread, but the last time was probably when my dad taught my daughter to blow the wrappers off straws, to her delight and my chagrin.

When I was a cash-strapped grad student, Panera launched a thin-crust pizza called a Crispani. The coupon waiting in my mailbox invited me to try a Crispani for free. As I was leaving the apartment complex’s mail room, I saw more coupons in the waste basket. Who would throw away free pizza? I shook my head and grabbed seven more coupons, all of which I used before the expiration date.

Years later, I heard that Panera’s founder, Ron Shaich, started a pay-what-you-want program in five Panera cafes. Citing the fact that one in six Americans lived in food-insecure households, Shaich called his initiative a “test of humanity.” Despite Shaich’s good intentions and a promising start, with most people paying the suggested price and many paying more, humanity ultimately failed the test as people who were not needy took advantage of the restaurant’s generosity. Living overseas at the time and in a better position financially, I hoped I would have passed.

In 2017, I moved back to the US with my family. Despite his PhD and numerous qualifications, my husband had a hard time finding a job. I worked as a freelancer, but I kept my rates low at first while I gained experience and confidence. Anxiety and nausea filled me whenever I checked my bank account or the prices at the grocery store, but there were upsides: my daughter had a wonderful pre-K teacher and was thriving.

For several months, Panera donated their unsold food to her school on Monday mornings—huge boxes of sliced and unsliced bread, cookies, muffins, pastries, and bagels. Families were invited to take as much as we wanted through what I now realize was their Day-End Dough-Nation program. Though there were times I worried we wouldn’t be able to pay the utility bills, we always had gourmet bread, bear claws, and cookies painted to look like tulips. I loved being able to give my daughter those whimsical pink and yellow cookies.

By adding a can of chopped tomatoes and some basil from the garden to a wheel of Panera’s focaccia, I could make bruschetta. A tub of cream cheese from Dollar Tree along with our weekly supply of Panera bagels, and breakfast was taken care of.

But though I struggled financially, I was never truly “broke.” My parents were just a phone call away. I didn’t like to ask for help, but I knew I could if I needed to, and I wasn’t alone. What happens to those who are alone and forgotten?

I read of parents who dilute the baby’s formula with water. They hold back tears as they dress for second jobs, bone tired. They know that poor nutrition stunts a child’s brain, but they’ll be on the streets if rent is late again. Meanwhile, at least a third of the food in the US is wasted. Red tape and logistical issues prevent most restaurants and grocery stores from donating food even if they want to. That fact makes it even more special when a chain like Panera finds a way to get unsold food to those who need it, giving hungry children not only whole-grain bread but also fancy tulip cookies.