BOSTON, BUT it was really Cambridge, because I was there for a year thinking I’d go deeper down the tracks of arts and learning, and took out a 50,000 dollar loan with three clicks of the mouse—a special deal just for chumps like me, who still believed in the promise of higher education at the highest peaks.
I got the degree but I am not even sure where I placed the paperwork and the program I attended is now defunct—arts in education, a relic from the past—all the notes I took on consciousness and liberation, growing mold in the basement.
I used to sing the body electric of Greene, Arendt, Freire, Lightfoot, Duckworth, and Dewey, the imagination as the final frontier of freedom. How we studied the moon in journals that traced its wax and wane, just so we could link it all back to Piaget and the child’s proclivity toward sense-making on her own terms.
Who else would let me write about autobiography as a political stance in those days, unless I had trekked in my brown four-door Honda to the eastern coast, where I first experienced a ferocious “nor’easter” and also met several time travelers on campus who, of course, wore trench coats!
I was soaring with anxiety in those days before I turned thirty. On the steps of the nightclub at midnight on my birthday, I remember asking my friend if life would ever feel like it was getting easier?
My dear friend, older than me by a few years, assured me that the answer was no, but she also taught me the pleasures of ambling and smelling the many flowers along the way, and ordering ice cream every day from the shop where the counter folk finally memorized my order: mint chocolate chip.
I remember the listening chambers and the steps that led up to the grand libraries and the ones that led to the basement bars where men in cozy wool sweaters waxed poetic about pedagogies of the oppressed to former school teachers who’d signed up for radical reformation.
I thought I might become a professor one day, so I listened on occasion to these sermons on the mount.
But I was more interested in Clifford, the vagabond of a guy with the bulbous nose and a dragon’s mouth of fiery breath who leaned against the window outside the quaint cafe that sold amazing raspberry muffins, where most of the students in the ed school went when the must and dust of the old library disturbed our lungs.
That’s where I met Michael, who was so skinny that everyone thought he had a drug problem but was afraid to tell me! He smoked a lot of weed but he was just skinny and pale by nature!
Ours was a counter affair.
I asked for muffins and lattes, he handed me these treats like I was a dignitary or mystic.
Who doesn’t fall a tiny bit in love with their baristas all throughout a lifetime?
Michael had a long beard and a twinkle in his eyes and he professed his love for zines and obscure poetry so of course, that was an invitation to his attic bedroom.
Michael lived in a small town just outside of Boston in an old purple Victorian mansion with a lush garden and it’s there where I hid after I’d secured my master’s degree—too stunned to drive all the way home without knowing first what I’d given up to get here.
That summer was full of floor picnics and sleeping in late and borrowing the Pantene shampoo that belonged to the woman who owned the house and who tolerated me because Michael was a dear friend of her husband’s but why was I staying there for so long and did I live there now?
Michael and I talked vaguely in the sunshine about the tsunami that had torn through villages halfway across the world. We talked about his mom, who disappeared one day with a Harley gang. We talked about his love of lava lamps and antique pencils, his obsession with the poet Ira Cohen in Brooklyn, and his collection of wayward poets who’d moved to Providence. Did I want to take a day trip there to hear some live poetry?
I am not sure what I learned about art or education that year, but I learned how to manage my fears after a surprise rash in my crotch made me feel like a sinner for sleeping with men I’d met on dating apps. That was before I met Michael, of course, and I confused his cocoon for protection.
Michael performed in a noise rock band—I had no idea the group was kind of famous—Sunburned Hand of the Man—I went to hear them play a few times, and spent many long hours in a random house full of secondhand furniture that reeked of cigarette smoke, listening to them rehearse while sipping on warm beers out of cans.
A little part of me knew I didn’t belong anywhere near these guys but the biggest lie I told myself was to keep trying.
The program I signed up for that year no longer exists—dissolved like the other dreams of that decade—into thin air and waves of I don’t care. I still speak to some of the friends I met that year—poets and artists and filmmakers making art against all odds—I suppose that I am, too, in my own way, insisting on my voice as a wave in the ocean.
Michael and I produced one tiny book that summer: Birds of Prey, typed on the old green typewriter guarded fiercely by a black cat that lived in the attic with him.
I’m also realizing how much we’re all in recovery—and recovering from—the collapsing of dreams we were living in as solid as houses that then crumbled—leaving us intellectually homeless, perhaps, and spitting stories from the past.
That guy Clifford who stood in front of the bakery cafe had memorized the bible and when we talked, he’d try to prove it to me, even though I didn’t ask, by asking himself a trivia question and then, in the same breath, answering it. He was always right!
Jesus stayed close to Clifford as he wandered the country—he said he’d come by train from California.
I eventually drove home at the end of that summer and got a place in Wicker Park. Michael packed me six American Spirits, the yellow-pack kind, and I smoked them all at one rest stop, where I remember calling him and crying that I wanted to come back.
But we both knew I didn’t really want to return to Boston. I just didn’t know yet how to come home.
I got the degree but I am not even sure where I placed the paperwork and the program I attended is now defunct—arts in education, a relic from the past—all the notes I took on consciousness and liberation, growing mold in the basement.
I used to sing the body electric of Greene, Arendt, Freire, Lightfoot, Duckworth, and Dewey, the imagination as the final frontier of freedom. How we studied the moon in journals that traced its wax and wane, just so we could link it all back to Piaget and the child’s proclivity toward sense-making on her own terms.
Who else would let me write about autobiography as a political stance in those days, unless I had trekked in my brown four-door Honda to the eastern coast, where I first experienced a ferocious “nor’easter” and also met several time travelers on campus who, of course, wore trench coats!
I was soaring with anxiety in those days before I turned thirty. On the steps of the nightclub at midnight on my birthday, I remember asking my friend if life would ever feel like it was getting easier?
My dear friend, older than me by a few years, assured me that the answer was no, but she also taught me the pleasures of ambling and smelling the many flowers along the way, and ordering ice cream every day from the shop where the counter folk finally memorized my order: mint chocolate chip.
I remember the listening chambers and the steps that led up to the grand libraries and the ones that led to the basement bars where men in cozy wool sweaters waxed poetic about pedagogies of the oppressed to former school teachers who’d signed up for radical reformation.
I thought I might become a professor one day, so I listened on occasion to these sermons on the mount.
But I was more interested in Clifford, the vagabond of a guy with the bulbous nose and a dragon’s mouth of fiery breath who leaned against the window outside the quaint cafe that sold amazing raspberry muffins, where most of the students in the ed school went when the must and dust of the old library disturbed our lungs.
That’s where I met Michael, who was so skinny that everyone thought he had a drug problem but was afraid to tell me! He smoked a lot of weed but he was just skinny and pale by nature!
Ours was a counter affair.
I asked for muffins and lattes, he handed me these treats like I was a dignitary or mystic.
Who doesn’t fall a tiny bit in love with their baristas all throughout a lifetime?
Michael had a long beard and a twinkle in his eyes and he professed his love for zines and obscure poetry so of course, that was an invitation to his attic bedroom.
Michael lived in a small town just outside of Boston in an old purple Victorian mansion with a lush garden and it’s there where I hid after I’d secured my master’s degree—too stunned to drive all the way home without knowing first what I’d given up to get here.
That summer was full of floor picnics and sleeping in late and borrowing the Pantene shampoo that belonged to the woman who owned the house and who tolerated me because Michael was a dear friend of her husband’s but why was I staying there for so long and did I live there now?
Michael and I talked vaguely in the sunshine about the tsunami that had torn through villages halfway across the world. We talked about his mom, who disappeared one day with a Harley gang. We talked about his love of lava lamps and antique pencils, his obsession with the poet Ira Cohen in Brooklyn, and his collection of wayward poets who’d moved to Providence. Did I want to take a day trip there to hear some live poetry?
I am not sure what I learned about art or education that year, but I learned how to manage my fears after a surprise rash in my crotch made me feel like a sinner for sleeping with men I’d met on dating apps. That was before I met Michael, of course, and I confused his cocoon for protection.
Michael performed in a noise rock band—I had no idea the group was kind of famous—Sunburned Hand of the Man—I went to hear them play a few times, and spent many long hours in a random house full of secondhand furniture that reeked of cigarette smoke, listening to them rehearse while sipping on warm beers out of cans.
A little part of me knew I didn’t belong anywhere near these guys but the biggest lie I told myself was to keep trying.
The program I signed up for that year no longer exists—dissolved like the other dreams of that decade—into thin air and waves of I don’t care. I still speak to some of the friends I met that year—poets and artists and filmmakers making art against all odds—I suppose that I am, too, in my own way, insisting on my voice as a wave in the ocean.
Michael and I produced one tiny book that summer: Birds of Prey, typed on the old green typewriter guarded fiercely by a black cat that lived in the attic with him.
I’m also realizing how much we’re all in recovery—and recovering from—the collapsing of dreams we were living in as solid as houses that then crumbled—leaving us intellectually homeless, perhaps, and spitting stories from the past.
That guy Clifford who stood in front of the bakery cafe had memorized the bible and when we talked, he’d try to prove it to me, even though I didn’t ask, by asking himself a trivia question and then, in the same breath, answering it. He was always right!
Jesus stayed close to Clifford as he wandered the country—he said he’d come by train from California.
I eventually drove home at the end of that summer and got a place in Wicker Park. Michael packed me six American Spirits, the yellow-pack kind, and I smoked them all at one rest stop, where I remember calling him and crying that I wanted to come back.
But we both knew I didn’t really want to return to Boston. I just didn’t know yet how to come home.
