Question #2

When I sat down at the coffee shop and nibbled on an overly sweet coconut bun, I was focused solely on completing my writing. I have a not-quite-complete speculative fiction novel waiting for my attention, three other novel ideas that need outlining, a travel book in-process, and a neglected blog.

I planned (as much as I plan any part of travel I do alone) this trip around the world with three focuses: to eat...a lot, to restore myself after almost seven years of working in violence prevention, and to write. I’ve paid the requisite attention to the first two goals and precious little to the last. Intermittent blogging isn’t sufficient. I want something robust and complete. I'm tired of telling people I’ve “almost” finished a book, I want to be definitive- I've finished.

Travel in Europe has never interested me in the same way other places in the world have. There are foods I want to eat all of the things in Italy and Spain, try out the cuisine in Croatia and Montenegro, but the ruins of Greece didn’t awe me the way Egypt’s did, the cities of Portugal don’t mesmerize me the way Vietnam’s did.

The Asia half of my travel helped me focus on goals one and two for this trip, hot baths and massages, good tours and night markets; maybe Europe will help me to focus on goal three. Europe inspires me to sit still, gaze at beautiful water and varied people while nibbling on food as I type furiously.

And type I did, Rodrigo y Gabriela played lyriclessly in my ears, drowning out the bits of conversation and traffic sounds that both floated and roared by. I looked up and smiled when a woman asked permission to sit at the seat catty-corner to me and again when she left. So when a 70ish year old man did the same, I offered him the same smile and nod. And then I continued typing.

He munched on his toast, eating first around the crusts before devouring those as well. When the busboy came by and seemed to be fussing at me (he was speaking in Portuguese and I wasn’t following any of what he was saying) the older man across from me mimicked him affectionately as the busboy walked back into the restaurant, and then shook his head and smiled in my direction. A nonverbal “don’t worry about it.”

I bent my head back to my computer, music still playing in my ears, and the second question in Tim Ferris’s Five Minute Journal exercise made me pull out one of my earbuds. That morning’s answer to the question, “what would make today great?”, rung in my ears: a meaningful connection.

I took out the second earbud and leaned over to the gentleman across from me and asked if he spoke English. He did. I asked him about his day.

We chatted for a while. Me, mostly listening, straining to hear him through his Austrian accent and over the rush-hour traffic circling the roundabout behind us. He had a stroke recently and fired his doctor because the doctor told him he’d never walk again (he walks to physical therapy every day). He played hockey for eight years, married a model. His wife died six years ago; doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong and one day she told him, “hold me, I’m ready to go,” and she went.

He’d been in Portugal for more than 30 years, I’ve been here a week. We sat opposite each other and for a short moment we were connected.

Cool breeze floating in, I thanked him and I walked away, reminded that we all carry volumes; whole stories of love and loss and laughter. With earbuds in and averted gazes those stories are easy to miss.

Later, having scrounged around for dinner, I settled into my seat at the table of my hostel. A man walked over searching out a mug or glass to prepare his vervain tea. The usual traveler pleasantries exchanged, we somehow settled into conversation.

Trump led to Brexit led to Algeria. We talked about travel and family and heartbreak. We exchanged Whats App information and in the morning we chatted about our plans, we sat quietly beside each other, tending to our own worlds but still connected. And when it was time for me to leave, he offered to walk me. And he did, accompanying me all the way to the bus station, a walk and train ride away.

I’ve often thought about what could have made my day better (question five in the Five Minute Journal). I’ve lamented “if only” to some event. But I've never really expressed a specific idea about how to make my day the best. I've “hoped” or “dreamed” but the thinking there is more magical less within my control. But starting my day mindfully. Starting my day with an idea of what I want from it in specific terms – not “i want to be happy” but “what could I do that would make me happy” has adjusted my thinking.

What would make your day great today?

David

I wasn’t homesick, or even lonely, not really. But I was something. Solo travel for all of its benefits, has its own challenges. Loneliness or whatever I was feeling, is one of them.

David shares this philosophy

It isn’t that I hadn’t talked to anyone, I have a penchant for talking to strangers even when I'm in the US and have easy access to friends. But meaningful conversation is different from the small talk strangers often exchange when they travel.

“How long are you traveling?”

“Where have you been?”

“Do you have a favorite thing you’ve done?”

Even when they manage to move beyond those basics, like when a Dutch duo shared an alternative boat route from Luang Prabang to Chaing Rai, or the Irish couple that shared tales of travel wonder and woe, the time is often short, the circumstances tenuous.

Pakse, for all that it lacked, provided me with something I needed more than the giant Buddha or the probably trickling waterfall on offer (it is the dry season...and dry season is not hyperbole).

I met David the first day I arrived. He greeted me heartily, told me about the happy hour upstairs, and left a friendly open-ended invitation that I had every intention of accepting. But travel days are scattered, meal times are disrupted, and in this case, the thing I was craving the most – connection – manifested itself in the form of calls from home.

But calls are just calls. Lovely but fleeting. A few minutes after I hang up, I’m left in the quiet of my room. It is the reason I am so obnoxious about friends being on the phone when we are hanging out. “I'm a real person in real time,” I always say.

David was a real person in real time.

Two days into my stay and David and I overlapped at breakfast. Chatty as I am he struck up a conversation and I invited him to join me. Six hours later he had errands to run so we arranged to meet up later.

Conversations with veritable strangers can be challenging. Out of any p;articular context of a job or an event, there is nothing to suggest shared interests or philosophies. And while searching out people that are the same as you can be limiting and problematic, I the current state of political affairs, discussions with strangers who are decidedly different in their social or political views have their own challenges.

the Buddha we didn't see

That didn’t prove to a problem for us. If nothing else we had travel in common, so we started there. Started with where we've been and where we are going. We moved to how long we've been traveling to what brought us here. And by the time we hit that note, we were all over the place. Even politics.

The politics of America, our president, the likelihood that he’ll get re-elected. The politics of England, the likelihood of a chaotic Brexit, Cameron’s place in the blame.

We laughed about the prices and wondered how the city justified tour prices that exceeded those for Angkor Watt. We found a trendy night spot filled with places to drink and eat and wondered how we managed to be the only foreigners in the place.

I left Pakse before David. He let me store my bag in his room since the hotel demanded more money to extend my checkout by 6 hours then I had paid to stay there. He wandered the city with and when my bus was late, he sat beside me and kept me company.

On a trip that is at once amazingly fulfilling and at times lonely- David was a welcome respite from small talk and books. And even now, both of us far from the place where we met, we are still in touch. His texts from Vietnam swirled in with the ones from America…and I appreciate it. Appreciate the gift of a stranger I now call friend.

10-year-old certainty

I still greet my dad with, “hey, old man.” It started as a joke sometime around graduation from college. As a military family we are Southern by inclination if not always location and respect was an expectation in any interaction with someone older than you. Hell, I’m almost 40 and I still pepper my language with “ma’am” and “sir”. 

“Old man” isn’t respectful, but crossing into true adulthood, where I’d pay my own bills and go my own way, it was allowed. The moniker was taken as I intended, a term of endearment, and a gentle jab. I didn’t really think my dad was old but he was older than me so…old man ribbing it was. 

His response was always, “better than the alternative,” a nod to the idea that getting old was better than being dead. I have to agree with that perspective. Dad has lots of thoughts on aging. When I chastised my parents for their inability to remember when and how long they remained engaged they both told me to, “go ask your aunt Sunday.”  At that point they’d been married about 25 years (now its 45 years and they really don’t remember).

“How can you not remember?” I asked, incredulous. “Keep living and you’ll see,” my dad responded with a smile.

He was right. There are any number of things I don’t remember now. Things I was certain there was no need to write down because – who forgets important things. Apparently forgetting runs in my family or maybe it is my age bracket; either way, if you ask me now what 10-year-old me wanted to be when I grew up I’m at a loss. 

The military brat within has to first do calculations about where we were living so that I can at least picture my life. It sounds silly to anyone who hasn’t moved much, but in my family we always start with “where were we?” as grounding.  At 10 we had left Florida and were living in Texas.  That means the Hinkle house. 

If we were in the Hinkle house than I was hanging with the Dudettes – a group of friends that for some reason that was a cool way to identify ourselves (whatever…we were 10). But that’s where I draw a blank. I remember sleep-overs and walking home from school. I remember my Girl Scout Leader and cutting my finger while chopping cabbage, and nightmares about my fourth grade teacher Mr. Phiester.  I do not remember what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’m not sure I thought about being anything other than a 10-year-old. 

Fast-forward a few years to when I was 12 or so and I remember wanting to be everything…I concocted a way to design houses using rooms that fit together like puzzle pieces so people could decide what their homes looked like, I had an advertising sketchbook filled with imaginary products and the marketing plan for each one, I constructed a paper “movie projector” and sketched out “films”, I considered child psychology, I wrote plays for me and my twin cousin to act out with our Cabbage Patch Kids, and I wrote poetry: 

the sun and the moon go to war each day and the one that wins is the one that stays;but he doesn’t stay long ‘cuz the other comes along and its war all over again.

I don’t remember thinking I was going to “be” any of those things. Not really. In my mind, I was those things. In my mind I was revolutionizing architecture and selling amazing (if fictitious) products and writing moving poetry. 

In my 10-year-old brain, as far as I can remember it now in my 40-year-old one, there was no need to think too heavily about what might be in light of what already was.

That differs greatly from where I sit now. 

Now I know architecture has a lot of math and, because I was math-phobic in high school and college, it vanished from my “could be” horizon. Psychology, especially of the child persuasion, struck me as depressing, and writing took a more utilitarian turn – I majored in journalism and had a short stint as a journalist through college. All of those things I was somehow faded away.

The work I do now did not exist in my 10-year-old brain. I didn’t know about non-profits (although my 10-year-old self knew about profit…I once made $22 off a box $1.49 box of brownie mix selling slices door-to-door) or international aid/development work. International development was my job until just a few years ago. And what I’ve transitioned to, working stateside in violence prevention, did not register at all when I was 10 because I didn’t know anything of violence. Lucky me. 

More than what I’ve chosen to do professionally in my adult life, the greatest differences between me-way-back-when and me-inching-up-in-age-now, is certainty. 

My 10-year-old self was pretty confident. The things I fancied doing I was certain I did well. So certain, that in my early days of writing I would cry big raindrop tears when given any critique on what I’d produced. And while I’m glad I learned to take critique as a tool for improvement rather than an assault on my talent, I do miss the certainty that what I offer the world is something it needs and will be better for having. In the absence of that certainty I find myself asking now what I never asked then, what the heck am I going to be when I grow up?

Courtesy of the DailyPost writing prompt:Ballerina Fireman Astronaut Movie Star.

The absence of "what next?"

The head space I’m currently occupying is frustrated or stuck or possibly just sad and I feel immobilized by it. I am generally a person of action, I have a problem and tackle it head on. I am nothing if not adept at crafting a two-year-plan and diving into what the next 24 months will look like. For most of my life I functioned that way, life carved out in two-year increments. I could do anything for two years, I conceded. And so I had one and two year stints (occasionally three) all over the world. I saw no reason to change my approach to life.

Oakland, CA- home?

But when I left Uganda in 2011, I left in part because the two year stints didn’t feel quite right anymore. A nagging desire to be rooted someplace emerged. A strange sensation for me to say the least, I have been a nomad since birth. Initially the consequence of my military family, the moving was a mantle I picked up for myself and continued to carry it forward to several states and countries over the years. 

There is something refreshing about being able to start fresh. Something cleansing about getting to reboot. Something challenging about starting from scratch and building a life anew. And I did that time and again. And I have sections of my life that trail behind me in journals and blogs and sometimes random memories of friends. Things I forget until gently reminded. Things that were possible because I was not married to a single location or even expectation for how my life should unfold.

But I came home from Uganda in search of something more familiar; and typing that now I can see the problem that has emerged that I didn’t foresee emerging, even though I should have. What the hell is home? More specifically, where the hell is my home? My entire life home has not been a place. I don’t really understand the affinity people have for hometowns or what that feels like. Home for me has always been at the foot of my parents’ bed. Not exactly the bed itself so much as it is the symbol for home that my heart conjures when people speak of their homes. 

When I’ve been away for a long time - back when I came home from college at break or later between countries- even back when I was in high school and maybe coming in after a night with friends, my sister and I would sit at the foot of my parents’ bed and we’d all talk. We’d talk until my mom fell or asleep or my dad was ready to settle in, and then I’d wander back to my bed feeling warm and loved because that was home for me. My family has always been home. 

My intention, upon returning to the United States, was not to return to the foot of my parents’ bed, or even to the city where my parents live…my intention was to create for myself the actual physical space of home that has always been mythical to me.

Oakland is as close as a physical manifestation of home that I can conjure. Oakland has a community of people that I care about, that care about me. Its architecture and coastlines and weather all appeal to me, the focus on food is in line with my own, the diversity of people feel right. Oakland, in a lot of ways, feels like my city. 

But home?

Home is elusive for me. Home falls into the category of seemingly simple and practical things that so many other people do and take for granted that are so elusive for me. Things like marrying and reproducing. 

This isn’t a lamenting of the life I’ve carved out for myself, so much as a realization that I don’t know my “what next?”. In the absence of a life partner and sans the desire to procreate, the world is limitless. Friends and family see it as wide open space. But right now…right now I feel small in it. Right now I feel untethered not in a freeing way but in a lost way. I am floating without a plan or even the simplicity of the spark of idea that, in the past, preceded the inception of my plans.

I have been discussing my lack of direction and confusion with my community for a while now. I’m tired of talking about it. Tired of holding the uncertainty and plan-less-ness in my own head, tired of unleashing it on those that love me. 

The truth is…I want to know what next? I’m not in flux but this state of mind feels very much like flux. I don’t want to be where I am forever and yet I don’t know where I want to be next. And in the absence of a “what next?” I feel stuck where I am…wanting but unable to send myself back out into the world.

I could blame Oakland, blame the desire to make tangible my intangible understanding of home. But Oakland is just a symbol. Oakland represents the first time in my life that I settled into the idea of where I am being the best place I could be. The first time I doubted the possibility that the unknown before me might reveal itself to me something not worthy of the effort of leaving. And so I cling to this place in a way I have never clung to a place before. Cling to the idea of this being the destination rather than simply part of my journey. 

Maybe I’m holding on to tight and what I need to do is loosen my grip…I’m attempting to loosen my grip.

My White Best Friend: love in the time of racial tension

When we first met, I got to know Zee through the letters she wrote me in her tiny, perfect, leaded print -telling me all about thoughts in her head. 

A few years later Zee left me, slumped on the floor of her apartment, three flights up so it was at least warm against the winter cold, while she went to get pizza. She understood that the grief that had swallowed me could not be mollified even with her love. Her gift to me that New Year’s Eve, was to let me be sad alongside the planned revelry of our friends. 

My birthday at a new job, she sent me three presents, one, an edible arrangement delivered to the office and big enough to share. She wanted me to make friends and the food was her contribution to the process.

Zee is more than a friend, she is my family. Hell, her family is my family. Zee is special. My kindred. And so my current head space, where rage bubbles just under the surface and has begun to frequently ooze out, is complicated. Complicated because I am black with kinky hair and an awareness of how that impacts my life, has impacted my life for years. Complicated because Zee is, I have joked for years, blue-white, like porcelain. Her veins are pale azure just under the skin’s surface, her eyes matching that hue, her hair, darkening over the years from blondish brown to brownish blond. 

This space I occupy is complicated because my anger at the murder of people who look like me, the mistreatment of people who look like me, the dismissal of the sorrow of people who look like me, the rage at the system that perpetuates that anger, mistreatment, and dismissal and was built and is maintained by people who look like Zee, does not negate my love for Zee.

And I have no desire to say that “Zee is different.” I don’t want to say it because I grew up with folks insulting everyone who wore my skin and in the same breath exempting me from the ridicule, as if being that person’s exception was a prize I was granted. I hated it then and I hate it now. The truth is that what is different is that Zee is an individual that I know and love. Simply that.

My current frame of mind is complicated because rage on the macro, even as it manifests sometimes daily in my micro, doesn’t change how I feel on a personal level. It makes it difficult to talk about…to sort out what it means and what it looks like, but it doesn’t change it. 

Less than a week after the South Carolina massacre, the only black person in a meeting, I ended up in two conversations that made me want to scream and punch. Instead I had to find my professional words to describe my visceral rage in acceptable terms (i.e., ones that wouldn’t get me fired). And so I explained why showing a documentary filled with only black people highlighted as the violent criminals is a continuation of the vilification of the black body. How that vilification makes it “ok,” even necessary, to shoot black people for the slightest provocation – for no provocation at all. 

I explained to the white man in my meeting that the disproportionate granting of conceal-and-carry weapon permits to whites is inequity whether he, or anyone else, thinks that issue is important. He told me, “black people shouldn’t worry about that, they have other things to worry about.” His response was so far out of place for both its patriarchal view on what black people should and shouldn’t focus their attention on and his assumption of a monolithic black voice and focus…not to mention it simply isn’t his place to insert his opinion on such matters. When I told him so, he doubled down and lectured me on the things that black people, in his estimation, should deem important. 

A friend eased my rage that day by joking through text that I should try not to call him “massa” by accident during the meeting. I laughed out loud, to the confusion of my colleagues, and released a bit of the tension that was holding me hostage.

In the aftermath of conversations like that, I tend to speak in general terms about whiteness and power. Those conversations become a micro lens into a macro world of abuse and disrespect and low expectations and a lack of any benefit of any doubt when it comes to black people. 

When days like last week happen, when in another meeting I had to explain that the taking down of the confederate flag from South Carolina’s capital was not a “distraction” to the people who fought to bring it down, that they weren’t pawns of the media just because their interests of the moment were directed to something that didn’t directly impact the folks in my meeting. I told them that if they had engaged those activists in our area of focus the intersection of the flag work and the gun control work would actually be really powerful. But they didn’t engage and knowing what I know about the group I sure as hell won’t do it myself.

And so I come home and I crave understanding. I crave an ability to vent the anger and frustration of the day. I crave knowing that the frustration will not be questioned because I’ve spent the day being questioned. 

In our first 10 years of friendship race didn’t come up nearly as much as it has in the last five. Zee’s and my relationship has dealt, in recent years, more and more with me trying to explain to her my sometimes cynical take on situations, the assumptions of racism even where she sees other potential explanations for behaviors. Before, discussions on race were sporadic, directly related to seemingly more isolated incidents, viewed through more optimistic eyes. But I’m tired now. I’m tired and the incidents aren’t sporadic and my patience to discuss and unpack them in measured tones has waned.

The complication of loving Zee, her family, and my other white friends and colleagues over the years, is exhausting. It is all an illustration of the dangers of the more compartmentalized world I’ve been living in. 

I find it hard to believe I’m alone in this, but hell, maybe I am. Maybe I’m the only person who has separated how much race impacts the way I live and what I think and how I respond to things from people who don’t have that experience. Not the big things. Not the obvious narratives that decent people everywhere acknowledge and agree on, but the smaller everyday slights and microagressions that grate incessantly at my peace of mind. 

I didn’t always have the words to share what blackness looks like and how it feels. 

When George Zimmerman was acquitted, the grief was so pronounced…so…so…I still can’t quite lay my hands on it. And with the black friends I was sitting with when the verdict was announced, I didn’t need words. They understood. They shared that feeling that bone-deep sorrow. I didn’t have to explain

I am conflicted because my love for Zee makes me feel bad that I didn’t try to explain to her the full breadth of my grief. My blackness reminds me that I spend so much of my time explaining my life to other people. Those aren’t concrete sides, they are pieces of myself that intertwine with no clear border between them.

This may not seem like it, but this is about love; love of my blackness-love of my white friends. A complicated love. Love fraught with the perils of any relationship that doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Like a long-distance love affair, removed from everyday turmoil and discomfort, Zee and I exist in a world where I know her intentions aren’t steeped in racism, where the systems of structural racism built around us are white noise to the ways we support each other. 

But structural racism isn’t white noise. In the real world all of my parts, my compartments, converge in a single space – my reality. My blackness, my compassion, my rage, my love…all together inside of me. And I haven’t found a way to make it any less complicated…