Last spring, Scott and I decided to trade blogs for a day. We agreed on a topic and a liberal deadline. Scott completed his in a timely manner. I completed mine... in my imagination. I'm bad at writing what I mean to write. When I sit down at a keyboard, invariably something else comes tapping out. Eventually I'll do it. In the meantime, please enjoy Scott's lovely work. I'll let you know when I'm starring in his
corner of the web.
for Lupschada.com, 3/3/04, by Scott Harris
I called Brooke the other day. I had been sitting in
my apartment, trying to scratch out the last few lines
in my travel journal before the impressions faded
completely, but it wasn't coming to me. It was warm
and I couldn't keep my mind on the words, kept setting
the journal down and wandering around the room and I
finally slipped the band around the cover to close it
tight and instead picked up the phone and called
Brooke.
The strange thing was she had known, somehow, that I
was going to call, had told her family that she was
expecting me to call, this even though it had been a
spur of the moment decision on a long slow afternoon.
And so I called her just a minute or two after she had
predicted I would and we talked for a time. And we
couldn't figure out how she had known I would call,
but I knew why the idea had come to me. It lay between
the jumbled, cramped words of the journal, in the
margins of my story, fit into the spaces between the
sites and the names of the monuments.
In September I went to France. Took the time off of
work, bought the plane ticket, packed my backpack and
off I went, alone. Some people told me not to go
because France was full of assholes who didn't fight
in Iraq and some told me not to go because of the heat
wave that had killed 10,000 but most of those who were
skeptical of the trip simply didn't understand why I
would go by myself. Too dangerous, too boring, too
lonely. I didn't think it would be any of these
things, so I went off by myself, and as I flew and
drove and walked I found that I didn't feel alone at
all. There was a pen in my pocket and stamps in my
wallet and postcards waiting blank for me to send off,
from every stop, to Brooke.
I wrote the first one before the trip started. I knew
I wouldn't have much time at the airport, what with
the increased security, so the night before my
departure I sorted through my postcards until I found
one from Boston and I carefully filled every bit of
the blank space with tiny cramped writing. I worried a
bit about what I would find to fill all the cards I
meant to send, for I meant to send one from every
location I visited and I meant to visit as many as
possible, so I created some fictional characters to
take the trip with me; I figured if I ran out of
things to say I could make up stories about my
imaginary friends.
I needn't have bothered. There was plenty for me to
see and say and the presence of my fictional traveling
companions wasn't half as real as the feeling that
Brooke was, in a strange way, with me at each stop.
Not just at each stop, but in the car and on the
plane, as I thought ahead about what I would write on
my next card or what I had sent in my last and
listened to a cd that she had made for me or I for
her.
I followed the setting sun across Normandy and
Brittany, ending my night on the sharply pitched
cobblestone streets of Mont St. Michel, empty but for
the cats that came out under the stars to stretch when
the tourists had at last left. I crossed salt water
rocks under the shadow of the parapets and the next
day I stood in the little post office and tried to put
into words what I felt and sent off to her a card
filled with prose purple enough to be claimed as
relative by the most inbred royals.
In the craters of Pont Du Hoc and on the cliffs of
Etretat, under the lion at Waterloo and by the
windmills of Luxembourg I worked out in my head what I
would tell to Brooke, back at home, about these
things. About myself. Sometimes I worried about how
she would like them and sometimes I wrote as though no
one would ever see and sometimes I drew small pictures
in the margins like furtive dreams. And I sent them
all, by ones and twos, five, ten, twenty cards, I sent
and more.
When we talked about swapping stories for each other's
site I said to her "some of my favorite Brooke
memories you weren't even there for". It was a good
line, funny, it sounded like a dirty joke. But I
wasn't thinking about anything dirty or weird or
funny. I was thinking about standing in a phone booth
at the Anvers Metro stop calling America and huddling
over a keyboard in a hash bar after midnight in
Amersterdam. I was thinking about standing under a
tree in the rain behind Notre Dame and about the fog
in the morning over the Iceland sea.
And I was thinking about a day when I chased a sunset
all through the afternoon and the sun's fading rays
cast highlights on clouds that flowed and tumbled like
hair across the shoulders of her sky.