My plastic bald eagle kite was already broken. But grampa got it off the ground.
I assembled it too quickly, incorrectly and bent the flimsy white plastic rods in ways they weren’t supposed to bend. The rods connected to thin plastic wings that were now incorrectly bent too. I was 7, maybe 8, and too eager to read directions.
Before we all sat down for a family dinner, I went to the soccer fields across the street from my house. It wasn’t very windy but I was determined to fly that kite – broken or not.
I set the triangular shape on the ground. The tip of the triangle, the eagle’s head, pointed in the air. The tips of the outstretched wings rested on the short green grass. I gave the white string some slack. Walked several steps backwards and yanked on it. The eagle somersaulted.
I tried again. This time it kart wheeled. Why wasn’t it soaring high above my head, wings ripping in the wind, gliding like I imagined it would?
I tried again and I tried again.
Someone must have been watching me fumble from our living room windows, which were always closer to the park than I remembered. I glanced up and saw my grampa, then in his 70s, walking slowly and stiffly across the empty soccer field.
He took the string from my small hands and wound it back on the spool. I don’t remember us saying anything to each other, though I’m sure we did. He held the kite by the flimsy white rods criss-crossed at its underbelly; a couple feet of string and the spool in the other.
He began to run.
Wind caught the wings and they began to flutter. The kite hit the air and it popped back, and then bowed forward, and popped back again – like it was afraid to fly. Grampa gave out just a little string so it could take-off, if it wanted.
I watched him run. His skinny legs, the same ones he used to swim out in Lake Michigan to impress my gramma decades earlier, shuffled across the grass in uneven strides. His feet kicked out behind him, like I’ve seen my brother’s do. The arthritis in his neck forced him to twist at the waist in order to look back at the kite.
I remember him wearing chocolate brown pants and a long sleeve over a collared dress shirt - always dressed with a collared shirt. He still wore contacts then, not the heavy black frames that slip off his big Italian nose today.
I watched him run and play with my kite while I skipped and jogged behind him. Watching him. Looking at him. Learning from him. Still not knowing what to say to him.
I never imagined that this moment, with all my nervousness for words and embarrassment for building a faulty kite, would be the first and last private memory I have of my grampa Dom. My family and I, we all shared the same memories of him: teaching us to dance with our feet on top of his, and his tomato plants, and stray cats he cared for like pets. We all laughed together at the jokes he told and all lost to his card games, but no one else would have this memory of him but me. It was ours alone to share.
And today, mine alone to remember.
For the last 15 years, my family and I have witnessed my grampa’s mental capacity slowly and steadily deteriorate. Now in his 90s, he suffers from severe dementia and is always doped up so he doesn’t get hostile, a common symptom of those with same illness.
We’ve all watched him get angry, depressed, and embarrassed because he knows he’s losing his grasp on the memories of who he is and his place in the world. He’s alone out there, adrift. And without those memories anchoring him in time and space, it’s up to me, my family, to remember for him. We must be the string that ties him to the ground.
The eagle kite didn’t get much higher than a few feet in the air. The misshapen wings and bent rods made it nose dive to the ground the more air it got. After grampa showed me how to run with the kite and hold the string in my hands, he passed it on to me and let me try.
Goodbyes are not the first things I remember about a person. They come up after some thought - after the funny, good and not so good times. When I think about those who have left my life, our last moments are the last memories I recall.
Goodbyes are never easy. The routine gets easier to act out as we go through life, but it never gets easier watching someone fade to black.
The last thing I said to Beth as she partied before for a year plus abroad, was not goodbye, but ‘you can always come home.’ I meant it as a reminder that home will always be here for her, weather you quit and return with your tail between your legs, or you seize every opportunity and let life take you around the world. That when you need to be consoled and when you need to be cheered on, home and everyone who is a part of that place, will always be here for you.
I’ll miss my friend, and always regret not spending more time with her. And I admit, I’ll always want her to come home and make me laugh and me feel like me, one more time. But it takes a last time, a last hoorah, to make me remember all the funny, good and not so good times before goodbye.
My heart grows flowers blue.
In the darkness of my heart,
Is the heart of fear.
My heart grows flowers black and blue.
Sad pretty petals blooming,
From my heart of fear.
The fantasy went like this:
I walk into the Monopole, my favorite college-town bar, and she’s there flirting with some cute hippy guy as she sips a pint. She’s wearing a tight shirt that shows off her plump, already impossible to ignore chest. Her black spiral curls fall oh so romantically past her shoulders. She has a sweet, stupid look on her face that says she’s either high or just an idiot. Probably both.
Never mind her name – she was just one in a series of girls I would stack myself up against and pin all my inadequacies, anger and resentment on. Them and not me because it’s too painful to examine myself, my past and love myself for who I am. While they are real people, I know the personality I’ve created for them only exists in my head - but that’s precisely where they are larger than life.
Funny because it's more about me than them.
She’s been a freshman for two plus years – I know because I looked up her status in the university’s public directory. She and my college boyfriend have the same birthday. And they also had sex at least once, at least that’s all they seem to drunkenly remember, while I was studying abroad in Mexico. They got into each other’s pants a few times too. She had a crush on him. An easy lay I’m sure, since he didn’t have to do much to seduce her.
This girl is short and has no ass. She has the reputation of being a stoner party girl who listens to Pink Floyd – my then boyfriend told me all about her. She’s a theater major – and theater majors are always annoying. She drives a black jeep Cherokee with Pink Floyd’s logo in hot pink on the rear window. I always wanted to slash her tires. Even better, dig my house keys into the car doors as I walked home, scribbling my anger into the black metal.
I don’t know why but I moved in down the street from her. I wanted to know everything I could about her. Wanted to know what parts of us were similar and what was different. Wanted to know how I was better than her. How I could make her life hell even though she didn’t do anything to me. I was making my own my life hell but had to blame it on someone else. My relationship with my first love was falling apart and if I blamed him, it would be my fault for staying with him. It was probably my fault that they had sex because I kissed a Mexican and told him. My misery was my own fault and I thought I deserved all the rottenness I was going through.
So the fantasy went like this:
I walk into the crowded, popular bar and order a dark, thick, foamy and bitter beer. Everyone I know is there, funny that they’re the same people she knows. We had the same friends, were in the same crowd and as my boyfriend put it, we’d probably be friends if I didn’t hate her. People liked her, just like they liked me.
I walk up to her, she’s sticking her chest out as she giggles to some wasted hippy who doesn’t give a shit about what she’s saying. She’s coquettish and flaunts herself in front of me – making herself look so desirable in front of me. She sees me and pretends to ignore me. Smiling that sly “I fucked your boyfriend while you were gone” smile that she always seemed to smile in front of me.
Saying nothing, I interrupt their conversation and dump the sticky beer on top of her nappy head. The foam and beer stench seep into her curls. Streaks of black and tan dribble down her face and stain her clothes. I imagine that it takes forever for her to wash it all off. Her mouth is agape, she’s frozen in astonishment. Everyone looks as they gasp and laugh and point. I’m sure they all know why I did it anyway – it’s such a small, incestual school.
I exit the bar. Funny that I don’t feel better after I humiliate her. And the more I replay the fantasy, it does nothing to make her go away.
The biggest challenge in learning how to write is finding your voice. It takes some introspection and being honest with yourself. Blurring the lines between what you think and what you feel - your voice is a mix of head and heart, never just one or the other. I found my voice once I took a step back and stopped trying so hard.
I think they call it seeing the forest for the trees.
A writing assignment brought me to Bishnu, a 22-year-old Bhutanese refugee who had recently arrived to Chicago. I was writing a profile on his life as a refugee and what it was like growing up in a camp.
The woman who introduced us told me Bishnu could speak excellent English, it was just that he had a thick accent. The world traveler inside me said "no problem." I've sustained dozens of conversations with foreigners and my patience is well-developed.
Forget the fact that I didn't know where Bhutan was, or what someone from that part of the world looked or sounded like. Just listen closely and be patient, I'll figure it out.
The lady was right. Bishnu speaks perfect English, and not just for a guy who arrived to America 3 months ago. He spoke with fluidity, never pausing or searching for the right word. The words came out of his mouth as if someone were pulling them on a rope hand over hand. And as for his accent, I couldn't decipher a single familiar word. He looked at me, almost hypnotically, with his unblinking black-brown eyes as he rambled. I thought he could see me glazing over, completely lost to what he was saying.
Just listen closely.
He spoke for some time. I kept asking questions, asking for him to clarify, clarify again and tell me one more time how many years he was in the refugee camp.
I got tired of trying to listen. Tired of trying to break the ice. Tired of trying not to let on how awkward I felt. Tired of being "on" and fulfilling some kind of journalistic role I had created in my head. I wanted so badly to engage him and show him how genuinely interested in his story I was. I would have grabbed onto anything familiar, any commonality that would tie us together. Something that I could relate to and show him I understood.
That moment didn't happen.
I went home and typed up my notes. I wrote down what details I had and how he said them and how he looked. Bits and pieces of a puzzle appeared. I organized them and then an image of who this person was appeared. Still blurry and incomplete, but a unique image no less.
I came across a story he told me about ditching school. There were no walls in his classroom, so when the teacher wasn't looking, he and his friends would run out of the room. I remember how mischievously he smiled when he said it. I found a quote from when he told me about the night they left home and traveled by bus to the camp: "it was like an adventure." I remembered he was reading a Red Eye and toting around a big backpack.
I think they call it seeing the forest for the trees. When you focus so intently on one thing, that you lose perspective and can't see the bigger, and perhaps more important, picture.
Once I stopped obsessing over each word he was saying, trying so hard to understand anything, Bishnu revealed himself to me. There is a piece of us all that transcends language and ethnicity. Something universal that is spoken in a smile or the significance of those seemingly unimportant words we actually understand. Something that gives us all away.
I found Bishnu's voice.
I rode four-hundred and thirty something of those miles. Pedaled on my second-hand, silver and blue 1988 Schwinn ten-speed - my trusty steed of tin. Rode through a sultry, Midwest July of 90-degree heat and humidity, summer rain and hail. Lifted up and pushed down a million times on those pedals on my way from Minneapolis to Chicago.
“You are a hero,” they told us.
I rarely think of that week my best friend, Ashley, and I joined a thousand others for AIDSRide. I never understood why I did it, I still don’t. I hadn’t ridden a bike in years. I didn’t know anyone who had AIDS. I was supposed to be going to college but didn't know how to take that first step. I was eighteen and trying to be a big girl but just couldn’t quite make the transition. I did AIDSRide on a whim, for an excuse to not think about my life’s direction. To not think about life.
But think about life is all anyone can do on a bike ride like that. Partly because the very reason you raised the $1,500 was to support life. Partly to celebrate and remember the lives of those who passed. And partly, because there is nothing else to do while you space out, listening to your breathing and get lost in the up and down rhythm of your peddling.
Four-hundred and thirty something miles is a long bike ride. I averaged about nine hours a day from morning, through high hot noon, till dusk. That’s a long time to watch that skinny, silvery wheel spin around and around and hum as it catches the concrete. It’s a long time to sit and contemplate the mechanics of your trusty steed and marvel at how simply it is put together.
One time, probably more, I thought about my mom. About the note she snuck into my bag that said she was proud of me.
Like most teenagers, I rebelled against my parents, especially my mom. I fought with her constantly and for no reason except to fight and be right. I intentionally made her feel bad, like a bad mom while all she wanted to do was love me and make me happy. At sixteen, the hight of my rebellion, I pierced my own eyebrow and showed it off to my parents when they came home. I don't know if it was the sight of it, or just the idea of it, but it made my mom cry. I made my mom cry. I’m sure there were other times that I caused her grief, but this was the first time it was in front of me.
I remember how the pooling tears made her dark brown eyes sparkle. We were sitting in our dining room at opposite ends of the table. She looked down and away and shook her head over and over. It was the quietest and most controlled expression of feelings I had ever seen. No sobbing, no screaming. She said she felt like a failure and wondered aloud where she went wrong. She said I was the most difficult of the four children to raise.
I didn't know it at the time, but I had achieved in making a really great mom feel like a bad mom.
It wasn’t until a decade later that I came to terms with why I made her feel the way I did. I was trying to punish her for taking off when we were kids. She came back each time she left, but that pain stayed with me and became the scapegoat for every failed adult relationship.I read that note in my tent one morning and later that day, I had to pull over and cry in the arms of a stranger before I could get back on the road. I knew how much she loved me, but the worst part was that I began to realize how much I loved her despite the pain she caused me. Sometimes it’s just easier to be angry, and I always wanted things to be easy. I realized that besides looking like her, my mom and I share a love of loving people. All those years of fighting her just to come to the realization that I loved her and not hated her? I didn't want to accept it, but it hurt too much to continue denying the truth. The tears burst out like a jack-in-the-box, like a surprise. The stranger, this guy that just happened to be there, didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t say anything at all. He just hugged me with his solid, damp arms and let me cry. Once I stopped, he gave me a rainbow-beaded necklace that I wore all week. I showered and slept in it. Saw it dangle around my chest and sparkle in the sun as I rode alone. That rainbow necklace, unbeknownst to me, became my emblem of transformation.
* * *
I stared at asses all day. Asses of all shapes and sizes packed inside fuchsia, neon-green and black spandex. Riders were no longer recognizable by their faces, but by the spandex they wore. Everyone knew me by the white scorpion I had on mine.
“Hey, there’s a scorpion on your leg!” They shouted as they whizzed by.
“WHAT?! Oh, huh, right.”
Nine hours a day in a semi-push-up pose will give your arms the curvy definition of a peanut. It will give you the worst, but funniest farmer’s tan ever – one that will take months to fade. In fact, nine hours in the sun will burn your skin until it literally poisons it. Red pimples bubble up and sting your thighs, forearms and the backs of your calves where the sun is almost constantly hitting. Even years later, the bumps will appear after five minutes in the sun. Nine hours crouched on a bike with a hard seat between your legs will make you forget you have to pee until it is too late. The moment you dismount is the moment you wet your spandex with the white scorpion on it.
Nine hours a day sitting on a hard seat will hurt your ass. Even if the seat is cushioned and you pay extra for the wide, made-for-women seat and buy ass-padded spandex. It’s chaffing, they tell you, that makes the tender skin on the inner part of your thigh, just below your ass, sore. They might as well consider that part of the thigh “private parts.” Your spandex-covered ass rubs against the seat and causes the skin to feel bruised. AIDSRide staffers hand out little tubes of “Butt-R” so you can grease up your ass and hope it reduces the chaffing. Everyone has their hands down their pants at the bike corral, giggling, because they know exactly what it looks like. Shortly after, you hear a chorus of moaning when the riders first sit on their bikes. But after mile twenty or so, the pain goes away.
Just like the thoughts I carried around in my mind. Sometimes we believe that the more we worry about our problems, the sooner we will come to a solution. Leave the family and go to college in New York? Will I forget this person who broke my heart? When will I be confident in myself and not so unstable? When am I going to believe in myself?
One philosophy my dad and I agree on, is that if you take a break from thinking about your problems, they usually have a way of working themselves out. I realized that after AIDSRide when my dad and I exchanged our usual few sentence dance. Giving your problems a time-out is not the same as running away from them. Eventually, you have to come back.
“I don’t want to think about how many overnights dad had to work so we could have Christmas,” he said.
“Wow, I never knew. What a hit to his pride that must have been.”
I told my brother how I used dad’s computer once and it was password protected. “PHR108percent” was the password. Paul Howard Rosenberg, 108 percent. Why it’s an eight and not a 10 or 20, I don’t know. But the message is some version of: “give more than you got.”
I learned a similar lesson on that bike ride. Somewhere between Minnesota and Illinois, wanting to give up and the relief of “just ten more miles,” between hail stinging my sun-poisoned arms, lungs burning from yet another gradual climb and seeing my smiling, blonde friend at the finish line – I learned that lesson. There were several HIV positive riders in the group. You knew them by the tiny florescent orange flag shooting up from their bikes. I saw those guys every day. In fact, they seemed to find me every time I wanted to quit.
“It’s so hot today. I didn’t sleep very well. I can’t go any further. If I stop now, I could go get a massage at the health tent and beat the crowds to the shower. Ya, that sounds nice. Fuck this.”
And then one of those riders with the flag would breeze by me.
“On your left!” They called, riding strong, flag ripping in the wind.
Sometimes they passed without warning. Slow, silent, and steady. But each one that passed, yanked me out of my negative, defeatist attitude. They inspired me to keep going. I thought of the health struggles some of these riders overcame to be here. Or actually, that each day could be a struggle for them. And here they were, riding for themselves, their friends or for people they may never know but are connected to through their disease. No matter what, they weren’t quitting. So what’s my excuse? It’s too hot?
I wish my dad could have been there, smiling his proud smile, on moments like that. At the moment I realized that while each of us is different, existing in different sets of circumstances, the most difficult and greatest struggle we all face is the struggle against ourselves. Fighting that voice that says, “just lay down and die already.” It is the voice of the easy way out, and oh, how we want life to be easy.
Peddling on days like that - with the sun in my eyes, the wind and bugs in my face, head aching from squinting, toes blistering inside my stiff shoes, knee joints pinching with every straightening of my leg and fifty miles to go - were some of the best days. No one told me this, it was a lesson I figured out in privacy, in solitude. It was a lesson I felt in the pit of my stomach and in the nervous beating of my heart. A lesson I wish I remembered years later when Ashley and I saw our friend’s broken body in a casket, or on the nights I fixed problems with drugs and alcohol. ‘Cause you see, even when we learn a lesson, we still forget, only to remember again. And the lesson was: the moment I give up, when fear pulls the covers over my eyes, the moment I say, “I can’t take it anymore!” is the same moment I make up my mind to finish everything.
“Ya, I remember AIDSRide.”
“That was craaazy. Why’d we do that?”
“I don’t know.”
Sundsvall, Sweden
My sister asked the bus driver if we were on the right bus. She paid the 42 Kroner for the two of us and explained she was showing me how to use the transportation system.
The large middle-aged driver said something to me in Swedish. The pitch of his voice rose and fell to the most foreign sounding words I have ever heard. He sounded like he was singing nonsense through a mouth full of marbles.
My sister, fluent in the language, explained I didn’t speak Swedish and was visiting the country from Chicago.
The driver turned and looked at me for a moment. Then he briefly closed his tiny eyes and smiled. A thousand things to say froze in my mouth as I stood there awkwardly. All I could do was smile back.
The wind and snow blew against the bus. At four o’clock, the December sky looked more like midnight. Our dialogue of upturned lips and curious looks ended with my sister telling me where to go.
I have never been in a country where I didn’t understand the language.
For the first time, I can’t communicate with anyone and my independence is suddenly rattled by the fear of the unknown. What if something happened to me or my sister? How would I ask for help? There are people everywhere, but how do I reach out to them?
For the first time, I’m dependant on the kindness of strangers. I am dependent on someone other than me.
For the first time.
“First tracks” is ski-bum talk for the first ride of the day on freshly groomed trails. It is the only time when the snow is at its best. First tracks is a privilege because it only happens once. First tracks means for a brief moment, a skier has the run to himself to practice a maneuver or just enjoy the solitude. Sometimes solitude is the maneuver. First tracks is a beautiful thing.
The next day I walk around the city of Sundsvall alone. I keep expecting to understand the signs but I can’t. I can’t recognize sounds. The birds sound different. I don’t know how to say “excuse me” as I pass someone or ask where the bathroom is. Ordering my badly needed cup of coffee is out of the question unless I’m up for charades. I point and smile. They smile back, warmly.
That night, I rode the bus home and watched a rider pet his German Shepherd sitting in the space next to him. The girl across from him had a jagged hair cut slanting away from her face. I looked out at the houses with brightly lit paper stars hanging in the dark windows. We passed a couple wearing reflective snowsuits walking with ski poles next to thigh-high snowdrifts. I caught myself smiling in the plexi-glass reflection.
For the first time, I was alone.
Someone once told me that in Mexico, if you can reach the bar you are old enough to drink.
Apparently that rule applies for selling alcohol as well.
Tuesday night in Guadalajara is Lucha Libre night. It’s the Mexican version of WWF but the wrestlers wear masks. The lucha, or fight, involves a lot of slapping, fake jump kicks and head butts. And don’t forget bravado. The crowd loves the scantily clad ladies escorting their meaty masked heroes in spanks down a runway reminiscent of a disco club. Each luchador has their trademark: one has the moves of a stripper, another a fairy (pun intended), one looks like a cowboy, the other like a comic book villain. The fairy, of course, tries to steal a kiss from the overly macho cowboy – or at least bend him in a compromising position. The crowd goes wild.
All that spectacle makes for a rowdy show and long lines at the bar – which isn’t really a bar but a glorified beer cart.
I chose the quickest moving line and slowly shuffled myself to the front. I looked straight ahead for the bartender expecting to meet his eyes. Where was he? Out of my peripherals I saw a small hand grasp two beers by the neck and in a snap pop off the caps. The tiny hand grabbed a 24 oz cup and dove the beers nose first into it. Before I even saw him completely, I knew this was no amateur.
I lowered my gaze a good foot and a half and saw a boy in an oversized t-shirt, eyes wide, waiting for me to tell him what I want. The counter was almost as high as his chest.
“Dos cervezas por favor.”
An adult stepped in to take my fifteen pesos. I moved to the side so the next guy could place his order. The kid strained to hand me my beers.
I crouched down a little.
“How old are you?” I asked.
"Thirteen," the kid's high-pitched voice replied.
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