In Which We Walk Through The Rose Garden

by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

Dots on Maps

by JOSIANE CURTIS

I moved to Portland in the midst of the April showers that, I was warned, are known to last clear into July. I knew one person of the city’s 600,000, a childhood friend who introduced me to the Pacific Northwest when she moved after college. I visited twice before making the decision to follow. On my second visit, I remarked about how odd it was that strangers smiled and said “hello” when they passed each other on the street; that was the near-extent of my knowledge about the city. I knew that a river divides east and west, with bridges balanced across it like art installations. In certain neighborhoods, the smell of fresh-baked bread fills the air, often without an obvious source or explanation, the scent hovering everywhere you walk like a balloon tied around your wrist. 

In my early days, I wandered the Northwest quadrant and admired the brick walls that read “FURNITURE” or “GLASSWARE” or “CURED HAMS,” in coats of paint now a century or more old. I fell in love with the layers of life in loft apartments and coffee shops that had once been warehouses and rolling mills. Rust and minerals appeared like flecks of salt and pepper in the once-blonde buildings. If cities are people then my Portland is Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, a headstrong woman aging gracefully. I marveled at the city’s visible history, and how foreign it all was to me.

Portland’s notorious rain didn’t bother me, that first season or any that have come after. In fact, I remember exploring those early months, confused at how the pavement was always wet but it rarely seemed to actually be raining. I didn’t drive a car and didn’t buy an umbrella. The first time I was caught in an unexpected downpour, I arrived home out of breath, less from running there than from a fit of laughter sparked by an elderly man who, also soaked to the bone, had smiled at me conspiratorially and jumped into a puddle. The strangers you pass in a Portland downpour will meet your eyes and smirk, as if sharing a secret no one in their cars or sitting warm at home knows: this is holy water! Portland rain is the fountain of youth! People go to outdoor concerts and farmers markets in stormy weather; no one melts. There is a too-obvious metaphor here about rain and the washing clean of the past, and it was not lost on me that first spring up north.

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My mother grew up in Santa Rosa, a town about a half hour from where I was raised. The details of her childhood are mostly a blur to me, but I know it was bad enough that the moment she turned 18, she took the first one-way ticket she could find out of town. This ticket came in the form of a wedding and a soon-to-become abusive husband. They took off in his Chevy Nomad and drove as far east as possible. Shortly after, she divorced him, became a model, and moved into a “flat” with her photographer boyfriend, “Chigger.”

We tend to grow up believing that our parents’ lives began when ours did. I learned early enough, though, that my mom’s life did not start because I came into it. Like a cat, she had fallen into one after another, landing effortlessly on her feet with each transition.

In rapid succession she morphed from model to rock band groupie, to hippie flower-child, to rootless traveler, moving back and forth from coast to coast and everywhere in between. Eventually, she got her high school diploma, and then entered an academic phase, working toward a PhD in language studies. She met my father in her academic phase. The my-father phase lasted about five years, toward the end of which she transitioned into the person I know: my mother.

My great-grandparents owned a plot of wild, naked land not far from Santa Rosa, where the sky at night is clear and cloudless, where the stars shine brighter than anywhere I’ve ever been. In that valley, even the darkest dark night glows. Shortly after I was born, they announced that they would be selling the property, and rather than see it sold off, my mom and her brother pooled their finances and bought it. My mother once again drove coast to coast, this time east to west, this time with a toddler and a nearly-newborn baby to keep her company. I didn’t know a father was a thing until many years later.

When I was fifteen, dating my first boyfriend and feeling the beginnings of what I thought might be love, I asked my mom why she’d left him. We were sitting in the living room, which looked out through two French doors to the back porch, and beyond that, the mountainside. “In all my life, when everything else around me came and went or fell apart, the view from this spot was the only thing that hadn’t changed since I was a little girl. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing that.” At the time, I couldn’t understand how a piece of property could be more important than a person. I hadn’t yet learned how lucky I was to have something in my life that stable, an idea of a childhood home that never faltered, was never threatened. I had not yet learned how easily people change.

When I was sixteen, my brother went to college and mom and I were left alone. We broke bad fast; a volatile combination of puberty and menopause. For three years we lived like lionesses, either at each other’s throats or silently stalking around the house, avoiding interaction. I became nocturnal. I would check for her bedroom light on my way up the driveway late at night, and if it was still on, I would sometimes park halfway down the gravel road and wait for it to go black.

by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

I wanted to blame her. For what? Anything. Everything. My father’s absence. Who I’d become: unaffectionate, cold, guarded. For my growing inability to distinguish between two things that should be opposite; love and loneliness, for example.

After high school, when I began to understand that my mother was depressed, and deeply so, I shifted blame to my father, for anything, everything. Just before moving to Portland, he was in San Francisco for a conference and I met him for coffee, seeing his face for maybe the fifth time since babyhood. At the time, my mother was sick and I was brave. I wanted to hate him. I wanted to make him defend himself.

What I took away from that visit is this: my mother wanted my father to follow her, and he wanted her to stay. But she didn’t ask him to follow, and he didn’t ask her to stay, and they both remained hurt over it for a long time. Maybe forever, the ghosts of that past life lingering throughout every life that came after. Her children are sometimes comforting, and sometimes a painful reminder of that man. When I wanted to be cruel, I knew how his last name or the eyebrows I inherited from him, held hard and fast like a dare, could cut her to the bone.

If I have learned anything valuable about relationships from the lack of my parents’, it is to avoid the lasting pain of this pitfall at all costs. It is that you can’t be mad at another person for not giving you something you never asked for.

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When I was looking at colleges, my mom and I traveled to the east coast. We visited Boston, where she took me to the Harvard stacks and told me about sneaking in to read Dickens and law books, long before she went back to school. In New York, we got lattes at a café on the street where she’d gone on her first date with my father. The bar they’d gone to was no longer there, but I could feel her remembering it hard enough that it might as well have been. It was summer and her memories stuck to the inside of my windpipe like humidity; these places were supposed to be new to me, but everywhere we went was already a piece of my history. Her nostalgia made me claustrophobic.

After college, I moved to San Francisco. When my mother visited, I tried to show her around my neighborhood but every street corner was already special. I would start a story and she’d finish it. I know these stories were an opportunity, an attempt she was making to bond, but it took the excitement out of the place for me. Everywhere I went seemed to have been my mother’s home before she was my mother. I felt unoriginal, but also guilty. I felt like I was perpetually taking things that had once belonged to her: the plain wedding band I wear on my right index finger, her grey cowl-neck sweater, city after city, youth.

by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

People often leave a place to escape their own memories, sick of standing on first kiss street corners or having breakup flashbacks on the bus route by an ex-boyfriend’s house. This was part of leaving California for me, but the appeal of Portland specifically was that I had no past there, even, especially, before my own. My mother had never been. The first time she visited, I walked her through the Rose Garden and Arboretum, took her to my favorite breakfast spot, found a Thai restaurant for dinner where neither of us had ever eaten. All weekend she nodded and smiled. She asked questions she didn’t already have answers for.

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Months after my grandmother died, my mom was shipped a box of old browning photographs, a sewing machine, and a recipe for that too-dense, too-rich chocolate cake Grammere had made every Christmas. My mom hated chocolate and had hated that cake. She emitted a sort of scoffing laugh when she found the recipe, and then her shoulder-shaking turned to crumbling as she pored and cried over the pictures, called in sick to work, had someone pick my brother and I up for school, didn’t leave the house for weeks.

A big black folder lived under the bed in the study with some of the prints from when she was modeling. In it, there were dozens of proof sheets and a few almost life-size black and white headshots, her skin grey and smooth and elegant. After Grammere died, I stole one of the photos.  My mom is in a garden and, even caught in the middle of a head-thrown-back laugh, there is a sadness in her face that I’ve sometimes been told is in mine as well.

Years later, I was helping my brother move and I found another of the photos, pressed between the pages of an atlas like a delicate flower. My mother is in an empty room, sitting on a wooden chair and looking at the camera, not smiling but seemingly content, like she is remembering something happy. I didn’t bring it up but wondered when he’d taken it. I wonder when he decided he didn’t want someone else to choose which pictures he would get one day, which to send through the mail in a repurposed shoebox.

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In Portland, I became friends with a woman who I consider to be one of my platonic soul mates. To say that Sondra always seems to know the right thing to say wouldn’t do her justice. She doesn’t “just know” the right thing to say, as if to imply that it comes easily, but she works hard to get to it. She listens, and reads people, and knows how to balance being honest and kind.

When we had known each other a few months, Sondra and I got together for a craft night. The holidays were approaching and she’d read about a way to weave magazine pages into bowls that could be given as Christmas presents. I came with a notebook, planning to write.

“Would you read me something?” Sondra asked as we settled onto the living room floor. I couldn’t remember the last person I’d read out loud to, the last time I’d even read out loud, but I said yes. I flipped through the notebook, found an old favorite, and then before I knew it I had read three pieces, five, nine. Somewhere in the middle, tears started streaming down my face.

In the silence after I finished, Sondra rose from the floor, hugged her shoulders around mine and whispered one simple sentence, five magnificent words into my ear before going to the kitchen to start dinner.

“You are not your mother.” 

by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

I didn’t even realize the piece I’d read had been about my mother, didn’t really even know when I had started crying or why, but there it was. It’s what I’d been running from. It’s why I had come to Portland – to find that out, or prove it to myself, or both.

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If Portland is a woman, she is like my mom. She goes to a grey resting place between seasons, a melancholy in her face even in the middle of a head-thrown back laugh. She smiles not that often, but when she does, it’s like August; it lights up the room. When she smiles, you forget everything that’s come before that moment and fall in love with her, and you forgive her, over and over again.

One Thanksgiving, my mom let me borrow one of her favorite sweaters, an oversized cowl-neck the color of six a.m. in September. I kept it long after the holiday, brought it with me when I moved to Portland. When she visited, she asked about it, having seen me wearing it in a photo a few weeks before. In true Capricorn passive aggressive fashion, I didn’t admit to having it, but snuck it back into her suitcase the night before she left.

The last time I saw her I was walking away from a Portland MAX station, where she was waiting for the train to the airport. My mother pulled the grey sweater she’d found in her bag that morning over her head, and disappeared into the sky. It started to rain.

Josiane Curtis is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Portland. She last wrote in these pages about leaving San Francisco. You can find her twitter here. You can find her website here.

Paintings by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson.

"Clair de Lune" - Flight Facilities (mp3)

In Which We Are On A Slightly Different Schedule

Seasonal

by TANIA ROHAN

It’s always fall in San Francisco. Sure, we might have a day or two that resembles something from another season, a balmy night or a miserably cold afternoon. We might even see a drop of snow once in 35 years. But for the most part, it’s September, October or November all year long here. A cool, temperate climate. Hoodie weather. This makes it the perfect place to enjoy heart-pumping outdoor activities if you are so inclined (I am not). It also makes it the perfect place to forget what day it is. 

Which might be why it’s hard to believe just how long it’s been since I came back here, weary from three countries in six years and about as many visa applications, jobs and fresh starts; skinny from more fun than food; pale from the London summer. My family threw a barbeque in my honor, so I fought jetlag to catch up with cousins and grandparents, speculate about next steps, enjoy my mom’s famous kebabs. By nightfall, I was drunk-texting the friends I’d left behind, joking that my return had been a huge mistake, wondering if it actually had been.

In the album from that day, there’s a picture of my Armenian grandmother in a baseball cap looking characteristically forlorn and maybe even a little amused. It’s the last photo I have of her. Less than a year later I’d be speaking at her funeral. That was the first time I thought: I came back just in time. 

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Within a few weeks of my return, I had begun to shed the skin of my former life, nostalgic texts and emails growing fewer and farther between. Within a few months, I had a new job and a new apartment. And thanks, in part, to the mockery of friends and family, it didn’t take long for me to ditch the British intonation/spelling/word choice I’d picked up.

I made new friends. I reconnected with old ones, sometimes by accident, a random sighting in a boutique or a bar in which we take turns exclaiming how little the other person has changed.

I got to know my family again. When I needed a break from the city, I spent weekends at my parents’ house in a sunny suburb on the south peninsula. I did this even more in the summer, when each mile on the drive down there seemed to bring with it another degree Fahrenheit.

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Summer is the coldest time of year in San Francisco. If it isn’t, it certainly feels that way. Year after year, countless 4th of July barbeques move indoors, thousands of summer tourists take refuge in souvenir fleece. While so much of the country hides out in air-conditioned rooms, we’ve been known to turn up the thermostat. The shops fill with clothes we can’t wear, not here, not anytime soon. It feels like a cruel joke — or at the very least, a lapse in merchandising strategy — that we can’t find a warm cardigan in the months when we most need one. Not only is it cold, but everyone seems to be in denial about it.

It is in the summer that we are most likely to find ourselves wrapped up in a blanket of fog, a mist so cold and thick it’s a light drizzle. A wind so fierce your scarf becomes a dangerous weapon. If you’re lucky, you might find yourself in one of the sunny spots. If you’re really, really lucky, you might find yourself in one of the sunny spots, on a hill or a rooftop, watching from afar while the fog sweeps across a pastel cityscape.

We wait it out, though, killing time until our Indian Summer. It’s hardly a heat wave and it’s frustratingly unpredictable, but a daytime high of 70°F is a fairly common occurrence in September or October. On those first warm weekends, the entire city seems to descend on one park or another for a dance party or a picnic or a nap. When the sun starts to set, we will immediately regret leaving home without a jacket. But for one afternoon, the sun dotes on a patient San Francisco.

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I met Daniel in Los Angeles one fall. By Christmas, we were in love. He was my polar opposite in every way except the ones that really mattered. Whereas I like “music to slit your wrists to,” he loves to dance. Whereas I’m always in a hurry, always knocking my knees and elbows as I navigate corridors, his movements are slow and steady, his actions calculated, precise. Whereas I’m disorganized, messy, haphazard, he sorts his laundry by six different categories. The first time I visited him in L.A., I dropped my entire bag of toiletries in his toilet. I watched in amazement as he slipped on a pair of disposable latex gloves (who doesn’t have a box of those handy?), fished the bag out, and then carefully washed and dried every item inside it.

That I found myself in another long-distance relationship did have me wondering about my capacity for something real, to love someone who was actually present. But this time it was different. This time, we were separated by highway instead of an ocean. This time, he moved for me instead of the other way around. After a year of back and forth, of weeks spent waiting for each subsequent visit, he quit his job, packed up his ‘98 Civic and drove six hours north to my apartment. That was the second time I thought: I came back just in time. (Though it was too late to prove to my Armenian grandmother that I was not, as she liked to speculate, a closeted lesbian.)

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Somewhere along the way I turned 30 and my life didn’t end. In fact, it was a surprisingly happy occasion. While 29 had filled me with dread, had felt like holding onto something that had long since passed, my 20s on life support, 30 felt like the beginning of something. What exactly? I wasn’t sure.

Somewhere along the way, I lost my Armenian grandfather. He was a strong man, a proud man. He was outspoken, brash, at times to the embarrassment of his children and grandchildren. He’d lived through Iraqi dictatorships and the Lebanese Civil War and hip replacement surgery. But in the end, I believe he died of a broken heart. 

Somewhere along the way, I married Daniel, changed careers, forgot how to drive, learned how to drive again.

At some point, I stopped thinking about whether or not I’d come back in time, what I’d missed or not missed. It stopped feeling like I’d ever been gone at all.

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They say that every seven years you are new again. That each cell in your body is replaced with a new one, and that that leads to a physical shift as well as an emotional one, a psychological one, a spiritual one. In my teens, I used this phenomenon to explain how my once silky, stick-straight hair had turned wavy and coarse. These days, I wonder if I’m on a slightly different schedule.

It’s been almost six years since I moved back here. Six years disguised as one long season — a fall that never seems to end.

It’s a damn good season, though, isn’t it? Maybe even the best.

Tania Rohan is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in San Francisco. You can find her twitter here. You can find her website here.

Photographs by Kathy Zembera.

"Gold Soundz" - Pavement (mp3)

In Which We Are Vaguely Offensive And Obviously Out Of Place

Substantially Late
to the Party

by JOANNA SWAN

Certain habits of a socially dubious nature are sometimes afforded an aura of Cool when rephrased in an affectedly casual way: thrift store shopping, honky-tonk music, smoking, driving a 1994 Honda Civic, fermenting kombucha.

Most everyone has some such a point of pride, a secret weapon of underdog prestige, of being hip-to-it before "it" was "It." One could count even nominal victories  throughout my junior year of college, for example, I derived inordinate satisfaction from knowing (and sometimes sharing) that I liked certain bands before they genre-jumped from "New Weird America" to a more coherent "Indie Rock" and concurrent commercials for such consumables as Crayola and Outback Steakhouse. Never have I succeeded at reconciling my career as a Girl Scout in such a way. In an inverse relationship to knowing obscure bands before they reach stardom, my Girl Scout membership began before girlhood was quite finished, yet well after it was simply cute.

Even then, at ninth grade maturity level and the height of my love affair with gaudy eye makeup, I don't think I ever really wanted to be part and parcel of what I saw as a more tame, homogeneous and charitable form of the Spice Girls. In my enfance, while neighborhood colleagues were building a Mattel world of pink plastic and bubblegum-scented nail polish, enjoying femininity in its preliminaries: I was tossing Jasmine Barbie in the air until her head popped off somewhere in the Murphy’s ornamental pear tree. My Aryan doll of similar branding received numerous haircuts brutalizing her blonde locks and, more positively, providing nesting material for the backyard finch population.

I played by myself in such a manner, and when I desired sociability I found it independently — in Jack, the circumspect older-kid-neighbor who had a tiny dog and boasted to the 1st-graders about his mythological stacks of homework. Or I basked in the Harrison brothers' decadence: their Nintendo 64 and kid-sized, battery-powered Army Jeep and mother's Chicken Pot Pies and unending Otter Pops supply. Later, I participated in requisite soccer seasons and City of Davis Junior Basketball practices, performing mediocrely and mainly enjoying the shenanigans that ensued when paired with similarly un-invested girl friends.

Emerging thus into an antebellic period of home life post-middle school crises of conscience and friend-crowd, I settled into a complacent year of Wuthering Heights, sines cosines tangents, and short boyfriends. Fifteen years old and ready to leave ninth grade one month in, I skipped tardy and shameless into Girl Scouts, as if the organization were but a transparent caprice.

Of course, I could have joined earlier. Scouting runs rampant in the northern California area, and autumnal Cookie Seasons of my girlhood saw me reconciling my vigorous sweet tooth with a vague jealousy directed at the young verdant saleswoman accepting similarly green currency from my grandmother. Samoa envy notwithstanding, I never found the impetus to Scout-ify, whether for social reasons (too goody-goody, an innate distaste for uniforms cultivated by years in the public school system) or otherwise. Incidentally, there was no bridging from Pantone color 541 to 334C (that recognizable green hue), no chance at phenomenal cookie sales by virtue of endearing Scoutness, no impressive compendium of embroidered emblems, no pledge and certainly no pride. I told anyone who stumbled upon the fact of my membership that "I joined so I could go to San Francisco for free."

That same San Francisco explanation befittingly illustrates my Girl Scout career. Most of the troop slept in regulation Girl Scout cabins on Girl Scout terrain somewhere near Golden Gate Park. My ladies-in-arms and I crept out into the Bay Area’s witching hour and watched in fascination or terror or disbelief as dozens of muffler-less vehicles cruised and revved outside the chain-link fence, racing for hours until sirens forced hasty egress.

For my fifteen-years, this spectacle was more valuable than any Fort or Bridge or understanding of Ethiopian cuisine; I was enamored with 1977, Pink Floyd's "The Wall," and the idea of doing illegal drugs — the latter of which remained by and large a bibliographic pursuit involving trips to the Yolo County Library and such surreptitiously-read titles as LSD: Doorway to the Numinous, The Drug Library's Hallucinogens, and Psychedelic Shamanism enjoyed on the hills overlooking the Blue Devils soccer fields.

Not that I was delinquent — one fellow member and host of our 2006 Secret Santa Gift Exchange was obliged to join as a result of her DUI. Another used pharmaceuticals. Several others’ sordid sexual conversations furnished entertaining weekly meetings for a girl who practiced piano on either the Steinway or the Mason & Hamlin for at least forty minutes a day (though ideally two hours); worked silently on Algebra II/Trig while AIMing an erstwhile boyfriend, absconded with a carton of ice cream and returned it to the freezer, half-empty; and fed herself the untenable truth that a thirst for company and camaraderie is quenched with dreams of Edward Scissorhands, self-reliance and snacks.

There were always more established and well-patched Scouts focused staunchly on high school courseloads and how the GS Gold Award might look on admissions applications down the road; I wore black hoodies from Mervyn's, knitted knobby scarves throughout meetings and forgot whether to knit or purl, and joked with Marie or Noelle about older boys we'd never date. I often felt in Girl Scouts meetings like the skinny little girl with bare, asphalt-stained feet in the company of my Barbie'd cohort; vaguely offensive, obviously out-of-place, an incongruous Puck in a sea of serious young Athenians.

It was easy to play the Fool when faced with resuscitating plastic babies for CPR certification, but decidedly more difficult when we Scouted north and south. I took community service as seriously as a teenager with little-to-no experience in anything less than lower-middle-class can. There was Habitat for Humanity in Oxnard, though all I remember are strawberry fields and working vigorously in a vain attempt to negate the caloric result of gorging on peanut M&Ms. In Davis, we planted a memorial tree for a girl I never met, a Girl Scout member and cancer victim. And how the PBS fund drive organizers must have perceived us as we traipsed into their Sacramento offices! All too-tight jeans, awkward glances, uncontrollable fits of giggling peppering our hours at the phone bank.

Did we offer any valuable service markedly more skillfully than a ragtag group of desperado pubescents? Why Girl Scouts? More a mercenary sent to infiltrate the unit and in the meanwhile strike up some friendships, I enjoyed the meetings, the home-baked brownies that Girl Scout Moms make (my mother, not a Girl Scout Mom, preferred instead to share in the spoils of what snacks I returned home with), the capaciousness of conversation. As if in this system of social gathering — organized by and populated with other women — I had more permission to express what is perhaps the decadence of being teenaged — that awkward, unbridled ridiculousness, outlandishness, sometimes-rude, energetic freedom.

Misguided or no, I felt that Girl Scouts affirmed this freedom. That is to say that if acting like a doofus is ever acceptable, it seemed especially so in the comfort of the Scouting environment. I sought out Girl Scouts to cure teenage malaise. Perhaps it didn’t empower me any more than did running barefoot behind shrubbery or climbing roofs or realizing that I could beat any boy at Mario Kart 64.

I stuck it out through high school and graduated as a Senior Girl Scout patch-less and Award-less, with an acquired taste for out-of-box brownies and pasta parties. Upon graduation I also received a CD of photos spanning 1st through 12th grades, of which I am in approximately 12. Of course I judged each of these dozen with my "cool/uncool"-binaried eye; of course, I am the disparate element, a Plain Jane among the Blanche Ingrams of Girl Scouts. But perhaps such disparity lies not with the Joanna in the photo, but with the group as a whole. A messy essence of awkward, uncool, diffident teenagers with too much makeup on bound together sometimes with a pledge, sometimes a patch, sometimes a Girl Scout Promise though, in my case, left unmemorized — and sometimes simply the mutual permission to be weird.

Joanna Swan is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about the saxophone.You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She blogs here and tumbls here.

"Silver Bells" - She & Him (mp3)

"Baby It's Cold Outside" - She & Him (mp3)

"Sleigh Ride" - She & Him (mp3)