Our Town and the Next Town Over

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

The author as a child, dressed as Oscar the Grouch.

Every year it floods on three sides of our town. I do not know how any town could have floods on three sides, but there it is. My mom says it is because the very rich people who live on the lake to the south of us keep the water levels too high so they can run their speedboats year-round, and then every spring, the rains come and we flood, and no one cares because we are all poor. It floods to the south along the river with the park with all the pavilions and the baseball diamonds and the tennis courts and the Frisbee golf course, and the small municipal (in-ground!) pool. And it floods on the southeast, behind the high school, and the motels near the highway. The Townsman Inn and Restaurant and Lounge has been renovated twenty times in half as many years, due to floods, most recently to feature taxidermy animals, on a shelf above all the booths, that stare at you in a menacing way over your coffee. And the one little tiny movie theater in town just seems to have water standing in the first three rows forever and always, and yet it remains open and we go see movies there, we just don’t sit in the first three rows. It floods to the northeast of town, too, all the way up practically to my Uncle Fuzz’s place, where he sleeps in the daytime while my aunt Margie sups on Sweet’N Low. There is the rust-red creek creeping up the concrete steps of my Uncle Fuzz’s house, while he is sleeping by day, because he is on graveyard shift his whole adult life at the tire factory, until he retires early with asbestos poisoning (from the tire factory).

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

A Year in Reading: Daniel Torday

I’ve been on leave from teaching this year, so it’s been a uniquely good 12 months of reading for me, a year when I’ve read for only one reason: fun. Now when I say fun … I’m a book nerd. So I tend to take on “reading projects.” The first was to work toward becoming a Joseph Conrad completist. I’m almost there. I warmed up with critic Maya Jasanoff ’s The Dawn Watch: Conrad in a Global World , which granted me permission to remember the capacious scope of his perspective, his humanistic genius. His masterwork was hard work, but Nostromo belongs on the shelf of both the most important and most difficult of the 20th century. The Secret Agent blew the top of my head off—it’s funny and deeply relevant to our moment, about a terrorist bombing gone horribly wrong. Under Western Eyes is all I got left. 2018 isn’t over yet. But then much fun came in reading whatever, whenever. That started with a heavy dose of Denis Johnson . The new posthumous collection of his short stories, The Lar...

Dressing for Others: Lawrence of Arabia’s Sartorial Statements

Left: T. E. Lawrence; Right: Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) In the southwest Jordanian desert, among the sandstone mountains of Wadi Rum, there is a face carved into a rock. The broad cheeks and wide chin are framed by a Bedouin kuffiyeh headdress and ‘iqal, and beneath the carving, in Arabic, are the words: “Lawrence The Arab 1917.” If you are visiting Wadi Rum with a tour guide, you can expect to be brought to this carving. You may also be shown a spring where Lawrence allegedly bathed, as well as a mountain named after his autobiography, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, whose rock face has been weathered into a shape that does, from some angles, look a little like a series of pillars. I am familiar with the legend of T.E. Lawrence—fluent Arabist, British hero of the Arab Revolt of 1916, troubled lover of the Arab peoples—as well as with the ways the Jordanian tourism industry has capitalized on this legend. Nevertheless, I am still surprised when I hear someone mentio...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog