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...

The Historical Future of Trans Literature

Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us. —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi would not have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice-versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappa mundi were not intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import, rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, ...

Re-Covered: Living Through History

A woman sips a cup of tea after her street is struck by a German bombing raid, 1940 Since the beginning of lockdown, I’ve sought refuge in sagas set during the Second World War. There is something deeply comforting about reading stories in which people are trying to live their lives against the backdrop of an intense global crisis, not least because it’s given me a much-needed sense of perspective. It’s so easy to become caught up in the myriad horrors of the contemporary moment, one sometimes forgets that the darkest days of the Second World War would have been just as depressing and desperate as the period we’re living through right now. Of the many books on the subject I read, Blitz Spirit: Voices of Britain Living Through Crisis, 1939–1945 —a brilliant new compendium of extracts from wartime diaries compiled from the Mass Observation Archive by the anthologist, editor, and literary agent Becky Brown—has stuck with me. Mass Observation (MO) was set up in 1937 by the anthr...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog