Vivé Griffith

Time for a Facebook Sabbatical

2011-10-30T16:38:00.000-05:00

I love Facebook. I love the status updates and I love flipping through photos of babies and vacations and bathroom remodels. I love the adrenaline rush I get when a little red box appears at the top of the page telling me someone has interacted with me in some way. I love that there are people there who knew me when I was two and people who work with me today and people who I know mostly by association—damn, even a woman who owns two copies of my chapbook. Former students. Ex-boyfriends. Old classmates. I love seeing colleagues’ travel photos and I love knowing what’s coming up next on my favorite podcasts. I love finding pithy ways to describe the mundane things my husband and I do on Saturday afternoons.

I may love Facebook a little too much and a little too often. So I’m taking the month of November off.

What will I do with my time if I’m not able to fall into the easy world of top stories, recent stories, news feeds, and birthday reminders? I want to find out. And I want to take on another insane time-consuming project—National Novel Writing Month, affectionately called NaNoWriMo, in which thousands of people scramble to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I’m not writing a novel. I don’t even have a writing project at hand. But I want desperately to return to a writing practice, so I’m gambling that 2,000 words a day will deliver me there. And maybe I’ll write a few blog entries. Take some long walks in the cooler weather. Put some veggies in the ground.

As for Facebook, I’m too chicken to disappear completely, to simply delete my account and get on with life like those who never signed up to begin with. I can’t imagine what my 25^th high school reunion earlier in the month would have been like without Facebook, all those old familiar faces familiar again, some part of their decades-long story already filled in—marriages, children, spare time tendencies. No, I don’t want to lose all that.

And I don’t imagine I can just dabble in Facebook. It’s like the glass canister of M&Ms a co-worker has placed in the breakroom and keeps refilling, a little stainless steel measuring spoon by its side. I look at that canister and know it’s no good, that it’s colorful but dangerous, that I’ll feel worse if I open it. But open it I do. And then all afternoon I rise from my chair, unscrew the lid, dip the spoon in for another dose, close the lid, sit down at my desk, eat, and then repeat. I can’t say no to Facebook anymore than I can say no to the M&Ms.

Instead I’ll ask my husband to intervene, have him change my password, write it down and hide it away somewhere, and give it to me on December 1. I’ll remove the app from my iPhone. And I’ll move into November, whatever it brings.

Friends, I’ll miss you. I’ll miss your Halloween costume recaps, the photos of Thanksgiving spreads and family members. I’ll miss your news, large and trivial, the premature Christmas trees. I’ll fly to New York and spend the holiday in Connecticut and not share my bite-sized stories. I’ll see you in December.

A Winter Walk

2011-01-08T00:12:00.001-06:00

My intentions for my winter break are simple. Relax. Get organized. Walk.

Maybe I could throw a few more in there, intentions having to do with planning classes and writing poems and reading great novels. But Relax, Organize, Walk come close to summing it up.

On December 20th I walked from home across town to Walton's, where I had a bratwurst (shhh...) with sauerkraut and mustard, then up to REI, Whole Earth, and over to visit my mom at the shop where she works. I let my camera dangle around my neck and I took I tried to capture details wherever I could. Here are some of the things that caught my eye on this last day of autumn in Austin.

Around the mailbox, this little guy is twined.

Then at the end of the street, I am greeted by these bright signs.

Crossing I-35 is always the worst part of the walk. Colorful reminders keep the roar of traffic at bay.

Autumn in December

Gnarled beauty.

Urban exotica.

Remember: peace

A glimpse of Old Austin on 6th Street

Soup and Bread

2010-11-27T17:36:00.027-06:00

Ask me what's the perfect symbol of a soulful life, and I'll tell you soup and bread. Bread, soup, maybe wine and salad, a friend or loved one across the table. It hardly gets better.

I believe this so entirely that I sometimes forget it altogether. It goes way back, back to 1996, when I was agonizing about whether to go to graduate school in New York, where I was accepted into a program I'd never thought would take me, or in Cincinnati, where I had a fellowship and a life. I thought the decision was about what place would be best for my writing, but I realized somewhere in the painful process that it was also about where I could live the life I wanted to live.

I held this image of my life, and it always had me with friends over, crammed into a tiny kitchen around a wood table where we would eat soup and bread, pour wine, talk long into the night. Except as I pondered, I realized how hard that image would be to create in the New York I'd be entering, one in which I'd be working nearly full-time, accruing debt, getting home late at night, and living far away from campus. When I looked at my life in Cincinnati, I realized I already had that soup-and-bread life. And I stayed.

(That decision caused life to unfold in a way that landed me here, in Austin, Texas, married to a man who gets me well enough to buy me The Bread Bible and a soup cookbook for Christmas.)

On Wednesday night I got to have L over for dinner, the house vacant of family for the evening. I began Wednesday morning on a day of cooking and music listening and before I knew it I'd made us soup and bread.

Soup was made with the Rancho Gordo yellow-eyed beans I bought in Napa last summer. Rancho Gordo's gorgeous beans are so pretty in their packages that it can be hard to cook them. But cook them I did, first by soaking them in a glass bowl. I found several versions of the same recipe online, but went with this one.

Meanwhile, I made bread. Olive bread. Olive bread that requires you start the night before with a sponge that rests in the fridge. Then it's kneaded with flour, water, yeast, salt, and oil-cured olives.

And to add to my ambition for the day, I decided to throw in some olive oil granola, a mix of oats and almonds and pumpkins seeds I tossed with olive oil, honey, cinnamon, cardamom, and vanilla and baked to a golden brown.

The soaked beans were cooked with some veggies and herbs and lemon rind in water. Italian parsley stems were tied together with twine and added. It seemed a little fussy, but the cooking water was downright tasty.

It was finished by adding a saute of veggies, rosemary, and roasted tomatoes. Meanwhile, the bread was baked with a pan of water below it on the bottom shelf.

I ladled soup into bowls and finished them with a swirl of olive oil and a dash of chopped parsley. L and I went to the garden and clipped lettuce from the veggie bed, which I dressed with a little olive oil, pepper, and Fini balsamic.

We carried it all to the screened-in porch, along with a lighter for the candles and a half-finished bottle of cabernet. A warm breeze tossed fronds bamboo muhly gracefully around and Leslie and I talked life, work, love, family, and food. We were at it past midnight, ushering in Thanksgiving day with one more gratitude to add to the list.

Back to the Blog

2010-11-08T09:21:00.005-06:00

If I were to sum up the question that has haunted and challenged, motivated and confounded me throughout my adult life, it would be this: What is my work?

The funny thing is that I've always asked the question within fairly narrow parameters, a slim window of possibility. It's not like I've been pondering brain surgery or construction management or choreography. I write. I teach. I love books and classrooms. I enjoy people and believe in the dignity of people's stories.

Years ago I wrote a mission statement that basically said I wanted to live a creative life and help others be creative.

So what's so hard? In some ways, work for me is not a question of content, but of form. In what way am I creative? In what way do I help others be creative? Where do I put my energy and attention?

For a long while I wrote poetry. I went off to distant cities and wooded cabins to write poetry. I also read poetry aloud in places. I taught poetry to kids and college students and teenagers and adult professionals who wanted an outlet for their voices. It was plenty of fun. I was broke.

Things shifted. So I started a job in which I wrote a lot -- feature stories about other people's work -- professors and researchers and program directors and, once in awhile, students. I met amazing people and got to be creative alongside photographers and designers and illustrators. But often I'd sit across a desk from someone with a list of questions and a tape recorder and I'd be acutely aware that they knew their work and I didn't. And I was there to tell about their work while not doing mine.

So in 2006 I took a trip, a long trip clear across the continent and back. I was following the journey my grandmother made 60 years earlier and recorded -- although sparsely -- in a small black journal. This was so clearly my work, to take this trip and write about it. It would pull together my research and interviewing, my writing and planning, my interest in women and travel and family and legacy. The trip was intense and surprising, magical and grueling. I lost a friendship. I gained seven pounds. I kept a blog and people I didn't even know read it.

Then I tried to write the book. How a book so obvious and appropriate could be so impossible is a topic for another day. I pushed, labored, wrote and rewrote, and as I danced around that project two things happened: I got engaged. And I landed a job I really, really wanted.

That was almost 3 1/2 years ago, around the time I last wrote in this blog. Since then I've gotten married and confirmed how much I love domestic life, my garden and my kitchen with its yellow checkerboard floor and red Le Creuset pots. I've been a few places, mostly ferny Northwest destinations but also on a recent cheese-and-bread-filled Paris journey. And I've been running a program called Free Minds with my full attention and full heart, a type of professional engagement I didn't know was possible for me. Oh, and I've written a few more drafts of the book.

So what is my work? I still find the question hard to answer simply. Perhaps it's because so many of these things are my work. Or because I am always journeying toward it. I return to this blog now because I think here those pieces of my life can be woven together into story. And I know I believe in story.

Hamburgers on Hard Rolls

2007-05-19T09:56:00.000-05:00

Every Saturday afternoon my grandmother's friends would come over to play bridge. Norma would drive, ferrying Evelyn and Lydia to the house on Savoy Street.

And every Saturday afternoon they would have hamburgers on hard rolls with Bermuda onions.

My grandmother, it turns out, lived a very stable life, filled with ritual and habit. Three times a day she bathed her mother-in-law in tar to fight back a skin problem severe enough to kill her. Lunch time she sat down around the table with her husband and two daughters. Saturday she played bridge.

Saturday was available because my grandfather worked, as he worked Monday through Friday and part of Sunday. My grandmother was alone much of the time. My mother attributes her mother's sense of independence, strong female friendships, and women-only adventures to that fact alone. If she could have been with her husband, she would have. Since she couldn't, she made other choices.

Which reminds me again how easy our lives are, comparatively. We laud the accomplishments of immigrants, but we forget how hard they work, and worked. My grandfather, whose father sold cheese in a tiny village in Southern Italy, grew to be a prosperous man. But he worked so hard he only shared supper with his family once a week. Other nights, he'd have the sandwich my grandmother made for him when he came home long after dark.

In the meantime, my grandmother played bridge.

We were close to Oatman and famished

2007-05-09T14:14:00.001-05:00

Forgive me, but that line keeps coming back to me -- Close to Oatman, Close to Oatman, Close to Oatman. Famished.

It seemed one of the longer days of the trip, that endless stretch from Los Angeles suburban strip malls to this empty desert road where jackrabbits dart into the hillsides. Kirk and I had already stopped for directions at the Moabi Marina, where people vacationed in the 114-degree heat. Water sports on the Colorado River in the middle of the desert. A humvee hauling a boat through the dun.

And then the town that wasn't a town, on the way to Oatman, the town that wasn't yet a town back when Olive Oatman was kidnapped by the Yavapai Indians, then sold to the Mohave. Bought back five years later, she wore Mohave tattoos on her face for the rest of her life.

Inside the Silver Dollar the crack of pool balls made Kirk jump. Inside Linda's Cafe, one man said to another, "I was going to ask you if you had a 77." No food makes more sense than hamburgers in a place like this, than french fries and iced tea amid the valances decorated with the Route 66 emblem.

What made the boy who asked for ice water storm out, leaving the door open behind him? What made the owner, serving us, blurt out, "Have you ever seen a fry that big before?"

The boy will grow up to be a violent man. Kirk and I will probably never drive this stretch of deserted highway again. Few will remember that in its earliest incarnation, Oatman was named Vivian. When we get there, the signs say open, though everything's closed.

Cameras Were Bigger Back Then

2007-04-16T07:26:00.001-05:00

There I am, off to see the world. It was 1993. I was just shy of 25. I was a marketing research analyst in Charlotte, North Carolina, a handful of years out of college and even fewer off a divorce. I hadn't really been anywhere.

I pulled out the photo album this morning. A month in Europe by myself, a loose itinerary that had me going into London and out of Frankfurt, not a single hotel reservation along the way.

While it's tempting to laugh at my Birkenstocks-and-socks combo (and numerous other elements of the photo) I'm trying to get past that. Because I've pulled it out for other reasons. Something incipient in that photo. A different way of being--one that put a priority on away over home--was being born. But at that moment, I was just standing in my friend's driveway, ready for the airport.

(Before the trip, I remember my mother saying, "Are you excited?" and me answering, "Oddly, I don't really feel excited." She said, "You don't feel excited about much." It stuck. And it seemed true. How could I not be excited at 24? And was it during this trip that I rediscovered excitement?)

Traveling alone, traveling as a woman, choosing travel over other things more conventional, more safe, more responsible. These are the things I want to write about.

(I remember that New Year's, remember a friend staying the night and how she sat on my bedroom floor before going back out to the pulled-out couch. I was in bed. It was late. And I told her, "This year I'm going to go to Europe." It seemed so radical! These days I live in a world where someone is always going off to Europe, or Costa Rica, or Mexico, or India. But back then, the idea was full of daring. "Really?" She wanted to know more.)

By the next morning I was in Trafalgar Square. A few days later seeing The Merchant of Venice in Stratford-Upon-Avon. And then on a boat in the Lake District, off to find Wordsworth's Dove Cottage.

It was cold on the water. We were cruising.

The Art of the 23-Day Journey

2007-04-11T10:47:00.001-05:00

How many hours were lost to reservation-making this past weekend? We are book for Italy this summer, a trip already distracting for all of the can't wait-ing around here. But something happened as I got my tickets together, moving the trip back by a day to save a few hundred dollars, figuring out when I'll be in Rome, Sicily, on the Adriatic.

I looked down at the Orbitz page awaiting my credit card and there it was: Total days=23.

Now I've been known to give too much emphasis to numbers, dates, and such things. But the fact that I'm writing a book about a 23-day journey and then taking a 23-day journey the following year--an entirely different journey--seems important to me. And Chris, not enamored with dates nor even (frankly) with synchronicity, added when I raced off to tell him, "Twenty-three is my birth day as well."

So there it is. Today, on paper, I'll ponder the art of the 23-day road trip.

And I'll ponder what it will mean for me to return to Rome 12 or 13 years later. It was in Rome that my traveler identity was solidified, in ways I'll tell at another time. And that identity is the one that sent me off on the road last year, hitting the Merritt Parkway in a rented Chevy Malibu with an American flag in the window.

And the freeze...

2007-04-08T08:44:00.000-05:00

Winter returns to Austin (and everywhere else) this weekend, and I look out anxiously at my plants to see if anything fell to yesterday's sleet and diving temperatures.

It's Easter morning. Everything is green and moist and chill. I'll be heading to church.

My friend Jane visited this last week, sitting with me at a table at Austin Java and giving me writing exercises which landed Morris Dees at Yellowstone with me and evoked those promenading ladies and gentlemen from before the War, dressing in their finery for evenings at Old Faithful Inn.

We've purchased tickets for Italy and I am left to decide in which Adriatic town to spend my 39th birthday. We've also purchased one of those blow-up exercise balls, which will reside in the den. Chris says, "Have we really become those people?"

There are worse things to become.

Happy Easter.

Saturday: New Bike, a Little Ditty

2007-03-31T16:57:00.000-05:00

It was to be a hyper-productive day, in which I finished taxes and planted columbine and romanced my sweetie, with whom I had my first date three years ago on-the-dot. So far, it hasn't turned out that way. But it isn't all lost.

I bought a bike today. I've been without a bike for a year or two, having sold my road bike to a friend training for the triathalon, in large part because I wanted something more equipped for the hike and bike trail and around-town rides. My old bike had been built for touring, and I'd bought it back when I imagined those long rides through the French hillsides that I've never taken.

So my new bike is simpler -- a Novara Metro -- a comfort bike with tires that handled my ride home from REI with ease. I used my 20 percent off coupon with some gusto.

And I wrote an essay to submit to the Channel Road Inn's writing contest. The winner gets a weekend at the inn, a lovely seaside spot in Santa Monica, which adds up to more than many of the places you can be published. I stayed there as a respite in the middle of my road trip, and I'd do it again. Besides, it's good practice to write about the trip in brief, related ways.

Tonight we head out for a celebratory dinner, perhaps at the new Sandra Bullock restaurant downtown because, well, why not?

Essay excerpt below. Happy Saturday.

It was Tuesday, June 27th, and I’d been traveling for 12 days. In a rented Chevy Malibu I’d sped across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, gotten lost in eastern Ohio, stayed awake across hundreds of miles of flat prairie in South Dakota. I’d crossed the Big Horns, the Virgin River Gorge, and the Mojave still shimmering with heat near midnight. I’d slept in sunken beds in motor courts and in bathroom-less cabins where bison roamed outside.

I was on the trail of my grandmother, Jennie Marrocco, who had traveled from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Los Angeles and back in 1946. Using her journal as my guide, I was re-creating her trip—which she made with three girlfriends—as exactly as I could 60 years later. I’d spent months in preparation tracking down the places she’d visited and the hotels she’d stayed in. My goal was to replicate her experience.

I thought Los Angeles would be the exception.

My grandmother had spent her nights in Southern California in Cucamonga, near San Bernardino, then a small farming and wine community. She slept in a “lovely cabin” and followed Route 66 into Los Angeles each day, where she visited Beverly Hills and the Chinese Theater and “loads of orange groves.” She’d sipped a cocktail at the Brown Derby, which she admitted was “not too hot.”

I could have stayed in Cucamonga myself, now named Rancho Cucamonga and a community of suburban California homes with red tile roofs. But the cabins would be long gone and the commute would have been a chaotic mix of concrete and traffic.

I chose to stay at the Channel Road Inn.

When I arrived, I was tired, achy, dizzy from travel. I needed the cookie sitting on the plate inside my cheerful room. I needed the note with my name on it, the sun flooding through the windows, the almond lotion in its tiny container in the bathroom. I needed the sense of ease contained in the fluffy comforter and the glasses for wine set out in the afternoon.

I used my nights at the Channel Road Inn to focus on quiet instead of adventure, recuperating instead of retracing.

On the second afternoon, I walked out the front door, took a right, followed a tunnel under the PCH, and ended up on the sand. I walked to the shore and stuck my toe in the water. When my grandmother had made it to California 60 years earlier, she had seen the Pacific for the first time. She’d traveled clear across the country to stand beside it. Doing so myself, I knew it was one of the few things that hadn’t changed.

Then I walked back to the inn. I looked at the historic photographs in frames in the living room, the details on the tiles of the elaborate fireplace. Although my grandmother had stayed 55 miles east, it was easy to see that staying at the inn was a more authentic way of re-creating her journey than staying at a chain hotel in Cucamonga ever could have been. This place, and the old California it so richly conjures up, would have been familiar to my grandmother in ways the strip shopping centers along Route 66 never could....

Pondering Authenticity

2007-03-28T10:40:00.001-05:00

To the left of the entrance to the Peery Hotel in Salt Lake City is an ornate piece of carved wood furniture called the Bishop’s Desk. It basically dominates the seating area with its curves and glass plate windows and drawers and designs. I remember Chris looking at it as I got us checked into the hotel, sitting in a high-backed chair and staring.

The Bishop’s Desk is original, I was told by my Peery Hotel history expert, a friendly guy named Dave who had taken Utah history courses in college. What I realize now is that it may not have been original to the Peery. It may just be old. Which ruins my image of Jennie and her friends hanging out in chairs around the Bishop’s Desk discussing plans for the day, discussing cherry and apricot groves awaiting their visit.

What happened? I read the materials Dave gave me about the Peery and discovered that in its renovation in 1985 it was made newly elegant. Wouldn't you think the mahogany reception desk was original? The stained glass windows in the lobby? The embossed "Peery" in the front of the building? Only the last is original. The rest were added in the 1980s.

This has me pondering authenticity again, which is much different from pondering the act of re-creating as I was a few days ago. I'm sitting in a coffeehouse, relatively newly opened in Austin, calling itself Dominican Joe. I like it here, but I've been to the Dominican Republic. Several times. My father is married to a Dominican woman. This coffee house, despite its mission to support projects in that country, says little about the Dominican Republic. It says far more about funky South Austin in 2007. Does that make it inauthentic? Does the Bishop's Desk looming in the lobby of the Peery as if it's always been there, when perhaps it hasn't, become inauthentic because it may not have been there in 1910, in 1946?

And what if someone wanted to try to return to Dominican Joe 60 years from now? What if someone were trying to understand the morning of March 28 in my life?

They might find this building, Texas limestone embedded with fossilized sea shells, curving near the corner of Riverside Drive, though they also might not. But if they did, if sitting here 60 years from now was a cafe, a coffeehouse, someplace you could fill a mug and sit down, what would still be authentic about it? Not the Sarah MacLachlan on the stereo. Not the couple that just came in and grabbed coffee then took off on their bikes, her bike a sweet new women's style with flowers painted up the frame. Not the folding card table I sit at when the rest of the coffee house is filled with solid wood.

And what if every bit of that could be re-created? What if every detail was authentic? Then what? What if the newspapers still announced the Senate's vote to force a withdrawal from Iraq in 2008 and the Anna Nicole Smith autopsy results. What if all of it? It still wouldn't be this morning with the cell phone ring from the next table, with the man explaining to his Asian friend what a pumpkin is -- "I'll draw it for you. It's the Halloween vegetable."--with the refrigerator case with two elaborate cupcakes of pink and purple frosting that hums and then stops and then hums again.

I'll make the calls to learn more about the Bishop's Desk. But even if it turns out it was there, even if my grandmother ran her finger over its carved angels with their wavy hair and chubby thighs, even then the attempts at authenticity bump very quickly against their limits.

Awaiting Turnaround

2007-03-28T10:39:00.000-05:00

When will I reach LA, dip my toes in the Pacific, and head back east? When? I have been writing and writing and I have yet to reach the Pacific. It might be easier to spring out of bed and to the project if I could just get headed back east. There things lightened up, burned clean by the heat of the Southwest sun.

Revisiting Salt Lake City

2007-03-19T07:51:00.000-05:00

So one thing I'm learning as I write this narrative is that there's what happened in any given place -- say, Salt Lake City, which I'm tackling these couple of weeks--and there's what happened in that place after nine months of reflection. What happened then, and what happened then when considered now. And since I'll be working on this book another year or two or three, there will ultimately be what happened then, what happened then now, and what happened then in the future. Which is about as far as I venture into metaphysics.

Salt Lake City, nine months later, is memorable largely because it's where I reunited with Chris. And it's where my trip went from being a women's-only adventure into an adventure that could expand enough to include a man. I've been pondering this change in plans, a change necessitated after I found myself traveling alone when I hadn't planned to. And I realize that the real question here is not women-women or women-men, but rather how possible it is to re-create something. If I had traveled with three other women, the same three women from Bridgeport to LA and back, would my trip have more authentically re-created my grandmother's? Or was re-creating an impossibility from Day One? When I found myself traveling alone for all those miles, it became clear that this version of the journey was no more authentic a re-creation than one that included a man for a couple of days. Already I wasn't traveling as my grandmother was. Already the chance for a game of bridge and a gin and tonic on the hotel verandah with some friends had passed.

So I return to Salt Lake City with my notes, photos, interviews, blog entries, and memories, and I see what percolates.

One thing I know is that the tale of meeting the Antique Roadshow twins and the guy from History Detectives in the lobby of an Italian restaurant goes in. At the time, I kept quiet. I didn't want to be one of those people. Turns out I am.

Why Not Blog?

2007-03-16T12:21:00.000-05:00

I admit it -- I've missed blogging. But since I'm no longer preparing for a cross-country road trip, nor taking a cross-country road trip, I haven't know what to blog about. But I've missed the directness that blogging offers a writer, the sense of a real audience, even if there isn't one, and the consequent necessity of attaching a real personaliity to what you write. Less vacuum, more voice.

So I asked myself, Why not blog? I've been obsessed with garden blogs lately, which makes sense because I've been obsessed with gardening. How could I not be with the safes bursting out pink and the return of the verbena that looked so sad all winter? I'm all wiggly about getting out to the Natural Gardener to bag up some compost tomorrow. And what else?

I am stumbling through the narrative of my road trip, moving forward into Salt Lake City and my Sunday in the most conservative city in America, and back to Greybull, Wyoming, where I realized that my desire for adventure had once again landed me in a place where my lack of adventurousness is apparent.

I'm also working on a few essays, researching pitches for this summer's trip to Italy and Sicily, running outside to check the status of the Four Nerve Daisies I just planted. I'm enjoying the perks of my job, which this week have included tix to see the new Burnt Orange film "Elvis and Anabelle" and this afternoon's photography reception where Pete Townshend will drink his tea and scones. I'm rehabbing some knee and ankle misery through physical therapy. I'm having dinner parties. I'm spending far too much time at the kitchen table gabbing with Chris. I'm watching Annabella race in rainy regattas. I'm reading travel memoirs.

And since I feel like this return-to-blogging entry should include a pic, check out my family's 1916 Italian passport photo. The oldest boy is my grandfather. The youngest, my Uncle Al, whom I visited in January in California.

Valentine's Day (reprise)

2007-02-16T09:49:00.000-06:00

I woke early. Grabbed some fleece. Flipped on the space heater in the kitchen. Retrieved the Christmas panettone from the sink, a half loaf that had been frozen and had defrosted overnight. When they were up, I served Chris and Annabella some panettone French toast, dusted with powdered sugar, garnished with a few orange slices, warmed maple syrup in a pitcher on the table. Happy Valentine's Day.

It was then I remembered that last year's Valentine's morning--the David Eyre pancake (incidentally also dusted with powdered sugar)--had made it into the blog. Which is to say, I've had this blog for a year.

Back then it was the mad scurry to get ready for the trip. There was so much to learn, so much to prepare. Back then I couldn't entirely believe I was going to travel 7,500 miles across the country. But I made reservations, researched locales, laid out routes, and did my best to keep manifesting. And it worked out. I made the trip. It wasn't without its costs--in ways I expected (money, time) and ways I didn't. But I arrived safely home on the other side of it, a little plumper, a little broker, a little more tired, but with lots of stories.

May I admit that for as hard as I worked getting ready for the trip and traveling, what's far more daunting is actually writing the book? If there's something to blog about now it's that -- a book is a big, long, challenging thing that I am learning how to do. But it now has a (working) title: Jennie Slept Here: Following my grandmother from Bridgeport to the Brown Derby (and back)

And I've still got good reason to get up early on Valentine's morning to make something special to be eaten, on the run, at the yellow table in the kitchen.

Notes on Wyoming

2006-11-05T22:49:00.001-06:00

One thing being here for three weeks (one week left to go!) has brought home for me is that passing through this summer, I didn’t get to know Wyoming at all. Which is to say that I didn’t get to know Minnesota or Utah or Arizona or Missouri either. The trip was more about the moving than the stopping, something abundantly clear as I start writing the book. Like the thrill of car ownership in contemporary China, where the miles of highway have doubled in the past five years, driving in 1946 was an end in itself. If you saw some of the country along the way, even better.

This summer I spent two days in Wyoming. This fall I’ll spend 30. I’ve seen how the brown hills turn colors, how the wind blows the trees sideways. I’ve danced at the White Buffalo with a 90-year-old man from Cheyenne named Merlin, a man with a bent body and a Band-aid across his forehead who still knows how to lead a lady in the two-step. I’ve had a drink at a bar where Butch Cassidy and Calamity Jane each drank. The bartender pointed out just two of the 26 bullet holes in the room. I’ve walked up a snowy trail to a crystal blue lake in the Big Horns. I know Wyoming better, but still I don’t know Wyoming. I know that it’s big. And that it’s good to wear an orange vest.

It’s in Wyoming that I’ve started to write a book, and that I’m learning how to go about doing so. I’m taking it a day at a time, a sentence at a time, but also trying to learn to plow through and revise later. I’m writing letters. I’m surrounding myself with photos. But I’m not blogging.

It had seemed that the blog would be a way of moving through this process, but this week it isn’t. I’m unplugging the Internet. I’m staying offline. I’m hanging out instead with Jennie and Pauline and Norma and Marie, or alternately with Kirk and Ginny and Laurie and FG. Or with my own ideas of travel and roadtripping, of the lives of women. In the very least, I'm hanging with my homesickness, which is very convenient as I write about those solitary stretches on the road.

So here in Wyoming for my last week of residency, I’m checking out. If you think about me, imagine me here, in this studio. Wish me good writing. Out the window is Wyoming, with its rabbits, deer, and the sad, knowing eyes of the cows.

It Begins (Friday's excerpt)

2006-10-27T19:11:00.000-05:00

Dede and I came down from the hill and sat on smooth rocks next to the river. She looked at me. I don’t think you should write a novel, she said. I think you should take the trip.

You are a traveler, Dede told me. Your grandmother was a traveler. You are 37. Your grandmother was 37. You are fascinated with place. Your grandmother went out to discover place. It was 1946. This summer will be 2006. It’s the 60 year anniversary. You have to do it.

Dede may not have said any of these things. I may have said them. But out of what she said and what I said something became clear: I would be taking the trip.

So it begins, finally, on the banks of the Pedernales River in Texas, a long, long way from Connecticut. It begins with my best friend looking at me and saying, Take the trip, the same way, perhaps, my grandmother’s friends said to her--contemplating whether to leave her two daughters and husband for three weeks--Take the trip. My grandmother’s ledger, small enough to fit in a pocket, moved out of the file and onto the desk.

Wednesday's excerpt

2006-10-26T08:25:00.000-05:00

It helps me think about someone reading, to have a sense of audience, when I write. To help facilitate that, I will post an excerpt of the day's writing each day. Or at least that's the plan. Here's a piece from Wednesday, unedited.

**

Americana, I will discover as I tackle the length of the country twice, comes in many forms and guises. I’ll find it in ceramic bunnies sold in service station gift shops in Kansas and turquoise jewelry spread out on folding tables next to the Taos Gorge bridge. In museums of both Crayola crayons and Pez dispensers in one town, and in brew pub t-shirts for sale in the Midwest. The Route 66 emblem printed into valances and neon signs and menus, the phrase woven through a million names.

My first serious taste of Americana, however, came at the Valero Station in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, where I stopped for the simple act of filling up the tank. Never mind that gas was more expensive in the summer of 2006 than at just about any time in our nation’s history, and never mind that filling up in my grandmother’s time was an entirely different experience, with station attendants checking the oil and tires, wiping down bug-strewn windows. I swiped my card, selected my grade, and started filling the tank.

There behind the station, which was situated in a white frame house with a pale brick chimney peeking from the roof, was the nose of a space capsule set on a rusted stand of sorts, placed in the green grass not far from a white Virgin Mary and a Bambi lawn ornament.

Ginny had crossed the street to the local post office in search of postcard stamps, themselves a piece of Americana, though Americana found around the world, Americana possibly stolen from another place. I finished my gas purchase and wandered into the back yard. There was a green, green lawn. Shade trees hanging their low branches toward the ground. A cement bench for sitting. And a space capsule, NASA written on one side, U.S. Air Force on the other.

Inside the station, Donna Swope, a heavy-set woman with a warm demeanor and fully made-up and entirely presentable face, was ready to answer my questions. Yes, indeed, that was a space shuttle in the back yard.

“It’s been back there since 1970 or 71, when my dad ran the station,” she said. “Some frat boys from Lafayette State have stolen it. It’s been written up in Weird America. It came with a space man, all in white.”

A spaceman all in white?

The story goes that back when the country was weary from Vietnam and young men waited for their draft numbers to come up, contemplating Canada, contemplating crew cuts, the Air Force sent men around the country with the noses of space capsules on trucks as a recruitment measure. Inside the space capsule an astronaut in full regalia would sit, enticing young men with Neil Armstrong dreams. But one of the recruiters got tired. One of them gave up. And when he stopped at the gas station in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, the station that sits right along the Delaware River with a grove of trees in the back yard, he decided he’d had enough.

“I’m headed to Arizona to live. What am I going to do with this space capsule?” he asked the man behind the counter, a simple man living a simple life well removed from the politics of the day simmering and boiling over in the cities. His was the life the recruiter longed for, sought in the West, in a place without heavy skies and protests.

“You can leave it here,” the station manager said. And it had been there ever since.

Donna Swope wants to restore the space capsule. Its paint is fading, the words U.S. Air Force barely legible except up close. She’ll restore the astronaut, too, to his best uniform. And then she’ll move them both out front. And she’ll tell the story of the recruiter gone to Arizona over and over again.

Jennie, in glimpses

2006-10-25T10:17:00.000-05:00

The first photo I have is 1925. Four girls, heavy of thigh, bobbed of hair, sit together along a bench, each left leg crossed over each right. It is what one writer will call the Era of Undressing, which explains their bare knees, the shadowed curves of their upper arms. And these—if the reflection on water in the backdrop suggests correctly—are bathing costumes, these are the narrow-sleeved numbers in which they will swim.

The teenager on the far left, holding a ball in her raised hands, will become my grandmother. She doesn’t know that yet. She is involved in the unsmiling posing of the time period. She is stopping her play. Her jaw is set. The far-left part of her hair will remain for five decades. She holds the ball, and she waits it out.

Wyoming, Faded Like Old Sheets

2006-10-22T19:11:00.000-05:00

I arrived in Wyoming a week ago, at the end of a 1,500-mile drive that proved to me that last summer’s journey did, indeed, create in me a love of being on the road. I retain my love, too, of stopping by friends’ houses for shared meals around heavy dining room tables.

What is the most striking about Wyoming? The enormity of the spaces? The quiet quiet quiet of walking down a road of red dirt and hearing no one and nothing? The fact of a full month to work my way back to my imagination, to the many possibilities? Snow in October? Waking to the lowing of cows calling out for their calves taken off to other ranches? The subtle variations in color?

I learn that you never cross a fence line or cattle guard in Wyoming.

I learn that some deer leap over fences. Others crouch down to slip below them.

Outside my window, J, an artist, folds her collapsible stool and heads inside as the sun sets. When the weather allows, she comes outside and looks up at Snake Mountain behind us, tries to capture it in oil.

There are 1,000 acres behind us to explore. Forgive the obviousness of the metaphor if I say that we’re here to explore those same expanses within. Or that we must always wear an orange vest.

Last night artists and writers alike braved the highway and arrived at the Rib and Chop House inside the Sheridan Inn, where Buffalo Bill once hung his hat. The vegetarian in the group ordered a half pound steak. More red meat on the table, more red wine, and a plate of ribs for me that staggered us all on their arrival. Share and share alike, and the plate emptied of all except bones.

Is all of this part of writing a book – exploring the tawny hillsides, reading interviews with Diane Ackerman, listening to disco on the iPod? The view out the window changes every day.

What Now?

2006-08-13T09:13:00.000-05:00

For the past month, the blog has been kind of like that phone call I didn’t return on the day I received it, or the letter that I didn’t respond to before it landed deep in a pile of papers, or the birthday card I bought but then left in a bag in the backseat of the car. I meant to blog, I thought a lot about blogging, I composed blogs in my head. But too much time had gone by for me to really know what to say. Saying something would require a long explanation (like this one) about why I hadn’t said something. And then I fell silent.

Blogging was one of the great surprises of this project. As a writer, it helped me start shaping my experiences into manageable pieces. It kept me looking for the quirky and interesting. And it got me out of my long habit of not putting work out there because I had to polish it to an impossible sheen. Blogging doesn’t allow for that.

Then as a traveler, as someone undertaking a massive and insane and exciting and entirely unlikely journey, the blog offered me support. I found out that people I went to middle school with (Keinan!) and friends of friends in Colorado (Christine!) and people I’d never met before (Frank’s mom!) and people I generally see everyday (Annabella!) were following me. And rooting for me. The rooting for me meant a lot. Thank you.

So in the midst of so many thank yous and so many summations, I stopped blogging. This blog entry is to tell you that I expect to be back. But I don’t know when. I’ve been working through the grunt work of sorting through all the notebooks and photos and people and experiences I had along the way, figuring out how to start turning them into a book. I’ve transcribed hundreds of pages of notes, and soon I’ll be pitching pieces of the project to magazines and newspapers.

So this blog entry is mostly to say that if you followed me along the way, and if you checked in now, thank you. I appreciate the massive showing of generosity and excitement with which people have greeted this project of mine. I've been very fortunate. And very grateful.

The Ladies Make an Appearance

2006-07-26T08:29:00.000-05:00

I've not figured out what, if anything, this blog will become yet, so I've left it idle while working my way through notebooks and photos and piles of collected paperwork to start making sense of the immensity of my experience.

But last week my cousin Mark sent me a casual email, an email with a sense of quiet about it, to let me know he'd gone through some boxes and discovered photos of my grandmother's travels--her 1946 cross-country travels. Mark said it kind of like that, and I added !!!!!!! Woo hoo! Thank you Mark!

He scanned images of the State Game Lodge, where I can point to the window where my room was, of the four women standing in the snow (in short sleeves and open-toed shoes) at Sylvan Lake, of Hopi in New Mexico and cattle surrounding the car while they drove. There's a particularly jaunty photo of my grandmother at the Grand Canyon, and there's this one of the four women there together. My grandmother's in the middle in the back. My best guess is that Norma's at her right, Marie at her left, and Pauline squatting in front. But I may be wrong.

All this while I've traveled without some very key information. The most key is what motivated them to do the trip. Doing the trip myself gave me some insight into that one, though I may never know the entire answer. But other pieces have been critical as well. Who was Pauline? What kind of car did they take? Did they have a guide book? Reservations at hotels?

And then the question of what they looked like. What they wore. How they interacted with each other. It may be good that I traveled without knowing these things, that so much of it had to happen in my imagination as I went. But having these photos today is quite a boon.

At Sylvan Lake, they took two pics. In the first they stand together, posed and smiling careful smiles. Formal. In the second, they have scooped snow into their hands, snow I'm sure they were delighted to discover at the end of June only a few hours removed from the heat. Their smiles are real. They can't believe their luck.

Snow, in the middle of the summer! And we didn't even bring our sweaters!

A Few Stories Before Going Back to Work

2006-07-17T07:53:00.000-05:00

I’d thought that coming home I would use the days before going to work to follow up on those blog entries I’d formulated in my head but not written or posted. Not so. Coming home has been about coming home. I’ve stocked the pantry and pulled the dead squash vines from the garden, done laundry and sorted mail, seen a movie and drank coffee with the beau and cooked red lentil dal and pesto pasta and Tuscan white beans with sage. All very grounding.

I head back to the office this morning, and those stories I’d wanted to tell are still floating out there. That’s okay. They can be captured in the book. But here, in brief, are a few things I’d wanted to say—

1.Thank You to Megan

When I pulled back into Cincinnati at the end of a day of 600 or so miles of driving, I cried. I’d not been back for a visit in six years, had left seven years ago, and pulling up the long hill past all the brick buildings was like slipping back into my skin. I’d loved my life there, loved the great architecture and the coziness of the neighborhoods, the big trees and the hills and most of all the sense of community. I felt more a part of a community in that city than anywhere I’ve lived.

The community is still there, even if things have changed. And Megan, my friend and host, made it easy for me to feel that during my short visit. She offered her home—the kind of three-story Victorian that doesn’t exist in Texas—and her do-whatever-you-need easiness. And she had a party. Old friends, sitting in a circle on carpets and couches, catching up and telling stories and eating the fantastic food she’d spent a day cooking and would never admit she’d spent a day cooking.

It’s not easy to thank Megan or to compliment her. She brushes both off before they make contact. It’s not easy to take her picture either. She dodges. But with the foil of a cute kid (Michele’s son Brady) she can sometimes be fooled.

2.Meeting Mr. Wilson

On the way west, I’d not managed to connect with Ed Wilson, the friendly historian who’d given me the scoop on Murdocksville. We’d arrived too late, and we’d had to leave out too early in the morning. On the way back east, even though the route didn’t include Murdocksville, I got to remedy that.

I took the directions from him over the phone, where he called me dear and offered numerous landmarks. Laurie took the roads like an old pro. And we pulled into the condos where he lives west of Pittsburgh just as dinnertime approached.

Mr. Wilson, who is actually Dr. Wilson, his PhD in history acquired many years ago in California, was as sunny in person as he was on the phone. And dapper too. In a home immaculately kept (despite all his protests over not having cleaned) and graced with history, including portraits of his great grandparents over the mantel, he showed us his work. Heavy books full of his research, the digging and reporting that occupy his days post-retirement. His son’s books. And a nice stack of poems.

Fielding my questions and Laurie’s too, we got to know Mr. Wilson, at least a little. He has a story to tell. Several. But they’re his, not mine.
What is mine is the memory of him reading us a poem for the road, at Laurie’s request. “The Road of Life,” he read, and we took his words with us back out onto the highway toward Pittsburgh.

3.All the Smiling People at the Grand Canyon

It was my favorite spot of the trip. It was a golden day. I met one kind, friendly and insanely happy person after another. Kirk and I laughed and walked and ate well in front of windows looking out on the canyon. At night we knew it was there, as we took the path to Bright Angels lodge to hear Dave McGraw sing, but there was nothing to indicate its presence. “An ocean without sound,” Kirk called it.

I’ve been trying to write about that day since it happened, but it’s too immense. Like the place itself.

Get Your Free Consumer Information Catalog

2006-07-15T15:04:00.000-05:00

Send to:

Catalog
Pueblo, CO 81009

The Pueblo mystery is solved! So it's a little vague just what a "free consumer information catalog" is, which may account for why FG and I couldn't figure out what it was we remembered being invited to send for in Pueblo, Colorado, but knew it was something and something ubiquitous.

The commercials from the 70s, 80s, and 90s are online, if you want to check them out. They're sure to ring bells.

Painted Ladies, Young and Old

2006-07-11T13:25:00.000-05:00

In Indianapolis, while I awaited the latest news from Laurie’s airport fiasco (moral of the story: avoid changing airlines mid-journey at all costs) I went poking about for the house where my grandmother’s sister Vivian lived. The women had cut diagonally up the center of the country in order to visit it, and spent two days there relaxing.

Vivian’s birth name was apparently Vitusta, though she was Vivian, in the same way that my grandmother Giovannesa was Jennie. Vitusta disappeared, but Vivian remained, resulting (monikerally?) in my mother Vivian, my cousin Vivian, and my own Vivé as well.

In the quaint neighborhood of brick sidewalks and painted lady Victorians I realized something. Vivian, the youngest of the five Remor girls, was to me just Vivian, a woman somewhere in her 30s with children at home and a sister visiting. When I found myself saying, “My great-aunt,” she became someone else. Someone I didn’t know.

I didn’t know her, of course, not in 1946 and not in my own life. She always lived somewhere else, and most of those sisters died when I was still a kid. But when I said, “great-aunt” she became an old lady. When I said, “Vivian,” she still had form, breath. So, too, in their own way, of the four women on that trip. Had I known any of them, it would have been when I was a kid and they were stooped and gray. They may have been feisty, or resigned, or full of stories. But they would have been old.

In my mind they are young. Adventurous. My peers. The project, essentially, allows them to remain that way.

I never found Vivian’s house. The address listed in the Indianapolis directory from that time doesn’t exist, though the houses around it still do.

I talked to two old men smoking in their garage and a local character named Herb who grew up in the neighborhood, but no one could say what house may have once been there. Vivian’s “cute” house was gone. So was the house on the corner where the woman with 12 children once lived.

Around the corner, however, the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley’s house remains. So, too, does one of his most famous poems, “Little Orphant Annie” -- An' the Gobble-uns 'at gits you / Ef you / Don't / Watch/Out!

Made It!

2006-07-11T10:43:00.000-05:00

The last several days of travel were so full that blogging fell by the wayside, though the backlog shall be attended to very soon. I have yet to write about meeting Mr. Wilson at his house not far from Murdocksville, Cincinnati reunions, the place where they (really) like Ike, and more, more.

But from my kitchen table in Austin I am happy to report that around about 8 pm on July 8th, Laurie and I pulled onto Savoy Street and I touched down on the grass in front of the house that was once my grandmother's. Round trip, on schedule. I admit that the final landing was a bit anticlimactic. We'd sat in heavy traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway. I'd gotten lost in Bridgeport, seeking streets that were familiar while ridiculously pointing out landmarks -- the church where my parents were married, the street where my grandfather owned his first house, my mother's elementary school -- that only told me I was warm, but not there. It was late, Laurie was hungry and quiet, and when I called my mom to give her the news, she was busy and said she'd call me back. Then I bickered on the phone with Chris about directions to Norwalk.

Altogether perfect, it seems. I beg your pardon, my mother would sing to me as a kid when I complained, I never promised you a rose garden. The hostas in front of the house, however, were very lovely.

We Missed Martins Ferry

2006-07-08T00:39:00.000-05:00

Coming across from Columbus, Laurie and I were excited to see Martins Ferry, Ohio, on the map, not for its sights, but because it was home to James Wright. Heading towards Wheeling, WV, and then up to Steubenville, Ohio, we anticipated Martin’s Ferry, if only to give it a peek and tip a hat to the poet.

We didn’t go through Martins Ferry. The map fooled us. But we did get close, and we rode along the Ohio for 15 miles, skimming the edge and seeing West Virginia rising green on the other side. It was Wright’s country, that odd mix of lush and industrial, of rusted bridges and jet skis, of smoke stacks and heavily wooded hillsides.

I remember driving through old industrial areas in Cincinnati when I lived there and finding something beautiful in the clutter and height and decaying power of the places. Maybe it was because Wright suggested that I could.

Beautiful Ohio

Those old Winnebago men
Knew what they were singing.
All summer long and all alone,
I had found a way
To sit on a railroad tie
Above the sewer main.
It spilled a shining waterfall out of a pipe
Somebody had gouged through the slanted earth.
Sixteen thousand and five hundred more or less people
In Martins Ferry, my home, my native country,
Quickened the river
With the speed of light.
And the light caught there
The solid speed of their lives
In the instant of that waterfall.
I know what we call it
Most of the time.
But I have my own song for it,
And sometimes, even today,
I call it beauty.

--James Wright

The Restaurant with 56 Men

2006-07-06T10:50:00.000-05:00

Despite its name, Sharon Springs, Kansas, has a distinctly masculine feel to it. It’s a railroad town and has long been home to or stopping place of men working the lines. The original hotel was directly across from the station, though today it’s an empty lot.

The Oak Tree Inn that we stayed at is actually owned by one of the railroad companies. The man at reception looked at two women wanting a room at 10 pm and said, Oh. We usually just get railroaders.

After a long day of driving, especially after the hours of empty east Colorado and west Kansas roads, Sharon Springs gathers a sort of grace.

It was there that my grandmother and her friends dined in a restaurant with 56 men and no other women. The first time I read that, and her assessment of it—We had a few good laughs—was the first time I realized just how intrepid she was. Now that I’ve been on the road hurtling across the country after her, I know better what that means.

FG and I set out on Tuesday morning to track down that restaurant of lore, following the conflicting advice of a group of women with deeply creviced faces who were sitting together in the hard booths of the Shell station having a coffee. They knew the old hotel—Glenda Horton used to run the place, interrupted by, It was Ray Johnson before her--and pointed me to two possibilities for the restaurant.

The first was an old house by the tracks that used to be a restaurant. Turn right at the Co-op, she said, which in Sharon Springs doesn’t mean wheat bran and tofu. I would find it just before the railroad bridge. And I did, suggesting overgrown weeds and peeling shingles as much as anything else. Interesting to imagine food and rowdy conversation coming from its walls.

The 56 men threw the ladies a bit, though. Was it an exaggeration? If not, then it couldn’t be that restaurant. It could, however, be the one that was right on the highway. It’s now a body shop, though the tiny cabins that sat next to it are still there (and still tiny). We discovered it on the way out of town. Like most of the buildings in Sharon Springs, it has a flourish of glass bricks. We wondered if they manufactured them in the town, because every building seemed to have them.

Here we found a business long removed from dining, and men, who like all of them, still look to be fed. These days that's at the faux Americana of Penny's Diner, with its chrome stools and Elvis Presley gold records on the walls.

Questions Asked on the Way to Sharon Springs, Kansas

2006-07-04T19:17:00.000-05:00

The first question was, Left or right? on the dirt road leaving Courtney and Mark’s house. That one we answered fairly easily, pulling into a driveway to allow the double-wide headed down the road to pass by.

We then wondered what’s a reasonable price to pay for a turquoise bracelet sold from a spread in front of a van next to the bridge over the gorge cut by the Rio Grande in New Mexico, a bracelet that wraps three times around the wrist.

After realizing we were headed to Colorado on the wrong road, we asked questions of navigation, all of which were easily answered with a few flips of the page in the road atlas. Our mis-step offered us impromptu Mexican for lunch.

The question that niggled us all day was What was it, what was it, that commercial from our childhoods that told us to send for a free booklet from Pueblo, Colorado? Anyone know? We wondered as we stepped from the car into serious wind on the outskirts of town. We spent a good part of the day trying to beat the storm at our backs. Eventually, it got us.

In Colorado Springs we wondered why a town known as one of the most conservative in the country had an entire street downtown lined with rainbow flags. Is it a good sign?

What is that animal? FG asked of the small deer-like creature out in the sagebrush. We also asked, at various times, Llama or alpaca? Is that an angus steer? Was that really an owl that flew past the car window?

Why is Arroyo on the map? It is an intersection with no buildings.

The spectacular lightning storm that hung dark in the distance and threw out some magnificent bolts elicited many questions of us as we drove down a very straight road over very slightly undulating hills with no other vehicles and no buildings or trees. The most pressing question was, What happens if lightning hits your car? The second, How far away is it? How far away now?

We tried to ask the woman at the gas station in Kit Carson whether we might encounter a restaurant in one of these small towns we were passing through, but it was difficult: she was sitting at a table in the corner with her back to the station, eating beef jerky and potato chips while watching a television set underneath several mounted buck heads.

We asked the question perpetually on the traveler’s tongue, the one she holds as long as she can: How much farther? Eastern Colorado into Kansas is empty. The roads are dark, and deer munch near the sides. Few cars pass.

Which is why we did not ask, Why Sharon Springs? After hours traveling through unpopulated territory, it shines like a tiny, tinny mecca on the plains, a town with a railroader hotel and one 24 hour diner. It must have offered the same sense of dingy relief for the women as well.

FG at Punkin Center, Colorado

2006-07-04T18:53:00.000-05:00

She couldn't resist...

Yoga on the Mesa—Thank you to Courtney and Mark

2006-07-04T18:45:00.000-05:00

Taos may have been great for my grandmother—she says nothing more than that the Taos Auto Courts were nice and she ate enchiladas and hot tamales, so it’s hard to know. But I guarantee it wasn’t as nice for her as it was for me. She didn’t have Courtney and Mark to host her.

I got the tamales and enchiladas, specifically Mark’s homemade green chili chicken and veggie enchiladas, served with chopped cilantro and sour cream and a fantastic salad straight from the garden. And I also got red wine on the porch while the wind picked up and the mountains caught the evening light. I got blueberries and dark chocolate in the great room in the evening. I got chai with honey and soy milk.

I also got a steam in the wonderful steam room with eucalyptus and some lavender scrub. I got to wake up lying before picture windows with a view across to the mountains. And I got the walk that Courtney, FG, and I took in the morning, following paths across the mesa that she is creating, breaking for some yoga, finishing at the labyrinth on their property.

All of it was proper respite before heading out for the final legs of the trip. Thank you to Courtney and Mark for your hospitality and for giving me a chance to peek in on the lovely life you’ve created for yourselves.

Have You Slept in a Wigwam Lately?

2006-07-03T00:44:00.000-05:00

Found yourself standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona?

Craved a snowcone and found only dust?

There are many ways to get your kicks on Route 66.

“A Darn Hot Desert”

2006-07-02T01:09:00.000-05:00

Of conditions on June 29, my grandmother says simply, “Left Cucamonga—rode through a darn hot desert---106-110.” I know I’ve said it before, but with each desert crossed in this blazing summer heat, with every mile of inhospitable earth I have looked at, I find myself stunned. How incredibly brutal that must have been.

The Malibu records the outside temperature on a dashboard screen, and when driving through Nevada, California, Arizona, it’s somewhat impossible not to become obsessed with the readings. 109 at 9 p.m. coming out of Vegas. At the Park Moabi Marina outside Needles, where people ride in golf carts with fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirrors, it’s 114. And along scuff the visitors, vacationing in the desert, making their way to watercraft that they’ll take out on the Colorado River. A drop of 30 degrees between Kingman and Williams, after a long climb up the hills.

But back to my grandmother. They would have driven the stretch of Route 66 that goes up into the hills near Oatman, AZ. On it on Thursday, Kirk and I went nearly 25 miles without seeing anyone. No other cars. No homes. No people. Just the occasional sand-colored rabbit darting across the road and a few birds. The land offered nothing—parched, scruffy, loaded with strange cacti—and the sense was that if you walked into it, you’d never come out.

We were treated to wild burros that were not too wild, as they approached the car looking for food, and funky old spots. The scenery was sometimes spectacular, unforgettable. But the heat never stopped.

I guess what amazes me is that no complaints come down the line in my grandmother’s looping handwriting. No protests. In Williams, Norma reports that they were refused drinking water – there wasn’t any. She simply states that they “weren’t too friendly to tourists.” And on they went. Darn hot indeed.

The High Price of Being a Los Angeles Woman

2006-07-02T00:19:00.000-05:00

Wednesday was my birthday and also something a fulcrum—the two halves of the trip balanced on it as I was sequestered there by the Pacific, somewhat stationary for 24 hours. It was a day that I decided not to work, which in this context means not a single trip to a historic site where I ask questions of someone sitting behind a counter, not a single photo taken, not a single note in the latest of many spiral bound notebooks.

I decided to play Los Angeles woman for the day—Los Angeles woman in my fantasy of it, not in the reality that most of the women actually live, I realize. For me, that meant someone else served me coffee, which I drank next to a window bright with sun before I made the obligatory battle through traffic (taking Chris to the airport). Then I circled through many layers of concrete in a parking garage. And then I went to a spa. A spa. For my birthday.

It was a fantastic idea, I thought. I ditched my stinky clothes and heavy bag in the locker, put on the soft robe and shower shoes, used nice bath products, and sipped water infused with cucumber. I did the steam room, then the cold dip, the hot tub, then the cold dip, sloughed my skin with sea salts, rinsed, did the hot tub again, ate some sliced oranges. I admired a few gorgeous bodies, a few not-so-gorgeous. And then a tall French woman with powerful arms took me into the back room and vigorously prodded at every knot in my body, which after nearly two weeks hunched over the wheel of a Chevy Malibu were plentiful.

That night I had dinner with a friend at a fantastic Thai restaurant in Malibu, spotted a young celebrity in a hat, and went to bed feeling I was well prepared for the trek back across America, not to mention being 38.

Until about noon the next day. Kirk and I had met in Santa Monica, taken care of gas fill-ups, rental car additional driver paperwork, oil changes and the like, and we were heading back out Route 66, reaching Cucamonga. I started shaking. Getting dizzy. Feeling faint. We ate. I picked at pieces of turkey in my sandwich, sitting at The Deli, directly across from the former service station to the stars.

Then we set back out, Kirk at the wheel. Within minutes she was making an emergency pull over into a parking lot (with great panache, I might add) while my stomach turned over. We hadn’t left Los Angeles County yet, and I was sick. It was absurd.

My theory—all that detoxifying did me in. I recovered over time, and we had a great day seeing the Southwest, landing in Williams, AZ, not too long after nightfall. But at Linda’s Café on Route 66 near Oatman, I indulged in a cheeseburger and fries, just for good measure.

Service Station to the Stars

2006-06-28T19:31:00.000-05:00

I admit it was hard to find any semblance of old Cucamonga—home to California’s first winery and loaded with citrus groves in 1946—in the Rancho Cucamonga of today. Today’s Rancho Cucamonga is a clean suburb of Los Angeles, ranked among the safest places in the country to live, loaded with new homes with orange tiled roofs and every version of shopping you could ever want.

We hunted through files at the library for a clue to where the “cute cabin” the women stayed in might have been, but we came up empty. We ourselves were shacked up at the Best Western, where all forms of breakfast require the use of Styrofoam.

We did, however, find the remains of the Ancil Morris Richfield Station, the gas station we were told was once service station to the stars. Built in 1926, it was a little architectural gem, and it was also the last gas before Palm Springs on Route 66. It’s where travelers, including celebrities, filled up before continuing west. It may even be where my grandmother filled up going in to Los Angeles.

No such luck today, however. Today’s it a barbed-wire enclosed symbol of the past. I expect to find many of them over the next few days. Kirk and I head out in the morning to travel the old Route 66 toward the Grand Canyon and beyond, past as many Best Buys as it has to offer.

How Did They Do It?

2006-06-27T12:04:00.000-05:00

Monday’s question of the day was how four women in a 1940s car with no a/c and crummy roads ever made it from Salt Lake City to Cucamonga, CA, in less than 24 hours. We asked it while we traveled through Utah’s deserts, through Arizona’s deserts, through Nevada’s deserts, and through California’s deserts. One long stretch of desert, with temps topping out at 113 degrees near and after Vegas and dust devils popping up randomly across the flat expanses. How?

We made it in 13 hours, including a two-hour stop in Vegas where I walked away $1.75 richer in the slot machines and Chris spoke his three words of Chinese to the hostess at Noodles restaurant in the Bellagio. But it was a long, long ride through some of the most desolate landscapes in the country. And we just kept thinking of doing it through the night with no air conditioning 60 years ago.

I’d first thought they’d traveled through the night because of the heat. A reasonable assumption, especially because my grandmother wrote, “Rode all night through the desert – and did not mind it.” Closer inspection of Norma’s journal, however, reveals that they left Salt Lake City before 7 a.m. and didn’t arrive in Cucamonga until 4:45 in the morning. It took more than 12 hours to get to Vegas, and another seven to get to Cucamonga. And it couldn’t have been comfortable.

For us it wasn’t so bad. We mocked ourselves as we pulled proscuitto and provolone from the cooler to put on our fresh bread from the bakery, listening to the iPod through the car’s radio. How soft we are. How easy we’ve got it.

A highlight of the day was a swing through Kolob Canyon in Zion National Park, a stop my grandmother couldn’t have known to make through stunning red outcroppings you’d never know existed just over the burnt hills visible from the highway. How quickly the West and the Southwest reach out to meet each other.

Out to see if there’s more to Cucamonga today than the BestBuyBarnesandNobleCarinosHomeDeptDenny’sOutbackSteakHouse we discovered upon arriving last night. And then on to Los Angeles. We touch the Pacific, Chris flies away, and then I turn around, face east, and start back out again with a tag team of girlfriends to accompany me.

Tale of Many Chrises

2006-06-25T14:30:00.000-05:00

In Salt Lake City, there are many men—and women—named Chris, I’ve discovered quickly.

There’s Chris Bosshardt, manager of the lovely Peery Hotel, to whom I owe a big thank you. He’s made my stay here grand, with an upgrade to a corner suite overlooking downtown and a handful of historical info via a friendly guy named Dave. Chris isn’t here this weekend. He’s got a new baby (named Hayden, for an area of Yellowstone) and a life outside the Peery. But he surely came through for me, and I thank him as I climb the hotel’s graceful staircase toward rooms, one of which my grandmother slept in.

There’s Christopher’s Restaurant downstairs, with its glossy bar peeking through open doors to the lobby.

At the restaurant last night—the impeccable Cucina Toscana—there was our waiter Christopher, accompanied by a second Christopher, accompanied by a young woman named Chris, who says her hearing’s not great because of her rugby injuries. Another Chris floated by as well.

And then there’s my Chris, the sweetest of all Chrises, who flew out to accompany me for this corner of the trip, especially for the long drive through the desert from Salt Lake to Cucamonga, CA, tomorrow. I drove from Yellowstone through a touch of Montana, a long stretch of Idaho, and straight south in Utah, the mountains always at my left, to fetch him at the Salt Lake City airport. When I pulled up, he was helping a little German lady find her way. Her husband, she complained, always drove too fast.

Thank You to Ruth Quinn

2006-06-25T11:35:00.000-05:00

Arriving at Old Faithful—having wound through roads lined with forest scarred from wildfires, stunning views of Yellowstone Lake, and a covey of tourists bordering the roads to shoot photos of bison—I was met by Ruth Quinn. For more than a decade, Ruth has given tours of the Old Faithful Inn, loving the building so much that she wrote and self-published the only biography of its architect, Robert Reamer.

As we walked, the crowds gathered around Old Faithful, awaiting her 5:00 eruption, and Ruth and I tried to piece out where my grandmother would have stayed when she was there. A cabin with only cold water and bathrooms down the line. Someplace where Marie started a fire that “sure felt good.” A spot where she could tell stories the rest of her life of sitting outside her cabin and watching Old Faithful erupt at night.

With the help of folks at Xanterra, which runs the lodging at Yellowstone, I’d traded down from a nice hotel room to a budget cabin with no bathroom, though there’s now hot water. It might be part of the same set of 300 lodge cabins that were there in the 40s, though only 80 remain today. Or they might have stayed at the old camper’s cabins on the other side of Old Faithful, which have been torn down as well. Ruth, a postcard collector, shared images of the old cabins.

The cabins today don’t look much different. Neither, I’d imagine, do the bison.

Ruth generously shared an hour and a half of her day with me, taking me through the under-renovation Old Faithful Inn, which had impressed my grandmother immensely. Explaining the evolution of Yellowstone lodging, which began with a series of hotels spaced one stage coach day’s apart and designed to allow wealthy tourists to imagine they were not in the wild but in Newport or Chicago. Reamer, with his rough hewn Inn, changed all that. Ruth says that it was only after the War that people like my grandmother, who were not guests of the Inn, could even enter. Clearly she did, marveling at the “four floors of seats” (a slightly hyperbolic description, it turns out…).

Images of Old Faithful, from Ruth’s early 50s postcard and from Friday evening, below.

Harder Than I Expected

2006-06-23T10:01:00.000-05:00

One-third of the way through, having covered 2,600 some-odd miles, I admit that the trip has been harder than I expected. I expected hard, of course. The first time I considered the journey, I shelved it because a serious look at the itinerary stopped me cold. But when it came back a year later, the only option seemed to be to move forward. And here I am at the Irma Hotel in Cody, WY, having eaten far too much red meat and slept in far too many beds (though I confess that I travel with a pillow now) and driven far too many solitary roads. And yet here I am.

It’s been harder because distances are an abstraction until they are actually covered. A map may say far. A map may say, flip the page, flip the page again. But it doesn’t tell the story of passing trucks and exit signs and missed intersections. It doesn’t tell how one hour bleeds into the next and into the next. And it doesn’t tell the way a body feels after days and days of distance—the heavy legs, the tight hands, the stiff back.

It’s been harder because I’ve done much of it alone. I hadn’t planned to, but I have. On the fourth morning of the trip, for a number of reasons more personal than blog-able, Ginny and I said goodbye in a Hampton’s Inn parking lot in Rochester, MN. She headed home, and I headed on. It’s been harder for that parting. Please wish us both well.

It’s been harder, ironically, because it’s gone so well, in that more places that my grandmother visited have been there than I ever expected—intact, stepping out of the journal and into my present. And thus they demand my attention.

I was thrilled when, driving into La Crosse, I discovered the word Bodega blazoned across a building in the center of downtown. My grandmother ate at the Bodega Lunch Club, which Norma reported was “highly recommended.” Today it’s the Bodega Brew Pub, filled with men in AC/DC shirts smoking cigarettes and downing beers under the same pressed tin ceiling as 60 years ago. By the time I spotted the Alex Johnson looming on the horizon in Rapid City, however, I found myself sighing. There it is. I have to go see it. Inside, still, the excitement of carved railings and wooden beams with painted patterns. Though Wednesday morning’s breakfast there was suitably uninspired.

To say it has been harder is not to complain. I am safe, and I am well, and I am fortunate to be able to be here and see all of these things. (I’m off to Yellowstone in a few minutes—I don’t get to complain…) The difficulties are part of the journey, and they teach me things. About myself, yes.

And about my grandmother and her friends, who drove like hell straight across the continent in a car that had to have been far less comfortable than mine, over roads far less smooth, climbing hills on dirt and clay paths and winding through mountains with narrow roads and no guardrails. They had survived the War, lost people, pursued careers at a time when fewer women did, leapt when the opportunity to be mobile returned. People ask me what my grandmother’s motivation was, and I don’t know. The journal never says. But I can say now that she traveled with determination and a will that in her wake I am beginning to understand.

A Recliner in Every Room

2006-06-22T23:19:00.000-05:00

Some things you might encounter at A Maverick Motel in Greybull, WY:

-- a recliner (in every room -- anyone see "Puffy Chair"?)
-- a model train made from a barbecue grill
-- a fiberglass Indian with scalps hanging from him that are really toupees
-- an 1855 full-length buffalo coat on a mannequin
-- a 140 billion year old snail fossil
-- a phone booth made from an outhouse
-- a golden mermaid perched above a phone booth made from an outhouse

-- an antique bedpan from the Claridges Hotel in London
-- a Mormon cart
-- a wagon on the roof pulled by an aluminum buffalo purchased in Mexico
-- a cream separator
-- dozens of cowboy boots lining the fence
-- a toilet seat fashioned as a mirror

-- an ostrich leg
-- many examples of fools gold
-- a gleaner used to separated the wheat from the chaff
-- an old loom
-- two mannequins driving an old car with fishing poles hanging from the back, out to hook some men
-- a dictaphone
-- many carousel horses
-- an old barber's chair

What you won't encounter at A Maverick Motel in Greybull, WY:

Smokers. The owner is so set against smokers he makes you sign a waver saying that if you smoke in one of his rooms, he'll fine you $250 per bed per room per day. He once returned from a vacation in Arizona because he got word that someone was smoking in one of his rooms, fined the guy $1360 and ran him out of town.

When I walked in to register for my room he said, "You don't smoke, do you? You don't smell like you smoke." This in a state where even the restaurant bathrooms have ashtrays!

South Dakota Vistas

2006-06-21T10:53:00.000-05:00

There are many sights to see around Custer State Park in South Dakota, where I spent Monday and Tuesday nights. Reaching the park from Mt. Rushmore—surely one of the country’s stranger sights, for all the hoopla surrounding it—looks simple enough on the map. After days of straightforward roads slicing straight through the prairie (and a swing through the surreal Badlands), I thought I knew what 15 miles meant.

Near Custer State Park, 15 miles means an hour of winding through switchbacks, one-lane tunnels, round sharp curves and up and down hills. The Black Hills appear suddenly with their tall pine trees and green rises, a vast departure from the dry flatness of the days before. As I wound through the roads, it grew dark. Animals blocked my way. I followed trucks into the tunnels where signs informed us to sound the horn before entering. Other signs told us that buffalo are dangerous – do not approach.

I didn’t approach, but I waited while a good-sized gathering of them blocked the road. I waited, also, while some cloven-hoofed animals (deer? antelope?) strayed into the street, sounded my horn again. I slowed appropriately at switchbacks. And finally I arrived. Too late for dinner, which was okay, because my grandmother’s proclamation of “What a steak!” wasn’t really exciting me at the moment. How about a plate of steamed spinach?

June 20th my grandmother says they had an easy day. To them that meant seeing Sylvan Lake, Wind Cave, the Needles, Hot Springs and more of the Black Hills. Given that she didn’t like much of it—or at least Wind Cave and the Hot Springs were disappointing—and given the miles covered and the miles to go, I chose my vistas more judiciously. They looked something like this:

It was a day of savoring my quiet inn room at the State Game Lodge—for all I know the same inn room she stayed in—the perfect weather—the type where you don’t even notice the air, it’s so ideally suited to the skin—and the chance to stay out of the car for a full 24 hours. My body aches, my head spins. On the porch where she says she played bridge and looked at the moon, I read a book and sipped an Arnold Palmer (half lemonade, half iced tea). In the dining room positively laden with stuffed pheasants, under historic chandeliers adorned with stuffed pheasants, I ate an elk chop, echoing her meal of Black Hills elk on the same night. And then again I rested. My grandmother, the dynamo, is wearing me ragged.

I write this from the dining room of the Alex Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, where they stopped for breakfast June 21st en route to Wyoming, where I stopped for breakfast just now. Muzak versions of “The Rose” from above. Smuckers jam in little packets. A trio of electronic gambling machines backing the mirrors. And the coffee, the bacon, eggs, and toast, garnished with a twist of orange on top of kale, that can’t have changed in 60 years.

For the Love of Laura Ingalls

2006-06-19T10:31:00.000-05:00

Like many a girl growing up in the 70s, I carried on a long-term love affair with little Laura Ingalls, who made life in the West seem so exciting and palpable, walking dirt roads to school and salting the meat that Pa brought home so that it would last through the winter. It’s easy to imagine that those early books cemented a love of stories that led me right to where I am today.

Laura was real to me, and I spent many childhood hours imagining what I would show her if she came to life now, if she popped right out of the past and into my bedroom. How would I explain escalators, and wouldn’t she be scared to climb on one? How would I explain the power lines running down my street? And cars! How fast we could get from one place to another.

Delightful, then, to travel the Laura Ingalls Wilder highway all day yesterday, the same highway my grandmother traveled, though long before Laura Ingalls Wilder had written her books, back when she was just a woman living her life, waiting for those first sentences to come. It may be the same highway Laura traveled herself, a long straight road across the prairie that runs next to the railroad, which certainly preceded its paved distances.

For a girl in Connecticut, the idea of a house built into the sod was magical. At the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove, MN, they’ve built one of their own. Less magical than the book, I admit, but rather cool nonetheless. They reminded me how Wilder wrote that one time a cow walked right over the house and its hoof pierced through the ceiling.

Even less magical the pioneer life displays, all sitting under the glare of fluorescent lights.

Across the street a family sat outside their house having a Father’s Day cookout. On Highway 14, another car and another car passed by. Laura Ingalls, in reality, was nowhere to be found. But a few girls growing up in the 00s, who poked their heads into the doorways of reconstructed church buildings and one-room schoolhouses, surely would have disagreed.

Safe in Pierre

2006-06-18T22:06:00.000-05:00

...after a day on the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Highway. Nothing but farms and tiny towns for which I needed to slow to 35 mph for the entire day. Safely ensconsed in a hotel. No cell phone service. Body ready to crumple. That's all for now. Tomorrow Mt. Rushmore, which thankfully is not too far away. And even two nights in the same place...

Leaving Aunt Marilynn's

2006-06-17T15:39:00.000-05:00

For Anonymous, who asked for pics of people, here are Ginny and I leaving her aunt's house this morning, bound for Minnesota.

Thanks to Walter Keener in Joliet

2006-06-17T15:30:00.000-05:00

There was a time in the day Friday that we were ahead of schedule—miraculous we thought, given that we’d started the day by not noticing the highway splitting and traveling 30 miles north when we should have gone west. Even so, we were cruising, and when we stopped for lunch in Fort Wayne, we looked to be golden for an early arrival in Joliet.

Not to be. Lunch took longer than we expected. Roads got congested. The Lincoln Highway, which had been a smooth, open road until then suddenly became a tangled mess of stoplights and semis. Life slowed down. Best Buys and Office Depots and Applebees and WalMarts appeared, with their attendant parking lots. No more grain silos and rows of corn.

We were aiming to hit Joliet by 5:00, when the Joliet Historical Museum was to close. I’d already talked to the curator, Walter Keener, who’d generously supplied information and an offer of help. As we traveled forward, the miles to Joliet shrinking at a much slower rate than the day itself, Ginny played the glass-half-full game. “Oh, we can make it,” she said. “4:45 at the latest.” Tail-lights glowed red with vehicles braking.

We arrived at the Joliet Historical Museum around 5:45. Walter Keener had waited for us. He pulled out newspapers from the day—a true treat to see an old paper in a form where I could turn the pages instead of pushing the button forward on microfilm—and photos and explanation. My grandmother called the Hotel Louis Joliet “grand.” It’s now apartments. She ate around the corner at the Rickett’s Restaurant. It’s in a building owned by the Unitarian Universalists, became a Spiegel, became a men’s story. The Lincoln Highway passed through. The old Route 66 passed through. The traffic, even then, was heavy, but to my eye it looked so stately with the heavy cars lining up.

Today that corner (from a different angle) looks much different...

And Joliet can still claim the longest-reigning Miss America ever -- Lois Delaner!

Thanks to Walter Keener for waiting for me, for making Joliet real for the afternoon.

Connecticut Post

2006-06-16T23:37:00.000-05:00

Much to report from the day, which was long and very full. Will do so tomorrow. In the meantime, check out the CT Post's coverage of the trip!

Following Grandmother's Trail 60 Years Later

All the Way to Murdocksville

2006-06-15T23:07:00.000-05:00

Eating leftover pasta in the Microtel Hotel at 11 pm might say enough about why I can't tell the story of Murdocksville tonight. Except to say that we found it, out windy roads west of Pittsburgh, staying left when Route 30 veered right, passing up and down hills and then crossing a one-lane bridge over Raccoon Creek.

Up a gravel drive called High Street, four or five houses, most there for more than 150 years. In one of them, most likely, my grandmother stayed. How she got there, all the way off the highway, through all those twists and turns, is anybody's guess. Fun to imagine.

From their porch, Steve and Dee told me about the town, about Mrs. Armstrong and her sunroom stacked with newspapers and Mrs. Wolfkill, who lived two doors down for a generation. She just recently went to assisted living. Steve, for his part, says that when renovating, he found a letter and a paper dated 1925. It told some of the history of the town, but he gave it away.

Follow the Star to Bethlehem Attractions

2006-06-15T22:57:00.000-05:00

Bethlehem, fascinating for its towering steel mills and churches that date back to the 1740s, takes its name seriously. Follow the *, the signs read. Except the signs are unfollowable. We chased the Visitor's Center for an hour. Around and around we went, taking the wrong exits onto the wrong highways, driving through a corporate office park with a sculpture of prancing dogs catching frisbees.

Made it to the historic district, did some library research, stood in a plaza overlooking the hills. Then got lost again, twisting up a pedestrian pathway into the street.

On the way out of town, the Visitor's Center appeared on the left. The star, on this occasion, didn't lead the way.

Connecticut Eating

2006-06-14T08:03:00.000-05:00

Tuesday was a day of wandering, taking the slow road from Norwalk through a series of Connecticut towns, past diners and strip malls and old Congregationalist churches, finding myself finally at a family friend’s house above the funeral home his family has run since the 19th century. It was also a day of wandering through the meals of Connecticut, most of which I can’t have in Texas.

Woke to a place setting waiting for me at what Chris affectionately calls the Cavello B&B. A mug and juice glass out, coffee already made and waiting in a white thermos. Oatmeal and raisins and nuts on the counter.

I soaked up the comfort of the Cavello B&B, watched the neighbor’s black lab chase a deer from the yard. Sat on the patio planning the day. Wrote, internetted, did a little laundry. I could have stayed forever.

But out into the day. Driving Route 1 was a trip through many Connecticuts. The one where I was born—Norwalk Hospital rising on the hill. The one of people’s imaginings—white Federalist houses surrounded by green lawns. And the one of delis and diners.

I ate at the Athena, a Greek diner, at the counter, thinking about the Athens in Charlotte where my friend Maureen and I spent many hours drinking coffee and talking poetry and life. The Athena is even more authentic, the stainless steel milk machines and shake makers lined against the wall. The mini juke boxes at every booth mixing Kelly Clarkson and Patsy Cline. The lemon meringue pie, chocolate pudding in its individual glasses covered with saran wrap, Boston cream pie, coconut cream. I had a reuben.

And on the road again. Dinner was with my mother, her friend Gloria, family friend Ray at the end of Savoy Street. Testos Italian. In the restaurant, the mayor circulated, shaking hands. My mother knew his mother. He knows about my project. He whisked past our table, smiles and grasps of hands. And then he was gone.

The green bean salad made its way around the table several times, and the eggplant parmesan could have fed a family.

Then we wandered down Savoy Street to my mother’s old house, my grandparent’s old house, the place where my journey will start about 24 hours from now. The new owners greeted us warmly. Into the house we went, where we found lovely renovations and still the dining room wallpaper my grandmother put up perhaps 50 years ago. The same bedrooms. And two striking daughters, now in their 20s, who grew up in the house just as my mother and her sister did.

Our day ended with homemade wine from their basement and swirled pound cake, sitting in the living room that was so much the same and so different. The house is clearly loved. And the wine, served over ice in small wine glasses, was terrific.

If You Blink Your Eyes…

2006-06-13T07:24:00.000-05:00

...you’ll miss Murdocksville. Or so says Ed Wilson, whom I talked with the night before I headed out. Finally some info on Murdocksville, which has haunted me (see First stop: Murdocksville and Oh Boy, Oh Murdocksville) from the beginning. First stop on the trip and it doesn’t seem to exist.

Ed Wilson, 79 years old in August and gloriously verbose, explained why. Murdocksville was once a thriving country town, built around a famous gristmill, a gristmill that was already out of operation in the 1940s. By the 40s there might have been eight or ten families living there, if that.

Ed Wilson is given to calling people “dear” and “honey.” He is given to fabulous pronouncements like, “I’m not one to sit down and rock myself into oblivion.” After living all over the world, or at least in Europe and several places in the states, and visiting every continent except Antarctica, Ed Wilson came home to Western Pennsylvania. And he got bored. So he started writing.

He’s written book after book, engaging all day in research on genealogy. He did a history of a local cemetery, which means he photographed almost 1500 tombstones and then traced each one to a person, an obituary, a family. And he turned it into a book. The locals love him.

He doesn’t believe my grandmother could have ended up in Murdocksville. It seems very unlikely to him, and there’s the fun of the mystery. Murdocksville wasn’t on Route 30, the Lincoln Highway. West of Clinton, through farm after farm, past the Virginia Lee, the resolutely crummy restaurant they ate at (more on this later), the road split. To the right, Route 30. To the left, a road of dirt and what he calls “red dog,” coal that wouldn’t burn that was used for roads. Two or three miles and there’s a bridge over Raccoon Creek, the old gristmill, a log house “built during Indian days.” That’s Murdocksville.

So let the guessing begin. Did they meet someone at the Virginia Lee who offered them beds for the night? Did they make a wrong turn and finally make a stop, amazed to find themselves there? Did they know someone and not mention it in their journals?

Mr. Wilson will take me to Murdocksville as it exists now on Thursday evening. Already I can tell that he will be the story, as much as or even moreso than the disappeared town itself.

Williamsburg Saturday

2006-06-12T11:10:00.000-05:00

Ginny’s apartment sits high against a courtyard, a sixth-floor walkup with a narrow staircase of marble steps worn down from the years of feet climbing and climbing. It was past 11 last night when I made the climb for the first time, my suitcase heavy enough to make me forget why I needed that extra book, two full sets of batteries.

I believe my journey started yesterday afternoon, when I boarded the plane in Austin to fly away. Some might say it began many, many months ago, the first time I said aloud that I was going to do this. Some might say it begins Thursday at 8:30 am, when I set off from Savoy Street (right into rush hour traffic, I suspect).

But I think it began when I stepped onto the plane. Or when I headed to the airport, running late but with a wash of calm coming over me when I realized I’d done what I could do, now what was left was just to go.

So I went, right into the city, where the sounds were the first thing I noticed. From Ginny’s courtyard the pulse of Latin music. Voices. The traffic heading toward the BQE a surprisingly easing whoosh. A baby cries. A horn beeps. Someone bangs something hard against something metal.

And on the streets, people calling out. The little girl yelling and banging on the door because her brother, watching her through the glass, won’t let her in. The Puerto Rican music festival in McCarren Park with the pulse, pulse, pulse. You hear things in Brooklyn, just passing by. Ginny knows what movie is filming in her neighborhood because she hears people saying the names of the stars into phones, to each other, into the air.

We spent the day wandering Williamsburg, with a stop for potato pancakes and coffee in bright yellow mugs. In McCarren Park, bordering Williamsburg and Greenpoint, the music festival kicked into high gear, a blare of song pressing against everything. We found the community garden covered with Creeping Jenny and clematis. And then McCarren Park Pool, beautiful symbol of what once was.

Opened in 1936, the pool was a summertime community hub for nearly 50 years before it was closed in 1984. Hard not to stumble immediately into nostalgia for the grand arches and expanse of pool area that once could hold 6800 swimmers, for the way it links the communities of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Hard not to relate it to the now-disappeared Murdocksville, to the spot where my grandfather once had a pharmacy, medicine bottles lined up behind the counter. Today trees grow through cracks in the pool's cement, graffiti covers much of the building, and rusted chain link keeps our voyeur eyes at a distance.

Leave-taking

2006-06-07T09:51:00.000-05:00

After all the planning, the to-do lists, after days of running around choosing cameras and digital recorders and making more rental car phone calls (finding a savings of $400!), after making contacts in far-flung places and trying on mesh pants that don’t wrinkle and laying the suitcase open to start tossing things into it, it always comes down to the simple act of leave-taking.

Inherent in all travel is that to go somewhere, you have to leave somewhere too.

Yesterday’s leave-taking took place in the airport parking garage, stopped in a no-parking zone because all the spots were full. Cement stairs rising toward walkways leading to automated check-in machines that inevitably suggest metal detectors and then the curved plastic of waiting area seats. But we weren’t thinking about that. We were standing behind the hatchback, suitcases set on the ground, saying goodbye. They would fly away, and when they came back, I’d be gone.

Another friend and her husband take leave today, he heading north to write for a month. And another friend, walking late in a parking lot, told me that she and her husband are separating, a leave-taking that sent my hand to my heart. There was an anecdote then, under the fluorescent lights while bookstore employees headed out for the night, a story so many years in the past of two teenagers being driven, separately, to a turnpike exit, of climbing out of one car to get in the other.

It was a story of coming together, returned to at a time of leaving.

No way to know what anyone else’s leave-taking is like, not the leave-taking of four women 60 years ago setting off toward the West, not for my friend who will have to choose what she takes with her and what she leaves, not for the next airport goodbye to happen today, not for each of the four women who will join me on this trip, each stepping away from something—if even for a few days—to be with me on the road.

My leave, ultimately, is short. Five weeks and then I’m home again. Among the leaves that life demands, this one is very simple. In the meantime, there’s the traveler’s trick of opening wide the space for newness while reserving the place where home resides.

Itinerary, Take Two

2006-05-29T11:27:00.000-05:00

I began blogging with an itinerary but as the trip draws near--I leave for New York a week from Friday—it seemed time to put out an updated one. The locations are the same. The details are far further along. And all is secure, all travel companions, airline tickets, critical hotel reservations, in order.

June 15 Bridgeport, CT -> Murdocksville, PA Ginny and I will head out from in front of my grandparents old house on Savoy St., with my mom, some cousins, and some old friends in attendance. The Merritt Parkway, the Pennsyvlania Turnpike, tunnels built by Cornelius Vanderbilt for his railroad, through Pittsburgh and a stop, it turns out, at an airport hotel, four miles from what had been Murdocksville.

June 16 Murdocksville, PA -> Joliet, IL We take the old Lincoln Highway through Ohio and Indiana into Joliet, stopping in Canton for breakfast and Fort Wayne for lunch. In Joliet I’m set to meet with someone at the historical museum there, who will have lots of goodies for me to check out. We’ll eat there, but since the old historic downtown hotels are no longer in operation, we’ll take advantage of staying with Ginny’s aunt and uncle in their comfy house.

June 17 Joliet, IL -> West Concord, MN Through Madison, through La Cross, where my grandmother bought my aunt a small wooden dog. Here we see the Mayo Clinic. Near there we stop for the night.

June 18 West Concord, MN -> Pierre, SD Here is where the West really begins. Saw our first large sheep and cattle ranches, my grandmother wrote. The old downtown hotel my grandmother stayed at appears to now be apartments.

June 19 Pierre, SD -> Hermosa, SD Through Rapid City and across the Black Mtns. When my grandmother crossed them, the road was just black dirt and clay. See Mt. Rushmore. First of two nights at the State Game Lodge, which once served as Calvin Coolidge’s “Summer White House.”

June 20 Hermosa, SD We finally get to chill out a bit, if you don’t count visits to the Needles, Wind Cave, the Hot Springs and Sylvan Lake.

June 21 Hermosa, SD -> Greybull, WY With a stop in Rapid City for breakfast. Hopefully, the gear shift won’t go out in the Big Horn, like it did for them. Greybull was a tiny town when they were there. Sounds like it still is today. We get to take a swing by Jentel , where I’ll have a one-month residency this fall.

June 22 Greybull, WY -> Cody, WY Hello, Buffalo Bill! Staying at the historic Irma Hotel and our first glimpses of Yellowstone.

June 23 Cody, WY -> Yellowstone There will be lots to do in Yellowstone, as they’ve supplied me with contacts for historic research and have even offered a tour of the Old Faithful Inn (undergoing renovation) and the cabins where my grandmother stayed. Hopefully I’ll get some sightseeing in too. (As I was finishing this entry, a contact called to tell me they’d secured me a cabin at Old Faithful Cabins, where my grandmother stayed…bravo!)

June 24 Yellowstone -> Salt Lake City, UT This is supposed to be a beautiful drive. We’ll stay at the Peery, where my grandmother stayed, for two nights. Made a great contact in the hotel manager, who’s helping with research. In 1946, you still needed a ration book no. 3 to buy a pint.

June 25 Salt Lake City Another night at the Peery, the Mormon Temple and some sightseeing. For two city girls, I can see the coffee shops we shall flock to. And time for a nice dinner. My grandmother loved the rooftop garden at the Hotel Utah.

June 26 Salt Lake City, UT -> Rancho Cucamonga, CA With a swing through Las Vegas for a few hours. I have a matchbook from the casino where she stopped. The women drove overnight, presumably to beat the heat. Despite suggestions that I drive with no a/c or radio, as they would have, I think it’ll be daytime driving with a/c and iPod.

June 27 Los Angeles The women stayed three nights in Cucamonga and commuted into LA. Cucamonga has been subsumed into a larger entity, and the quaint cabins they stayed at are no more. And commuting into LA? I’ll drop off Ginny--my intrepid travel companion for 3,000 miles--at a friend’s and I’ll retreat to a B&B for a few days R&R with some sightseeing.

June 28 Los Angeles Shhh, it’s my birthday… A little down time in LA and a Thai meal at Paola’s favorite Malibu restaurant. Getting ready for the second leg…

June 29 Los Angeles -> Williams, AZ Kirk and I head out in the morning, driving through “a darn hot desert,” as my grandmother deemed it. We’ll stay right on Route 66 in a historic hotel with four-poster beds and fluffy pillows. The Grand Canyon.

June 30 Williams, AZ -> The Grand Canyon Here we are, at the Grand Canyon, at the El Tovar, the hotel my grandmother talked about the rest of her life. Hopefully we’ll avoid the flat tire (Norma and Marie changed it) and I think we may miss out on the Kolb Brothers, though we now have their museum.

July 1 The Grand Canyon -> Gallup, NM El Rancho, the famous El Rancho. My grandmother heard some good music. I hope to meet with some octogenarians—Sally and Juanita-- who can tell me the history, share some stories. Kirk and I will share stories too.

July 2 Gallup, NM -> Taos, NM I’ll stay at Courtney’s, where the porch invites yoga and the steam room invites sore driving muscles to let loose. She’s promised enchiladas and tamales like my grandmother ate. I’ll drop Kirk in Albuquerque and pick up FG in Santa Fe. She’ll have arrived the night before for some serious swing dancing.

July 3 Taos, NM -> Sharon Springs, KS Goodbye, Courtney. I wanted to stay longer. FG and I are off through Colorado Springs toward Kansas. In Sharon Springs the women dined with 56 men—all truck drivers—and “had a few good laughs.” I doubt we can replicate it, but no one is more ready for a few good laughs than FG, my friend since we landed in the same freshman dorm room 20 years ago.

July 4 Sharon Springs, KS -> Kansas City, MO There’s no Hotel St. Regis to stay at, but I’ll bet the fireworks shows are more impressive. My grandmother bought some fireworks for the kids and said, “The ride was much lovelier than the S.D. & Nevada.” Go figure.

June 5 Kansas City, MO -> Indianapolis, IN -> Cincinnati, OH My grandmother went to Indianapolis to see her sister Vivian. I’ll swing by their old house, check out the neighborhood, and drop FG at the airport and pick up Laurie. Tag team girlfriends. But in the spirit of her Indianapolis stay--Relax most of the day-- we’ll head to Cincinnati, where we can stay with a friend and relax ourselves. Dinner, first, with Laurie’s friend Julie.

June 6 Cincinnati, OH I lived here from 1995-99 and haven’t been back since the spring of 2000. Staying with Megan, seeing friends, walking the sidewalks of Ludlow. Like my grandmother, a day of homey respite.

June 7 Cincinnati, OH -> Greensburg, PA Riding through Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Here my grandmother echoed the things I read in books about the time. Hotels were built next to the train station. Slept at the Penn-Albert and what a night, she wrote, Trains-Trains-Trains q 3 min. Norma reported it was terrible.

June 8 Greensburg, PA -> Bridgeport, CT Laurie, my friend who most represents home to me, who has provided house tours at parties when I was busy getting the food together (or gotten the food together herself!), who offers daily-ness and security and hey you want to go for a walk this afternoon? to my life, will accompany me back.

Oh Boy, Oh Murdocksville

2006-05-24T17:35:00.000-05:00

There was a time when this day looked like it was going to dribble away from me, lost in little obsessions like what kind of computer messenger bag I want to buy for the trip, a bit of celebrity gossip, making lists of follow-ups that I’ve been putting off. And planning for a mini Memorial Day gathering.

Then it all came back at me. I was going to say “tsunami-like,” but I think that metaphor isn’t allowed any more. Raging river. Today came back at me like a raging river. Nonstop.

Phone calls: Bridgeport, following up with the former mayor who’s now head of the chamber equivalent there. He’s now dropped me an e-mail and we’ll probably talk tomorrow. Salt Lake City, where I chatted with the super-friendly manager of the Peery Hotel. He’ll have some historical data for me when I arrive, and hopefully meet up to say hello and do an interview, provided he’s not in the labor room with his wife, who’s due a week earlier. Custer, SD. Yellowstone. Joliet, IL.

In Joliet I connected with Walter Keener, curator of the Joliet Historical Museum. Walter knows Joliet, and he’s enthusiastic about sharing it. He was able to help me figure out which hotel my grandmother stayed at (the Louis Joliet). He told me about downtown during the time, what they would have encountered on the Lincoln Highway. He’s going to look for room rates at the hotel in 1946, dig through the newspaper to see what turns up. He’ll meet with me when I roll into Joliet on June 16th. He’ll show me historical photos and postcards. And he himself just drove from Pittsburgh to Joliet—basically my day 2 journey—so he told me what to expect.

My mother has turned up an album of old matchbook covers my grandmother collected. On the phone, we went through those, looking for specifics that I didn’t already have. We found a few—a bar in Las Vegas, a restaurant in Salt Lake City, a banquet room in Joliet. And we found (again) that my grandmother was a woman on the move. She was in everyplace from Quebec to San Francisco to Fargo, none of which were part of this journey.

And then Murdocksville. First stop: Murdocksville Murdocksville has begun to haunt me, to call me to follow it like those unavailable men I once followed with such fervor. Where have you gone, Murdocksville? How can I find you?

And like those unavailable men, it turns out Murdocksville is now just a bend in the road. Four miles west of the Pittsburgh airport. I mostly knew this. But what I didn’t know is if anything really existed of the town anymore. Turns out the schoolhouse was closed down in the 1950s, the town swallowed up into the others around it. Today it’s probably a few houses on the Lincoln Highway, maybe a few houses on the flight path.

To find this out, however, I’ve exhausted Google. I’ve contacted the Beaver County Historical Museum. Checked out the Washington County online sites. Looked at maps from the Perry-Casteneda Library (where I’d expected to spend the day lost in mircrofilm) and the University of Pittsburgh. I called the Pennsylvania State Archives (for the second time) and confirmed that it no longer has a postal code. Now it’s part of Findlay Township. And to Findlay Township I went a-calling. “Talk to Cheryl” I was told. Tomorrow I shall.

Thus went my Wednesday, closing with a follow-up call from Yellowstone (I may be the first person who ever tried to talk her way in to cabins with no toilet, thereby giving up a real hotel room….) from Lisa Dean promising assistance. I have been roundly supported, greeted with friendliness and enthusiasm, and offered help where it’s available.

And I find myself saying, Whew. Here I am, exactly where I placed myself, right in the middle of this massive, unstoppable thing. I am carried forward. Sometimes buoyed, sometimes swept.

Home & Away

2006-05-23T07:55:00.000-05:00

Staying & going. Attach & detach. Stasis & movement. Routine & adventure. The traveler faces a dichotomy, a tension, and sometimes a downright struggle. There’s the part of her/himself that wants home, family, regularity, comfort. The part of her/him that longs for the road, the place where everything is new, freedom reigns, anything could happen.

During my year traveling I met those who seemed capable of almost forgetting home existed. They didn’t carry pictures. They called back to family (this was before I even knew the internet existed, back when making contact required the effort of calling cards, pay phones and a little savvy) once a month, maybe once every two months, maybe less. They were constantly tipping forward toward whatever was next.

I was never one of those people. But I wasn’t someone who just came away for a week or two, at least back then. I wanted to be on the road, but I wanted to carry parts of home with me too. I had photos. I wrote reams of letters. I received reams of letters back. I had every other week phone dates with my dearest friend. And then I climbed aboard trains and buses with just my backpack and wandered around finding places to stay and met people I would never see again and ate local food sitting on park benches…

The tension between home and away has always been potent for me.

Norma’s journal ends with the sentence: Home again and though we enjoyed the trip it was good to know we were nearing home. My grandmother’s ends with Home-ward-Bound and Total Mileage 7,550.

Did one struggle more with being away versus being home? Probably not. Probably one just said more than the other.

But as I enter this trip at the same age that they were which presumably means the same time in life, I certainly struggle with it. It’s a time when I’m loving home as much as I ever have, loving the house, the man, his daughter, the everyday ritual of oatmeal, the laundry folding parties on the den carpet while we watch Masterpiece Theatre. I’ve been indulgently domestic, made a giant pot of black bean soup with a side of mojo on Sunday, babied the dining room table with lemon oil.

And off I go. The idea, of course, is that here and away exist on a continuum, that each actually makes the other possible. I actually believe that this is true, at least for me. But often I still experience them as opposing forces, picking up their weapons, ready to do battle.

White Convertible

2006-05-19T13:31:00.000-05:00

I walked the lake this morning with a friend who went solo roadtripping across the West a year or two ago, and the experience of car-dom, the experience of being a woman on the road, on the road, brought to her mind an image from her childhood.

Her parents were divorcing, splitting the assets, which were few. Her father had to come up with $10K for her mother, who was starting out life anew. He scrimped and borrowed and finally wrote her a check. They were even. And with her check, her ticket-to-her-future check, she did one thing—

She bought a car. A white Rabbit convertible. She’d always wanted a Volkswagon, always wanted, I presume, a convertible. She spent her entire portion of her marital assets on that car. White exterior, white convertible top, white interior upholstery.

People thought she was crazy. She lived in a crummy apartment. She was trying to be a yoga teacher. She had no security, and she’d already handed over primary custody of her three children to their father. Shouldn’t she do something with her money?

A quarter century later, my friend recalls a photo she has of her mother wearing a white sundress and standing in front of her new white convertible, and what she remembers is how happy her mother was. That car was her ticket to freedom, and she wanted that freedom, those white seats, the wind in her hair, more than she wanted any of the rest of it. And today no one begrudges her that freedom, it seems. Or that car.

It’s one of my friend's favorite photos of her mother, and she promises to show it to me someday.

I’m not sure that cars mean the same to us now, women or men. But I can see how once, not that long ago, a woman who owned her own car owned something more than an engine and four tires. She owned, in a sense, her own life. Her ability to come and go, to cover ground, to choose direction.

"Roamin About"

2006-05-18T08:21:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I read through the Daily Capital Journal of Pierre, SD (So. Dak. was the abbreviation of the time) a rather charming daily, averaging four pages a day in 1946, that I suspect is very different today. It contained tidbits like, "Mr. Oscar Green is entertaining a cousin and his family from Kansas this week" and "Sam Fry returned from Huron Saturday with a truck load of grasshopper bait spreaders."

I couldn't resist this tidbit from the daily column "Roamin About" written by someone who clearly loved his role as pontificator and gossip of Pierre and the surrounds:

IF YOU ARE TEMPTED TO DISCUSS your hostess or intimate subjects with your lady friends while leaving a strictly feminine bridge party, hold up your comments until you get clear of the house, for here’s what can happen. A local man came home too early one night, considerably before his wife’s lady guests were due to leave. Too tired to stay awake in the kitchen or the basement, or the coal bin or someplace inconspicuous, he bedded down in his rather spacious closet and waited, trying to sleep there because the master’s bed was loaded with the coats and hats of the visitors. When the party finally broke up, our friend heard all of the parting conversation from the guests.

In his case none of the conversation burned his ears. Whether his position was strategic or awkward, remains an unanswered question.

One Month to Take Off

2006-05-16T08:10:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, sitting at my desk at work trying to finish a feature on media literacy, coordinate seven recommenders for the summer reading list, awaiting edits on a feature on dragonflies, scheduling meetings, all the things that keep things afloat at the office, I looked at the calendar. May 15th. One month to departure.

I had marked the day that morning, without knowing it yet, by reading a children's biography of Will and Charles Mayo, the Mayo brothers of the Mayo Clinic. It's a good story, how a small town in Minnesota became site of the world's most renowned medical center, a story involving a tornado, some industrious nuns, and a couple of overachieving brothers.

Though putting Rochester on the route was definitely going out of the way for my grandmother and her friends, I'm not sure they got to see anything of the clinic besides the hotels and restaurants that built up around it. And to discover that getting a room was near impossible. Norma called that day the "day of days."

So one month to departure I'm feeling more leisurely than I surely should be. The car is reserved, travel companions are secured, most plane tickets are purchased, hotels are booked where they need to be. I even talked to Bridgeport's Mayor Fabrizi on Saturday. The next several weeks are sure to include many to-do lists and lots and lots of research. My main goal now is to get myself ready for every location, gathering as much historical info as I can, making whatever phone calls need making. Setting up interviews. And enjoying the house and garden and coffees with Chris in the morning before all is movement, movement for awhile.

Emery, the Last Living Pioneer

2006-05-10T22:39:00.000-05:00

The entry for the Grand Canyon, June 30th, includes some of the most rhapsodic prose in my grandmother's just-the-facts journal: "The colors at sunset are out of this world.... Stayed and heard cow-boys singing..."

She also noted this: "Went to a lecture-movie by the Klob Bros."

Who were the Klob Bros? Well, they weren't the Klob Bros, they were the Kolb Bros, and they were a fixture at the Grand Canyon from the turn of the century until Emery Kolb died in a Flagstaff hospital in 1976. They were scenic photographers, adventurers, and great personalities. They created a photography studio at Bright Angel trailhead, a studio perched precariously on the edge of the canyon. In 1912 they took a boat down the Colorado River, fording the rapids with a movie camera in hand. The film they made toured the country.

And then they began showing it from their studio every night, every night for 60 years, with Emery at the helm. It became the longest-running movie in history. And somewhere in there, my grandmother went to see it.

My favorite anecdote from the information I dug up about the Kolbs was this: Often, after introducing the movie, Emery would say he was too old and feeble to narrate the whole film. Having said that, he would then spring past the astonished audience and up a flight of stairs to start the projector. In later years it was not the movie that drew people into the auditorium but Emery himself, the last living pioneer of Grand Canyon.

Thanksgiving at Raymar

2006-05-08T08:04:00.000-05:00

Ask about my grandmother and you’re likely to hear about her dinners, in particular her Thanksgiving dinners. Cousin Lionel remembers one with an international menu that offered a dish from each country represented at the table. For his family, it was heart of palm from Brazil.

Uncle Rod, whom I saw this weekend on my trip to McAllen to dig through boxes of family photos, remembers Thanksgiving as well. Jennie was a great cook, and everything had to be done perfectly, the table set just-so.

My mother, who very much rejected her biological claim to culinary prowess and goes out to eat for Thanksgiving, remembers that the preparation went on and on.

My grandmother appears to have been an odd mix of exacting, creative, and adventurous.

I could write more, and will, but in the meantime, here’s her handwritten menu for Thanksgiving dinner, 1942. “Raymar” was her moniker for her home, the home of Raymond Marrocco. My Aunt Joan, who would have been seven at the time, made place cards for the table, some of which are still in her scrapbook. The meal? Well, it sounded rather fabulous.

Thanks to Mike Harding

2006-05-08T07:37:00.000-05:00

...and Anna Ortega DeLago.

Piece of my trip began coming together on Friday, when I spoke with two contacts at two hotels, both of whom helped expand the trip into its shape.

First was Anna Ortega DeLago from the El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, NM. I'd written her about my stop there in July, had sent her a copy of my grandmother's entry from the day, when she had dinner at the hotel restaurant and "heard some good music." Anna responded by offering me a discount on my room there and, even better, offering the names of two octogenarians in Gallup whom I might be able to talk to. One of them, Juanita, worked at the El Rancho for much of her life, including in the 40s. She may have been there when my grandmother was. The other she called "a Gallup historian."

Phone calls to come. I was giddy.

Mike Harding called from the Grand Canyon South Rim. He came to the Grand Canyon after college in 1976, much to his parents' chagrin, and he never left. Today he is director of lodging.

Mike got me a room at the El Tovar, where my grandmother stayed and where rooms are booked many months in advance. I'd been thus far shut out, though I checked for vacancies nearly every day. My grandmother often talked about the grand hotel she'd stayed at in the Canyon. Built in 1905, it's one of the country's historic park stopping points. I'm glad to be able to do more than just check out the lobby.

What Mike also offered was his enthusiasm for the place he works. I'd not been thinking about how some of these places, particularly Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, are populated by people who simply love them and are committed to them. Like my friend Christine's friends in Alaska, some of whom saw Denali for the first time and never wanted to be far from it, people go to these spectacular places and create lives around them. Mike said he'd talk to some of the long-timers, see if anyone could point me to info about the hotel and the Grand Canyon at the time. And I hope to discover what makes him love the place so much himself.

And in the meantime, thanks go out. I've more hotels to talk to, more enthusiasms to touch.

Did Marie Marry Someone Else?

2006-05-03T09:38:00.000-05:00

The researcher at the Bridgeport Public Library ran into dead ends. We talked last week and her package of photocopied documents arrived yesterday.

No tracking Pauline. Nothing of note about Norma. My grandmother appears in an article dated June 30, 1946 (mid-journey) wherein she was elected vice president of the St Vincent's Hospital Aumnae Program. No page turners there.

But a little bit about Marie, though no telling what happened to her after the early 60s. Before that, she was vice president of Fairfield Dress Company. The president was Hyman Black.

So there he is--Mr. Black--the married lover she kept all those years. The one my mother remembers as the most lively and fun of them all. He'd visit and twirl her around, take time to play. The man my grandmother ultimately banned from the house because his illicit presence might be a bad influence on her daughters. The man who gave my mom a tour of the dress factory when she was in college, who was always gracious and kind to her. The man Marie presumably left at home when she went off to travel. The man she finally married.

But not quite. There's no indication that they married. In fact, Hyman appears to have moved to Florida with his wife Sarah.

And what of Marie?

A Maria Crestino, maiden name Spino, appears in the Connecticut death index, dying in 1993 in Waterbury, CT (coincidentally where my great grandmother died). It could be the Marie I'm tracking. The death record shows a birthdate of 1908. In census records she was 23 in 1930, 13 in 1920. With a late in the year birthday (October 24th) the dates potentially fit.

So who was John Crestino? What made him able to finally marry Marie, after all those years of being a girlfriend to someone else? My mother says, "Well, maybe. I was told she married Mr. Black, but maybe she didn't." It was fairly common, my mother says, for men at that time to keep long-term girlfriends, to ship their wives off to the Catskills and dally with their girlfriends for the summer. It didn't change her opinion of anyone. But it did keep her parents from allowing Marie to be her godmother when it was time for her confirmation.

Which is the better ending to the slim story of Marie? Is it that she waited all those years, working alongside her married lover, and finally was made an honest woman? Or is it that she got sick of waiting, or that Hyman moved away with his wife, and she found another man to marry? In the movie version, John Crestino would be honest and kind, maybe a little schlumpy. Maybe he'd be a floor supervisor at the dress factory. Maybe he'd be widowed. Marie would love him with an acceptance that he'd never truly hold her passion.

In the movie version, of course, I could verify this by flying to distant locals and entering dusty archives where I'd dig through filing cabinets and pull giant tomes from the shelves. I would tie the pieces together, create a seamless narrative of Marie's life. But I'm at a desk in Texas with a iBook and a lot of conjecture, and Marie is gone 12 years.

Not Story Tellers

2006-04-26T18:25:00.000-05:00

If you visit my boyfriend Chris’s family, you are sure to be treated to a wallop of lore. His father will say, “Yes, well remember when Uncle Tony…” and his Uncle Dick will regale you with tales of the Bobby Thomson home run (I was this close, I tell you…) in 1951. Stories abound. Stories are passed around, picked up, transferred down the line, told again.

This isn’t true in my family. We’re a terse bunch. Or perhaps not terse. Just the types to keep it close to the chest. Or to leave the past in the past. In any case, I know little about my family. I know little about my heritage.

When I was in the third grade or so, my teacher sent me down the hall to another classroom to give a message to the teacher. I went in, and as I told her what I was to tell her, I apparently gesticulated with some gusto. The teacher said, “Are you Italian?” Huh? “You talk with your hands. You must be Italian.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. And I had no idea if I was Italian. I didn’t think so. I didn’t know.

So I went home and told the story to my parents. My mother laughed. “As a matter of fact, you are Italian.” Huh? Turns out I was so Italian that they spoke Italian in my mother’s house growing up, or at least enough that her grandmother could get along. Her father immigrated from Abruzzo as a child. Her mother’s parents immigrated from the mountains near the Brenner Pass. And I was sitting there a dark-haired kid with deep-set dark eyes and hands that wouldn’t sit still, not knowing anything about any of it.

Why does this matter? I’m trying to capture a journey that happened 60 years in the past and I come from a people who don’t like to talk about the past. I don’t have stories about my grandmother, who died when I was 9. I don’t have stories about the women she was friends with, the places she went, what she loved and hated and believed in and laughed over. I don’t know how she would want to be remembered.

I’ve started reading a gorgeous memoir by John Phillip Santos called Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation. Beautiful language, a similar questing over family history, a reclaiming of generations. He claims that the Mexicans don’t remember –

It sometimes seem as if Mexicans are to forgetting what the Jews are to remembering. We have made selective forgetting a sacramental obligation. Leave it all in the past, all that you were, and all that you could not be. There is pain enough in the present to go around. Some memories cannot be abandoned. Let the past reclaim all the rest, forever, and let stories come to their fitting end.

Santos then becomes the one who reaches his hand back to grab hold of the past before it disappears. He becomes the storyteller. That becomes my role as well.

Quick Dry Underwear

2006-04-25T08:11:00.000-05:00

Even as I ponder the big questions—the dynamics of women together, the impact of the War on their thinking—the little questions creep in. Like laundry. Four women in a car for 23 days in 1946. How did they clean their clothes?

That’s easy, you say. They washed them in hotel sinks and hung them to dry. Well, maybe. But think about it. Those women were cruising. For only six nights of the entire trip were they more than one night in one place. Often they drove all day, tumbled into town for dinner and a bit of sightseeing, then awoke the next morning and hit the road again. Perhaps wet clothing was draped over the back seats as they traveled.

But what clothing? The war meant rations and shortages and Utility bras. What, then, in the months following? And what about other accoutrements? Did the women roll their hair at night? Did they bother with makeup? Earrings? All those days with the windows open blowing hot air across the car. Surely they wrapped their hair up in those headscarves with the tie on top.

National Geographic has a book on the American highway, and in it they recall four women who traveled Route 66 from East to West around the same time my grandmother took her trip. The women snapped photos of themselves at each state line. They’re wearing cropped pants and military jackets. Little flat shoes. Stripes.

This is all the more reason to hope that the leads I am following to track down the other women and to dig through boxes at my cousin’s house in South Texas yield some photographs. My grandmother mentions taking photos, including of Native Americans in New Mexico, who clearly were exotic to her. It would matter so much to see the women, see their faces and clothes and the car they drove.

In the meantime, I have to figure out my own laundry options. Thankfully, I live in the day of outdoor stores and high tech fabric. I can buy skirts that don’t wrinkle and pants that zip into shorts. And quick dry underwear.

Have I Mentioned That I Don’t Like Cars?

2006-04-21T15:02:00.000-05:00

Or driving? Or highways? Or long distances? ‘Tis true.

I like travel. Actually, I love travel, am devoted to it, and in many cases I even love the getting there. The trains. The buses. Sometimes even the airplanes, or at least the hubbub of people and lines and reunions and goodbyes at the airport.

But the car, not so much. In fact, when I first contemplated this project—after a coworker, upon hearing of my grandmother’s journal, said, “You should take that trip!”— I was wrapped in the excitement of the journal, of the very fact that in 1946 these women were adventurous enough and savvy enough to take off and go. I wasn’t thinking about the driving.

Then, in October of 2004, I took a writing retreat in a tiny town in Mexico called Chacala. In between reading and working on essays and buying strange squashes from the itsy grocery in the village center, I pulled out maps of the U.S. and plotted the trip. Oh no! I thought. Were they crazy? They were relentless in their movement. Never mind!

I didn’t want to drive it.

The truth is, if I could, I’d live a car-free life. I did so once, for several years in Cincinnati, where I shared the second floor of an old Victorian with a boyfriend and worked part-time at a doctor’s office just down the street (and later went to grad school at the university up the hill). My neighborhood boasted everything I could need—grocery store, coffeehouse, library, art house theater, Indian restaurant, health food store, book store, pharmacy. I could stop at the grocery while walking back from work, pick up something for dinner, grab a few baklava for dessert at the Mediterranean store, drop in at the wine shop for recommendations…

It was like New York, only cheaper.

Then the boyfriend and I broke up. Life got more complicated—with jobs more meaningful than transcribing charts for a pair of gastroenterologists—and late night buses were less appealing alone. I got a car. Then I moved to Texas, where cars really aren’t optional.

I drive to work, circling up and up between layers of cement in the parking garage. I drive to the grocery store, often taking the highway to get there. I drive to coffeehouses, to friends’ houses, to the movies, to the hike and bike trail where I then walk. And this summer I’ll drive across the country.

Because the project came back with a vengeance, so clearly the work that I am meant to do, with its themes so much my themes—travel, the lives of women, the quest after legacy, the tension between movement and standing still. Because it has become the most engaging and exciting work I’ve ever done, the work I couldn't imagine turning my back on. Because my dislike of driving is, in itself, part of the story.

My mother says that from the time my grandmother got her drivers license all she wanted to do was go. She drove to the coast to paint. She drove to Vermont to antique. She drove and drove. So there’s something in what it meant to her to be on the road. And there’s something in what it means to me to be on the road too.

This Is Not a Garden Blog

2006-04-21T14:50:00.000-05:00

Because it's been established that I am too busy for a garden blog. However, a walk to check the mail offers the butterflies, the butterflies, swooping and diving and fluttering and drinking on all those gorgeous plants we placed out front in November. Butterflies, however, are shy. They're not in favor of being caught on film, especially the big guys.

There's this little dude on the lantana by the curb.

And there are the bees gulping from the Gregg's mist. Not shy at all.

Plane Hops for Argentina with ‘Copter Crash Victim

2006-04-20T07:49:00.000-05:00

Thus reads the headline in the Bridgeport Post from August 9, 1946. In the photo, Norma Fontanella is seen in profile sitting next to a body covered in a white sheet in an ambulance. An inset shows another nurse, Mrs. Sylvia O’Dwyer. Norma and Sylvia were accompanying the body—who was patient Commander Carlos Gadda—from St. Vincent’s to Laguardia. Norma accompanied him all the way back to Argentina.

Commander Gadda was in Bridgeport to visit the Sikorksy Helicopter Plant to witness of a demonstration of the Sikorsky S-51 helicopter. It was an S-51 that crashed, coming in for a landing “when one of the rotor blades ‘flew off’ and the entire ship ‘seemed to vibrate’” according to witnesses mentioned in the New York Times. It only got worse from there, and Commander Gadda ended up pinned under the fuselage. He injured his spinal cord, and after he returned to Argentina, he died.

According to Evelyn’s note on the copy of the newspaper clipping that she sent me, Norma stayed in touch with Mrs. Gadda for many years.

It was quite a summer for Norma – traveling the country with girlfriends then coming home to take care of a critically injured Argentine commander and flying to South America with him. She arrived back in Bridgeport from the toad trip at 7:30 on July 8th, adding the note Home again and though we enjoyed the trip it was good to know we were nearing home. The next day the copter crashed in Seaside Park. One month later she was flying away.

Sixty years after the fact, when I asked cousin Lionel about Norma, the first thing he mentioned was the trip to Argentina. Norma is the one who went to Argentina. In Lionel’s story, Gadda was an Argentine general and Peron himself made the request for Norma to accompany him home. The newspaper articles say nothing of that, but it’s a nice tip of the hat to Norma to let the story rest there.

Lionel was interested in her trip to Argentina because she visited family there, family that immigrated from Forno di Zoldo at the same time that Norma’s parents and my great grandparents immigrated to Connecticut. The Fontanellas and the Remors/Fains were intertwined for generations, so her family was our family.

I’m interested in the trip because it seems to be the story that remains about Norma, though I’m sure there are many other stories. After we’re gone, something must remain, and it may or may not be the thing we would want it to be. Here I am in 2006, Norma’s friend’s granddaughter, speculating on her life. What I know is that she flew to Argentina with a wounded commander. Is that what mattered to her? Is that what she would want me to know?

Brave Companions of the Road (and more)

2006-04-18T08:17:00.000-05:00

Why no blogging? Because I’ve got so many plates spinning that I can’t seem to get still enough to compose what might need composing. Less than two months till departure. I’m handing over dates at the office and receiving credit card bills with hotels already on them and checking out flights and as I look to the future, I see that for three or four months, this will be my life – moving, moving, moving.

Updates begin with the securing of, as Nanci Griffith calls them, “brave companions of the road.”

Over a few Cokes and some stale potato chips on a hot day in my yellow kitchen a friend and I plotted her participation, which will begin in Los Angeles and continue to possibly Albuquerque and probably Kansas City. She looks forward to the long stretches, she says. How lucky for me! I see meandering conversations on endless desert roads. She’ll be with me at the Grand Canyon—someplace I’m really excited to see—and at the newly reopened Grand Canyon Hotel, sitting right on Route 66 in Williams, AZ.

And while I planted cucumbers and peppers and yellow squash in the garden bed, cell phone tucked in the back pocket, another friend and I plotted how participation may not happen for her, despite both of our wishes. She’s got a son’s 13th birthday trip and a variety of flights and car rentals already on her plate. Any ideas for how someone can be involved without being in the car with me?

Pretty soon, it seems, the whole trip will be covered, except for the Salt Lake City to Los Angeles drive across the desert. The women did it overnight in 1946, presumably to stave off the heat in a car where air conditioning wasn’t yet an option. I think I’ll do it during the day, and probably alone. I drive into LA for the longest stay of the trip – three nights in the same city—and my 38th birthday. More on that later.

Meanwhile, I ponder the agent question. I consider pitches. I keep nudging (nudging, nudging, nudging until very soon I wake up in a panic) myself to get proposals out to car companies and hotels to get sponsorship for the trip. I’ve got to at least ask.

Tomorrow Gary Glazner will be in town. Gary’s a poet and a poetry entrepreneur, a high energy, welcoming and exciting guy I met a few years back when we were on a panel together at the Texas Book Festival. I’ve also interviewed him for a few stories I’ve written for Writer’s Digest and Poet’s Market. I’ll attend a poetry session he’s doing with Alzheimer’s patients as part of his Alzheimer's Poetry Project, and perhaps I’ll brainstorm ideas with him if we can find the time.

The great thing about Gary is that he’s got the gumption to put things out there and believe they’ll happen. And then make them happen. A good dose of that in my life never hurts.

Between working on logistics and continuing research (all those 1946 newspapers await me at the library, with their fantastic headlines – “Pravda Berates U.S. Atom Plan”) and working on queries and pitches and alternative sources of funding, I could do nothing but work on this project from now until June.

Which is why I really want to start a gardening blog. To track the planting and growing of butterfly-friendly plants in my new garden bed outside the studio door.

And to offer photographs of cactus blooming purple in the late afternoon sun along the path back to the house.

And to see which butterflies, exactly, already munch on the fennel and swirl around the lantana.

I posed this as the greatest idea of the week, just about the time I finished reading Michael Paterniti’s Driving Mr. Albert, perhaps the best cross-country road trip book in a decade or two. My surprisingly level-headed mate just looked at me.

“A gardening blog?”

“Yes!”

“Hmmm. You wouldn’t be trying to distract yourself from the fucking enormous project you have sitting in front of you, would you?”

And then I laughed. And got back to work.

Getting to Know Bridgeport

2006-04-12T11:31:00.000-05:00

I grew up hearing my mother’s stories of Bridgeport in the 40s and 50s, a town where she could ride buses wherever she wanted, where her mother – anxious to get pesky Vivian out of her hair – would send her blocks down the street to buy a loaf of bread. Every time I was told I couldn’t do something I wanted to do, every time I countered by saying “But you got to do it,” I was told it was a different time then. That different time existed in Bridgeport.

My own memories of Bridgeport are less idyllic. As an adolescent, my mother and I spent a week visiting my grandfather at the house on Savoy Street he bought in the 1930s. Each night I’d be sent up to bed just before the 11:00 news, out of New York City, came on. My grandfather, already old and hard of hearing, would keep the television on and blaring loud, and the news would travel up the steep staircase and to the bedroom where I slept. I knew that the bedroom was once my mother’s, and I liked poking through the closets and the mirrored vanity stuffed with old goodies.

That week the news station my grandfather watched was running a week-long series on rape in New York City. I’m not kidding. Gang rape, date rape, jump-out-of-the-bushes-and-get-you-rape. So each night horrible stories, interviews with victims, and frightening statistics would blast across the house while I’d lie in the bed upstairs. I was young, just starting to enter my body and my impending womanhood. I was learning fear. Some of the stories I heard that week have stayed with me the rest of my life. And they inevitably became associated with Bridgeport.

One night my grandfather drove us to the shore, where we ate a fish dinner at a restaurant with outdoor picnic tables on the water. The route there took us through one of the city’s rougher neighborhoods, and my grandfather tottered along, going 10 miles per hour in his old green Plymouth, windows down. “They’ll reach right into the car and grab your purse in this area,” he said nonchalantly, poking along. It was his city and he was unfazed.

Now his city, my mother’s city, my grandmother’s city, Norma, Marie, and Pauline’s city, is a place I need to get to know. I called St. Vincent’s Hospital today, trying to track down an archivist who might have information about the woman who trained as nurses there in the 1930s. My grandmother finished first and went off to Columbia Presbyterian for a year or two. Norma, Pauline and my grandmother’s sister Ada were still there in 1930. And I called the Bridgeport Public Library, where a friendly historian is going to help me track down information about the women from clippings files, city directories, and obituaries.

Bridgeport--the city that P.T. Barnum built, known as “Park City,” Connecticut’s largest. Home of Remington Arms, General Electric and Underwood Typewriters. Home to so many European immigrants (every single woman on that trip appears to have been a first generation American) that a hospital was built to serve them in 1903.

Time to learn more about Bridgeport then. And today. The current mayor is the son of one of my mother's close late friends. My sort-of-godmother still lives two doors down from my family house on Savoy Street. The grapes my grandfather brought over from Italy still climb the stone walls behind his house. And St.Vincent’s is still there, advertising its high tech sleep center on the recorded message I listened to while on hold.

Joe Louis vs Billy Conn

2006-04-06T08:19:00.000-05:00

All over the headlines on the week the women left on their trip was the first heavyweight boxing battle since before the war—champion Joe Louis (The Brown Bomber) vs. Billy Conn (the Pittsburgh Kid). At the time, it was considered the biggest sporting event in history.

Why? The two had fought one of heavyweight’s most famous battles in 1941, when the much-smaller and spryer Conn had made it to round 13 against Louis, using his speed and agility to keep Louis on his toes. Louis had famously quipped, going into the fight, “He can run, but he can’t hide.” He was right. Louis won with a knock out.

Both men fought in the Army during the war. Check out this Joe Louis war poster.

The rematch in 1946 was hyped the entire year, with journalists covering the training, rests and day-to-day happenings of both fighters. Jackie Robinson visited Louis. Mrs. Conn reported on raising her two youngsters.

The fight was held in Yankee Stadium on June 19th. The stadium was outfitted with a ring and extra seating, all built with army surplus aluminum and stainless steel. The city had 2,250 police officers on hand for the event. More than 45,000 people attended.

It was also the first televised heavyweight bout in history. People couldn’t tune in at home, but in various places, viewing centers were set up, including at Washington’s Hotel Statler. Truman couldn’t make it, but Supreme Court Justices, the Attorney General, and a slew of Cabinet members did.

Conn was considered fearless and brash. Louis the greatest ever. The greatest won in eight rounds in a fight then ended up being rather anticlimactic. Conn only got one good punch in. Afterwards, he retired from boxing at age 23. Louis decided to go golfing. He held his title until 1951, when he lost a fight to Rocky Marciano.

More Highways

2006-04-05T10:55:00.000-05:00

For weeks all I’ve written about is the highway, trying to finish up a draft of an essay about living 500 feet from I-35 and, tied into that, living with a man and his daughter 500 feet from the highway, learning to settle down while traffic keeps moving.

Lots of fun research to prime me for all the research that still exists for this project. That 167,000 vehicles travel the stretch of I-35 that passes through Central Austin every single day. That I-35 in Austin was built where East Avenue used to be, and East Avenue was grand and picturesque, with streets 200 feet wide and oak-filled medians. That in Truro, Iowa, there is an Interstate 35 High School and its mascot it the roadrunner (!). That the hillside our house sits on is full of flint, which means the Native Americans set up camp here, generation after generation, looking out to the east for buffalo on the plains.

The essay took all my time for weeks, but I read it last night as part of the Utter reading series at Book People, and I can now set it to rest to gestate awhile on its own. I’ll plan to pick it up next month with fresh eyes, revise, and send it out.

In the meantime, there is no time to inch back into the project. I must leap. Be immersed. What does that mean? Well, this morning it means getting that thank you note out to Evelyn and, if I can swing it, starting the letters I’ll send to hotel managers at the hotels my grandmother stayed at asking them to comp the stay. But the list is long: researching the individual locations they traveled, reading those newspapers on microfilm that are waiting for me at the library, contacting car companies to try to get a sponsored vehicle for the trip, calling St. Vincent’s Hospital to see if I can learn more about Pauline. Oh, and pitching articles related to the project and starting to contact agents. And on and on.

I’ll leave for the northeast almost exactly two months from today. It’s going to be a sprint.

Evelyn Calls

2006-03-29T08:18:00.000-06:00

Evelyn called to make sure that I got the journal, and we had a nice chat. It wasn’t a revealing chat in terms of information, but it started creating the foundation for what could become more revealing in the future. I’m not convinced, however, that she has much to reveal. But she can still talk about Stafford Springs, where my grandmother and Norma grew up, about the family my grandmother came from.

I’d been mistaken in my approach, I think. I’ve gotten used to calling people and having them answer my questions off the cuff with relative ease. That’s because I’ve grown used to talking to professors who are, essentially, in the business of imparting information. And who have invested so much of their lives in the information that they are itchy to get it imparted and to get credit for the imparting.

Evelyn is an 85-year-old woman living alone and not used to being asked to talk about things from 60 years ago. So I just let her talk about what she wanted to. About moving to Arizona and how her husband built the only house in the area with insulation, so she stays warm during the winter. About her grandson, who is doing dissertation research on an Italian/Spanish writer. And then about going down to Bridgeport in 1932 to watch Norma and my great-aunt Ada graduate from nursing school.

And more. But she’s pointed me back to that nursing school class. In it, the woman named Pauline. How do I discover what happened to her? She looks to be the only other possibility for descendents. Tracking her down is up next.

Tale of Two Journals

2006-03-27T22:19:00.000-06:00

Oh my. Norma’s sister Evelyn did kindly send me a copy of Norma’s journal from the trip, as well as a clipping from the paper showing Norma accompanying the Argentine Commander Carlos Gadda back to Argentina after he was injured in a helicopter crash. August 9, 1946, almost one month to-the-day after the close of the trip.

But the oh my is this: Norma’s journal is almost identical to my grandmother’s. I mean identical. Same phrasing. Same descriptions. Some different details. Norma does a bit more relating of how the temps were and how she felt than my grandmother. (One day she writes, This was the most exciting day of my life!) My grandmother reports on what she eats.

But the day they left, Jennie: Had dinner at Howard Johnson’s. Went over the Penn. Turnpike – what a road – 201 m of perfect driving with no speed limit and no lights. Norma: Had dinner at Howard Johnson’s. Went over the Penn. Turnpike. Wonderful highway of 201 mi of driving. No speed limit.

On June 19, Jennie: Went and saw Mt. Rushmore. It was beautiful. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Norma: Went to Rushmore National Park. Wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

At Yellowstone, Jennie: Marie started a fire and it sure felt good. Norma: Terribly cold – made a fire and it felt good.

And on it goes. The times and places all line up, but so does the language used to describe them. Perhaps they copied from each other. Perhaps all four women took a moment at the end of the day to jot down the facts of the day and they collaborated on the process.

I couldn’t help remembering, however, how as teenagers we’d get dropped off at the movies and then sneak off to someplace else, getting back to the theater in time to be picked up. And how we’d line up our stories beforehand. How many times we saw 16 Candles!

The Elusiveness of Pay Dirt

2006-03-20T12:05:00.000-06:00

It is probably the nature of the game that is gathering information for a book: The imagination trumps actuality again and again.

I’ve been waiting for cousin Lionel to pass on the phone number of Evelyn B, the youngest sister of Norma Fontanella, who is alive and well in Arizona. Norma grew up with my grandmother and joined her on the trip; Evelyn used to babysit my Aunt Joan. When Lionel finally handed over the number, he added this little tidbit: Norma kept a journal of the trip also. And Evelyn has it.

My imagination--fueled by reading Michael Paterniti’s Driving Mr. Albert, about traveling across the country with an kooky old man and Einstein’s brain (and all the research involved)—was at it immediately. What fortuity! I’d fly to Tucson to see Evelyn, spend a day at her house hearing all about Norma, Marie, Pauline, and my grandmother. (Or at least about Norma.) There would be photos. There would be tales. And there would be almost-lost anecdotes that would unlock the door to what would make four women take off across the country right after the war.

When I screwed up the courage to call Evelyn, it was like people write books about her sister’s journeys all the time. She had better things to do.

Which isn’t to say she wasn’t gracious. Only that it was clear that showing up at her door with a tape recorder and a list of questions would seem…overzealous? (Of course I am overzealous, but still.) Kicking back to tell stories of her sister’s life isn’t high on her list of priorities.

Norma’s journal sounds even sparer than my grandmother’s. Times. Places. How much they spent for dinner. Evelyn’s going to write out the info on a piece of paper and send it to me. Copying the journal didn’t seem worth it to her. She remembers nothing else herself –she was married and raising kids when the trip happened. What kind of car did they drive? I don’t know. What about Marie Spino? I think I met her once. She wasn’t a nurse. Are there any pictures? No. And she adds, I’m 85 years old now.

So in the mail will come what Evelyn remembers, some notes from Norma’s journal, and a copy of clippings and other things from Norma’s trip to Argentina with the wounded commander. And I’ll be staying home for the weekend.

Following other low-yield trails, on Saturday I watched the better part of Anna and the King of Siam, the 1946 movie I thought would tell me something about independent women of the time. Doesn’t this plucky British woman show up and set things right in the palace of the overindulgent king?

Indeed. The movie was all hoop skirts and Rex Harrison forgetting he was supposed to be Thai. Irene Dunne’s character is clever, but she’s far from inspirational. And I doubt my grandmother and her friends were stopping at the theater in Los Angeles (the film came out mid-journey) to cheer her on with her giant bows tied around her chin. Maybe they liked Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice a little more. I suspect I will.

And the digging continues.

Wednesday updates

2006-03-15T11:23:00.000-06:00

All updates are logistical right now.

I’m reserving hotels, beginning with the ones my grandmother stayed at that are still in operation. The State Game Lodge in Hermosa, SD, is booked, as is the Peery Hotel in Salt Lake City. At the El Rancho in Gallup, NM, once home to movie stars, a woman said, “She’ll call you back” and set the phone on the desk while she looked for a piece of paper. The El Tovar at the Grand Canyon is already full. Can Bill Johnston, its manager, help me? I’ll find out.

One fabulous traveler friend (also a writer, adventurer, and damn cool woman) has signed on to accompany me from Bridgeport to Yellowstone. Years ago we drove a Ryder truck from Texas to New York, one of us hanging her head out the passenger window to check for oncoming cars after the rear view mirror fell off in Georgia. In my studio I have a photo of us sitting on the truck’s bumper, the words “RENT ME” above our heads.

This was Monday’s excellent news.

I’ve been thinking about how often my travels take me to cities. In the almost two years Chris and I have known each other, we’ve gone to Vancouver and New York and Buenos Aires and Los Angeles. In my own travels I tend toward biggies like Rome and London. Even traveling in Mexico, I preferred Merida to Tulum. Chris and I loved walking around the downtown areas of Monterrey for a friend’s wedding in May.

Good, then, for me to enter the places where hotel phones are answered by lifting a headset off the receiver instead of pressing a switchboard button. Good to bump along the back roads for awhile. Good to eat in towns where the choices are slim. I bet I have a lot to learn.

Later today, hitting the papers. Interlibrary loan has sent me editions from the day the women traveled through of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Joliet Herald-News, The Salt Lake Tribune and the hometown Bridgeport Post. Hello, microfilm reader. I hear you whirring.

Wyoming, Wyoming, and a World of Words

2006-03-12T15:39:00.000-06:00

The project has been on hold this week while the annual AWP conference descended on Austin. Writers and editors and poets and lots of old friends and near-forgotten classmates and memoirist heroes and people I admire and people I don’t admire all got jumbled together for four days.

But first, I got word that I’ve been awarded a one-month residency to Jentel , an artist residency program in Wyoming. I’ll go from mid-October to mid-November, perfect timing for working on the book, and a perfect place to work on it. I'm thrilled.

In June, I’ll travel across Wyoming on what looks to be the same road my grandmother did. (Note: road, not interstate—woo hoo!) It’ll be my first time seeing that part of the West, which makes returning to it a few months later to write synchronistically ideal. And Jentel is close enough to my route for me to turn off and visit on the way.

It was exciting news to carry with me into AWP. And it was fabulous to catch up with people I care about and rarely get to see. To hear about houses and children and babies and impending babies and books and books and books. To clink margarita glasses together and share barbecue ordering tips and just generally pick up where we left off.

And with that, words. Words that we shared across tables. Words that we leaned in to offer in private. Words we handed each other on sheets of paper. And all those words printed in books, on broadsides, on signs, splattered across covers. All those words. It’s a wonder we still have anything to say.

Highwaying

2006-03-06T07:49:00.000-06:00

The Merritt Parkway. The Pennsylvania Turnpike. The Lincoln Highway. Route 66. My grandmother traveled some of America’s most revered roadways.

It was the year Nat King Cole recorded, “(Get Your Kicks) on Route 66,” but she may not have known the song yet. She never mentions Route 66. But I can trace her travels across it, including the night she stayed at El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, NM, where Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, Ronald Reagan, Kirk Douglas, and other stars of the day stayed. It was built in 1937 by movie magnate D.W. Griffith’s brother.

(I'll be there on July 1.)

She also traveled where there was no highway, would be none for a decade or longer. In South Dakota she wrote, “Saw the Black Mts—the road over them was terrible, just hill and black dirt + clay.”

My journey back to imagining the roads she traveled inevitably begins by considering the roads I’ll travel. Which begins by considering how hard it is today to travel on roads. The country is crisscrossed by highways. Across the desert in the west, I’ve got no choice but to take I-15 and I-40. She took them too, but they weren’t yet numbered, weren’t yet part of the national highway system. They also weren’t yet lined with Best Buys and McDonald’s and the glowing signs announcing vacancies at cheap hotels.

And the roar of big rigs. There were trucks, yes. My grandmother stops at a truck stop in Sharon Springs, KS, and reports 56 men and no women in the place. “We had a few good laughs.”

But not the semis carrying layers of new cars and not the freighters full of vegetables and plastic chairs and Monterrey stone and whatever else run up and down and up and down the highway at all times. This I’ll be pondering a lot. This I’ll write much more about in months to come. The highway is much on my mind.

I live only 600 feet from I-35 and there is never a moment when it doesn’t hum.

First stop: Murdockville?

2006-02-27T07:02:00.000-06:00

Spade work is what the nonfiction writer I met with this week called it – all that research I need to do in advance of the trip. Getting the goods on each destination so that I might arrive and ask, “Is that the field where they saw….?” “The town must have looked different before the ... was built.”

Thus, newspapers are being tracked down – the Bridgeport Post, the Herald-News in Joliet, IL, the Salt Lake Tribune, The Capital Journal of Pierre, SD (when I call them about archives the accent couldn’t be more perfect). I stumble through using the microfilm machine. I discover how to request an interlibrary loan.

And what of the first leg of the trip – Bridgeport to Murdockville, where they ate at the Virginia Lee (“what a dump – just canned food”) and “slept at a cute home”? Murdockville, somewhere past Ray’s Hill, Allegheny, and the Seidling Mountains?

I can’t find it. I Google “Murdockville.” A few genealogical notes. No more. I change the spelling to Murdochville, as Google suggests, to discover much about a town in Quebec. I check my map, my atlas. No listing. No small dot on the map.

Perhaps it doesn’t exist anymore. Score one for change.

Almost, but not quite. I call the Pennsylvania State Archives, where a friendly reference librarian hears my question, pauses, then goes to get an old atlas. There it is, planted 20 miles west of Pittsburgh, just off Route 30, the old Lincoln Highway.

Murdocksville.

Farm country. Villages, not even townships. Tax lists from the 19th century listing acreage, horses, and cows. Home to the oldest landmark of significance in Beaver County: White’s Mill. Even today no high school, town hall, hotels. But the airport, the airport is right up the road. Score one for change.

Saladmaking, circa 1946

2006-02-27T07:00:00.000-06:00

Found this tidbit in the Chicago Tribune, June 17 --

Black Pepper Still on List of Scarce Spices

“...When we can buy whole black peppercorn again there’ll be a renewed interest in saladmaking, for freshly ground pepper gives a pungency to salad which no other spice can provide."

Myth of the Woman Traveler

2006-02-23T08:13:00.000-06:00

Today’s Salon offers a review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, a travel memoir. The review’s title: Lost and Found. Subtitle: Divorced and depressed, Elizabeth Gilbert traveled the world in search of peace. She came back happy, healthy, and with a story to inspire us all.

This encapsulates the topic I’ve been writing around for the past few days, will probably write my way through over the course of this project: For women, travel so often means a tossing off of conventional life.

Inherent in the Salon review, inherent perhaps in the book itself is the idea that if Elizabeth Gilbert had been happy and healthy to begin with, she wouldn’t have traveled the world. Travel, particularly solo, adventurous, truth-seeking travel doesn’t happen in the midst of satisfying living. It happens when life somehow drops away.

How many women’s travel memoirs begin with a wedding ring left on the bedside stand? A closet of business suits dropped at the Goodwill? A death, a discovery? A friend of mine took off to travel after she saw the Twin Towers fall. I wandered out for a year with backpack when I needed to shake my identity as a 24-year-old divorcee.

This isn’t so true of men. A man can motorcycle South America in search of the Che Guevara legend and no one asks what went awry in his life. Steinbeck can poke around the country in a camper called Rocicante and simply be jovial and curious.

What is the myth at the core of this? Is it culturally created? Does it go all the way back, Diana running solo through the forest with her arrows? She is, after all, the goddess of transitions. (She was also to be feared.)

Think of Frances Mayes’s luscious memoir Under the Tuscan Sun. So full of old homes and literary references and arugula picked along the driveway and tossed with some pine nuts and pasta for dinner.

Mayes is a university professor who buys a house in Tuscany, renovates it, discovers life’s little pleasures and all things Italian. And yes, she does it all with her partner, her long-term boyfriend. Together they work on the house, and together they return home to take up jobs and lives in between Tuscan visits.

How quickly these details drop away. In the movie version the story becomes a chick-flick romp (also delicious, but for very different reasons). Where does it begin? Diane Lane getting a divorce, her life shattered by finding out her husband is a creep and her money basically gone, to boot.

It’s more dramatic, yes. And it allows her to fall for a hunky Gian-Carlo standing in a listing doorway in a white suit. But it also fits this myth that women adventure only when the domestic and rooted is gone. Cast off or taken away. Why else would she end up with a crumbling villa in the countryside?

What makes women go? What makes them come back? Is the urge to travel always in opposition to the urge toward home, settledness, connection? These are the types of questions that start pulsing through me as the project grows limbs.

Forty Year Old Bachelor Goes Down in Flames

2006-02-21T08:25:00.000-06:00

On the day the women returned from their travels, the news was Russia Soviets Russia Soviets (four decades of Russia Soviets...) and that Howard Hughes had crashed his plane in a Beverly Hills neighborhood the day before and might not survive.

If you’re going to crash your plane, where better to do it right there among celebrities so that an actor (Dennis O’Keefe, who lived nearby) can report the details to the press? What more dramatic than careening directly into homes? “A wing sliced through a bedroom corner, narrowly missing Mr. and Mrs. Jerry De Kamp,” The New York Times reports.

And then to be pulled from the wreckage, delivered to the hospital to state dramatically, “I’m Howard Hughes” before losing consciousness?

Two photographs: a crumpled airplane and an insanely handsome Hughes, aviator goggles clamped to his forehead.

By the next day, Hughes would be meeting with business associates at the hospital. Truman would send him a cheerful telegram. He would recover lung function after a few weeks. The New York Times would use the word “pulchritudinous” to describe Jane Russell, who starred in his film “The Outlaw,” which would soon be banned.

In August he’d leave the hospital. In September he’d walk again and then pilot a plane to New York. And so it would go.

But on July 8th, 1946, he trumped even Mother Cabrini, who that day became a saint.

The Magic of Dates

2006-02-18T11:00:00.000-06:00

They stick like cooked pasta against the wall.

There are many things I forget easily—movies, for example. Don’t say to me, “Do you remember in To Kill a Mockingbird when….” I don’t.

I forget library books. Whether or not I turned off the coffee pot. Anything technological, but especially the difference between RAM and—you see, I even forget what I am supposed to be comparing. I'll probably forget that story you told me about your sister and the LAPD.

But I never forget a date.

Birthdays, of course. Not just my family (May 13, July 27, Sept. 14, Mar. 23, Dec. 20) – that’s the easy part. Not just friends (Mar. 26, July 17, Aug. 17, Aug. 28, Nov. 9, Dec. 25, Nov. 1…) but friends I am no longer in touch with, friends from various times in my life. My middle school best friend’s birthday is July 11, the same day as my supervisor from 1992-94. I’ve talked to neither in a decade or more.

Dates stay with me long past their usefulness.

I remember the birthdays of exes (Oct. 28, Dec. 14, June 8), of pseudo-exes (June 25, June 30, April 20, Feb. 5) who were never boyfriends at all. I needn’t have loved you to know your birthday. Guys I went to high school with (Oct. 2, Sept. 27).

The dates I started dating different men: Nov. 7, Nov. 9, June 8, Mar. 31.

The dates we broke up: Aug. 22, Jan. 20, Feb 1.

My one-time wedding anniversary: Feb. 27. It would be 16 years this month.

The date my divorce became final: Nov. 2.

I think you get the picture.

The day I moved to Austin: Aug. 10. The day I moved into the house on Hillside Ave: Mar 1. The day I moved into this house: July 23. The day Chris closed on it: Jan. 28.

This is how it is in my head. One date leads to the next leads to the next.

The day I left to spend a year in Europe: Aug. 8. The day I got back from the smaller trip the year before: June 27.

I am the one who will call a friend and say, “Did you know that it’s 8 years ago today that we took that trip to New York?” I say, “I left my job at Duke Power 11 years ago this week.” I’m the one who says, “I moved in six months ago on Monday, let’s have a toast.”

It's not just that the numbers stay in my head. Dates matter to me. A day has its own resonance. It is the holder of history, it carries births and deaths and important events and a million forgotten details. It's got something to do with memory. With persistence.

All of this to say, when someone asks me, “Do you really have to travel on exactly the same days that your grandmother did?”, I’ve got no choice but to say, “Yes.”

There is nothing more me than to step into a car on June 15th, 60 years to-the-day after she did, and hit the road.

Itinerary, take one

2006-02-17T15:42:00.000-06:00

Here’s the trip as my grandmother took it. My goal is to follow her path, day by day. My only planned departure is that rather than stay two days in Indianapolis, where my grandmother’s sister Vivian (my mother’s namesake and by extension, sort of mine) lived, I’ll head to Cincinnati, where my own history resides.

June 15 Bridgeport, CT -> Murdockville, PA
June 16 Murdockville, PA -> Joliet, IL
June 17 Joliet, IL -> West Concord, MN
June 18 West Concord, MN -> Pierre, SD
June 19 Pierre, SD -> Hermosa, SD
June 20 (stay in Hermosa)
June 21 Hermosa, SD -> Greybull, WY
June 22 Greybull, WY -> Cody, WY
June 23 (stay at Yellowstone)
June 24 Yellowstone -> Salt Lake City, UT
June 25 (stay in Salt Lake City)
June 26 Salt Lake City, UT -> Cucamonga, CA (Los Angeles)
June 27 (stay in LA)
June 28 (stay in LA)
June 29 Cucamonga, CA -> Williams, AZ
June 30 Williams, AZ -> Grand Canyon
July 1 Grand Canyon -> Gallup, NM
July 2 Gallup, NM -> Taos, NM
July 3 Taos, NM -> Sharon Springs, KS
July 4 Sharon Springs, KS -> Kansas City, MO
July 5 Kansas City, MO -> Indianapolis, IN
July 6 (stay in Indianapolis)
July 7 Indianapolis, IN -> Greensburg, PA
July 8 Greensburg, PA -> Bridgeport, CT

Total Miles: 7,550
Total Days: 23
Total years since the journey was taken: 60

A Little About Marie

2006-02-15T09:45:00.000-06:00

One thing is clear of woman number three, Marie, she who started the fire at a Yellowstone lodge that “sure felt good”: she spent her life as someone’s mistress.

When I mention a woman named Marie on the trip, my mother says, “Marie Spino.” Cousin Lionel says, “Marie Spino.” Immediately.

Then my mother says, “The thing about Marie is that she dated Mr. Black for years, but he had a wife.” And Lionel says, cautiously, “What has your mother told you about Marie?” before proceeding.

The Census tells me she’s born around 1903 in Stratford, CT, the younger daughter of Italian immigrant parents Joseph and Rose Spino. What is remembered of her more than 100 years later, however, is this one fact of her personal life. She was devoted to a married man.

(And, Lionel tells me, she was a very attractive woman.)

I turn to Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, with its rapt and tortured narrator who loves a man she can never have, though she bears his children and waits waits waits for him:

“Perhaps I am his hope. But then she is his present. And if then she is his present, I am not his present. Therefore, I am not, and I wonder why no one has noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury me. For I am utterly collapsed. I lounge with glazed eyes, or weep tears of sheer weakness.”

And

“I accept it without tomorrows and without any lilies of promise. It is the enough, the now, and though it comes without anything, it gives me everything.”

It isn’t unrequited. It is unattainable.

When I read that book in my 20s, it said something raw and profound to me. Reading it again a few years ago, even when I was mourning the end of my own relationship with an unattainable man, I couldn’t help thinking she needed to just get over it. Go have a life, girl. He ain’t worth it. How could he be?

My mother remembers Mr. Black as a very nice man, always kind to her and her sister. When my mother was in college and taking a clothing design class, Mr. Black took her on a tour of the dress factory he ran.

Lionel remembers that Jennie, my grandmother, eventually told Marie she couldn’t come to the house with Mr. Black. She was a bad influence on her daughters.

What no one can tell me is what it meant for Marie to be Mr. Black’s girlfriend. Perhaps the arrangement suited her just fine. Perhaps the freedom inherent in it was exactly what she wanted. Perhaps she could have never taken a trip across the country with three girlfriends if she’d been married and a mother.

Or perhaps it was the source of unbearable pain in her life.

Or perhaps neither.

In the end, when they were older and their friends’ children had grown and left the house and their hair had grayed, Mr. Black and Marie were married.

Perhaps it was a great love story.

David Eyre's Pancakes

2006-02-14T07:46:00.000-06:00

Valentine’s morning, I wake early, but instead of going directly to the studio, I play kitchen goddess for a bit, putting in the oven a batch of David Eyre pancakes (or a single pancake, depending on how you look at it) for a holiday morning treat. They’ll be eaten quickly, before Chris and Annabella shuffle out the door for their drive to school. They’ll be less savored than if they were offered at 6 pm or even in the middle of the day, when tastebuds and teenagers are awake. But they’ll be a treat nonetheless.

According to my google sources, the David Eyre pancake was popularized in a 1966 article in the New York Times, but comes from a 1919 cookbook. (In 1985, columnist Craig Claiborne posited it as the most popular recipe the newspaper ever printed.) It’s an oven-baked, poofy confection, curling up the sides of the pan and looping over the top. Then covered with powdered sugar and a squeeze of lemon that makes it tart and delicious.

With it, I’ll serve some blueberries and a special Ferrero Rocher chocolate for later in the day.

The stuff of holiday brunches, deserving of the term “elegant,” these pancakes are straight out of my grandmother’s generation, and perhaps might have once graced my grandmother’s table. And there is something of my grandmother in me when I garnish and present and mark the day. (Chris says I made him look like a schmuck – didn’t we agree that Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark holiday? [We did.] Annabella is all curiosity and appreciation, as she normally is with food of any sort – poking, sniffing, exclaiming.)

My father, remembering my grandmother (the mother-in-law who never liked him), is sure that on that trip, she ran the show. She always had to run the show. Sometimes feats of kitchen prowess are exactly that – a way of wresting control. In the kitchen, the cook commands the timing, the ingredients, the combinations and flavors. If my grandmother added green food coloring to every dish on St. Patrick’s Day (with not a drop of Irish blood in her), where did her motivations come from? Creativity or assertion? Celebration or dominion?

Me? My Valentine’s morning treat was, of course, all love.

Tracing the Women -- Jennie and Norma

2006-02-13T07:33:00.000-06:00

Who were the four women in that car 60 years ago? Part of my adventure lies in answering that question.

My grandmother leaves few clues, just first names dribbled in here and there. Discovering more—through Census data and stories from family members and general sleuthing—makes me downright giddy.

Here’s what I know so far:

1. Jennie – My grandmother, Jennie Marrocco, born Giovannesa Remor on May 14, 1909, in Stafford Springs, CT.

You might think I’d know the most about her, but I don’t. She died when I was only 10, and my memories of her are slim. I remember her as stern and humorless. Apparently, she wasn’t. Apparently, she was a riot.

When she traveled, Jennie was a mother with two children – Joan (age 11) and Vivian (my mother, age 6). She was married to Raymond Marrocco, an immigrant from Vasto, Italy, and a pharmacist. She was a nurse. She threw notoriously elaborate holiday meals. (Once, I am told, she held an international Thanksgiving, with dishes representing the homelands of everyone at the table – heart-of-palm for her Brazilian/Portuguese brother-in-law, and on it goes.)

I’ll discover Jennie through stories from my mother and her cousin, Lionel. Through a visit to McAllen, TX, to dig through boxes of things at her late daughter Joan’s house and collect stories from Joan’s husband. Through her old neighbor Evelyn, who still lives two doors down. Through others who knew her.

2. Norma – The Norma listed in my grandmother’s ledger can only be Norma Fontanella, well known to my mother and to Lionel as well. Also a nurse, also from Stafford Springs, Norma grew up with my grandmother and her parents immigrated from the Northern Italy town of Forno di Zoldo together. In fact, the Remors and the Fontanellas were entwined by marriage generations back. She was a member of the family.

Norma was also a nurse, trained at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Bridgeport along with my grandmother and her sister, Ada. She never married. Census records show she was born May 21, 1906 in Stafford Springs and died in Stafford on December 2, 1989.

Another strong woman, Norma’s claim to fame is that she cared for an Argentine general injured during a visit to buy Sikorsky helicopters in Connecticut. When he was well enough to go back home, he requested Norma go with him. Juan Peron himself petitioned the U.S. government on the general’s behalf. Norma went. (Wait till I find the clippings!)

Norma’s youngest sister, Evelyn, is still alive, living in Tucson. Lionel called her, and she remembers the 1946 trip. I’ll be talking to her soon.

Marie and Pauline remain. More soon!

An Introduction to the Project

2006-02-12T10:28:00.000-06:00

It begins, you see, with a small black ledger found while rummaging through a box of photos at my mom’s condo. The ledger’s inside cover announces, ““Made Expressly for F.W. Woolworth Co.” And beyond that, my grandmother’s looping scrawl. The first page titled “June 15, 1946.”

The ledger is my grandmother’s record of the cross-country road trip she took in 1946. She began in Bridgeport, CT, probably in front of the house my mother owned until just a decade ago, a tall frame home filled with marble-topped tables. She winds back to Bridgeport 23 days later, after driving across Pennsylvania and into the Midwest. After seeing Mt. Rushmore and Yellowstone. After experiencing the car’s gear shift going out in the Big Horn Mountains. After having a drink at the Brown Derby in L.A. and eating what I’d guess where her first-ever tamales and enchiladas in Taos. Across Kansas, Missouri, a few days relaxing with her sister in Indianapolis. Back across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, whose tunnels were dug by Cornelius Vanderbilt for a defunct train route.

My grandmother clearly didn’t have posterity on her mind when she scribbled her journal. She offers no motivations for a trip that took her away from her home, husband and two kids for three full weeks. She offers no details of planning or clues to what she might have thought about, talked about, longed for or celebrated in 7,550 miles of driving. She was a nurse, and she was used to getting the facts on paper. She offers distances. Times. Hotel names. Meals of black elk and canned food.

Through the journal, three women creep in. Norma, who took the lead in changing a blown-out tire near the Grand Canyon. Marie, who started a fire that “sure felt good” in their Yellowstone hotel room. And Pauline, who my grandmother kidded about going over snow-covered mountains in the South Dakota distance. “What a surprise – we did!!!!”

So we have four women traveling together across the country just nine months after the war ended. My grandmother, born in 1909, was 37 years old. I am 37 years old.

This is where I enter the story.

This summer, 60 years after my grandmother’s trip, I will trace her journey, leaving Bridgeport on June 15th, returning July 8th, driving the same distances she drove, seeing the same sights she saw, staying when possible in the same hotels she stayed in. It is a different country. It is the same country. We are the same age. We are in different stages of life. Where do we intersect?

The project is an adventure. It is a quest. And it is a book. This blog will track its unfolding.

2005-12-07T09:55:00.000-06:00