A Picture of My Past

We're on the road again, visiting my husband's family in Memphis for a long weekend. The drive is about 12 hours from Detroit and one I've come to know fairly well now. As I barreled down the highway with cruise control set on our spunky little rental, I couldn't help but wish that my eyes had the capacity to record, like a camera. The wish first struck me when we were driving through New England and I wanted desperately to capture what it looks and feels like to be driving through winding back country roads. We set up our digital camcorder in various and sundry ways and only managed to record the dizzying passage of trees, pavement and every single bump along the way. Why could the camera not honestly record the journey? Why do our eyes see the whole picture? Why is that third dimension so vital to getting a sense of a place?

I understand the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words every time I try to sit down and describe an experience. A photo can describe what was next to what, how objects and people are arranged, but it gives a Johnnie Paper description of a place and person in time. What may take thousands of words is worth the telling if only for the gentle nuance that a voice can give to an event. A photo can't tell you that the mood at the wedding was tense because the best man was drunk and the bride and groom fought in front of all the guests. Words may be cumbersome but can still more accurately transport an outsider there.

I'm not discounting pictures, don't misunderstand. I think that the truest snapshot of a thing is done with both words and photos. If someone has never been to Mozambique and has never seen any photos of life there, a photo-less description relies on that person's imagination to paint that picture and imaginations are varied in their complexity and fitness.

So, I will be trying to take more photos, being far more a woman of words than images, and will be making use of my new darling flickr account.

Read more after the jump.

Red Tape Is a Sure Sign of Liberation

I spent an inordinate amount of time today reading about the bureaucracies of getting a visa to spend more than three months in Spain. Undaunted, I began making our monthly checklist from now through the end of 2009 when we hope to be packed up and ready for launch.

One of the foolish thoughts I've been harboring is that two years is an incredibly long way away. Upon making the checklist, I began to wonder if two years would really be enough time to get house and finances and applications and visas and everything in order.

Something I learned today that was slightly disheartening is that, should one choose to live in Spain for a year without working, they would have to arrive with $75,000 (that's an internet reference and so I've got no claim to its validity) in their bank account (or in investments). Silly me, I was thinking somewhere in the ballpark of half that. The prospect of socking away 75K in two years has me reconsidering finding part time work as a TEFL teacher or something equally footloose that would, at least, get me a temporary visa with a work permit attached.

Obviously, I'll have to find ways to save more than we had planned which was already hovering around a knee-weakening $1,000/month. I'm envisioning this plan as a kind of snowball. If I set the goal of having a giant yard sale on Memorial Day weekend this year, I can save as planned until then and then take the savings up to that date plus any earnings from the garage sale to open a money market account where any future funds would go until we're ready to invest.

A yard sale by the end of May would mean that we will have to systematically go through each and every room of our house (including the basement---oh, the dread!) and rid ourselves of the excess. Don't worry, this won't be our only yard sale.

During this period, we will also be renewing our passports, weening ourselves off of the car (gas is currently costing us $150/month!), weening myself off of sugary stuffs (can you imagine, I spend approximately $1400/year in drinks alone!), and weening ourselves off of restaurants (which conspire to make our monthly food budget something close to $500). I'd like to also sell one of our cars, currently used by a friend, and be putting all of that extra money into the pot on a consistent basis by Memorial Day.

That's a tall order amounting to, essentially, a complete and total lifestyle overhaul. I'm not entirely sure Remy will go for it.

If, by the end of May, we can do all of those things, we should be able to increase our saving from the $750 that is truly feasible at this moment to closer to $1250 per month.

We could have a $10,000 seed to invest with by the end of summer and, with a bit of luck and shrewd planning, increase our egg that much more than we could with saving alone.

Naive? Perhaps. We'll see.

Read more after the jump.

New Hampshire & Maine

In October, Remy and I took a week-long vacation to New England to visit my family and spend some time with a few of our friends. For some reason, I thought that I had posted about it but, looking back, it appears that I didn't. I'm surprised at this considering the fullness and renewal that the week provided but, hitting the ground running as we did as soon as we returned, it's any wonder I've thought to do it at all.

Though I love my family very much, I know I'm not alone in being able to spend only a few days with them at a time. I feel constantly compelled to defend myself and my beliefs to them, particularly in the face of my father's fundamentalist proselytizing. In an attempt to build in as much vacation as we could, we designed brief sojourns to New Hampshire into our visits with my folks. Calling in some old contacts from the time that we lived there, we arranged to stay at The Gile House in Franklin, NH. We had spent time there with the owner and our mutual friends when we lived in Franklin and loved the place. It is outside the city center (a city of 8,000 which makes it remote enough on its own) and is beautiful both inside and out. We arrived at night but the caretaker was kind enough to leave the lights on for us. Photos of the house and grounds can be found here.

Among the things we did while in New Hampshire were drive up to Plymouth for lunch at Biederman's, one of the best sub shops in the state. I am from the quaint little town of Plymouth and a friend of ours currently owns a shop there so it was worth our while to drive up for the afternoon, see the old sights and surprise our friend who was unaware that we were visiting. Our goal was to scare the living daylights out of our friend by dropping into his shop unannounced. No heart attacks were had, unfortunately. As luck would have it, our friend was on a vacation himself with is wife in Atlantic City. We did speak to him on the phone, in the end, and arranged to see them both later in the week.

On a Sunday, we visited Canterbury Shaker Village, where I had once worked. I had an inexplicable need to see the Meeting House again and so we decided to take the Historical Tour and jump off after going into that building. Fortune smiled on us and allowed us to be on the tour with Daryl Thompson who not only remembered us but welcomed us with his characteristic warmth. I could hardly hide my tears at being there again, a place that had brought me such respite, such joy.

We also went to an intimate dinner party with our friends who own the local antique shop in Franklin. I can't speak enough about how much we've missed their company, their dinner parties at their farm in Andover and how we've missed New Hampshire in a thousand little ways. My heart stayed in my throat for much of the trip, memories hiding in every little thing, unexpectedly revealing themselves through scents, scenes and sounds. The few days we spent were like a drink after a long journey. I can hardly recall now, two months later, what it is like to no longer thirst. I can't adequately define what "home" means, what it feels like to be from a place and miss it so badly that it aches at moments, but I can say this, when I am there, anywhere there, I am unburdened and true, I am myself without any apology. And while I'm there, it's true, I feel too big for the place sometimes but, while I'm away, I suffer without it. Who I am, how I view the world, how I interact with others, are all linked to that place that I'm from and there is no cutting it out of me.

We went to Maine twice, once at the beginning of the week and once at the end. During the first part of the week, we went with my mother and brother to York Beach. The weather was cold, particularly on the ocean, but we love that beach and wanted to visit it again. We also spent time with my family so there was little going and doing and far more sitting and sharing than we experienced in New Hampshire. My family was happy in their new home in Maine, far happier than they had been in Memphis, and I was happy to see them happy.

I'm sure that there other notable things along the way but, since so much time has passed, it's hard to remember them all now.

Read more after the jump.

Incognito

Tonight I traveled without going very far from my doorstep, into a world of carefully mussed hair, intricately planned dishevelment and the droning mediocrity bred by the cult of celebrity.

Yesterday, a friend mentioned that Vincent Gallo's band was playing the local contemporary art museum this evening. "My god, he's such a freak show," were my first words, followed shortly by hours of deliberation over attending. I had hoped for some sort of excrement-flinging masturbatory orgy of chaos but, sadly, I knew what I was getting into after reading some overblown and pretentious statement about how his work, like countless others, defies definition and resists the banal, albeit accurate, description of improvisation. I also knew that, by simple virtue of the fact that it was held at the museum and it was Vincent Gallo, the famous-for-knowing-someone-famous-hipster-god, I would be swimming in a sea of blindly-administered haircuts and short-sighted and narrowly-ironic rehashing of terrible clothing trends from the darkest depths of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

All these things bore themselves out to be true. There were no surprises. There was no innovation. And I was angry that the hall was packed with people who tried so ridiculously hard to look as though they didn't try at all because someone with a modicum of indie cred had slapped together a drug-induced slumber of a band. Perhaps they were all there for the hope of fecal-flinging, just as I was. Perhaps I'm no better for having went, myself, regardless of my desire for circus antics.

I did, however, not go running to the nearby watering hole upon hearing that that is where Gallo eventually surfaced. Instead, Remy, B, and myself returned to the really real world of the here and now and ate flaming cheese at a Coney whilst talking about social injustice, gender inequality and breeds of dogs. I would surely prefer to feel my legs sweating against the plastic booth seat, cast in the glow of a sickly orange flourescent "OPA!" with ranch dressing smeared on my right breast and thigh than to travel again to the hip side of town.

Read more after the jump.