Don't Stop Believin'

As my husband and I approached the farm, the Canadian classic rock station in the rented car began playing the 1981 monster jam “Don’t Stop Believin’” recorded by Journey at the very zenith of Steve Perry’s tight jeans and white sneakers period.  My husband and I were visiting Montreal, celebrating 10 years of marriage, and I had convinced him to drive south of the border for an afternoon so I could see my high school boyfriend for the first time in fifteen years.  I’d been referring to him simply as “my boyfriend”, ever since I found out where he lived thanks to the book that his wife wrote about their first year running an organic farm together.  It had been quite a mental journey, I’d become a kind of time traveler within my own life.  I hadn’t thought about him in years but suddenly I couldn’t stop visiting my own past.  Despite the fact that I’m not a small town girl – I grew up in Brooklyn, and my boyfriend wasn’t born and raised in south Detroit – he grew up in the megalopolis of New Paltz, and neither of us ever took a midnight train going anywhere, it felt significant that Don’t Stop Believin’ was playing on the radio moments before our reunion.   

My husband is heavily tattooed and I look fairly Semitic so people seem to have this idea that in our relationship I’m the one who civilized him but that’s an illusion.  I was the one who freaked out when we got engaged and flew to Amsterdam with my friend Joanie and got really stoned.  On our wedding day I realized only after I’d gotten my hair and makeup done, and after I’d gotten dressed that it had been a while since I’d shaved my armpits.  My dress had short sleeves, and I noticed there was about a quarter to half an inch of growth that was visible when I lifted my arms.  “Is this a big deal, I mean, is this okay?” I asked.  “No, it’s not okay, it’s terrible!” He said.  “Well, I’m already dressed and I can’t pull my clothes over my head without ruining my hair,” I said.  “Fine, I’ll shave you,” he said.  We stood in front of the bathroom sink, my husband dressed in a 3 piece suit, me in my wedding dress, and I watched our reflections in the bathroom mirror as he lathered up my armpits and shaved them – not for me so much, but so that he wouldn’t have to face the humiliation of showing up to his own wedding with a hirsute bride.  

This wouldn’t be the last time he had to deal with my depilatory issues.  A couple months ago I explained to my friend Lois that I’d discovered that since I don’t grow much hair on the back of my legs that I thought I could get away with just shaving the front, but my husband didn’t share in this opinion.  “I’m beginning to think,” she said, “that you’re very lucky to have him.”  

I’d gotten in touch with my boyfriend a couple months earlier, we’d spoken on the phone only once – our schedules are very different, he gets up at 4 and goes to bed at 9, and in planning our trip to Montreal I noticed that on the map, at least, it didn’t look very far from his farm in upstate New York.  He doesn’t have modern conveniences like email or a facebook account, so I left a message on what I’m sure is probably an actual answering machine saying that we were going to be in Quebec and was it a long drive?  I really didn’t know if it was a big deal to cross the border or how long it would take to get there.  He called back the same day and said “We’d love to see you, Montreal is about a 90 minute drive, I’ve got the dates penciled in on our calendar, let me know.”  It was only then that I approached my husband about making this side trip.  

I chose my words carefully.  “Here’s the thing,” I began, “when we visited L.A. a few years ago, we saw not one but two of your exes, and when I first moved back to Chicago and we started dating, it seemed like every girl you were friends with had slept with you at some point.  I didn’t have a lot of boyfriends, and this is as close as I’ll ever get to his farm, you have to give me this one.”   

“It’s not him that I have a problem with,” my husband said, “I get freaked out by farms.”  I knew this to be true, having dragged him to my childhood summer camp in the wilds of Vermont a couple times, where he tolerated the wilderness that I so cherished and that I credit for making up a good part of my character.  It was the first time he’d ever been away from electricity and indoor plumbing, and I had to give him his props – he stepped out of his comfort zone and actually managed to enjoy himself.  In the end we agreed to make a day trip out of my boyfriend’s farm. 

And then a strange thing started happening, I had stress dreams about the visit.  In one, I was visiting my boyfriend, and his wife met me and was perfectly friendly, but he didn’t want to talk to me, he just sort of stood there and looked away from me, and wouldn’t make eye contact, and they put me up in this dilapidated outbuilding that was full of cats and cat litter and cat shit, and then his wife asked me if I’d like to meet with her to talk about writing, because she’s writer.  When I told my husband he said “first of all, I think it’s hilarious that you didn’t recognize that the dilapidated house full of cats and cat shit is our house, and secondly, I think you’re more interested in talking to her than you are in talking to him.”  He’s a fucking genius.   

Then I had a dream that convinced me that my subconscious is an egomaniac, I dreamt that my boyfriend called and told me not to visit him, because he was still in love with me, and it would be just too difficult for him to see me.  

Throughout this whole process I’d been referring to him as “my boyfriend,” to the point where everyone else was too, even my husband.  When we discussed our travel plans, he began sentences with phrases like “so when we get to your boyfriend’s farm…” and I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to introduce him any other way, it’s just how I know him, and what I’d been calling him.  I don’t think my husband would have a problem with it, but it probably wasn’t a great idea to do that in front of his wife, who I’d never met, and maybe my boyfriend would think it was a little weird. 

He recognized me through the car window, we were probably the only visitors he was expecting that day, so it wasn’t too hard to guess who we were.  He walked to my side of the car, looking pretty much as he always has – tall, lanky, a little more rugged from years spent working the land, dressed in a straw hat, a button down shirt, and jeans.  “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said, “everyone’s been asking me ‘when is your girlfriend getting here?’” 

He was having lunch outside with his crew, a small group of awesomely filthy men who looked to be somewhere in their twenties.  There were visible dirt lines on their calves where their pant legs ended, with everything below caked in various shades of farm dirt.  They asked my husband about tattoos, and asked me what their boss was like in high school.  Feeling suddenly shy, all I could come up with was: “well, he wasn’t a farmer.”  A nine month old baby girl crawled at my boyfriend’s feet.  Somehow she’d managed to get a piece of old, dried up chicken shit in her mouth.  “Oh man, that is the worst thing I’ve ever smelled coming out of a baby’s mouth,” he said, removing the offending fecal matter.  Turning to my husband, he said: “So I hear that you’re a real nature boy and that you can’t wait to roll up your sleeves and dig in.”    

“If you want to know word for word what he said to me,” I asked,  

“Yes, I do.” He answered. 

“He said: I will go to the farm with you, but I do not want to be involved to any part of the circle of life; I do not want to see anything get inseminated, I do not want to see anything get born, I do not want to see anything get killed.  I will hang out on the porch, I will sip mint tea, and I will pet the dog.” 

“Alright,” my boyfriend said, “no sex and no death, I think we can handle that.”  He took us on a tour of the farm, stopping to pick stalks of asparagus for us to snack on, walking us through as much shade as possible, and making sure our water bottle was refilled regularly in the 90 degree heat.  Despite himself, my husband became fascinated with the enterprise, asking specific questions about things like mobile chicken coops that were moved daily to provide natural fertilizer to the fields, draft horses that pulled equipment that was made in the 1930’s by Amish farmers, and disease vectors.  “Well, we’re coming up on some pregnant pigs,” my boyfriend said, “but that’s sex, so I don’t know if you want to see that.”  My husband said that would be okay, and we watched the impressively sized sows enjoying the shade.  One of them turned her hind quarters toward us and started rubbing her rump up against the side of a corrugated metal structure.  “I think I’m going to start doing that,” I said.  “What?” my boyfriend asked.  “Rub my butt up against stuff when it itches.” 

“We’ve got dairy cows too,” my boyfriend said, “have you ever milked a cow?” he asked, directing his question to my husband.  “He has,” I offered, “and he was surprised that it was warm.”   

After the tour we met up with my boyfriend’s wife and their three year-old daughter in front of the farmhouse.  The three year-old was dressed in pink striped pants and a pink top, and was riding a pony that was tethered to a rope and being guided by her mother.  “Do you have any idea how many little girls would love to have a pony?” I asked her.  “No, she really doesn’t”, her mother answered.  To her husband she said: “we were inside and she was upstairs screaming and screaming, I went to see what was happening and it turned out her fingers were stuck in her tiara.”  “That happens to me all the time,” I said.  We were joined by the family dog, who leaned against me and looked deeply into my eyes until I started petting him, a pullet that had gotten loose from the pen next to the farmhouse, and the nine month-old, who began busily stuffing her mouth with grass.  “Don’t worry about it,” her mother said when I went to take the greenery from the child’s mouth, “it will come out one way or another.”  For a moment it seemed as if every life form possible was crowded together on that small patch of lawn, and I began to get an idea of how busy life must be for my boyfriend and his family, who, with a hired staff of five, manage to provide 200 people with 60% of their daily calories. 

We were invited to stay for dinner, and the food was amazing, having all come from right outside the door.  We started with cold asparagus soup and moved on to green salad and baked chicken.  “Mommy,” the three year-old asked sweetly, “was this chicken slaughtered this year?”  “No honey,” came the answer, “this chicken was slaughtered last year, it came from the freezer.”  I silently compared the moment to a story my mother in-law tells of her own daughter sitting down to dinner and asking “Mommy, why is it called chicken?” and getting really upset when she got an answer.  As it turns out, my boyfriend’s three year-old daughter who loves the color pink and wears tiaras around the house really enjoys watching animals get slaughtered, and plays a game called “slaughter” with her friends, where the ground rule is you can only pretend to kill animals, so they play with it the family dog, or whatever barnyard animals happen to be nearby.   

We’d brought Canadian beer and pastry with us, which we shared at the end of the meal.  We were invited to stay the night, I was on the fence.  There would be literally nothing to do once our hosts went to bed at 9, and they get up at 4, which didn’t sound great.  When the subject of our wedding anniversary, which was the following day, came up, my boyfriend said “we’re planting leeks tomorrow, what better way to celebrate ten years of marriage than by planting ten thousand leeks?  Also, there’s going to be a steer slaughter tomorrow – but that’s death, so you probably don’t want to see that.”  It seemed like a good moment to end the visit – we’d enjoyed each other’s company, but seeing everybody again at 4am, all bleary-eyed and irritable didn’t seem too appealing. 

My boyfriend packed us a bag of asparagus, lettuce, and homemade bread, and walked us to our car, where my high school boyfriend and my husband of ten years shook hands, momentarily fusing my past and my future.  “It was so great to see you,” my boyfriend said, and leaned in for a hug that was short enough not to get weird and uncomfortable, but long enough to acknowledge our history.   

On the drive back to Canada, my husband was quiet for a few minutes.  “I’d like to go back sometime,” he finally said.  “Yeah?” I asked. “Yeah, maybe stay at an inn or a B&B in town for a couple days and uh, you know, work.”  “On the farm?” I asked.  “Yeah, I think that would be really cool.”  If I hadn’t been buckled into my seat, I would have fallen right out of it.   

We crossed the border back into Canada, where my civilized husband and I returned to our well-appointed B&B, where three course morning meals were delivered to our room every morning by handsome men, and complimentary slippers were provided at the front door.  The experience left me feeling not so much nostalgic as much as it felt like I’d time travelled, and was now back in the present, all grown up.  But mostly it got that infernal Journey song stuck in my head, so if anyone knows of an antidote – please, let me know.  Unless that antidote is “Oh Sherrie,” that’s ten times worse.

Insomnia, redux

the painting that my high school boyfriend gave me for my 18th birthday.  Not a great photo, but I should really be asleep right now.

Once again, I can't sleep.  It's 5:30, but I've been tossing and turning for much longer.  Last night I read at Tuesday Funk, a monthly reading series at the Hopleaf.  I'd been on the bill for some time, and had planned on reading the story I titled "my boyfriend" and have posted elsewhere in these pages.  (Wow, that's the first time I've linked back to my own blog, how very self-referential of me).

But that's not what's keeping me up.  A while back I actually went and bought my boyfriend's wife's book, The Dirty Life, and as it turns out, it's a pretty good read.  Besides being an interesting story, it made me feel better - made me realize it was simply the pull of the past that was making me feel so nostalgic and whatnot, and it was nice to know that my boyfriend was doing well.  I genuinely wished him and his wife well.  So when I saw that his wife had a facebook fan page for the book, I hit "like", and posted the following comment back on February 6th:

Hello Kristin,

A couple months ago my NPR feed on facebook had a writeup about your book, and within the first three lines I recognized Mark from the description. I knew him in high school, lost track of him years ago, and although I've reconnected with many old friends through the magic of facebook, no matter what I did I couldn't find him (doesn't help that he changed his name and has no Internet presence). I've been reading articles about your farm and your book, and heard your interview with Melissa Block. What an amazing story, and what a remarkable adventure you've undertaken. Please give my regards to Mark, and all the best with your farm, your book, and your family.

JP

At the time, there weren't an inordinate amount of fans on the page, less than 300, and it flummoxed me that while she had responded to some other, less intriguing comments, she never bothered to respond to mine.  I thought about it, and realized that it was a bit ridiculous to wait around and feel insulted by a perceived facebook slight, when she wasn't even really the person I wanted to get in touch with.  My boyfriend is so off the grid that I'm not sure he has a flush toilet, much less a facebook account, so I took it upon myself to write the following note and drop it in the mail on March 7th:


Dear Mark,

Back in November, I had the strange experience of reading my NPR updates on facebook, and coming across a story about a journalist from New York who'd gone to western Pennsylvania to interview a farmer... and something told me right then that the farmer in question was you, even before I'd read two paragraphs.  I bought Kristin's book, and read it inside of a week.  What an incredible story, I'm really amazed at what you've done at Essex Farms.  I've tried looking you up from time to time, and now I know why I never got very far - I was looking for MG in Pennsylvania, and now you're MK in upstate New York.  I left a note on the facebook fan page for The Dirty Life, but I gather Kristin doesn't have much time to mess around on facebook, as she doesn't leave a lot of comments on people's posts.  I figured I should write you an actual note, since posting a comment on the facebook fan page of your wife's book is a pretty disconnected way of trying to say hello, and I'm pretty sure the last time I saw you I'd never surfed the Internet in my life much less tried to reconnect with old friends on it.  (If memory serves me, the last time we saw each other was in 1996, when I was living in Boston.)

I feel like I know so much about your life, but it's strange because I know it all from reading your wife's book.  I don't have any books for you to read about me, but I'll sum it up in a couple sentences: I'm still in Chicago, have been married for almost 10 years now, and I'm still a writer. I had a job writing human interest stories and grant proposals for an international humanitarian aid organization, but I lost it almost 2 years ago in the bad economy.  I was unemployed for a year, and used the time to travel, volunteer, and write.  Now I work doing administrative stuff, and it's not bad, if not my dream job.  I get to Plymouth, Vermont about once a year in late August, which I'm guessing is a busy season on the farm, but I'd love to stop by and say hello.

It's so good to know you're out there, doing your thing,

All my best,

   
JP (I included my phone number, which I won't do here, just in case the government or aliens are reading this)

And then.... nothing. I started to get irritated, I'd actually bothered to reach out across the years and make contact, and for whatever reason neither my boyfriend nor his wife deemed it necessary to respond.

Then, yesterday morning, as I was getting ready to walk out the door, the phone rang.  I looked at the caller ID, it said simply "New York call" from area code 518.  I don't know anyone with that area code, so I let it go to voicemail... and then I thought maybe I should check and see if there was a message.

I'm nerdy enough to copy and paste the note I left on The Dirty Life's wall, and I'm nerdy enough to have kept a copy of the text of the note that I sent my boyfriend, but there's something a little creepy about transcribing phone messages from old boyfriends word for word on my blog, so I'll paraphrase:

"J, I got a great letter from you, thank you so much.  It's been sitting on my desk for a month, and since I hadn't replied to it I figured I'd just call.  I can't wait to hear your voice and hear all your news."

I walked into the bedroom where my husband was still asleep.  He opened his eyes half an inch and I said "my boyfriend just called me!"

It was a trip; I haven't heard his voice since 1996, and he sounded exactly the same.  I went to work in a daze, and called back that evening.  I got his voicemail, and left a message that went something like this:

"Hi Mark, this is J calling you back.  You're probably asleep, or just not in your office.  Thanks so much for calling, I'm sorry I missed it.  It's so crazy to hear your voice on my voicemail, I'm pretty sure the last time I heard your voice or saw you was fifteen years ago.  I guess I'll try calling during the day, or - here's my cell phone number, I have my cell phone with me most of the time.  Hope to talk to you soon, and I hope everything is going well out there."

Last night, as I left work and walked to the bus stop to catch the #92 to the Hopleaf, I noticed I had a message from area code 518 from a couple minutes earlier.  It was Mark again.  I called back, and he picked up the phone.

"Mark?"  I said.
"Yes?"
"This is J,"
"Get out of town!"

We spoke for the entire bus ride, and continued our conversation as I stood outside the Hopleaf waiting for my husband.  And that, dear readers, is how I came to have a conversation with my high school boyfriend, who I haven't spoken to in 15 years, minutes before reading a story about him to a live audience.  (I didn't tell him that last part).

No wonder I can't sleep.

School Story for The Moth

Last month The Moth came to Chicago for the first time to do a StorySLAM. I went on assignment for Gapers Block, and even came prepared with a story to tell in case my name got pulled from the hat. I didn't prepare very well though, I typed the story up that very morning, and spent the day trying to memorize it. I was so caught up in my notes that I forgot to put my name in the hat once I got to the event, and I was feeling insecure about how little time I'd invested in rehearsing. I did get a decent Gapers Block piece out of it though.

It would be a shame to leave the as yet unperformed story in its dusty little corner of my computer, so I thought I'd publish it here even if I never manage to tell it on stage:

School

I almost didn't graduate from high school because I failed gym. I'll say that again - I almost didn't graduate from high school because I failed gym. Not calculus or AP French - no, gym.

I went to a tiny Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, a town about 60 miles north of New York City that might qualify as a rust-belt city, but with none of the accompanying cache. A percentage of the student body was on the fast track to success, but it was widely known as a second chance school, and several of my classmates had repeated a year upon entering, or had been given the choice between boarding school or military school.

As boarding schools go, it was pretty lax. There were no uniforms, no football team - only soccer, and it was co-ed. We had dances, but no prom - that went against the Quaker aesthetic of not making people feel bad if they don't have a date - or whatever, I can't remember exactly which tenant of Quakerism is compromised by prom night.

The PE requirement was, to say the least, relaxed. While I'd spent two seasons on the cross country team - becoming a Hudson Valley Athletic League All Star, by the way. I even got a letter, but since the cross country team didn't have jackets I never sewed it to anything.

I was never a great student, I had trouble concentrating on anything that didn't interest me, and had perfected the art of self-sabotage to the point that every semester it seemed I might fail all my classes, but by some miracle of last minute studying I passed. By the spring of my senior year I had developed a serious case of what is sometimes referred to as senior-itis, and the most athletic endeavor I could bring myself to sign up for was Outdoor Club. Yes, we had something called Outdoor Club, and it counted as PE credit. A few times a week the Outdoor Club would load up in a van, drive to some out of the way, picturesque locale in the Hudson Valley, and go for a walk.

And I failed.

I was in my Outdoor Club coach's office, if that's even what his title was, I'm not sure. It was about two weeks before graduation. My family had made arrangements to rent a car and drive up from Brooklyn to watch me graduate under the shade of a 100 year-old oak tree in a ceremony that featured the puppeteer Kevin Clash - best known for bringing Sesame Street's Elmo to life. My coach and I were having what I thought was a friendly conversation. Jack was somewhere in his fifties, he was balding with a monk's fringe of gray hair on the sides of his head, he had a pot belly and all the menacing presence of Santa Claus.

"Well," Jack said, his eyes on an attendance sheet spread out among a pile of other papers on his desk, "it looks like you've missed four sessions of Outdoor Club." It was true, I had. That spring I'd met my first real boyfriend and together we cut class and idled the hours away. By the time I was accepted to college, most of my academics, including Outdoor Club, had fallen pretty low on my list of priorities. Who cared if I wasn't out walking with Jack and the rest of the club? I was so out of here, my life was just beginning, and what kind of a gym class was Outdoor Club anyway?
"Yeah," I said.
"You know the maximum number of absences is two," he said.
"Yeah," I said. As bad of a student as I was, I never made excuses for myself, I took whatever punishment came my way as a result of my bad habits. I spent hours in what was called "special study hall", where all the under-performing kids were sent. We sat together in the dining hall under the supervision of a teacher, who sat at a table grading papers. They didn't care what we did, as long as we didn't leave the room. I spent my time writing notes to my friend Cori. I never did a lick of homework in special study hall.
"Well I'm sorry," Jack said, "but I'm not going to be able to give you a passing grade."

Suddenly the future that I was no longer going to enjoy flashed before my eyes - college, career, family, success - and in its place came a new future, an unpleasant and dark future filled with menial, backbreaking jobs, cigarette smoke and a terrible soundtrack - songs like Irene Cara's What a Feeling.

"But Jack, I..." I stammered, and the rest became in incomprehensible blur of half-choked pleas and stammered explanations, "I... can't... not... graduate... I'm ... already accepted to college..." My tears were so forceful they practically shot out of my eyes like water from a lawn sprinkler, I couldn't see anything. All I knew was that my life was ruined, and that it was all my fault.

"Okay, okay," Jack said between my outbursts, "now let's just take it easy, just settle down." His tone was soothing, listening to Jack was like listening to a bedtime story. "If you go outside right now, and go for a nice long walk," he said, "I'll just erase two of these absences, all right?"

My tears stopped. Could this really be true? Could one walk really make the difference between working in a gas station or becoming a tenured college professor? Was this even ethical, could Jack really do this? I didn't care if it was or not. "Uh, okay," I said, and left Jack's office.

I went outside and walked like I had never walked before. I walked all the way around the school campus, up the hill past the auditorium and the gym, past the boys dorms and beyond to the other side of the hill, past the main building, the science buildings, the infirmary, the girls dorms and the dining hall until I was back in front of Jack's office. When I was done circling the campus I did it again for good measure. To this day I don't know if Jack was watching me.

Two weeks later I graduated under the shade of a 100 year-old oak tree with 65 other students, in a ceremony presided over by Elmo, and never told any of my classmates how close I came to not graduating.