A little something about transformation? In room #5 at the Sou’Wester, next to the stove, there was a Victorian highchair with a potty hole in it. Potty hole: Exactly what you think I mean. My mom has been staying in this room for twenty years, and this potty chair had been sitting there every step of the way, untouched, decoration. Just recently, we noticed some wheels attached to the back, and we brought it into the middle of the floor. We unlatched a couple of hinges and bent the legs, and voila! Like a Transformer, it turned into a little Victorian baby walker, with a tray painted in tiny, crazy, Victorian storybook pictures.

There is always room for change, time & space for surprise. My mom presented the potty chair at her concert, complete with a demonstration of it’s metamorphose.

Kate is back from India. We hashed over bowls of plain white rice yesterday, wearing each other like lovely, old coats. She had her fingers laced in front of her on the kitchen counter. Her nails were long, almond shaped and filed so that the tips formed perfect, white crescents. She buttered challah, offered me peanut butter brownies.

I said, “Your nails,” and clutched her hands. “They’re beautiful. I’ve never seen them like this.”

“I know,” she said. “It was just time. And of course, right? You move to New York City and start wearing high heels. I move to Calcutta and grow out my fingernails. The dirtiest city in the world. Of course.”

She was glowing, the same, but with legs ten-thousand leagues longer. She had slogged through a disorganized volunteer program, thought hard about what “making a difference” really means, left on an early train to Bodhgaya for a ten-day meditation retreat and spent her remaining days with the Tibetan people at the base of the Himalayas. And then we were back in her kitchen, and I was kissing her parents hello like yesterday.

And her parents are the best. I asked them how they held up in her absence and they didn’t even feign separation anxiety. “Oh,” her mother said, “We went to Argentina, had our friends over for parties, saw a lot of music, drank a lot of wine.”

I came back to Maggie, down from the mountain, an encyclopedia of nutrition facts, ready to move energy like boulders, shove me around with Shiatsu. I came back to Grace, a professional ballerina, a career at eighteen. Mckenzie, a full-time book clerk under the union, Austin hustling at the Cup & Saucer Cafe. Naomi’s at the health food store, cooking samples for the weekend, rejecting art school. And Paul’s still taking one grueling dishwashing job after another–but he’s got a few sweet hours at a diner in NW, prep-chef. Dustin is writing song after song, hanging out with the dear from Talkdemonic, starting up his studio. There’s people doing reading salons, hosting shows at their house every Saturday. There’s people who’ve stopped making art. There’s people who are still working at health insurance collection agencies, but are happy. There are others who are bored.

I had a dream last night that Kelsey’s mom (who fed me half the food I ate growing up) was throwing me and a handful of people I remember from elementary school, a welcome home party. She kept putting out cake after cake on the buffet table, and everyone I hugged kept whining into my ear, “All I want is something savory, but all she’s got is cake!”

Christmas was nice, breezy. I was in Kelsey’s basement, the first Christmas we didn’t live two houses apart, and it started to snow. I took a long Winter’s nap at home. My dad and Tessa called to tell me they felt ignored, and so I had to wake up. Wake up wake up.

How do you know when you’re being reckless with people’s hearts? How do you know when people feel taken for granted? Sometimes you have no idea how much damage you’re causing, and really–what can you do until the scream shatters the glass? Recklessness is often borne of ignorance. I keep missing my cues.

Dustin and I got pizza and root beer, went to tiny Cine-Magic and saw “Juno,” and cried, remembered the last movie we saw together in theatres was also about unintended pregnancy. Listened to Kimya Dawson. Oh, I keep missing my cues. I sat in the backseat of his mom’s car, with her dog’s head on my lap, which is how I remember being seventeen. Dustin and I played it cool, and then decided not to. Decided to talk about everything.

Mckenzie, Maggie and I were slugs on a couch, fasting, sucking on lemon halves. Mckenzie got me Shel Silverstein’s “The Missing Piece” for Christmas. So much of our social lives in Portland revolve around food. There are like, six cafes per square block, and I alway wondered how the hell we support so many–but it’s the only thing people can think of to do.

Meals with people is one of my top three favorites things ever, but a city’s got to attempt to offer something more.

My mom takes these epic walks across the city and then calls John to come pick her up. I scarf chicken thighs marinated in tomatoes, coconut milk, garbanzo beans and lemons with my dad and Tessa, watch Big Love, slowly write my Christmas poems. Tessa was talking about trying to make shit happen in a place doesn’t suit her. She has been talking about this for about ten years, and for ten years she’s been in Portland.

She said, “In my twenties, all I had to do was think about something, and flyer or a book relevant to my thought would fall out of a window. Everything felt connected, intentional. I’d ask for a certain type of person to show up in my life, and they would. I don’t have that at all any more.”

I asked, “And do you think, then, that the only way you can have this relationship with the universe is by being in a place that’s true to you in the first place? Or rather, that being in a place that doesn’t feed you actually stops this sort of, magic from happening?”

She said, “Yeah, I think so.”

Let me be your ripe pomegranate floating in a blue plastic swimming pool on the first day of winter.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight.

It rained the entire way home from the beach. Dark, spooky, heavy rain. I read East of Eden out loud to my family, about the sociopathic Cathy Ames, the whoremaster and his sickness. I read them poetry on the way there, two days before: “The Highway Man,” Frost’s winter poems, Blake’s “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” back to back. I read “The Tale of the Yongy Bongy Bo,” and we all felt very sad. What a tragic story. I’m sure he’s still out there, floating on that turtle shell. (By Edward Lear.)

The night before, each home from our respective schools, Diana, Kelsey and I went to see Grace do her thing in the Oregon Ballet Theatre’s “Nutcracker.” This year Grace was a demi-Flower and The Harlequin, glittering out of a box. I have known these ladies longer than I’ve had a conscience. We used to pretend we were baby birds and knock each other out of the nest, brutal games of house. Now we wear Pashminas and go to chic subterranean fondue restaurants where you dip cheesecake in vats of chocolate. (The Melting Pot.)

And people still call us girls. Only when we’re together. Always when we’re together. “Can I help you girls?” and “Are you girls finished?” Dear universe: We are ladies now. Give us some fucking credit, or we’ll knock you out of the nest.

The Nutcracker: what a strange story. We go every year, and in some versions, Clara wakes up at the end, with a it-was-all-just-a-dream yawn, but in some versions, she doesn’t: she floats downstream in a sailboat with the Nutcracker himself and the story ends, leaving the audience reeling: So wait, why was grandfather standing on top of the clock? How did she end up in this alternate reality?

And my mom had a concert in Longview, Washington, on the peninsula, at the Historic Sou’Wester Lodge. We’ve been going to the Sou’Wester since I was in-utero. I never thought it was strange, thought that all families took summer vacations at old, damp resorts where mid-Century Airstream trailers were converted into cabins, furnished as if it were 1973. My mother is dear friends with the caretakers, a pair of seventy-something South African intellectuals, sweeter, wryer, and quicker than most people I’ve ever met.

My mom, and her friend Janine, have played an annual woodwind concert at the Sou’Wester for twenty years. This was the anniversary. Instead of staying in one of the trailers (our favorites being the grand “African Queen” and “The Imperial Spartan”) we took a room at the top of the lodge, #5, that looked out over the bay. Watched A Christmas Carol. The concert was lovely. The town folk came out to see her play, and the South African caretakers fed us tea and cake at intermission.

My aunt Robin came, and ate candies quietly in the corner. My cousin Galen brought his boyfriend, and we chewed the fat, and I went back with them to Astoria for the night. Sat in the back of his boyfriend’s truck, listening to Joanna Newsom.

Astoria is an old, sloping coastal town where Lewis and Clark ended their expedition, and it is where my aunt and my cousin live in a tiny apartment that looks out over Saddle Mountain.

My aunt’s apartment was buried in potholders and pencil cans, crafts and candy wrappers. A little more chilling than usual. We ate JoJos and soup. Galen and I talked all night, made fun of our family, our projects, our lives. We watched The Charlie Brown Christmas Special, and I fell asleep on his floor, on an island of couch cushions and afghans. We wanted doughnuts so badly in the morning, we didn’t know what to do.

“It’s just one of those mornings. Doughnut mornings. Doughnut mornings and Jojo nights,” Galen said. “You can use that as a blog entry.”

J’adore le Sou’Wester.

In Portland, the waitstaff at restaurants ask if they can have a bite of your food. “Oh, could I try that?” and then, before you respond, they’ve already reached down and broken off a corner of your quiche. “Yum,” they say with a slight raise of their eyebrows. The lattes are the best in the country. The white person per capita is probably the highest in the world. It has been dark, chalky gray and rainy. But this morning the clouds lifted, like the fedora I’d forgotten that my step-dad wears every day, and right now it is blue, sunny, full of breath.

Last summer, my mom and I started dumpster diving. We talked about wearing matching terry-cloth rompers and calling ourselves The Romper Mamas, but often I was the only one to rock the romper–green, turquoise, day-glo rainbow. We did garage sales, construction sites, tables and lamps on the side of the road. She would make offers and say, “Look, we’re trying to send my daughter to college. If you find that you have more stuff to get rid of than you’re selling at your garage sale, call me, and we’ll take it off your hands.”

And ever since then, she’s been hearing from these people. Families will call and say, “We’ve got a box of stuff” or “We’ve got a chair and a bag of clothes” and “How’s your daughter doing?” It’s an exchange: They’re getting shit taken off of their hands, comparable to a junk hauling service minus the fee, and we’re getting money for the things we end up selling. Another thing happened when we started doing this: We got stories as they guided us through their houses and their garages, piece by piece, telling us why they’re moving, why they’re not, where their parents were born and where that stain came from.

Upon my homecoming, my mother and I headed to “the [Goodwill] bins,” a sprawling donation center at the edge of town where you swim through massive, blue crates collecting every matter of matter, paid for by the pound. We’ve gotten two calls from her junk networks. She jumps around in her bright green raincoat, and still can’t get over it: “Isn’t this wild?” She shrieks, and sometimes my sister, Olivia, comes along, to help us load.

“Oh, God, did I tell you one of the gals I work has a new man-friend who works for a 1-800-Got-Junk? She introduced me to him, and said he’ll keep us posted when he gets good shit.” I really like it when my mom says “good shit” with fervor.

She then said that this “gal” recently went through a horrible break-up, that the previous guy had just been a royal asshole toward the end, and maybe I’m spoiled, maybe I don’t get it—but I thought, why do people get involved with assholes? How does this happen? I think I was involved with a shit once—when I was, you know, thirteen? Fifteen? But then I decided that would never happen again, and it didn’t. We make choices.

I walked the length and width of Southeast Portland with Naomi, talking about romantic fluidity, open relationships, letting love in and out, like breathing. I watch people slog through suffocating, monogamous relationships, day after day: relationships built on what is lacking, as opposed to what is there, in a constant state of repair. It blows my mind, breaks my heart because: you have the choice to live so well. 

I am beginning to believe we can realize any dream, fantasy, vision. How annoying, right? I could talk about this forever. I could start writing a book about this. How far can this go, how great can we be? People are going to start telling me to shut up soon, on a regular basis, as I believe this more and more.

It’s been blustery and wet. Windswept dry, and reduced to small puddles in the places where the concrete dips from old age. In the way we’ve done it since we were thirteen, Naomi and I talked too loudly and inappropriately, in a very quiet coffee shop, tried to stow away unnoticed and knocked the lid off of a garbage can. And laughed about it so hard snot came out of our faces. Her hair is down to her waist, curls at the ends like a mermaid’s, and is bright pink, looks like it grew in that way. She got the color spectrum tattooed to her ear, and her nebula sleeve has spread.

Dustin made latkes, and Paul made a salad, roasted pine nuts, diced apples and goat cheese. Dustin put cushions around the living room carpet, turned on oscillating disco lights. They have a dj station set up by their bay windows, on milk crates. Mckenzie came through the door, wept, a new piercing through her septum. We drank hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps, swapped stories, talked about reality, the benefits and pointlessness of leaving home. I slept in Mckenzie’s attic bedroom, under her cloudlike blankets. Big space. Lots of space for her canvases. Christmas lights strung around the rim. The cat pattered around.

We woke up and made a scramble. Asparagus is an aphrodisiac. Dustin and I hugged goodmorning, goodbye. The first night we’d spent in that house in separate beds.

With my family: Made chicken, cooked carrots, polenta with sun dried tomatoes, and sliced tomatoes salted and sprinkled with pepper and sage. Watched “Superbad” with Olivia, started going to the Funky Door every morning, to work and write, like old times. Erected the Christmas tree, tangled in lights and ornaments that survived the storm.

What storm? The one that was my family and is no longer. We still do the same things: I make a show of things being misplaced or broken, and someone else has to stop what their doing to show me that the phone book is right where it’s supposed to be, that I have to turn the key a little farther to open the door. My step-dad still gets defensive when we don’t like the way he decorates. My sister takes too long to come to the dinner table. Amen.

My step-dad waxed the floor twice yesterday. For fun. My mom played her flute.

My step-mom had a birthday party last night. I wore a long, silk sari and orange lipstick, and she wore a black 1950’s spring-loaded party dress, and we adhered tattoos to our wrists and to the back of my dad’s head while he was trying to finish dinner. As guests arrived, we made cocktails: Mint Juleps, Gimlets, Gingeritas. My dad wore his hair in a ponytail which I’d never seen before, nor had I noticed how dandelion blond he was. People can’t even pigeonhole us any more. While I was gone, they bought a small, red SUV. They can’t even call us hippies.

Nearing the end of the night, we were sitting on pillows around the living room, which no longer houses the television–as the nook which was my bedroom has been turned into the den–and we were talking about Catholicism, and then astrology. Andrea, a Latina minister from the Universal Church of Christ, said:

“There’s this place that the planets rotate into, this breath or pause, I forget what it’s called.”

I hadn’t said much all night. After all, how many abbreviated answers can I give to “How’s New York?” But to this I said, “That’s how I felt the other night, before I got on the plane–I know about this planetary stillness.”

That last night in Brooklyn, we’d had a reading of holiday trauma stories (hilarious!) at Smooch (it’s okay to laugh! Trauma is hilarious!) The stories were succinct and seasoned. There was something powerful about watching Jenny talking about the coffee-can bank account, infidelity, telling her grandfather to grow up.

Excerpt from my contribution, “Pot Smokin’ Groupie“: There was the Christmas I took the train to Seattle to visit some family, the Christmas that my step-dad called my aunt Trish to tell her, “Keep your eye on Adrian. We don’t want her to become a pot-smokin’ groupie again,” which was ludicrous, because I had never even fantasized about such a thing, hadn’t even learned to inhale, ludicrous because it was a projection of his own sickness, and the guilt he wore like badge regarding my brothers’ recent going crazy. When we sat down around my aunt’s kitchen table that night, my face stained and raw with tears, I decorated a bright, green ornament with a Sharpie. I wrote: Pot smokin’ groupie, 2005. Merry Christmas…

Then Robert, Zoe, Sophie and I got snacks and Guinness (the milkshake of beers!) at Maggie Brown’s (love it, like an attic from the 1930s) and we drank to next semester (intentionality, Scrabble & jazz, performance.)

And then I met up with two Portland throw-backs, two guys I’ve known since middle school who happened to be available and in the neighborhood: Jackson and Davi. Jackson and I were born a month apart in the same hospital in Manhattan. We got pints at Five Spot and talked. We went back to campus, and they played Portuguese pop music while I packed, and we battered each other like thirteen-year-olds. I said, “Guys: a couple of weeks ago, the key to my bike lock broke in half and my bike’s been stuck to the rack ever since. It’s the only thing left to do. Will you help me?”

They flexed their muscles, Yeah, YEAH, and I got bolt cutters from security at one in the morning, and the boys snapped my cable and called it a night. I wheeled Fritzy inside, bowed down, hugged Allie goodbye, left my quiet, empty room as the door snicked shut behind me.

I walked to the Gates house. From a block away, I could see Sweeney’s shadowy form, and the tail of his long, wool coat perched on the fire escape. It was blistering cold.

“Hello! It looks great up there!”

“It is!”

“Let me in,” I said. “I’m freezing.”

I was wearing a sleeveless dress and no leggings.

As I waited behind the heavy iron door, watching him come towards me in the hallway, I was so happy to see him. We sat on his couch and talked, while Robbie played Mum, wrote a paper. It was two in the morning. I’d already decided not to sleep before the flight, and Sweeney had offered to give me a ride to the airport. The cats pattered around. We were silent. A filmmaker they know stopped by and sat in the recliner across from us, writing. I smoked a cigarette very slowly, and held Sweeney’s hand, and wrote sonnets with my other hand. I looked up and stared.

“I feel so good right now,” I said.

“What’d you take?” The filmmaker asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

The planetary stillness: Everything was in order. All I had to do was wait. I have two amazing homes. I was neither anxious or sad, a little melancholy about leaving Brooklyn, a little thrilled about heading West. Still and open and still. Chris got home, thrashing, on downers, slapping my belly, and so Sweeney and I left before the shit hit the fan, drove around under the streetlights, blurry from the chill.

The flight was long. I dozed in and out. I transfered in Denver to a Portland-bound plane and as soon as the stewardess spoke into the PA system, I knew I was back in the Northwest. She sounded like she was on Quaalude’s. That slow, slurred, casual delivery: “The weather in Portland is cloudy, with a chance of showers, some wind from the East. It’s approximately forty degrees in the valley.” Ah. Yes.

Olivia and my mom met me at the terminal, and Olivia started crying. She has braces now and she’s taller than me. Home. We drove through Southeast Portland, to our tiny, grey bungalow, where John was taking a long Winter’s nap. He has begun mounting and hanging his art in the basement, gallery style. My bedroom has vanished at this house, too, but there’s still space for me. All sorts of space. My mom went to the farmer’s market that morning, and so we started making dinner:

Garlic and chive pesto. Apples and pumpkin butter. Bok choy, raw, and bok choy cooked in a veggie melange. Sausage stuffed with bell peppers. Curried squash seasoning. I took a long bath and talked to Naomi on the phone about the easiness of giving and receiving love, art school, threesomes. My family watched Casablanca up until the part where Ingrid Bergman says, “Sing it , Sam,” with tears in her eyes, and then I slept hard, happy, so happy to be home.

At my step-mom’s birthday party the following night, my dad was talking about how, when they were married, he and my mom used to subscribe to Regan election literature to see what they were up against. That was in 1980.

“You know,” I said. “I think that’s the year she stopped paying attention to politics. Regan getting elected really broke her heart.”

“Really?” my dad said.

“I’m telling you,” I said. “She’s never shown interest in politics. The only time I’ve ever heard her reference anything political is in regards to this summer you’re talking about, before the 1980 elections. She said she was playing lots of weddings at the time, for rich people, and she heard them talking about Regan, like he could actually be elected, like this could actually happen. Up until then, she’d been in denial, because, really, in the end, who would let him be president?”

I could just see her, twenty-five and quick, letting her flute drop from her lips during the procession, as she realized the world was, in the end, not going to come through for her. Fuck ‘em, she thought.

Let you’re appetite do its thing, you never know who you’re feeding.

I learned this first and foremost from the Lakota-Sioux, from the white social misfits and reservation-vets that my father spends his time with, drumming and talking to Spirit: if you notice yourself especially thirsty or craving unusual portions of food, pay attention. Like the role of a pregnant woman, someone you love or share blood with may be seeking extra sustenance they may not have access to. Think of yourself as a vessel. As a womb, an umbilical cord.

For a couple of weeks, I was chowing down: Curried red lentil soup. With black beans. And rosemary and mint. Leftover antipasto deli meats and asiago cheese. Walnuts. French toast. Pancakes. Meat. When someone asked me what I wanted to eat, I said MEAT. I’ve got type-O blood, the prehistoric strand, and our thing is meat and grains. Then, a week ago, my appetite left. Left a trail of smoke and a layer of fat and I ate a pear for breakfast. No lunch. Dates and cashews and carrot juice for lunch. No dinner. No-stir peanut butter on a piece of gummy, multi-grain bread. Orange juice. Goodnight.

Then I heard from my friend Kate. She had just finished ten days of meditation in Bodhgaya. And I thought, well hell: I’ve been feeding Kate.

And actually, for the last few months, she’s been specifically requesting this on her blog: “Please think of me while you eat butternut squash,” she said. “For the love of god.”

Something to keep in mind: If you need to get fed, just ask. Even if you’re broke or on the other side of the world.

When I meet something with resistance, it usually means that there’s something huge there to learn. Is this universal? If I have learned anything over the past four months [or years], I’ve learned that. When Lily and I were bumping into the city last week at the back of the Chinatown bus, the world began to shrink around me: “A week from now, I’ll be on a plane going back home.” Nothing about my life in New York felt finished, or in a state I felt comfortable letting it sit still for a month, like a pile of art supplies on my bedroom floor, half out of the package.

This terrified me, and so I turned to Lily and said, “By the end of this week, I will feel ready to leave, okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

Our classes have been ending in tears. We’re having major separation anxiety about leaving Stacie Cassarino’s class. Her insistence and attention to detail was excruciating at times, but I’ve been forced into this incredibly thorough mentality because I felt exposed with her, I felt seen. And I had to speak, despite the words curdled in my throat, my face hot and red and vulnerable. She’s one of the most illuminating teachers I’ve ever had. Lily and prof. Ellery Washington had a misunderstanding over the reality of suicide and the literary deconstruction of depression, which requires suicide to have a concrete reason: Tears tears tears. It happened in seconds. Lily fled the class and Ellery began to weep.

At the end of Stacie’s class, we asked her about an airplane experience she’d referenced a couple of months back. “Did I tell you guys about that time I was on a plane that almost didn’t make it?” is what she had said. “No? Hm. Moving on.”

But she finally told us. The left engine had caught on fire, ten-thousand feet in the air. She and everyone else watched flames plume from the turbine. She said to the woman next to her, “I don’t want to die,” and the woman pulled a blanket over her own head and turned away. The pilots were promising a safe landing, but she was watching people kiss their rosaries, call their families, and she was thinking, “My parents are going to have to plan my funeral, go pick up my belongings in Seattle–what are they going to find?” The flames grew, and she said everyone was either comatose or hysterical, and that it was a fourteen-year-old boy to her left that started to bring her back into focus. He put his hand on her leg and started asking her about her life, what she was teaching, who she was visiting in Boston, as the flames roared on. And they landed.

Last night was Allie’s birthday. She’s a Sag rising, Sag sun, Aquarius moon. No bullshit. Full of fire. Knina invited us over for smoothies. She has two small dogs, and she just adopted her second cat, both of which have matching kerchiefs tied around their necks. Knina teetered around in her high wooden heels, talked about wanting to be that old lady when she grows up, who gives piano lessons, who all the children think is a witch.

Manhattan Ave. in Greenpoint, where she lives, is done up in lights. All of the telephone wires have sparkling banners of string lights and light-up bows and light-up poinsettias. There are a lot of Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood, a lot of Catholicism, the father, son and the holy ghost.

We made smoothies, calculated numerology, talked about the spectrum of sexuality, autism, pre-schoolers, having and not having an emotional core. We held up birthday candles for Allie to extinguish. (Find your number for this year, and reflect: ex. my birthday is 9/5/88–to get my number for 2007, I add 9 + 5 + 2 + 0 + 0+ 7 = 23 and 2 + 3 = 5. The year of restlessness, travel, projects, ingenuity.)

Robert and I are curating a reading of holiday flash-fiction at Smooch this Friday. We are going to be curating things regularly when we get back from break. He is so alive, and so full of integrity it hurts. We are going to stage script readings, one-acts, plays. We are going to start writing a play, gradually, and take it to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (do you know about this? http://www.edfringe.com/)

Alisdair said that practicing French makes him feel bourgeoisie, and I said, “Get over it. I need your help.” He speaks four languages. So we practiced French in the fog cloaking Grand Ave, splitting Williamsburg. We got Indian food. For Christmas, I’m inheriting his old Smith-Corona slate-colored typewriter. Our homework nights are coming to a seasonal halt.

And I feel completely ready to leave. Finals came to a smooth end, sheaf by sheaf of paper, like landing fiery plane. Things feel so good right now. Like after burning through a fever.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a letter from Robin Rose Hilleary, inscribed with a wholly [holy] fitting stanza from Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

Peyote solidities of halls,
backyard green tree cemetery dawns,
wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead
joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations
in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn…

“You know why they call it “chatting?” Lily asked me.

“No, why.”

“Because in World War I the soldiers would sit in the trenches, covered in lice, and pick at each other during their free time. Chat was just another word for lice,” she said.

“Then how did it become a verb?”

“What do you think they did while they picked?”

I sat on the cold, granite steps of the Lincoln Memorial watching the sun set over the capitol building. Lily, her brother and her dad were to my left, each of our backs pressed against a single column.

I thought: Cities are the same everywhere you go. In the last month I’ve been to Chicago, Kansas City, Baltimore and Washington DC, and on top of that, I live in New York City and I see it all, everyday: there is the same stuff, the same shops, department stories, architecture, faces repeated like paper dolls.

It’s not a bad thing, it just goes to show that the only good reason to travel anywhere is to see people that you adore, people you want to get to know, want to make love to, work with, listen to. Who needs to see another Potbelly’s, another Macy’s Christmas window display?

If it wasn’t for the National Monument staring at me obliquely from the reflecting pool, I could have been anywhere. But it was nice. Lily’s father gave me the grand tour, jovial, in his gray tweed trench coat. He told me about the cherry blossoms that bloom every Spring along the Potomac, took me to the Hirshorn Museum, made me stand in the center, The Air & Space Museum, the Edward Hopper exhibit at the National Museum of Art. I saw “Nighthawkes” in person, deep and lonely. The Whitehouse. The National Christmas tree. We walked for miles and miles, and ended the night in the chapel of a Lutheran church that her father designed a window for. We stood before the colors, illuminated, giving us halos.

Lily’s parents live in two separate historic towns on the outskirts of Baltimore. Her dad lives in the converted A-frame of a giant, white Colonial. We arrived at night, and he had just been to an Italian deli called Trinocchria’s. He gave us salami and sopersetta wrapped in wax paper, a wedge of asiago, stuffed olives, mozzerella balls and foccacia. Lily drove us to her mom’s: an old farmhouse in Relay. Her mom sliced things for us, arranged it on a plate. She is a kindergarten teacher. Lily’s brother rubbed his eyes. We all sat around the table, chatted.

“Was your family affected by the floods I’ve been hearing about?” Lily’s mother asked.

“Floods?” I said.

Apparently Oregon has been up to its’ knees in water. How did I miss this?

We sat by the radiators, trying to stay warm, reading Christmas books. Then we settled down for a long winter’s nap in her creaky, iron bed, and awoke with the daylight. Ate grapefruit, como with raspberry jam, coffee. There were a few inches of snow outside, so we played Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”

She took me to her old school, read poetry with her favorite teacher. Read “The Wasteland” to each other on our way into the city. Lily’s dad is a stained glass artist, and we met him and her brother at his studio above the train tracks. Ate cookies, stared at her brother who reminds me of mine, only his rage is more on the surface, his emotions present, beautiful. We made etched-glass ornaments and her dad sandblasted them.

Lily and her brother took me to 34th street. We looked at lights, got thick, cheap hot chocolate from a machine. We slept at her boyfriend’s brownstone in the city that night, got overzealous, got sick on whiskey. I can’t do it. Sam is a doting, lanky, painter brought up by a man who owns a health food store and a woman who talks about the moon. We spent the night again Saturday. I met friends that Lily tells stories about.

Oh, Sam and Lily. I just love them. Their presence, their soft, openness together. We shared a bed and woke with the daylight.

Last week, I was examining Sweeney’s blackheads, like an ape, and he said, “Isn’t it funny; this is how we met.” And it was true. In September he was walking around at one of The Salons, shirtless, and I had just met him, read a poem, and I said, “Excuse me, I know this is weird, but would you mind if I looked at your back?”

On a New York note: That household is a vortex. Sweeney’s, I mean. And they don’t fight it. They bathe in it. I saw Robbi one afternoon, carrying around a large rake. He waved to me, casually. Later, Sweeney told me that he had been carrying around that rake for days, from class to class, that he hadn’t slept in ninety hours. For no reason. They are always awake, nervous and creative. They get up at dawn because they can’t sleep and go for walks. Chris Martiny is high on Aderol and Shakespeare (”Mostly Shakespeare,” they said. “It’s a problem. It’s gotten to the point where it’s interrupting his life”) and there are people in and out, friends all night, stopping by to drink, to talk about books, knock each other around. They have this other roommate who paints houses–but he is out on jobs until four in the morning.

“He couldn’t actually be painting,” I said. “Not at this hour.”

“Oh, definitely not,” Sweeney said.

“So then why don’t you ask what he’s really doing?”

“Because, if he feels the need to tell us he’s painting, then I’d guess there’s a good reason,” he said.

One morning, I peered into Robbi’s room and his bed was missing. “Well, now the bed’s involved,” Sweeney said, shrugging, as if this was just another day, another missing bed. No explanation.

They are kind of magic.

Before we departed from Baltimore on Sunday, Lily and I stopped by her dad’s place and made cannoli, mixing and chopping, talking, listening to a Judy Collins tape. When we got to her mom’s, there were two stuffed stockings: she clapped her hands together and said, “Santa came early for you two!” We sat down on the carpet and unwrapped tiny gifts, clementines, cookies, a disposable camera. Really lovely, doting people. Dedicated. A little traumatized like the rest of us.

Families are my thing.

Lily and I devoured the leftover Italian food at the back of the Chinatown bus on the way home, read books (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, The Boys of My Youth, a Gore Vidal essay on memoir), finished finals. I’m making thermal-like headway on a couple of stories, doing presentations. I finished my proposal to the writing department, wrote one for The Prattler, convincing the administration to keep us as paid staff. Over here in Stabile Hall, we are making almost every meal ourselves because we are finished feeling bloated, floating out of the cafeteria everyday. Our bowels are in rapture.

I can’t believe I’m leaving for a month. What if everything is different when I get back?

Everything will be different when I get back. A month is a month is a month.

Portland is going to be like re-admittance to Eden.

Also, tomorrow Lily and I are catching the Chintown bus to Baltimore for the weekend. Lately I have been using the Baltimore ‘o’ in my sentences. I have no idea where it came from.

Don’t know what kind of accent I mean? See a John Waters movie.