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The laundry is almost done, the ironing nearly complete (a biannual event), the litter of emails read, half dozen voicemails answered, and soon the surface mail will be sorted into appropriate piles: pay, pitch, reply.  Across the street, a lawnmower drones away, someone is hammering something somewhere, and Owen is sleeping on the floor beside my feet, his nose about six inches from a whirring fan.  Three games of fetch today.  A dog’s idea of heaven, it seems.  That and the human being you love the most is home.  Not at work.  Not away.  But home.

It must be a function of age, but being home for a few days seems quite nice.  I’m not doing anything remotely interesting: chores, errands, bills, a few meetings here and there.  But the sheer routine of it all is comfortable.

At least it will be for a short while.  By the end of the week I will be ready to get out of town again.  And luckily enough, that’s the plan.  This time, not the Northeast, not the Southeast, but the Midwest.  Iowa.  The real Midwest. 

The air is soft in North Carolina. Lightly humid, perfumed by some languid flowering shrubs, the stillness of morning punctuated by a hundred trilling birds.  A soft breeze slips its arm over my shoulders.  What are you writin’? 

We’ve been here only twelve hours or so, but even in that short time the hospitable nature of the south has been evident everywhere. It began when we debarked the plane.  People waited patiently while those ahead of them rescued suitcases from overhead compartments.  No one shoved.  No one cast dark looks on anyone else.  No one muttered the impatient east coast mantra: c’mon, c’mon, c’mon.  People moved with a languid slowness which seemed to be as natural as breathing.  They smiled a lot.  Invited others to go first.  Chatted amiably about the weather, a little girl’s pink hat, their next meal. I could live on a plane on the tarmac in Raleigh Durham, North Carolina.

But of course a tarmac is not a city. Yesterday afternoon, Natalie H. and I wandered the streets of Durham.  It was clear we were not in the best of neighborhoods.  An alley strewn with odd and recent trash – a vacuum cleaner, a rolled up window shade, remnants of a shopping cart.  Abandoned streets.  Vacant buildings.  Torn up sidewalks.  Neither one of us has a great sense of direction, we discovered, so our wanderings took on a random looping course.  And it was hot.  90 or 95 or 103.  Not humid, just hot.  We stopped for water at a tiny convenience store.  The clerk gazed at us quizzically.  We asked about a grocery store nearby.  He pointed toward the just visible interstate, and in a liquid Jamaican accent suggested the next exit, a couple of turns. 

I shook my head.  “We’re walking.”

He mouthed an “O.”  Then laughed.  “There be no grocery stores close to here.” 

We thanked him and stepped back out into the heat.  Two teenage girls wandered the sidewalk a block away.  No cars passed.  The heat rose and rose from the abandoned streets. 

Later, as the heat of the day lifts, I sit by the pool at our hotel.  A half dozen middle aged women, all quite large and very pale, paddle about in the blue-tinged water, chatting.  They have come for a week at the Duke Diet and Fitness Center across the street.  I hear the phrase “broiled chicken” repeated with a resigned reverence.  The sun sinks lower into the sky.  A uniformed security guard watches over us.

Today: We begin the week of Literacy Through Photography work.  Get our cameras and film and assignments.  Meet the group.  I am here to bring back materials for my students; Natalie too.  Together, we plan to create a collaborative LTP project between the Richmond elementary schools and Indiana University East.  In some ways, neither one of us truly needs to be here – we’ve both done writing and photography with our own students – but if we come back with one good idea…this week will be worth it.

A friend sent me this list of analogies and metaphors found in high school essays.  One can only hope that some of these are not quite real, but unfortunately I suspect many, if not most, are.  Enjoy…

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up. 

Two thousand miles later I am back where I began a week ago.  Tonight, as I type, the sound of the road is still loud in my head.  The roar of semis downshifting.  The gassy explosive pop of airbrakes.  Horns honking.  Four different truckers honked at me today.  I have no idea why.  Perhaps it was the bumper sticker on my own truck: Cowgirls Drive Trucks.  Maybe.  I left Acton, Massachusetts yesterday, drove through low clouds skirting the Berkshires, then the endlessly beautiful hills and fields of upstate New York.  Of all the places on the trip, the drive between Albany and Rochester is definitely the loveliest.  Green rolling fields, gleaming lakes and rivers, heavily fruited grapevines.  I got out somewhere, I don’t remember where, and lake gulls cruised the parking lot.  The air smelled sweet, lightly perfumed with some flower, even there just off the thruway.

Last night, in Erie, Pennsylvania, I knew I was closer to home — home the Midwest.  Erie is a no-nonsense kind of city.  At the Peach Street exit, if you go north, there are miles of fastfood joints, cheap hotels, check cashing stores, heap chain stores for groceries, household goods, all that.  No beauty.  Not here. 

Then, today, through Ohio.  As I have written before, somewhere south of Cleveland, the land flattens out.  The monocultures begin: soy, corn, a little wheat, alfalfa.  It’s not ugly, not like Erie, but the land is more purely utilitarian now.  This land does not loll on either side of the road, absorbing your admiration; the land in Ohio, and then into Indiana, lies there, mute, stoic, and doing its job.  Yes, it does remind me of those turn of the century women, dutifully lying there while their men do their work.  What can I say.  After two thousand miles on the road, the imagination is loosened.  My brain is joggling around in my head, and there is more that I could write about being back in Indiana.  But not tonight.  A little dog named Owen says he needs to watch some baseball.  Okay, Owen.  Let’s go…

One of the enduring, albeit minor, disadvantages of living in a small city in the Midwest is the scant variety of good food.  Usually it’s easy to overlook the limited range of choices in our grocery stores.  You get used to it, really.  You decide that it’s okay, most of the time, that we have cheddar and brie, mozzarella and havarti, but not…say…Wensleydale.  You decide that it’s not a big deal that we have French Roast and Italian Roast but not…sigh…Nantucket Blend.  You come to terms with the fact we don’t have proscuitto, or fresh scallops, or fresh cranberries, or organic green tea (fresh tea, housed in a little cardboard pyramid), or organic radicchio in the local grocery store.  You get used to things the way they are.  And you’re not going hungry, so you can’t really complain.  Can you?

But.  Then you go on a trip.  And you see what’s out there.  And you decide that you are deprived.  That it’s wrong, just wrong, that you can’t walk into a grocery store and see an entire case filled with different cheeses.  That you can’t choose from fifteen different varieties of coffee.  That there’s no prosciutto in the entire county, doggone it.  And that worst of all, your favorite snack — wasabi peas – is, at home, something like three dollars for three ounces, and here, in Acton, Massachusetts, on the shelf at Idylwyld Farms, the wasabi peas are a dollar thirty-nine for what looks like half a pound of wasabi peas.  Wasabi peas to die for.  Crunchy, spicy, just the right amount of salty.  And you can eat a ton because they’re so cheap. 

So you buy a carton of the wasabi peas, and you sit them next to you on the truck as you drive back to the Midwest.  And you will yourself not to eat them, not yet, not until you arrive home, because waiting at home is an even greater wasabi pea fan than you.

In the meantime, for those of us west of the Hudson, a wasabi pea recipe that looks pretty good, and even better, pretty cheap…

Last night, my sister Abby, my brother-in-law Jim, my dad and I went out for dinner.  We chose a restaurant in Concord, a little Italian place with decent food and easily accessible.  The restaurant sits by the railroad tracks in a building on the edge of a parking lot near a dry cleaners, a CVS, and a grocery store.  The building used to house the bowling alley back in the 60s and 70s, a rather seedy place that seemed to be always dim, smoke-filled and bearing the stench of stale beer.  For some reason, in high school, we actually had bowling classes there; Candlepin bowling, of course, that quintessentially New England, and annoyingly difficult version of the game. 

Anyway.  There we were in the nice little Italian restaurant last night.  It was one of those sort-of-upscale places: muted decor, fairly expensive entrees, a long wine list that charges more than twice the retail price for a bottle of ordinary chardonnay.  There were a few groups of people eating — a group of half a dozen thirty-something men, all wearing Dockers in various shades of khaki, jewel-toned button down shirts, and expensive looking ties.  A family or two, one elderly couple, the four of us.  A quiet night. 

But then, as we were purusing the menu, the glass door opened, letting in a stream of sunlight, and in came a noisy party of three — a thin 50-ish woman in a beautiful blue suit, a blocky odd-looking man with an enormous black mop of hair, and a twenty-something young woman following behind toting an enormous green leather bag.  The threesome headed straight for the bar, found three seats on the corner, and were greeted with much enthusiasm by the bartender, and a ruddy-faced man in a pink oxford shirt already knee deep in a martini.  We — Dad, Abby, Jim, and I — all turned to look.

Abby leaned over to me.  “You know who that is, don’t you?”

I didn’t.  But she told me.  A famous writer (the blue suit).  Her famous writer husband (the mop of hair).  We surmised that the woman toting the green bag must be the assistant.  We watched.  The couple held court at the bar, the young woman fawning over both of them, the bartender administering liquid to all.  Then suddenly, all three got up, and made their departure, raucously bye-bye-ing everyone on their way out. 

Jim, Abby, and I all shrugged.  Guess they’re going somewhere better.  After all, this little Italian place is really nowhere, sandwiched as it is between the dry cleaners and the railroad tracks, housed in a former bowling alley.  And if you’re famous, wealthy, and connected, why — really — would you spend an evening here?  We went back to studying the menu.

But then the threesome, plus two or three more ruddy oxford-shirt-wearing guys, came back.  Back to the bar, back to their corner, back for the admistration of more wine, martinis, the glowing stuff in little glasses they tossed back, one after another.  We ordered our meal, ate, chatted, occasionally watched this group of famous and their satellites.  Then, it was time to go.  As we stood up, so did the man with the black mop of hair.   He got up, went outdoors, and lit a cigar.  His thin wife followed.  And, then, because we were all headed the same direction, there I was suddenly outdoors, standing watching the sunset next to this famous man and his famous wife.  She turned toward me and flashed me an aggressive pre-emptive hello. (I recognized the code immediately.  It goes: I’m famous, and I know you recognize me, and I recognize that you recognize me, but you are no one and I am someone, so don’t even think about admitting that you recognize me.) Then she strode back into the bar. 

I shrugged internally and regarded the sunset.  Her husband – in his day, and in the course of history probably more famous than his wife will come to be – turned to me and smiled. “Looks like we’re in for some nice weather.”  And so he and I chatted about the weather, and the sunset, and the first hurricane of the season.  “Alberto,” he said, shaking his head.  “Alberto.”  And then, it was time for us to go.  “Have a nice night,” I said.  “You too,” he said.  At that, he went back inside the bar.  The door opened and closed, glinting briefly in the low glare of the setting sun.  And we turned away and went on home.

This is the first post on my new blog.  We’ve moved from AOL to a friendlier world.  Whether you’ve gotten here by way of AOL or otherwise, welcome.  And come back for writing about writing, and teaching, life in the Midwest, dogs, good food, and more.