Senior class Photos

“There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s me,” is the unimaginative white lie tacked onto the end of too many relationships. Last time I said it was at a wine bar in Edinburgh during their Festival ten years ago, to some poor guy who’d flown out to meet me there. In a recent interview with Accidental Expats I explained why I left the US permanently: “the priorities of my birth country are not necessarily my own. Instead I seek to savor a few of the many experiences that the world offers in different locations.”

Priorities include retailer-driven holidays: Valentine’s Day, Christmas and Hallowe’en. As Kelsey Timmerman wrote, “Black Friday: The day the American Consumer takes full advantage of Cheap Labor around the World.” Where the focus is on sentiment and stuffing faces. Where stuff serves as a distraction from substance.

Thanksgiving’s a particularly ambivalent holiday for me. I went to school with kids from many different backgrounds. Some of my great-great-great grandparents fled European wars to live in the US, while my Hmong friends’ families had fled persecution that stemmed from the American war in Laos. Other friends’ ancestors had been brought over with fewer options: as slaves and indentured servants. Opportunism was in our genes and in our American mythology. But for some classmates, Thanksgiving was a reminder of what they had lost with the pestilence and the underhanded treaties that had squeezed their families onto reservations. Every year we had discussions about the less savory sides of our country’s history, which were rarely addressed in our textbooks.

Perhaps it’s because what American culture I do experience is online and more mainstream now, but I don’t hear much from those voices anymore. As I’ve said before, America’s not the only country with this problem: every time I walk to the train station I pass a mural depicting massacres of local people. I’ve spoken with Cuban painters about the island’s indigenous people who were completely exterminated by the Spanish. But while I’m thankful for so much in my life, as this writer puts it best, “Thanksgiving can never be just a day of thanks”

Sketching in a Cemetery, Paris 1998

Recently I headed to my favorite local cafe for a dinner break with a slim book, The Quiet American by Graham Greene. I looked forward to some good background music and a healthy fresh meal on dishes I wouldn’t have to wash afterwards. I’d been writing much of the day and preparing sketches for a new painting. Preoccupied with afterimages from the sketching session, I didn’t notice the notebook on my table after I placed my order.

A man around my age suddenly sat down across from me. I looked up from my book, startled, and he belatedly asked, “Mind if I sit here?” Actually, I did mind. He was good-looking: tall and slender with tousled curly hair, nice clothes that hadn’t seen an iron in awhile, but even if I had been single, I would’ve had no time for him.

“I’m working,” I said, though hadn’t thought of it that way before. I was reading The Quiet American for the fifth time for pleasure but also for the book I’m writing: to sift through Greene’s prose looking for his impressions of a Vietnam that disappeared decades before my first visit there. This guy was apparently a friend of a friend, but I had no interest in distraction by strangers, whatever their intentions. The man stood up, apologized, and left with his notebook.

In the past I’ve always focused on either writing or visual work; rarely have I done both at once intensely, simultaneously as I am now. Until I wrote a friend I didn’t realize how packed my schedule is these days:

8am-9am: Writing online
9am-Noon: Misc. admin or head straight into painting/visual work
Noon-1pm: Lunch and misc. emails
1pm-5/6: Visual work – painting, photography, printing
6-9pm: Yoga class, dinner, online writing, etc
9pm-Midnight/2am: Offline writing, sometimes Twitter

But this schedule is my choice: in order to complete the book and Calendar Girls in time for a US tour next fall, this is what I’ve got to do. For the next several months. The daily accomplishments keep me going: meeting my word counts, adding highlights and midtones to a painting.

And, really, who wouldn’t rather have dinner with Graham Greene than with a stranger?