Snapshot: Man In the Corner On the Blue Line

There is a man and two women standing in the corner of a car on the T.  The train is a blue line bound for Wonderland and the man and the two women board at Aquarium and ride on past Maverick where I debark.

The man is white and young and dressed in slacks with mousy brown hair.  He is tall.  He holds an over-sized leather ladies’ leather bag between his feet.  On his right is an Asian woman with ivory skin and perfectly-rouged cheeks.  She is wearing gray leggings and tall black boots.  She is talking to the man in accented English.  On his left is a woman with brown eyes and brown hair and jiggly jowls and fat around her mid-section.  She is wearing tan corduroy and stark white running sneakers of the far-too-new variety and has a purse strap cutting her across the chest.  She is talking to the man in Hungarian or Ukrainian or another Eastern European language indiscernible to me.

The women take turns speaking to the man.  One waits for the other to finish – pausing and eying the man for a reaction, eying the other for a sign that she has concluded her segment – before continuing on.  There is a moment between each thing being said at him; in his direction.

The man breathes and his head windshield-wipers from the one woman to the other (from his mother to his girlfriend? his wife?).  He is set on intermittent and pauses just long enough to blink at each one before swishing back the other way.  The man breathes.

The man breathes and opens his mouth and for one half instant and I think he will say something.  And then his mouth closes a bit.  I see the hair plumb to his nose and his mouth (still slightly ajar) flutter with his breath like a collection of socks on a drying line on a breezy afternoon in a backyard in the sun.

He says nothing.  And the women keep talking; taking their turns, each in their own language, each looking at him and checking in with the other.  And I exit the train.  And the man keeps swishing back and forth to the rhythm of his life.

Read Full Post »

Mixed Up: A Poem

Tired of not being understood – exclamation point (!)

Tired of everything coming at the wrong time because I can’t say what works for me and I can’t say what I want.

Tired of not having the things I need when I need them and then having them magically appear when I don’t.

Tired of maybes and tomorrows and laters that never materialize.

Tired of being nearly 28 years old and living hand to mouth, country to country, out of a suitcase and all in my head.
When is it time to sync my brain to my body and my body to my heart and my heart to my head and my head to my life?  When is it time to give up on being pinched at the cheeks and realize that I’m an adult.

I’ve made so many steps forward.  Why is this one so hard?

Read Full Post »

Portrait: A Child’s Eyes

Sometimes you plan and plan a trip, but in the end that magical feeling you so wanted to remember forever eludes you.  Squatting in the patchy shade of a camel-chewed tree, this is how I felt after my desert safari in Rajasthan, India.  Suffice it to say, a young, single woman should think better of safaring alone with male guides… I had lost my faith in India and the sincerity of its people.  I stepped heavily into the sand-blasted local bus that would take me back into the city and away from my disappointment.

He was the first person I laid eyes on and he was the most beautiful child I’d seen in India.  There was a calmness about his gaze that immediately began to settle the anger I had been feeling for being fool enough to travel alone into the desert like that.

I watched him for a long time before drawing my camera from my bag.  I knew I wanted to capture his eyes.  They danced about his dusty face and tiptoed in my direction shyly.  Despite the heat and the sand, this boy’s face was clean and pure.  He was nearly a man in his culture, but guarded the innocence of boyhood.  The corners of his mouth crept upward and his smile touched mine.  It was in that moment that I found that magical feeling I thought I would leave India without.

This post has been (re-)entered into the Grantourismo and HomeAway Holiday-Rentals travel blogging competition.

Read Full Post »

On the Streets of Mumbai – First Encounter with the Street Children

There’s a street just around the corner and down the footpath from the Churchgate train station.  I couldn’t tell you the address of this place, but I could describe it as bordering one of Mumbai’s several maidens, or grass malls, and housing a line of cheap clothing stalls.  It doesn’t much matter the address, as Mumbaikers generally describe locations based on what they’re across from or next to.  A result of being a city in two languages, I imagine.  And I’m certain the families who live on this street – who’ve lived on this street, up against the surrounding fences and in the nearby gullies for the past 40 years – don’t have any need for an actual address.

The streets of Bombay smell of warm piss and cooling feces.  This isn’t surprising given that over 14 million Indians call the city home.  With more people per square kilometer than any other city in the world, Bombay (re-named Mumbai in 2006) is over 14 times more populous than New York City.  And Americans wonder why Asians have a different sense of personal space.

It’s impossible to step foot out of a Mumbai house (and often even inside one) without tripping over some form of humanity.  There are hapless businessmen dressed in slacks and long-sleeve Oxford shirts, unaware that other parts of the world practice a thing called short sleeves in this kind of heat.  There are hordes of schoolchildren: girls with thick, shiny, black plaited hair and boys with varying levels of pre-pubescent acne.  There are beggars who wheel themselves on small wooden boards, reminiscent of the yellow plastic scooters I played with as a child in elementary school physical education.  There are hawkers – half of them children – who’ve ascertained my need for a coloring book or to have my shoes polished (He ends up polishing my sandal and half of my foot) and are relentless in convincing me of this fact.  I search and search but the dogs asleep on the pavement and the rats dead in the gutters outnumber any other white person I see.  And I see lots of people.

*****

How old are you? I ask in slow English, crouched down on my haunches as if I were an Indian myself.  She wobbles her head like Indians do, the whites of her eyes large in the glow of the stall lights.  The Indian head wobble can mean any of a thousand things, but in this case it indicates shyness and her lack of understanding.  You, I articulate again, touching my finger to her tiny chest.  Four? Five? I hold up my fingers, clean and white.

My guide translates my question into Hindi and the little girl holds up six fingers.  She says she’s six, my guide reiterates, but I think she’s five, and I wonder if anyone at all knows this little girl’s actual date of birth.

I pull my camera from my backpack and, in the international language of I Don’t Speak Yours, state my request to take the little girl’s photo.  With the aid of technology, shyness melts into the heat of the evening, and little hands clamber up my sides, groping for the glow of a screen that has captured her image.  Her fingers are dry and grimy and she smells of dust and petrol fumes.  Her hair is slightly matted and her teeth gleam white against her dark skin.  She continues to play my body like a jungle gym until, at last, she flops down onto a pile of plastic bags and begins unwrapping a tinfoil ball, which, I find, contains the Indian bread, roti.  I don’t know the address of where I am in the dark heat of Mumbai, but I know now why I’ve come.

This post has been entered into the Grantourismo-HomeAway travel writing competition
http://grantourismotravels.com/2010/03/10/grantourismo-travel-blogging-competition-march/comment-page-1/#comment-487

Read Full Post »

The Novel – Opening

Starting a novel in a tattered notebook, sitting at the back corner of a pizza joint in small town, Maine, USA, isn’t exactly how I envisioned doing this.  Then again, most of the writing I’ll do and have done that pertains to travel and living the life of a happy nomad has probably also been in a tattered notebook in the back of some joint, pizza or otherwise.

Crack is addictive. Travel is worse.  In the ten years since I started traveling, I estimate I’ve spent at least $20,000 of my own US dollars on travel.  It might not seem like a lot, but, for me, it’s often been the difference between a world (of) experience(s) and a right of passage, high ticket object: High school me gets a car or high school me studies abroad?  College me gets a computer or college me… studies abroad again?  At almost age 30 (oh my god), my worldly possessions are few and stored in plastic tubs.  So, it stands to reason that a travelogue, travel journal, travel book or what have you, should be written in a seedy location, in a ragged notebook.

Read Full Post »