Alan Lightman is coming to town!

I was 22 and spending the night at Wellesley with my friend Claire. I’d graduated already; she still had a semester to go. I slept on the floor in her dorm room, which was lit with pink bulbs, the walls decorated with charms and beads and scarves she’d collected in India, where she’d studied abroad. I arrived in the late afternoon. We ate dinner in the dining hall, and then went out to a party. We stayed up late, as I recall, drinking wine from a box and watching the lake. It was fall, an Indian summer.

What I remember most, though, about that visit is waking up the next morning, lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling while Claire slept. She’s always been a late sleeper. After a while, quiet as could be, I turned so I could study the bottom row of her bookshelf. Among many textbooks, a couple of novels I’d read, and an English-Arabic dictionary, I saw a tiny book, a book I could manage to skim while Claire snoozed. I tugged it off the shelf: Einstein’s Dreams.

I read the whole book while Claire slept, falling into Alan Lightman’s words, leaving that college dorm room where outside delivery trucks came and went, students left their rooms to go to the library, or the dining hall, or church.

“In the world in which time is a circle,” Lightman writes, “every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely. So too every moment that two friends stop becoming friends, every time that a family is broken because of money, every vicious remark in an argument between spouses, every opportunity denied because of a superior’s jealous, every promise not kept.”

I read every word and didn’t stop for water or the bathroom or a breath of fresh air. It was Milan Kundera, but American, I thought. It was physics and math, and it was, to me, one long poem. Lightman was talking about time, Einstein’s mind, metaphysics—and I could understand it perfectly. This was science in beautiful, tragic metaphors. Many times I wept as I read Einstein’s Dreams, but Claire never stirred. Sunlight travelled in patches across the floor as I fell in love with the book in my hands.

“They stand quietly,” Lightman writes, describing those waiting to see the Great Clock, the first clock ever invented, the thing that would count their lives down. “They stand quietly,” he writes, “reading prayer books, holding their children. They stand quietly, but secretly they seethe with their anger. For they must watch measured that which should not be measured.”

Claire finally woke up. She looked at me and asked, “What it is it, my love?” I held up the book, asked whether she’d read it. “Not yet, my precious one,” she replied. “It’s for a class.” We went to the dining hall for breakfast, and then I drove back to Cambridge, cleaned my apartment, took a nap, and cooked a meal. Time rolled past, winter into spring into ten years from that day. Still, Einstein’s Dreams come to me often, and now I check the time less.

Don't miss Alan Lightman in Santa Fe this Wednesday! He'll be discussing his latest, The Accidental Universe (Vintage). 

May 6, 7:30 PM, at the James A. Little Theatre on Cerrillos Road...thanks, Santa Fe Institute!

Ahorita

Argentines don't use the word ahorita, as the Peruvians do, and the Ecuadorians, and the Central Americans, whose meals are churned out like clockwork at the same time each day. Ahora means now; ahorita means right now, this very second, let's go, vamos entonces. It's a word you've heard a million times, a word you still can't pronounce quite right, not with the way the ah becomes or becomes eat. But you figure you should have known that it wouldn't work here anyway, since every other word seems to have shifted its meaning or changed altogether, since you got here. The word for sweater, the word for umbrella, the word for stove. The words for Okay, I'll take it, and the way to say Shut up.

The absence of ahorita suits Argentina. Nothing ever happens right now anyway, and if you even suggest it you'll be met with surprised looks and a possible snort of laughter. 'Now?' the person will say, and blink at you. 'Right now?' And then everyone will order another drink and the minutes will slip into hours, and when you look at your watch again you won't believe the time it reads. Here, nine o'clock means ten-thirty, breakfast means brunch, coffee means an early dinner and meanwhile, your bedtime creeps into the madrugada. You cannot help but get swept up in the way time advances here; six in the evening ceases to be a viable dinner hour, and you drink coffee at nine without ever worrying about whether you'll sleep that night.

Argentina uses 24-hour time, military time, and it takes a while to get used to people saying your clothes will be washed by sixteen, and that they hope you can make the party by twenty. You've always struggled with numbers, in English and Spanish both, and so the 24-hour clock confounds you and you show up for things at the wrong times. No one minds though, of course they don't, they just open the door for you and kiss your cheek, helping you with your coat and profusely thanking you for the three-dollar bottle of Merlot you've brought to share.

So the clock ticks round and round, twenty-four hours a day, and anything becomes possible at four AM. At seven AM. At midnight, eating supper. You wonder whether you'll bring this clock with you when you go, a clock that's warped and slippery like the ones in Dali's paintings. How long will it take, you wonder, for them to fall from you - these languishing hours of which any interpretation is acceptable? And how long will right now stay off limits? The weeks you have left here stretch before you, but because you are now on this country's time, you know not to count them.

Color in Space and Time

To my dear readership:

A few words on Carlos Cruz-Diez's exhibit, 'El color en el espacio y en el tiempo,' shown at the MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2011

Carlos Cruz-Diez makes art you have to enter. He makes sculpture-paintings you must move around to see fully; with the slightest shift, the barest breath, the surface changes, and  sometimes it even slides right into the opposite of itself. 


I discovered Cruz Diez last weekend at the MALBA Museum’s tenth anniversary celebration. The MALBA, one of BA’s largest and most-respected museums, mirrors both the architecture and content of the Whitney in New York: high ceilings and a blocky, triangular exterior, and highly experimental exhibitions of modern art inside. Buenos Aires and New York remind me of each other as well, so that similarity could be reinforcing my comparison. In any case, how good it felt to be in that fine museum, which felt to me so reminiscent of those contemporary galleries in New York and Boston that I’ve been missing.

The MALBA presented an excellent series entitled ‘Art in Latin America: 1990-2010,’ which I admired for the incredible, exhaustive portrait created by this curator—but there were crowds, how could there not have been, on a glorious BA weekend….and I couldn’t really breathe in there, let alone stand and look. So I’m taking Sam there when she comes—on a weekday, and meanwhile, I let Cruz-Diez’s quieter show upstairs pull me under.

Cruz-Diez’s exhibit presented some of his earliest drawings and watercolors, which echo the tiny points and blocky, emotive patches of color employed by the later European Impressionists. Yet the ‘painting-sculptures’ that quickly followed those drawings are made of slats of painted wood glued to canvases. They show how fast this artist shifted from both literal expression and the limits of a two-dimensional surface. The sculptures, at first reminiscent of Piet Mondrian’s paintings of white lines and squares of color, morph within two years into luminous, shapeshifting surfaces that engage without employing anything literal.

From a few slats of wood on a canvas, Cruz-Diez moved into a process which involved laying, centimeters apart, dozens or hundreds of paper-thin slats horizontally. By varying the colors of the geometrical shapes on the canvas, as well as the colors on the slats themselves, Cruz-Diez made the works—the ‘sculpture-paintings’—different depending on where the viewer is positioned. He made it necessary that the viewer move in and out of the canvas to see the 'whole'. The effect is a work that shifts and shimmers as you pass it, drawing you in to inspect and then asking that you step back and take in the whole. These pieces are made to take time.

Self-defined as a ‘kinetic’ artist, Cruz-Diez finally moves beyond the canvas altogether; at the end of his MALBA exhibition, viewers are invited to slip gauzy hair-nets over their shoes and enter an all-white room: white floors, white ceilings, and white walls. Except that nothing is really white; the gallery is cordoned off by half-walls, and each ‘half-room’ exudes a color. Light is the medium here, light and white walls. An all-pink room envelops you, the pink, boxed bulb in the center of the room radiating more the heat of the pink than the light of it. A similar blue room induces melancholy, and a green room invigorates. At least, these were my impressions; each colored room absorbed me, completely shifting, albeit momentarily, how I felt. It was an amazing end to a truly powerful exhibit, one where I entered so many rooms, shifted between so many dimensions and so many times of day. It was a Rothko-like immersion, that all-absorbing color, except in this case the light was literal.

Cruz-Diez was born in Caracas in 1923. He’s divided his time between Mexico and France since 1960, and has exhibited extensively on both those continents.  I encourage you to see his works up close if you’re ever given the chance, and I’ll leave you, my dear readership, with this excerpt from Mari Carmen Ramirez’s essay, “The Issue At Stake is Color,” as printed in MALBA’s write-up, ‘Carlos Cruz-Diez: El color en el espacio y en el tiempo.’

Cruz-Diez immerses us in unprecedented situations—what he calls ‘événements,’ or events—in which color happens, becoming several things at once; an unsuspected dimension of space; an unrestrained, real-time experience; and an essential means for reconditioning and stimulating our senses.

Portrait of the artist (daylife.com)

An Hour Like Water

Originally published in The Best Women's Travel Writing

Alfonso is half an hour late. He doesn’t call to tell me this, nor does he apologize when he finally shows up where we've arranged to meet, on the corner in front of the convenience store. He just kisses me on the cheek and asks, Do you like Arabian food? He asks it in Spanish, and I have to get him to repeat the question two more times. Árabe is the word I’m not getting, not with the way he crushes the r and turns the b into a v.

Should we be talking in English? He asks me in English, after the third and final attempt. I pout. It was just that one word! I protest, and he laughs and unlocks the car. The door on my side scrapes the curb as I pull it shut—You sank the car! He says, but he’s not angry. He’s used to the screech of the door against the high sidewalk, and jokes that if I weighed just a little bit less, the car wouldn’t sink so bad. I know he is teasing, though, because he told me the other night that I should eat more, and ordered us both desserts.

I decide, as we drive down Godoy Cruz, past the horse-racing track and the massive banyan tree, past the lime-green Chinese restaurant and the tiny gas station, that I won’t be mad that he showed up late. Even if I said something, he’d just remind me that it wasn’t his fault—I don’t have a watch, remember? He’d say. And I’d have to admit that I’ve used the same excuse. Anyway, I tell myself, leaning back in my seat and watching the lights of Palermo flicker past, isn’t the strange slow motion of time the sweetest thing about this place? Alfonso turns up the music, explaining that the man singing is an Alaskan guy who grew up in Buenos Aires. We listen to his raspy, folksy voice, and cruise up and down the nighttime streets.

The bars we speed past are crowded with trendy twenty-somethings. Knee-length stiletto boots; tight jeans and leather jackets. The girls have this hair, this amazing long hair that reaches down past their ass, and the guys hold their women close to them, kissing them, eyes closed. We drive down the series of streets named after Central American countries—Nicaragua and Costa Rica, Honduras. I tell Alfonso, in Spanish, that I like this part of town because the streets remind me how far I have come. Which one’s your favorite? He asks, and I tell him, without hesitating, Nicaragua. I tell him I liked the heat there, I liked the poets, I liked the blue waters of the Corn Islands and the way, in the evening, the sun made everything pink.

*

The Arabian restaurant, when we arrive, is so jammed that we have to add our names to a long list, a list that a bald man holds with importance at the door. He is smoking, smoking and ushering people in and out, and there must be thirty or forty people waiting for him to call their names, standing there beneath the plastic awning in the sweet, unexpected warmth of this springtime night.

Let’s go for a beer, Alfonso suggests, after we’ve added our name. How long is the wait? I ask, and he tells me it’s enough time to have a beer. I don’t push it. This is like him ringing the doorbell late and not apologizing; this is the way time works here. It’s like Harrison, one of the other English teachers at Conviven, told me on the bus ride home the other day: Time is more fluid here, he’d said, just like everything else. He’d grinned, then kissed me on the cheek and jumped off the bus—his stop. I watched him lope away with his long legs and cropped hair, his blue eyes, down the cobblestone street and out of sight.

Although the Arabian restaurant was jammed inside and out, the streets around here are empty. We peer into the windows of bars that are silent, the stools and counters gleaming and unused. Spooky, I say. It’s a vicious cycle, Alfonso tells me. The place is empty, so no one goes in. No one goes in, and the place stays empty. I practice saying ‘vicious cycle’ in Spanish; Alfonso makes fun of my accent. I remind him that at least we’re speaking in Spanish, right? He shrugs, nods, and takes my arm. Here, he says, and points to a little pizza joint with a couple of outdoor tables and a few waiters standing around smoking.

           

Alfonso orders a big bottle of beer, which comes with little dishes of chips and peanuts and crackers. I’m starving, Alfonso admits, pouring the beer into squat jelly jars and then reaching for a handful of peanuts. He asks me if I’ve eaten, and I tell him I have—Hours ago, I say. I can’t wait until midnight for dinner, I joke, and he shrugs. Is it midnight already? He asks, and checks his wrist for a watch that isn’t there. Then he laughs and grabs for another handful of peanuts, tossing one at me, aiming for my shirt’s v-shaped neckline.

I like Alfonso because he tosses peanuts at me, and he doesn’t care about time. He doesn’t get stressed about it, even though he works as an attorney and knows his minutes are on the clock. I like him because he chats with the tall, African-looking waiter who comes out and refills our glasses of beers and our dishes of peanuts and chips. The two of them guess where the other is from, ignoring me, and I like this. Everyone chats here; everyone has the time and the interest for a brief conversation. We finish our beers and pay the bill. Our table will be ready now, Alfonso says.

And it is. We go back to the Arabian place and wait just two minutes at the door, the patio still jammed, until the man with the list and the cigarette calls our name. He doesn’t show us in, he just directs us inside and up the stairs. Take the table with silverware on it, he says, and checks his list to call out the next name. After we sit, Alfonso orders without consulting the menu, and this is something I like, too. He rattles off a list of dishes, and asks for a bottle of wine. Hot, thin bread arrives in a napkin-covered basket, and sparkling water, and then the plates come, one after the other, now stuffed grape leaves, now falafel, now a type of meat pie and a type of cheese casserole and a tart, lemony salad. The wine is cold and tastes like flowers and oranges both. We eat and eat, using our fingers and not our forks, and after a while baklava arrives for dessert, and possibly the best coffee I’ve ever had, sweet without being sugary, grainy and rich without being cloying. Every bite requires you to close your eyes, because with them open, your senses are overwhelmed. I am stuffed, I am sleepy; I’m in heaven.

Just before we leave, I check my watch. It’s 3 AM. The restaurant remains full; the waiters hurry around. I catch Alfonso looking at me; he shakes his head. I pull my shirtsleeve down over my wrist to cover my watch.

Time is a different animal here, Alfonso says. It’s another thing altogether, than what you know. He pulls me closer as we make our way though the restaurant, towards the door, squeezing between tables and chairs, diners and servers and the man with the list. So forget it, Alfonso whispers, and hustles me out the door.

And he is right. Here, time’s a river, and because it moves like water, it would be stupid to try and cling. The sun setting down doesn’t mark another hour; the thing is the glimmer, the long shadows of the trees. And this night is not the minutes; it’s not the morning growing closer. It’s the moonlight, it’s the coffee, it’s the not-so-distant summer on the wind.

Same clothes, different day

I bought a razor today. It’s the first razor I’ve had since Quito, and doesn’t it look so shiny and new, with its three blades and its blue handle? I know it will be destroyed in one shower; just count all the days that it’s been, after all. And I’ve taken to stealing all the napkins from tables in restaurants, and from the little plastic holder in the breakfast room at this hostel, because there’s never any toilet paper, anywhere, and I’m too lazy to buy a roll. Besides, there’s no room in my pack for one, anyway. It’s become the norm to wear the same shirt to bed that I wore during the day, the same shirt and double-sweater combination, in fact, and I’ve gotten into the habit of waking up in it, too, and wearing it again. It’s so freezing sometimes, does it really matter? No one’s going to see the t-shirt I’ve had on for three days, anyway, not with all the sweaters I wear.

And is it strange that I’ve taken to carrying around my plastic costal full of food? There’s still the half-empty bottle of olive oil Kassidy bought in Lima and left for me when she flew to Cusco—it’s the olive oil that tastes funny, like the small, black olives they grow up there. There’s a half-eaten loaf of bread in that bag, and some cut-up avocadoes and peppers and a head of broccoli, but I swear I throw that stuff away if it starts to go brown. The half-empty bottle of red wine won’t last long, though. Anyway, the homeless people get lucky sometimes, because there are always a couple rolls in there I know I won’t finish, or a few green apples I bought in bulk because the big bag cost as much as two or three loose pieces of fruit, and so I’ve taken to handing out food instead of coins to the people who beg on the sidewalk. Maybe they snort and laugh at the food I give, or maybe they devour it, I don’t know. I don’t ever look back.

For ten days there I didn’t ever know the date. The best way I had of guessing was by checking the bus tickets I bought and then used as bookmarks, but even those weren’t reliable, after a while, the way they piled up and got shuffled around, mixed together—Potosi to Sucre, Oruro to Potosi, Coroico to La Paz, La Paz to Puno. With every transit comes a tax ticket, too, which is the price you pay (ten or twenty cents) to use the bus terminals, and so what I have now are a stack of tickets with different dates, and I’m saving them, to remember this trip by.

At least I always know the time, even though my watch gets waterlogged every time I enter a humid place, or wear it accidentally in the shower, or get heated up walking up and down the streets of God-knows-which town I’m in. But I forgot that August came after July, forgot that July was winding down, and so when I opened my email the other day for the first time in nearly two weeks, I couldn’t believe that the month had ended and another was beginning. Summer flew, I guess you could say, but it isn’t summer here, anyway, and so what good are the names of the months to me. It’s already Friday? I might ask the woman who sells me the ticket to the next town, and she’ll look at me like I’m crazy and roll her eyes. It’s Sunday, she’ll say, and then I’ll remember that the days don’t matter to me anyway, and I’ll pass my fare over the counter.

Will I sink right back in to easy laundry, to fresh clothes daily, to clean razors in a hot shower, to towels that aren’t permanently wet because it’s too cold for anything to dry here? Will I get used to five or six pairs of jeans to choose from, ten pairs of shoes, seven handbags, two kinds of perfume? Will I get used to the way perfume smells, even—will it stop catching me on the street and making me sneeze? Will I start wearing makeup again, the way I used to every day, carefully applying it before the mirror in the morning before work? Will I get used to the way I look with eyeliner, or, from now on, will I see myself as whorish for darkening my lids and lashes and mouth? And how quickly will I forget, I wonder, what it’s like to not care? Will I forget soon enough how it feels to look into my backpack and see the shirts and pants rolled up there and marvel at all the clothes I have?

How fast will I start wanting things again? Because right now, this freedom from things, from clothes and smells and hairless legs, is tasting pretty damn good. I’m starting to think that razors are a big scam, anyway. I wasted fifteen minutes in the shower, for one thing, and weren’t we born with hair on our legs? How long, I wonder, will it take before I forget what this is like? How long before I start to know the days, the dates, the month? At least I’ll stop feeling guilty for missing birthdays. And how long before I stop hoarding food like I might starve without bread on a ten-hour bus ride? How long before I start combing my hair again? When, I wonder, as I eat my lunch on the step outside my room, will avocado sandwiches stop tasting this fine?

The Land of Eternal Youth

I meet Isaac on the bus from Loja to Vilcabamba, the day before yesterday. He was on the five-hour ride from Cuenca to Loja, too, but we left so early that everyone dozed for the first half of the ride, and watched the featured film, ‘Big Momma,’ for the second half. Still, I eyed Isaac, wondering where he was from, guessing that he was American when he pulled out a thick book with reviews from the San Francisco Chronicle on the back. I didn’t catch the title—he read it for only a moment before tipping his head back and closing his eyes. And so I watched ‘Big Momma’ in Spanish, and I was glad that for once they weren’t playing some gory Italian film, which always fills the bus with sounds of shooting and crying.

Isaac sees me take out my Lonely Planet while we wait for the Vilcabamba bus to leave. The thing weighs a ton, and hasn’t helped me much; still, it's something to look at. Vilcabamba is famous for its residents who just don’t seem to kick the bucket, I read, and then I hear Isaac’s voice. “If you have any questions about Vilcabamba, let me know,” he is saying, leaning across his seat to talk to me. The two young women behind us, both with low-cut shirts and babies on their laps, watch us attentively. “I lived there for a year,” he adds.

Isaac has curly curly hair and wears glasses; definitley Jewish, I remember thinking, maybe unfairly, but turns out he is. I tell him I’d love a hotel recommendation; Isaac knows plenty. As the bus pulls out of the station, I move to the seat beside him, and for the whole ride we talk. He’s a talker. He tells me he taught English in this valley for a year, and it’s been four since he’s returned. He can’t wait, and his enthusiasm is infectious. He points out the little towns that, for some reason, never got famous like Vilcabamba did, even though, he says, they’re just as beautiful. He points out the village with the pretty blue church, and the valley that’s sprung up with houses since he was last hear. And as we reach our destination, he claps his hands. “I love it here,” he admits, unnecessarily.

The hostel Isaac recommends is superb, the cottages designed around a garden. “Anything grows here,” he tells me, and this hostel makes that obvious. They’ve got vegetables, clover instead of grass, and vines of golden trumpets climbing the clay walls. The short Ecuadorian man who answers the door shows me a room with whitewashed walls and a high, angled ceiling, two beds with thick mattresses. “Eleven dollars per night,” he tells me when I ask the price. And then he hastens to add: “including breakfast.”

The Mexican restaurant Isaac tells me to visit is also excellent. I am starving. “I haven’t eaten in days,” I tell Isaac. I admit that the week has been a rough one: a dead man, a car chase, and a bumpy ride out of my relationship stole my appetite. The waitress at the Mexican place serves me sliced chicken, big brown beans, warm tortillas, and a pile of guacamole. That dish, and a cup of strong coffee, cost four dollars. As I sit out on the restaurant’s patio, I watch Isaac climb into a pickup, the vehicle owned by his host father from four years ago. And as he drives out of the main square, perched in the truck’s bed, he catches my eye and flashes a peace sign.

*

Isaac calls me to hike the next morning. He’s got a few spare hours before he needs to meet another family he lived with, and so we meet at a tiny tienda up the hill from my hostel and walk down the paved road that quickly turns to dirt. This landscape is incredible; the frequent, steep hills form jungled valleys, and a river runs along the road. We pass a house with animal skins tacked to the outside walls; we pass a group of men laying cement for a new house. Isaac notes that many homes have gone up since he was last here. “The gringos love this place,” he says. “For twenty thousand, they can buy a nice piece of land, and for another fifty, they can build their dream house.” He points to the line of homes with red roofs that have gone up on the adjacent hill. Stone gates keep intruders out.

He tells me about the hippies, too, the way they flock from the States and Argentina and Europe to buy up land where they can grow whatever they want. “It’s easy to live off the map,” Isaac says. “But there are a lot of crazies out here, guys who come and live as hermits, or go into the town square to get drunk every day before lunch.” Still, he loves the place; every man who passes us, Isaac knows. His Spanish is still good after four years in Berkeley, and he chats with men who carry machetes strapped to their hips and wear dusty rubber boots. “Sorry,” he apologizes after each eager, lengthy conversation, but I know he really isn’t. He beams.

We climb up out of the valley and traverse the ridge, and you can see that the hills around us have been stripped bare long ago. We can look down to where the river divides the land and see that houses have sprung up, and fresh roads. “Those weren’t there before,” Isaac says many times. He talks steadily as we walk, keeping me entertained, stopping periodically to look around, his hand shading his eyes. “God,” he keeps saying. “Vilcabamba.” We pass an old man with a long, white beard and round spectacles, and his wizened, gray-haired, feisty-looking wife. They’re hiking to visit a friend, they tell us in Spanish, even though their accents beneath are American. We pass a hippie girl with rosaries around her neck and no bra who asks us about the purple flowers we keep passing. We pass two men who are cutting the brush on the sides of the hill with machetes—food for the cows, Isaac says. He cheerily greets them: “How’s it going?” He asks. “Working,” the men grumble, without looking up.

We never end up finding the waterfall Isaac was sure existed down in one of the valleys, but we stumble along the rocky river, stopping once to sit and eat cookies. We get lost, but not very, and eventually clouds come and fill the blue, blue sky. We pass a tree with wide, flat leaves the colors of white stones; “They look like mirrors from far away,” Isaac says. We see birds—little yellow ones, iridescent blue ones, once a toucan sitting perfectly still in a tree, its beak long and curved. It doesn’t stir when we call to it, clap at it, and I wonder aloud whether it’s sleeping. On our walk back towards the village, we pass the same men, hacking at the hillside brush. An orange-brown mutt sits perched above them, looking down, and this time Isaac doesn’t say a word.

*

You can see why the hippies come. You can see why the old people hold on to their years, and why these little hotels spring up and fill every season. In Cuenca, it rained, and Loja was gray, but nestled in this valley, Vilcabamba boasts an eternal summer. I didn’t imagine rain, hot as the afternoon was, the sun beating down without making shadows, but this afternoon clouds came and spilled over us and then broke open and it poured. The smell of the earth rose up right away as the rain gained strength and then turned to chips of hail. But even as the sky above me darkened, blue sky clung on in the distance. The rain is still falling now, cooling the air and bringing to life all the plants around here that today’s sun dried. And yet the clouds are softening, lightening, and I know that in a moment they’ll turn pink. I’ll sleep one more night in my soft Vilcabamba bed, where outside my window emerald clover grows thick. And then someone else will come, and sleep in this bed, and walk the Vilcabamba mountains to be amazed.

How to Love What You Have

Today I saw a dead man. He was lying on the cobblestone plaza in front of one of Cuenca's huge white cathedrals, just as the rain was starting to fall. I was running, running to the nearest café without an umbrella when I saw him there, flat on his back, his arms spread beside him. It isn’t uncommon to see men passed out on the street here; they get drunk and sleep it off. But the rain wasn’t waking him up. It picked up and then started to pour, soaking him, soaking the streets and the trees, but still he didn’t move, and then a short man in an old suit and a navy baseball hat came over and tried to lift the man up, pulling on his arm, but he couldn't move him. The man's head slumped back, and I saw the short guy lift the man's limp wrist and hold it in his hand. 

The two men beside me in the café were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, watching. At first they were laughing; how drunk can you get in the middle of the day? But then they saw that the short man couldn’t make him move, they saw the way he lifted his head and looked around, the man's wrist in his hand, and so they ran out into the rain, leaving their cigarettes smoking in their ashtray. The three of them struggled with the man’s body, and I could see when they lifted him that his hair was gray and combed back and he wore a dark, elegant suit. His shoes were shined. He was dead weight. The men staggered across the plaza and disappeared into the library across the street. A few minutes later, I heard the sound of a siren screaming, and then the ambulance appeared and the medics jumped out and ran through the library’s open door, while a guard stood watch, a huge gun strapped across his chest.

I wrote an essay at Vermont College about an emergency a little like this one. The essay, which I called 'Siren,' is about the day I was in my apartment in Cambridge, and I saw an ambulance pull up to the curb, and medics rush out and pound up the stairs and then carry down a child, strapped to a stretcher and hooked up to tubes. A woman upstairs screamed, I wrote, while the medics rushed the child out the door and away in the ambulance. A few months ago I submitted the essay to The Boston Review, and today, just a few moments before I saw the dead man, I received a reply. This is what they sent to me:

Thank you for sending us "Siren."

This story was moving and well-written. After careful consideration, we have decided it does not suit the present needs of Boston Review. However, we encourage you to write more and to submit in the future.

Though this submission does not suit our present needs, we look forward to reading more.

I read the note and felt uplifted. This is something, I thought. And then I ran to the café and saw the dead man and I couldn’t watch the ambulance roll him into it and take him away. My submission didn’t suit the Boston Review's present needs. Eerily, it suited instead this moment, this day, this rain and this man in the suit on the ground. The two guys come into the café now, shuddering, and one of them has tears in his eyes.

Go home tonight and hold the person you love. Hold them close and tell them how you feel, because someday, we’re all going to follow that man in the suit. I want my family so bad right now; I want to wrap you up tight in my arms, but I can't, and so I hope you all know that I'm sitting here, so far from home, and thanking God for you. Today I saw an old man lying on the cold street, and I learned that your life can change with a drop of rain. 

Where dimensions mean little

In Tom Miller's non-fiction travelogue, 'The Panama Hat Trail,' the narrator documents his quest through Ecuador in search of the story of the famed Panama hat. Miller begins in Quito, conducting interviews with Panama hat distributors, then buses it across the country, up and down the coast, tracking down the straw beginnings of the hat.

Miller's descriptions of Ecuador are incredible. With travelogues written thirty years ago by privileged white men, I think that, at least for this writer, there will always come a distance, a revealed perspective that doesn't seem quite fair, a use of certain words that doesn't feel quite right. Still, Miller had his finger on the pulse. He's not afraid to tell it like it is, and to tell it beautifully. His writing is never hard, you know? He can blend grief with humor and make a poor place beautiful. Occasionally I wonder whether he's oversimplifying, but I read nearly each page with pleasure, savoring the prose, savoring the way I am transported.

The following passage was taken from Chapter Six of 'The Panama Hat Trail,' wherein the author has been walking all day with a few straw-cutters through tiny towns north of La Libertad. The sun is hot, and they're headed for the fields. The author is eager to see the Panama hat's very first beginnings, in the form of the unharvested straw. As they walk, Domingo, one of the cutters, tells the narrator that they'll reach the plantations soon. Miller writes:


Soon? What does soon mean to someone who walks barefoot three hours to work in the morning and back again at night? For all I knew he went home for lunch too. Soon? Distance and time are two of life's limitations that take on surreal questions in Latin America. Dimensions mean little. Soon? It could mean today, tonight, tomorrow, by next week, or I'm not sure. Soon could be fifteen minutes or fifteen miles. The difference between soon and forever might be negligible. A few minutes later Domingo added: "We're getting closer."