Gare de Lyon, Paris

I am going back to Annonay for the second time in three days. I am going to see Tante Monique, she is in the hospital. Tante is French for aunt, she is my mother’s 85-year-old sister. (One of the effects of my mom’s decision to have children at the non-traditional age of 43 is that many of our relatives are older, much older. The question of mortality – with its attendant non-negotiables of sickness, old age and death – has been more present for my sister and I than many of our friends growing up, friends whose mothers had children in their 20s. But this choice of my mother – to have children “later” – is one that I celebrate, one that I am emulating. Before my mom became a mother, she lived on three continents, participated in United Nations peace-keeping operations in the Middle East, learned different languages by living in their countries, bought fabulous clothes hand-made for her by various designers. All these amazing experiences informed her mothering. Her parenting techniques have always been unique and exceptional. Unfortunately, my sister and I perceived them – with our desperate desires of just fitting-in while growing up in America – as insane and inexplicable. But with the modicum of hard-won objectivity we have gained through our mutual therapies and experiences, we realize now that we would not trade our childhoods for anything).

This journey back to Annonay from Paris is a multi-stepped affair; one that is a sequence of metro-train-bus-taxi, ending with a walk across the bridge of the River Deume. Although exhausting, I appreciate the intricacy of this itinerary since it affords me the opportunity to compose myself. This is the aunt who would organize elaborate, month-long summer road trips, zooming us through France every year. Thanks to her indefatigable, truck-driver instincts, we criss-crossed the roads of France – staying in the smallest hotels in the obscurest villages, stopping at oyster museums and strawberry festivals along the way. As we reminisced in her hospital room, she reminds me that during a visit to the cathedral in Bourges when I was 12, I told her I wanted to get married there. I had totally forgotten, both the cathedral and that I had ever said that. But it is thanks to her profound curiosity and energy for always, always learning that I even have a link to France, that I have an understanding of this part of my genetic inheritance.

One of my favorite links with her is linguistic – (she has always done this for us, but she has stepped up the intensity once I told her of my decision to come live in Paris) – she is always cataloging French idioms and expressions. She meticulously types up lists of French expressions with their etymologies, meanings and translations. She always says, rightfully so, that these are the hardest parts of a language to learn – the obscure phrase which operates with a delicate alchemy of pop culture, history and French collective memory. Understanding them, she tells me, will lend me cultural currency and legitimacy. I have to enter fully into the language, she tells me, not to be content to rest at French’s threshold. Thanks to her lists, I can nod empathetically when someone complains about a hair being in the soup or feet in the plate – or laugh appropriately when someone refers to the worm in the cauliflower. Even this past Sunday, when the doctor came by her hospital room, he mentioned the need to see events à l’optique. In answer to my confused face, she said gently “I will add that to your list, don’t worry.”

During my telephone call to her Sunday night – letting her know that I had arrived safely in Paris – she apologizes for being too weak to type up the latest list she is working on. But she tells me that to view events à l’optique is to remember the relevant, to understand what is most important. It is thanks to her that I am slowly learning to live my life this way.

spring equinox

Paris is beginning to spring. Eight more days to make it official, of course, but this morning has that brightness that makes the miracle of tulips and jonquils seem inevitable. There is nothing like watching the seasons turn over each other to make you feel at home in your newly adopted city.

It makes me think of Persephone – that goddess of spring, of returns, of reunions. Persephone, whose kidnapping by Hades (the god of the underworld) caused her mother, Demeter (the goddess of the earth and its harvests), to grieve so desperately that the earth slid into the quiet of winter. Not knowing where her daughter was being held hostage, Demeter journeyed the earth, searching for her everywhere with Hecate (the goddess of the crossroads). The earth waited in its winter. In response to the people’s hunger and cold, Zeus forced Hades to release Persephone. But before handing her over to Hermes (the god of boundaries and the travelers who cross them) who had come to guide her back to earth, Hades tricked her into eating four pomegranate seeds. Hades had stipulated that Persephone would be released only if she had not eaten anything during her ordeal. The four seeds she did eat obligated her to return to the underworld for four months of each year. When Persephone finally did return to earth, spring marked the end of Demeter’s grieving.

Persephone’s story – with its attendant explanations of the cyclical nature of love and grief – sounds a resonance with the potential for transformations with which spring seduces us each year.

visitations and progressions: bloomington, indiana lake lemon

Today, on my last day in Indiana, Akiko and I went Sunday driving. We went to Lake Lemon, where we had gone several summers before. The lake was still frozen over in the center, although its icy edges were disappearing because of the progression towards spring. Akiko said: “Nature is moving forward to spring – that means that this is the time that we must also move forward to the next stage of our life.” We have not yet figured out what that next stage is going to be, but it was breakthrough enough to know that we have to have movement forward.

Grief can lull us into a stasis, a frozen silence, when confronted with the enormity of loss. It is an almost-impossible effort to enunciate its effects – to verbalize how specifically it fills the void of what was sundered. In his essay “The Poet,” Ralph W. Emerson writes that the quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze. To metamorphize grief into elegy, to revolutionize loss into value, is to know how to navigate tenderly, with respectful care, these icy floats upon which we need to sit for a while before we can even think of being lured back to the shore – where, as Elizabeth Bishop writes – “love will unexpectedly appear over & over again.”

Detroit International Airport

It is snowing tonight in Detroit, where I fly in for my connecting flight to Indianapolis. I left Paris this morning in order to come to Indiana to be with Akiko. She has recently returned to Indiana from Japan, where her mother just passed away. I am arriving as a pilgrim of grief, knowing that the gesture of my movement here might be the main thing I am accomplishing. I am led more by love than by reason, knowing that I have nothing more concrete than presence to offer.

During the plane’s descent bringing me closer back to home, I recognize the efficient anonymity of the hotel clusters which sprout around all American airports with the speedy tenacity of mold. From the distance the sky affords, these many Marriot Inns and Motor Lodges look about as substantial as Lego villages. With the plane descending into the familiar American landscape, I feel the downward pull of grief.

The journey of grieving and its signposts are familiar. Years ago, I took a Greyhound bus from Winter Park, Florida to Lost Valley, Oregon. Up till this point, the geography of the country had been mostly abstract for me. I saw the states fly by in the square patches of color from the bus window: Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California… By focusing on the details of landscape alone, I was trying to still the hollow echoes of my first relationship dissolving, devolving into nothing more mundane than love disappearing. My decision to cover the entire width of the nation by bus was my attempt physicalize the magnitude of the pain I felt. While tinged with a tad of the dramatic and the hysteric, it was the only way that I could enunciate my grief. I found comfort in the name of my Greyhound destination: Lost Valley. It was a writer’s commune in Oregon where I decided to live for a while, staying in a cabin in exchange for cultivation of the organic zucchini patch.

With the death of her mother, another color is added to the spectrum of similarities between Akiko and I. When my father died, I was two years old. I was unable to verbalize my own experience of grief; I did not have the vocabulary to grasp what had happened to him. Since then, in a way, I have been lugging behind me the body of my father, covered in a shrouded silence. While I have no answers for Akiko, I am comforted by her questions. As we retrace all the familiar steps of our shared life in Bloomington, I cling with a certainty that it is the distance I have covered which will address a love so deep that I could not otherwise name.

In the meantime, I am stringing together my epiphanies like so many Christmas lights, pinpoints of illumination against a larger darkness.

spring semester

And so another semester begins here within the French educational system. I surprised mostly myself at the full spectrum of my emotional experience last semester at the University of Paris. It began at the lowest octaves of abject terror and aversion to the unique oxymoron that is the French “organizational system,” rising to arpeggios of joy culminating in my most amazing students giving me roses during our pilgrimages to cafés fueled by Hemingway’s alcoholism at the end of the semester.

Maybe it was the blunt trauma to the head produced by my encounter with the Kafkian bureaucracy that is the university in France. It is a system which is run primarily with unfathomable, and gleefully unexplained, acronyms. The following is just a modest example:



Maybe it was the weight of my anticipatory riot gear. This was the place, it must be remembered, that just the year before had been incapacitated for weeks due to full-scale student riots, costing millions of euros in structural damage. But it sounds so poetic in French: les émeutes... Stories of fleeing teachers were shared in traumatized whispers that were more reminiscent of refugee camps than classrooms.

French academic calendars are always somewhat aleatory due to this phenomenon of the student body. There is the proud tradition of May ’68 to uphold…











Or maybe it was just the strangeness of doing something so personal as teaching in such a new and different place. Whatever it was, the experience of teaching – and therefore being more fully present in Paris – has been transformative. The fly-by-night pedagogical philosophy which the French seem to prefer has liberated me to engage in wildly discursive debates with my literature students, and therefore, also myself.

returns - to the selves

Since coming back to Paris from Rome, I have been thinking about the possibilities of living in the present moment, of trying to learn how to master the fraction of the second that lies before me – which is the only part of the present and the future that I can ever truly know. How to stop running (or hiding) from it and embrace it?

But instead of flinging my arms with abandon around this knowable nanosecond before me, I have always felt a compulsion, instead, to engage in a continual emotional traffic between places – between where I am but instead want to be, between where I am instead of where I feel I should be. I have always felt paralyzed by this ambivalence – feeling the pull of equal strength in more than one direction.

Which leads to an existentially irritating question – what am I trying to do here, right now? Writing here in this blog instead of being in Paris? Why do I continue to tease this ache of nostalgia, a word combining the meanings of ache and return (nostos)? And for what, exactly - for which place - am I aching?

I remember feeling a clang of recognition from which I am still vibrating – when I first read in André Aciman’s False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory: “The true site of nostalgia is therefore not a land, or two lands, but the loop and interminable traffic between these two lands…This eventually becomes the home, the spiritual home, the capital. Displacement as an abstract concept, becomes the tangible home.”




I had bought False Papers at Shakespeare and Company this past October, a few days after I had arrived in Paris. Shakespeare’s is that little bookstore across the Seine, in front of Notre Dame, next to the best café in Paris, Café Panis. This bookstore is a place replete with public and personal mythology. It is the sister bookstore to City Lights in San Francisco. It is the bookstore which Sylvia Beach founded, originally a lending library which Hemingway at first avoided because he did not even have the money to borrow a book. Beach, in her tenderly tactful compassion, gave him not only a free membership but also free food. With her intuitive insight, she was also the person to first publish James Joyce’s Ulysses with her own funds and publishing press (practically bankrupting her) when the rest of the world was hostile in its attempts to silence his so-called obscenity. Although it can be easily and quickly scoffed because of its cheap inclusion in Ethan Hawke’s and Julie Delpy’s movie Before Sunset, and all the American tourists crawling about – speaking loudly while not reading anything. It also has infuriatingly outrageous prices (10 Euros for a USED Dover edition, which in the States costs $1. New. Seriously?), it is still and also the first place that I go whenever I am back in Paris.



During my first nights in Paris last October, I had finally found the gumption to scurry from my dubious and dank hotel near la Bastille. Unfortunately, it had taken me all day to carefully and cautiously coax out this strength to leave the confines of my room. I had begun to regard the seediness of the place and my fellow lodgers as familiar, and therefore safe, and it was now late. I knew I would have to pass the gauntlet of the way-too-friendly, completely unprofessional garde de nuit, who would always ask me to be his playing partner in Grand Theft Auto, or some other gracious American video game. Thankfully, this night, he was passed out next to his glaringly obvious brown bag. Also thankfully, Shakespeare’s is one of the few places in Paris that is open till midnight.


That night, I was like a junkie scanning the shelves frantically, looking for something to narcoticize me, to still the silence of arrival, to wrest me from the panic of my coming to Paris. There is always a certain jolt when catapulted into new time zones. It was, granted, a catapulsion which I had not really prepared for. I had lived a very itinerant lifestyle in Bloomington before leaving for Paris. My only focus has been finishing my Master’s paper on narratives of exile for my Comparative Literature degree. While writing and researching, I had been house-sitting multiple houses for months, subletting my apartment to unfortunately disreputable sorts in order to save on cash. My last few weeks in Bloomington, I had spent trying to store books and valuables with various loved ones and getting rid of so many old clothes and papers and memories so quickly that I felt like a molting snake on a time-lapse Discovery program. Slapping the few socks that I could still find into a ridiculously small bag had been the extent of my practical Parisian preparations.

So, I was looking for something preferably trashy and long-winded. Anita Shreve? Jonathan Franzen’s new memoir? As I was leaving with both, of course, I was stepping over the resident black cat (whom the booksellers pride on not naming) when another book caught my eye. Tripping over the cat, I reached to take a used copy of Aciman’s book from the shelf. It was by the door. In the autobiography section. It had the word memory on the cover. And exile. As I opened the front cover, it had more talismans which soothed me like incantations: Paris, Proust, nostalgia, Emily Dickinson, Italy, loneliness, wandering, Ulysses, departure, New York…


This was the slanted answer, speaking to my sense of displacement of being in Paris, making it concrete. In the first pages, Aciman writes about his return to his birthplace, Alexandria – a city which for him, expulsed as a Jew with his family in 1967 – is a shadow city, a city existing only in the memory and mythology of his family: “So this is Alexandra, I think, before shutting the window, feeling very much like Freud when, in his early forties, he had finally achieved his lifelong dream of visiting Athens, and, standing on the Acropolis, felt strangely disappointed, calling his numbness derealization.”

I had always wobbled shakily around the geographic centers which gave my family its own eclectic identity: France, Beirut, Vienna, Canada, Japan, Miami…

In a way, Paris had always been my shadow city – a place more abstract than real. In my head, it – along with all of France – belonged to my very French mother.

Beirut, my own birthplace, also felt like a shadow city. It belonged to my parent’s romance and immense vistas of majestic cedar trees and civil wars. It was in that Beirut apartment, the Casa Blanca, that my family had its very happy, but very short, tenure as a complete unit. After fleeing the civil war, my father died, and my mother began looping our now-triadic unit between the possibilities of France and the United States. Since we left Beirut when I was so young, it is swathed in my own un-remembered memories.

In a way, I was coming to Paris to hypostatize it, to treat something conceptual as if it were real.

I reached for Aciman’s book as I had reached for Paris – in a haphazard way, led by nothing more concrete than intuition – yet I felt like I had landed on it like my birthright. I had come back to my mother’s country as an apologetic American and a lapsed Frenchwoman. I had wanted to create with the fusion of these two adjectives something brilliant, but now that I was here, the traffic between these two adjectives was proving to be more congested than I had anticipated. Hence, these bloggable moments. They are my way of pulling off to the side of the highway to marvel at the collection of city lights before and behind me, becoming more real. Maybe that is what all writing is – a metabolization occurring on the page while the heart is busy looping in between its imagined shadow cities.


thank you, matt, for being such an integral part of my re-membering...

Inter-blog-ual referencing...

in hopes of gently urging back the voice of my favorite blogger, here is a cyber shout-out to marie-hélène who presently finds herself nestled in the middle of the new hampshire snows...in thanks of her constant inspiration...

she and micah are back at the macdowell arts colony for the month to work on their iraq documentary. (and it is to AMERICAN HOSTAGE that the oscar goes to for the best acknowledgment in a recent work of non-fiction "and thanks to the macdowell colony, because no one can hear you scream in the woods.")


as billy strayhorn would say: "always onwards and upwards."

mh: as you write history in your cabin by the fire, know that all my admiration and love is dancing around you in celebration...

Letter to N.Y. by Elizabeth Bishop
For Louise Crane

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so teribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

--Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.