Author: Jeannine Ouellette

My thirteen-year-old daughter Sophie is a dyed-in-the-wool lifelong vegetarian, occasional vegan, and budding animal rights activist. I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that as a result of this latter interest she’d be the butt of a lot of jokes in her lifetime, but she found out on her own not long ago when she joined the PETA Street Team and discovered a section of the organization’s website devoted to “come backs” for miscellaneous insults she might encounter.

The thing about animal rights is that the topic draws criticism not only from the people who would prefer to wear fur in peace, but also from the leftiest of lefties, who get infuriated over people raising a ruckus about factory farming and cruel shampoo when the world is plagued by war, homelessness, child abuse, and environmental devastation.

I know that buying free-range eggs, in the whole scope of planetary problems, is a rather small drop in the bucket. But I’m quietly thrilled that my daughter is expressing a commitment to and a passion for something with more substance than lipgloss. There are more than enough issues out there for everyone, after all, and involvement with one often leads to another. For example, she just finished reading A Civil Action, the real-life legal thriller about the toxic waste dumping in Woburn, Massachusetts. She loved it, despite (and because of) having to swallow a bitter pill of indignation over the omnipotence of corporate giants and the fallibility of our justice system.

I myself converted to vegetarianism because, put simply, I could. With almost no effort, I am able to do something that’s better for the planet, that eliminates the possibility of contributing to unethical livestock practices, all the doing something that’s healthy for me. So many other things I should do, but I can’t or I don’t, but vegetarianism is just so easy I can’t turn down the potential good karma it represents.

The day I went vegetarian still sticks in my mind. It wasn’t long after the ice had gone out on North Center Lake, and the blinding spring sun bounced off the water and flooded through the west windows of our old Victorian house. I was upstairs folding laundry while baby Sophie helped by pulling the tidy stacks off the couch when I wasn’t looking. Somewhere in the middle of this tiresome game, my attention turned to the television in the other room. I caught a short snippet of a PBS documentary showing a man drinking warm blood from the neck of a freshly beheaded snake, and I said, “That’s it.”

I can see now that my reasoning was pretty loose, and I also recall feeling pretty sheepish about subsisting primarily on bread and noodles for the first couple of meatless years (“For vegetarians, we don’t seem to eat very many vegetables,” I remember saying). I didn’t care for tofu back then, and couldn’t stand legumes. I’d grown up on hamburgers, tuna fish, and hot dish, and it took years to orient my palate toward broader horizons.

Meanwhile, we decided to raise Sophie vegetarian, and her siblings, too, as they came along. Once in a while, people would prod us about what might happen when our kids got a little older. “Aren’t you worried that once they have the chance they’re going to go off the deep end—you know, gorge themselves on hot dogs and Big Macs?”
In truth, I wasn’t worried at all. I figured that eventually they’d have to make their own choice anyway, and what they ate when they came of age would have little bearing on me. As it happened, when their dad and I split up, he married an omnivore and gave up vegetarianism. Perfect opportunity for the kids to start scarfing down sausage and buffalo wings. But the years have unwound and they haven’t chosen to do so. At thirteen, eleven, and eight, they’re wholehearted herbivores, and for reasons of their own.

Which, as I said, can sometimes be cause for humor, intended or not. Sophie was at the mall recently, celebrating a friend’s birthday. All of the girls ordered Asian at the food court. Sophie was the only one who didn’t get chicken, and she had to explain to one of the girls who didn’t know her that she’s a vegetarian, has been her whole life. “Really?” asked the girl, with sincerity, concern, and an extended fork. “Would you like to try my chicken?”

Days before the anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, a car bomb desecrated a five-story hotel in Baghdad, killing seventeen people and wounding at least forty. No matter what the complex politics of this act, the truth is that somebody did it because they hate somebody else.

I teach my fourth-graders over and over: Don’t hate people. These kids are so good-hearted, I think they’re really getting it. Then somebody calls somebody else a fatso, and that kid calls the other kid stupid. And one tells me that the other one hates him, and then the other one starts to cry. And I know these kids: one really is afraid of being a fatso, and the other really is afraid of being stupid, and they’re both wounded and angry, and they’re both good kids. Now they’ve got to sort it out and forgive each other, or else the anger festers and turns hard. So I help them listen to each other, and then we start again.

I have yet to find a faster route, a more drastic means of teaching human decency and acceptance. But others have tried. On April 5, 1968, the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Jane Elliott tried. That morning, in the tiny, all-white, all-Christian town of Riceville, Iowa, the third-grade teacher threw out her lesson plans and walked into her classroom with a terrible, powerful idea for one of the most memorable and controversial classroom experiments in American education: the brown-eyed/blue-eyed exercise.
Elliott had talked about discrimination countless times, but still her students carried the persistent assumptions of their time and place—a place without a black person in sight, but with plenty of negative stereotypes anyway. She suggested that it might be fun to divide the class for two days into groups based on eye color; they would pretend that one group was better than the other on the first day, then switch roles on the second. “Would you like to do that?” she asked the class cheerfully. “Yes! Yes!” they chorused, hands raised dutifully in the air.

Elliott explained the rules. Being on top meant five minutes’ extra recess, second helpings at lunch, always getting in line first, and lots of praise and compliments from the teacher. Being on the bottom meant not being allowed to use the drinking fountain (“Brown-eyed children will have to use paper cups, of course”), shorter recesses, no seconds at lunch (“You know those brown-eyeds will take too much”), and constant put-downs from Mrs. Elliott. Inferiors also had to wear cloth collars so there would be no mistaking one sort of person for another.

Elliott watched her normally kind, cooperative class turn nasty within fifteen minutes. Name-calling and fights erupted. Inferior children turned in poor schoolwork. Superior children offered Elliott advice about how to keep the inferior children in line, such as placing the yardstick within reach at all times.
Elliott hated the immediate effects of her eye-color exercise, but believed that it got through in a way nothing else had. She repeated it year after year; today, she tours the globe teaching it to adults, while teachers everywhere have repeated it with students across the grades.

In 1970, ABC News produced Eye of the Storm, a documentary showing Elliott conducting her exercise with her third-grade class. In 1985, Frontline’s “A Class Divided” documented a 1984 mini-reunion of those third-graders, now speaking as adults about the positive effects of Elliot’s lesson. One woman recounts with a potent freshness the hatred she felt for Mrs. Elliott during the experience.

“A Class Divided” is one of the most requested programs in Frontline’s twenty-year history. “I absolutely hate this exercise,” Elliott told Frontline in a 2002 interview. “But the worst of it is that it is as necessary today as it was in 1968.”
I understand why people laud Elliott and her work. But still, I just don’t know. I watch the expression on a small girl’s face some thirty years ago as Mrs. Elliott points out, “Laurie is not ready yet… What color are Laurie’s eyes? Yes, Laurie is a brown-eyed. You’ll notice we spend a lot of time waiting for brown-eyed people.” The camera zooms in on Laurie’s face collapsing. I cringe.

Teaching is inefficient, muddy work. But with all due respect, I cannot imagine doing the brown-eyed/blue-eyed exercise with young children. I’m bound to the challenge of teaching them not to hate without manipulating their capacity to hate in the process. Can children understand discrimination, oppression, or violence without experiencing them for themselves? I think they can, I really think they can. And it is we who must teach them.

Sleeping birds are vulnerable. This is why the lucky ones flock by the tens of thousands to roost for the night on the low, gnarled branches of the mangrove trees that flourish in the back bay waters of Estero Island, Florida, where I just spent a week with Jon and our kids.

In these quiet, tidal waters, masses of entangled leaves, boughs, and trunks spring out of the sea itself—there’s no ground at all above water. On the landless Bird Island, some fifteen thousand birds gather at dusk to nod off in peace. No ground, no predators. These birds are fearless for the night. How I envy those birds on Bird Island. The romance of it makes me shudder: What would my life look like if I erased all predators?

Oh Lord, I’d have my work cut out for me. Obviously, at this very moment, I’d eradicate my proclivity to sun rash (an unfortunate ailment I’ve passed along, much to her horror, to my elder daughter). Without sun rash, I could enjoy a week at the beach without red blisters, ice soaks, antihistamines, cortisone, calamine, and Desitin ointment.

What is sun rash, anyway, my daughter wants to know as her hands and feet swell and itch painfully with small blisters and under-the-skin bleeding. Is it some sort of allergy? Indeed, it is, known medically as the exotic-sounding “polymorphous light eruption.” When I was little, my mom used to call it “heat rash,” a term decidedly less flattering than either sun rash or polymorphous light eruption. Heat rash sounds oddly private, and vaguely unclean. We girls will take our sun rash, no matter how gruesome, to any form of “heat rash,” thank you. But if we had the chance to be as free of menaces as the birds on Bird Island, then we’d banish sun rash, and all other rashes for that matter.

There are other things I’d ditch faster, though, come to think of it. Based on today’s mail offerings, I’d erase the mean people from the law firm that handled my divorce almost four years ago—the ones who now send unpleasant letters regarding the obscene amount of money I still owe them and the inadequacy of my regular monthly payments. Maybe all bills could be eliminated.

But first I would erase my son’s melancholy for all things dead and gone: his first house, friends who’ve moved away, his homemade cardboard mailbox that I threw to the floor and broke (it still hurts to recall the snapping sound) in a sleep-deprived fit of frustration when he was three years old, and his several deceased pets, including Popsicle the parakeet who dropped dead while my son was traveling, adding shock and guilt to his inevitable heartbreak. I would get rid of it all, and more, until he was a free eleven-year-old boy, alight on a mangrove branch with his blond head tucked under a sturdy wing.

Though I imagine the melancholy could wait until I’d done away with assaults. The boys who jumped out at my friend and me in a haunted house twenty summers ago, grabbing us and tearing the buttons from our shirts, bruising our wrists, scaring us senseless before the next person who’d bought a ticket for fear stumbled down the darkened hallway. The crazed men who’ve assaulted so many women I know. The stepfather nicknamed Mafia by his friends, not enemies, who picked up my sister by her long straight hair. All assaults would be erased on my Bird Island.

And how about psychic assaults, those haunting bad memories and humiliations? I’d can them. The time my friend and writing colleague called from Knoxville to say our editor at Simon and Schuster had received our manuscript and was demanding a total rewrite. “She hated it,” drawled my friend. “Just hated it.”

It’s exhausting, this process of elimination. It’s not the same as feeling somewhere in your ancient psyche that the light is waning, and taking wing to a certain spot far out in the water where you know you will rest easy for the night, safe, fearless.

So I throw the mail in the mail basket and carry my daughter’s blanket up to her lofted bed. I tuck it in around the edges, smooth it out. I lie down with her while she reads Caps for Sale. A spray of freckles has emerged on the tan skin across the bridge of her nose (unlike her sister, she does not get sun rash). I run through all of the kids in my mind, their faces, their quirks. Who needs what, who’s doing okay, who’s struggling. Eventually, they all sleep.

Sleeping children are vulnerable. There is no Bird Island in sight, and only flawed parents to keep them safe. Let us rise to it, even if barely. That’s ultimately all I ask. That’s my real Bird Island.

What does it mean if you have a dream about flying through the air strapped to a toilet? Dare I ask? How could I not?

Since ancient Mesopotamia, where dreams were first recorded, people have meandered the path of wonder in search of meaning in dreams. Dreams have inspired music, literature, mythology, political decisions, and scientific advances. Einstein was spurred toward his theory of relativity by the memory of a childhood dream.

Somehow, I don’t think my recent experience has potential on that scale. In the dream, I was with my sister in a bright New York coffee shop. We were having some sort of flat-bread sandwich, and I was marveling at how pretty and strange she looked in the poufy 1950s housedress that she had apparently modified to suit her expanding middle. I excused myself to find the restroom, and that’s when the surprises kicked in.

It turned out the bathroom didn’t have any stalls, just an extraordinary selection of unusual toilets. As I wandered about, trying to decide which toilet to use, the room grew and shifted, becoming something along the lines of an enormous warehouse with toilets in every shape, size, and color. It was hard to commit to a commode, but finally, I did. I chose one that sat like a throne atop a ten-foot pyramid of stairs. Slowly, I climbed. In the dream, the fact that the toilet had a seatbelt didn’t sound any alarms. But it should have. Because as soon as I’d slipped my pants down (glancing furtively toward the door the whole time) and belted myself in, the toilet propelled itself from its high perch and swung forward and down and up again in a wide, thrilling arc through the bright open air of the warehouse. I felt awkward about my pants being down, and peeing was out of the question, but the ride itself was enchanting.

Carl Jung and other dream researchers have agreed that flying dreams are about ambition and achievement, while a swing as a dream symbol suggests issues hanging in the balance that can be made to swing in your favor if you are patient and cautious. Toilets, I’ve learned, are widely acknowledged to symbolize purification and self-renewal. Public restrooms with no stalls, on the other hand, can indicate frustration about not getting enough privacy. And public nakedness might point to an experience of embarrassment or vulnerability. That’s a lot of material from one strange little dream.

But there’s probably even more to it than that, because many dream researchers believe that through dreaming we access a certain collective unconscious, and that’s why our dreams might be considered products of a certain universal symbology.

Kelly Bulkeley is a theological scholar, author, and researcher who started an interesting study in 1996. He gathered dream reports from college undergrads of all political persuasions and ultimately compared the dreams of twenty-eight highly conservative people to those of twenty-eight highly liberal people, with men and women equally represented.

At an academic conference in the summer of 2001, Bulkeley presented his findings, with the disqualifier that his sample was way too small to be conclusive. But still, it was interesting. People on the right had more nightmares, more dreams in which they lacked power, and more lifelike dreams: “Female rights were especially anxious about family relationships, and male rights had dreams almost devoid of girlfriends,” said Bulkeley. Meanwhile, lefties had fewer nightmares and more dreams of good fortune, personal power, bizarre elements, and, among the males, an “unusually high” number of female characters.

Bulkeley’s findings (much to his amused surprise) were snatched up by the national media, and political partisans on both sides spun the issue, despite Bulkeley’s disclaimer about the sample size. How could they resist? Terry McAuliffe, Democratic National Committee chairman, quipped, “If George W. Bush were the leader of my party, I’d have trouble sleeping at night, too.” “What do you expect after eight years of William Jefferson Clinton?” retorted Kevin Sheridan of the Republican National Committee.

However we spin or dismiss our dreams during the waking hours, the significance of dreams is too well established to wave away. Some people can even will their own dreams, after much disciplined practice. Which means that you, too, could take a ride through Manhattan on a flying toilet, if only you set your mind to it.

Maybe Governor Pawlenty’s idea of reinstating the death penalty in Minnesota will spur young people into some political interest, if not action. My stepdaughter was certainly disturbed when her research on the issue turned up the facts of the last Minnesotan execution in 1906, which didn’t go well. The hangman miscalculated the necessary calibration between the length of rope and the height of the scaffold, and William Williams’s feet struck the floor. Deputy sheriffs grabbed the rope and hoisted Williams up for almost fifteen minutes until the convicted murderer died by strangulation.

We all have our mile markers along the path of political ignition, some stranger than others. Do you remember the night Bill Clinton trounced George Bush? God knows, I do. That was the same night my fourteen-year-old foster daughter Erica snapped the braces off her teeth with pliers. But I didn’t discover that until the next morning.

On the night of the election, I was twenty-four years old. I had a colicky newborn in arm and a toddler at my feet. My chic, academic sister called from her cramped apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side as soon as victory was assured. She said something triumphant about how this election was really going to show the old boys club where they could go, now that old Georgie was a paltry single-term weenie. I stood barefoot in my nineteenth-century farm kitchen and let myself inflate like a balloon with hope like I hadn’t known since my own political awakening at the age of sixteen.

It was 1984, and I was an avid supporter of the Mondale-Ferraro ticket. I couldn’t vote yet, but I could stay up late into the night poring over my mother’s assigned college reading on the horrors of the nuclear world and systemic poverty. I could leaflet the neighborhood for my candidates and watch every televised debate. Ferraro was tough and smart and even pretty, with her arched brows and wide smile. It enraged me how the other side made fun of her. Mondale was sage and fatherly and good and honest. Of course they would win.

I was overly righteous and awkward as an adolescent politico, but I deserved some credit for my sincerity, which was so intense that it frequently ignited the wick afloat in my vast reservoir of ignorance and naiveté.

Not much had changed by 1992, when my team finally won for the first time. I crept into our foster daughter’s bedroom to herald the news. Except Erica wasn’t in her bed, or her room. She wasn’t anywhere in the house. She had climbed out her window and run off down some rural road to hang out in a friend’s basement plucking off her orthodontia, one tooth at a time.

That wasn’t the last disturbing episode from Erica, who remained a part of our family for years even as her primary residence kept changing as she transferred from one intensive therapeutic setting to the next, while she stayed with us on weekends. Eventually she ended up in my hometown of Duluth, where we continued to visit her until she emancipated herself from the system to become an exotic dancer, or at least that’s what she told me during one of our last conversations. I was not surprised, based on all that I knew about the abuses Erica had racked up at the hands of her toothless father, her disinterested mother, and a string of others who had swung through her life.

I think of Erica often, especially during election years. That girl really had something. She was smart, talented, and profoundly wounded. She had every reason to be consumed by rage, but she wasn’t. She was self-destructive, yes, but also unabashedly enthusiastic. She was resilient. She walked with grace and operated out of kindness and intuition an astonishing amount of the time. Sometimes I see someone in a car or standing in line at a store and I think it’s Erica, but then I realize she’s not sixteen anymore. She’d be closer to the age I was when I stood in as her mother. Chances are, I wouldn’t even recognize her, even though I can still picture the shape of her small white teeth that stayed straight even after she pried her braces off herself. Truth is, I saw something admirable in Erica’s do-it-yourself dentistry, violent though it was. Erica didn’t waste a lot of time feeling sorry for herself and she had the brains and the guts to make her own solutions when necessary. No doubt she’d have had a knack for politics, and I sure do hope she’s out there somewhere, getting by just fine, and raising a little hell in all the right places.

My teenage daughter hurt my feelings the other day, and this bizarre thing happened. The light in the room shifted, there was a faint static, and a tremor ran through my body. Suddenly, I was channeling my brother-in-law’s Jewish mother (odd, since she is still alive and well in Louisville).
“Sophie,” I heard myself lament. “Can’t you see this from my perspective? I carried you, I gave birth to you, I nursed you and took you to work with me, I breastfed you during meetings in front of rowdy young sales guys, and then I quit the job to raise you—which was not always a cake walk, I might add.”

You see, Sophie was easily the most stubborn child in world history. “How did this happen?” I remember thinking to myself back then, during the car ride home after a particularly harrowing tantrum at Grandma’s. “We’re reading all the best parenting books, we’re raising her with love, patience, and respect, we’re doing everything right, and still, she’s plotting to destroy us.”

Sophie, three years old and unnervingly silent in the back seat, read my thought and promptly pulled out a tuft of her baby brother’s hair. “I’m gonna win this one,” she screamed, as her father pulled the car over and I unclenched her fist from the baby’s wispy golden locks, one chubby finger at a time.

Even Sophie remembers some of the highlights of those years. But she insists her vexing tendency to pull out her brother’s hair was not entirely her fault. “I always had a reason. And besides, it comes out very easily,” she explained recently. “It’s very poorly rooted.”

Only during the aftermath of my marriage to Sophie’s father did I gain insight into my daughter’s dogged resolve to take life by the throat and shake what she wants out of it. I gleaned this insight through basic (if belated) observation of my own and my ex-husband’s behavior. If I had wanted a docile, easygoing child, her father and I should have had personality transplants. Of course, I never really wanted an easy child. I loved the feisty one I got as if she were an aching piece of my own heart, fragile and exposed, pounding mightily, forever seeking shelter within the safe cavity of my ribs.

Last week I had coffee with my ex-husband. Those who know us will undoubtedly be stunned to hear this. Three and a half years after our separation, we are still not the “let’s chat over espresso and biscotti” sort of ex-spouses. We are the “isn’t it nice that we’re so flexible and reasonable with each other, but you make one false move and I’ll make you regret it forever” kind of ex-spouses. We’re both Aries, and evidently, Aries-to-Aries matrimony does not make for tidy divorce.

“Your mistake,” I told Sophie’s father as we sipped bad coffee and took turns picking off each other’s scabs, “was that you grossly underestimated my obstinacy.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I’ve always known full well how obstinate you are. We’re two of the most tenacious SOBs on the planet.” Yes, thank you very much. How else would we have gotten so much done in our eleven-year marriage? Two postgraduate degrees (his), two book deals (mine), and three kids plus several foster children in four different houses (ours), just for starters. It takes a stubborn streak to get things done. But to mix it with conflict is to concoct one bitter, obstreperous cocktail. We have this perverse and unreasonable resistance to control. Under the wrong circumstances, we behave like poorly trained cairn terriers, who must stupidly insist on having everything be our own idea. We like to win more than we like to admit among more evolved company.

My ex-husband and I had arranged this coffee talk in hopes of further improving the way we work things out on behalf of our kids. And toward that end, we didn’t get all that far. Instead, we sidetracked ourselves by reminiscing about all the horrible things we’d said and done to each other during our breakup. He even shared a few gruesome ideas he hadn’t managed to carry out. We both laughed. Only as our meeting began to close in on itself—bound by the expectations of those who waited at home, worrying—did we gingerly reveal our ugliest scars and most enduring regrets. All the while making sure to point out repeatedly how much more perfect and idyllic our lives are now. Hey, what did you expect? Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.

The thing I miss most about living in the country is the very thing I eventually came to hate about it: the long snake of black tar between one place and another, the empty distances, the endless driving. Oh, my God, how I miss the driving.

I miss going for days and days without leaving the house in winter, little babies, creaky floors, nowhere to go, no one to see. Four walls, big window, bare branches, frozen lake.

I miss stuffing those babies into snowsuits and then stuffing those snowsuits into car seats, clicking them in, and going, going, nowhere, for hours. Sleeping children, warm car, barren county roads. I can’t remember anymore the times it didn’t work. The times the baby boy screamed instead of slept, the times the spirited girl, that untamed horse, pulled his hair or bit him. The one time we skidded on black ice right into the ditch as a storm kicked up on the last afternoon of December. I don’t care about those times anymore now that we’ve survived and nobody kept screaming forever, or biting forever. They stopped those things, and it all turned out okay, and now I miss the driving the way I remember it.

The car I hated the most is the one I now recall so fondly. Big Blue, we named it, because it was a boat, and it was blue. It was handed down from the in-laws for the eighteen hundred dollars it took to replace the transmission. We paid over time for this beast, large and unstylish with that dirty patch of duct tape on the taillight (smashed as it sat innocently in the small-town church parking lot-smashed, it would seem, by a fellow parishioner who drove away from the damage without so much as an apology note, can you imagine?). But I can’t remember the duct tape anymore, or the way driving that car made me feel like a cross between a grandpa and an unwed teenage mother. That’s not the way I remember Big Blue. It’s the heft of it that I recall, the solid slam of the door, the quiet way it hummed at high speeds-no shaking or whining the way these small tin boxes do. Big Blue had a way of rocking gently as it coasted that made me understand and appreciate the likening of large cars to watercraft. It’s a compliment, really, to call a car a boat. I loved Big Blue, even though I was very, very happy when it died.

What I miss most about those country afternoons in Big Blue is the way it came to feel so normal to drive a long, long way to nowhere. Sometimes I took the children to the thrift store at the intersection that still poses as a town called Almelund. I’d carry my son on my hip while chasing my daughter around the store. But the chase was made easier by the woman who owned the shop-her strange appearance entranced my curious little girl. The shopkeeper always wore floor-length skirts with aprons, and frilly blouses with high collars, small buttons, and puffed sleeves. She looked like Ma Ingalls on Sunday. I don’t know why she dressed this way, because I never asked her. But she fit in pretty well with her surroundings. The air in the shop was dense with must, and the place was crammed floor to ceiling with broken antiques and unusual junk. I always, out of politeness, bought some tiny thing, usually a ten-cent plastic toy to keep my hyper mare occupied for the long drive home.

But just as often as we stopped, we kept going, further east into Wisconsin, or north toward Pine City, children sleeping, motor whirring, road unrolling behind us like the world’s longest runner, steel gray and utterly inhospitable, except for its openness. The only choices to be made were trivial ones: Turn left or right? Exit now or later? Turn around or keep on driving?

I miss the driving because I’ll never have it again. The country is behind me, the country with its right-wing politics and greasy-spoon food and frigid lake full of milfoil and disappointment. The country with its endless county roads crisscrossing each other and looping back on themselves, as senseless and difficult to decipher as the lines of an open palm. So many roads, so few destinations.
My children don’t wear snowsuits anymore, or ride in car seats, or remember much about Big Blue. They have places to go with specific routes to appointed stops that leave little room for rumination. The city is full of destinations, but short on empty stretches of tar, of time, of space, where a person can travel hundreds of miles without ever leaving. I don’t ever want to drive that way again, so desperately and without purpose, but still I miss it more than I can say.