3 posts tagged “boise”
I was 18 years old and walking home to my apartment on Franklin Avenue in Boise from work as a waiter at Plush Pippin on State Street. As I zipped along the street, Eric, who was Wendy Belcher's boyfriend (my first boyfriend Jerry and I lived with her), was playing football in the field at Boise High and he saw me passing at shouted out: "The Wall fell down, maaaaaan! Those Germans are freeeeee!"
though i grew up in a small town in idaho, i have long been, and irretrievably become, a city person. as a kid, getting to salt lake city was the "big time" for us--with a good childhood friend i'd sit overlooking benton street overpass (in pocatello) and dream about hopping the train bound for salt lake, the only real city i'd ever experienced first hand. though my family is from LA, it never really felt like part of my existence. we'd go visit now and then, but it felt more like our family's past than any significant influence on our lives. even as a kid when we'd visit my father in minneapolis or washington, d.c., it was always through the back windows of a station wagon (so to speak). those big cities far away were scary to me, dangerous places where people got mugged and grass was forbidden to grow.
but when i was 17, i spent a summer in washington and rode the subway alone into the district (my father's place was in suburban maryland) and felt a jolt of LIFE there like i'd never experienced before. dupont circle with its record shops, georgetown, the monuments, the subway: i loved every single minute of it. after returning to school in idaho, i knew that it was only a matter of time before i could get out and live in a city on my own...
the town i'm from isn't a terrible place. people are down to earth, it's pretty and clean, and if you drive just 20 minutes you can be in the middle of nature. but once i was able to get out, i did. first i moved to boise. i remember feeling amazed that (at the time) i could count nine movie theatres there! NINE! i was fascinated with the idea that you could see a different movie every single night forever and ever. i rented an apartment in an old "mansion" in boise's north end and started my life as (small-time though it was): urbanite. (it was during this time, in fact, that crystal and i became good friends, though she would have a totally different take on that time than i would probably).then, later i moved to seattle and i was hooked: city life was definitely for me. the cafes (i'd sit at a cafe in wallingford and watch people pass for hours), the nightlife, the theatres, the motion, the shops, the lunatics, the buses, the skyscrapers. then i was in LA for a summer and off to asia where i lived in some of the biggest cities in the world (shanghai, hong kong, tokyo).
cities to me represent freedom, and not in an ideological dogmatic sense, but in a real individual way: it's easy to disappear into a city. it's easy to define yourself and bits of your own essence can be collected in every corner, street, and alleyway. i love how the unexpected can suddenly step in front of you in a city: a stray kitten, a weed blooming in a sidewalk crack, a crowded bus careening past dangerously. from bumping into a beautiful tall russian girl on a crowded LA bus along doheny ("eet's ok," she said in her lilting accent, "eets a crowded boos."), to bumping into a former boss from from seattle while walking along nathan road one evening in hong kong, to sitting at cafes in montparnasse all day people-watching and not stirring once, to wandering through the british museum in london with 8 chinese boys under 10. cities put experiences and people in our path that wouldn't come along back home in dodge (or maybe i'm talking about how it would be if i'd stayed in dodge).
cities, like people, each have their own personalities and quirks. cities have a hum that is unlike any other sound: a collection of humans and cars and trains and people and planes flying over head and electrical fields. when i'm back in "nature" now, i am at first excited about it. but maybe i don't quite "get it". i don't like camping, really, though i've done it several times (i don't mind it, either, but to me it has everything to do with WHO you are with...the experience of nature itself for me is rather incidental). i like nature and the woods and mountains, but i just prefer concrete and trees growing on sidewalks and parks with wrought iron gates. some people get to asia and positively freak out when they see the teeming mass of humanity that wanders the streets daily in cities like tokyo or shanghai. but to me it's comforting: all those people represent love affairs ending or beginning, of pain and happiness, of life starting and life ending. it doesn't feel crowded (well, it doesn't usually); it feels liberating and gives me a sense of how important it is to really live and live right. i feel comforted by the miles and miles of nameless streets that span out in every direction in cities, of being in a taxi passing building after building and intersection after intersection, reveling in how anonymous it all is.
the fears that we all have, ironically, are the same: my stepfather hates cities, says he feels claustrophobic, but this is exactly what i feel when i go back to small towns. there is no escape from anything in small places. the limits of life are tangible and all you have to do is get in your car and drive 10 minutes to see them physically.
eileen chang writes in her collection of essays written on water:
I like to listen to city sounds. People more poetic than I listen from their pillows to the sound of rustling pines or the roar of ocean waves, while I can't fall asleep until I hear the sound of streetcars...People who have lived their entire lives amid the bustle of the city do not realize what exactly they cannot do without until they have left. The thoughts of city people unfold across a striped curtain. The pale white stripes are streetcars in motion, moving neatly in parallel, their streams of sound flowing continuously into subconscious strata.(24)
why do some deaths make you feel as if age is creeping up on you?
william styron was such a huge figure in my literary upbringing. even though he hadn't really written much in a long, long time, it still seems so final that he won't ever write anything as beautiful and tragic and numbing as sophie's choice, which is just an amazing novel.
i remember holing myself up in this attic apartment in the north end of boise one thanksgiving weekend maybe 15
years ago. i was going through a very difficult time for personal reasons (a breakup, an impending move, story of my life) and my friend andrea was in phoenix so she asked if i would stay in her apartment while she was gone to look after her cat. for four days i was there, all alone, and i read sophie's choice then: all i did for four days was cook (she had a great kitchen there), take long baths in her clawfoot bathtub, lay on her sofa and in her bed and read read read.
it is such a painful novel, almost too painful, but it was exactly what i needed at that time in my life. its images (and though i like meryl streep, i've never really seen her as sophie in my mind) are still with me all these years later: the creaking old house, the phonograph, the other characters struggling with their own turmoil. it is such a testament to the ability that humans have to get past suffering, to move on even though unspeakable wickedness has been done to them. and it did things that were so new at the time, suggesting that people get into relationships precisely because these relationships make them unhappy--this kind of emotional day to day unhappiness distracts them from the real scars that won't ever heal...
anyway, it's one of my favorite novels.
i read the confessions of nat turner years a few months later, and it, too, was good. it really illustrated how powerless the average slave was in determining his own fate--really put a human face on it. but it felt like too much, like two really draining emotional movies right after another: i just couldn't deal with another novel full of such anguish. when i read nat turner again years later, it worked much better for me (though i know it's pretty criticized in certain academic circles, not least of which because it was written by a white man).
styron was such an icon, one of the only one left of that group of upper crust southern writers who straddled the eras between eudora welty and doctorow. he moved in all those james baldwin (despite being a sharp critic of styron's work) and marlon brando...all those lee strasberg types who wandered around new york city in the 40s and 50s and 60s...man what i would give to have been a part of that....
it's weird that someone i didn't even know (and someone who had not even an inkling of my existence) could loom so large in my mind...i really admired him: his talent, his politics, his life.
rest in peace...
