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Early Maps
I was the baby of the family, accustomed to being led around by the hand. My reputation lacked direction. At the Jersey Shore one year, my uncle made me lead him to the grocery store, and then the deli counter inside the grocery store. Where was the restaurant where we had made reservations? We were on a spit of sand too narrow to become lost upon.
And after I had led him he would ask me, “How did you get here?” He would make me attempt to name the streets I had walked, the corners I had known, how long it had taken to arrive. I didn’t know. Those maps weren’t mine. Some days the streets had different words to me.
On the mountaintops, the Minoans built sanctuaries in sequence with the rising sun’s equinoxes and particular stars: points they found to be constant, and therefore, significant to their civilization. We look for what is dependable in our landscapes when we do not know what is consistent in ourselves.
I went to elementary school in the woods, I was mostly friends with rabbits and dogs. I went to middle school, the gym teacher made fun of me for not being able to find the cafeteria. “I sure hope you don’t grow up to be a pilot or anything.”
Then it was September, three planes crashed. One in New York, one in a field in Pennsylvania, one in nearby D.C. Los Angeles, where my father was born, felt very far away. The principal came on the…
