The Americans

My father in Northern Ireland, early 1960's*

Ilana and I began watching the series The Americans yesterday. It's a fantastic show. The acting is subtle and strong, the depictions of spying and undercover life understated and compelling. Ilana told me, after just one episode, that she had had a fantasy that her family was undercover, secret Soviet spies, when she was young. I never knew that, but it makes sense in light of some other fantasies she's shared with me.

Funnily enough, I never had this fantasy, despite the fact that I experienced my mother as a Russophile.

The photo above shows my dad in Northern Ireland. This is the beginning of the era where they drove to Russia together, peeping behind the Iron Curtain in a VW Bug. The story goes that they were taking a co-worker of Dad's back, but of course Mom wanted any reason to head to Russia. She was fluent, with a Master's degree in Russian. I haven't dug deeply enough to see what her personal reaction was to being there (I have letters and whatnot somewhere), but I know she joked that people mistook our father for a young Lenin. The facial hair probably had a lot to do with that.

You can see it even more obviously in this theatrical shot of him from when my parents first met. He was Judge Hawthorne in a production of The Crucible at the time:

My dad as Judge Hawthorne, late 1950's. Pretty Lenin-like, eh?!

What is funny to me is that I grew up in Joseph McCarthy's hometown and burial place - Appleton WI - and my mother was a Russophile. We had Russian books and artefacts all over our house. This was mid-Cold War - 70's, 80's. Not an easy time to be into Russia in midwestern America. My mom was pretty quiet about it - didn't have many close friends in our town anyway. Dad made jokes (and likely actually did both) about pissing on McCarthy's grave and dating one of the Rosenberg's cousins before marrying Mom.

So it wasn't exactly a secret. Then again, there was nothing to hide.

If you are a spy, you cover it all up.
My parents had nothing to hide.

But I didn't grow up in a typical American family. Definitely not average Midwesterners, and certainly not the suburban-like neighbors we had. Mom taught me that New York was the promised land, and even more so, Europe. Travel was to be expected, if not living abroad. They would have raised us in Ireland if there hadn't been "the troubles" at the time. Mom went to a private, very well cultured school in Chicago growing up.

To be a small-town Midwesterner meant things she disdained: well-kept lawns, carpools, gossip and doing your nails. It's hard now to tell what was her own shame in comparing herself or our family to the surrounding community, and what was actual ethic or cultural preference for her. But the ebony bust of Nefertiti on our grand piano and the brass-and-glass Russian tea sets on the side board certainly imply she had other tastes.

Very few objects in The Americans look familiar to me. They don't indulge in Russian culture - the spy KGB couple have to act as if they have no idea what caviar is when they encounter it. And yet, there is something about their lives - trying to get by in the 80's in America as non-Americans - that I get. My parents were Americans by birth, but they didn't act like the other Americans around us. So something feels familiar to me in the way these Americans act. A little bit off. A little bit disjointed.

*I made some revisions to this post after my eldest brother brought some family stories - and definitely some dates! - into better alignment for me.

Chez moi, ou non pas? (My home, or not?)

"Please don't park here - car exit" Paris, 2012

I remember when I was eleven or so, I went on a trip with my brothers to Ohio, for a family friend's wedding. Staying in her apartment, one of a large building that encircled an active courtyard, I recorded the sounds that were so unusual - normal to someone but not to me - and enjoyed listening to them again and again. I wasn't bothered by being "kept awake" - I was curious about this place where even the pace of speech differed.

I could hear people's conversations, something I didn't often overhear in my quiet, "a suburb not attached to a larger city" town of upbringing. I heard basketball and sirens, yelling and people running around. It was what made me most aware I was elsewhere.

So, when I woke from a nap this afternoon in the lovely, light and open fifth story bedroom of my host's place in Paris, I had a similar curiosity. For a moment, I thought I was at home:
I heard skateboards outside, cars shuffling around one another, a cat on my left, cuddled up close.
It could have been home: comfortable, clean, cozy.
Only, it's not.

Going Home?

I dream often of a mixed-together Madison-Appleton. In the dream I am thinking of going home, to the house I have owned in Madison for 6.5 years now, and accidentally, the house I grew up in pops into mind, still as was last I saw the inside of it over 12 years ago. They become one and I can't tell where I am. Bedrooms swap with each other so the home in my dream is a mix of both, and sometimes that becomes lucid dreaming - so lucid even when I am awake I feel as if I never left the dream.

Often it is very painful for me to go to Appleton. I've managed to go home (see, I said it, though I meant to write "there") almost annually for my nephew's birthday party in August, going the long way around on 441 so I don't have to tread too familiar territory from "back then." But of course he and his mother live perilously close to the complex where the first boy I kissed and a few friends after inhabited, the street name for my nephew's house even the same as a costume the boy was wearing when I met the ex-boyfriend.

The only time I can go into the city proper and not lose my shit is when I am shut down, turned off. I went back for a reading with Erika last August and since we went into just a new cafe - Harmony - I hadn't been in before because it's relatively new, and because Erika kept me busy by chatting with me and having her own reactions to going back (she's from the same area), I managed to get through ok. And I let that convince me that going back this time, while I was in the area teaching my online creative writing class to Junior High kids and meeting with them in person in Oshkosh (at the same tech college my dad finished his career out at before dying; though I never visited him at that building, luckily!), would be ok.

I knew a couple of days before it wasn't going to be ok. My guts got wobbly and my skin began to itch. My neck, which has been well-behaved lately because I have consciously worked on my stress and anxiety levels, ratcheted up into a totally frozen spasm. Even with the treat of meeting Helen Boyd on my schedule - she just happens to be living in Appleton at the moment! - I still knew it wasn't going to be pretty. I booked myself a hotel room in Fond du Lac (mis-estimating how far it is from Appleton - it was so much cheaper than Oshkosh, but not worth the extra drive!) with hot tub on premise and made the first leg of the drive just fine.

On the way to Sheboygan, my partner's hometown, we drive through Fond du Lac, so although Schreiner's Restaurant (intersection of 23/41 - Johnson St) is on my map of Fox Valley's loaded memories, I am used to it. But as soon as I began to head up past Oshkosh (pretty neutral place, which is why I took the gig - I don't see myself ever taking one in Appleton, though one of my students lives there and half of them go to school in Kimberly), the world started to get pretty weird.

It's a well-worn analog, but the best I can say is that it's a little like being on LSD, which I did a fair amount of in high school in that town. I saw the exit I used to take to my best friend's house (two exits, depending on if I were coming from north or south) and began to cry, quite spontaneously and with great misery. Everything that I saw, and often things I had forgotten about - AutoTrust on Oneida were I got my first Saab worked on after my mom died, the Walgreen's where Anne worked in High School, Between the Locks where we often had post-show food and drink - carried a whole world that would open up quickly, flash itself to me, then disappear.

It was an experience like this I had coming over the darkened N. Oneida bridge, catching myself peering high over my steering wheel for the Appleton "skyline" in which the two worlds - Madison, coming over John Nolen going North; Appleton, coming south over the Skyline Bridge crossing the Fox River - merged. The flash was like a living dream, two consciousnesses and a couple of subconsciousnesses, for good measure. I jerked the wheel without trying and then caught myself again and the tears came anew.

Once inside the cafe I was ok - I knew that would be the case and told myself as much as soon as the bridge bit passed. Even after that, going to Pat's Tap, a familiar place, I could handle myself ok. Heid's Music, Avenue Jewelry Shop - lots of the same places remained along that stretch, but I was settled in, returned to my skin, awake and out of the dream of then, thoroughly in the present with Helen.

My apologies to Appletonians whom I would quite like to see - this was an experimental visit and as you can see it was a bit tender, to say the least. Seeing a new face helped a lot; let's hope I can see old faces in the future and have that ground me, too.

I was exhausted come Friday afternoon, driving into the sunset (ugh) after teaching the kids in Oshkosh. But when I turned that last corner - avoiding the John Nolen Bridge, not needing a flashback - around Pug Mahones and into my driveway, I felt a relief and deep belief that the trip did help to settle a couple of things for sure - THIS is my home, even if that WAS, and in a certain sense, always will be; a first lover, the first kiss, those people don't ever stop being your firsts. But this is my home now. The cats and Dylan make sure I know that without a doubt, and I love them for it.