texas to minnesota

So, it turns out it takes a long time to get from Texas to Minnesota. Long enough that you can make a thirteen minute video. Making the video kind of gave me someone to talk to for 18 hours which makes me sound crazy, but actually the video helped pass the time. And this morning I put some scraps together. Here you go… just in case you want to watch someone talk to himself.

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coming back to america: expected and unexpected

There are so many parts of reentry to America to talk about, and I’ve started to make two lists. Here’s what I have so far:

Things that are really not surprising at all:

Super Wal-Mart is super terrifying. For two years, I did grocery shopping the Armenian way. I chatted with shopkeepers, had coffee with my bakery ladies, and shook hands with the vegetable man. There were so many things I couldn’t find in Armenia like brown sugar, buffalo wings, or tostada shells. Still, after growing up on America’s industrial food system, it was actually thrilling to know I could make do and that I actually loved food that was good for me.
I went to Guatemala for a summer during college, and when my mom picked me up at the airport at trip’s end, she took me to Wal-Mart to get whatever I wanted. In the orange juice section I had a breakdown. I couldn’t stop talking long enough to breathe. I hyperventilated. I couldn’t take the aisle of cookies, the plethora of tortilla chips, and now how was I supposed to know which of the juices hit highest marks in taste, vitamin content, price, and what if there’s some orange juice criterion I DON’T KNOW ABOUT!?  Consumer culture made me whack-a-doo. This time I saw it coming years away, and when I go in, I actually alternate between wanting to buy out the warehouse and run from the aisles as fast as I can.  Despite being the only game in this small town, I avoid the place as much as possible.

I can pet dogs. Every Peace Corps volunteer in Armenia felt like their town was the worst when it came to aggressive, angry, barking dogs. Every town had its regular strays, and I had to adjust my route to work to avoid the worst ones. I’ve been in Texas a month, and I haven’t seen a stray dog yet. 99% of the dogs I’ve encountered are well-behaved with owners that treat them like best friends. I’ve got my sister’s dog in my lap right now.

I can take a shower whenever I want to. This is privilege, straight up. I can drink the water. I can do laundry or dishes. I can take a hot shower. And if I want to, I can do this all at 3:00 am. It’s the kind of privilege so huge it inspires guilt.

There are some things that have absolutely caught me off guard:

Our silverware is heavy and shiny and beautiful. I know, not the most massive epiphany. Still, my first day back, I was dropping the silverware into the drawer and couldn’t stop from marveling at the beveled edges, the roses on handles, the gleam on the backs of spoons, the weight of each piece in my hands. In Armenia, I bought all my silverware, some twenty peaces for about $3. I can still feel the edge of a fork against my lip. Each dull piece was simply cut from a sheet and warped. I used to think our Texas silverware was old and dingy. And when I arrived here weeks ago, I at first thought my family must have bought an entirely new set of the same things. But no, the silverware here is just really nice.

I love going to the gym. I know you don’t really know me, and I know I’m lookin’ fly. But this bod hasn’t seen a gym since finishing my college credits in phys ed.  However, after knee surgery, and after a general lack of exercise in Armenian culture, I am so happy to be pushing my limits. I curl things and press things and crunch things, and then I bike until start to drip. And while my jogging figure was a spectacle on the roads of Stepanavan, here I am just one in sweaty crowd.

There are hand-mixers. Do you remember how I made a lot of chocolate chip cookies in Armenia. The landfamily loved them, and I can admit to having way to many, what I called, “Baker’s Dozen Dinners,” where dinner was simply a pile of cookies. (Those were long, cold, and lonely winters!) I have a knack for them now, and the other night my family wanted them. So, I got everything together, including a perfect wooden spoon for the mixing. Butter melted, eggs beat, sugar creamy, I had my little sister start adding the flour.
“This is where it gets a little tough.” I chuckled.
“We have a mixer, you know,” my mother said from the dining room.
For a moment I had no idea what she was saying. Literally, the sentence didn’t make sense. Then, brain finally firing at top speed… A MIXER. I remembered what it was, and I flipped out.
This has actually been my first and only reentry freak-out. Over the mixer. That was the trigger, and the monumental privilege that I now experience slammed me in the face. I have a washer and a dryer. I have a dishwashing machine. I have DVR. I have a comfortable bed. And I have a mixer.

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it’s raining

Stop the presses.

No, seriously, I was writing another post, stopped and took a Diet Coke to my dad out in the drive way with raindrops falling on and all around me. RAINDROPS. He left, and I just stood in the driveway for ten minutes, befuddled by all this water from thousands of feet away. I want to go out there again.

I feel like I’m in the Skylark part of the Sarah, Plain & Tall trilogy. Where are you, Glenn Close, Christopher Walken? Let’s clasp hands and dance in the soggy grass!

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texas is too hot

The trees have given up. Really, it’s too hot. They’re over it.

It’s seems like our grass here in Central Texas just won’t grow. The trees can’t take the heat. This branch from a cedar elm was shed in desperation, if trees can experience such a thing. Over 40 days with temperatures on or above 100˚F (40˚C). I have long since melted.

I arrived home to find that over half of my family’s trees have died from oak wilt, and now branches are falling. That feels sad; it feels like something I want to complain about. Then I see something like the video below from a shelter in Mogadishu where 300 families are struggling against famine and social unrest, scraping out lives in bombed out hovels. I think about haves and have-nots. I think about where I left almost a month ago. I still can’t make it all make sense.

I will say this. In this hot, hot place I’ve landed there is kindness and delight and rest. I promise to be sharing more of that soon. Thanks for sticking with me.

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when you return home you notice things

After five days I still haven’t finished unpacking. Armenia feels like a dream I keep trying to sleep my way back to. The world won’t stop spinning long enough for me to get my bearings, but slowly I seem anyway to make my way through the day in this familiar and yet unfamiliar small, Texan hometown of mine.

Here are some of the first things I noticed:

-Hot. So hot. If in the near future you can’t find me, just look around for puddles.

-My sister is tall. She hid from me at the airport, then tapped me on the shoulder mid-other-brother hug. I turned around to see this beautiful, young woman standing where my little sister should have been. Still, goodness if she isn’t the same, bright star I left two years ago, same smile, same laugh. She was just passing by my room and walked in simply for another hug.

-The shiny, heavy silverware. It’s pretty how the end of forks and spoons tapers into leaves and roses, how the edges are rounded, how clearly they reflect my face upside-down. I do the dishes and handle them a little slowly just to look at them.

-The whirring of fans in the morning. In Armenia, my house’s only morning sounds were birds singing outside the window and my breathing. Now I hear the air conditioner and the fan in every occupied room.

-The colors. The dark green of trees, the Arizona Cypress, the Ashe Juniper. The crushed, stalky yellow of dried grass in yards too heat-blanched to give more than some spots of faint green. The blue of pool water. The comforting, deep brown of a cup of Armenian coffee.

-My Texan accent. It is coming back. It is coming back strong

-My Armenian accent. I keep un-aspirating my T’s and saying my vowels funny. This is based on reports from my mother who keeps asking me to repeat things I’m fairly certain I said in plain English (whatever that is).

-My need to kiss. I keep forgetting that a kiss on the cheek is not an American tradition.

-General awe. There are certain times I find myself looking all around with my eyes wide and my jaw open, thinking, “I’m sorry; am I here, like actually HERE, right now?”

Then there’s the new dog, the vertigo, the shiny gym equipment, the sound of tires on paved roads, etc., etc.

There will be more. I wish I had made a similar list in Armenia.

 

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ways running in north armenia is different from running in west texas

For the first time since summer ’08, I ran yesterday.  Back in the late college, early work years I ran.  If I wasn’t running, I was doing yoga, playing racquetball or tennis.  I moved around back then.  I think these days I just creak.

I told myself after leaving West Texas, that I’d run in Panama.  The island wouldn’t let me, demanded instead that I simply lay on the beach and then move to the hammock.  I told myself I’d run in Kolkata.  The anti-American rhetoric blasted from the neighborhood temple wouldn’t let me.  I told myself I’d run in my Peace Corps training village.  My laziness wouldn’t let me.

So finally yesterday, I ran in Armenia.  I have concluded already that running in Armenia is much different from running in America.

Mind you, running from a pursuant such as a fire-breathing bloodhound or a mace-wielding court reporter would likely be the same here as in the good ol’ USA.  Running for recreation your health, that non-descript sort, really is quite different in my VERY LIMITED experience.  I’ll give you what I observed on Day One.

Ways running in North Armenian is different from running in West Texas

1.  Terrain. Back in Texas I lived across the street from a well lit, smooth and even, clearly-marked-by-the-mile running track.  Here in Armenia, I live on a street that is mostly mud.  The parts that aren’t mud are made of puddle.

2. Community Involvement. Back in Texas I got very little recognition for my running.  At most, I would hear the occasional, “Saw you running,” from a friend, possibly a car-horn honk.  Here in Armenia, The American Running is a community event.   Apparently I can contribute to the flexibility of necks here;  I’ve never seen necks stretched so far to see something so insignificant as a guy putting one foot in front of the other.  Granted, I’ve never seen an Armenian run.  Not once.  So one morning when the American comes by at seemingly break-neck speed (what? 5mph?), with a beet red face, huffing like a steam engine, perhaps that’s something to brighten up a calendar with.

I hear reports of village running in which villagers literaly bring the family out to see the runner huff by.  This was expressed by another PCV in the form of a complaint.  I’m hoping that if I generate this kind of community involvement, that perhaps I can get them to cheer for me, maybe even throw flowers!

3. Lack of social elevation. Running in West Texas brings prestige.  I, for one, know that I never ran just to be healthy, and I certainly didn’t run because it was Such A Blast.  I don’t enjoy pushing myself.  I’m not a Mountain Climber kind of guy, more of a Lay In A Field Watching the Clouds Float type, I’d say.  While, “I want to be 80 and able to get around on my own if I can help it,” was my general (and really true) public explanation of my running, I know that I enjoyed the prestige.  I ran because I was then recognized in a new group, an unspoken class: People Who Take Care of Themselves.  I was someone who had Learned From History, someone who’d paid attention to “Supersize Me”, etc., and had taken the noble resolve to make sure I was going to live down America’s larger-than-life stereotype.  I was Taking Care of Myself.

Running in Armenia does not bring prestige.  As an American here, I already stand apart.  Also, no one runs here, as I said, so I’m not joining any kind of zeitgeist by taking to the road in my Nikes.  Yes, I can get recognition for running, but I’ll get the same kind of looks if I stand on the corner juggling hedgehogs.  Neither is really done, and neither really elevates me socially.

4.  Cleaning up. Exercise in America comes with a shower.  That cultural tidbit is rather awkwardly delivered to us starting in Junior High.  However, as you grow older and you can afford your own personal shower, being clean is almost the reward.   Many times I’d get through a hard run thinking, “It’s alright.  Very soon I’ll be fresh and clean, eating a burrito and watching an episode of The Office.”
You may recall my water situation here in Armenia.  My lack of running water means that I either get up before the Lord (you know Jesus be sleepin’ in), or I run in the evening and sleep sticky and smelly.  Yes, I know, I know.  Don’t be lazy.  Plan around it.  But why don’t you consider your commitment to running if YOU could only take a shower during the first chunk of YOUR workday (10am-1pm)?  Imagine that sometimes the water for no reason just doesn’t run out of the spout.  Imagine that not only are you running and showering, but then you are mopping, doing dishes and handwashing all of your laundry.  Yes, I know, people in the world have survived much, much harder routines.  I will be the first to admit that I have eaten from the bourgeois silver platter.  But I know for sure that trying to figure out when I’m going to run based on when I’ll be able to shower next does not make the enterprise more enticing.

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Whine, whine, whine, complain, complain complain.  Really, running yesterday was really nice.  I’m going to go ahead and do it again.  And maybe even some more after that.  Til death do us part, if Running will still have me.

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