Music is Disco’s calling and to show he is a Jewish woman at heart he barks his head off and prances around in the back seat. I turn down the music. “It’s O.K., Disco,” my mom says scratching the sweet spot under his chin. He then calmly rests his head on my mom’s left shoulder and closes his eyes as we barrel through the flatlands of Nebraska.
• What happens if you just have the kit and not the caboodle?
• No nagging feeling ever really goes away.
• Is Prince Matchabelli really a prince?
• What if Elvis sang “Oops, I did it again”?
• You’re only as good as your worst photo.
We’ve traveled far, 1,500 miles, with an overnight in Bismarck, North Dakota during which Disco expertly performs the job no one gave him: to bark at all suspicious noises including his own farting. When he finally does sleep, it’s on my mom’s bed nestled up against her back. I feel betrayed, then pathetic, and finally, petty. It dawns on me I am in the middle of east bumble headed to pot-smoking, computer-geekville without a clue as to what I hope to do when I get there.
Eckhart Tolle’s words drone on:
…the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory…arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation… Both are illusions.
In my panic I start to cry. After a few moments of quiet crying, I kick it up a notch to get some attention. Disco notices first because, well, it’s his job. Then my mom wakes up. I blow my nose.
“Are you O.K.?” she asks.
“Not really,” I say.
“What’s the matter?”
“Idon’tknowhatI’mdowhatthehellamIIdon’tIdon’tknoww hereI’mgoingandIandIandI…” and in the middle of all that I feel a nudge. It’s my mom with her ticket (pillow) pushing me over as she crawls into bed beside me. She kisses my cheek, holds my hands and tells me it’s going to be ok. Disco jumps up and paralyzes my left leg which is his way of saying, “Maybe, yes, maybe, no, but what are you going to do about it now?”
Epilogue: my mom liked the dog so much she got herself a cat.
Book author and humorist Laurie Frankel knows pain is the root of all comedy and is thrilled her life is so damn funny. When not penning grocery store haiku or telling it like it is, this former East Coaster can be found whooping it up in southern California. You can reach her at www.laurieslovelogic.com
ELIZABETH FONSECA
The Ravioli Man
He had visions of dessert.
IF YOU ARE A YOUNG WOMAN TRAVELING ALONE, THERE is one thing you can count on: lots of attention. Sometimes, you might even want it.
On my first solo backpacking trip, I learned this truism. It’s the joy of solo travel: You meet many more people. It’s the bane of solo travel. You meet many more people.
I met the Ravioli Man through another guy I’ll call Hans, a curly-haired blond Swiss with sensuous lips whom I met one day in the Tuileries. We got to walking, talking, I was wary but curious. He looked striking in white, Good Humoresque attire. My hotel, I said, was too expensive. Turns out he knew a place. Still fool enough to listen to beguiling Swiss strangers, I packed my backpack, said adieu to Laurent the desk clerk, and followed the ice-cream man to another part of Paris.
Remember that it was summer, and there were few inexpensive rooms at the inn. We emerged from the Metro into a Dickensian scene of stump-legged beggars and belles with brusque tones, ambiguous makeup, and rather less ambiguous track lines on their arms. But the room in the Hotel Splendide was cheap and clean, and the tobacco-stained fingers of the night were encroaching, so I thought wistfully of Laurent, said yes to the room and no to the ice-cream man who, after much kissing and cajoling (his), went away.
I prided myself on my backpacker thriftiness, my conquest of a statuesque, limpid-eyed Swiss, my giddy placement near the gritty underworld of the City of Light, and went in search of libation. The bread-cheese-water combo was beginning to wear, doubly so by the certain knowledge of rich creams and sauces stirred to silky smoothness behind the café curtains of each brasserie—but I did have that Swiss Army knife I had to keep in fighting trim. So I wended my way back through the thickening cluster of ravaged women and narrowly avoided baguette theft to arrive safely at my haven.
And that’s when things got interesting.
No sooner had I laid out my repast on the tiny metal table in my room than came a knock on my door. In my faulty French and state of high suspicion, I asked who was there. Lo, my concierge, concerned about the state of the water supply in my room (I had a wee sink). Not yet the seasoned traveler, I let him in. With an elaborate display of lingua franca gestures and his and my broken French (he appearing to be of Middle Eastern stock), I deduced that he felt the trickle of water spilling from my faucet insufficient. It’s nothing, I said, go away. He went. Exhausted from swatting away amorous Swiss gents and lurid junkies, I was relieved.
I sat down to the chunk of cheese and was just then breaking my crust of bread when I heard another knock. Years of training demanded that I answer. It was my concierge-cum-handyman, overly interested in the state of my sink. Elaborate gestures, elaborate protests. Of course I had broken all the rules of logic and Hotel Splendide decorum by actually answering that knock, so the man sat on the rickety chair and eyed my dinner. Now he was concerned about my nutrition, and I about getting him and his roving eyes out, not to mention pondering how my discreet friend Laurent in the Hotel-Out-of-the-Backpacker’s-Budget was doing right about then. After much operatic negotiation and repeated insistence that, no, I didn’t want to share a meal with him, he went away.
Ah, peace! The cheese was pungent, the water a tonic, the bread perfectly crusty and my book a brace. I’d just shifted to a nice long stretch on the bed when—the knock again. It pains me to write this, but I answered. Only this time (the process of learning is slow and fraught with danger) I opened the door but a crack, blocking it with my shoulder in ready position to slam it shut. There was my concierge, a plate of steaming ravioli in his hand. He wanted to come in. Finally, I found the voice to be emphatic. No! I said, and slammed the door in his face. From the other side I heard, in a bewildered voice, this time in English, “But I am not Iranian!”
I went to sleep with my bed pulled in front of the flimsy door, wondering at the myriad implications of his one English phrase. I woke laughing, and just a short time later I kicked the dust of the Hotel Splendide off my shoes and shouldered my backpack, on to other adventures.
Elizabeth Fonseca has taught English in various locations around the world, including the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. Her interests include travel, poetry, and cross-cultural communication. Overcoming her fear of ravioli, she has moved on to pen restaurant reviews and write for the Abu Dhabi Explorer guidebook.
COLLEEN FRIESEN
The Education of a Guinea Pig
How do you say “My backside hurts” in Spanish?
IT’S KINDA HARD TO LOOK CASUAL WHEN YOU’RE PACKING a fluorescent orange Ziploc with a radioactive symbol on it labeled DANGER-BIOHAZARD-Specimen Bag. And how do you get rid of the bubblegum-purple medical gloves, the little cup and the wooden stool collection spoon when you’re sharing a bathroom with a Guatemalan family and their only wastebasket has no lid?
It had all sounded so simple while I was safely at home and surfing the web.The banner proclaimed, “FREE SPANISH LESSONS!!!” I just had to be a guinea pig in a Johns Hopkins University clinical trial for a vaccine against travelers diarrhea. I would merely agree to drink a slippery-salty concoction made up of killed E. coli bacteria and cholera. As long as I promised to check in with their nurses to provide blood, and “other” samples, they’d pay for three weeks of Spanish classes and a homestay in Antigua, Guatemala.
My less frugal friends (O.K., everyone I talked to) seemed incapable of recognizing the beauty of this offer. What’s not to like? My twenty-year-old stepson was more astute than most. “Let me get this straight.” He leaned forward f
or clarification. “They’re paying you for your shit.” Well yes, that’s another way to put it.
Five A.M. I descend from the heavens into the bedlam of Guatemala City. I spot a taxi driver holding a battered piece of cardboard with a pretty close approximation of my name. I jump in his cab and am immediately wracked by doubt. I may be off the plane but now I’m really flying. Pedestrians are duly warned by blasting honks. Careening suddenly seems like such an evocative and completely right word. Riding shotgun also takes on a new meaning as we pass a Coca-Cola truck with an armed guard hanging from its side. There are bullet holes in the door panel. My taxi’s cutoff seatbelts aren’t doing much to reassure me. What is this some sort of cosmic test? Look God, no protection!
We turn off the highway and bounce along the cobbled roads down wall-lined avenidas. The taxi dives deeper into the maze of empty streets. How do I know it’s me he’s supposed to have in this cab? Where the hell are we? My mind is in that suspended frame I go to whenever I’m overwhelmed. I feel I have as much substance as a clay vase and about as many thoughts. Jesus just stares at me from his perch on the dash.
And then quite suddenly, my driver is gone and I’m alone in the cool dawn.The air is fragrant with the smell of damp stone. The guidebook warnings of muggings, thieves and murder are clamoring for attention in my feverish brain. I am standing in front of a crumbling wall facing the street that looks like every other crumbling wall facing the street. I buzz at various doors, hoping that the quivering jelly feeling in my belly is strictly from fear instead of the bacterial soup I drank last week. It already feels like forever ago but that’s probably because it was on a different planet.
A battered wood door creaks open revealing a grinning woman.The little Spanish I know flies out of my head. All I remember is the not particularly useful phrase, “Dos margaritas, por favor. “Apparently, I’ve been on one too many all-inclusive holidays.
Vilma and Roberto are in their twenties with three children under the age of five. The entire family sleeps in one ten-by-ten room. This frees the two extra rooms for student rentals.The living room has nothing in it but a television and various pictures of a suffering Jesus and a much happier looking Mickey Mouse. The kitchen consists of a sink, one cupboard, stove, fridge, and blender. The table has five chairs. I am to sit with Anna, the other student. Every meal, while Vilma serves us, the family waits in their room either with Roberto or with their older cousin Rosa. We eat as fast as we can as we hear the children being shushed as they wait for their turn.
Vilma stands for hours at the large sink under the corrugated tin roof of her courtyard. She scrubs and rinses and wrings out diapers, shirts, little dresses and pants. In the evening she stands in the kitchen with a makeshift ironing board made of towels piled on the table. Each item emerges with crisp edges.
A couple times a week, I furtively head to the Johns Hopkins unit with my deposit. It’s only a little cup in a baggie, although the baggie is festooned with that nuclear symbol, but my pack feels transparent. I can’t wait to dump it in their little bar fridge with its magnificent poop magnet collection. I may not be able to conjugate all my verbos but I’m learning a new lingo. I tick off the box that says my stool was fully formed. An episode is described as “when the stool takes on the form of the cup.” Sort of Dairy Queen style.
I’m delivering my goods and Johns Hopkins duly delivers theirs. Every day my free lessons help my struggling Spanish. I’m not quite ready for any discussions on existentialism, but I’m able to ask and mostly comprehend directions. So, on the weekends I board the chicken buses and head off to explore this world of light and shadow.
In the hotels I discover the same facilities that exist in my Monday to Friday home.That is, the agua caliente dial on the showerhead is more to inspire hope than actual hot water. Every day, proving the adage of hope springing eternal, I force the dial over to the hottest setting, trying not to touch the exposed wires. I then attempt to wash my hair without actually letting the cold trickle touch my head. I slime the wet around on my clammy skin, using the vile little pack towel that I promise to toss before I head home. I pull on my boring beige travel garb onto my damp skin. Khaki never looked so bland until I landed in a country where the women are dressed in direct competition with the parrots.
The last week of school my teacher Maria, who like me is female and in her forties, asks me to write about my typical day in Canada. I write that I like to have a hot bath every night. She stops me after that sentence.
“¿Agua caliente? Every night? You can lie down in water up to here?” She brushes back her blue-black glossy hair and holds her hand to her neck, her café au lait hand against the rainbow embroidery of her blouse.
“Do you like baths?” I ask, running my broken fingernails through my grubby hair. I am wishing desperately for Jabon de San Simon. The soap that promised to wash away my sins. Unfortunately, it is at the bottom of my pack, useless against my current ignorance.
“I don’t know. I’ve never had one…but it sounds very nice.”
Colleen Friesen lives on the seaside in Sechelt, B.C. with her husband, their hyperactive twelve-year-old nephew, and a continuously shedding and occasionally incontinent Dalmatian named Mary-Margaret. Her work has appeared in A Woman’s Asia, Whose Panties Are These? as well as a variety of magazines, newspapers, and websites.
We entered a clearing that was all ahhhh. To our right, long narrow falls hurried over dark volcanic rock then thundered into a pool the shape of a half-moon.To our left, misty wisps floated over the hot springs that filled rocky crevices. Jungle-smothered cliffs gave way to sky blue.
Paradise’s only fault? Other tourists. No problem, we’d wait them out. As the last French syllables were fading down the trail, we stripped and plunged into the pool. Billions of tingles shot through us as we dog-paddled towards the falls for a cold pummeling. Icy, we scrambled for the nearest steamy spring. Hot, cold, hot, cold: again and again, until all muscles were the consistency of an éclair’s creamy insides.Then we collapsed neck deep each in our own bubbling crevice. Shadows lengthened. We reminded ourselves how fast dark follows sunset. We would agree it was time to go then sink back into our private pools and reveries. Strange noises entered my consciousness, so I rolled my head towards the trail, and…
Oh. My. Word. Dozens of soldiers were charging towards us. Black backs glistening as they ripped off their shirts. Black butts were next as shouting and calling to each other, they unzipped their pants.The man nearest me was buck naked—and laughing.
Guadeloupe’s army advanced and not even the trusty “au secours” entered my head. My body leapt from torpor to torpedo in under ten seconds, streaking toward Karen and clothes. Adrenaline pumping, shirttails flying, and sneakers squishing we hurtled halfway down the trail. Then, bent over, hands on knees we gulped first for breath, giggles mounting to guffaws as it penetrated—we be big buffoons.
—Kate Crawford, “Uncovered in Guadeloupe”
LAURIE Mc ANDISH KING
Keys to the Outback
They were hanging there the whole time.
“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU LEFT THEM THERE,” JIM MUTTERED as I squeezed the handle and pulled hard for a third time.
“What do you mean, you can’t believe it? You can see them as well as I can. You’re not going blind, are you?” The keys were clearly visible in the ignition. People were beginning to stare.
He walked around to my side of the car. “I knew this would happen if I let you drive.”
“It has nothing to do with my driving.” I circled to the passenger side to try that handle again. “My driving was fine. It’s not as though you’ve never locked keys in the car.” I wasn’t entirely certain he ever had, but was willing to gamble on it to make my point. I wanted desperately to defend myself, because I suspected my mistake would have serious consequences.
We had rented our Holden wagon in Darwin, 300 miles away. At first, the man at the A1 Car Rental company tried to give us an old beater: no ra
dio, one broken window, lots of dents, the whole thing covered in powdery red dust. “Yir goin’ tuh Katherine? This’s yir car, mate!”
The salesman looked at us incredulously when we complained. After some verbal wrangling, my husband, who is large and can be quite persuasive, managed to get us a late model station wagon with intact windows and a weak-but-functioning air conditioner.
Knowing we were in for long expanses of empty highway, we stopped at the edge of town to top off the fuel tank. “What’s the speed limit, anyway?” Jim asked the attendant.
“What kin ya do, mate?”
“I said, ‘What’s the speed limit on the highway to Katherine?’” Jim repeated himself cheerfully. He meets strangers easily.
“What kin ya do?”
We hadn’t anticipated any troubles communicating with the locals on our trip Down Under, but that had been naïve. Their accents were difficult to understand, the rhyming slang was impossible to decipher, and the wry Aussie sense of humor kept me off balance. I had become resigned to the fact that I was clueless much of the time, but Jim liked to maintain a sense of control.
About an hour out of Darwin we stopped to take each other’s picture standing next to what the Aussies call “anthills.” These aren’t mere bumps of soft dirt, like American anthills. They are towering structures, sometimes as much as twenty feet high, built by termites out of their own saliva and feces.The resulting substance is so hard that the anthills were ground up and used instead of concrete to make airplane runways during World War II. Or so the Aussies said, and I believed them.
The instant we climbed out of the car, flies covered us both. Flies! Making themselves at home on my bare arms, crawling up my legs, doing their best to creep into my eyes and mouth. I tried desperately to shoo them away, but the flies were not deterred; they crawled over us with impunity. Billions of them live there—maybe trillions. I read that there are more than 650 separate species in Australia.The air was hot—easily 105 degrees Fahrenheit—and the land stretched out flat and dusty, with sparse vegetation and even fewer animals. I couldn’t imagine how such a lifeless expanse could possibly support those buzzing hordes. What did they eat, anyway, when there were no tourists around?
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