Goodbye, California. Hello, California.

Big moves are on the way, but I’ll leave that for the next posting. In the meantime, the following story is my goodbye letter to my former co-workers at the Center for Digital Storytelling. In thinking about leaving I wasn’t sure what to say really; So often the experiences in our lives don’t have any conclusions at all. The best I could do then was paint a picture of what my last experience in California was like and assume those reading it know that my current experience has been much, much different.

Until I have the time to talk more about what my future path entails, the screenshot below marks where I’ll be moving to in August.

Potter Valley, California

A thank you. And a final story (for now).

The twin towers fell only a month-and-a-half after I moved in with Farshid, and on that sunny September morning I awoke him to the same news that my panicked mother had just called to tell me.

I threw open the sliding plywood door that separated our rooms, looked down at his sleeping, unaware face, and said something to the effect that a plane had just crashed into the Trade Center in New York City.

Farshid shot out of his sheetless, queen-sized bed that occupied most of the living room, and had the television on in an instant. It was still tuned to CNN from the previous night since he would spend every evening taking in the reports from Iraq and wondering about the survival of his family––a family he had left behind nearly 30 years before––and then we watched through the lens of a shaky camera the second, blurred plane bury itself into the other tower. Our eyes strained to comprehend the early morning images, and our voices, sunken into the depths of our stomachs, trailed miles behind us. The sound that spilled from Farshid, however, was a breathless and guttural moan that all but made up for the deafening silence coming from the terrified journalists reporting from the safety of their studios.

Until that day, Farshid would talk to his family once every few months via a secret 1-800 phone number he had established when he first moved to the States. That one number was the only way his family could call him without being discovered by Saddam Hussein’s government.

—————————————–

In the classroom later that morning, it didn’t seem like anything had changed. It was as though the madness of that day only existed inside of our apartment. Students weren’t talking about NY. They were talking about weekend surfing, or drinking, or nothing at all.The instructor came in and took a tally of the number of students who knew what the Trade Towers were: less than five out of 20. One student asked if the towers were in Paris, or was it London? The instructor informed everybody of the severity of the issue and dismissed class for the rest of the week.

When I came back home, Farshid was right where I left him, sitting upright in bed with his strong back and brilliant white hair pressing against the wall. He was sobbing. His oversized muscle shirt was pulled over his knees, and his eyes were painfully and hopelessly glued to the television.

After that day, Farshid crumbled. His 1-800 number connecting him to Iraq was disconnected just days after the attack, and any possibilities for contact with his family evaporated. He knew the US would retaliate against who ever was responsible, and he knew Baghdad would be the first to be hit. He also knew that he would be profiled and watched by the United States government simply because he was from the region.Farshid would spend hours of every day trying to reconnect with his family. He needed to send them money, he’d say, but his accounts were frozen, his phone was tapped, his car was followed. The white nylon shades in the living room were always pulled down as far as they could go, exposing the naked wooden cylinder at the top and the pullstring touching the dusty baseboard heater at the bottom. The phone would ring and go straight to answering machine. If I called during the day to check-in and see if there was any new news, I would announce myself and plead with him to answer, knowing that he was just inches away, with eyes staring at the news reports on the television but his ears sharply tuned to my words. But rarely would he pick up the phone.

As the days grew darker with the coming of winter’s rainy season, and the nylon shades began to collect a uniform layer of dust quietly streaked by a stray, curious fingerprint pulling the curled lip of shade away from the window, my tenure at college came to an end.

——————————————

From behind the espresso machine, on most mornings I’d watch the earliest layers of light catch the edges of night-darkened cars passing-by outside, a silhouette of mountains highlighted in their windows.  5:00 AM commuters to LA were common, and I relied on them as a visual reminder to transition the shop’s pre-dawn drum n’ bass ambiance to a more coffee-friendly jazz station. By sunrise, Hollywood’s sunglasses and suits outweighed the Street’s split-soled shoes and rotting teeth. The end of the graveyard shift left me unsettled as I drank my first cup of morning coffee. The day would be just beginning, but in hazy stretches of the 48-hour cycle, there was little distinction between what was appropriately known as day and night. Then it would be time for class, and I would try my hardest to stay awake and take notes. Three and a half months into my first semester I decided to stop going after I voluntarily slept through my midterms.

I awoke nearly two days later to find that Farshid had covered all the exterior surfaces within our apartment with plastic wrap. Cabinets, door handles, faucets, the remote controls, the telephone, the handles of pots and pans, stove knobs and even the white nylon curtain’s pullstring was hastily slathered in a thick layer of thin and wrinkly plastic. It didn’t take long for the wrappings to accumulate countless, tacky folds of oily grime. But once the plastic wrap was applied, it never was changed. It soon turned from transparent to tan. A few days later, Farshid banned shoes in the apartment when he heard on the news that they were responsible for 88% of household infections. And in case my bare feet carried anything else that would endanger his health, he constructed a path of brown paper bags taped together lengthwise that led from the front door through the living room into my bedroom.

Farshid and I lived in that space for nearly nine months together until I learned from our Super that the rent for the entire apartment was $670, and of that I was paying $500 plus utilities.

Within days of finding out that I was paying for our life together in that disgusting little one-window apartment that smelled of liver drippings and gym shorts, I quit my job at the coffee shop, packed up my car, popped two Adderall, and arrived in Ithaca 2 days later like a dog with my tail between my legs.

I vowed never to return to California––that god-awful state––and its 4 AM meth-addict coffee drinkers, its flaccid plastic wrap furnishings, its surf-talk, and its endless, endless days filled with blue skies, black hearts and sheer insanity.

———————————–

Here I am again, nearly eight years later, and this time I’m staying here.

Thank you, Center for Digital Storytelling, for everything. California ain’t so bad, and you guys made it a whole lot better.

-Patrick

Enduring sounds mired in memory: Two audio landscapes.

What does it mean to confront the physical manifestations of our memories?

The following audio pieces, produced in 2007 and 2008 for my college honors thesis, emphasize ambient and environmental sounds throughout the narratives while also addressing questions of identity, creativity, grief, and patterned behavior. There were several goals of the project:

––To compose personal narratives, or stories, that explored my past as a way to bring about a catharsis while also creating an engaging piece of text.

––To emphasize the ambient sounds of those places I was concerned with.

––To reveal the intricacies of place and memory.

Silent City:

Falling in Love with a Memory:

The Promise of Asylum at Dilmun Hill Farm.

I remember pressing all of my weight into the door and sliding it open, slowly moving its casters along the rusty tracks. The interior of Blair Barn was covered in dust, awakened from winter’s dormant days and lit by the March sun. Scattered feathers. Stale droppings. A pile of delicate bones flitted across the floorboards. Faded photographs of dirt-smudged students with smiling faces were pinned to one wall, and hand-painted signs proclaiming “Dilmun Hill Student Farm!” leaned against another. Towards the back of the barn where the light was out of reach, two couches were piled high with raincoats and shovels still caked with mud from last October’s final harvest.

When I stepped into the barn for that first time and encountered each of those suspended memories, I wondered about the narratives that were threaded into them––the stories they carried, and the ones they left behind. What had compelled those people to work at Dilmun Hill? And what did they find once they got there? I imagined seeing my own picture pinned to the wall, one narrative among many, contributing to a greater story that we all could be a part of––a story that says, this is a place, and this is who we have been.

My own story of Dilmun Hill was influenced by my upbringing in Ithaca, and my family’s business: a small breakfast diner that primarily catered to students. I remember when I was five-years-old, walking through the dining room and wondering about so many of those customers with their backward caps and baggy sweatshirts, noting how different they looked from the steel-toed truck drivers that drank from bottomless cups of coffee and talked local politics with my father. I would listen to my parents’ conversations at the end of the day while we were closing up, and learn that Cornell with all of its hungry mouths to feed was what kept us in business. Then we’d mop the kitchen and vacuum the dining room. Make sure the tables were set with clean ashtrays and freshly filled jelly bowls. We’d turn off the fan in the office, the radio at the counter, and the neon signs on the wall. Then one of my parents would set the alarm and we’d make a mad dash for the door, trying to get out before we set it off and ended up calling the cops on ourselves. Pull the door tight. Turn the key. Double check.

Drive home to Enfield.

Eat. Sleep. Mend.

Do it again tomorrow.

Nearly two decades later, with the diner long-since closed, I eventually became one of those same Cornell students whose nascent pistons help to keep Ithaca spinning. My identity as a dependent, local resident changed the day I received my acceptance letter in the mail. I soon became one of them.

Prior to my enrollment at Cornell, I spent a number of years scraping by on eight dollars an hour as an organic farm laborer. I went into it with the idea that a pastoral lifestyle would be the seductive get-away from what was turning into a lifetime in the service industry. It was an alternative to talking politics at the diner. Smarter. Better. It was different. It was progressive. It was everything that I never thought I had growing up. The furlough died quickly though, once I actually started working––my burnt back to the sun, swollen hands weeding as fast as possible. But by the end of that first season my idea of farming as an escape from my past had begun to dissolve. It was true that I wasn’t placing silverware on tables anymore, or scraping runny eggs into the garbage, bleaching coffee cups, or running ashtrays through the dishwasher. But instead, I was digging holes in the ground, planting seeds, turning compost, and spreading horse manure. Then it hit me: For as much as I ached for the experiences and the ensuing lifestyle to be different from everything I really knew growing up, I wasn’t able to say they really were. And when it was time to go home and peel off my boots, my body was sore from hard work and repetition, just like my parents were from their days at the diner.

Halfway through my first semester, I applied for the co-manager position at Dilmun Hill because I wanted to keep working outside and growing food. But in retrospect, there was a greater reason for why I wanted to be at the farm: I believed that I simply didn’t know how to do anything else. The Ivy League left me feeling wholly inadequate. Learning critical discourses in classrooms perforated by the ol’ boy network isn’t something you learn to do when you spend the first 17 years of your life learning to serve Cornell for a living. Working with your hands is, however. So I thought I would feel more at home on the farm. I was going back to what I knew, to the stories I left behind, to all I had.

I remember straddling the edges of an empty furrow, its vanishing point advancing and retreating with the field’s early-morning contours as it cut through the desiccated topsoil. I thrust my shovel into the earth, anchoring it inward with my right foot, pivoting the worn wooden handle in a long arch. Unloading the weighted soil just to the left of the new hole, I mechanically moved down the row another 24 inches to dig again, and again, in preparation for the two hundred tomato plants that lie in a tangled mass on the edge of the field, nearly three weeks overdue for planting.

Eventually the tomatoes prospered, as did most of our crops and experiments that year. We successfully developed a bicycle transportation system as a way to move our produce around Cornell’s campus. We gave dozens of tours. We even hosted a Sustainable Agriculture Education Association conference fieldtrip that prompted participants to think about farm-based curriculums. My co-managers, Ben Scott-Killian and John Crooke were also wonderful companions in the field, as we spent hours planning our beds, sowing seeds, harvesting vegetables, and telling our stories. John, raised on a dairy farm in eastern Pennsylvania, was at the farm by 8 AM and didn’t leave until he completed everything on his daily to-do list. And Ben, a Long Islander born-and-bred, a man of action, inspired us to experiment with new crops and planting methods.

The stories that meant the most to me though were the ones recounted in the fields, the ones about belonging, and what it meant for John and Ben to be away from home. I spent a great deal of time listening to their stories, but I couldn’t speak to Dilmun as a place away from home because I was home, and while I had left many times before, I always returned. Instead, what I could talk about was coming back to Ithaca after leaving so many times, and how I confronted my relationship to this place with its conflicting stories and accumulated memories.

In Dilmun Hill I had seen the promise of asylum, a way to reclaim the past in the very town I had grown up in. I had hoped to find someone who could say, I know why you’re here, and I know what it’s like, too, someone who could help me reverse the guilt and the anger that all-too-often accompanies a break in fidelity. But I never heard those words, nor found the refuge I had originally set out for. Instead, I met dozens of other students who were struggling with their own narratives, who were trellising self-imposed identities and trying to make sense of what Dilmun Hill, and its resonances, meant to them. Students who, with every thrust of a shovel, wanted their photographs pinned to the wall of the barn too.

Photographs by Benjamin Scott-Killian

untitled.

goodbye, ithaca.

I am abandoning Ithaca and leaving behind memories that have yet to be fully articulated, but for now they will be put on pause, a rest between breaths, so that my home and I can both grow without the other.

 

 

 

 

Goodbye, Ithaca. I’ll miss you.

 

 

A poem by Dick Lourie:

What it’s Like Living in Ithaca New York

 

here’s what it’s like:  let’s say you have just had

lunch someplace in Collegetown and you are

on your way to Karl Jaentsch’s garage with

your VW because yesterday

you noticed the brakes were beginning to fade.

 

you start down the Buffalo Street Hill  it

looks like rain now after a sunny morning:

when you slow down for the blinking yellow

light at Stewart Avenue those brakes are

not good

 

and it gets worse   that huge old green

house on the corner of Fountain Place and

then the shiny face of Terrace Hill Apartments flash by you like the past        you feel terror

in your wrists        your stomach        and you know 

those brakes are gone and you won’t be able 

to stop at the red light on Aurora

 

where there are several people leisurely 

crossing your path:  maybe on their way from

the Unitarian Church to Hal’s Delicatessen or they just left their

own apartment to go buy some flowers

or whatever errands we do all day—

in any case there they are and you can’t stop

 

so this is what it’s like: as if your brakes

had failed and you couldn’t avoid running

right through that crowd knocking them all apart—

panic   broken limbs   and screams in the street

 

well the chances are that on any

given day at least one of these people

would be somebody you had quarreled with

last year and hadn’t spoken to since  or  

a friend you had visited only last week

or even the person you once were married to yourself

who would see  

just before the impact        

that it was you

that’s what it’s like living in Ithaca

memories as they move forward.

I remember proclaiming my love for a forgotten someone on the insides of the lighthouse wall; my chest covered in nettles from the gorge; dodging my father’s jealous fist as he drunkenly drove us home one afternoon; beating a garter snake over and over again with a stick until its intestines spilled out from its mouth; waking up in my bed only to find myself cradling the head and torso of the woman next to me, my lover, as I tried to awake from my dream; smoking cigarettes in the bathtub, warm water up to my belly button, praying that my mom couldn’t smell the smoke as she watched TV in the next room; staring at my dog as she barked at me: I stood in the living room and she was tied to a tree in the backyard. 

I remember the “I Heart Houston” bumper sticker that was on the wall above my bunk bed. I remember that no one ever slept in the the bottom bunk; assembling a wall of rocks around my mom’s garden; mowing the lawn without a shirt on when i was in high school and hoping that the beautiful neighbor, a girl down the street, would drive by and notice me; opening the door for an old lady while I was at the diner and her paying me a quarter to do so; holding my dad’s flaccid hand while he was dying.

moving.

A car careens by and leaves smeared apple blossoms in its wake. When they first fell to the ground it looked like snow all over the place – piles of petals sleeping in all the corners of the neighborhood. But now after a good spring day they’re flat and motionless, and soaked in a brine of cold rain and street juice.The cherry lights of the car stop at the intersection and then round the corner in tandem. It’s quiet here for a moment before the neighbor across the street starts up her heavy duty power washer and continues to spray the enamel off of her driveway. 

These scenes are the ones I want to remember before I leave this little town because they are the ones that have inspired me to move away.

There’s something about growing up in the same place for 25 years that makes life too easy to live. I pay cheap rent. I eat efficiently. I know who my friends and family are. And those things are great and I know that I will miss them when I’m gone. I will miss them tremendously. But having those things also affords me the opportunity to think about the “extras,” or those parts of life that easily go unexamined when faced with daily pressures. 

And as I’ve been feeling lost in the “extras,” I look forward to new pressure.

 

When I originally started this post, I wanted it to be about this man:

Al saved my life and he tried to save my father’s. He would spend hours talking to each of us at the counter at the diner. Sometimes my dad and I would talk with him together, but most of the time it was one-on-one.

The last time I saw Al, we were all sitting on a picnic table behind his house on South Hill. It was the day of my high school graduation and my mom and Al had decided to throw me a party.

It was fun while it lasted. We stood around the picnic table and smoked cigarettes and told old stories. It was me, mom, Al, my cousin Joey, JT the cook, and Bernie the magician. Bernie gave me a 2 dollar bill that was folded into the shape of a bow tie. The others gave me cards with cash tucked inside, maybe a pack of smokes too. And then I left the party, my party, and went to hang out with my friends. Soon after I moved to California, and that was the last time I would see Al before he died two years later.

I’m headed back to California now. Al has long since passed but I think about him at least once every couple of days. If it weren’t for him, I probably wouldn’t have ever made it through.

Place as a reflexive process

To experience place is to have an ongoing frame of reference upon which one can gauge the changes that occur in his or her life.They hold a mirror to our actions and the resulting consequences. Places and their events offer us the opportunity to remember who we once were, while also reminding us of who we’re becoming. The former understanding typically is one that invokes sweet memories and a nostalgia of the past; the latter can do just the opposite and frighten us away from re-processing what a place means to us. Much of my own place is grounded in Ithaca and is supplemented by outside experiences that are then brought into the fold.

cantos

The Drudgery of Place

All-to-often the notion of place is only associated with the positive aspects of experience, that is, those experiences that we can fondly remember and look forward to remembering for years to come. However, in creating this blog, my aim is to challenge the romanticized view of place. 

Place is the collision of the past and the present – like a sun-faded knot of police tape that’s still tied to a post on Ithaca’s most famous bridge 5 months after-the-fact. Place is walking over the bridge, and past the tape, everyday – even if that means forgetting about what happened there. Place is then the realization that you forgot about the tape in the first place, and the guilt you feel moments later because you don’t want to lose the memory – the memory of the last place someone you’ll never know, ever saw.

Over time, a sense of place is established through an accumulation of experiences. Sometimes these experiences are not the ones we want to remember later in life. But living in place requires that you face these narratives on a daily basis.