Posts

DMV Encounters

On my sixteenth birthday, I learned that the DMV is the great American equalizer. It was a sunny day with a breeze, but inside the DMV I suddenly felt suffocated, as if my senses were under attack. I pulled a number and sat down in one of the few empty plastic chairs. Sitting only a few feet away from the counter, I had a front-row seat to everyone’s queries and complaints. People were there to register trailers, renew driver’s licenses, and transfer titles, among other things. We were all there for different reasons, and yet in that small space we found ourselves entangled.

I took in the people around me. To my right, a purposefully presented woman with Tory Burch flats and a Louis Vuitton bag. To my left, a gentleman who clearly had less fortunate circumstances. The Russian immigrant getting a driver’s license for the first time. The young Black woman with a beaming smile who asked me where I got my number in what I thought might be a West African accent. The father who held his son’s hand as it shook and fidgeted wildly. I guess everyone has to go to the DMV, I thought.

After about half an hour of waiting, with much more time left to go, an older woman walked in and sat down next to me. She was small, with dark gray hair pulled back into a neat bun. After sitting briefly in silence, we got to talking.

We talked about politics, Ukraine, and gay rights. We talked, from two vastly different demographic viewpoints, about what we saw as the good in the world, and what that meant. We talked about how you never know who you might meet at the DMV, and how everyone must end up here at some point; seemingly nobody is exempt from the experience.

As I left, driver’s license in hand, I waved to the woman I met. She stayed on my mind, and I wondered if I stayed on hers. Our connection and conversation reminded me that every person at the DMV that day had entered into a silent pact, an unspoken agreement to maintain peace in this public space often associated only with dread. But on that day, unexpectedly, we each had an opportunity to see life from different perspectives, if only for 134 minutes.

SY JONES, Portland

Is This the Mayor?

I was trying to sleep in, but at 7:30 a.m.
the phone rang.

“Hello?” I mumbled sleepily. 

“Is this the mayor?” 

“Yes?” I was newly appointed, and it was still a shock. 

“Good. There’s a horse loose in my yard.”

“Excuse me?”

“There’s a horse in my yard and I need you to get it out.”

“A horse?”

“Yes, dear, a horse,” my caller said, her voice indignant.

“Okay, tell me where,” I stammered.

I hung up and dialed the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Office. 

“Good morning. This is the mayor of Wheeler.”

“What can I do for you, Madam Mayor?”

“There’s a horse loose here. I need a deputy to come up and get it.” 

“I’m sorry, we don’t have any officers in that area right now.”

“Excuse me?” I replied for the second time.

“All the deputies are in for shift change.”

“How long will it take?”

“At least forty-five minutes,” the dispatcher said. “I thought you had an ordinance banning livestock?”

“We do. Send someone, soon as you can, please.”

As the mayor, this was my responsibility. I did the only thing that occurred to me: I poured a cup of coffee, found a carrot, grabbed a dog leash, and went looking for a runaway horse.

I spotted the horse in the yard just as a pickup drove up. A woman jumped out, grabbed him, and walked him back toward a ruined corral across the street.

As I approached, she blurted out, “I’m sorry. My dogs ate the corral tape.” I noticed two large dogs nearby looking decidedly sheepish.

“You know you’re not supposed to stable horses in city limits.”

“I know. I’ll have him out of here this morning.”

I didn’t see any need to push the point, and headed back to my car just as a deputy pulled up. “That was a quick forty-five minutes,”
I commented.

“A call-out made me late for shift change. Everything all right?”

“Yeah, the owner just got back.”

He hesitated before asking, “You know there’s an ordinance prohibiting livestock, right?”

“So I’ve heard.”

Then my morning caller came out of her house. “Thank goodness that thing is out of my garden,” she said. “Don’t you know there is an ordinance prohibiting horses here?”

STEVIE STEPHENS BURDEN, Wheeler

Locating Us

It is summer 2022 and my debut in the City of Roses. I am on my way to Black Futures Farm to meet the founders, who invited me to support the programming elements of their work. When I arrive at the address, I park on the street across from the fields of Brentwood Park, as instructed, and take in the suburban surroundings as I get out of my car and step into the dry heat. Allured by the luscious greenery, I start to walk toward a large metal gate with a hand-painted sign just behind it. I stroll farther to the right, toward a vibrant garden of fruiting vegetables in front of an obtuse building. Just as my thoughts wander as to where Black people are farming around here, someone calls out to me. I turn and immediately know it is one of the farmers. He says that everyone gets confused their first time and leads the way to a much smaller gate, hardly noticeable on the other side of the flowering shrubs. We walk down a wood-chip path past several community plots filled with various foods and ornamentals. I hear laughter and see familiar faces, an air of liberation enfolding me, as I step into this Black-centered farming and place-making space on public land.

It is summer 2024, in my last days of service to Black Futures Farm. I am at the farm, weeding in the herb box as I wait for local Black organizers who are hosting an event this afternoon. I dig my soiled fingers into my overalls and pull out my phone to check for notifications. I tell the herbs I’ll be right back and start walking past the fig trees, collards, and grapevines, toward the gate. Sure enough, as I approach what I now know to be laurels and rhododendrons, there are two people with wagons and boxes heading toward the large metal gate and the Portland Public Schools building that neighbors us. I call out and wave them in my direction. After setting a bright orange cone in front of the small gate for only their guests to notice, I show them the way to the farm. At the threshold, I express the blessing of guiding more of our people to this sacred space. Recalling the news of my departure, one of the organizers leans in and tenderly affirms, “And because of you, we’ll always know the way.”

NIA HARRIS, Portland

Farewell to the Feeds

I finally deleted Instagram. It was my last holdout; I left Facebook and the platform I will always call Twitter months ago. In September, I will be thirty-five years old. I’ve spent two-thirds of my life and nearly a quarter of a century on social media, living on the cusp of public and private.

Although my late-’80s birthday makes me a middle-of-the-road millennial, my childhood looked a lot like Gen Z’s. I grew up online. As a chubby kid who garnered straight As silently from the back of the classroom, I excelled in the world of instant messages. On AIM and ICQ, I had time to edit my words and the leeway to render them in fuchsia Papyrus lettering on a purple background. My first sexual experiences happened not under the bleachers, but in AOL chat rooms. Every time I get on an airplane, if I’ve got a seat number like 19F, I am transported back to this time—to the ubiquitous question “a/s/l?” and my fabricated tweenage answers.

When Internet 1.0 blog platforms like Xanga and LiveJournal—where my adolescent presence is probably still discoverable—gave rise to MySpace, it seemed like a natural evolution. We didn’t know the feeds were going to eat the world. The early crew of hyper-online kids was self-selecting for the carbuncular and quiet, for whom the
freedom of anonymity—the dissolution of the body in favor of the avatar—felt like relief. Then came platforms that demanded your given name and a real-life photo. Then came the flood. 

As I wend my way toward middle age, I am, for the first time since I was twelve, living my life without recording it before it happens. I am no longer incessantly curating the senseless fabric of being—or my calendar—to prioritize the most like-worthy photo op. (As a personal essayist with a memoir in the works, I’m still always looking over my own shoulder, always narrating. Perhaps my internet upbringing is part of why I’ve made it my work to synthesize and make public my private experience.)

Going social media-free might seem, to some, like a sequestering. But I feel myself becoming a realer person. The people around me—physically around me—see my life not as a series of carefully frozen flashes, but as resplendent and authentic: a moving mess, ineffable and impermanent.

JAMIE CATTANACH, Portland

Outspoken

My daughter Candela’s first language is Spanish, though she has been exposed to English as well since she was a baby. When we moved to Oregon, she started kindergarten and stopped speaking Spanish to me. I thought she felt that having an accent was bad; she avoided talking about it.

Last year, at my younger daughter’s birthday party, I was talking about bilingualism with the father of one of her friends. Candela overheard us and said, “I hated ESL classes—they suck.” This was the first time she’d said anything about the topic. I guess talking to a stranger was easier for her. I asked her if she could put the words to paper. I felt terribly sad when I read what she wrote. Here it is:

I was born in Santa Cruz, California, in 2012. My first language was Spanish, and soon after came English. At age five, I moved to Bend and started kindergarten at High Lakes Elementary School. The first week there I started ESL. The teacher I had was fun! But it made me feel different, and not in a good way. I missed out on making new friends and having fun with my classmates, for being taken to another classroom with another teacher to do the same things that I was learning in my real class, or things that I already knew. Every day it would make me feel more and more stupid. I thought that there was something wrong with me, that I had a learning disability. I did not need to be there when I was just like all the other kids. I talked like everyone else, acted like everyone else, and was just as smart as everyone else, but that didn’t matter.

The next year I was still in the program, but kids started to exclude me because they thought there was something wrong with me, and I did too. I had friends, but I still felt alone. After I finished first grade, I stopped speaking Spanish. I didn’t want to leave the classroom that I enjoyed being a part of anymore.

I was ashamed of speaking Spanish. 

ESL made me think I was stupid, ever since I started, and now because of it, doubting myself has become a habit that I can’t stop. I’m not fully recovered, and I don’t think I ever will be. Ever since I finished the ESL program, I have suffered. And I feel so bad for all the other students who have been going through that for even longer.

CRISTINA MORALES, Bend

Shadow Play

There is a certain allure to a window shade. I am thinking of a particular window shade in my new house, which is cream-colored and probably from Ikea. When I first moved in, I had to adjust to its shut nature, because I never draw my window shades. I like to leave little to the imagination of my neighbors. My housemates are private people, or so they say, and prefer to keep it shut. What I don’t tell them is that the status of the window shade speaks to strangers. In their tenderest moments, these sweet boys I’ve come to know let shadows tell their story to the passersby. Their masculinity is manufactured in the obstruction of these moments, as shadows distort to mimic the movies. Window shades are for private people, but privacy is actually the willingness to be perceived as you are not.

NALEDI WIBERG, Portland

Devil at the Door

I was born into a small, deeply religious community in Egypt, attending a stern Apostolic church that emphasized traditional roles for women. This religion determined what my life would look like before I had any say in it. I was expected to serve my brothers until marriage, when I would then have to serve my husband and our family. I grew up longing for more, but because I was forbidden from watching TV or engaging with anyone outside of our faith, it never occurred to me that there was more to be had. It took most of my life to convince my family to allow me to get my high school diploma. Aside from school and home, I would attend church every week, where I would witness my family members speak about the devil and sometimes perform exorcisms. I held a deep, lingering fear of the devil. I did not realize how ingrained this fear was until I moved to the United States.

My life took a dramatic turn after I married. I gave birth to my first daughter and was soon pregnant with my second. My husband and I agreed that we did not want our daughters to face the same sexism and abuse I did. In 2000, we received our green cards and moved to Oregon. I had a challenging time adapting to my new environment. I was unfamiliar with the language and the culture, and I felt a profound sense of loneliness and anxiety.

I gave birth to my second daughter on October 25, 2000. A few days later, I heard a knock on my door. After a moment of hesitation, I convinced myself to answer. It was as if the spirit of fear was standing in front of me, draped all in black, with long nails and a gruesome mask. The dark figure began chanting something I was not familiar with: “Trick or treat!” I imagined that was their prayer to the devil. I felt paralyzed with fear. I barricaded the door and called my husband in a panic. He explained that Halloween is a harmless American tradition, and I was not in any danger. 

Eventually, my husband and I grew comfortable in our new world. We began to embrace American traditions while combining them with our religion. We allowed our children to participate in Halloween by dressing as angels. Today, my girls love to celebrate Halloween. And for me, each year, Halloween acts as a reminder of my journey. 

JESSICA HANNA, Gresham

Last Trip to the Warm Spring

It is Tuesday, and I am thinking about getting ready: going over lists, making plans, imagining what this final mission will be like.

For decades, we traveled to the warm spring together, a place that became an ever-larger part of our history as the years flew by. In the beginning, there were only rumors and cryptic clues gleaned from people who knew the remote backcountry. When we found this magical place, we were determined not to spread the mythology, but to keep it to ourselves as much as we could. It became our private place hidden on the vast public lands, the land that belongs to all of us, to all of you. 

This was our playground, a place where we could lie in the pool, lean back against the hand-stacked rock wall, and let the not-quite-hot water rush over us, cleansing the desert dust from our bodies and the cobwebs from our minds. A place where we could take in the glorious canyon vista and talk of our life together. A place where we made love in the most private way in this most public of places. And now, on this final journey, a place where the final share of her ashes will wash over the rocks, cascading down the waterfall and into the grand river below.

Goodness, what a wonderful place. Tomorrow, I will be there.

JOHN MARBLE, Crawfordsville

Tags