Dispatches | Page 37

Jim’s Way

July 4, 2012 Dispatches

We — my uncles Jim and Larry, my cousin Lindsay, and I — went to Scotland on the sort of family business that is not business at all but is, rather, an excuse for a vacation. We are Scottish by an unremarkable fraction, but because that branch of family history is well documented, because we have things like a plaid and a crest, our unremarkable fraction can feel an awful lot like half.

Painting Chairs

June 27, 2012 Dispatches

By REBECCA CHACE

I have been painting chairs this summer. It is my second summer visiting my boyfriend at his country house in the Catskills, though it’s not only my boyfriend’s house. The house belongs to him and his wife. I am here because his wife is dead. She passed away two and a half years ago, and her death sometimes feels as blunt and brutal as the undeniable fact that the phrase “passed away” is trying to soften. I didn’t know her, but she was a powerful woman who died too young and left behind an adolescent son and a husband of twenty years.

Between Two Places

June 20, 2012 Dispatches

By CRALAN KELDER

Driving with LLL Louise Landes Levi from Amsterdam up to Riva San Vitale in the Alps to visit Franco’s place at the Franco Beltrametti foundation:

Moonstone

June 13, 2012 Dispatches

By ROLF ALBERT YNGVE

Three days of dirty weather and everyone saw it on their way home from work. It was dumped onto the Silver Strand State Beach parking lot— the keel naked and scabbed with barnacles, the mast canted. Someone said the park maintenance people must have hauled it up out of the surf. It looked like a forklift had punched two holes in the hull.

Inside Passage

June 6, 2012 Dispatches

By RACHEL MORGENSTERN-CLARREN

Like the forearms
of the fishermen,

Port Arthur Girl

May 30, 2012 Dispatches

By CAROL ALEXANDER

Down around Port Arthur the tumbleweed, that mobile diaspore,
flings its seeds in a race with time, dying in a pool of rain or oil.
And what they have is a lot of sky and oil tanks coddling crude
and girls in much more underwear than they wear way up North.
Mining land is deeply scarred and raw, the gravel pits alien,
like lunar landscapes or the bank where Charon plies his trade.
The young ones necking in their cars, the ugly bars, showed you
the rocking road away from that stripped coastal town.

Reunion

May 23, 2012 Dispatches

By MAURA CANDELA

The dogs were the first to greet us. Two came trotting into the parking lot of the Masseria. A farm manor on a mountaintop, the Masseria was built into the cliff of tufa, the sandstone of the mountains that ring the Valley of the Jato. Like one of Michelangelo’s Captives struggling to be free of marble encasement, the house—with all its many additions—seemed caught in the act of struggling to free itself of the mountain.

First Apartment Near St. Mary’s T Stop

May 16, 2012 Dispatches

By BRETT FOSTER

I recollect at last those first few weeks
on Beacon Street: broke newlyweds, we hid
our finite riches in a little room,
a basement studio whose cost seemed gruesome.
Fresh from Corpus Christi, you learned to speak
a northern language, talk of “quarters” wide-
mouthed like a Chowdahead’s wicked idiom.

The Blue Pearl

May 9, 2012 Dispatches

By NOREEN MCAULIFFE

On the stern of the Sharp, Mendee and I process fish diets. She slings a camouflage-green burbot over her thigh and slices its belly from tail to gills so the intestines spill out. Finding the stomach, she chops it off and splits it open, then hands it to me. It is rubbery and limp, like a popped balloon. I hold it over a petri dish and squirt water into the pink ridges so that the burbot’s last meal pours into the dish. This one had a few snails. The last one had three plump silver grayling stretching it taut, which we gutted in turn to see what they had eaten. This is how ecologists reconstruct a food web: unlocking who’s inside whom, like opening a Russian nesting doll.

Five Things About Mexico City (for Cinco de Mayo)

May 2, 2012 Dispatches

By LYNNE WEISS

1) Five Names: Before it was destroyed by Cortez, the Aztec city that stood where Mexico City is today was called 1) Tenochtitlan. In the late 18th century the city was known as the 2) City of Palaces because of the grand mansions built by wealthy nobles and merchants. Today it is 3) Ciudad de Mexico or, as the capital of the nation, the 4) Distrito Federal, or 5) Mexico, D.F. (like Washington, DC).