All posts tagged: Essay

Baltimore Soundscape

By MARIAN CROTTY

 baltimore street

The week of Freddie Gray’s funeral, after the rallies and the marches, after the west side ignites and the camera crews descend upon our city, the helicopters swarm in two clusters—one to the east side and one to the west, a steady thunking all-day-and-night stutter. It’s the sound of tension hovering—a sound that makes people stop on the sidewalks and stare up at the sky.

We live on a busy street of tall old houses between the two sides of the city that are being watched from the air and a couple miles north of the downtown tourist area of glass storefronts and office buildings, where a human wall of police officers and national guard troops stretch along the inner harbor, watching at eye level, men and women holding guns and shields with handfuls of coiled plastic handcuffs attached to their uniforms. We are surrounded by the noise of what’s happening, but we are removed from any sense of risk: we are not afraid of the police; we are not afraid of our neighbors; there is no merchandise being protected by force. It is an exaggerated version of how I often feel in Baltimore—safe but not far from people who do not feel safe.  

Baltimore Soundscape
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The Boarding School Belt

North of the Bible Belt and east of the Borscht Belt lies the Boarding School Belt. Of the 300 or so boarding schools in the U.S., 120 are in the Northeast, what might be called the Eden of American education. You know, that magical place where Andover and Exeter lead inexorably to Yale and Harvard.

The Boarding School Belt
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My Redemption at the Movies

black and white film actors

The last thing I remember about my father was him walking away wearing his camel coat. I remember him from the back, his dark hair escaping from his hat.

It was Christmas evening and it was cold, for Rome at least. He had just accompanied me to a train, which I would take to reach my cousins in Calabria. He was not happy that I was leaving, and would die a few hours later. A stroke, the doctors said.

My Redemption at the Movies
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Chart Showing the Ratio of Church Accommodation to the Population Over 10 Years of Age

colored chart

We were on the small roads that sometimes turn gravel, sometimes dead end, when we found it. This was Vermont, about ten years ago, our first road trip together: a circuit of swimming holes, picnics, and stops for general store ice cream. We passed a series of “Take Back Vermont” signs. Somewhere along the way we came upon the man, who by all appearances seemed to be a Hare Krishna devotee, having a yard sale. It was here in the sunny warm greenness that we found THE PEOPLE’S CYCLOPEDIA OF UNIVERSAL KNOWLEDGE, WITH NUMEROUS APPENDIXES INVALUABLE FOR REFERENCE IN ALL DEPARTMENTS OF INDUSTRIAL LIFE. BROUGHT DOWN TO THE YEAR 1885.

Chart Showing the Ratio of Church Accommodation to the Population Over 10 Years of Age
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Early Spring in the Indiana Dunes

By MARIAN CROTTY

 

The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore stretches along the southern tip of Lake Michigan in sixteen separate pieces—jagged, sharp-cornered patches of land that float in an industrial landscape of rail lines, factories, and tiny dilapidated homes. The official National Parks visitors’ map includes not just the usual hiking trails and bike paths, but also two steel mills, an electric company, and the machine-gutted inlets that make up the port of Indiana.

About a year ago, on a gray day in March, my girlfriend and I drove here from Chicago, where she lived then and where I was visiting for a long weekend. Winter was melting, but it was cold by the water, the air heavy with evaporated snowmelt, the lake’s presence radiating toward us even before we could see the flare of blue rising above the mounds of the red silt. It was a lonely place. Except for an older woman sitting by herself on a blanket, staring solemnly into the distance, the beach was empty.

Early Spring in the Indiana Dunes
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Cease-fire

people by forest

1. Seocho via Gangnam

My family and I are struggling along Teheran Road in Seocho-dong, Seoul, and it is my fault. I should have conducted us one stop farther to Gangnam Station, where the number ten exit would have deposited us in front of our destination, but we are disoriented by the city’s newness and haven’t yet learned the subway stations, nor do we know the banks and stores and restaurants piled atop each other in metallic high-rises footnoted by cafés and tea rooms and dessert shops. It is late May, nearly summer, when people punctuate meals with shaved ice covered with red bean jelly, rice cakes, diced fruit, grain powder, green tea, condensed milk, and ice cream for more richness. Humidity surrounds us and compresses our chests, though the forecast today says “mildly dusty.” Tomorrow, when it says “very dusty,” the sky adopts a yellowish tinge from pollution that Koreans claim drifts over from industrialized China. The passersby do not wear sunglasses, a strange omission for a country obsessed with pale and poreless complexions.

Cease-fire
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Stories We Tell

By MARIAN CROTTY

 

1.   A few days before I moved to Baltimore this summer, I read an article about the city’s racial dynamics that had just been published by D. Watkins, a relatively young black writer who’d grown up in Baltimore. He described a city so racially segregated that it felt like two different places: one black, one white; one dangerous, one quaint; one introduced to him as a kid growing up in East Baltimore and one that he found later as a college student in North Baltimore, attending the predominately white private liberal arts college, where I had just accepted a job. Watkins painted a picture of two adjacent but separate worlds, a place where, he says, white people somehow manage to host literary events in a city that is more than 60% black without one black face in the crowd.

Stories We Tell
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Where I Once Belonged: A Tribute to Kent Haruf

By JAMES ALAN GILL

I studied history in college, because it seemed somehow practical (don’t ask me why), and after three years of study I realized that I was a mediocre historian at best, that what I loved about researching the past were the stories, and so I took a creative writing class.

By sheer luck that class was taught by Kent Haruf. I had no idea of the tradition of great writers who had taught at Southern Illinois University (before Kent, Richard Russo and John Gardner held his faculty position), nor the already strong and growing writing program that was present in 1995 when I was there. I walked into the first day of class like any other, hiding my nervousness with aloofness. I never had the text for any class on the first day.

Where I Once Belonged: A Tribute to Kent Haruf
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Book Shopping in Lisbon

Bookstore

It’s Thanksgiving Day across the Atlantic in Massachusetts, where I live. There, among my American family and friends, it’s a quiet, contemplative day, but here in the Chiado, the heart of downtown Lisbon and the city’s oldest shopping district, everything is bustling, as if the Portuguese are scurrying to get a one-day head start on Black Friday. It’s a raw, drizzly day, a sign of winter’s approach, and the cobbled sidewalks are slippery. I’ve walked these hilly streets for 35-plus years, often darting from one bookstore to the next—new, used, rare—flipping through the pages of everything from current bestsellers, to obscure dime-store colonial-era comics, to rare folios of brightly-colored, highly inaccurate antique maps. That’s what I’m doing today, I’m book shopping.

Book Shopping in Lisbon
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