Best American Essays 2005

Susan Orlean (ed.)
Best American Essays 2005


I had a night off while in Washington, DC a couple of weeks ago. Like a salmon returning to its spawning ground, I found myself disembarking the metro at the Pentagon, with the intention of walking past my old apartment, now ten years past. Upon exiting the station, I saw nothing familiar. The events of September 11, 2001, have transformed the facade — what was once a sidewalk in front of an oddly-shaped office building is now a closed corridor encased in bulletproof glass. I found myself not quite able to orient myself. The building itself is of course identical on all sides. Only by spotting the the Sheraton hotel at the top of the hill was I able to tell which way to walk.

But as I did walk, things became quickly more familiar. I remembered riding my skateboard along the sidewalk home from work every day. Here was where I used to hop the curb head into traffic. Here was where I wiped out at the bottom of the hill on the way to my second week at my new job, arriving at work torn and bloody, silently passing into my office without a word from my colleagues after dabbing the congealing blood from the stinging wounds with a paper towel in the bathroom. (I flex my wrist as I pass the spot; it still cracks, echoes of the impact ten years later.) The weight of those ten years is stifling as I walk, makes it hard to breathe. Ten years gone. How many of those years was I really happy? How many was I just running away?

I arrive at what used to be my front steps, and I picture Jane, smoking a cigarette and waiting for me to come home. And I picture myself, not wanting to be home, passing her by without a word, getting a beer from the fridge, and taking it upstairs to the shower, staying under the hot water much longer than needed, until the bottle was empty, resigning myself to those few minutes alone that life had seen fit to leave me before it was time to shut off the water and return to an existence that I didn’t want. Twenty-one years old, no longer able to be a kid, not yet able to be an adult. Those days set me on a wrong course for years to follow, always running away from life because I had never learned to sculpt it, fleeing my reality instead of recreating it. Washington, Chicago, Pennsylvania, Stockholm, Pennsylvania again, and finally the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where I learned that contentment was something I needed to make, not find. All those years, I was running away, but never towards. Jane pulled it neatly from the lyrics of “Spider in the Snow” — you’re afraid to not let go. I guess I knew even then that she was right, but I didn’t know how to not let go. The curse of the military brat: letting go was the only thing I had ever known.

The impression that I get from Best American Essays 2005 is that essayists are gay New Yorkers obsessed with food. I think that can’t possibly be right. While I’m willing to believe that a gay New Yorker is more likely to write essays than a straight farmer from Kentucky, I’m less willing to believe that it makes for a very compelling book of essays. Or maybe it’s just compelling to other gay New Yorkers interested in cooking. And truth be told, they probably buy more books than the farmers in Kentucky, anyway. I guess it’s a closed system.

On Saturday, I leave for six weeks in Ye Olde Countrie. I expect I’ll have a few essays of my own at the end of that rainbow. Watch this space for updates…