I can't wait to fly

I, of course, was more of an X-Man child.

Don't get me wrong. Superman was great. I loved Superman. But that was sort of the problem, you know? Everybody loved Superman. Superman was the embodiment of the cool kids' crowd. He was strong, and handsome, and had women swooning after him, and even in a faaaabulous cape and ruby-red boots with two-inch heels, he still came across as butch. So fine, he was an alien whose entire race got blown up in a planetary cataclysm (save for himself, a dog, his cousin, and three criminals in parachute pants), and he was consequently the ultimate outsider to this planet he had chosen to protect. The point is, he was a hero to everybody. He passed.

The first time I read the X-Men was in the mid-eighties. Our family vacation to a beach in South Carolina had gotten rained in, and to shut me up my mom gave me a dollar and let me buy a comic book from the convenience store.

It was an early issue of the Morlock Massacre. There was a cameo by the Power Pack kids; Rachael Summers (Phoenix II) was part of the team; Kitty Pryde was in a stasis chamber on the Blackbird slowly disincorporating. The team spent the whole issue slogging around sewers and fighting mutants with hideous deformations and strange, slightly off-putting powers. The art was a bit sloppy, the story was a giant mess, and I read the entire issue in one sitting and found myself in it.

The X-Men were loathed by everybody. Nobody thought of them as heroes, except for those of us observing their universe from the outside. Every character was tragically flawed, and they muddled through their imperfect lives the best way they knew how, just like the rest of us did.

I think I was too slow to get the message, if there was one intended. It's the same thing I'd tell my ten year old self. Hang on. You'll get through it. Everyone does.

News From the Lake

In my last months in Boston, when I told my friends that I was turning down the offers in Toronto and San Diego and taking a job in the midwest, Benjamin had the best response. After a long, last drag on the butt end of his cigarette, he gave me a big hug and a kiss on my cheek. "That's fabulous, sweetie. And I promise I'll still be your friend when you come back all earnest and fat."

A year later, I am still blessed with tiny stick arms and hummingbird-like metabolism. And I have managed to surround myself with bicoastal expat friends who all have the same sickly inappropriate sense of humor that I do. I live in the center part of town, one of what the locals sneeringly deride as "condo people", and I would very much like to believe that my life is still more This American Life than Prairie Home Companion.

And yet.

I go to the farmers market every Saturday morning and banter about the weather with the lady who sells hand-made soaps.

A coworker sees me on the street and invites me over for dinner because his wife, she's pulled in a mess of strawberries and now it's time for pies.

I go biking out past the suburbs on Sunday mornings along a trail that winds through fields full of sprouting cornstalks and swerve to avoid the chipmunks who like to dash across the pavement for fun.

I walk home in the evenings past a white-haired man playing lazy blues on a steel guitar who sings infrequently in a croaking whiskey and cigarettes baritone.

There are days I don't understand at all how I ended up here. My heartbeat is slowing to match the steady plodding thrum of the slow midwestern life I'm begun to lead, and I can't decide if it's my age or the oddly compelling charisma of this town that's causing the change. But oddest of all is how much I'm coming to like this place, where all the women are strong and the men good-looking and the children above average.

Life in Lake Wobegon won't be so bad.

In/Out

I gave directions today, and they went something like this.

"Okay, you see where they're tearing up the road over there? Just after you pass the concrete truck, make a left and follow the street down past the new student apartments they're building until you see a strip mall fenced off for demolition. If you see a second construction zone, you've gone too far."

I think I'm finally getting the hang of this place. Towns in the midwest breathe in cycles, and here there are seasons for planting, seasons for construction, and seasons for sitting quietly at home and drinking hot cocoa.

I've had people tell me that all of this is due to the weather, and that in a place with seasons as extreme as ours, construction happens in the brief respites between cold snaps. But Boston was never like this. The routine of digging up and tearing down and repaving and building up happened all year round, and there were snowstorms there as bad as any I've seen here.

The truth is something nobody from this city will ever admit to. For all of the pretensions of urbanism, this is a farm town at heart. Farm people know that there are days when the crops need picking and the cows start to calf, and if you want to build something, well, you've got about a month between the end of morel season and the start of squash planting, so you'd better start it then, hadn't you?

I am getting it. I may never be one of you, but I am getting it.

There now

Doesn't that feel better?