Flash Fiction: Mom’s Errands

Photo by Hebert Santos on Pexels.com

The cold February sunshine was jabbing at the patchy grasses and wizened brush along the sidewalk. Walking along the street was a boy whose short blonde hair was collected into a small ponytail at the base of his red neck. 

Slavoj, the son of Slovak immigrants, who, despite living his entire life in a tiny West Virginian town and unable to speak more than a few broken sentences of his mother tongue, carried his Slavic heritage in a locally unpronounceable name. As he hobbled down the wide empty street on the edge of town, his booted cast clunking heavily on the cement, he kicked at a rock in anger. 

Slavoj’s mother had requested he spend his hallowed Saturday morning to go and purchase two jars of creamed honey from Saint Helen’s Cross Convent so she could bake a pear tart for their dinner guests that night. She could have quickly sent him to the small shop across the street. Still, instead, out of some desire to buy locally and another for the almost unearthly taste of the creamed honey from the sisters at Saint Helen’s, she sent her injured son (albeit not badly) a mile and a half up the road to the convent.

Deciding he couldn’t go a step farther, Slavoj walked a few feet off the sidewalk and sat down on a large rock, determined not to move from there until his mother came to pick him up in her honda. He opened up his phone to call her but instead began to flick through his old pictures absent-mindedly. A view of his sister’s cat. A photo of his left ankle, shrunken and white, that he snapped while getting his cast redone. The boys’ treehouse, far back in the woods of his house. Finally, he paused at a photo from last week at the hospital. His father’s eyes looked wide but not scared. His bald head wasn’t shiny, more of a muted tan. Slavoj clicked his phone shut and stood up from his rock. He would not call his mother; he was cold anyways.

Saint Helen’s was a simple gray building, it had none of the majesties of the convents in the big cities or European countrysides, but it was pleasant enough. Tidy, large, and squat, the building had a tentatively welcoming charm. A large white and red sign was leaning against the entryway pillar; it read:” SHOP THIS WAY” with an arrow pointing around to the side of the building. An addition was added to the side of the main building; it had expansive windows and large glass doors. Slavoj peered inside the doorway could see shelves loaded with honey jars and preserves, as well as a middle-aged nun who waved him inside.

The air in the shop was warm and smelled like he supposed a gingerbread house would. Several other customers (mostly white-haired) milled around, loading their plastic shopping baskets with jars and brown paper sacks filled with pastries. There was something in Slavoj that started to make him sweat.  He limped up to the sister in gray and told her that his mom needed “two big jars of the summer creamed honey.”

Despite the awkward briskness of the boy’s request, the big woman nodded. Standing to her feet and harboring a slight smile, she walked to one of the many shelves. With a deep and gentle voice, the woman (showing Slavoj the two jars) asked if this was what he was looking for. 

Slavoj stared into the woman’s face; he saw a flyaway gray hair, whiskers around the mouth, wrinkles around the eyes, and a slightly downturned nose. She looked nothing like his mother, which made him wary of her. She felt comforting yet foreign. He almost afraid. “Yes, I think that’s what mom wants.” 

She moved back to the cash register and set the jars on the table. She cracked her fingers and typed a few things into the computer next to her. She then flicked her eyes back to the boy. “Anything else?” 

He felt his face heat up, his heart rose in his throat, and he couldn’t speak. All that Slavoj could do was shake his head no. He glanced at the pay till and handed over 14 dollars and 50 cents to the woman (the exact amount his mother gave him); he watched his hands tremble as he put down the cash. The woman observed him, and as he loaded his backpack and started walking towards the door, she rounded the counter, grabbing some straws of honey as she went. The sister beat him to the door and held out her handful of honey straws; they were colored red, yellow, and green. Passing them into his hand, she looked him in the eye and said, “God loves you and sees how you help your mother.”

Slavoj wasn’t quite sure what to say; he mostly just felt like he wanted to start his long journey home. Holding the straws, he said thank you and began to make his way back around the main building. He shoved most of them in his pocket but snapped one of them in two and began to suck out the red-colored honey. It had the taste of flowers and raspberries. The sweetness washed over his tongue, and he tasted it for hours afterward. He slowly hobbled home, thinking about the sister’s wrinkled eyes, his mother’s pear tart, and what had made him so scared.

REVIEW: EAT by Tobe Nwigwe

There is a brand standard for what success looks like in the world of rap royalty. Cash and clout. Sex and swag. Cynicism and hunger. A club of applauding yesmen and a throne built of sneakers and gold. For most, success in the rap game is flexing; the shredding and frying of naysayers – tribalistic exultation of the “home team.” This is an exhibitionist age that knows that money is in the spectacle. The money is in what can be ostentatiously retweeted or slapped into a TikTok. It’s an era of Lil Uzies and baby-pink diamonds implanted in foreheads. It’s the same story again and again of independent rappers being stomped into shape by vampiric labels in a campaign clawing up the rap pyramid. The listeners are starry-eyed but held at arm’s length, unable to touch the spectors projected to them. In the midst of all this, swaddled in seafoam green and humble tube socks, Tobe Nwigwe is a petrified tree in the tides.

Throughout the pandemic, the theater of life played out in a living room. As for me, I worked as a residential advisor, taught high school English, ran Bible studies, mentored students, exercised, drew, and then fell in love with a longtime colleague and friend. I rode the wave of the Coronavirus pandemic, dragged in and out with whatever regulations appeared in the news next. Like most of us, I juggled the monotony of this awkward, unbuttoned time of restless waiting and spent too much time staring at a blue screen. 

In September of 2020, I found a refuge in the minty, monochrome living room of Tobe Nwigwe and his wife, Fat. 

Their living room – with its carpeted floors, splashy paint jobs, sterile lack of furniture, and empty picture frames – is the place where Tobe, Fat, and family friend LaNell Grant (Nell), have concocted, rapped, and choreographed dozens of songs. In EAT – my first exposure to both their musical and visual work – the setting doesn’t make for the coziest of living rooms. Its 70’s hospital green, antiseptic cleanliness, and the lazy and too-close-for-comfort pans of the camera make the viewer feel like Tobe might take a bite out of them while looking at his shiny gold grills. However, Nwigwe’s living room, like so many living rooms throughout the pandemic, becomes a place of warmth, electric excitement, and familial affection by the song’s end. EAT is musically enthralling, but the video and the song need each other – it’s a song built for its visual partner.

First premiering in August of that year, EAT hypnotizes. The flutes in the beat and the dancers’ simple synchronous gestures are reminiscent of a snake charmer and cobra. I found it hard to look away. Tobe is a sniper; he caps the target for every one of his signature, guttural “Ouu” s that enliven the song’s pacing. The dancers’ controlled and meticulous movements, sometimes in perfect sync, sometimes in a domino effect, enrapture the watcher and add clockwork heaviness to the music. Tobe’s lazy smiles and sly eyebrow raises to make the watch lean in. Wonder what he has to say. Beginning with a wind-up, a slow and controlled start of the song, the sleepy, almost apathetic look he wears is a stark contrast to the energy and jovial “good-time-ness” that characterize the last minute of the three-minute-thirty track. I was dragged into their living room to get told a story and wound up in the throes of a half-time chant and gleeful family reunion. 

In the tide of the pandemic, the constant washing over of news stories, regulations, and heartbreaks, one challenge was to grapple with a painful reality while retaining openness and hope. As I mentioned before, my time as a residential adviser was intense, and while sorting out my role with the twelve young adults in the program, my colleague and I fell in love and we began to ask ourselves questions about how to join our lives together in the midst of friendship, shared work, and the potency of a dormitory during COVID. For this reason that one of the most attractive aspects of the song was the teamwork that Fat and Tobe displayed. Almost like wrestlers who tag each other in and out. First Tobe, then Fat, then Tobe. Each, in their turn, brings progressively more punch to their bars. Cheering each other on from the sidelines. As soon as Fat takes over the second verse, Tobe appears behind her, and instead of stealing the show, he hollers a ferocious “YEAH” for every zinger she smashes. The notion of love and teamwork is so tied up in both their personal and professional lives. I realized that this was a paradigm I chased, and watching them do it well is something to behold. They know how to cheer each other on.

This is where Nwigwe diverges from some of his “colleagues,” as he refers to them. Many contemporary Rappers use women more as a prop rather than as a member of the team. The triad – Fat, Nell, and Tobe – have seen a massive amount of success in the last year. EAT is a song in their quarantine collection. The songs were weekly uploaded to Youtube with principled calculation. They touch on everything from Tobe and Fat’s marriage to a plea for law enforcement to “arrest the killers of Breonna Taylor” (I Need You To (Breonna Taylor)), the song that put Nwigwe on the pop culture map. 

EAT is both biography and vision casting. It’s drowning with expectation, hope, and gratitude as well as a discussion of the crystalline sharpness of life without meaning.

Rapping was not Nwigwe’s original plan; as a first-generation Nigerian-American, Tobe (or Tobechuwu Nwigwe as is his proper name) is a man with a dual identity. In public life, Tobe was met with the complicated identity of being a black American in Texas. As well as his wholistically African, un-American upbringing. In a recent interview, Nwigwe mentions that his mother disapproved of his interest in rap. She believed that she shouldn’t have struggled as an immigrant for so long for her child to choose a path that would lead to instability. Pushed into education and having a large amount of success in football, Nwigwe was set to be a prospective NFL athlete; however, that all changed when an injury obliterated his career. In the following years, Nwigwe would start an “edutainment” charity to help kids from his Houston neighborhood find purpose and direction. But in time, his attention shifted to music.

Nwigwe saw a missing piece in rap culture. Music that was authentic to reality but that offered a hope of something better. That didn’t bleed too much cynicism, struggle, or fury, but full of the gentle shaking out for truth. Even in the songs where he expresses the most anger, for example, TRY JESUS, he remains relaxed and takes the tone of a patient teacher, suggesting that in the context of the suffering of Black Americans at the hand of a broken system, the the listener should:

“Try Jesus

Not me

‘Cause I throw hands.”

While Nwigwe’s spirituality is not the main event of his music, it is often tainted with or perhaps even in the DNA of his lyrics. In EAT, he offers a quick “Praise God” and then discusses the time in his life when “purple haze would keep me warmer than a pea coat,” A mention of his previous reliance on marijuana. He is willing to touch on the grittier parts of life, his family’s poverty, his past addictions, the unfairness of the system, but he also douses everything in a bit of love and hope. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel for Tobe.

When I stumbled upon EAT and the rest of the body of Nwigwe’s work, it seemed like the entire world had too. His videos were being retweeted by some of the most influential people in the rap game. Michelle Obama and Beyonce both added Nwigwe songs to their Spotify playlists (that’s what Fat is referencing in her verses in EAT) – gaining him even more public attention. He soon performed EAT with Fat and Nell on Jimmy Kimmel. Despite the fame and their many offers, Nwigwe and his team are adamant in their refusal to come under the guardianship of a record label. They started as a family business, and they will stay a family business.

I danced to Nwigwe at my wedding. He thundered in the background in his strange, slow, explosive way. I was encircled by friends and family and cheered on as my husband and I came together in a bear-hug.

Success to Nwigwe is not about money (though he and Fat are pretty happy to have a nice, open living room); it’s not about muscling up to the next rapper to prove who can flex the hardest. Success is about loving family and creating dialogue; it’s about the longing for truth and hope, and for Tobe, it is about showing young people (including his children) that purpose and love are out there for those willing to seek it.

Writer’s Journey: Reflection for Creative Writing Course

Preface: Around the time of COVID (and the months before), I struggled to put my thoughts on paper. For years before, I was a prolific journaler, I would write reflections, humorous little stories, and poems for a blog, and always felt like I had something tumbling out of me. At the end of 2019, I couldn’t find a way to say anything else. Below is a dramatization of this story, and the freedom, encouragement, and fun that this term in Creative Writing invited me into.

There was an old tractor in an even older barn on the edge of the property. At one point, before the big winter came (the winter that had actually lasted 2 years instead of 4 months), the tractor had been one of the farm’s most necessary members. No harvest could be brought in without its roaring engine and massive, ever slowly, turning wheels. Since the beginning of winter – aside from one failed attempt to plow the black ground when it was still frozen solid – it sat waiting, sagging, and later, when it was clear the winter wouldn’t end anytime soon, falling into a deep slumber of rust and dust.

2 should-be winters, 2 would-be springs, 2 would-be summers, and 1.5 would-be falls until the icicles began to drip from the little homestead and the ancient barn began to creak with the sound of expanding wood. Strange timing too, as the next should-be winter was around the bend. But without too much reason, in the fall of 2022, the earth began to soften and the cold engine of the tractor began to warm up.

Tractors aren’t obviously sentient, but that is usually because they do what they need to do without making a fuss. But its a mistake to assume they are brainless, heartless pieces of machinery. Just because they usually work the way one thinks they should, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have feelings. The farmer, despite her best efforts to make the trek to the barn during the long winter, the tractor was dreadfully neglected, left to the starving boredom of its mind. When the snow began to melt, and the farmer came to oil and polish the tractor once every few days, and began to warm up the barn to make sure the metal wouldn’t fracture, the little tractor began to remember what it was made for.

Its first day on the still partially frozen mud was a bit haphazard. The tractor slid around, it had forgotten its bearings, how to hold the course, and turn the earth in a straight line. But in time, on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th days out in the dirt, the feeling began to come back into its hydraulic tubes and engine hoses. The farmer, delighted after the days of initial chaos, watched large portions of her dead land get turned to life. The cold, dead earth of the winter began to feel like a memory. She started off with some potatoes and carrots, but made plans for an herb garden, and to replant the pear orchard.

The cheerful tractor puttered along, knowing that it really was true that long winters do result in the finest springs.

On Vocation

Bothy in Scotland (for illustration sake)

If the world is a garden and each person has a patch of earth to till, shape, and tend to, I think that there is an old, stone house in need of reconstruction on my plot. 

What started as a curiosity for old buildings, the stories I would tell myself about them and the magic they had that the pre-fabricated legions lacked, turned into a passion at university. I spent summer breaks fixing up rooms in houses. I’ve dusted off bricks, evaluated shotty mortar jobs, and unclogged pipes. I’ve sanded, repainted, and replaced rotted wood. Washed and reset fragments of pottery. If you cut me, wood glue might spill out. For me, manual work, likely because I spend much of my academic and professional life in socially rigorous settings, refreshes me.

But beyond repairing buildings and clay pots (work both necessary and satisfying because one sees the result), my vocation is to participate in the restoration of people. I plan to give my life to join in with God’s restoration of society – in education, sexuality, mental health, and human relationships.

This is by nature a much fuzzier field of work than replacing tiles. After all, humans are much more complicated than buildings, and it makes sense that the restoration process is often not as visible. Humans are a mish-mash of pride, unpredictability, hope, and brokenness. And whether it is in a coffee shop or a classroom, I find my purpose in witnessing moments of vulnerability and freedom. I have had generous mentors who lit fires of curiosity in me, offered direction in my search for Truth, challenged my view of the world, and it’s my wholehearted desire to give this to the people God puts around me.

I grew up in an environment open to strangers. People – both family and foreigners – were in a constant tumble in and out our front door. For me, this restorative process begins in deep relationships with others, but more specifically with generosity and hospitality. I think there is even a Biblical premise for this – the kingdom of heaven that Jesus talks about is built on accepting God’s relentless grace and living life open-handed. Accepting this has become the hinge point for me in the restoration of my own view of the world, God, and others.

Isaiah 58 talks about how in the breaking of chains and the feeding of the poor, the city becomes a restored and flourishing place. I think this also applies to the spiritual and emotional needs of people.

It is impossible to know the future, but for now, as I work with high school students and young professionals – both believers and not – I hope that God can use me in some way to restore and bind up the brokenhearted by listening, prayer, expressing hospitality in my home and classroom, and knowing when to direct them to more help. Maybe humans are like buildings; they need maintenance and an attentive eye to stay standing.

Life in Bratislava

An interview about life in Bratislava with my friend Salma.

(I actually even got paid for this!!!)

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=777781566189783

Quarantine Music Video

Spring 2020, trapped in the glorious state of Oregon, I made this beast of a video with friends from the corners of the world (but mostly north America and Europe).

Everything is Bigger

Once again America has proved she is number one. We are officially the best at spreading the coronavirus (or at the very least, the winners of most people with COViD 19) in the world. Go us!

As the old saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas – and while that is probably true, after living in Europe for a few years, I’ll delicately extend that to the rest of the US. This is the longest I’ve been home for a while, and I have to say, it is more comfortable this time. Whenever I come back for just a few weeks, I feel like I am trying to squeeze everything in. It’s rushed and there’s always so much eating! That’s probably why I always come away feeling repugnant for a fortnight of over indulgence. (logically so)

That being said, it is still weird and there are still things that bother me. It’s funny how living outside of your culture (assuming you’ve always grown up as an insider to your home culture, like I have) makes the weirdness of each of those lifestyles, attitudes, and philosophies more apparent. Gotta love juxtaposition!

I am trying not be a woke, hipster millennial that is wringing out pompous Europeanisms on whomever she deems uncultured. But it is SO hard not to compare everything. Oh, in Slovakia we do this or that, blah blah blah. I find myself doing this literally everytime I’m back. (but again, this is just the 4th time I’ve been ”back” since the move. This time though, I feel like I am present here. In my home country. With enough stability and time to actually take in ”America.” But that again is probably insufficient. I’m homebound, some what I am actually assimilating to is the ”Cramer culture.”

That is strange too. I know I’ve changed in the last few years, and my parents, they’ve aged, they’ve grown as people, they’ve seen some real hardship, and come out the other side different. It’s always a funny thing to come back to your home as an adult. That was always a bizarre for me when I was at uni, and it’s even more pronounced now. Overall though, after these last 4 weeks, I am starting to feel like I have a stronger sense of myself here. There is still the occasional blind fury that reverse culture shock sends me into, point and case: Costco – but everything is starting to feel a bit more normal and less like walking around in a dream.

I did actually start writing this to talk about Costco, and I’ve accidentally derailed myself, so let’s return! America loves shopping. that is literally how our economy works, when we had the recession, the government sent out checks to people so they would go by things and restart up our economy. Mmmmhhhh, people who bought things they didn’t need and couldn’t afford, being asked to continue buying things they don’t need and can’t afford (this is one of my big frustrations with this country). That being said, we are once again in a state of United crisis, and the answer is suddenly NOT about buying things. But for some reason, our knee jerk reaction is to still go spend money.

No store quite encapsulates this as much as Costco – it’s a store that sells things in bulk. It’s actually a wonderful store that is prime for shopping for long term hibernation. But, there is still something that is uncomfortable about it’s excess.

The smallest container of eggs was 5 dozen. And my dad is grabbing frozen pizza (of which you must buy in packs of 4)

Imagine a store of freaked-out Americans all pushing ELEPHANTINE carts filled to the brim. There was just something so creepy about it. We went at an off time, but even still the was a line going into the store.

This was one of my first trips out in public for a few weeks, and it truly was a strange atmosphere.

Though the thoughts we’re disorganized, frankly that’s how I’m feeling these days. Slowly recalibrating to my home culture, trying to maintain teaching through the internet with a 9 hour time difference, and wholeheartedly enjoying the smell of the Juniper trees, cooking with my mom, laughing with my brother, discussing theology and politics with my dad, and getting a bit of r&r.

Absolutely a strange time to be alive!

Feline Spine Tree

Being trapped in Bend, OR during the Great World Shutdown of 2020 has not exactly been an agonizing experience. My parent’s home is sufficiently lost in the surrounding juniper woods, and aside from my violent allergies to the tree, I’ve been embracing the great outdoors so holistically, my pioneer great-great-grandparents are applauding me for their graves. Though I’ve been trying to snap a pic whenever I go out, nothing has been quite so impressive as this animal spine that I found dangling from a tree. I’ve tried to figure out how it got there, but so far I’m a little lost as to how some that big (no joke, I think I might have been a cat) got suspended from a tree. I’ve seen some red-tail hawks divebombing what I can only assume are rodents, but maybe one nabbed a cat and brought it up into a tree to feast.

Anyways, the first bit of my walk is always spent in tree spine contemplation. One of the contemporary mysteries of my life.

As I move on forward I wander down the hill through the forest along a sandy path. Bend is in a part of Oregon called the high dessert. It doesn’t rain much (not like the part of the state before the Cascade Mountain range which is an actual rain forest) so the dry, almost sand like dirt holds footprints. Everyday I follow my own footprints winding through the desert (I can see I’ve been the only one out here, because I have weird, styrofoam-like soles that have a distinctive mark), the only other sets are from deer who have their own paths.

After about half a mile I walk up a little incline and reach a lava rock canal that is mostly empty except for some still water and like 50000000 tumbleweeds (think western movie). The rocks are black and rough, and sometimes I climb down into the ditch and skip little fractures of stone on the brown water.

Once I make it to the road I can see the mountains, the most majestic are a set called the Three Sisters. They are snowtopped and sometimes bleed into the clouds in front of them. On a clear day though, they puncture the sky.

I’ve hit farm land now. And my new best friends live here:

Usually this is where I turn around, I’ve waved at my cow and I am ready for the two miles back to the house. However sometimes I find the courage to take the 6.5 mile track. I was literally bragging to everyone about how I was gonna do Devin (a race in BA that is almost exactly 6.5 miles) and if anything good came out of Coronavirus, it’s that I can avoid the race and not have to make up an excuse, haha. But as almost an indictment on my laziness, to visit the coolest of all Oregon places I have to make it that far.

The Peterson Rock Garden is a true marvel of mankind. It is a recreation of all of the most important places on earth, in tiny, colorful rocks. I was absolutely (and unknowingly) trespassing as I kicked my way through the cornfield. The place has the air of an abandoned amusement park. It has an almost eery run-downess to it. Everything is slightly off-kilter. And it’s FANTASTIC. Just this week I safely saw monasteries in France, the Taj Mahal, and New York.

So that’s that. A walk around rural Bend during the off-off-season.

hjkgshjfjrr

No vowels! What is computer?

I have basically forgotten what it means to type out my emotions in the last year. But here I am, back typing away. I haven’t even browsed through my old posts for inspiration yet – and “not really feeling inspired at the moment” has been the whole of the last year, so I figured I should just projectile type and see if anything quality comes out.

So, well, its been a while. This is like one of those meetings you have with a friend that you haven’t seen for a year; in the past you were both so synchronized you could easily pinpoint a minuet abnormality in each other’s moods, but after time and physical distance separated you, you come together, and the first few minutes you don’t know where to start. The roots are still the same, you’re still you and they’re still them, but you’re off kilter and unbalanced. You have to reacclimate to each other – like resetting a watch. So, lets reset the watch.

Hello, good to see you! Yes! Its been good in Slovakia! Teaching? Well, third years the charm, am I right? Uuuuummmhmmm!

I do still like sitting with a coffee and reading my Bible!

Oh my gosh! Yes! That was me publicly crying at a Starbucks because I have no boyfriend!

What? You’ve been lifting weights too? Well, you look great! But you always do!

Piece of freaking cake.

I have a theory that humans really can only exist in a state of contradiction – or maybe its balance. I can be full of immense joy and still harbor a very tender brokenheartedness, I can feel so confident in God and the person He has made me, and then be dogged by total insecurity, be quick minded and then watch my thinking disintegrate, feel fury and then watch it melt into peace. Seriously, what are we? Fragile, fragile jars of clay.

So concludes thoughts of the day!

Okay this time we really did start a podcast…

If you remember yester-year’s promises of a podcast by yours truly, and you waited aptly for said cast, and then were disappointed with both the quality and the frequency of said cast, have I got news for you!! At this very moment a new, fairly mediocre episode is available wherever you stream podcasts! A new beginning if you will.

We are just messing around, but if you have time to kill and want to listen to us being weird, well, now you can.

Feedback is welcome! We haven’t really hashed out what we are doing yet, so if you want to offer input, we’ll take it! (Help us find a direction, haha)

So, after all that, enjoy!!

Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-halu%C5%A1kanauts/id1495244663?uo=4

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3Nhl4A9RyMb9dce9ObWIeE

Google podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xMTY1YmI3OC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==