Chapter Six – Interrelated Fates, We are all One Roux

Back to Chapter 5 part 2
Chapter Six – Interrelated Fates, We are all One Roux

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The degreed-summer ratcheted down the Fahrenheit.  I enrolled in graduate school at the white-version of the University of New Orleans for the fall.  The debt for a Tulane MBA would have required me to sell a kidney.  I only had enough plasma for a state school to suckle a publically-funded nipple.

I worked for an accounting temporary company over the summer to get my own apartment.  Ashley went back and forth to Nottoway.  We were happy in a blur like singular-dimension sitcom characters thriving in a parallel world of minimal confliction of true drama.  Somewhere blue dresses were stained for a distracted nation, but we were focused.

Before I knew it we were halfway through Ashley’s senior year.  I was earning my Masters in Accounting.  I took Ashley out to eat at the Upperline for Valentines Day in this cubby corner of a garden district restaurant.  Generations of uptown men brought their wives to linger through dinner of sophisticated pallets and laissez le bon temps roulette attitude.  The art on the walls and the bustle of the dining room was in every way local.  I was watching a girl raised in nowhere Louisiana with immigrant blood find service in my city.  Maybe the roux was seeping in with that slow-motioned heat, the white flour and the oil into that beautiful chocolate brown.  I wrote Ashley a Valentine’s Day poem.  I read the tortoise to her as she spooned her coca moose desert. 

Tortoise- 2/14/1997 - Turtle head up, hand in my ticket, only inches left in this line.  Defined in your stride, the movement I was missing, the absent balance.

The fresh construction of my future etched, a whole assurance of what will come despite the frustration pot-holed along the old road, dug-out from shelled respective speed, a symmetrical beauty permeates.  With deepest love, Ethan

We went to Ashley’s apartment.  We held each other with nothing, but Ashley’s diamond crucifix paused upon her neckline strung in golden constant.  Ashley’s father gave Ashley the cross for her first communion.  Ashley never took the perpendicular lines off.  We rested on a goose-feather duvet in a cloud of drift.

Spring came with Ashley’s college graduation.  Ashley and I each turned down offers from the Big Five CPA firms to elect graduate degrees.  There were credit hour requirements beyond an undergraduate threshold for public accounting certifications. 

Ashley told me how proud her father was of her.  Graduation day for Ashley was anti-climactic.  Ashley’s father did not graduate from college.  For Mr. Hilton Hingle graduation meant everything to see his daughter in that cap and gown.  Ashley’s mother Lacey was educated, but Ashley’s father knew education’s value like an orphan knows what it means to come from a two-parent household. 

That inequity motivated Ashley throughout her life.  Ashley had tears in her eyes seeing her father’s reflected gaze.  I was just some guy with freesia and irises.  I had my time.  I was happy for Ashley to have hers.

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Princess Diana found a wrong turn in Paris.  We were lily immune to such distractions.  The times of worrying about searching were dissipating to trickles.  My fuel to write was lower than it had ever been.  Charles Bukowski said, “Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.”  I was a writer’s-block free-man sipping a beer at sunset on a freshly tarred roof. 

I got to know Ashley’s Hingle family better.  Ashley’s father Hilton was a folks is folks sort of man.  Mr. Hingle knew how far back his markings soaked in his soil.  If Hilton could detect the same plausibly incestuous down-home tractor-pull cologne on a person, then Hilton was a pig in shit.  I was not one of those people.  Apparently New Orleans may have been London or Cairo, but it certainly was not Nottoway. 

Hilton was completely hairless on top with the exception of a few straggling lost-dog meandering stands left around the outskirts.  Hilton wore scalp covering tractor caps like black ladies wear church hats like crowns for Jesus on Sunday mornings.  Hilton’s heart burn was pandemic.  Hilton was a swimming-pool grass-cutting obsessed man at home.  He was a steel-toed boot kind of man on the road.  In either dominion a flush cocktail was his Linus blanket to quench his parched colloquial-country constructed tongue.  His pickup truck was a pulpit-radio for Rush Limbaugh.

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For Christmas Hilton, Lacey, Ashley and I went to Tracer Robertson’s family Christmas party.  I watched the surroundings like a social evolution PBS documentary film of Nottoway-life staring the Parish Sheriff’s clan.  The Sheriff’s wife, Martha was a wonderful kind down-home Southern woman.  Martha was baking and entertaining with an immaculate porch door open. 

“Want some beer hunny-bunny?” “Well come on in yall.”  Mrs. Robertson had a rural gangsta-style that got Ashley’s country-bumpkin vagina all moist.  Martha’s home was like a Confederate-charmed magazine with ferns on the porch, a garden of flowers, vegetables and herbs soaking in the Louisiana sun.  Iced tea came out the tap.  Porch stationed rocking chairs moved with the ghosts of the generations that never left.

Tracer was destined to be a Senator or Governor.  His brother Clay was preordained to his daddy’s Parish sheriff throne.  Name recognition was like shitting golden carrots in a land full of rabbits in this warren of a town. 

Ashley’s mother, Lacey, worked as the accountant in Sherriff Robertson’s office.  Lacey came to America to attend the college town down the road from Nottoway.  Lacey’s junior year Hilton knocked Lacey up with Ashley.  The couple married under Jesus’ blessing pre-womb catapult.  Ashley was born in the back room of a Nottoway farm house in a glorious home birth for a cone-head little girl flushed and curious.  Ashley always said her parent’s told her that she was a child born grown up.

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I asked so many questions in that year going back and forth to Nottoway in an ease of self-managed graduate school.  Snippets of Ashley’s childhood mapped out like markers in the sand.  Piecemeal conversations were like reading every fifth page of Ashley’s prepubescent and adolescent diaries.

Ashley a childhood recap: I always wanted to be in the next stage.  I was born with a cone-head, which scared my dad.  I liked being naked.  I remember my father as Superman.  I believed he could pick up the house with one hand and stomp tornadoes.  I remember my mother as loving, my best friend.  My mother was a strong-willed pioneer.  My mom loved me more than anything.

Our home was a small wood-frame in Nottoway.  Dad worked in and on the walls every weekend.  At one point we had a dirt floor bathroom.  We did not have much, but I felt like a princess.  We swam or rode our bikes.  I pretended that I was the boss.  We played “college.”  I would be Samantha – “but you can call me Sam.”

I wanted to be the first female president and the first female to play in the NFL.  I also wanted to work with disabled children.  My best friend was my brother Jeffery, even though I would never admit it.

I was friends with people in the neighborhood until fifth grade.  Then I was friends with everyone at school.  There were only fifteen people in my grade.  So I was friends with the sixth and seventh grades as well: Tracer, Ben, Greg, Chad, Bobby, Buzz, mostly guys.  Guys were easier to understand!

We explored the “open land”.  There was an old industrial park behind some woods with knocked down buildings.  The “open land” was the center stage for our adventures; cousins getting stuck in quicksand, people getting shot with BB guns and devil worshipers flying in on helicopters.

My favorite family vacations were our summer trips to Europe.  Jeffery and I were forced to play together.  The trips were boring with Oma and Opa, but we saw the world and learned.  I was loved.  I was confident.  I had no fears.  We did not have much money, but we were so wealthy. 

As a teenager I lusted for independence.  I was old enough to get a job, drive a car and make my own decisions.  I wanted to be self-sufficient.  Unfortunately, I was far from ready.  I had trouble with freedom.  I was not making good decisions or hanging out with good people.  I was hard on myself. 

My relationship with my parents was strained.  I still find myself apologizing.  I remember yelling, “I hate you!”  My parents were looking out for me, but I saw them as my obstacle.

We disagreed about everything.  My father especially disagreed about how I dressed.  I was not dressing sexy, but rather grungy, nothing ironed, usually dirty and un-tucked.  We disagreed about friends.  I tried to rescue “lost puppies” or people who could not be saved.

My grades were good.  I did not try very hard, but was still at the top of my class.  I went to St. Sebastian’s my freshman year.  Junior year I got two C’s at the target school for Louisiana in Natchitoches.  I went back to St. Sebastian’s in Nottoway.  I played basketball.  I tried all the styles from preppy, sporty and grunge. 

My first date was with Kevin.  My dad sat him at the table chewing on his spit tobacco for fifteen minutes, asked him fifty questions, with long pauses in between the interrogation.  My dad finally let us leave. 

My first kiss was with Buzz Stevens.  I had a huge Easter party at my house.  I was in fifth grade.  Buzz was in eighth.  Buzz stationed several buddies as look-outs.  We were in my room, slow danced and he kissed me over my black and white bed spread in my black and white painted room.

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Ashley’s brother Jeffery was two years younger.  Jeffery was a kid who wanted to prove himself; to take the most arduous option to demonstrate his resiliency to capitulate to the norm.  If asked to catch a tail of an animal, Jeffery would pick a tiger over a house cat. 

Jeffery was a broken spirit, yet symbiotically dependent, a domesticated drone under his parent’s fiscal discretions.  Jeffery would take to quest; unbolting norms and doors for the sake of segmenting his ability.  What was expected from Ashley would not be thrust upon Jeffery.  Ashley was little Miss perfect, do-gooder in her parent’s eyes. 

Despite the realities of Ashley’s adolescence, Ashley’s parent’s demonstrated a consistent reliance on their daughter’s presumed acquiesce to parental desires in times of tribulation based on her gender.  Ashley’s was catered to and punished less.  This line of assumption produced an inverse result when it came to the boy in the family.

In this dichotomy of gender roles, Jeffery had little place to go to acquire a unique stream of parental attention.  Jeffery could never get better grades, be sweeter, or better liked.  It was as if Ashley took on the roll of Jeffery’s second mother.  Nobody stopped Ashley so she assumed the position.  Ashley was not the “let me kiss your bo-bo” mommy.  Ashley was the “let me tell you what to do” mommy.  All that fucked Jeffery up a little bit, until Jeffery got his own space to breathe.

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Hilton would get irate, especially with Jeffery about doing man-work.  Hilton displayed a never-good-enough attitude to Jeffery’s man roles, his school assignments, and Jeffery’s constant inability to be someone other than himself.  Hilton smelled of motor oil and confidence.  There was no tractor engine Hilton could not finagle into howling a diesel-dragon cloud. 

Ashley told me one time in high school her dad was fooling with their push mower.  The contrapuntal contraption would not start.  Ashley heard Hilton cursing at the gray machine with military rancor; commanding it to obey orders.  Hilton took a shovel and beat the fuck out of it until parts flew.  Hilton stormed in the house.  Ashley crouched on the interior of her door with her back pressed.  Ashley was not allowed to lock her door anymore, after Hilton had kicked the door in to enter earlier that year. 

After the lawnmower, Ashley’s could hear Hilton arguing with Ashley’s mother through the echoes through her battened doorway.  Hilton beat a hole through the sheetrock screaming at the personified wall.  Hilton may have even let out a tear. 

The next Sunday Hilton patched the wall and bought a new lawnmower.  If Hilton ever fixed his own mistakes it was accomplished quietly and spackled over the chasm as if nothing had ever happened.  I could still see the adjusted wallpaper lines in the hallway when I visited.

The man chain-smoked his eyes dry.  He was incapable of crying, hardened in leathery cemetery-skin.  Hilton was calcified.  This sort of rubbed off on Ashley in her weaker ways.  The woman was in many respects impervious to need, to vulnerability, to asking for help, to admitting assistance would be beneficial.  Ashley’s body was allergic to most proposed remedies unless coming from her parents.  

In childhood, Ashley craved aerobic iron-pressed wake ups.  Ashley would get out a little mat and exercise to be up when Hilton got his coffee to head to work with his rural braggadocio-rise at dawn.  Ashley would iron the uniforms: hers and her daddy’s.

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Ashley’s mother Lacey doted when Hilton was off doing odd construction jobs.  Lacey scrubbed off the white trailer-trash image.  The thought was like a ghost of never made it to Amsterdam life.  Hilton was a yokel denizen anchored to Nottoway. 

Lacey came to the United States and digested English in a remain-standing-and-eat-at-the-counter sort of meal.  Lacey pushed her first born and finished school in between the clan raising Ashley and Jeffery.  The beloved Hingle matriarch, Granny Darling was a constant bull weevil burrowing in Lacey’s ear. 

Lacey got the job with Sherriff Robertson.  Lacey settled into coasting in the rut of plowing a Nottoway life.  Lacey was this inspirational do-it-all female icon to Ashley.  Ashley got her partial scholarship to Tulane and whisked away like Dorothy.  Lacey was left behind calling in for visits every chance she could get.  Ashley clicked her silver slippers when ever she could to visit back home.

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In 1998, I had an economics course as part of my graduate program at the University of New Orleans.  I had a woman from Uganda named Winnie, a few locals and a guy from Spain in my group.  We debated principles of supply and demand plots, curves, free-hand Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.  We looked at the lines of manipulation in the market.  The professor was a blatant liberal.  She railed on Reagan for his voodoo economics, trickle-down mantras that gave Milton Friedman a boner.

We discussed the role of stockholders.  We asked, “If we can charge more for a product and not lose demand, then, why wouldn’t we?”  “If I can sell a good that you are willing to pay me for and it is priced too high then I guess you will not buy it if it costs too much?”  Newton should be so lucky to discover such constant forces of the universe. 

Winnie was a tuxedo-shade of Ugandan woman, mother of two, and a transplant with a thick Bantu accent.  Winnie told me about water retrieval methods in Uganda the week before.  I thought about America and all these kids of Real World New Orleans scattered around the classroom working retail and fill in the blank to finance these discussions. 

We broke down our analysis by thinking on a macro level: entry barriers to markets, anti-trust collusion, and global resource availability.  We considered all this shit that affects every part of our life that is so frustrating to contemplate on our micro level interface.  We tried to segment industries that basically defied the gravity of Friedman’s laws.

I can buy cheaper clothes, basic food, more humble shelter; yurt?  Greed can be mitigated by a consumer saying “I will not pay today, corner dealer in the big box, No.”  We made a hit list: pharmaceuticals, banking, oil, defense contractors, basically health, finance, energy and security.  These were the four legs on which a man can not say no to at the table of the devil.  “Sign here son if you want your child to breathe, to sleep under a sky I provide.  Pray I do not change the terms of this arrangement.”  (Yes, Lord Vader.)

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I thought about macro level constraints.  My mind wandered.

I saw greed go unchecked, no maximum wage laws, pissing gasoline on the house we lived in, over the clothes we wore, on the food we ate, the very things we could choose.  Put our mouth on the gas pump like a more certain Russian roulette.  I saw the great trickle-down paranoia.  If you tax or tithe the ignorant congregation gets convinced the price will just go up dollar for dollar to maintain a “tight” profit waistline.  How could a company manage its profits to benefit, trickle to the masses like a septuagenarian’s crimped urethra? 

Corporate citizenship is advertising expense and a tax brake.  Corporations are phantom-faced amoeba aggregations of beings with a billion souls never forming one culpable organism.  All the diffusion abdicates a conscience for emperor-with-no-close conversations.  Go ask Bhopal about Union Carbide.  Look into the future.  Ask how close Exxon Mobil could be British Petroleum.  (Mocando says checkmate Valdez.)  Ask Deloitte and Touche how close they were to being Arthur Andersen.  Citizen’s United ruling obliterates democracy under Stay Puff Marshmallow Man Super PAC Corporate campaigns.  They are all the same.  Some just fucked up in public. 

I ranted to myself.  Greed will eventually destroy us alone like cockroach-faced last-leprechauns mating and hoarding gold buried down squirrel-style for a nuclear winter.  We can stow it away in Goldman sacks and Lehman nest-eggs.  For what, for when no one is left to buy or pay or use, for all this generational wealth tucked in Gringotts goblin vaults? 

This all comes back to evolution, to maintain the genes, to leave seven levels of offspring out who can control the means in which profit is achieved.  Make it rain and weather patterns bless the means.  Choking in a dining room alone, we are still on the savannah.  Only we do not even know who the fuck to run from.

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I thought of my American Manifesto blog again, this time on healthcare.  If we can not care for each other, than what do we have in this America?  Medicine rarely tastes appetizing, but generally we are better for it. 

One day computers, the internet would unleash our democracy if we could circumvent special interests of corporations to allow our government to create it.  I thought of WeCare.gov.  One day we could have a web-based single-payer universal health care system facilitated through IRS adjusted gross income fluctuating annual deductibles and per service co-pay’s.  All the doctors could have one web-based appointment system, with videos for conferencing and education about ailments and pharmaceuticals.  No more drug commercials.  No more illegal drugs, only controlled substances.  We could treat addiction as a medical problem instead of a crime.  We could make purchase contracts with foreign governments to neuter cartels.

What the fuck?  No one was listening.  I figured treating people like humans rather than receipts was mutually beneficial, but what the hell did I know?

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School progressed with more of a corporate training pursuit then some mandatory must-get-college-credit mandate.  Graduate school was “optional.”  I chose to invest in critical-thinking capabilities.  Graduate degrees are the new bachelor’s degrees.  High school diplomas are now elementary. 

Most of my generation bustles like lemmings into an over-crowded elevator.  We finance our future for a chance at a penthouse graduate-degree required pay-grade position.  Masters program completion is like buying a lottery ticket.  There are only so many row boats on this Titanic and a degree buys you at least one oar.  The other usually comes with luck in the form of parental subsidizes like a bank account or a skin tone. 

I enjoyed living on my own.  I decided to spend a third year getting my Masters in Business Administration and Accounting and another hit from the debt pipe to push the ramifications from the opiates of education down the line.  The world could declare me here forward educated to go out and about with papyrus-proof producible American acumen.  I would have a transcript license in my wallet to present to doubters that I was qualified to be a long-winded self-absorbed know-it-all.  I could rant in public rather than just in my own misguided head.  Sarcasm off.

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My classmate, Malique from high school got shot by the New Orleans police.  Two of the officers were black, three white.  Race was on the tip of speech lashing around like having a bee land on our collective tongue.  We were afraid to, yet moving wildly.  Somewhere Studs Terkel was still asking questions, but I was not sure who was listening.

The cops had Malique mistaken on a crack call-in coming out of a bar.  Many thought Malique was convicted of the crime of being black and the inherent threat of melanin.  Guns were pulled thirty-one shots fired.  Malique caught twenty.  Malique had a record, arrested for drug charges earlier that year, but whoever they thought Malique was; he wasn’t.  Whatever they thought Malique was reaching for; he wasn’t.  I got a letter from Michael for New York where Mike was still living.

Michael - November 7, 1998 - We took this ride to Brooklyn to this Italian girl’s house.  The men were short and spoke hybrid Italglish.  The pudgy women were shorter and kept bringing food: cookies, pasta, baked chicken, rollup stuff.  The grandmother reminded me of my Creole Mammy, always loading us down.  Like when I came down for Mardi Gras in college with my friend George.  We were recovering from the three of us spending that week down on Bourbon Street. 

We went to my Mammy’s house in Treme.  My grandma had a buffet waiting for us: smothered chicken, macaroni and cheese, greens, okra gumbo.  While we were eating my grandma asked you, “Ethan, do you want a hot dog?  I can make you one.”  Even after you told her no, Mammy still kept bursting the table top with those mixed up mutt-tubes made of God-knows-what.  After dinner we watched the Italian girl’s cousin play roller hockey.  Game on.

Michael had mixed feelings watching our Homer Plessy-city in turmoil.

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Ashley and I were doing well.  In the spring of 1999, we made a trip together to visit my grandmother JoAnne in Wichita, somewhere in Middle America, land of corn tax subsidies instead of cotton. 

My grandmother was in her late sixties.  Grandma JoAnne had been dating.  JoAnne was involved in civic clubs and the ladies auxiliary still.  She had seemed to set my grandfather Arthur’s death into a pocket.  There were still pictures of him in the house, but not in a shrine, more in a “think of him fondly context we never talk about.”

My grandmother loved Ashley.  Ashley was bubbly and rosy-checked in a yellow dress, a blazing-sun in the countryside rural-Kansas splendor.  JoAnne seemed to imprint the qualities of her youth onto Ashley.  She found kinship in Ashley’s European heritage, being an anchor-baby herself.  JoAnne offered Ashley her homemade iced tea.  I think my grandmother fell in love with Ashley in that, “this girl is beautiful and better make me a great-grandchild one day self-interested Darwinian desire.” 

My dad Timothy mulled in manly service retrieving tea leaves from his mother-in-law’s pantry.  My dad discovered a canister next to the peanut butter labeled, “Benson’s Strawberry Fields Edible Body Paint.”  I guess chocolate might lead to confusing color connotations.  My father did not want an underlying opportunity for family bonding to go wasted, so he pulled the jar out and asked, “JoAnne, what is this?” 

My grandmother grew a pit-pink-lady-apple of face.  My mother bubbled up Jesus’ name as if she could scarf up my grandmother’s look in some sort of parental epiphany of the garden gates being opened.  Her mother, the perve, stood in her doily-adorned kitchen generationally unaware that sometimes it is ok to keep food products in a place other than the kitchen.  Images of my grandmother grinding on her Viagra-commercial of a boyfriend cowgirl-style slurping strawberry off his red-raw nipples made the room a bit queasy.  It was funny and we laughed.  A widow should be allowed such indulgences.  Hell, we all should.  At least we did not find my grandmother’s anal beads with the rolling pins.  Insert Tupperware suction sound in triplicate.

About ten years later I remember talking with my grandma JoAnne after she ended up marrying that boyfriend.  He died of pancreatic cancer.  Twice widowed, JoAnne kept her spirits up making jokes and relishing her role as our dirty grandma.  Grandma once told me during a crab-boil sipping a beer, “I spent a lot of time on top of the two of them.  I think of the good times.  It’s better than crying.” The flashback image was stuck in my head of this reverse cowgirl riding younger version of this octogenarian grinding with her fist pumping in the air whirling around in a halo of circles. 

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Back home, Ashley and I hung out in between classes at two different schools.  Ashley was in graduate school on partial scholarship part-debt at Tulane.  I was on a fully debt-lubricated waterslide at the University of New Orleans. 

We spent a night out at the Circle Bar being introduced to Mr. Andre Williams.  Black and white porn reeled-films projected around the crown molding.  The place was packed like a seventeen-year-old Dungeon and Dragons fanatic’s box of condoms.  The atmosphere was smoky in anticipation of something unearthly, unsanitary and intoxicatingly raw. 

Andrew Williams is Mr. Rhythm, American sex, funk like a more perverted step-brother of James Brown.  Mr. Star-time, Bacon Fat, Shake your Tail Feather, circumcised as a grown man Jewish convert, Only Black Man in South Dakota born to a share cropper raised in the north superstar busted out by a crack pipe and a flawed body fueled by sex, Bacardi, and groove.  He is the Black God Father.  That night Ashley and I saw the legend, vibrant, vintage, and visceral.

I have never wanted to have sex with a sixty year old black man, but if Andre Williams sang to you in his dirty funk he could make a Baptist preacher’s daughter out from Klan country get freaky.  He was agile, mobile and hostile, singing Pussy Stank like he was singing Eleanor Rigby to the Ladies Auxiliary.  I gained an immediate appreciation for Andre’s let-it-fly style, be alive and call a spade a spade.  I heard the importance of the trinity of sex, fucking, and making love.  Ashley and I had fun back at her place later.

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One time in her study Ashley showed me a builder’s magazine Hilton gave her with an advertisement for weather shield windows.  The page was bordered in yellow with a two-page centerfold layout of a grand southern home.  The house was embraced by a giant wraparound porch.  A huddled family sipped iced tea in the twilight. 

The ceiling fans on the porch hummed.  The house was lit up at dusk.  The advertised windows populated the dormers of a gambrel roof.  A mom dispensed beverages.  Ashley said, “This is it.  This is my dream a big porch to live out in the grass, with a big yard to cut.  It is like the porch is hugging the home.  Sure, one day I would love a BMW, but this, that would be too good to be true.”

I laughed with Ashley.  I saw a prepared corporate future for both of us with our battlements at the ready to take all this function to task in corporate America.  The big five of Nottoway probably included dairy farmers.  We were set to be citizens of the world.  Even if New Orleans was a little big town, it had so much history and soul. 

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In the summer Ashley planned a trip to Europe to visit her grandparents in Holland, stay with some of her Uncle’s army buddies in Germany and go exploring for a few months.  Not seeing Ashley was difficult.  I had a job assisting in the accounting for the construction of the Ritz Carlton in downtown New Orleans.  I committed to the project as a bridge, before starting with Arthur Andersen in the fall. 

Come autumn, I was going to be an auditor, but first I was using the stuff Sotaman taught me to figure out exactly how much each part of a hotel project was costing to correlate with financing and debt obligations. 

Before Ashley left for Europe I gave her this note and a photo of us together.  “If every inch between here and there were a word I could not describe how much I will miss you.  Enjoy yourself, these moments, these opportunities and I will be here waiting, love always, Ethan.”  Before long Ashley started sending me postcards like a cuter traveling Fraggle Rock uncle.

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Ashley-June 15, 1999 - Hey! I arrived in Germany today by train.  We spent the day in Wurzburg.  This was a small part of a castle of a bishop in the 1700’s.  I will be here until I go to Holland on the weekend.  Carel and his family are so hospitable.  This is a storybook town.  Tonight they are having a barbeque in my honor and inviting my uncle’s army comrades.  I will keep you posted.

Ashley – June 17, 1999-Hey I’m having a great time here in Disney World.  Just kidding, but this is the castle Disney’s is modeled after, the Royal Castle Neuschwanstein.  I’m staying at a Bavarian house.  Two more days and back to Holland.  I am thinking of taking that trip to Paris.  If I go you will get a postcard!

Ashley –June 19, 1999- Hey, we spent the day in Munich.  We visited churches.  I drank at the oldest guesthouse in the world, the Hofbrauhaus.  Beer, pretzels and sausage: we are in the heart of Bavaria.  I sat below a German sign that read, “It’s worse to be thirsty than homesick.”  Love, Ashley P.S. I drank a few in your honor.  Prost!

Ashley –June 22, 1999– Hi, everything here is great.  I have no idea what this card says but it has cows.  I will pretend it says I miss you and can’t wait to see you and I’ve been riding my bike.  All my love

Ashley – June 24, 1999-Hey I went to Eindhoven today.  It is just a few miles from Venlo.  My next stop is Germany and hopefully I can get a hotel in Venlo.  Staying with family is difficult.  Eindhoven is great.  I went shopping and got you something.  I miss you so much.  Love.

Ashley –June 26, 1999-I climbed to the top of this mountain.  It is 3,000 meters high and called Zugspitze.  It is difficult to see how high I climbed especially with the ice and snow, but I made it!  Just before me a man slipped on the ice where there was no railing and almost fell.  We got some pictures, no exposed bone though.  I am living on the edge!

Ashley-June 28, 1999-The men here are so sexy!  Ha Ha Ha.  I just love those little suspenders!  Today is my last day in Germany, more beer.  Prost!

Ashley –June 30, 1999 - On the back of some Dutch fold out card.

Ethan, I think you can figure out what this card says.  Call council travel and meet me for the two most magical weeks of our lives.  I love you.  I do not know what I was thinking when I left without you.  I’ll pay for all your expenses.  (heart drawn symbol) Ashley

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That card registered with a mutual-ache.  I was going to work and flocking to the mailbox on the way in like a Pavlovian test-subject hitting the bar for his food pellet.  The words in the card gave me permission to disregard the pragmatic-functional task of income-generating task orientation to waking up to life buzzing around my head.  Within a week I was on a plane to Europe with a ring to propose. 

I took my remaining life’s savings from summer jobs and the few weeks at the half-pieced-together hotel and bought a plane ticket, a round diamond one-carat ring in a simple gold band size six; the elegant and unassuming kind that Ashley would want.  I was all in. 

I made a run to Nottoway and asked Ashley’s father the precursor question in a tense and short-winded exchange.  Hilton looked at me with a half-bitten lip, shook my hand and emitted a single, “all right then.”  I could tell Hilton was perturbed his wife had been informed prior to my arrival as to my intentions and had giddily annihilated his sole ownership of the moment.  Lacey was assisting me with the logistics of communicating my arrival to her parents and Ashley.  I had never been outside of the United States and was glad I had gotten my passport back in undergrad.

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I landed in Dusseldorf in Hasselhof fashion.  Ashley was at the airport with her Opa and Oma.  We drove into Holland.  We were aflutter with smiles and bouncing souls in the Euro-rover.  Venlo had organized bike paths, tiny streets with parallel riding lanes for bicycles.  Ashley showed me the post office where she mailed postcards and Jan Linders the supermarket with cheese rounds the size of watermelons. 

I got to meet Ashley’s three uncles, Claus, Jan, and Peter.  Ashley’s grandparents had a quaint Dutch home with an efficiently-packed refrigerator the size of a small Pilipino woman.  The milk was in a liter bottle.  There was no ice maker and the exquisite deli meats and chesses were packed in tiny clear containers.  The front yard had no room for a lawn, but Ashley’s grandparents cared for the planter space in meticulous fashion.  Apparently the Dutch so appreciate the brief growing time in between the snow that they celebrate the pittance pocket of Earth they inhabit with a zeal for the flowers and every plant that can possibly blossom, at least the retired ones appeared to do so.

I was not sure when or how I was going to propose, but I figured the moment would come to me given time to adjust to the longitude.  On the weekend we took a train trip up to Amsterdam.  The Euro cup was going on, Holland was playing Italy.  The city was ablaze in Queen’s Orange and splattered with Italiano blue.  When we disembarked Centraal Station we bought orange cow hats to immigrate.  Hup! Holland Hup!  Soccer hooligans unite. 

We bought each other matching prostitutes in our two-people hotel room.  Ashley was hankering for something American with all the Oma-food.  We got McDonalds French fries and some Euro-fare for me.  Ashley had to pay for ketchup packets.  Ashley would not return my flannel shirt.

The Amsterdam canals traced like a finger on skin through the barge floating city.  The elevation reminded me of New Orleans.  The buildings were tall and slender like Dutch nostrils evolved to maximize heating intake.  The streets were dabbed with history and great artists like Rembrandt and Van Gogh. 

We made love in the evening with the window open in the hotel room while the soccer match was going on.  We could hear the tide of the game based on the roar and moan of the city.  We never made it to the spy on the red-light district and neither of us smoked.  We could have been anywhere.  All we wanted was each other.

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We tracked back to Venlo.  We found the Ijssalon Clevers ice cream restaurant.  We rode Ashley’s grandparent’s bikes and ferried across a fifty meter river.  Ijssalon Clevers was a sit down and order full menu affair with twenty pages of Willy Wonka-style creations complete with decorative insignia accoutrements.  All the ice creams were made in-house in flavors beyond American precepts with spiral cookies and sparklers.  Ashley got the banana split in a ceramic banana-yellow shaped dish.  I got a strawberry, blueberry whipped-cream combination in a martini glass.

We wandered around town exploring and planned a bus trip to Paris on Saturday.  Ashley wanted to go before.  I knew this was my chance.  I had an outline in my head, but I knew this was one of those moments in life about living and not thinking.  It was a doing moment.

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The bus trip was eight hours.  We woke before dawn and boarded a bus painted with the word Spanje over a yellow sun.  The fellow travelers were in all ways more Euro.  I quickly learned this involved a lust for techno music even at four in the morning.  The incessant beat accompanied each turn of the tire and each puff of smoke from the participants who wanted to use the common air space as an ash tray. 

Apparently heading to France was not as immediately romantic as the stereotype that preceded it.  However once dawn arose on the French countryside the cigarette odor was sporadic and the beat drowned out the window.  The green hills were Monet in movement.  Little farms and villages peppered this old land.  I felt naked in my American youth like a spanked Norman Rockwell baby seeing things with virgin sockets.

After the expanse of hours our bus circled into Paris.  The buildings were substantial and stately.  Something appearing out of a history book in architectural wrinkles was on every block.  Rotund buildings bereft of commercialism from afar and oozing historical context abounded.  We whisked past landmarks: Napoleon’s tomb with a cannon shot, the arc de triomphe and the Champs-Elysees. The Eifel Tower looked down like a fence-peeker mother-in-law.  Finally I spotted the Notre Dame cathedral with its oval window in the tower.  No Quasimodo was in sight.  When I saw this bastion of Catholicism, I knew that was the place to propose.

We exited the bus in a round next to a humungous Ferris wheel and an obelisk, where the bus would come back to meet us in the evening.  I managed to get Ashley to verbalize an interest in seeing la Notre Dame as if it were solely her idea.  This was usually the sort of Jedi-mind-trick only achievable by women, but we were in Paris and Ashley’s force powers were weakened.  We headed west with a stop at a street side Parisian café.

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I had a blue backpack containing my camera that I had not used the whole trip because I had the ring next to a Kodak film roll inside the camera case.  I ordered prosciutto with a no-ice coke.  The bartender put lemon in the glass.  I had a fresh-greens arugula salad.  Ashley had the upstream swimming salmon.

The food may have been delectable, but my focus was on maintaining the illusion of another day as if we were in Amsterdam and I had no plan.  This was just some guy spending time with his girlfriend a few blocks from the perimeter of the Louvre.  Mona Lisa was smiling on me.

Ashley – July 17, 1999- a note from a photo scrap book - Before Ethan took this picture, he kept making me back up.  Finally he took the photograph.  I walked up to him fumbling with the camera, book sack and camera case.  I offered to help and Ethan declined.  So I came closer. 

At that moment, Ethan rolled a roll of film across the tiles.  I went down to pick it up and so did he.  Ethan was down on one knee, looked in my eyes and I knew.  Ethan asked me to marry him.  I said, “Yes,” before Ethan could finish.  We sat on the stones for hours, just holding each other.

Ethan – Ashley and I were finishing lunch of salmon, salads and prosciutto at a Paris café.  I asked Ashley to watch the book sack while I went upstairs to the restroom.  We stepped out to the sidewalk, when I realized we had left the bag behind.  I freaked out to see the waitress trailing our path.  I was extremely relieved.  Ashley seemed more calm given her lack of knowledge about what clandestine overture was about to occur.  I flew across the globe and I almost sabotaged myself a block away.

In Paris July 17, 1999, 2:45 pm on the steps of the Notre Dame, seven blocks away from the street counting the curb, and four large blocks from the right if you face away from the church. 

It was one of those applaud love moments directors instruct people to gather and cheer in the movies, except people really did stop and marvel.  When we see two quixotic people at the pinnacle of love’s reciprocal quest being affirmed we are innately drawn to stop and stare the same way as when we see death on a highway or a marvelous feat of human heart leaping through obstacles.  Love in this world bravely stepping up on that podium to put on a show is an exhilarating spectacle. 

After lingering holding each other and kissing on the tiles and then a bench.  We tucked away inside the cathedral and said some prayers about our life together.  There was a black-bloused man inside assigned strictly to be the head-shusher to silence the visitors cycling in and out.  We felt lucky to set the stage of our life together in such a holy place.  God was with us. 

We took a boat ride on the Seine on top of a double-tiered vessel looking out over visions we did not have time to visit.  Logistics did not matter.  We were an obnoxiously in love pair.  Ashley basked at her finger like a child on Christmas morning.

After our voyage down the waterways of Paris, we decided to stop in a café on a boat across from la Notre Dame.  As we took in the view, we ordered a few potations to wet our parched palates: a bottle of champagne, Monet & Chandon, along with some sparkling water and a superfluous fruit smoothie concoction.  I guess we were thirsty.  Besides the quenching, we attempted to order le pain, bread, but all we received were peanuts.  But there was not much that could spoil the site of our engagement under the setting Parisian sun. 
Continue to Capter 7 part 1