You can listen to this story in the audio above, read by me.
Introduction
In the planning for the Le Mobile Feast tour of the country, I established a set of guidelines for how I would interact with my hosts and their friends, the dinner guests. I did not formally write them down, but these were the ones that in the end proved most helpful:
Show up and listen more than talk. Ask questions and wait long enough for the full answers. Assume the best intentions in people and take them as they present themselves. Put aside my own beliefs and discomfort, barring any threat to physical safety. If I stayed within my comfort zones, then I would likely learn little.
The first one, “show up,” was the crucial aspect of the entire project. To get a better sense of who we were as a nation, I needed to go meet people where they lived and listen to them talk about their daily reality. Not the “virtual reality” on display on social media, or even the large events that occupied national headlines and the news, but the one that they experienced firsthand along with other community members. The dinner parties helped my hosts to gather people whom I otherwise would not have met and who would offer glimpses into their lives throughout the meal. Afterward, I would request a recorded one-on-one interview with those who were willing to share more with me.
At the table and in the interviews, these mindsets and approaches generally allowed my interlocutors enough time and space to reveal more about themselves than they might in a typical back-and-forth conversation, where oftentimes, in an attempt to relate, we inadvertently hijack someone’s story with our own. I discovered that if I asked follow-up questions and stayed silent long enough, people would ponder things perhaps for the first time and surprise themselves with new reflections. In these conversations, rather than looking for answers that might fit into an existing pattern in my own mind, I let mutual discoveries of new ideas and perspectives guide our course.
The travel guide author Rick Steves once advised people who visit a foreign land and culture, “If something is not to your liking, change your liking.” In my context, I often translated that as, if something is disagreeable with my beliefs, then suspend my judgment. A friend who once witnessed a follow-up recorded interview that I conducted with a dinner guest remarked that my long silences were initially uncomfortable for her, but then she noticed that the other person would elaborate in unexpected ways.
By the end of three years on the road, slightly over half of my hosts were strangers until we met at their front door or in a public place. And half of that number of people I found through the app called CouchSurfing, popular with travelers who aim to host other travelers. I used the app when I wanted to visit a certain place but could not find a host through personal connections. Clara in Columbus, Ohio, was one of those CouchSurfing hosts.
I stayed with her for three days and quickly learned that she was in a precarious moment in life and was asking important questions about who she was and what she was willing to do. From the start, she caught my attention by mentioning topics that I had written about in my journal, bringing together overarching themes and patterns that I had witnessed in other parts of the country. Among these were also deeply personal matters that I knew would require trust for her to share with me, especially as she knew that I aimed to write about my observations and the people I met. Without LMF as a motivating context, I probably would not have asked a stranger about the socially sensitive subjects of addiction, religious beliefs, and family turmoil.
I did not know Zen Hospice Project founding director Frank Ostaseski’s name until six months after I met Clara, but something he said has stayed with me since then, and it applies to how I interacted with Clara during my brief time with her. Ostaseski, a leader in end-of-life care, believes that “listening is the shortest distance between two human beings.”
Clara told me so much about her life because I asked questions, allowed her to answer them fully, and then followed up with more questions to form a developed portrait of her, accepting any contradictions that she presented. I needed to be respectful to her and her stories, not just during our conversations but also in my daily journaling. In both instances I tried to reserve judgment and suspend my biases, not by denying them but by silently acknowledging and purposely not reacting to them. You will see below how difficult that could be sometimes, as I occasionally slipped. If I were to include these stories in a book, using real names, then I would have left out the comments that exposed my biases, as they do not offer helpful insight. I include them here to show how even the shortest distance can be hard to traverse.
I lost touch with Clara not long after my visit and before I could request a recorded interview. Without her formal acceptance, I would not have used her story in a book about LMF. I have relied on my journal entries and edited for cohesion and to clarify details and references to larger themes. Because I was not able to verify any of my notes with Clara, I’ve changed all the names of real people. Who exactly they are is less important here than what our interactions and their stories reveal.
Clara occasionally asked me not to use certain details or whole stories after she had told them, and I have omitted all of those. All parenthetical notes come from my journal entries at the time. I have used square brackets to indicate present commentary.
Each morning I spent at least an hour at a coffee shop near Clara’s apartment, where I carefully recorded what had occurred the day before.
4/29/2017: Columbus, OH; Crimson Cup Coffee
I left Richmond, Kentucky, mid-morning yesterday and drove three-plus hours to Columbus. I stopped in Lexington for lunch at Dad’s Favorites after seeing on Yelp the many photos of decadent sandwiches. Mine did not disappoint. While eating, I exchanged text messages with Clara and her friend Hannah about doing a dinner that night at Hannah’s house, which was actually her parents’ house. By now I have grown accustomed to cooking for a dinner party on the first evening in town and planning for it before seeing the kitchen.
Clara offered to host me through the CouchSurfing app. She and Hannah met at a Bible study and became friends. In the previous year they traveled in Europe together for some five weeks, and Hannah stayed for another five. For the dinner party Hannah’s brother and his wife would join us. The parents would not, because they were on a date night.
To confirm some details about my stay, I called Clara after eating lunch, and she explained that she was “in between” two places and had recently moved into an apartment belonging to her best friend Kyle. It was a temporary arrangement, she said. “He’s a slob,” she warned me, and that was why we would use Hannah’s home for our dinner party.
______ Drive [redacted for privacy], where I found the house, was “the nicest street in the neighborhood,” according to Hannah’s brother. “And the house is the largest one on the street.” Even so, he said, with the influx of immigrants and refugees into the neighborhood on the northern edge of the city, some home prices have dropped. Unlike the rise in property prices throughout much of Columbus, the immigrant effect here had kept the house’s valuation down.
After the dinner Clara asked if I wanted to go out and have a drink. We went to Podunk’s because I had seen it on the way to the house from the interstate. When I mentioned the name to Hannah, she didn’t recognize it even though it was only about a mile away. I gathered that Hannah did not go out in that part of the city. When Clara and I got to the venue, I saw why. Two police officers greeted us at the door. After checking for our IDs, the man patted me down, and the woman did the same with Clara. It was her first pat down in Columbus and my first anywhere outside an airport or government building that I could recall. We enjoyed our drink and conversation — screaming into each other’s ears over the loud music — but left to hit up one of the bars that Clara frequented. She wanted to show me one.
We drove seven miles toward downtown to Hound Dog Pizza, near the Ohio State University, where it was quiet enough for us to hear each other. By then, she had had some rum at dinner, the last gulp of Hannah’s wine, and a rum and coke that she downed quickly at Podunk’s. Earlier, while we were cooking the beignets for dessert, she told me that it took one drink for her to feel drunk. I couldn’t tell, but she must have been drunk by the time we got to Hound Dog, and she ordered water.
“What do people like to do in Columbus?” I asked.
“Barcades and board game nights,” she replied. [I would patronize many barcades throughout my travels in the Midwest.]
Despite having met me just a few hours prior, Clara was open and detailed when telling me about her life. She’s the fourth of five kids, with a heroin addict for a dad. “He’s a functional addict,” she said. He helped to debunk the myth that heroin addiction immediately ruined lives. Many people used heroin without turning into the stereotypical emaciated corpses that had gripped the popular imagination. She moved out of her family’s home at 14 and into her grandmother’s house, to escape the unpredictability.
After finishing high school, she chose not to go to college and set out on her own. She eventually got into wedding photography but didn’t have the discipline to manage her schedule when no one was telling her what to do all the time. She quit doing that and “went out my door to look for work.” She landed at a one-person insurance agency, working for a 70-something man, basically keeping him company in the office. He paid her well, even during the first months of trial, and had said that he would fund her training to get certified to sell insurance. She wanted to earn the certification but did not see herself working there for long. He was near retirement — or death, she said — and so the business could not be a long-term investment. Also, a large part of her wanted to travel again. Her ideal life would involve “travel, photography, and writing.”
Until recently, Clara was shy and avoided talking to people. She surprised me with that description, as the person I talked to on the phone and then in person was friendly and talkative. She stood around 5’-9”, with long brown hair and a slender build. She was a beautiful woman, all the more because of her warm nature and calm, soothing voice. When I asked Clara what had led to the changes in her personality, she attributed them to her relationship with God. More specifically, it was because she was taking a break from attending church. She belonged to a church that held meetings in someone’s home. At the moment, her church was “chastising” her for the broken marriage that began when she was 18. It was something of an arranged marriage and did not work out. At 26 years old, Clara realized that she saw her husband more as a brother. The couple’s separation caused a rift between Clara and the church leaders, as well as between her and many of its members.
She did not say how long ago that happened, but the fact that she was still “in between” places suggested that it was recent. Since then, she said, she has felt free to “explore,” and she has been going out drinking and dancing, especially with Kyle, her best friend in whose apartment she was staying and hosting me for a few days. She felt tremendous guilt doing these sinful things, but “it’s so much fun.” She knew that she was moving away from God, she said, but it was something she would allow herself to do. She could not explain why her guilty conscience had not won the debate, and she quickly discovered that she enjoyed the “heathen” activities of drinking and dancing and flirting. She said that she recently fell in love with a man she met last year in Europe while traveling with Hannah. She had never felt that way about anyone, and I suspected she was very curious, perhaps in an adolescent way that is at once thrilling and terrifying, the latter even without the probable condemnation of her church’s leaders.
We got home from Hound Dog Pizza pretty late and still had to dry the laundered sheets for my bed, so we stayed up to talk some more. She told me all kinds of stories while texting with a guy in Italy (a different one). She claimed that she talked with these men because she was “bored” and obsessed with Europe. She didn’t think of the probability that they might see her 1-a.m. texting as keen interest on her part.
4/30/2017: Columbus, OH; Crimson Cup Coffee
I have no idea where Kyle spends the night. Again, this morning he returned home from somewhere to take his shower and start the day, maybe after a nap. He and Clara hot-rack his bed. She gets up for her day when he comes back from the night. [He did not sleep in his apartment on any of the nights during my stay, and Clara gave me her room for my comfort and privacy. “Hot-rack” is a Navy term for when ship crew members on opposite duty schedules share a bed.]
Clara told me how Kyle recently ate Chipotle every day for a month just so he could receive a catered meal meant for an “office party.” My first time walking into the apartment, I spotted a couple of large Chipotle carry-out cartons in a pile of moving boxes in the living room. They came full of food, and he went through it all in one week, presumably before it could spoil. Clara said she helped some, but I imagined that he ate most of it.
The three of us met for lunch yesterday at Mozart’s — Clara’s favorite restaurant — which offered an impressively large bakery menu and comfort-food fares. She told me about her family, including some of her “notorious” cousins. “My family has been on the show Cops,” she said. Her mom kept a recording of the episode. After lunch Kyle went home to nap, and Clara and I spent the next several hours together.
[She told me many stories about various members of her family that she did not give me permission to use. In my journal, I summarized all that I heard this way: “Clara gave me the impression that, if you’re in this family, stand still long enough and shit would fall from the sky onto your head.”]
It made sense and also did not make sense to me that, in such a volatile environment, Clara was “pushed” by family to marry her husband. Maybe there was something to the fact that people thought it was in her best interest to latch onto a decent guy as soon as possible.
As we were readying to leave, she asked if I wanted to accompany her to visit her friends Teresa and Robert. They had invited her to see their new house, where she had not been. On our way, we drove through the “ghetto” part of Columbus. [I did not note its name.] Clara used that word to describe the area and talked about how the highway divided the disparate neighborhoods in it, creating visual cues to let you know you had crossed a socioeconomic divide.
“I like how convenient the highways are when you want to get into these places,” she said, but she was aware of the racist thinking and planning policy that went into creating such segregation. As we observed the changes from one block to another, separated by an interstate or major highway, I wondered if the same construction planning and real estate zoning had occurred here as in Louisville, purposely disenfranchising black residents. [Not long before visiting Columbus, I had spent several days exploring the neighborhoods on either side of Louisville’s 9th Street Divide.1]
Clara told me so much about Columbus that, upon arrival at her friends’ new house, all I knew about Teresa was that she used to be a stripper and that these days she was looking for better friends. That’s where Clara came in. I learned through Teresa that Clara was a good presence in many people’s lives in Columbus, and that she valued relationships. She spent a good deal of time and energy on them, blocking out hours and days to visit with individual people, checking in with them on the phone. She was very good at keeping in touch, Teresa said.
When Teresa opened the door, I saw that she was part-Asian. Half-Japanese, she would say later. Initially, she seemed unaware of my presence, not so much as giving me a look to acknowledge that a strange man had just entered her house. After several minutes I extended my hand and introduced myself. She looked at me for the first time then.
I’m willing to attribute her aloofness to her being extremely hungover, even though it was well after 1 p.m. All over the living room were signs that some epic drinking had occurred the previous night. Half-empty plastic supersized bottles of cheap liquor sat on the coffee table, and a large trash can stood next to the couch. “It’s for the beer bottles,” Teresa said, an explanation made unnecessary by the impressive number of empties inside the bin.
We didn’t see it, but there was a loud, excited dog in the next room, which was closed off by a glass door. It was in a crate, Teresa said, and undergoing puppy training. There were signs of a child living in the house, confirmed when Clara asked about Teresa’s daughter, who was four. The child was currently spending time with either her dad or his parents, as happened once a month or so. Teresa and Robert would take advantage of her absence to host all-nighters like the one whose aftermath we were witnessing.
Clara asked for a tour of the house, which took us through the main floor, where Teresa pointed to a room and said that their roommate lived in it. The adjacent bathroom also belonged to the tenant. We then went upstairs to see the daughter’s room, which was large enough to contain two beds and still allow for an open play space. The child had a walk-in closet containing more hanging clothes than most adults would have, even though she would likely not fit into most of them in a few months’ time.
The master bedroom was a sight. Apparently, the party proceeded upstairs at some point in the early morning hours and into the bedroom. Robert had tried going to bed before everyone else, so everyone else took the party to him. A folding table sat at the end of the king bed, with two folding chairs. Many more unfinished bottles, ash trays, and other discarded bottles lay there than downstairs.
We walked past a closed door. “Robert’s actually in there,” Teresa said, pointing to the bathroom. “He’s having a meeting.”
“Hi, Robert!” Clara called out, and we heard a muffled reply through the door. “Who’s he meeting with?” she asked Teresa, missing the joke.
“Himself,” replied Teresa, deadpanning, and Clara caught the humor.
We returned downstairs and descended further into the basement. A cat also lived in the house, and it apparently used the basement as a bathroom. The space went on for three rooms, with few enough windows that only in the third one did the smell abate. In the second room, Teresa pointed to a thin wooden door and said to us that “someone else uses that to sleep in.” I would have thought it a tool shed or a utility closet. But it was a darkened, windowless room. Clara opened the door without permission and said hello to someone in the dark. I could barely make out the edge of a mattress on the ground, but a voice responded to her, confused about who she was.
We went up the stairs and took a different path to the kitchen, through what would be a dining room. A dining table sat lonely in the room, covered with cigarette paper, tobacco, and a cigarette roller. It’s much cheaper to make your own, we were told. The kitchen displayed signs of normal daily life, with freshly washed dishes and baking sheets drying on the counter, pots and pans of various sizes hanging above the sink, and some dirty plates piled neatly in the basin. On the other side of the window above the sink was a freshly cut grass lawn that extended some 30 yards from the house. They had many long-term plans for the yard, Teresa said, for both their child and the dog.
Several minutes after we sat down in the living room, Robert came downstairs to greet us. The basement-dwelling “housemate” who was sleeping also joined us, looking disheveled and red-eyed. He was shirtless, his torso and arms showcasing nipple rings and tattoos. He was friendly and talkative, and coherent, for someone who had stopped drinking only at 8 in the morning, and he impressively kept a dangling cigarette at the edge of his lips while chatting with us. Halfway out the front door, presumably to light his cigarette, he turned around and asked Teresa: “Is it cool to medicate?” Teresa said, “Yes.” Clara didn’t know what that meant, so Teresa explained that he was asking about cannabis.
Robert was in much better shape than Teresa and the unnamed roommate, benefitting from one or two hours more sleep and the relief of his “meeting.” He introduced us to the dog, tightly gripping the leash even as we were standing in the living room. They were in the process of looking for an effective trainer for the German shepherd after obedience school had failed him. At one point Teresa said that she needed to do cardio again, but she could not run through the neighborhood with the dog. He would chase after everyone and everything, so she would spend the entire time holding him back rather than exercising. She gave another reason why she couldn’t run in the neighborhood. I was expecting her to say physical safety, but instead she asked, “Do you know what catcalling is?”
Robert was hungry and asked if everyone would like coffee. It was their breakfast, after all. They were walking to the kitchen when Clara told him that he could cook bacon in the oven on a baking sheet instead of frying it in a pan. He had never heard of that. They were arguing about it when Clara called out to me in the living room, “Ask Steve. He’s a chef.” I went into the kitchen to confirm Clara’s claim. Robert slowly relented, and it was clear that he needed to hear it from a man. He started asking questions about the particulars of how to cook bacon in the oven, but he completely ignored Clara, the person who’d first told him it could be done. He addressed just me, even after I tried to defer to Clara. I should add that his dad was full Ukrainian (but hated Ukrainians and preferred to think of himself as Russian), and he was brought up in the Orthodox Church. Old conceptions of gender, when bolstered by religious dogma, could die hard.
I initially shocked Robert (and Teresa) and then rendered him doubtful about my cooking abilities when I suggested to him that he could make “candied bacon” by putting brown sugar on the uncooked bacon and letting it caramelize as it baked. Their incredulous response to the suggestion made me wonder what they were imagining about how it would taste. After I had sprinkled the sugar on one strip to demonstrate, Robert did it to two more. “Just in case I like it,” he said, sounding more open-minded. “I don’t want to have just one strip.” (At this writing, I do not know the verdict.)
We left halfway through the bacon’s cooking to let them start their day, at around 3 p.m. On the way back to my car, which I had left parked outside of Crimson Cup, Clara drove through downtown and several nearby neighborhoods. She showed me the Museum of Art (free on Sundays, good to know) and where she used to live. She said that the restaurant industry often tested menus and concepts in Columbus before spreading them to other areas of the country. We passed the capitol building, where some of her friends worked for John Kasich.
“When he was running for president, some of my friends secretly didn’t want him to win,” she told me. “They love having him as their boss.”
Back at my car, I was planning on going for a walk because the day’s rainy forecast broke its promise and gave us sunshine. Clara had invited me to join her and some friends later for board game night (a big thing among young people here, she had told me the day before), so I wanted to get some exercise before another potentially late night. When I got home, I figured that Clara would be shortly behind me. I had her key and didn’t want to leave the apartment and lock her out. Strangely, she didn’t respond to either my call or text. Instead of leaving, I lay down in bed to see if she would come home shortly. Eventually, I abandoned the idea of going for a walk after seeing the sunny forecast for the following day.
After she had returned home, I left alone, followed her suggestion, and drove to German Village, a touristy area — and an historic landmark — close to downtown. At one point the Germans were the largest immigrant group in the city, and they lived mostly in that neighborhood. I ended up at the Book Loft, a large labyrinth of a store. In addition to seemingly every recently published book, the Loft also sold records and comic books. I bought a copy of Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.
While driving into Ohio from Kentucky, I had heard a radio interview with Sam Quinones, the author of the book, which was published two years earlier. The title came from the name of a public swimming pool in Portsmouth, Ohio, that was a community hub where generations of residents congregated. When it shut down after 64 years of operation, in 1993, the community lost a rallying point, and the subsequent decades of social and economic changes robbed the town and region of other means to maintain communal ties. In Quinones’s telling, in those same ensuing decades the opioid epidemic would seize the country by its jugular, choking every town and city no matter the size. If we think of the national crisis as ripples in a pond that emanated from somewhere at some point, then Portsmouth was where the rock first disturbed the water’s surface. Although opioids had ravaged the American landscape for decades by 2017, most of us still saw addiction in simple terms, as a weakness of will that rendered the drug user a burden on society. For decades, this simplistic view allowed the many functioning addicts among us, like Clara’s dad, to descend into irrecoverable depths without notice. Even worse, sometimes we would use their “normal” appearances to deny that a problem existed at all. In Dreamland, Quinones painted a complex picture with many shades of grey.
After getting the board-game-night address from Clara, I drove to the house, which turned out to be close to Kyle’s apartment. Entering the neighborhood of single family homes, I wasn’t sure what to think or expect from the host and attendees of the night’s festivities. I pulled up to a midsize house that was much nicer than expected. A young woman named Kate opened the door to greet me excitedly and made it sound like they had been waiting specifically for me to arrive. Letting me through the main hallway, she said that everyone else was in the basement.
I walked downstairs to see Clara, Kyle, and another young man dressed in a three-piece suit. It occurred to me then that Kate was also dressed up. I asked, and Don (the suited man) said they had just come from a wedding. Strange, I remarked, a Saturday night wedding that didn’t go late into the night with partying. They’d left early, Don said, for game night. Also strange, I thought.
For the rest of the night we played Blokus and dominos. They taught me the first, and I taught them the second. We were all drinking ice water (also unusual). Casual conversation suggested that Don and Kate attended the same church as Clara. Clearly, they were not among the people currently “disciplining” her. She actually had to clarify for them why she was being disciplined — for separating from her husband. Nothing else was said about the subject, and I was dying of curiosity but let it pass.
After a match of dominos to 100 points, we ended game night. Don won, and Kate lost — she seemed very competitive and not used to losing, especially to Don. I was thinking about getting some food, having skipped dinner, and asked for suggestions. It was nearing 11:30. Clara asked if I wanted to join them for a bar outing later, and I declined.
I didn’t sleep much last night because of the three or four trains that ran through the night, blowing their whistle practically outside the window. After she got home, Clara got on the phone with (I think) the same guy she had been talking with in Italy. I heard through the walls bits of their conversation, which turned into a video chat. At some point she left for the bar. Sometime after 3, she returned with another woman, and they proceeded to have a conversation that progressively got louder. I learned in the morning that it was Kyle’s ex-girlfriend who had come over. In the morning Clara said that she was drunk after doing one shot of tequila at the bar.
[I recorded in my journal Clara’s comment about the restaurant industry out of curiosity, intending to learn more about whether that might be the case. Two weeks later I would read in Dreamland that “no place, apparently, represents the country more faithfully, and for that reason Columbus, Ohio, had been known as ‘the test-market capital of the United States’ for several years now.”2]
5/1/2017: Columbus, OH; Crimson Cup Coffee
The LMF journey has turned dark on occasion, but somehow it has felt different in the past few states, starting with West Virginia. I’m sure that I have been influenced by the past two years’ worth of media coverage and discussion about Appalachia, and therefore everything I am seeing has been colored by that lens. I wonder if there would be a similar effect if all I knew about California was the problems with homelessness in Los Angeles and tech hipsters in Silicon Valley, and then spent just a few days visiting those cities. I probably would recognize all of the clichés and miss much else.
On the other hand, I do trust my instincts as a seasoned U.S. traveler. Something does feel different.
For one, religion plays a much stronger role in people’s lives here than it does in even the South. In the South, matters are settled. Because the environment doesn’t change much, families can go for generations without switching church or god or religion. [Between the ages of 16 and 33, I was a practicing Evangelical Christian, an active Sunday School teacher, and home Bible study leader. I first joined a Presbyterian Church, in Southern California, and later became a member of two Southern Baptist congregations, in Panama City, Florida, and then Corpus Christi, Texas. Story for another time.] In the more culturally turbulent areas of the Rust Belt, the past few decades’ changes in industry — departures of corporations and, therefore, of social stability — have necessitated movement, immigration in and out, of both people and ideas. There’s a restlessness that results from children knowing their futures cannot be similar to those of their parents a generation earlier. With that uncertainty comes the uprooting of ideas and ways of life that had until now been taken for granted.3
Some people respond to this uncertainty by abandoning previous thoughts and beliefs, and they strike out on their own. They move to another city. Or they stay but find another circle of friends and redefine their beliefs.
Other people double-down and dig deeper into religion, for example. At least a church community provides an immediate and reliable support system. In fact, the stricter the code of behavior among a group, the more safety it represents. The case seems to be true for some members of the church I recently got to know well in Grove City, Pennsylvania. I’m hearing similar sentiments from Clara, whose life has been so unpredictable and shiftless that even the current “disciplining” by some church members feels right, because it’s rooted in some kind of foundation, of shared beliefs and values.
Clara occasionally mentions “the sin of man that obviates the grace of a perfect God,” sounding exactly like everyone else who would say the same thing, no matter where the person lived. Having belonged on “the inside,” hearing that language and rhetoric for nearly two decades, I recognize it readily.
Clara marvels at how much she enjoys going out and dancing and drinking. She comes close to asking why, but I don’t think she does. When she talks about it, she just says that she knows it is wrong, that it’s “putting her further from God.” One time, she said, “Maybe it’s what needs to happen for now.” It would make sense to me if she just phrased it as giving herself a timeout, or a probationary period — like the Amish do with their children when they turn 18 — to figure out what to do about her broken marriage. But she does not get to that point. This balancing of obedience to God and desire to “have fun” just sounds like an ambiguous and precarious state of being. She seems just as easily able to fall back into the established order — staying in the marriage, apologizing for her behavior, and resuming her life in the church — as to walk away entirely.
Of course, I’m getting only a glimpse of her life as it unfolds now. I won’t be around to see developments months or years from now. I suspect things will change in short order from how they are now, balancing on a knife’s edge. It seems to me, they need to, because the situation cannot remain so precarious for long.
Afterword
Sadly, I did not get to interview Clara and ask her to expound on many of the stories she had shared. Nonetheless, they are patches that helped me to form a coherent narrative quilt of who we are as a nation. They uncover tensions that exist in our individual lives and that speak to our search for meaning.
In the bracketed commentary I noted where my own experiences helped and hindered my understanding of another person. For example, my Christian background allowed me to readily understand Clara’s framework as she tried to sort out her own reasoning for certain decisions. At times I needed to stifle the temptation to question her church’s interpretation of biblical principles or to question things in a Socratic way, that is, in leading her to the answers I already had in mind. As an example of hindrance, my judgment reared itself in my recollection of Robert. As I reread my journal for this writing, I became certain that he did not tell me about his dad while cooking the bacon. Writing about that moment on the next day, I made a connection, perhaps accurate and perhaps not, between how he treated Clara and his Russian Orthodox upbringing.
The important lesson that I repeatedly learned throughout my journey and conversations with people from all walks of life is this: People come with a set of experiences that define their values, and I do not need to agree with them to understand them. To paraphrase Krista Tippett, one of the best interviewers I know: I’m not interested in what you believe but how you came to believe it.
One of my current objectives with this project, LMF2, is to propose better ways for us to engage in civil discourse and conversations in general. The guidelines I mention in the “Introduction” are a good start, especially the first one about being in one another’s presence and listening more than talking. With technology, we can be present with another person through the phone or on a screen; however, I want to be explicit here about the contrast between the kind of “communication” and “discourse” that occur online and the kind of one-on-one conversations where Frank Ostaseski’s type of listening can happen. It’s practically impossible to truly listen amid asynchronistic engagement to online posts and comments, and yet for many of us, this is where we devote so much of our energy and time every day. One reason many of us favor online forums for our conversations might be that we have become more mindful of public reaction to our comments than of how we should relate to another individual, who necessarily embodies complex stories and experiences.
Whereas online interactions that are visible to a larger audience may tend to widen divides, sitting with someone and listening generously can much more effectively shorten the distance between two humans. If there’s a way out of our current divisiveness, it might very well begin with this kind of listening.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Clara and her friends for sharing their homes and stories with me, and for introducing me to Columbus. A big thank-you to my friend Greg, who provided many helpful suggestions and edits.
Quinones, Sam. Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2016, p. 161.
The 2017 book Glass House, about Lancaster, Ohio, is an excellent, in-depth and intimate reporting of what happens to these towns and cities that for generations had produced what looked and felt like the American Dream only to disintegrate in the past few decades. Tellingly, Brian Alexander’s full title is Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town.
