Posts Tagged ‘audio postcard’

Transmission from Mt. Angel: Vodka Abuse

A few months ago, I met Meg in a Writing for the Radio class with Kim Stafford. Meg has very large blue eyes which telegraph the funny or tragic in what she is saying.  When she talks, she tends to look around at who she’s talking to and make good eye contact.  She once studied acting in NYC where she lived for 18 years before moving back to Mt. Angel where she grew up. In Mt. Angel, she lives in a farmhouse close to a 130 year old Benedictine monastery. It’s a very small community where people know a person’s entire family history for generations. All they need is the last name, and they know a lot about you. She volunteers listening to elderly people who confide secrets to her they don’t tell anyone else because if they did, that person would probably know too much.  Here’s a little story by Meg about her vodka-making project, which she did despite the disapproval of some of her family.

I’ve Been Here All Along and I’m Getting Tired

I spent the 4th through 6th grades with Mrs Schmidt at the Sacramento Waldorf school, which probably saved me from a life of delinquency.  She was German, and maybe that had nothing to do with it, but she was both very kind and very strict.  I was kind of a mess in the fourth grade.  I couldn’t pay attention and read under the desk constantly.  I never turned in homework and my handwriting was almost illegible.  My parents had just got divorced and my dad was back in Eugene, Oregon.  I missed him and everything else.  Mrs. Schmidt was somehow able to keep me on a tight leash.  Dear Mrs. Schmidt, you probably didn’t guess that when you let me into your classroom with the rounded wooden door handles that you’d be breaking up a fight between two girls in organic sweaters and me with the copper rod from eurythmics class.  But I’m all good now, I promise.  If I am, it’s probably due to you.  Here’s one of those times I tried your patience.

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Contingencies_Serbia_1996, a poem

Between 1996 and 1997, I was living in Transylvania and would frequently go down to Northern Serbia to visit with my boyfriend because he had a friend there in a small town in Vojvodina, a once autonomous region that  was faced now with the growing tension between Serbs and other groups.  You could actually feel it between people as the year went on.  We once jumped off a train a station early because a bunch of guys with shaved heads and steel-toed boots were acting jumpy.  One kept walking up and down the corridor and opening the sliding door of our compartment and looking in.  He was tall and looked big like you get from training.   The older lady next to me in a flowered headscarf and peacoat just looked straight ahead, not looking, so we copied her example and got off at the next stop.  This was in between the two Bosnian wars.  Dragorad was Serb, and over the year grew more and more nationalistic, which began to put a strain on our friendship with him.

But early on, before spring break and the debacle with getting kicked out of his friend’s flat in Novisad for saying the wrong thing about Clinton, we used to have long chats in the evenings in the rundown stucco house he shared with mom and brother who he took care of despite being only seventeen.  His mom couldn’t get out of bed.  She was ill somehow, in some way I never fully understood.  We would sit around the rough wooden table and eat simple food he cooked and smoke and drink coffee and talk and argue late into the night.  This is one of those evenings.

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Even If You Think No One Else Will See

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