Last time I posted here I was trying to get comfortable with writing, trying to get back to work on the manuscript of my new book idea. I was in the place of weighing old material, beckoning new material, struggling to find a way to tell a story that would bring together my life and the journey my parents took in 1951 across Europe.

And then all went silent here. I disappeared.

Sometimes no news is excellent news.

I simply slid down into the land of creativity, that place of sublime flow where each day acceptance yields more gifts, yields more production, yields unexpected connections. And so I have been writing for weeks, the story growing around me in ways I could not have have planned or forced.

I am in a space of opening to what comes. I like what is happening on the page. I trust it.

What I can say to you as a memorist is I didn’t get here with a well drawn outline. I didn’t get here by watching the clock and planning when I would complete and deliver a draft for celebratory publication. I got here by simply letting go, following a fuzzy idea, and knowing that everything I write could be crap—yet being really pleased when the stuff that has come out seems quite cogent and laced with insight.

So every day I have trusted that—that I may throw it out, even while I let myself like a lot of it.

And hence, I go forward, dear reader, sculpting the words that are given to me.

Leap and trust. That’s my best advice.

Oh and don’t drink or watch TV. Those two are sure to rob you of clarity and inspiration. At least for me, the good stuff comes when the channel is clear.

I have been back in America for weeks now.

I never posted again after Brussels. Why?

The day I took the train out of Brussels, destined for my last stop on the Continent, I emerged from the station in Amsterdam and tumbled into a setting so surreal I thought I’d walked onto a vintage, post-nuclear-apocaplyse movie set: glassy-eyed automatons wandered through urban decay. Newspapers swirled in gusts of wind. Sun flickered off dust whipping round people’s hair and coats. Paper cups pivoted in half-orbs in the gutters scratching on asphalt—cree-ehsch, cree-ehsch. Bottles heaped corners filled with fast food wrappers.

And through it all marched the oblivious hordes.

I walked for blocks wheeling my suitcase, a furrow knitting my brows. “This is the dirtiest city I have ever seen.”

Why was everyone acting like this was okay?

I followed the directions I’d memorized to find my hotel hoping I’d walk out of a bad dream, but things only grew worse. Overflowing trash containers. Food rotting in gutters. Coffee cups blowing. Broken beer bottles.

I passed a woman a few doors down a side street sweeping the steps to her rowhouse and approached holding out the slip of paper with the hotel address. “Hello,” I said.

“You are close.” She looked up from the paper. “I can show you,” and she carried her broom to the canal street, pointed across water toward the next bridge. “There,” she said, “on the corner.”

“May I ask—” I hesitated. I did not want to offend her. “Why is the city so dirty?”

“I am so embarrassed.” She hung her head. “I am going away this weekend. I can not take it. Two weeks now. A garbage strike.”

We commiserated. Then I rolled my bag past another mountain of garbage to the hotel door.

The strike only grew more appalling in those first days in Amsterdam with the mounds of garbage bags turning into mountains, the stink filling narrow streets. Others reported rats, but I did not see any. Still, how could they not have been lurking in doorways and under bridges just ready for dark and the opportunity to forage?

The sheer weight of the garbage, coupled with the lack of wi-fi at the hotel simply made blogging during those last days difficult. Once I found my way back to Amsterdam—I took to leaving the city nearly every day—I had to sit on the bottom step of a spiral staircase outside the locked door of the hotel office to pick up a signal, a prospect that sounded unappealing at the end of the day.

And so, the clock ran out, and I boarded one last train, to Schiphol this time, and reluctantly left Europe to return to this life and the task of making a story from the raw material of experience.

And here we are today . . .

Below you’ll find a few more of my Trash photos from Amsterdam.

In the future I’ll post photos from my final explorations in Holland, the term my parents used when speaking of the Netherlands. But then I will turn this blog in a new direction. Memoir-on-the Road will continue to chronicle the places I traveled in pursuit of this story, but more and more I will look at the process I go through taking events and emotion, research and history and finding my way into a draft of a book-length memoir.

It will be a process of discovery and that seems a useful thing to share with others seeking a way to shape a tale from life lived, so check back in.

May 6, 2010

I am in Paris. My first evening here I washed some clothing in the bathroom sink; it was time. I’d been holding out on a pair of silk pajamas. It’s true, dear reader, I had not washed them since I left home, but as you will see, there is a reason.

The first night I stayed in a hotel in Portland, Oregon, before I caught a flight early the next morning to Rome. That night I pulled from my suitcase the silk pajamas and slipped into them. Noticing a stain on the front, I brushed at it with my hand, but it would not come off. Odd, these are brand new . . .

I turned on a light and inspected. There, as plain as if the material were the floor and my kitty Flynn had just dashed in the door from playing in the rain and mud, were a series of paws prints dashing across the front of my pajamas. Instantly, I saw him in his happy passion for life, banging his little nose at my bedroom window to come in—who cares about doors?

Sitting at my desk and computer I would routinely swivel to the left, slide the window open, and in Flynn would dart, usually across my desk, keyboard, or lap and onto the floor, or with a bound of delight over me and onto the desk and whatever papers might be spread there. His lust for life charmed me below all my routine admonishments; he must have felt this.

Later, after a snack, he would ricochet around the room seeking attention, climbing shelves, tables, whatever presented itself as reminiscent of a tree branch, fence, railing. Sometimes drawers were left open by inattention on my part, and sometimes Flynn climbed these drawers to explore the closet. My black silk pajamas rested on top of a pile of clothing in a drawer, waiting to be packed for this journey. I did not know then, of course, that those sacred, muddy footprints would be the last evidence of his short, joyous life, and so I simply could not wash them away. They went to bed with me each night for weeks, until through sheer love I wore them away onto bed sheets across Europe.

Last night I attended mass at Notre Dame Cathedral and I said a prayer for all things lost: my mother, Nancy, and my companion, Flynn.

You can travel the world dear reader, but you carry your losses with you.
When I return to America, filled with the richness of this experience, it will still be to an empty house lined with the possessions my mother loved, but not my mother, and to a daily life devoid of my magic little friend.

Magic Jumping Kitty: