When Samuel Beam, better known by his stage name Iron & Wine, sidled his way onto the Peter J. Sharp stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the crowd of New Yorkers in the auditorium took in a collective breath and began to applaud.
Some people grapple with their own mortality through meditation, or mountain climbing, or making a pilgrimage to some lost, crumbling temple full of monks. Some do it because they’ve just received a diagnosis of terminal illness or reached their 80th birthday. I just have to step onto a 737.
It was a hot Friday night in Berlin, and young people on the narrow streets of Kreuzberg district were just beginning their usual 48-hour clubbing routine with cigarettes, beer, and lines of cocaine. Aware that I stood out as a solitary woman and an obvious foreigner, I tried to shove my way through the throngs of smelly teenagers and drunken old men as efficiently as I could, right shoulder angled toward the crowd to get the maximum force-to-surface area ratio.
“What is that thing?” I watched in confusion as Anna exhaled a thin stream of what looked like smoke into the cramped air of her bedroom. With only a few weeks left in our senior year, we had spent the afternoon trading high school reflections and speculating about the mysteries of college, now only months away. Real schoolwork and the anxieties of the application process now behind us, these last months of spring had begun to feel like a sort of limbo, a time of licensed aimlessness before the fall brought new routines.
Getting tickets was a nightmare—the chances were slim to nothing. One in a quarter billion. But somehow, the odds worked in your favor. Seems pretty arbitrary, if you ask me. You were offered a front row seat under one condition—you would stay for all of it.
There are thirteen churches and one synagogue in the town where I grew up. It is an anomaly for Bergen County, which is known for, among other things, the heavily Jewish bastions of Fairlawn and Teaneck. My synagogue community is small when compared to communities in the more Jewish towns, though it is larger than others in the county’s northwestern corner.
I am walking home from the U-Store around 10pm on the first night I can remember not feeling cold after sunset. My Arrested Development poster of Tobias’ jean shorts keeps falling down and I need tape, but they only have the University-approved wall adhesive that mothers buy on your first day of college that you never use.
My father’s father flew free from the depths of the Russian Empire as an infant, for sticks and stones and angry Christians drove his family out. It was in 1916 or maybe 1917.
We sit by the window, eating Chobani with rigid, robust, black C-store spoons. “Did you know Chobani was actually founded by a Turkish dude?” I say. She is Greek, and I know some of the tumultuous regional history, but I am still surprised to see her eyes well with tears.
“Always be happy, never be content.” Etched in pavement just a few steps from my dorm, the inscription never fails to draw my attention. I’ve always read it as a testament to Princeton’s hard-driving academic ethos: a reminder to students to always keep striving, never to cease pushing themselves to achieve.
I reach into my bag, the wrapper crinkles, and, suddenly, I think I want to climb a mountain. Well, I take that back. I’m rather un-athletic, my legs are disproportional to my body, and recently I’ve developed an incessant rattling cough, so I know that that’s a poor idea.
On a map, the penobscot Bay in Downeast Maine looks like shattered glass. Rivers and inlets crack through the rocky coast, carving out hundreds of islands and peninsulas. A favorite of fishermen and vacationers, the Penobscot is the halfway point on the coast between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia.
