I eloped to Biloxi, Mississippi, when I was 19.
Biloxi was deep in the stronghold of an eternal, physical, and mental South--overbearing heat, plantations, I-9, small downtown, deserted streets, railroads tracks, magnolia trees, and Spanish moss. My new life was about waiting for my airman first class husband to come home late at night and recount his day at Kessler Air force Base: on the base life was ripe with action, orders, discipline, training, marches, shiny uniforms, and new recruits. But I wasn’t privy to any of it, just an occasional visit to its commissary to pick up household items. Instead, I stayed home—slept in late, watched soaps, ate cookies, sat by the pool, and walked along the shallow waters of Biloxi Beach, always alone (my husband was always called away for some detail or duty that kept him on base most of the time). I might have been depressed back then, but I didn’t realize it.
I might have also been running away from an overbearing mother, my violent father's recent death, and my too fast-paced and unrelenting life in New York City, where I moved to from Florida after my father’ passing and where I worked as teller at Chemical Bank on 42nd street. But I was also a novice adventurer, a young woman who heeded the call to Mississippi after my boyfriend said he missed me and wanted to marry me.
What can I say about living in a state of dullness? It pulled me into feelings of nothingness, it looked like a humid, overcast day with rain-filled clouds, and it seemed its people were in cohoots with its faraway mental time zone so that I couldn't reach them and didn't bother trying. That was my Biloxi, and it is also my Portland, Maine.
I can see the similarities of between states of feeling in each place (I recently moved to Portland after raising two kids on my own). Yet I now admit that the perfect antidote for mental, physical, and psychological exhaustion is and will always be solitude, quiet, darkness, and sleep, even though there is a difference between giving fully into an all-encompassing lethargy and not being the least bit proactive in trying to overcome it while being in a state of rest. I believe it was Maurice Sendak who said,“when you are tired sleep in a dark place.”
Looking back, I should have seen more of Biloxi, its Civil War fields, museums, plantations, and cemeteries; and I should have made Biloxi's antidote of dullness into an elixir of discovery. This would have healed me sooner, made me clear-minded and available to my immediate present--as challenging as that was at the time. But I was young and inexperienced, so I didn't learn my lesson until now. (The other day I read an article about Biloxi on its 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and I realized that some places I once knew were no longer there, like some plantations along I-9 and the apartment building where I lived, also along I-9. It made me sad not knowing those places and collecting their memories.)
Like Biloxi, I arrived in Portland exhausted and in need of a break from raising two kids as a single, full-time working mother. Portland was a step back in time to the same bleak, exhausted mental time zone I experienced in Biloxi. This time, though, I recognized the languidness that gripped and anchored me in a full stop, except Portland's spirit was draped in more of L.L. Bean preppies, 60s hippies/free love, and 70s music and drugs.
Maybe real time travel is about knowing how place fits into your mental time zone. You just need to know where you are at the moment whether you're repeating your past, having a new perspective on your present, or a glimpsing into your future, You don’t need a machine to go back or forward in personal history or your experience or memory of it. It was Confucius who said that you can know your future by understanding your past. It seems life experiences are boomerangs for time-shifting your perspectives.
This time in Portland, I went beyond the dull. I understood that being in a state of quiet is the only way for me to heal in places with an overwhelming sense of it--and Portland is quiet; it’s also remote, austere, and slow-moving. Its people are intellectuals, hard-core feminists, loners, summer tourists, artsy/folksy/gypsies/yoga enthusiasts, outdoorsmen/women, religious zealots, long lost ancestors of native American Indians, drunks, hard-scrabble poor, and/or detached rich white folk who fear anything the least bit different, especially the beautiful, high cheek-boned and smiling Somali immigrants (The Catholic organizations here have sponsored many immigrants from war-torn areas in Africa), who even in the midst of winter wear light and colorful headscarves and skirts and look like precious stones lying about a dark mountainside.
I go beyond it all to recalibrate dullness into daily adventures: hikes in the forest with guidebooks on trees, wild flowers, and birds; rides on ferries to Peaks, Long, Cliff, and Diamond Islands where I have picnics with club sandwiches I buy in town; visits to museums; rentals from the library of art house and foreign films and documentaries. I also read books, write, and date.
Maybe one day Maine will be a lost memory recollected with fresh eyes in new new time and place. Memoir, "The Continent of Ruby," available at: http://www.amazon.com
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