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Gods of the Modern World Wear Running Shoes
Alongside a lonely high desert highway in northern
No one knows how it got there or exactly when it became The Shoe Tree. Some claim that a newlywed bride tossed her heels into the branches in a moment of ecstasy. Others say it was a truckload of drunken migrants on their way back from a party.
Whatever the reason, The Shoe Tree has found a place in the local lore of the small desert community where it resides. Legends grew up around it. Travelers late at night sometimes claimed to see the ghost of a young woman killed in a traffic accident just around the bend reclining against the base. Others claimed that jewels or money could be found stuffed in some of the toes of the footwear.
Most people treated the tree with affection and humor. Some, like my mother-in-law, found it ridiculous in the extreme. A few shunned it, claiming it was akin to the worship of Baal.
Maybe they had a point.
The Shoe Tree did exude a certain reverential presence. Majestic and gnarled, The Shoe Tree was a deity among trees. Impossible to ignore, the tree with its ever increasing number of canvas fruit commanded attention. Every so often the highway department would come along and clear out the shoes, but within days they would show up again. Cowboy boots and dance shoes. Expensive Nikes and casual slippers. High heels. Birkenstocks. Even mukluks and diving flippers occasionally made their appearance. Once I saw a false leg dangling like a giant pod from the branches.
Then one Friday morning The Shoe Tree lay on its side in the turnout it had inhabited for years. Someone had cut it down.
The demise of The Shoe Tree made front page news in Susanville, about 50 miles away. Accusations flew. Some blamed the highway department. Others an escaped convict from the nearby penitentiary. One resident tried to pass it off as the work of aliens from outer space who took it to study the earth’s culture. Most believed it to be the work of an angry, alienated teenager with a chip on his shoulder.
Overnight a small shrine grew up in the place where The Shoe Tree once stood. Bouquets of flowers in old boots adorned the stump. Poems, pictures, and lots of old shoes formed an altar.
Then, new shoe trees began appearing throughout the area. One on the road to
Someday, far in the future, archeologists may discover these trees. What will they conclude? That we worshiped the shoe? Or we were a people with a foot fetish? Maybe they will presume that we were a restless folk who loved travel, always in search of new horizons. Maybe they would be right.
I’ve been in China long enough now that not much surprises me. So when my husband and I went to Guantang Fuhai Hotspring Resort over Christmas weekend and the brochure told us to “Come On In and Enjoy our Drug Pool!” we figured, sure, why not? After all, the brochure also told us that we could “cultivate spirit and free from vulgarity here.”
The land smells like old coins,
like rust and sulphur
I came here
middle-aged and ungraceful
to grieve
to live again
and I found myself on an old bus
on a road that dipped
and rose through the
We passed a village.
An old woman
in a white dress
sat on the dividing line
of the highway
a bouquet of lilies
clutched to her breast
her head thrown back to
the cloudless sky
screaming
My Mother’s Typhoon
On the second anniversary of my mother’s death a typhoon hit
Dorothy’s big regret is that she wasn’t born in Victorian England where she could drink tea, eat crumpets and swoon anytime something unpleasant happened. She would have been a natural for smelling salts. Instead she was born just before the Great Depression, became a war bride, divorced when the war ended, remarried and raised one daughter through the conservative fifties, her son during the hippie era, and her youngest in the seventies. I was the youngest. Since she died two years ago, I’ve been trying to reconstruct her life in a way that I was never able to do while she was alive.
Like most mothers and daughters, our relationship was messy. Her passiveness, actually, the passiveness of both my parents, drove me crazy. Leisurely drives in the country usually culminated with my mother peering over her dark-rimmed glasses at my father and asking, “Honey, should we stop for lunch?”
To which he would reply, “Okay, where do you want to stop?”
“Oh, I don’t care. Anyplace is fine.”
“Well, you tell me. I don’t care.”
“I don’t care either. Wherever you want.”
“No, you decide,” until, I, or my brother or sister, would point at the next restaurant we passed and shout, “There! Stop there!”
Our one or two visits a year often ended with me feeling frustrated to the point of a final blowup. Then the guilt would set in and obsess me long after one of us had boarded the flight home. Guilt from her, rage from my father, I had inherited a mixture of traits that fought against each other like monkeys and lions.
Since coming to
Who knows where dreams come from? Maybe it’s just my subconscious working through grief. Maybe something of her spirit remains and is trying to comfort me. Who knows what happens after we die? I know I don’t believe in anything that religion teaches and, yet, I believe in something. I believe that even nothing is something.
On the first anniversary of my mother’s death I bought flowers and incense. One of my students came along with me. “Are you sure you want to do this,” she asked.
“Of course. Why not?” I answered.
“She died in
I took my chances, even though she did have a terrible sense of direction.
That night she appeared in my dream as a very old woman, so bent over that she had to crawl. She said, “I feel so sad when I look at these children to know that they, too, will have to grow old. How good it would be to die today. Then I could be with him.”
Some say that the symbiotic bond between mother and daughter is the most intense in a person’s life. Maybe it’s true. I’ve spent my life trying to escape being like my mother yet, I look just like her. And the similarities don’t stop there. I also want to please, please, please. I want everyone to like me. Yet, unlike her, I can be a colossal bitch with an erratic temper. I speak my mind. I’m stronger than my mother and certainly, more adventurous. I love torrential storms.
My mother had always been afraid of storms. As a child, I remember her flinching at every clap of thunder during one of the frequent
In some ways Dorothy was an adventurous woman for her generation. She traveled internationally without my father, although always with a group or as part of a tour. She had secrets. Once she loved a man other than my father. She told me this several years after he had died but I remembered the time. I was a teenager and my mother went to the library several nights a week, often returning home up to an hour after it closed. She believed my father never knew and I never told her that during those years he often paced the living room, staring out the windows, muttering about why wasn’t my mother home yet? When the car finally turned into the driveway, he would retire to the bedroom and read as though he hadn’t even noticed her absence.
I was unprepared for my mother’s death. I still hadn’t quite processed losing my father two years earlier, and now she was gone as well. I grieved and, yet, I felt other emotions too. Neither of my parents had lived to 80. Now I would never have to be responsible for caring for either of them during an infirm old age.
Something broke loose in me during that first year after she died. I came to and took a job at a small college. Sometimes late at night after the land had cooled from the humid afternoon heat, I would walk along the canal past the tall weeds. Bats darted around my head. In the black sky dangled a misshapen moon.
During the typhoon, on the second anniversary of my mother’s death, I walked outside through the dark campus. Trees lay uprooted along the sidewalk. Shattered glass from windows in The Foreign Languages Building sprinkled the sidewalk. Wind raged and nearly blew me off my feet. The typhoon brought a histrionic closure to my second year of mourning. I still dream about my mother; I will always dream about her. I still miss her. But the clichéd sayings that are meaningless in the first year of grief begin to make sense. Time does heal. Loss does become more bearable.
The Field
After English corner
the students come up for tea.
It’s late
and the night has turned damp.
Outside the wind
raps its chilly fingers
against the window.
We talk of ghosts.
One of the girls tells me
about a field she passed
every day on her way to school.
Sometimes there were babies there.
Always girls.
There might be
a small basket
or a pile of clothes.
Sometimes the dogs were snarling
over the bodies.
The smell, she said,
was terrible.
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