HALF A DREAM A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Holly M. S. Christensen December, 2010 Thesis written by Holly M. S. Christensen B.A., B.A., The Ohio State University, 1992 M.F.A., Kent State University, 2010 Approved by David P. Giffels, Advisor Ron Corthell, Chair, Department of English John R.D. Stalvey, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Prologue: Columbus, Ohio 1992......................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Heading Out, 24 July 2007.......................................................................... 4 Chapter Two: Found and Lost ......................................................................................... 12 Chapter Three: Going Back to Knoxville ........................................................................ 26 Chapter Four: All in One Day.......................................................................................... 62 Chapter Five: Bats............................................................................................................ 68 Chapter Six: Westward with Wizards.............................................................................. 99 Chapter Seven: Everybody’s Got Something to Hide ................................................... 121 Chapter Eight: Six Days................................................................................................. 149 Chapter Nine: Tassajara................................................................................................. 200 Chapter Ten: Pop-top Adventures ................................................................................. 217 Chapter Eleven: About Face .......................................................................................... 234 Chapter Twelve: Wide States......................................................................................... 247 Chapter Thirteen: Homeward ........................................................................................ 265 iii Prologue: Columbus, Ohio 1992 Hey, I know that guy, I tell my friend who is sitting outdoors with me at a café in late August. In the past week, the temperatures have dropped so that it feels more like September, autumn, and the warmth of the sun is welcome. My friend and I are taking a break from writing our theses, which are due by months end. Whats his name? What is it? I ask mostly of myself. Hey! Hey, Chris! I yell when I remember. He turns to see whos calling him. I wave him over and he joins us. Hows Lori? I ask, referring to Chriss girlfriend, when he sits down with his paper cup of coffee. Hes wearing a thin wool cardigan over a white dress shirt and it reminds me in a good way of the sweaters my grandpa wore. In a nostalgic, yet hip way. Shes good. She flew back to New York yesterday. Whats she doing in New York? I ask. She moved there about two months ago. Why? Well, she never could find work here. I mean, you know, in our field, he says. Like Chris, Lori is an architect. I met her last December when she was working at the café at Borders Bookstore. Thats too bad. So when are you moving? I ask. 1 2 Thats too bad. So when are you moving? I ask. Uh, no, maybe you didnt hear? We split up, he says and in that instant, I know. Its not that I wish it, or even think about it. I just know. I know we will be together. The next few weeks, Chris and I run into each other several times. Walking past the School of Architecture on my way home from work one afternoon, he comes out with project supplies in hand, dressed in an old t-shirt and shorts splattered with paint. For more than two hours, we stand there and talk in the early evening sunlight. A few days later, I spy his 62 Ford Falcon parked on my street and tuck a friendly note under his windshield wiper. And after nearly a month of random get-togethers, I decide to make the first move and call to invite him to a Greek Festival in the Short North neighborhood. My heart pounds when his phone begins ringing. After five rings, his answering machine picks up and I exhale. I leave a message and am relieved not to hear his rejection. He can just choose not to return my call. But he does call. And by mere coincidence, our first date is on his thirty-first birthday, Labor Day, 1992. The days during our first weeks together do not provide enough time for us to explore each other and I fall asleep only when Im exhausted. I awaken when simply tired, eager to find next to me this man I believe is the love of my life. It is what I had always heard about love, real love, that if ever I were so lucky as to find it, I would know it when I felt it. And feel it I do. It makes sense for him to move in since hes there all the time anyways, even though we have only been together several weeks. Later, it makes sense to try and get pregnant even though weve only been together several months. Just ten months after our 3 first date, when I am two months pregnant, we get married at the county courthouse because it just makes sense. Chapter One: Heading Out, 24 July 2007 I closed the pop-top, a black plastic bin attached to the rooftop of my 5-speed Matrix, and hopped off of the back bumper. My oldest son, Claude, was thirteen and sitting in the front passenger seat with his right leg hanging out on the ground. He was going through the audio books I had set on the floor on his side of the car. His younger brothers, ten- year-old Hugo and Jules, who had just turned seven, were organizing the things--travel games, sketch books and pencils, comic books--they had chosen to bring on our cross country road trip. We were just waiting to say goodbye to their father who was in the house looking for his camera. I found it! said Christopher as he came out the back door of our yellow brick house and descended the stone steps to our crumbling concrete driveway. Come on, everybody, lets get a photo before your big trip! Hey, guys, I said, leaning my head into the back window of the car, my arm on the roof, Lets quick get a photo so we can get going. Groaning, they got out of the car and stood with me under the Buddhist prayer flags that hung across our driveway just behind the parked car. Hollyhocks grew in the flowerbed next to us, overshadowing young sunflowers that had yet to bud. In the photo, the boys cluster around me, a spiral of blonde heads and faces tan from two months of summer. Theyd already spent three weeks in Northern Michigan with their grandparents, one week camping in Vermont with 4 5 weeks in Northern Michigan with their grandparents, one week camping in Vermont with their father and now we would be gone for a month, returning just in time for the beginning of the school year. What they knew was that we were finally driving all the way to California, a trip the boys and I had discussed taking for the past few years. They knew we would be staying with friends and family along the way and that they would visit for the first time iconic places like the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore. They knew their father would join us in the middle of the trip, flying out to travel with us for a few days before flying back. They knew theyd have adventures unlike any theyd had before, even though I had taken them on innumerable road trips since each of them were babies. What they didnt know was that I was leaving their father. Nearly a year before, I had developed a sensation in my right side, a chronic pulsing. At first it was not painful, just unusual. Through the fall the sensation increased in intensity and frequency. By December, I often found myself grabbing my side, sinking my fingers into the area, trying to massage out the throbbing. In January, my doctor ordered an MRI and it revealed nothing. But the pain increased until May, when it pounded with the insistence of a cop at the door of an emergency call. I woke up in the middle of a night and heard what it was trying to tell me. It was time to leave my husband, Christopher. Without knowing how, after years as a stay-home mom, I told Christopher I had to separate, get a job and an apartment. Immediately, my right side began vibrating as though it were humming. A day later, it went silent. 6 The two months since I had told Christopher I had to leave him had been exhausting for both of us. But I insisted on taking this trip and catching Christopher in a rare conciliatory moment, he had agreed. I immediately told the boys that we would leave when they came back from Vermont. Once our three sons were on board and planning the trip with me, it was a fait accompli. Christopher, whether he wanted us to or not, would not try to keep us from going. I was always most comfortable when it was just the boys and me. Before I had any children I questioned how couples with multiple children could ever divorce. How was it they didnt figure out their incompatibility after having their first baby together? How could a couple continue to have children who had enough wrong in their relationship to end up divorced after all the commitment that went into having multiple children? Life is most predictable when she is showing you how easy things you once questioned can come to pass in your own life. When Claude was two and Christopher and I had managed to survive the first harsh years of our marriage, years filled with job losses, multiple moves and an emotional distancing between the two of us that was never fully bridged, we decided to have a second child. But the issues that had made the first years so sad, so incompatible, had not been resolved. They were just ignored more easily after he found steady work making decent money and I was fully involved starting a non-profit advocacy group supporting lay midwifery in our state.