That Would Be Me (dot net)

When I was thirteen my father, his second wife and their then two young children moved to the Dominican Republic, the country that shares the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean with Haiti. I saw him once from then until I was in my forties. I kept saying I need to visit him in order to reconnect, but it wasn’t until shortly after my mother died that I realized it was never going to happen unless I simply made the decision and did it.

I made all the travel arrangements, got my passport, took the appropriate time off from work, then realized I should probably have some command of Spanish before I set foot in the Spanish speaking country. I bought some tapes and books and set out to study. I was diligent. I set aside time each day to work on it. I repeated all the phrases on the tapes. I did this right up until I boarded the plane headed for Miami where I’d get my layover to the DR.

With all this work, the only Spanish that actually stuck in my mind was the rather obscure phrase, qué lástima, which means “what a pity.” I doubted I’d ever get to use this hard won knowledge.

My father and his wife Carol picked me up at the airport. On the long drive through Santo Domingo, the capital city, to La Romana, the costal town they lived in, I kept noticing large stores with huge, bright, windowed fronts; Estevez Muebles, Frank Muebles, Pedro Muebles, Albert Muebles. I mentioned to Dad that the Muebles family must be really large. He was confused. I mentioned all the stores. Muebles, he informed me, means “furniture”. It seems furniture stores are very profitable in the Dominican Republic. They sell furniture to people on “time payments” and when the people couldn’t keep up the payments (which happens often in a country with so many poor), they repossess, then sell it again. And again. Very lucrative. He and Carol had the good graces not to laugh too loudly at my misapprehension, but it did become a topic of humorous conversation with the family and many of the people I met while I was there.

I also told them of my attempt to learn Spanish, and the one phrase I’d mastered. Dad complimented me on my pronunciation.

The trip was wonderful. Reconnecting with my father and his wife and meeting my half-brother, who was already an adult, for the first time were special experiences, but the biggest benefit of the trip, one that still moves me to this day, was how willing my father was to allow me to say anything, ask any question, make any accusation I had about his absence in my life all those years. He answered honestly and compassionately and without judgement. It was infinitely easy to forgive him, and to forgive myself for harboring any resentment. I now have a grand relationship with him.

On one of the last days I was there, Dad, Carol, my brother Paul and I piled into the car to drive across the island to visit Dad and Carol’s oldest, Ann, who I had last seen when she was around five. She now had her own family with three small boys. We got to their house, traded hugs and chatter and I told the muebles story and shared my one Spanish phrase, the one I had no hope of ever being able to use. They all thought both stories were very funny. (Ann and Dad translated to the boys and gathered friends, none of whom spoke any English.) One of Ann’s boys even tried to teach me Spanish by telling me the proper name for things and making me repeat them. None of those words stuck, either, but you have to give the kid credit for trying.

Late that afternoon, while Ann was fixing a traditional Dominican meal, her husband Daryoush went out to buy some ice cream for desert. During dinner, he was called out on some business matter. Later that evening he hadn’t yet returned, so Ann brought out the ice cream and divided it among those present.

“What about Daryoush?” I asked, knowing that he had been especially looking forward to it.

“He’ll have to miss out, I guess.”

“Qué lástima,” I said.

Everyone cheered.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

Second Day Back, Saturday, August 19, 2006

The seminar was wonderful, informative and powerful. I am a changed man. The very foundation of existence has shifted. Life as we know it on the planet will never be the same. The universe has shifted three degrees into the blue. God wept. Okay, enough of that, this is a travel journal, and, although the seminar was a journey, the signposts of that journey will have to show up on their own here, I won’t consciously try to insert them. I did meet some great people who I think will be around for a while. That would be nice.

The seminar ended Thursday afternoon and Thursday evening four of us went into downtown Minneapolis to see a play at the Guthrie Theater. The Guthrie is one of the premier theaters in America and I’ve always wanted to see something there, but it didn’t even dawn on me that it would be right down the street (so to speak) until a friend back in LA said, “You’re going to Minneapolis? That’s were the Guthrie is!” So. I mentioned this to one of the guys at the event and he said he’d get tickets. We got directions from the concierge and four of us set off on our adventure (with a side trip to a good sushi restaurant for a little raw fish and saki). The directions were wrong. Seems that they’ve built a new Guthrie Theater, that this is the first season at the new theater, this the first play there (The Great Gatsby) and that most people in Minneapolis were unaware of this. Everyone we stopped to ask gave us a different idea about just where the place was. We traveled all around downtown Minneapolis until we stopped by an odd fellow who looked slightly off, friendly buy possibly schizophrenic, possibly occasionally homeless. He very clearly knew right where the place was.

By the time we found it, parked and picked up our tickets, we were about fifteen or twenty minutes late for the opening curtain (a misnomer, of course, there is no curtain on a thrust stage and the Guthrie stage - old and new - is about as thrust-y as you can get) so we quietly found our seats. The theater was amazing, large but intimate if that makes any sense, a wonderful facility. I’d love to work there. The play was good, a few of the actors were “acting”, the guy playing Gatsby was very good, the guy who played the gas station owner was amazing. Daisy was cute and alluring, but I couldn’t imagine her as someone who three men would destroy their lives for. The sets were great. They used very little to suggest the setting but did it in a very effective way. It even included a simulated swimming pool where Gatsby floated around on a rubber raft. Very cool. In any case, the experience was what counted and the experience was grand. The building has one long arm jutting out of the fifth floor, a cantilever that hangs out over the river (which someone on the balcony at its end told me was the Mississippi and I have no reason to doubt him) that was a highlight of it.

Back to the hotel, drinks with several of the seminar participants (one of whom was a handsome straight man who had thought he had lost it because I hadn’t flirted with him. After that I made a point of flirting with him whenever I saw him. What fun - safe flirting - who’da thunk?) then bed. Left the next morning after lunch with two of my theater companions, then on the road.

In the movie The Secret, Jack Canfield talks about driving from Los Angeles to New York at night. You can see about a hundred feet in front of your car. And yet, only seeing this much, you can make it all the way. He’s using it as a metaphor for life - know your destination (your goal) then just take the next step, don’t worry about the next two, three or fifteen steps, they’ll take care of themselves. This, maybe, is why I like driving. I know where I’m going, know I can get there even with a detour or two, and all I have to worry about is what I can see right in front of me.

Okay, philosophy aside, the parking lot of the motel I stayed at last night was full of small beetles. (I almost spelled that “beatles” but that would have been wrong, wouldn’t it?) The room was clean, but I got the sense the beetles hadn’t stayed outside. (The beatles probably did, though, I never saw any of them.) The clock wasn’t plugged in, so I had to pull the little bed side table out to find the outlet and noticed part of the cord was stuck in this little plastic tray filled with something sticky, and in the something sticky were more beetles. (Ringo may have been there, I didn’t study it long enough to find out.)

I thought about being creeped out but decided if I want to get any sleep I’d just have to come to terms with my roommates. I asked them all pleasantly to leave me alone while I slept and left it at that. The only one I actually saw (besides the unfortunate few in the sticky tray) was walking along the edges of the floor in the bathroom in the morning while I was sitting there voiding and reading. He circumambulated the room a couple of times, then disappeared into some crevice or other. I only bring this up because, as I sit at this rest stop in the middle of Nebraska (the motel was in Iowa) a lady bug decided that the top edge of my computer was something needing exploration. She (he? Who knows the sex of a lady bug. There must be guy lady bugs. Do they, like the one in the bug cartoon, have issues about that?) made the journey several times, decided she’d (he’d?) gleaned all she could from it and flew off. Normally I would have shooed her away as soon as she landed. I don’t mind lady bugs, mind you, but the instinct is to shoo away anything not congruent and lady bugs are not congruent with the top edge of a laptop. After all the beetles last night, bugs not nearly as pleasant as this little orange and black dainty, I realized that, if I can sleep with them in my room, I can let one explore my laptop.

It has been cloudy since I left Minneapolis. It rained for about ten minutes late yesterday afternoon, but I was on the highway and it stopped before I was able to pull off and put the car top up. It wasn’t raining very hard and was actually kind of pleasant. The wind is blowing a bit, now, and I’m trying to decided if I want the top up on the next leg of the journey or not. I will decided after I start the car. Perhaps, if I remember, I’ll record which way I went. Perhaps not. Some things need to remain a mystery to preserve that sens of wonder in the reader, don’t you think?

Since there is no Internet connection at this rest stop (did you know all the rest stops in Iowa have wireless Internet? Very twenty-first century, I must say. I didn’t use it at any of them because you only got a small, finite amount of time before they started charging and it seemed, somehow, pointless) I will post this once I touch down this evening. Til then, the road beckons, the next hundred feet await.

I took the top down. So much for mystery and wonder. I’m at a motel in Brush, Colorado run by a young, blondish poor-white-trash woman and her poor-white-trash husband. She has two young poor-white-trash children and most of the night’s tenants are poor-white-trash. The main exception being the oriental family two doors down. (I leave it to you to decide about me.) My immediate neighbors are a thin, blond grandmother, her two small blond grandchildren and at least two rowdy and possibly drunk men who I haven’t yet seen. I did hear them arguing with each other about how to use the key card to open the door, with a lot of back and forth about the timing of the little green light and turning the handle and a large double “Whoop!” when, I assume, they got it right.

The Internet connection doesn’t reach to my corner room, so I’m sitting in the gazebo between the parking lot and the pool, my blowing coyly in the evening wind, typing furiously, trying to get this written and posted before my coy hair drives me nuts and I have to go inside, away from the wind.

Ah, travel. There’s a Chinese restaurant with a bar right past the pool. Perhaps I’ll have a small drink before retiring for the evening.

______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“.

Second Day - Wednesday, August 10, 2006

Utah is in a different universe. And as you go further east (at least on the 70) it gets more and more alien. The western end has green and looks normal, but it starts to get strange very soon. I was told that, as you travel along the way, you go through every geological era. It’s beautiful, breathtaking, actually (how often will I use that word?) but off-putting. I can’t imagine living there. There is a stretch of the 70 highway where there are “no services” for over 100 miles. It’s no wonder. I can’t imagine any sort of people who would want to populate it enough for there to be services. When you cross the border to Colorado you are instantly transportede back into our universe, there is green and houses and people and horses. The only animals I saw in Utah were lizards.

Half way through Utah, I realized that a friend I haven’t seen lived somewhere in Colorado. I remembered the town Carbondale and looked at the map. It was only a few miles from the highway I was on. I had my little phone book with me. I called the last number I had for her and her husband. It was Michelle’s voice on the answering machine, but they weren’t home.

Just outside of Colorado, I stopped at a rest stop because the wind was so strong I had to put the top up on the convertible. Good thing I did, it started raining shortly after that and rained the rest of the day. Driving in the rain is a whole different experience. You can’t see as far ahead and the rhythm is different. I even think th e rhythm of my breathing changed a little. Slowed down or something. I could be wrong, perhaps I’m just trying to be poetic.

I called Michelle and Marvin again just inside of Colorado at Grant Junction. They were there, live in Paonia not Carbondale, they would love to see me and it would take me about two hours to get there from where I was. I had to go. They live in a small geodesic dome that they built as a “temporary” house while they built their big dome. They’d planned on being in the small one for a year. Well, Marvin’s job got exported to India, then he fell off the roof one winter and was in the hospital, so the big dome never got started. Until last May, seven years later. It’s pretty great, actually, very exciting. I took some video of it. (Yes, I finally started taking some short movies at rest stops, etc. Didn’t take me long to get off it…) I spent the night in their very funky home and visited.

Marvin’s network wouldn’t talk to my computer. Is it because I’m gay?

Third Day - Thursday, August 10, 2006

This morning, I got up and went into the big dome. The floor is still bare plywood, but most of the inner roof (ceiling?) is in place, as are the windows and a counter that will be the kitchen. Except for one corner that will be the bedroom, there are no inner walls, so it’s a huge open space. When I walked in, I felt dizzy. After a moment, it passed, but later Marvin insisted that the dome was on a vortex and that, when he was digging the basement, Michelle couldn’t stand in it because the energy was so strong she would almost faint. I’m not sure what to think of that, I’m one of those skeptic believers. I want to believe things like vortexes, even have some experience of things like that, but a big part of my mind says, “You were dizzy because you didn’t sleep well, silly.”

I had breakfast with Marvin and Michelle, then hit the road at about 10:30. While eating, they had the news on and it was full of reports of all the nonsense at the all the airports all over the country. Okay, yes, they captured a bunch of suspected terrorists. In England. Because the precautions being taken are working. So America responds with its normal, rational, considered reaction and goes nuts. I cannot convey how glad I am that Steve talked me into driving to my seminar. I was anyway, but now it seems more than propitious. Of course, I imagine certain people are ecstatic about the airport craziness. Divide and conquer, rule by fear.

I took the back highway from Paonia to Carbondale. Colorado is magnificent, beautiful, grand, green, immense, overwhelming. Driving down the twisty road listening to Beethoven’s Fifth is the only way to do it. Until Beethoven’s Sixth came on. Perfect. The fifth, so dramatic and grand, was the best way to see the mountains and the river by the road, the Crystal River. The sixth, the Pastorale, was then perfect for the lower end of the highway through the communities of local coal miners and hippy artists. The music ended just as I got to Carbondale and back on the main highway. Synchronicity, anyone? Of course, beautiful Colorado is also the state that voted in Proposition 2 all those years ago. Go figure.

I’m at a rest stop outside of Glenwood Springs. If I’m not too tired, I’ll write more this evening.

Fourth Day, Friday, August 11, 2006

Two nights with no Internet. Can I survive? The eastern end of Colorado is much more even, still beautiful, but it’s a gentler beauty. I’m now in Nebraska. I was told Nebraska would be boring. Flat and boring. Not true. Yes, it’s flat, but that makes it easier to drive, and it is lush and full green with lots of trees. The landscape is varied and very interesting. A lot of insects, though. I crossed the border at night and every time I passed a stand of trees I heard this arrhythmic whining buzz and clicking. After hearing it several times, I figured out it was some type of bug. Locusts? Who knows. I also kept colliding with bugs, and my windshield was a mess when I stopped. This morning when I cleaned the windshield off there were five dead bees and a wasp on the hood. Bees and wasps! I’m sitting at a beautiful rest stop with a thick lawn and tall shade trees with a stream running through it and the constant buzzing sound from the field behind me. And I’ve been bitten by at least six ants and a spider or two.

I think I’ve trained my bladder. As soon as I see a Rest Stop sign and decide to stop, it starts aching, as if it now has permission to get ready to void. Very odd. Useful, though, in a strange way.

I keep seeing signs for Buffalo Bill’s ranch, and there have been some highway-side attractions with tee-pees and covered wagons and it makes me wonder about the fortitude of people who traveled the same distance I’m traveling (in the other direction, of course) with their whole families and all their belongings and it took months and years. And there were no highways or rest stops. (Of course, if you think about it, the entire way was one big rest stop. When you have to relieve yourself just stop, go behind a tree and “rest”.

Last night the moon rose very late. It was completely dark and I saw this weird glowing orange dome on in the distance directly in front of me. I wondered what building would be lit like that. As I got closer, it got bigger and I realized it was the moon, huge, orange and distorted. When it broke the horizon, it looked like a glowing squashed pumpkin. It looked like that for about fifteen minutes until it was fully up in the sky.

I still don’t know why I love traveling so much. I was saddened that I would be going by myself and tried to think of a way to get a traveling companion, but I’m so glad I didn’t. Being alone on the highway is the point. I think. I’m trying to figure what it means to me. Maybe I shouldn’t try and just enjoy it. Today, I sang. For over an hour. To Simon and Garfunkle. It’s a good thing I am alone, probably.

I’m at a Best Western in Williams Iowa. Internet at last! (Oh, what a modern drone I am.) Iowa’s air is damp and dirty. I expected the damp, it’s high summer and this is the Midwest. But I didn’t expect the dirty part. During the day there was a faint brown hue to the horizon and as it turned to dusk, the air got damper and difficult to see through. Not like a smokey room, but dense and grey.

Nothing philosophical tonight. I stopped earlier than I expected and am just relaxing. I only have about a hundred and eighty miles to Minneapolis. I’m looking forward to the last leg of this part of the trip. I don’t know how many posts I’ll be able to do while the seminar is raging, but if the spirit and the opportunity present themselves simultaneously, I’ll write. If not, I’m sure there’ll be plenty on the road home, what with processing everything from the week and all.

Til then.
_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“.

First Day - Tuesday August 8, 2006

I am taking a road trip to Minneapolis, driving my little Mini Cooper Convertible named Nigel. Yes, I named my car. I was going to fly, but Steve convinced me to take the time and drive, knowing how much I love driving. Good old Steve.

What a glorious day. I love getting out on the highway. I don’t even know why. Driving feeds me in some odd way that I’ve never been able to completely explain. The route is steady and forward, there aren’t any real decisions to make, all the important ones have already been taken care of. I love watching the terrain change as I go, but that’s not the real reason I like driving. I take in the scenery, the gorgeous Virgin River Gorge, which I’d never seen, the clouds over the Mojave, which I have. I watched sunset over Utah, at a rest stop shortly after I crossed the border. (Funny, Nevada, which is supposed to be such a wealthy state, doesn’t have any rest stops with bathrooms. I’m already at my second in Utah. And Utah’s are the nicest rest stops I’ve ever had the pleasure of stretching my legs and draining my bladder in.) The moon rising over a butte, huge and bright with a scar of clouds over it, was breath taking. I keep these images in my mind and think I should record them. In fact, I brought my video camera with me for just that purpose, and have it all unpacked with a tape in it ready and waiting on my front passenger seat under the album of music CDs I’ve been methodically listening to ever since I left Los Angeles and lost the local radio stations, but it seems, somehow, peripheral to the driving, and I haven’t turned it on, yet. It seems almost the antithesis of the spontaneous experience of driving. I will turn it on and use it sometime during my trip. After five days of driving, the peripheral will probably be more attractive.

I like seeing different people as I travel. People say “People are people.” Yes, but the people in North Las Vegas are a different sort of people than those in Los Angeles. There’s a desperate, haunted look in the faces and bodies of the people behind the counter, and, indeed those in front of it, at the Shell station I stopped at to top of my gas tank. Most of the haunted faces were staring into video poker screens, which might have something to do with it.

There’s one big gathering of casinos on this road, once you get out of Vegas. As I passed it, I wondered why they put it just there, then I saw the border and realized it’s the eastern version of State Line on the California side. No dummies here. Get everyone just as they enter your state, get them again just as they leave.

I’ve been on the road since 11:30 this morning. It’s now 8:54. I stopped to eat a sandwich and type this, but I want to get back on the road again. Another hour, perhaps, before I get tired. I like driving at night a lot; proof, I guess, that the scenery isn’t the main reason I crave this.

More later. Another stop at the rest room then, as the singer says, “on the road again.”

____________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“.