I don't want to contribute to the circus by writing about Terri Schiavo, except to point out what's been missed the past week while her private, family struggle was made public. The first is rather personal to me. I wasn't able to write about it in Europe because of the on-off nature of my internet connection. S told me about it in an email, then I managed to find this article on the icasualties.org website, the only site that puts stories about the wars on their front page. (That's right, we're still at war, in two countries no less. I know; you thought the wars had been won now that democracy has come to the Mideast. In Bush World that includes Afghanistan; the rest of the world knows that Asia and the Mideast are not the same place.) On March 26, four soldiers from the Indiana National Guard's 76th Brigade were killed when their humvee ran over a landmine outside of Kabul. They were part of the embedded program training Afghan troops. S is in the Indiana Guard too, and he's training Afghan troops, but he didn't know these men well. The blast ushered in the spring with a promise by the Taliban that there would be more, according to this Chinese paper. The whole thing made me sad, nervous, unable to sleep well for a couple of nights. Do you have to know someone over there in order to hear these stories?

Meanwhile, since March 25th nine soldiers have died in Iraq, including three killed yesterday and one today. This says nothing of all who have been injured, many severely, nor of any of the Iraqi Army and police who have been killed. Civilians? In our "culture of life" society, civilian deaths and injuries are meaningless; their losses are part of the "lesser evil" calculus that makes the war worthwhile, an equation easy to promote, apparently, when the victims don't live in Florida.

You have to search through the icasualties.org headlines to read about these family tragedies; the mainstream press are too busy diverting our attention with the Schaivo family. Of course we believe Bush et al when they tell us democracy has come and everything is fine. We think to ourselves that it must be right since we've not heard anything about the wars in, what, a week? More? As no news is good news, clearly the troops are coming home soon, no one has been killed or lost a limb, or taken shrapnel to the brain, lost their eyesight or their hearing, nothing. The wars are over. After a long commercial break, we're back to Schiavo and her grieving parents and widower now that she's truly dead.

More photographs from the trip, once again in the spirit of distraction.

We were only in Belgium two days, but we managed to see and do quite a bit thanks to our good friends there, a wonderful couple my mother met in Spain years ago. They are both married, just not to each other. The visit was a bit interesting for us, as we had to negotiate around their spouses. Ah, Old Europe!

Here's a sausage shop in Brussels:


And a lace shop in Bruges:


A stunning flower shop in Brussels. Upscale, though significantly less expensive than in the states. Cut flowers are incredibly cheap in Belgium. If only we could eat them! The dollar is weak so everything else is expensive.


A restaurant's seafood specials out on display:


And finally, cheese. Stinky cheese. Yum yum!

I meant to post these before going to Europe. Ah, the best laid plans!

LA is a wonderful city to photograph. My friend L is an incredible hostess; she knows the city's hidden-away places and makes all the out-in-the-open ones interesting too.

I loved these kung-fu figurines lined up in a crotchety grid like the terra cotta soldiers of Xian. S and I just purged our house of tchotchkes, so I couldn't in good conscience buy even one. But I wanted to!


The new LA cathedral is stunning. Austere with a touch of flash; a bit grandiose and outsized as all cathedrals are. Outside, there is this contemporary grotto to the Mother, la virgen de Guadalupe. I thought she was made appropriately dramatic by the darkening sky behind her:



The Cathedral's confessionals were both gorgeous and frightening to me. They looked like torture chambers or Bedlam cells. How perfect! Beauty and violence all in one place. What the hell goes on in there?!

My first photograph of the trip, an empty Cadbury chocolate dispenser on the train platform at Heathrow. What struck me was the light was still on inside:

Here are a few of the photos I promised weeks ago, the ones I had such trouble uploading (big surprise -- I was practically hanging my computer out the window to get a decent signal).

Our friends got married the day after St. Patrick's Day, which has become a popular holiday modeled after the American celebration (even green beer sometimes!). The parade was fantastic; most of the costumes were homemade and the puppets were spectacular. The opening was a bit odd, though, with what seemed like the entire Irish national guard marching lock-step down the boulevard, with a handful of tinny, ramshackle tanks following them. Then came this, a traveling UN security checkpoint:



It's not just me, is it? I mean it's sort of strange, right? The crowd gave them ample applause, though the soldiers (peacekeepers? What are these guys called?) didn't crack a smile; they were "professionalism" personified. Rosy-cheeked boys in bright blue berets.



Cork is a city of rowhouses, and I guess when one of them is condemned and torn down (or perhaps just torn down -- Cork's economy is booming), they have to hold up the neighbors during construction. I thought it made a striking image.

I'm back from Europe and here in Chicago we're fully in spring, when the days scatter between sunshine and darkness, warmth and near freezing. Yesterday was glorious: the sun shone most of the day and temps reached into the mid-seventies. Today, though, I woke to a typical Chicago day in March (which may be the cruelest month here): dusk light at mid-day, an undefined sky locking in temps just ten degrees above freezing. It seems, then, the perfect day to write.

We arrived in London six days ago, a town I consider my own little Bermuda Triangle in the north Atlantic. Every time I go there things go wrong. Back in 1988, my first trip there alone, I was cheated. This time my luggage was lost, then I lost my sunglasses, then a wonderful Italian meal (truly -- it convinced me, at the time, that there is finally good food in England) made me so sick I had to miss Hecuba at the Royal Shakespeare. What can you do? I think it was made worse because of the failing dollar, which made everything outrageously, angrily, expensive. At over $2/pound, even a continental breakfast can set you back $12 or more. We paid over $100 for a cab ride from the airport to our hotel. It would be funny if it weren't so aggravating. Perhaps it's good, though, that London has its way with me, always at the end of my trips. It's as if the town is sending me on, ensuring I'll be happy to come home, that I'll welcome the gloomy days, the congested streets.

My mother says I should be writing about my experiences more than in the blog, that I should be documenting my emotions during this time and that I won't regret it no matter what. I know she's right, but it doesn't make it any easier. I hover between numbness and low-level anxiety, with occasional spikes of true happiness or darkness. Most moments I honestly have no idea how I feel. This makes me, I fear, completely ill-equipped to write about my experience, a rather pathetic admission, I know. I've encouraged others to write about their experiences for years, and I've called myself a writer for some time now (even if inside I often call myself a fraud), yet I am inarticulate now. I envy those who can let it go, let it out, without a second thought, without any apparent worries about what others are expecting of them (or what they expect of themselves, perhaps). How on earth do they do it? Instead, I look out the window of the cafe at the queue of newspaper dispenser boxes, the free weeklies screaming out their prices in bright white, capital letters. I've got nothing.

I feel the same desire to fit my experience into a narrative, something familiar so it can make sense, as so many others do. The narratives around me are of the grieving woman (when the husband or son has been lost); the angry woman (that fits me sometimes); or the preternaturally strong woman (not unlike her male counterpart), the one who is so sure in her convictions she seems hollow, unreal. I saw one of these women on C-Span yesterday, a soldier just a couple of years older than me who had both legs blown off and her arm crushed when a rocket-propelled grenade was shot into the Blackhawk she was flying over Iraq. She sat with one prosthetic on, the other in her hands, with her husband beside her and talked about how she is desperate to get back into uniform and start flying again, how she believes it is her duty to "give back," etc. etc. She was shockingly confident for most of the interview, until she and her husband were asked whether they had discussed this possibility before she was deployed. They had not, she said. They had prepared for one or the other of them to die, but not to be injured severely. Suddenly she seemed vulnerable, her husband too, as if they were about to break from the talking points the Army had given them and tell us the truth, that they were both terrified, heartbroken, shocked with grief. Her husband, when he talked about her, looked down at her prosthetic and the space left where her other leg used to be. Seeing his eyes fixed there, I wondered what would happen to them in the future, if their marriage would make it through this, whether or not she would still play out the "strong woman" narrative even if he left or if she was unable to fly again. Or was she actually hollow, so full of conviction and belief as to have no feelings beyond obligation and duty and pride? If so, I thought, then I envied her, her life bound to such a simple, straightforward narrative, one that will give her talking points for the rest of her life.

I know we impose these structures on our experiences regardless of how those experiences have actually played out, to make sense of chaos and uncertainty and the audacity of fate. If I were her, perhaps I would want to adopt that narrative too, since the alternatives are so unpleasant. The war-ruined vet, angry at everyone, including herself? Lost, then, in self-loathing and distrust? Or the self-pitying woman who finds solace in others helping her? Why is it so hard to write a new narrative? Are there only a handful of outcomes, since the larger birth-life-death narrative underlies all of them? I don't want to drown in questions. I just want to believe that we're not victim to the stars like Hecuba, Odysseus, Paris, and Helen were.