not making sense

One of the most jarring experiences of my Mexican travels last month occurred at 3am at the U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales, Arizona. Woken from a frozen and not-too-deep sleep, my foggy brain struggled to comprehend the identity of the uniformed officials walking down the bus aisle towards me. Surely they must be Mexican-- we're entering Mexico, and they're speaking Spanish. Turns out they were American, and equally mystified by me. "Where are you going? Why are you going there? Do you have family there? You're traveling alone? Why? How much cash do you have? How long are you traveling for? You're just traveling? I'm going to keep your passport for now, please get your things and come with me." I became increasingly annoyed as they searched my bag and asked me questions about my employment-- or lack thereof. After it was all over (the closest thing I had to contraband being an enormously heavy book on the history of the CIA that actually would double pretty well as a weapon in a pinch), I asked-- Why did you single me out? Had it been any kind of reasonable hour, the answer would have made me laugh out loud: "You don't make sense."

But of course my presence on a Mexican-bound bus in the middle of the night, with a backpack, little cash and a big book, made perfect sense for an adventurous soul who has just lost a job and wants to explore the tantalizingly close country to the south. What the Border Patrol agent meant was-- you don't make sense to me. I didn't fit into his idea of normal. And of course he's right-- what I was doing might very well sound like lunacy to 98.5% of the American public. But what he didn't know was that I come from a family with a distinct indifference to "normal."

The story as I have heard it from my slightly scandalized grandmother is that in 1980, with their six week old daughter in a box between the front seats, my parents up and left their rural Northeast homes, families, and lives, and drove to Tucson, Arizona. They didn't know anyone in that whole huge desert mountain state. I'm still not sure why they did it. But they moved into a tiny apartment, installed the baby's crib in a closet, and set about creating a life in this run-down desert mequite-scented city. They watched gloriously violent thunderstorms break over the mountains at night, scavenged food from dumpsters, took pictures of their white-blond home-birthed babies by cactuses. Eventually they bought a house in a bad neighborhood where they persuaded vegetables to grow in the rocky soil, endured a break-in (and stayed!), raised bees and rabbits, provided refuge to refugees (not the official, government-sanctioned kind) fleeing CIA-initiated violence in their Central American nations, and home-schooled their young children (one of my earliest academic memories is my father telling me about the atrocities Columbus committed on the New World's indigenous peoples). Even in Tucson's notoriously weird culture, I imagine my parents' lives never "made sense."

Later, they moved to Mesa, a sprawling suburb of Phoenix, and for a few years flirted with normalcy-- my mother taught high school, my father got a Master's degree, they owned a house with air conditioning (still no TV). But the year my brother and I turned 7 and 9, my parents moved us to a distant archipelago nation in the Pacific Ocean. For a four and a half year stretch interrupted only by a six month cross-country roadtrip return to the U.S, our lives were normal only to inhabitants of the Phillippines. I grew up thinking there was nothing terribly unusual about absurdly jam-packed buses, coup attempts, day-long games of capture the flag in the tropical forest, neighbors roasting dog for dinner, blackouts and bucket showers and black sand beaches.

I guess there's a time for all of us when we realize that our parents-- and the lives they have created for us-- are not normal. When I was ten, during our six-month return to the U.S., I remember tearfully begging my parents to let me be a "normal American kid." Which is funny now, because what on earth did I know about being a normal American? Nothing, but I did my best to learn after we returned to live in rural Alabama and then Georgia. As a teenager, my parents' steadfast refusal to do what made sense-- my ideas were closer to the view of the Border Patrol guard-- were a constant source of embarassment, and at times drove me to hysterical rage. It is not normal, I wailed, to make your children pull weeds every day, to dig through public trash receptacles for aluminum cans, to allow my little brother to get down on his stomach in a grocery store and search for coins underneath vending machines, to buy clothes at thrift stores, to fertilize the garden with urine, to live in a house with 8 foster kids, to charge me ten cents per mile to drive the family car. I suspected that we washed and re-used ziplock bags and shopped at thrift stores because we were abjectly poor, because that was better than the appalling alternative that my parents chose to live this way. None of it made sense to me when I compared our life with that of my classmates, who shopped at the Gap with their fashionably dressed mothers and received brand new Audis for their birthdays.

For years I tried to escape my parents' oddities. I got a job and bought new clothes and makeup, stealthily threw away ziplock bags, kept my friends away from the house, dated the boy with the Audi and went on ski vacations with his family, agonized over the ultimately hopeless quest to become popular. I opted for a very small, very white, very conservative university with Georgian architecture and a well-pressed population of beautiful people studying business management and nursing. I was going to make sense, to have a normal life.

But something in my DNA just wouldn't let me be normal. Cracks formed in the carefully constructed image, and I began to do surprising things-- working at a youth hostel for a summer in Amsterdam; dumpster diving for Krispy Kreme donuts; volunteering to spend the night sleeping on the cold floor of a homeless shelter; developing a love for all things Latin. I sought out friends who ridiculed sororities, convinced me to sell blood plasma and smuggle food out of the cafeteria in my backpack instead of buying groceries, and traveled to exotic places. The decision that ultimately would prevent me from ever being really content with normal was signing up after graduation to spend a year of voluntary service in Jamaica. The truth is, throughout it all I never even got close to being normal-- no matter how hard I tried to strangle the independent spirit my parents instilled, I couldn't achieve the normalcy I craved. After a while, I think I just got tired of fighting it, and that's when I discovered the richness lurking outside the mainstream-- the absolute terrifying beauty of throwing open your windows to the gritty rainstorm of life.

Now I'm no crazy hippy-- I hope to own a house, and I do buy new clothes sometimes and spend far more money that my parents would approve of on going out to eat. But it's the "nonsense" that makes my life rich and interesting and rewarding. I've traveled to places my parents have never seen, and I went through all of law school without owning a car. I re-wash ziplock bags, compost, make bread and only shop at thrift stores on 50% off days. I aspire to represent poor and crazy people. I too left the East coast for the rocky wide open spaces of Arizona. I don't make sense to Border Patrol agents-- and I think that's a good thing.

Now my parents live in the Atlanta suburbs in a house without conventional heating, raise ridiculously tame chickens, occasionally eat roadkill, and restructure their acreage by manual labor and scavenged materials. Recently, my 13-year-old brother (home-schooled!) wrote to tell me about our Dad's latest project: Laura, he got some mortar free from a development, but it got rained on, so "what he does is puts it in a screen and shakes it so that some mortar dust falls out into a bucket and repeats this even though we probably don't need it. "

Yes, Phillip, your parents don't really make sense. And my prayer for you is that you never will either.