a soup bowl full of country

BEING AN AMERICAN has never been easy. Even at the start, the idea of independence wasn’t exactly popular. About a third of people in the colonies supported the American Revolution, a third were on the side of the British Empire, and a third didn’t really care one way or the other or were just indifferent. As The Who sang in 1971, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” I fear I might have belonged to this third category. I’d like to say I would have been there with Franklin and Jefferson in Philadelphia.

But I can’t really be sure.

In recent years, American politics have been challenging. It’s hard to recall that Minnesota and Greenland were the main topics earlier this year. In the meantime, there’s been a war in Iran. Or is it a war? Is it still ongoing or is it over? Nobody knows. And nobody can even say if it was a war or some other kind of armed conflict. I feel strangely indifferent to it, but perhaps that reflects the same ambivalent feelings that presented at America’s moment of birth.

For me, America is not about flags, armies, and politics. And it isn’t even “American food.” During these years in which America has been wrestling with its soul, I have rediscovered my own origins. I’m happy to inform you that they do eat well there. Not barbecue, hamburgers, fries, or anything else considered to be typical American food. It’s at times easy to forget that America might be an idea, but it’s also a place, where each region has its culture and cuisine.

I am from the East Coast.

What that means is that our local nature found its way onto our plates and soup bowls. When I think of my childhood foods, there were no potatoes or schnitzels, as they have here in Estonia. There was no blood sausage, and dark rye was essentially unknown. The only real black bread available was at some German restaurant, though you could find pumpernickel in the stores. But it’s not the same thing.

We had lobsters, though, all kinds of crabs, shark and tuna steaks and bags full of clams and mussels. I remember one lovely summer, maybe 1985 or thereabouts, when my father was away on a business trip in England. My mother didn’t feel like making a big dinner that night and decided that our dinner would be a big bowl full of mussels with melted butter. There I sat with my brother on the deck, eating away. I have to admit; it was probably one of the best dinners I’ve ever had.

We lived in a village on the north shore of Long Island. Before the Second World War, this was a summer place, and many of the houses were built as summer cottages at first, before they were outfitted for year-round living. From my window, you could see the sound that separated Long Island from the State of Connecticut. At night, you could see lights glowing on the other side of the water. During the day, white sailboats and ships moved across the water, and sometimes you might hear the honk of a fog horn.

Our food culture was very influenced by New England and in some ways Long Island is a more natural part of that region. The City of New York has a colorful history, where the first Europeans who settled were the Dutch and their heritage lives on in local foods such as koolsla, cole slaw, a cabbage salad with mayonnaise. We did eat this, but more in restaurants or delis.

But my mother did take me to the seafood store regularly, where all kinds of surprises awaited. A usual purchase was soft-shell crabs. These were breaded and fried. I ate every part of them. I don’t even want to know what parts I ate, but there were certainly some unusual tasting parts. Were those the crab brains? Who knows. For me, they were the most nutritious food around.

There were also scallops, which were very welcome for dinner. These came straight from Peconic Bay on the eastern end of Long Island. But you could get these up and down Long Island and across New England and up into Maine, and from there on to Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick. Who knows where the end of the scallop trail is. Scallops were a kind of delicacy, because they were more expensive. Clams were much more common. Truth be told, Justin Petrone’s first meal after breast milk was linguine in white clam sauce.

Just as an Estonian may dream of potato salad, black bread, beer and herring, I dream of shellfish.

In the seafood store, there were also lobsters sleeping in tubs, their claws held shut by colorful rubberbands. We ate lobster quite often. My mother would buy four or five and they would be put in a paperbag. At home, they would await their fate in the cold of the refrigerator until evening. Then they would be put into the boiling water. I remember how I could hear them tapping at the inside of the pot, trying to get out. But at some moment, there was no more tapping. The best parts were the claws, of course, and the rich and meaty tail.

Lobster was something special. They were expensive too and we would eat them at birthdays or some other special occasion. I have a weird memory of my father’s 38th birthday. I was about five years old and I remember how a lobster got up and tried to run across the table, away from my knife and fork. In the end, I did get him. What’s weird is how clear this memory is, even if it was probably a dream. Or was it?

It’s odd to think of how much time I have spent with crustaceans.

Once, in the seafood store, the owner decided to play a trick. He took out the lobster and put it on the floor. It began to move toward me. This was like a scene from a science fiction movie. I can still hear all of those legs tapping on the ceramic tiled floor.

It’s interesting that even McDonalds offers lobster rolls in New England. All you have to do is order your lobster roll and drive up to the next window. And there it is, in your hand. In New York, this is less common, so it was always a fun part of traveling north.

Just one ferry ride and the lobster roll is yours.

What a weird combination — a fast-food delicacy.

I haven’t even got to the soup. Our chowders are interesting. As a child, I knew two kinds. There was New England clam chowder and then Manhattan clam chowder. New England clam chowder is cream based and filling, Manhattan is tomato based and a bit spicier. I should acknowledge that when I was a kid, the waters around Manhattan were not the cleanest. So, I would wonder, peering into my soup, what kind of stuff was in the Manhattan clam chowder. Was there hospital waste in there? Dead bodies? That’s what I imagined was floating in it.

Everybody knew the mafia dumped their hits in the waters around New York.

If you head out farther east, or travel by ship to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, you’ll encounter quahog chowder. Quahog is an Algonquain word, it refers to a kind of clam with a very tough kind of meat. This is very everyday food. One summer when I was spending time at my friend’s grandparents’ house on the eastern end of Long Island, we spent the day collecting clams and made soup at night. So, if someone asks me about American food, this is what comes to mind. What we actually ate.

It’s nice to think and write about soup. It’s like getting your country back with every spoonful.

Long Island’s north shore looks out on Long Island Sound, its east will lead you to Europe, eventually, and its south shore opens up to the Atlantic. These are deep waters and so we often had swordfish, tuna, and mako shark steaks on our table. My father never really made dinner, that was mom’s specialty, but the grill was his domain. He would grill up some shark.

We ate Jaws with baby potatoes.

The indigenous people along the east coast were mainly Algonquians and they subsisted on maize, beans, and squash. In Tallinn, the Three Sisters refers to three old houses, but for indigenous people, the three sisters were just these three staple crops. In school I learned that there was often a big pot at the center of their homes into which they tossed all three, plus some venison or fish. If you were hungry, you just grabbed a bowl and helped yourself.

We never ate that way, exactly, but we did have the sweetest corn in the US, or so we told ourselves, and we knew that the corn we ate at the end of summer would be even sweeter. I had my own strategy for eating corn. Some just chomp away, with corn flying every which way, but I take my time. I do it systematically, so that every piece is properly eaten. Husking the corn was my favorite thing to do before dinner (or do you really want to put out the plates? I don’t.)

So there I would sit. But how many did we usually buy? Sixteen?

Even as suburbia was growing all around us, there were still some functional farms in existence. We would buy our corn from there.

For us, summer meant seafood, corn, and potatoes.

The potatoes were also cultivated on the local farms.

My grandmother wasn’t from the place where we lived. She came from down south. Her father was from North Carolina, and her mother was from Virginia. They had a different food culture. The climate there is warmer, the people are closer to the land. They had smoked hams, fried chicken. Lots of peanuts. Some farmers only grew peanuts. But corn had a special place of honor. My grandma would make me cornbread all the time. Every time I went to visit her, where she had her Elvis Presley Christmas album, she sent me home with bags full of cornbread.

The word for maize comes from an indigenous language — the Taino word mahiz. So I think there’s nothing more American than corn or maize. It’s probably one of the things that define it.

It’s interesting to think of American food today, a rainy morning in some Estonian cafe. Sometimes I even forget that I am from there, but then something odd happens, like I see a bunch of shipping pallets and think, for a moment, that they are lobster traps. Or I start to talk about lobsters and people look at me like I’m weird.

What kind of person talks about lobsters?

Once I had to find the Estonian word for spout, when I was writing about whales. People had no idea what it was. “You know, that spurt that comes out when the whale surfaces to breathe?” Then I realized that I was just from somewhere else. A place where people talk about whales and lobsters all the time. A place where your homeland comes with a hot bowl full of quahog chowder.

America is, after all, named after some Italian explorer named Amerigo. But maize and quahog? Those are real American words, if you ask me.

An Estonian version of this article appeared in the magazine GO Reisiajakiri earlier this year.

stowaway

ON THE WAY HOME, I wound up as a stowaway, riding in the back of an old-fashioned mail bus. It had been recently refurbished, and the interior smelled of fresh pine. Crates of letters were stacked up on both sides of the coach. I knew that if I followed the north coast road, I would eventually make it home, but at some point, the road changed. It was generic and unfamiliar, and the forest here was so dense and green that I lost my bearings entirely.

There was also water on both sides of the road now, which made no sense. The south coast was a good 20 miles away. The mail bus rolled to a stop, and a wooden ladder descended mechanically from the back. Into the storage area walked the postman, wearing a striped jacket and a straw hat, as if he had just stepped out of 1910. “Another stowaway, huh?” he said.

The postman wasn’t angry. He fetched a few envelopes and went to stuff some mailboxes. “But where are we?” I asked him. “I thought this was Long Island.” The postman’s eyes narrowed. “You, good sir, are in the most exclusive part of Long Island. Pristine, undeveloped, inhabited by only the oldest, wealthiest families. It’s so off limits that it’s never appeared on any map.”

The postman went on. “See that, over there? That’s Fresh Pond. Most people think that’s the north shore. But out here, there’s this strip of unspoiled land, a grant to the settlers of these parts by His Majesty Charles II.” I stuck my head out of the mail bus and looked around. I saw no homes anywhere, just old-growth forest teeming with wildlife. The air here was so fresh it hurt just to breathe it. How could it be that there was a part of the island I had never seen?

“If it’s so exclusive, how do I get anywhere from here?” I asked. “I don’t think my parents know how to get here.” “Where are you going?” he asked. I told him the name of the town. “No worries,” he said, returning to the front of the bus. “I’ll drop you at the old post office. You’ll have to find your way home from there. And you can never tell anyone that you saw this place.”

flickering room

WHAT BECAME of the furniture in my grandparents’ house? The little German table in the living room, the shining Buddha beside the couch, the little chair from my grandmother’s home in Virginia? It was here that I awoke in my bed, just as I had gone to sleep in Estonia, on the other side of the ocean. The Atlantic washed against the Netherlands and Denmark, and seeped through the straits, until it caressed the Baltic, which tugged it north to Estonia. Here I was back in the Long Island living room. Everything was a shade of drab brown or drab green.

“I need to make a cup of coffee.” This was my core impulse. Something to smack me over the head and wake me from my deep slumber. A small kitchenette had been installed right here in the corner, where the stereo used to be. I began to empty the contents of the espresso maker. As I did, the black coffee grounds flew into the air. As they landed, they glowed with fire. There were fiery ghost strands burning away all around the room. Each nestled in its own blaze. How could it be that none of these small fires started to spread? They all remained there, in place.

There might be some other explanation for the flickering fires in the living room. In the back, I could see the bedroom where my grandfather died. Or didn’t he die in the bathroom? It was quite dark in there; I could see the furniture in the shadows. But he wasn’t here anymore. He was gone, and grandma was in the kitchen, making cornbread again, all dressed in white. In the kitchen, there was an old metal scale that hung suspended across from the telephone. As I entered the kitchen, the scale began to dance about. “Don’t mind that,” my grandma said. “It’s just the ghosts. They like to play with it.” I also liked to play with it when I was young. How strange to be back in the old house. It was as if it was suspended in time. Nothing had changed. It could have been any year, but my grandma’s hair would always be white. There was nothing to be afraid of, though. The kitchen ghosts were playful. The fires didn’t catch.

patchogue

THE OCEAN LINER docked at Patchogue on the south shore of Long Island and we finally disembarked. It had been years since I had been in Patchogue, maybe decades. Hadn’t I bought my first car, the blues mobile, from some nondescript Patchogue homeowner at some moment during the Clinton Administration? But that was a long time ago, and in the meantime, Patchogue had developed into a major Atlantic seaport and international metropolis. Parts of downtown had been declared car free and turned into pedestrian walking streets. It was hard to say what it reminded me of, maybe those winding shopping streets in Ireland and Wales. This was not your grandfather’s Patchogue.

Naturally, I was with my family. We were stunned, awed, by this great change that had taken place on the south shore of Long Island. Why, it was almost as if, after subsistence farming, and clamming and oystering and fishing for centuries, civilization had arrived. It just took time to take root. There was even a small Asian Quarter of Patchogue, where a streetfront spa offered fish pedicures. My wife and children stood in line and soon little garra ruffa fish were nibbling the dead skin from their heels. I tried it too, but it just wasn’t my thing. Instead I went and sat in the waiting area with a fellow islander who was reading The Wall Street Journal.

“Well, are we still at war with Iran?” I asked the man. He was older and Jewish and looked like Paul Simon. Maybe it was him? The man sighed loudly and folded the newspaper. Then he said, “After reading this newspaper, the honest answer is, I don’t know.” “Me neither,” I said. I dug into a cup full of delicious rum raisin ice cream, which had somehow materialized in my hands. “Nobody knows.”

of dogs and cars

IN A PARKING LOT with Hendrik Hendrikson, James Simmul, who was probably the only Estonian I knew named James, and a talented bass guitarist at that, and small toy car and a dog. Hendrik was talking about an upcoming game night to be held at the old cultural palace. I was barely paying attention. He was originally from Massachusetts and just old enough that he could have been, had he so desired, a member of New Kids on the Block. This made me always look at him strangely, trying to imagine him side by side with Donny Wahlberg and Jordan Knight. Was Hendrik Hendrikson the sixth New Kid? How many of them were there even?

They kind of wandered off after that. The house was an old hospital that had been converted into an commercial building, with a white facade and vague Stalinist and Federalist elements, with ivy growing around the columns in front, and a pale blue visible beneath the chipped paint of the exterior. I heard there was a concert happening at the castle ruins, or maybe near the old manor house? Hendrik Hendrikson and James Simmul roamed off into the crowds, which left me, an Australian sheepdog named Lou and a toy car that I could fit inside of.

This was sort of like my daughter’s toy car, except that it had a front and back seat and a trunk. It was made out of cheap plastic. So cheap that when I tried to back out of the parking lot, with Lou in the back, the steering wheel came off and it rolled to a halt between two very pricey vehicles, which had obviously been leased and indebted their pretend “owners,” a BMW and a Porsche. Oh, the anxiety of watching that car land in the middle, stopping against a wall.

The dog was unharmed, happily panting in the back, and I reinserted the wheel in front. Leaving this parking lot was turning out to be harder than I thought. But I knew my parents place was up the road apiece, and I would just have to navigate that tricky three-way intersection before it would just be shady country roads all the way back to the homestead. The hook that held the back of the toy car shut had come off too, so I jammed the doors together, the dog in the back, and began my tedious journey. Then my daughter Lucinda came running out of the bushes, clad in her overalls, looking almost like I did when I was that age.

“Daddy!” “What the hell are you doing hiding in the bushes?” I hoisted her into the trunk with the dog, and we set off. It was getting evening now, I was worried about rush hour traffic. I wasn’t sure where this place was. The house had all kinds of strange businesses operating inside of it. A New York-style deli on the right. A Soviet-style hospital on the further right.

I got the car going, but then I lost control of the steering wheel again, or rather it came off in my hands, one of the wheels fell off, and the whole car drove headfirst into a stone wall at the other end of the parking lot. Somehow I was in two places as this happened. I was in the driver’s seat and I was behind the car watching it happen, two vantage points at once. Huh?

When I woke up, I was in the hospital in the dark. Maybe I had hit my head? It felt kind of sore. Or maybe those were the drugs wearing off? I found my pants on the floor. Outside the door, I could hear the audio from an Estonian television news program. Priit Kuusk was looking very serious and saying serious things about Ukraine and Russia and drone bits. I had to get out of this place. I knew they were going to probably restrain me, or put me through some formal process, some bureaucracy to get out of it. But I needed to find my dog Lou and my daughter Lucinda and they might still be out there waiting patiently in my little toy car. My pants not even buckled, I was already out the door. We were going to make it, little toy cars be damned.

gino’s kitchen

GINO REPURPOSED an old colonial farmhouse on the north shore of Long Island, somewhere east of Port Jefferson, in that winding country sprawl that stitches together Mount Sinai, Miller Place, and Sound Beach. These are long, sleepy country roads, canopied with lush dense greenery. It was here that he set up his own restaurant, fittingly dubbed “Gino’s Kitchen.”

How I wound up at the restaurant is a mystery. All I know is that I was there. It had retained some of its older architectural elements, but there was a kind of atrium with walls of lattice and ivy growing all over it. Small round tables were arrayed throughout this atrium area, with white tablecloths, covered with candles, hunks of ciabatta straight out of the brick oven, and wine glasses filled halfway with red and white. Servers swooped in and left like graceful birds.

As I walked through this part of the restaurant, I began to notice that only women were seated at the tables. Beautiful young Italian women. Or were they Italian-American women? They were looking at me as if I was attractive. There was that discernible moment of being overwhelmed, followed by a facial twitch that showed they were trying to regain their composure. Lovely chocolate-headed brunettes, sipping chianti, eyeballing me, inspecting me. But if I stayed … I told myself. But if I stayed … One of the Italian women had very pink, full lips.

In the kitchen inside the main house, there were enormous pots of water boiling. In went the fresh pasta, over here was the sauce, or gravy as some call it, bubbling up and spurting red, like the La Brea Tar Pits. It seemed like an army of chefs in white were shoveling in pizzas, beating eggs, drizzling vinaigrette. I peered down into the pot of sauce, could see hues of purple and orange on the surface. What was he putting in there? Chili pepper? Just then, Gino entered, a head like an eggplant, round, muscular, in a black t-shirt that read, “Gino’s Kitchen.”

“What the fuck are you doing in my kitchen?” he said to me. “Nothing,” I stammered. “I just was having a look at the sauce.” “Don’t you dare try to steal my fucking sauce recipe.” he said. “Get the fuck out now. Get the fuck out of my fucking kitchen!” There was a door at one end, and I sort of backed my way toward the door. Outside, the light was a strange kind of blue twilight gray.

With a push and a shove, and a twist of a metal doorknob, I was out the door, back under the trees of Miller Place or wherever this was. More black SUVs pulled into the gravel parking lot, and I got on my way. Maybe I could hitch out to Orient. Take a ferry up to New England. Leave the island for good. It was quiet and a light breeze was rolling in off the sound as I started walking. In the distance, I could see the white spire of an old congregational church.

cemetery

AND SO WE RETURNED to Huntington on Long Island, which is one of the few settlements that could be called a real town on the North Shore and not on overgrown coastal meadow village or a sprawled out ship-building port, but a real micro-city with its own library and its ways and boulevards with names like New York Avenue and Prospect Street. There used to be trolleys running the length of Main Street, gliding along metallic grooves, bells ringing, in the old days, the Model T and Model A days, when the automobile was a luxury and the straw hat ruled. The trolleys inevitably circled around the grand town hall at the end of Main Street.

This vast brick structure, constructed by some post-war — here meaning post-Civil War — architect was still in use when I returned there with an Estonian woman, whose name I could never remember, but who was so keen to see my childhood places, such as the swimming pool at the YMCA, and we walked up the granite steps, where there were long lines of townspeople waiting to see some clerk or process some paperwork. What was her name anyway? Annikki? Tuulikki? In the long lawns that stretched down toward the center of town, some women were at work gardening. One poked her head up from between the bushes and I noticed the embroidered white linen bonnet of an Estonian folk costume. Then I heard lines of Estonian dialogue passed between the women, who were planting the gardens with yellow flowers.

Annikki and I came down the steps and there was a friendly encounter with the Estonian gardeners. “What on earth are you doing here?” She asked. “We came over for the summer,” the woman said. She was dressed in a white, traditional folk costume. It was strange that she would wear such beautiful clothes for such hard work, yet there wasn’t a spot of dirt on her.

The cemetery was next to the town hall, on the other side of a grove of dark trees. There was a long stone wall now erected between these properties, but there were many doors in this wall, which stretched for quite some ways, but most of the doors were sealed, and even from in between the few cracks, I could only hear the sounds of young town hall civil servants talking.

We found our way around to the cemetery, which was where my grandfather was entombed, and his father Salvatore and mother Rosaria, and their fathers and mothers and many cousins.

“This is where they sleep, the old Italians,” I told Annikki. She was a slender girl, with tufts of red hair and freckles. Her hair seemed to be in constant windblown animation. I put an arm around her. Annikki was compulsively curious about the world. But something about this world was off. For when I peered down in the cemetery, I saw the ruins of Rome, the tombs of Pompeii. Crumbling columns, nude statues missing arms and noses, all covered with moss.

“This must be the older part of the cemetery,” I told Annikki. “Where the very old Italians sleep. My relatives are buried in the newer part.” There was a small stone house at the gate, with statues of Apollo and Venus out in front. Out of this house stepped an Italian woman, dark-haired and olive-eyed, some years older than me, her skin a perpetual sun-kissed brown.

She began to speak to me, but in Italian, and I expressed myself to the best of my abilities. Some words fell out. Cimitero, parenti. “Your Italian is just awful,” she said in a turn. “Bruto. Who even taught you to speak our language?” “That’s the thing,” I said, sadly. “Nobody did.”

hollow road

HOLLOW ROAD was a shady road. If you followed it from one end to the other, it would carry you from the Village Green to Cedar Street. It was called Hollow Road because it ran the length of a hollow. Atlantic coastal deciduous trees rose up on both sides, tall, towering oaks, cedars, and maples. In all seasons, the hillsides were covered with their colorful rotting leaves. About halfway down on the left, as you traveled the road toward Cedar Street, there was an old cemetery where the original British settler families like the Conklins and Bayles were entombed behind iron gates and beneath Victorian angels. But I never went up in there.

On this day, I walked on ahead, gingerly, freely. It was late spring, early summer, or the onset of fall. The sun shone through the leaves into the darkness of the hollow and as I exited this kind of natural tunnel, I found myself at the foot of Suffolk Avenue. On the right hand side though, I could see that several newer houses had been constructed since I went away, in a style someone might call Scandinavian contemporary. Such buildings would not be out of place on the other side of the ocean. In fact, the more I observed them, the more I began to realize that this part of Hollow Road matched Hariduse Street, which means Education Street. At least the houses looked like the kinds that one found at the start of Hariduse Street, just before the old Airplane Factory. But this was not Estonia. This was Long Island. I was sure of it. The trees were proof. Estonia didn’t have these trees.

The houses were deserted. I didn’t see one trampoline in a yard or car in a driveway. They were made of wood with yellow corrugated metal roofs. All of the trees around them had been cut down, the underbrush removed. The land had been ploughed through and reshaped and covered with fresh green sod from the sod farms out east. It was just too vacant and peculiar. I walked up one of the gravel driveways and found myself at the door of one of these Scandinavian contemporary houses on Hollow Road. The door was ajar and so I went in.

There was almost no furniture in the house. A table, a couch. But someone was living here. On the table, I saw piles of chocolate wrappers from Ghirardelli and other big name manufacturers. On the walls hung the glinting paintings of the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt. I stood there in that unlit room admiring the Klimt paintings when a woman walked in and startled me. “Who are you? What are you doing here in my house?” she said.

She was younger than me and she had raven black hair. This was pulled up in a messy braid. She wore a white jacket. Her eyes were light and remarkable but not threatening. I told her quickly that I had used to live in the neighborhood, how I can discovered the strange houses, how I had decided to look inside, how my curiosity had got the best of me. She told me that she was a translator, a chocolate translator, and how she was responsible for translating all of Ghirardelli’s packaging and marketing materials into other languages. But how did she come to acquire the Klimt paintings? Weren’t they worth millions? They were beautiful pieces.

“Yes, I also like them very much,” she said. At that moment, I began to feel a familiar, wavy sea-like sensation. It was like the floor was being pulled out from beneath me. She just stood there, staring at me. She had very light, soft skin. It was like milk. She looked too familiar. Who was she? The maritime sensation continued. “Well,” the woman said. Her voice tinkled like faint, far off music. “What now?”

scooter

I WAS ON MY WAY HOME when I saw the man. He was standing by the roadside in a field. He was wearing a black, button down shirt, a pair of blue jeans, his arms were folded. He looked like a young Benny Andersson of ABBA, but was clean shaven. He saw me on my scooter and waved me down. “Are you lost?” I asked. The stranger replied, “Hey man, could you give me a ride?”

It seemed like a peculiar request. He wanted to ride on my Bolt scooter? But there was only room for one. I shook my head. “I’m going home,” I told him. “I live right around the corner.” With that, I was off. The roads around my house were elevated, but more or less followed the same pattern as Pineapple Street, Prince Street, and Rich Old Bastard’s Neck Road, out in Quahog Ponds at the easternmost point of Long Island. At the end of Rich Old Bastard’s, there was an old manor house, and at the start of that road, there was a burial ground for African and Indian servants.

I went to make the turn onto Rich Old Bastard’s Neck Road, and the man stood in front of me again. He had somehow sprinted through the fields, forests and wetlands and arrived to the spot before I got there. Who was capable of running so quickly? And without breaking a sweat? He approached me with that same Benny Andersson cool. “Hey man,” he asked again, “could you give me a ride?”

This time, I decided to ditch the man in black. I revved the scooter, zoomed up ahead to another waterfront estate. I held the scooter in one hand and came up through the terrace in front, ducking through some screened-in corridors and walkways until I came out the other side, where I could see that the way home was all clear. Then I boarded my scooter and cruised on down Rich Old Bastard’s Neck Road to the old manor house where I seemingly lived. It was a fine day and the sun was out. I could see the ducks and geese in the water and reeds that lined the road.

When I got to the house, I quickly went in and locked the door behind me. My daughters’ toys and clothes were all over the floor in the foyer, and I began to pick them up and put them away in a cupboard. The door handle began to jiggle and I could see that someone was trying to get in. I went over to the door and put my eye to the keyhole. I saw the man’s eye on the other side. This time, he wasn’t so friendly. “I asked,” he grunted while trying to break down the door, “if you could give me a ride!” The door opened at that moment and he collapsed inside. Not knowing what to do, I fell back. As the man lunged, I kicked the air, hoping to strike. “Get the hell out of my house,” I shrieked. “Get out now!”

marjatta

THE BUS LEFT ME OFF by the university, which was in a city, maybe even Washington in the District of Columbia. Wherever it was, the yellow-hued brickwork and soldierly architecture looked all too familiar to me. That hustle and bustle of an urban conurbation, construction site cranes looming, sticky humidity, gliding metro escalators and stuffy streetcar exhaust. I walked along through the pedestrians and noise. I went into the school through the side door.

A long time ago, around the time that Nirvana’s popularity peaked, I had been in this same building. I was sure of it. This was my alma mater, Sconset Junior High. If you went in by the side door and turned left down the first corridor, it would take you straight to Mr. Archimedes’ wood shop, where we once fashioned daggers and other weapons using the saws and lathes. In between, the grand auditorium, where year after year the theatre arts program staged beloved productions for the community. The next corridor led to the music department, the domain of Mr. Stuyvesant. It was all familiar, as I said, except that some things in the school were new.

The original school lacked a second floor over this wing, for example, but this version had one, with a staircase up. Maybe it had been added later? I went up the steps and looked out the windows, which showed that stretch of I Street between 23rd and Pennsylvania Avenue. Trash cans, hot dog vendors, and the shuttle bus to the Mount Vernon Campus. This was exactly where I was living in the spring of my junior year of college, except that my junior high had been transposed onto it. It was truly weird.

On the second floor of this strange, fusion school, Marjatta was about to sing a ballad. She had a concert and there were posters on the walls. I went to all of Marjatta’s concerts. Who wouldn’t go to see a singer who looked like a maiden from the Kalevala? She wore a red dress, her chestnut hair was done up like Little My. I stood there with my camera, ready to take photos. This, I thought, would be welcome, boyfriend-like behavior.

Around her stood and sat a group of other Finnish musicians. They too were out of place. But when they finished their set, Marjatta just brushed aside me with her small entourage of bassists and percussionists. She made some quick eye contact with me, but said not a hope-extending word. That was all. Unrequited love and all that. I was stunned and disoriented. I watched Marjatta walk down the hall. I was back where I had started, wherever this place was. My melancholy youth of looking out windows.