Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Naomi Solomon

It was a puzzle we were clearly not up to sorting out: the Sibling Tourists and the Mystery of the Little Kings. We had not been in Istanbul long and wouldn’t stay much longer, but we saw them everywhere we went, at different times on different days—more often in shiny, touristy Sultanahmet on the west side of the river, but occasionally in Beyoglu, the more everyday neighborhood on the east side. Little boys, ranging from maybe six to ten years old, dressed all in white and silver. Some had capes, some had elaborately embroidered vests that sparkled hotly in the dusty sunlight; most, if not all, had crowns. A few clutched silver-studded scepters, looking lightweight like finely sculpted tinfoil, in the hand that wasn’t tightly clasped by a beaming parent or grandparent.

None of the little kings looked especially jubilant. Relatives bedecked in slightly less regal formalwear swarmed around them, big smiles and disposable cameras flashing. The little kings smiled the way that children do when they know they are supposed to smile: tight and toothy, eyes pointed straight at the camera lense.

Sitting in the square with the Blue Mosque towering behind us, a mixed study in mass and delicacy, my brother and I watched a little king who looked to be about eight years old as he posed stiffly for photos with a bevy of aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, and grandparents. The child of honor in front, the Blue Mosque as a backdrop, and relatives taking turns on both sides of the camera, click.

“Maybe it’s for a holiday?”

“Maybe it’s for a ceremonial thing… like a Bar Mitzvah?”

“Maybe they’re auditioning for a Turkish children’s version of American Idol?”

“Maybe there’s, like, a Renaissance Faire kinda thing for little boys?”

We slipped into the mosque between services, our shoes off and my head and shoulders draped in a large blue scarf handed to me at the door. The huge, open interior, intricately decorated with blue and white columns, tile work, and stained glass, was full of light and whispering people. We eavesdropped on a guided group and learned that it was designed to be entirely lit by sunlight, via well-placed windows and mirrors. In the middle of the guide’s description of the mosque’s origins, a teenage boy (not in king regalia) came up to us. He said “hello” a few times before he caught our attention. He introduced himself as Mohammad and said he was learning English, and asked if we had any questions.

“Can you tell us why all these little boys are dressed like kings—with the capes and crowns and everything?” I couldn’t stop myself from miming crown, a quick upward sweep of the fingers over the sides of my head, not sure how much sense my question would make to Mohammad. He was just beginning his explanation, something to do with birthdays, when it was announced in English, Arabic, and French that evening prayers were about to start and anyone not there to pray had to leave.

Mohammad asked us for an email address, so he could continue to practice his English with us, and thrust a pen and piece of paper at my brother, who obliged. Mohammad said a polite thank-you, and we lost him in the crowd leaving the mosque.

We didn’t ask anyone else about the little kings in our last two days in the city, though we continued to see them, sparkling and solemn-looking. When Mohammad emailed us weeks after we had gotten home, the email simply read, “Hi I am your friend Mohammad that met you at the Blue Mosque.” I’m not sure that we ever wrote back.

[img via thisisbossi under a Creative Commons license]

by Ian F. King

Part 1: Sometimes the Real Thing is More Than What’s Necessary

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Wait. No, I don’t. I have no idea what you are thinking, because I have no idea what I was thinking. There was no real reason my vacation ended up being spent in the largest “city” in the 49th most populated state in the United States (suck it, Wyoming). The vacation was almost a “staycation,” but the thought of having to use that tedious compound alone was motivation to go anywhere. The decision might as well have been made by throwing a dart at a map, so let’s say I threw a mind dart at a map of cheap places to go for a few days that would also offer some measure of tranquility. And there you have it.

Sometime after crossing the state line, I stopped shrugging my shoulders and decided to embrace my destination. All the green outside the train window was soothing. I forgot about the hot sidewalks and the hot garbage smell that emanates from them. Vermont’s nickname, the Green Mountain State, is half-earned. Its highest point is just over four thousand feet above sea level; the mountains here would only pass for foothills where I’m from. But the color green truly is everywhere, even in Burlington, the aforementioned largest city in the state.

Populated by roughly forty thousand souls, Burlington has the distinction of being the smallest US city to be the largest city in its state. That population is also roughly ninety-three percent white, which is one of many ways it feels like the Pacific Northwest, my home region; particularly the similarly-sized college town of Bellingham. Like Bellingham, Burlington’s population and industries owe a lot to a university that sits uphill from the old city center. It’s lousy with coffee shops and hippies. They are both also situated on the eastern shores of comparable-sized bodies of water, Lake Champlain and the Puget Sound, with the same green-hilled landscape meandering off in all directions.

This visual similarity was so close that, many times over the few days I was hanging out along the waterfront, when I turned my head or looked up from the book I was reading or closed my eyes for a second and then opened them again, I would become confused about where I was. In the weeks before going to Vermont I had become homesick for Seattle. It was a feeling that I hadn’t felt in years, and I couldn’t tell why I was feeling it. After those flashes of geographical displacement in Burlington, it finally came clear. I had been missing the view.

by Liz Mathews

In years now long gone, summer vacations around the Midwest were what my family did, yet regardless of where our vehicle took us, there was really only one destination for my sister and I: the hotel swimming pool. My parents were well aware of this, and, because flaring tempers on family vacations were inevitable, they did everything in their power to avoid trouble from the beginning. This included booking hotel rooms in hotels with pools.

Visiting the Badlands during a tornado warning? Gazing upon the purple beauty of a waterfall in the Ozarks? Counting the number of forest fire warning signs in Manitoba? Sure, those things are fine, whatever. Dog-paddling in the lukewarm water of the humid hotel swimming pool room? I’m there before you can say “No lifeguard on duty.”

My sister, too.

So a few weeks ago, when our mother confirmed that yes, there was a swimming pool at the Crowne Plaza in Wauwatosa, swimsuits were the first things in our respective bags. My family descended on Wisconsin from various places in the United States, and congregated at my aunt and uncle’s home for an evening of eating and boozing. And then more of the eating, and also the drinking. The idea of the hotel swimming pool lingered, though.

It was late by the time my family made it to the Crowne Plaza. Still, since it was open 24 hours, my sister and father and I looked in on the pool. I was dissuaded by the teenage girl in her bikini and her boyfriend in board shorts. My sister’s face showed obvious disappointment, but we agreed that bright and early the next morning, the pool was ours.

Except that it wasn’t. At 8:15am there was a middle-aged man checking his Blackberry in one of the lounge chairs, and an older man doing who-knows-what in the deeper end of the pool. My sister and I entered the water. It was colder than expected. We stood awkwardly. We swam the width of the pool several times, only to then stand awkwardly again.

Soon enough the old man exited the pool. “I hope I wasn’t in your way,” he said as he passed us with his snorkel mask. “Oh, no,” we assured him.

The other man continued his Blackberry checking. We continued being in the hotel swimming pool.

After we’d done some racing up and down the length of the pool, and zombie walked some more lengths, an older woman entered the room and started working out in the whirlpool. We stood awkwardly some more, and considered the clock on the wall.

It took us a while to actually extricate ourselves from the pool, despite the sense of uncertainty that pervaded the whole swim session. Maybe we were clinging to memories of our younger selves, of summer vacations and breaks from schoolwork. Maybe we just didn’t want to fight over the shower. I can’t speak for my sister.

But if this is growing up, then what I can do is sigh.

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by Naomi Solomon

It had already been a strange weekend when I met Russell. He pulled up in front of the inn half an hour early on Sunday, the charter bus bigger and louder than I had imagined it would be. I fumbled my way out of the hammock and to the side of the bus, feeling strikingly unprofessional in a still-wet bathing suit mostly covered by an undershirt and shorts. If he thought I was anything but the highly-efficient-and-seasoned-yet-friendly event planner that I hoped I’d sounded like over the phone, he was kind enough not to give any indication.

We agreed that I would do a quick lap and remind everyone of the departure time while he stayed on the bus and made sure it was properly air-conditioned.

Twenty-five minutes later I was back and fully dressed, in time to see Russell helping the first guests load lawn chairs and picnic blankets into the luggage compartment, telling them how it’d be a quick ride since he lived right there in the area we’d be visiting and knew the way by heart. When everyone was on the bus I did a headcount, compared it to my list, felt briefly like a camp counselor (on Family Day, I guess, since most of the group was roughly my parents’ age), and gave Russell the go-ahead to drive on.

I sat in the seat just behind him, and explained over the combined roar of the AC and diesel engine, “We bought the tickets for tonight way in advance, and a few people ended up not being able to come. I can’t get a refund on the tickets, so if you want to come in with us you’d be more than welcome, and if you know of anyone else in the area, they could come, too—maybe your wife? We might as well use the tickets.”

“Oh yeah? That would be really nice. My wife’s home with cancer, she’s not feeling too well today, but maybe her son and his girlfriend will come.”

He said it casually, matter-of-fact but not unfeeling, as if he was used to having people dismiss a painstaking daily struggle as mere circumstance. Not inviting sympathy, but not discouraging it, either.

“Wow, I’m so sorry to hear that. And sorry we’re taking you away from her on the holiday.”

“Well, that’s the job. She understands. I mean, it was different before I took this job, but now I just kind of have to take whatever gigs the bus company comes up with for me.” He held the wheel casually as he spoke, eyes scanning the darkening road ahead comfortably. Russell seemed to assess the familiar route for helpful updates rather than check against potential hazards.

“What did you do before?”

“Let’s see, I was a real estate agent for years, but it’s a tough job in this area right now, and after a while it just didn’t seem worth it to keep up my license. I drove a truck for a while, and that’s pretty good money but it’s lonely and it was taking me away from home for too long. So this is better in a way, but they only pay twelve dollars an hour.”

We talked a bit more, and then he pulled into the parking lot and the next few hours were a bustle of passing out tickets, getting the group to the barbeque and then from there to the lawn where we’d watch fireworks, entertaining the few kids in the group with goofy improv games and discussing the beauty of the surrounding topiary with the adults. That twelve dollars an hour stuck with me throughout: at this elaborate botanic garden each ticket to see the fireworks display was nearly three hours of work, and dinner passes were roughly the same. I didn’t have a wife with cancer or a stepson with (as I learned on the drive back) a history of DUIs that made it difficult to find work, and the for the money I was making that weekend confirming tour reservations and shepherding strangers from pool to museum to dinner to fireworks, I should be spending over twelve hours per day behind the wheel.

When he dropped us off back at the inn, I shouted a goodbye to Russell into the bus from the dark and perfectly-kept lawn, and wished him and his wife the best. He nodded and smiled.

“I hope she got to see the fireworks on TV,” he said. “They were really something, really a beautiful show.”

[img via]

by J.B. Staniforth

Mawuko was from Ghana, a student at the international MBA program at which I’d found a job as a receptionist. We first met during the winter, which was, like most Montreal winters, ferociously cold. And like many immigrants to Montreal from warmer countries, Mawuko suffered it with a sense of humor, first amazed by the cold and snow, then tiring sarcastically of it as the novelty wore off, and finally amazed again at the wait for spring to come in May.

By the time spring came, we’d become friendly. My girlfriend also worked at the reception desk on alternating days, and Mawuko took to passing time on breaks by wandering over and chatting with us. He introduced us to his wife, who was also studying in town, and brought us Ghanaian chocolate after he’d gone home for a desperately-needed visit in the mid-winter.

As long as I knew him, Mawuko’s dress was standard business-casual, except for those days in the program on which he was required to attend a meeting or presentation and wore a suit. So I was enthused to discover that as the summer temperatures reached those to which he was more accustomed, his wardrobe widened to included dashikis, kaftans, and kufi-caps. Part of the fun of the job was encountering people from all over the world and asking them about the customs of home, and Mawuko took great pleasure in pointing out that there weren’t many people in Montreal with his sense of style.

Thus, it was in a brilliant purple kaftan that he appeared through the door during the third day of the first heat wave of summer. The city was living up to its meteorological reputation of “nine months of winter, three months of hell,” and as Mawuko staggered into the air conditioned office, I could see he was sweating mightily. A V-shaped patch of sweat darkened his purple kaftan nearly to the belly, while two dark u-shapes descended from his armpits. Upon entering, he paused in the air-conditioning to blot his forehead, temples, and upper lip with a handkerchief. Then he looked at the desk and saw me.

“Have you been outside lately?” he asked. In spite of his musical accent, his tone was accusatory, as though I was somehow responsible for the weather.

“No,” I said. “I got here early for the air conditioning.” That was true; I didn’t bother to add that my roommates and I had taped cardboard over all our windows in the hope of blocking out the cruelty of the sun.

“It is so hot outside,” Mawuko said. “I mean, it is unreal.”

“It does get hot,” I concurred.

“No, you don’t understand. It is hotter than Africa. Africa! And you know what they say about Africa? That it’s a hot place?”

“It’s the humidity,” I offered.

“You’re damned right it is! We don’t have humidity like this in Africa. It’s terrible.”

I shrugged; I couldn’t then, and can’t now, afford to live anywhere else.

“And in the winter,” he went on, “it is so cold. So terribly cold. What is wrong with this country? Why do you people live here?”

“I can only speak for myself,” I said, “but I stay mostly because the rent is cheap and all the insects are very small.”

Mawuko shook his head.

“You people are crazy,” he said.

The last I heard of him, he and his wife moved home to Ghana immediately upon completing their studies in Montreal.

[img via]

by Ian F. King

1.
On a Sunday afternoon I was in my friend’s car, driving to a nearby Montreal-style Jewish deli in Brooklyn. At the base of 4th Avenue, the visage of the Williamsburgh Savings & Loan building rose prominently from the otherwise flat surroundings. My friend remarked on its priapic nature. This was the umpteenth time I’d heard this comparison. Not from him alone, but also from a wide swath of the local population over time, including the occasional person on the subway, gazing on it coming into view as the above ground part of the line bends around the Smith & 9th Street station. It finally struck me why this building in particular, seemingly more than any other in New York City, reminds people of the male organ: it stands alone. The similarity can’t just be its shape. In the bigger picture, there’s really nothing that makes this building more like genitalia than any other. However, no one looks out on the Manhattan skyline and says, “wow, that looks like a big bunch of penises.” Yet there they are, rows of giant phalli filled with the lifeblood of our society, thrusting heavenward.

2.
When my parents recently visited from thousands of miles away, on the other coast of this country, the third place we went on their first day here (after the park and then brunch) was the Gowanus Canal. My father, a photography enthusiast, was eager to take pictures. We saw a dead rat floating in the water, unidentifiable filth drifting along the banks and collecting against the pilings that hold up the stubby two-lane drawbridges. I told them the famous anecdote about the canal testing positive for gonorrhea. My mother and I leaned on railings as my father snapped shot after shot of the graffiti and detritus. There are a great many decaying and decrepit areas in our home city as well, including the Duwamish River, which was itself declared a Superfund site in 2001. They spent the week taking a pass on many of the city’s most famous tourist destinations, skipping the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, among others, mostly because the lines were long. On the morning of their last day I asked them what they wanted to do with their final hours in the Big Apple. “Well, your dad really wants to go back down to the canal,” my mom said.

3.
Before going in to the City Reliquary, I wander down Havermeyer almost to the bridge and weave my way back north through the cross streets, stopping once to go into a corner store, and twice to peruse a menu posted outside though I’m not hungry at all. The museum, no bigger than an average living room, is wall-to-wall clutter with a collection of what basically has been in the homes and garages of New York City residents at some point during the past one hundred years. There’s an old subway token residing under glass that is identical to the one I’ve kept on a thin strand of ball chain in my desk drawer since 1999. In the “special exhibition” room there’s a temporary show about old signage that used to be a defining element of the neighborhood, featuring a foam bull’s head, a foam water tower, and some other fake objects made out of foam, that all used to hang from store facades, but now hang from the Reliquary ceiling. This was a world that no longer lived there, and I had no idea it was missing when I was out walking around those blocks just minutes before. Decades from now, where will they hang our dog bakery and baby yoga supply store signs?

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by caitlin macrae

You hear about the L.A. River like it’s a sasquatch or a chupacabra, something mythic and mutant, a lie to keep children from going too far past the sidewalk in front of the house. And it’s basically just like that, a weak and scary thing, in parts, but mostly worse in your imagination: a trickle of liquid meandering around islands of upturned shopping carts and the shredded remains of plastic bags. It’s the image everyone knows, on the million contact sheets of a million amateur photographers looking for something gritty and teeming with metaphor, but it’s still true. Somewhere upstream there are river stones and swimming ducks and a riverbed not made of concrete. A river river, with green things, something that looks less like an aquatic memorial to an unwon war. But that’s all pretty far from us. When most of Los Angeles was a giant flood plain, the L.A. River used to connect to the Ballona Creek, which used to have wetlands, which are now a tiny swampy patch run through by the 90 freeway. Now Ballona is its own thing, sort of the L.A. River’s lame little brother, which is basically the worst fate to which a body of water could be resigned. Same islands of misfit refuse, fewer green things. There’s a bike path that runs along the creek, a series of steep drops and hills at impossible angles, punctuating long stretches of not much at all.

Gar used to take his family there on weekends sometimes, their fifteen-year-old hatchback Honda teeming with bicycles, everyone competing with fast food wrappers and barnacles of loose change for legroom. He had just moved to Culver City, had just gotten married again, had just bought his first house since the house in the valley with his second (now ex-) wife, the one with the red door that was sold in the divorce. Two of his five children come to his new house every other weekend. They are going to be a family, come hell, high water, or horribly drawn out group therapy sessions; therefore, families ride bikes. So.

So on Saturdays in the blistering California summer, a row of partially related people like ducklings draw themselves in a line along the pavement next to the water, flying down hills and crawling up hills while the small fake river shimmers and reflects promises of under-eye sunburns. The littlest one’s legs whirl with hummingbird speed but he is always farthest behind. The girl hates everyone around her and this stupid bike, hates Gar especially but gets worried every time he pedals out of sight. The rest triangulate up front, longer legs and outdoor bodies. They all take turns being first and last, a family that is not quite family, water that just barely passes for water.

[img via]

by Ian F. King

The plain black scarf had traveled three thousand miles and waited three months to be reunited with me, its neglectful owner. The December before, I was visiting my hometown on the holiday break. One night in the middle of the week I was at a small bar—the walls were covered in antlers, the floor was covered in peanut shells, and the dudes were covered in beards—in my old neighborhood with and old friend, Emma. After a while I had to take off to go meet another old friend, and that’s where I first left the plain black scarf, draped on the back of a rickety chair. I didn’t notice it was missing until Emma called me to tell me she had it, though she was driving home right then.

I had to leave the West Coast without it. However, our mutual friend Laura, who happened to live ten blocks away from me, was also visiting there at the same time. The scarf was handed off, and flew back across the country in Laura’s suitcase. Though Laura lived so close, it took me three months to make the time to pick it up. We met up in late March at a bar between our apartments with a couple of other friends. I was reunited with my jet-setting seven-dollar scarf for a whole four hours before I walked out of the bar without it again. It was a warm Saturday night. When I went to check out the lost and found the next day, it wasn’t there.

One year later, I was once again the owner of an identical seven-dollar black scarf. That same year later, I was in the very same bar around the very same time, and lost that very same scarf on the first warm Saturday night of the season. That very same lost and found cardboard box did not have my lost scarf in it the next day.

This weekend, yet another year later, at a different bar, I lost my coat (though it was also black and also very cheap) instead. At least I know it’s missing before I leave; someone’s walked off with it. Assuming it’s long gone like my old scarves, I call the bar first before going there in person. After confirming the coat has actually been returned (me: 1; being fated to lose things: 2), the conversation I have with the bartender ends fortuitously.

Me (mildly thrilled): Wow, that’s great, it’ll still be there tomorrow, yeah?

Bartender (turning inquisitive): Yeah, it’ll be here. Hey, is this Ian from WNYU?

Me (briefly convinced I sewed a slightly-misleading nametag into my coat): Um, well, my name is Ian…

Bartender (thinks he might have the right guy): Ian who lives in the West Village?

Me (oddly bummed I’m not the right Ian): No, different Ian. But close, I guess.

Bartender (unfazed by the coincidence): Ah, never mind. Yeah, it’ll be here, I’ll put your name on it.

Me (pulling it back together after getting bummed for a second there): Thanks.

[img via]

by Naomi Solomon

Small and slightly crumpled-seeming—from her ponytailed hair, frizzy and dyed reddish-brown, to her gently wrinkled face, to the crinkle in her lilting voice—Nadia will lead you from the carpeted locker room where the front desk attendant left you into small side room that looks like a cross between a hospital room and the waiting area of a therapist’s office, all soft lighting and sheet-draped beds. She introduces herself several times during the short walk: “I am Nadia—easy to remember, yes? Nah-dee-ya.”

Inside, she closes the door, adjusts the lighting imperceptibly, and holds up a large white towel that easily devours the full breadth of her armspan, forming a droopy barrier between you and her. She turns her head ninety degrees and tells you to hang your robe on the hook behind the door and lie on your belly on the bed. You do as she says, feeling awkward as you raise your arms in front of your naked self to hang up the robe, and lie on the bed, wriggling on your knees and elbows to center yourself on the white expanse. Nadia has followed you over, walking sideways so she can continue to hold the towel between the two of you. Once you are settled, she covers you in one big efficient swish, as if she were an expert picnicker laying out a picnic blanket on a smooth lawn, before she sets to work tucking and folding the towel to reveal everything but the crack of your buttocks, essentially transforming the giant swath of white cotton into a bulky g-string.

Whatever treatment you have asked for, Nadia will assure you, “You will love it, you see. Your skin afterwards is soft like the baby, you love it. Do not worry, if it tickles that means it’s working, making skin soft and nice.”

Then she sets to work, doing whatever you said you wanted when you called to make the appointment: a mud wrap, maybe, and she covers you quickly, her latex-wrapped hands smoothing thick green sludge all over the uncovered parts of you; or a sea scrub, and she rubs something gritty and fresh-smelling quickly and fiercely into your skin. Midway through she steps aside to refill the small metal mixing bowl of mud or all-natural exfoliant, and while her back is turned she tells you to flip over. When she approaches you again it is behind another towel, which this time will stretch from just above your nipples to end in a neat V over your pelvis. Again you are slathered or scrubbed, Nadia’s hands darting briefly under the towel to cover your belly.

After letting it soak or tingle or harden for fifteen minutes, she sends you to a very hot shower to rinse off, and when you come back warm and pink and shiny-feeling, and open, as if your pores and mind and lungs have shed anything that had stuck in them too long, she’ll tell you she wants to give you a hug, brief moments before she does so.

On your way out you see Nadia with her next client, and you stop her a moment to slip her some money—she smiles and nods, maybe hugs you again, and slips it into a pocket beneath her apron without looking at it—wondering what a good tip is for someone who coats strangers in mud or sea salt paste and has not-quite-seen you naked.

by Liz Wyckoff

On our Delta flight from Portland to Atlanta, we all watch a precautionary video. No more flight attendants with poorly-choreographed clicks and tightenings. No oxygen masks held up to the ceiling and dropped dangerously close to passengers’ faces.

Now, we get Katherine Lee: star of Delta’s airline safety video. We get the subtle cups of her cheeks, a finger wag warning us that our “mobile phones and other electronic devices should now be turned … off;” the seductive snap of that cell phone in her well-manicured hand. We get tangerine-colored hair swept across her forehead like a smooth cirrus cloud.

We, the passengers, are a motley crew. Lots of glasses. We chew the ice in our complimentary drinks. I get the sense we’re all playing the game I usually play in tight spaces with strangers. If the plane crash-lands on an uninhabited island, with whom will we make babies to propagate the species? We glance at each other out of the corners of our eyes.

Most of us, I believe, are remembering the video. Her voice echoes in our heads like something a partner once said during sex. “Insert the metal tip into the buckle.” “Adjust the strap so it’s low and tight across your lap.”

Every once in a while, we tune our mini television screens to the program that charts our path across the country. We cruise over the cookie-cutter borders of Nebraska and Kansas and Missouri. Altitude: 37,004 ft. Ground Speed: 943 km/h.

We all want to be somewhere: the place we just left, the place we’re going, or somewhere else altogether.

Later, we watch a beautiful sunrise—the moon hangs pale and white as a clipped fingernail in the sky. About an inch from the horizon, the atmosphere shifts into a deep red, then a brilliant orange, then, finally, the color of the Delta woman’s hair. Tangerine.

We, the passengers, have dull, greasy hair. We lower our window shades and shut our eyes. Thankfully, we’ll be here for a few more hours.