Scenes from public spaces, a while back

Behind my mask I forget about people watching. About what it’s like to sit lazily and listen. I remember people I don’t know:

The teacher who ran into three female students wearing big gold hoops on Valencia Street. They tell her about a kid who got in trouble in their class that day. “It’s racism playing out like we discussed in class, girls,” she says. “Black and Brown boys don’t get power anywhere else so when they can fight they’re going to fight,” she says. “Maybe we can change that,” she says, and they hug her goodbye, and then she calls them back so she can buy them chocolate croissants at Craftsman and Wolves. 

The guy on the 33 bus at 8:45 pm with a carefully packed rolling shopping bag, carefully dressed in a black sweatshirt, carefully eating something fried out of a plastic bag using his duffel bag as a table, carefully wiping the corners of his mouth. When he’s done eating, he pulls out what looked like a photocopy of a book page with a childish font at the top. He photocopies pages from library books during the day, rides the bus all night, until it ends at the terminal out by the VA.

The tall Black man with sunglasses, headphones, and a bucket hat on the 21 bus who asks a kid next to him to get up in case old people need to sit. The kid has been reading Harry Potter through glasses, a dream student, and gets up silently, nervously, wondering what he has done wrong. The man speaks in soft smooth tones to a brittle old lady in a purple sweater “How you doing - oh you know, keeping busy - ain’t that right.” He likes to wander North Beach, he tells me, walking 6 blocks up and 6 blocks back again. He was born and raised in San Francisco, and gets too homesick to leave for good. 

On Kigali's Quiet

Kigali has diplomatic compounds like Geneva and bookstores with gridded French composition books. It feels like a Lego city. Smooth, smooth roads, streetlamps, reflectors between lanes. Perfectly poised police officers who, David told us, share English phrases like “I will punish you” and “I forgive you” if they pull you over. Since 2004, they’ve decreased traffic deaths by 32%. Visitors to Kigali from Nairobi or Kampala remark on how calm the city is, how quiet, how orderly.

The Kigali Genocide Memorial explains this order. Order is a coping mechanism for the worst disorder imaginable. At the Memorial, we read about the Belgian colonialists who decided one tribe was better than another, seeding violent resentment. About the way people turned this resentment into a careful plan to exterminate the other. About the small handful of international troops who escorted diplomats to safety when the extermination began, who instead would have been enough to stop it.

In the section of the Memorial for children, under a small, framed baby picture:

Francine (12)

Favorite sport: swimming

Favorite food: egg and chips

Favorite drinks: milk and Fanta

Favorite friend: Claudette

Death: hacked by machete.

East Africa Notebook Scraps

I’m still a sucker for the names of places.

In Addis Ababa, the flight boarding to Asmara

A guy walked past in a white tunic with pink vest and a pillbox hat. There were the veiled ladies cracking themselves up and the guy in a natty blue suit with a Burberry bag and the family where the Dad would have fit in at the Battery in San Francisco, Chelsea boots and a tweed blazer. The mother wore a full black hijab, and the daughter wore a sweatshirt and shiny sandals with her hair in many braids. She giggled with glee as she played on the floor. I watched a group of Italian tourists playing cards and started to remember what it’s like to travel, and why.

Kampala

I was scared to leave Ana’s house to go to my first meeting so I just left without checking my map, walked through the gate with my heart pounding. I got red dirt on my new sneakers, which are technically just recycled waterbottles well-packaged by Silicon Valley. At the supermarket with chickens in front I started breathing again when I asked for directions and remembered I’ve been the one who looks different before.

Being a passenger on the back of a boda boda at rush hour in Kampala may be the best way to reach a state of equanimity and enlightenment. Do you have control of your fate, of your body in space, of how close your driver gets to the car next to you? Nope, so you might as well enjoy the view and hope for the best. I watched the women with bananas on their heads, the barefoot kids, a guy running with weights, the high school students walking home wearing Beats headphones. In my mind, that city is hills, exhilaration and exhaust, clenching the back rail of a boda boda on the way home to Ana’s apartment.

Lake Mburu

It started raining on our way to Lake Mburu, red dirt puddles and kids pulling their cattle. Eyes on the road and things to see, talking about UBI and impact investing, unspooling life, eating snacks. We got pulled over for “speeding”  – the muzungu tax, Eric said, 50,000 shillings. The officer had a smile around his mouth.

Onward. We stopped for food on the side of the road near a sign that said “corruption in procurement worsens poverty.” We watched an egg bubble and expand on a griddle, watched a chappati brown, watched the quick hands of the men who must stand there all day. One guy had small gold glasses and tried to charge us 6000 shillings when it should have been 3000. “No no no, my friend!” Ali exclaimed. He smiled sheepishly, but wouldn’t go lower than 4000. “You requested salt,” he said.

Worth it - a Rolex may be better than a breakfast taco. At the park the next day, I woke up from a bad dream and ran into zebras on a muddy road.

Kisoro

To get to the gorillas in Mgahinga, we took a matatu to a bus to a taxi. On the matatu, a woman suckled her baby with Mountain Dew. On the bus, we watched music videos on loop over a rich soundsystem and it felt like a tropical vacation, steel drums and bananas trees passing by the open windows. We talked about the midterm elections. Ali said the US was tense and violent, which certainly feels true if you compare the view out any Greyhound to the view from this bus. The Earth heaved in amazing ways, making mounds of black dirt dressed in green. There were men selling sheets when the bus stopped, women sitting with their cabbages, babies getting haircuts. Inside the bus, the music videos played over and over, women in love and done wrong with their head wraps and their hips telling the story.

When we arrived in Kisoro, it was dusk and everyone was walking along the road, a few women in jeans, but mostly in dresses, long skirts, and shawls so bright I realized I may have never seen color before them. The little girls had short hair and party dresses. One smiled at me huge and said, “give me money!”

Kisoro to Kigali

Breakfast in Kisoro was $3, plaintain and potato and green bean in a spicy sauce while kids were walking to school in the mist.

We drove to the border crossing listening to Bosco’s radio, airy songs which he told us were mostly Rwandese. “This one, it’s for angels of the genocide,” he said. The volcanos are lavender before the sun has risen. So many people killed so many others here. You can’t help but thinking that as you cross the border into Rwanda.

We took another bus, along roads lined with straight rows of trees like a French estate. The lady next to me sang for most of the two hours and helped her friend swipe through what must have been Rwandese Tinder. Wind through the windows, up and around hills that I imagined chiefs surveying long ago until we arrived in Kigali, where the Radisson conference center marks the skyline like a sentry for a new economy.

Dinner in Kigali was $23, a weird mélange of ginger cocktails and avocado fries in a big lodge room full of expats. The evening streets quiet, no one walking.

Nairobi

On the plane to Nairobi, more men wore suits and read the business section, and a pastor asked me if I were Christian. The city pulsates in my mind still. My five-block radius encompassed three malls, mobile money, a swimming pool, transit strikes, laughing colleagues, local founders, expat founders, carrot cake, Chinese noodles, and ginger juice. At the Indian supermarket in the mall next door to my hotel, Africans, Asians, and blonde girls bought yogurt and peanuts and curry. I learned how to walk on sidewalks that sometimes disintegrated into dust, how to dodge cars when I crossed the road, and how to call my Uber driver with directions. On the drive to Ruiru to see BURN’s factory, there was a woman sleeping by the tomatoes she was selling at midday, reclined like a Manet subject except exhausted.

Hell’s Gate

I went to Hell’s Gate Park by myself on Saturday morning after it turned out I would not, in fact, be able both to crash a wedding in northern Kenya and make my flight out from Nairobi on Sunday. In an obstinate quest for an adventure, which turned out to be very hot and a little underwhelming, I spent four quiet hours in a car, which was in fact was the adventure, expanding my understanding of Kenya beyond a sexy Nairobi that’s using technology to change the world. This Kenya was green forests and trash-lined red dirt roads, small mobile money kiosks painted with Safaricom ads, monkeys on the median, butcher-shop-hotel combos (who stays there??), long-strided runners, Masaii kids in t-shirts and flipflops shepherding goats, and a valley whose expansiveness made it feel like the floor of the whole world.

Addis Ababa Again

When we arrived in Addis, a stewardness was sobbing. The first customer service desk was in Chinese. At 11 pm, a motley crowd of safari-shirted Americans, Italian couples with matching backpacks, and Kenyan businessmen drank Ethiopian coffee, which is served with popcorn. We boarded the next flight.

I want to be like the people who still stop on the gangway to take a picture of the plane, approaching the world with wonder, seeing not a plane but a giant metal bird preening its wings before flying around the world. When I woke up, I was in Paris.

Interview on "Negotiating the Terms"

If you scrolled back to the first essay on this site, from 2015, and read through the rest of the words stored here - on social activism, on writing, on ranchers, on nostalgia, on language, on Benefit Corporations and educational equity and sugar highs and road trips and cities of innovation and oceans and grinding poverty all combined - maybe you'd immediately suggest that I look for a role with an impact investment fund. (Or maybe not). 

However, since we are *all about the journey*, it took me three years to figure out the right direction for a career I'd want to dig into. I'm sharing an interview I got to do with a young woman whose made it her side hustle to interview young women in all sorts of investment roles. It answers a lot of questions about what the heck impact investing with Acumen means, and, I hope, it can be useful to anyone thinking about a career in social impact, or a career without a clearly defined title.

The original is here, and I highly recommend checking out the other interviews Nikita has pulled together. 

What attracted you to venture capital and working with startups?

It’s a long story, but each chapter was important. In some way it began in my childhood kitchen. My dad is a business owner - he runs a chain of weekly local papers with my aunt. Our kitchen table was always covered in advance copies of the paper, and I loved visiting the small businesses downtown that advertised because it felt like we lived in a strong community. My first job was writing for The Bernardsville News. I interviewed local characters and I loved learning about who they were and what they were working on. That desire to share people’s perspectives led me to major in  American Studies and work for student publications at Yale. I was specifically interested in the intersection of journalism and activism. After I graduated, I started working for NationSwell, a social impact media startup.

I was a jack of all trades on a staff of 3 working to crack the problem of telling stories that motivate readers to take action. We started a series of in-person sessions in NYC with innovators like General McChrystal and Andrew Yang (the founder of Venture for America) to bring service-minded people together and create solutions. Over that first year, I helped build this series of monthly gatherings into a membership community, the NationSwell Council, that became a key revenue stream for NationSwell’s media platform and has now expanded to 7 cities across the US.  

I was doing this on the side while I had a full-time job in consulting. There are so many different ways to work with startups, be that as an intrapreneur at a corporation or a scrappy founder or something in between. I loved building NationSwell, and it gave me the opportunity to use skills I had picked up from journalism and consulting. When I was considering my next move, I knew that I was interested in social enterprise. I also strongly believed that I needed to live in the communities I wanted to work with. So I signed up for Teach for America and taught on the border in Pharr, Texas for two years. I started noticing things that were too systemic to solve as a teacher. Intergenerational challenges - lack of job opportunities and financial empowerment. I wanted to work for a fund that was investing in companies providing these fundamental rights to low-income families. I am proud to be at Acumen now.   

What makes Acumen different than other social impact funds?

There’s been a proliferation of impact investing funds in the last few years, which is generally a great thing. But in South Texas, I also saw a lot of companies with an impact mission that didn’t actually prioritize what families needed.  I only looked at funds that clearly tracked the impact of their investments. Acumen has Lean Data: a mobile-based methodology we built to collect customer and business insights in 2-8 weeks at low cost. Lean Data helps us understand what’s important to customers and how our portfolio companies can implement that feedback for their next quarter. Because it’s a standardized way of collecting data - now being used by other impact investors, too - we can benchmark across business models, geographies, and stages of business. We believe it makes us better investors.

Here’s an example of how Lean Data works. One of our investees, BioLite, an energy company that sells smokeless cookstoves in East Africa and India, wanted to understand how they could help sales agents improve their pitches to better reach women. The Lean Data survey asked customers what motivated them to make their purchase and spoke to BioLite’s sales agents to understand how they targeted their customers. We found that BioLite’s core value prop of saving money on fuel resonated for male and female customers, but that men and women were motivated by different secondary factors for purchasing a stove. BioLite’s sales team has been able to pilot different sales methods based on this feedback, and we’re about to conduct a follow-up survey to understand if sales and conversion rates have improved.

The last thing that makes Acumen special goes beyond the dollars. We’re developing leaders in the markets where we work. We have five regional fellowship programs which are like mini-MBAs for early-stage entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and activists to build both hard skills like financial modeling and softer skills like storytelling. It’s a powerful community of social entrepreneurs that pays it forward and that we see as essential for building the social impact ecosystem - Acumen Fellows have even started companies together.  

How does an impact fund differ from your typical institutional venture firm?

Every impact fund is a bit different, and Acumen has a unique position as a non-profit. One big difference obviously is that I fundraise philanthropy, which our investment team then invests in for-profit companies. We aim for a 1x return across our entire portfolio and any return from exit is re-invested in our fund. Because of our structure, we can take risks on new business models or markets that an institutional investor or even another impact fund might not be able to stomach. We see our investments as catalysts for whole sectors, creating investment opportunities for other funds.

One of my favorite examples is  off-grid solar company, d.light. We made a $200,000 investment in 2007, when its prototype was the cheapest available solar lantern in the Indian and E. African markets. We made the bet that it could be transformational for the entire off-grid energy sector. As the company grew, our additional equity and debt investments attracted investment from larger impact and institutional investors. This spring, d.light raised $50M in debt funding and reached their 82 millionth customer.  Over ten years we’ve invested $5M in d.light - if we had donated the equivalent in solar lanterns, we would have reached only 250,000 customers.

How did you find and recruit for this role at Acumen?

I reached out to everyone I knew in the impact space after my teaching job. I created a Google Drive with social impact jobs and relevant funds. At that time, I was also considering joining an early-stage, mission-driven company. A founder at one of the edtech companies I spoke to connected me with a women at Acumen America who is now my colleague (hi Stella!), and we had a great informational conversation about what she was seeing in the workforce development and financial inclusion sectors. But at that time there were no openings at Acumen.

I decided to move to San Francisco last summer without a job, but a role at Acumen actually opened up the day I started driving West. My informational interviews ended up being really helpful - my now-colleague was able to speak to my cultural fit for Acumen, and, in having had conversation after conversation, I had refined my why for impact investing as well as a clear narrative of how my skills were a fit. I was coming from  non-traditional investment background but I had thought carefully about the abilities I’d honed as a journalist and teacher. I was able to draw connections between everything I’d done and how they led me to Acumen.

What are some investments that you’re excited about in this area?

EveryTable, a chain of grab-and-go restaurants that provide healthy meals at affordable prices across L.A. from Beverly Hills to Compton, is actually in our health portfolio but has a really cool workforce development component. The company hires staff from the neighborhoods where it works, in partnership with local nonprofits serving formerly incarcerated individuals, foster kids aging out of the system, single mothers, and more. They pay more than minimum wage, but are exploring a franchising system that goes far beyond that.

In the traditional fast food franchise world, there’s been something like redlining, where a franchise owner in a low-income neighborhood doesn’t have opportunities to open stores in more affluent areas. The vision for Everytable’s franchise system is that it would train employees in entrepreneurship and provide them a path to ownership in any neighborhood that the restaurant serves. If you think about the size of popular franchises like Subway and McDonalds, the opportunity for low-income and minority entrepreneurs with a re-imagined system is huge. It looks like breaking down structural inequities.

You are researching strategic partnerships while managing events and relationships with existing Partners. How do you manage all of these responsibilities?

I am learning something new every day, especially around how to manage my workflow! I’ve just started using a 1-3-5 system to keep track of priorities - one main priority for the day that must get done, three medium-sized tasks to complete, and then 5 little things - say, an email, or registering for an event - that I could even do on my commute. .

Because my role is all about sharing Acumen’s work, I have to be on top of everything that’s happening around our organization. I I try to capture my thoughts on what I’ve read or heard in tweets; knowing that I can succinctly summarize my work is a great way to help the information stick.

I also practice my pitches however I can! The better I know how to tell Acumen’s story, the more successful I can be in meetings with Partners and prospects. I like to do rapid fire pitches with my office colleagues as well as my friends. I’m grateful they let me use them as guinea pigs!

What are some challenges you face as an operator in vc?

That pesky imposter syndrome, which for me stems from my non-traditional background. I know I’m the right person for this role, but I think because we live in a culture of “experts” and I tend towards the generalist, every month or so I question my own authority. I have a few solutions to these brief existential crises. The first is to be up front about the areas where I need to grow - be that in terms of skills or mindset. My manager is all about growth and she pushes me in the right ways. We do coaching sessions, for example, to think through next steps for a strategic project or pitch. The second solution is a little more meta, but it helps me - I think about how my training as a journalist gave me tools to parachute in anywhere and learn quickly. Especially in a rapidly-changing field like impact venture, this skill is as important as expertise on a particular topic.  

Any advice for young women who want to enter venture capital - on the investing, operations, or platform side?

If you’re interested in impact investing or social enterprise, the best thing you can do is - and I’m borrowing this from author and activist Bryan Stevenson - get proximate before you think systemic. If you want to have impact, you have to think about the community you’re impacting - and you have to know it. Listen to the people you’re serving.Find out ways to work within that community. Teaching was an extremely formational journey for me. I wouldn’t be at Acumen if I hadn’t driven past my students’ homes and developed relationships with their families - if I hadn’t seen on a day to day basis what a better loan term or job opportunity could have done for them. When I’m fundraising, I draw on these stories and they remind me why this work is so important.

What Happened Next in San Francisco

1.

These are sentences from my notebook from the last 8 months. I’m putting them in their place, shuffling my cards so I can make a new hand.  Two-thirds of a year. I’m not old enough, yet, to count time too closely. But I moved here on purpose. I shifted my storyline with so much intention. I’m curious to find out what happened next.

2.

When the tide goes out at Ocean Beach, I learned in September, the Bay is emptying like a bathtub. We drank beers in the haze and the boys surfed. Don’t get used to this, everyone said. The city steamed in the day but by evening was like the cool side of the pillow. I loved California already for its peaches and plums, stayed up too late baking pluots into pie.

During the heat wave, I saw homeless San Francisco at the San Francisco Public Library, washing in the public restrooms and napping in the corners. I saw startup San Francisco at Uber, eating beet chips in the cafeteria and holding meetings in backlit spaceship chairs. Hayes Valley felt like a chic French village at night and the Mission felt like McAllen’s tough cousin, muscled with murals and garbage. The city smelled like eucalyptus and pot and urine, a city of dreams and dreams deferred or never even dreamt.

Right after I got hired, I pretended I was comfortable holding an old fashioned at a fancy restaurant under the highway in SoMa, asking the Mayor of Charlottesville for his unvarnished stories while picking at a cheese platter. 24th Street was better. Sage, drums, girls in feathered headdresses riding slowly down the street. Hair salons making an extra buck by painting faces. The small of pan de muerto in fluorescent-lit bakeshops where the grandma only speaks Spanish but the grandson prefers English. You’re welcome.

I came back to SF in January to skies that turned pink before rain. I came back to the sunrise cracking over the Transamerica tower, late to work. I came back to weekends golden and liquid. I bought a wetsuit and surfed, noticing when I breathed into the wall of water and stood up, and when I just said shit. I biked up and down Golden Gate and Folsom and Oak. I spoke in meetings. I walked in and out of bodegas and fish shops and Chinese grocery stores. I owned a view of San Francisco from a second-story window. The whole city spread below like a picnic blanket and the Salesforce Tower was a delicious rainbow fish.

“You can see why people stay out here,” my east coast parents said, after a day of riding bikes through the Presidio. We took a ferry across to Alameda like a late-night vaporetto ride in Venice. We ran through Golden Gate Park like it was our New Jersey loop. But we ate in the Outer Sunset and I told them how this city felt like nowhere else, like something I could only build myself.

Spring: the rain that makes everything green, exhilarated. The rain that highlights the homeless. Everyone with a place to go evaporates, and everyone in tents or bus stations is left on misty streets like a soggy paper bag. Spring evenings still felt soft like in high school. Days felt bright and raw and the surf was choppy and the coast south was jagged, new.

It’s baseball season now and I run after work. I run along the Embarcadero, I run past the stadium, I run into electric scooters on the sidewalks. I found a place by the Bay where the water is still and the path peters out like writing you’ve erased. I keep running. I haven’t been here long enough to own anything. From my house, you have to run up a hill in either direction to get a view. Then the sun drops into the Pacific and mist rolls across the mountains in Marin like you made it happen.

From the Archives, More Than Sky

I had heard the story. A woman bought the unfinished framework of a one-story house in a field and started to build it higher and wider. The wind-bleached wood looked like bones against the blue February sky. As she scrambled between the ribs of the top floor she whistled, the neighbors say—continuous whistles, as if she only ever breathed one breath. When the season spread into spring, and then summer, she became quiet. She ran out of songs, one neighbor said, but I bet she just wanted to listen to the heavy hum of cicadas. She bought a harness and belayed herself up and down each of the six outer walls to shingle them with cedar. By the end of the summer she was brown, and her hair had turned blonde. She painted the cedar shingles white. In the autumn, when the frost stiffened the fields, the neighbors didn’t see her anymore. They could hear hammering from inside, and sometimes a drill.

No one else ever touched the house’s bones, they tell me, though when I climb up the stairs years after they say she began it seems incredible. The rooms are complete and smooth. The second floor is made out of windows. There is no furniture. To the right of the staircase, on the third floor, there’s a small hexagonal room. The woman has a low, square table set on top of a Turkish carpet, and stacks of paper, and a jar of yellow pencils. It’s February, and the water in a clear drinking glass is frozen. I look up and notice there’s no ceiling. The woman looks up from a sheaf of lined paper. Such a pleasure, she says, to wake up to that blue sky.

New places

A nap I don’t want to wake up from.  A quiet I don’t want to break. A hum, testing out the sound of my voice under an archway. Wondering why I set an alarm. Wanting to go back to that quiet but wondering, too, if I need to wake up. Wondering if I am awake already anyway.

I'm learning California by smell. Pot and eucalyptus in the dark on my bike ride home. Pine in the Presidio in the morning, oranges midday, fish in the afternoon where the Bay meets the Embarcadero. By sight sometimes I don't believe it. Twin Peaks hovers over Market, resting quietly under the moon. Streets near the Battery still speculate on gold and Bitcoin. Bolinas shelters a girl with long hair and a giant skateboard moving her hips down the hill like she’s dancing.

The House Last Summer

This summer, the last summer I could spend at the house where my grandmother had lived in Massachusetts, I knew that I was moving soon to San Francisco, where maybe the mist would be similar but the water couldn’t be the same. I tried to remember everything that had been in Beverly because I knew that I was moving to build something all mine. I thought it might be something like a future and that I would want some company from the past.

Time at the house has been part past, part present, part future for some time now, at least since Nonna died. There is history in the house itself, which my grandfather rolled on logs from the woods to its position on a rocky point, and there is history on the bookshelves, in Nonna’s scrapbooks and signed first editions, and there is history in the floorboards, which creak with the weight of people who have visited and stayed but don’t live there anymore. The sea off the point is so changing that it demands your presence just to watch. And after swims in that water, we sit around the pockmarked wooden table where my grandfather wrote his thesis and spin out plans for the future.  

This summer, I paid attention to the living room, which is the heart and lungs of the house. I tried to memorize its lines and its objects and its space. Its two walls are mostly windows, floor to ceiling panes that cross over the blue of the sea right outside. What little there remains of actual walls radiates warm gray, the color of the sea on a cloudy day.

In the evening, after her bath, Nonna would close the heavy canvas drapes across those windows – to keep out the bad guys, she’d say – and in the morning, in her nightgown, she would pad across the worn wooden floor to open them. The sea and sky filled so much of the frame, and the sun’s radiation around 7 am was so golden, that it was easy to believe that each day really was a new day, something moving and open for me to hop into.

The low pegged walnut coffee table in the living room used to be covered with small Venetian glass ashtrays and Japanese lacquer coasters, a purse-sized sterling silver perfume vial, and a few engraved cigarette lighters whose fluid had long ago been lit. It was the neatly arranged detritus of interesting friends and late night conversations. On Sundays, we would cover that table with sections of the newspaper, until Nonna had finished the crossword; on Christmas, we would litter it with wrapping paper, blue and green Venini glasses of eggnog, and platters of cheese and crackers and taramasalata, which Nonna would eat with gusto even if some stayed on her upper lip for a few minutes before anyone told her.

There used to be a small wooden sailor’s trunk in the living room, too, a middle eastern spice chest with sharp corners, covered in sharp brass shapes. Everyone walked into it by accident, and that’s how we learned that the grownups cursed. Ellie and I used to build Lego there, count shells and seaglass there, leave piles of books there after Christmas when we’d read in the sun on the blue and white striped couch. The oriental carpet underneath was worn but its colors matched the blue and red silk pillows on the white canvas sofas.

Behind the fireplace, the walls are pickled wood, their color like a picnic table left out to weather. A sign still hangs above the grate in Nonna’s spidery handwriting, which looks to me like school in Venice, like War and Peace, like carefully balanced checkbooks. FLUE IS CLOSED. Open it before lighting.

Next to the fireplace, one wall behind the bookshelf is painted a red that matches the faded sofa cushions. It holds books that came home from Houghton Mifflin with my great-grandmother, an editor – Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, a Julia Child first edition, a memoir called Mrs. Marco Polo with an enclosed typewritten letter from the author. We rearranged the shelves a bit after Nonna died and we sold some things. A bust of the my great-grandfather, a poet, watches over a clear hexagonal Venetian glass with a red rim, a conch shell that used to be in the kitchen, and the sense that we have tried to reincarnate this house as it used to be for the few more months that we have it.

On my last night in Beverly this summer, my brother and I walk to the beach to light a fire. I pass through the empty living room. So much is gone already, but there had been so much there to begin with that when I pass through the room I feel its warmth – the sun through sailcloth curtains, the evenings by the fireplace, the library full of Europe and art and the sea. I feel the weight of its loss double.

We walk across the cool grass of the lawn, avoiding the edges of the gravel driveway, and I’m not trying to remember more, but all of a sudden everything is there: every time my sister and I went to the rocks in the morning or twirled on the grass with our neighbors at dusk, every newspaper Dad bought and episode of Jeopardy that Nonna watched in the study with a sweating glass of Scotch; every time we arrived at night to the breeze or I Ieft for Gloucester in the morning to stillness; how we all read here, played cards here, swam here, relished in the breeze and rocks and sunsets; how many identical pictures we took of the sunset from the kitchen.

I want to remember everything right there so I won’t lose it when I can’t come back next summer, and so I go to write it down. One memory unlocks another, then, and I realize that the memories are infinite, that I can leave them tonight and find them for sustenance later.

3,480 Miles West

Lines from the car.

Leaving Fort Worth, Texas

I don't think I'll stop saying y'all, and I will always look for the reggaeton radio station, and the trumpet solo in a mariachi solo will always give me chills. 

Davis Mountain State Park, West Texas

If I were an artist, I would paint the Davis Mountains simply, like a Rothko. I'd scrape undulating lines of blue, green, and purple, blurring the boundaries, adding in only curves. I'd show the painting at a gallery where the only light comes from fireflies. 

El Paso, Texas

The mountains stand sentry over a valley that is neither Mexico nor the United States, just a valley, houses on streets and restaurants with neon signs and tire shops and Target. The border is fluid here, where people work in Juarez and live in El Paso, work in El Paso and live in Juarez. Until Donald Trump promised more deportations, the community trusted the police. 

Somewhere past Santa Fe, New Mexico

The road beyond Santa Fe feels like a shuttle to a place that got forgotten on an American trip to "progress." There's a NASA research stations and there are so many trailer homes. 

The road beyond Santa Fe is called the Paso Real, the royal road. Many small roadside crosses mark its edges, crosses festooned with flowers and grains and faded photographs. Monuments to roadside dead, memorials for unsolved murders of native women and Latino men. Along the Paso Real, a freckled guy in a Walmart parking lot scammed me for cig money, and then there were the most magnificent mountains I've ever seen. 

Boulder, Utah

You turn brown in the canyons of Southern Utah, toasted by the sun and reflective of the red and gold and purple rock. You stand on top of a canyon rim and feel like you're seeing the progression of time. You stand at the bottom of a rock wall with a row of petroglyphs and feel very small. 

Sunbathing

I read The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in Cancun, on a beach under a sun that laughs at you for previously thinking you could tan. The book made sense there. Junot Diaz calls the places that speckle the Caribbean sea surreal, for their heat and their water and the true myths of their histories, and Cancun definitely fits the bill. It’s Disney surreal, not the dirt-floors-and-guns absurdity of countries under dictatorships, but still - you question the reality of the whole place. The sun that pulls sweat out of your pores and dulls your brain. The water that’s brighter blue than a blue raspberry Slurpee. The sand and the high-rise hotels that are blinding white; the fact that someone thought to line a thin strip of barrier shore with those high-rises in the first place; the fact that in high season every room in every one of them is occupied by people who are escaping their own reality, wherever in the world that may be. 

Maybe most surreal was the documentation of that escape. Everywhere we looked: phones out to capture arms reaching to the sky, hats at a jaunty angle, abs tightened. Props, I guess, to the numerous women I saw attempting the complicated mermaid-selfie maneuver: lounge in foamy surf in small string bikini, take selfie without drowning phone or self. 

So on this beach, drifting in and out of sleep, I was reading Oscar Wao, a story that’s basically about how real life can feel like a fable and dreams can infiltrate reality. The sentences of sneakily poetic slang, Dominican and American, went down like cool water because that’s how my brain feels, right now, a total mezcla. It’s running back towards sure-footed English but feeling like it’s picked up a few words in Spanish it doesn’t want to let go. 

I fell asleep on a page where Junior, our main guide through all this quilombo, is talking about his drives around Paterson and Camden and Perth Amboy. Place names and their peculiar gravity. These are the cities on the highway signs on my way home from the Newark airport. Like Oscar Wao’s Dominican grandmother La Inca is stringing their names together, incanting me home. 

Somewhere else, Yunior talks about “a particularly Jersey malaise - the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres,” but I woke up sunburnt on a surreal beach to the feeling that this time the longing is for places that are real, that are already there.