Shadow Memory
When my grandmother died a few years ago, I was given her formal china, her silverware, a fur-lined lap robe, and her Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition—an old brick of a book, leather-bound, with skin-thin pages and black half-moon thumb tabs. I was more taken with the china and the silverware than the Webster’s; after all, I had much newer dictionaries, as well as a computer that could spell and find synonyms on its own. One afternoon, in the throes of spring cleaning, I decided to get rid of it. Before pitching it into my rummage box, I riffled idly through its pages. I flipped past the color plates showing house flags of steamship lines, and the multicolumned Table of Oils and Fats, and the pen-and-ink drawings of diploids and seed weevils, and page after page of ant-size type defining “gressorial” and “sacrarium” and “tingle,” until I came upon a page—“Luna Cornea” through “lustless”—that was stuck lightly to the next. I peeled the pages apart. Between them was a small four-leaf clover, all of its leaves facing upward, its long stem curving into a lazy “j.” The clover was still green, or at least greenish, and the leaves were dry and perfectly flat but hardy and well attached to the stem. A little stain of clover juice was printed onto the pages it had been pressed between.
It was startling to come across these two lives, pressed between pages: my grandmother’s and this weed, which she must have found—when? When she was out for a walk? At a picnic? Had my grandfather found the clover and saved it for her? Or had some other suitor offered it to her, hoping for his own luck? Had my grandmother tucked it into her dictionary and then forgotten it? Did she pick this page for a purpose? Or did she just place it somewhere in the middle of the book and fail to note the page, so that when she went back for it weeks or years later, she couldn’t find it and never saw it again? Not since my grandmother died had I had such a distinct sense of her—a sense of her as I’d never actually known her, as a young woman with the time and patience to sort through blades of grass, looking for four leaves on a clover, believing in the luck one might bring her. And I believed I was lucky, too, having been so close to losing it, to discarding it, to never knowing what I had in my hands.
So this is what’s left behind, these things that end up as our real inheritance—the flotsam and jetsam of life, the stuff that drifts into our hands and into history, the chance impression, the little shadow each of us casts, the fragile thing someone carefully catalogs and cares for and then forgets or maybe doesn’t, the image of an image that conjures a memory that is either real or imagined—these are here, plucked and pressed between the pages, so they will stay fresh forever, or forever slip away.
Afterword
It’s always a pleasure to revisit a place or, in this case, a story about a place, and it is always fascinating to see what time has done to it. I often keep track of the places and situations I’ve written about—they stay wired into my consciousness well after I’ve unpacked my suitcase, filed the travel vouchers, finished the piece. Nothing ever stays the same, of course. The story feels eternal, fixed, and complete, but it is really only a shard of a moment, and, in no time at all, the place will have transformed, the story evolved, the characters changed.
Sometimes the proof of this evolution is inescapable, such as the sad bulletin about Keiko’s sudden death in Norway just a few months after I’d seen him there lolling in his fjord, when I was following up on the story “Where’s Willy?” Keiko was not old for a wild whale, but very old for a captive one. Since one of the great puzzles of his existence was figuring out whether he was essentially a wild whale or a captive whale, it was hard to determine whether he should be considered not old or very old. Turns out he was very old—or at least old enough to get a bad case of pneumonia, and to suffer it secretly until it was too late to help him. So his saga ended in the fjord he’d found on his own, during that one summer when for a while it looked like Willy would finally go free.
I followed the continuing saga of Joan Byron-Marasek for months after I’d finished writing about her. After dozens of hearings and dozens of lawyers and dozens of schemes to delay the inevitable, she lost her final round of appeals, and the State of New Jersey came and took her tigers away. They are now living in a wild animal sanctuary near Houston, Texas. Animal hoarders have a staggering rate of recidivism—that is, most of them begin collecting again shortly after their animals are removed—so I won’t be surprised at all if one of these days we see another story about Byron-Marasek, announcing that she has assembled another menagerie.
What else has happened since I completed these journeys? Well, Centro Vasco, the Cuban restaurant in Miami that I profiled in “The Homesick Restaurant,” closed just a few months after my story was published. According to Jauretsi Saizarbatoria, whose family owned the restaurant, Centro Vasco was firebombed after a performance there by a Cuban singer who was on good terms with the Castro regime. The Saizarbatorias suspected that right-wing anti-Castro activists were involved, and they were so disheartened that they decided they had had enough of the atmosphere in Little Havana. Midland, Texas—which was the hometown of a mere candidate for president at the time of my story—is now, of course, the hometown of the president. Herb Spitzer, owner of the Sunshine Market (from “All Mixed Up”) did follow through on his plans to retire a few months after I finished my reporting; in fact, I ran into him in Florida a few years later, and it appeared that golf and real sunshine suited him even better than groceries and the Sunshine Market had. I’ve driven by the market a few times since the story was published, and it looks good, but much more corporate now—much less the one-man show, the neighborhood place, that it had been when Spitzer was still there.
Craig Fleming, the CEO of Thomas Kinkade’s company Media Arts, was forced out just a few weeks after I interviewed him; so was the next CEO, and the next one—a sign, most likely, of some softness in the Kinkade market, which had also prompted a group of Kinkade gallery owners to sue the company for misrepresenting the value of their product. The Kingdom of Bhutan, which had been television-free at the time of my visit, has since given in to the march of modernism and decided to legalize the idiot box—and even instituted a national network, which I’m told broadcasts the Bhutanese equivalent of school-board meetings. Of the women who went on the Bhutanese fertility trip I wrote about in “Fertile Ground,” one has adopted a child and another has had a baby since coming back from the Himalayas, and perhaps more are still on the way. The JonBenet Ramsey murder case, which is the story that propelled me to write about children’s beauty pageants (“Beautiful Girls”), is still unsolved, although at least once a month, some wild-eyed tabloid like the Weekly World News claims to have exposed JonBenet’s true killer. As far as I know, though, the gloom that her death spread on the pageant world has lifted and the pageants are back in full swing: babies in spangles and toddlers in ball gowns competing to be the prettiest girl in the world.
On the other hand, some things I’ve written about haven’t changed at all. Hervé Halfon, the owner of Afric’ Music, is still threatening to leave Paris, but hasn’t yet made a move; Gray’s Papaya still has good deals on hot dogs and papaya juice and still has mustard that gets stuck in the spout; kids in Cuba still live to play baseball; Mount Fuji is and ever will be the pure image of everything Japanese. Pat and Jim Bannick still proudly hang on to their party line, and unless the phone company pries it out of their hands, they plan to hang on to it indefinitely. Tina Turner has still not visited my apartment. Travel around the world is hardly as carefree now as it was when I wrote about Thailand in “The Place to Disappear,” but I’m sure that another generation of kids has found its way onto Khao San Road and is merrily drinking beer and watching free movies at the Khao San cafés.
What has truly not changed, and I hope never will, is my feeling that the world is an endlessly surprising and amazing place—that each time I overload my suitcase and head out the door, each time I think of something or someone I want to learn more about,
each time I pull out my pen and start scribbling notes, a new adventure is beginning, I’m lucky to be on it, and wherever I am is exactly the right place.
Author’s Note
Except for minor corrections, the stories in this collection are printed as they originally appeared in the following magazines:
PART ONE: HERE
Lifelike The New Yorker, June 9, 2003
A Place Called Midland The New Yorker, October 16 and 23, 2000
Beautiful Girls The New Yorker, August 2, 1997
Party Line The New Yorker, December 16, 2002
Madame President The New Yorker, February 21 and 28, 2000
All Mixed Up The New Yorker, June 22, 1992
The Lady and the Tigers The New Yorker, February 18 and 25, 2002
Super-Duper The New Yorker, February 13, 1995
PART TWO: THERE
The Homesick Restaurant The New Yorker, January 15, 1996
Rough Diamonds The New Yorker, August 5, 2002
The Congo Sound The New Yorker, October 14 and 21, 2002
Like Waters and
Chocolate Pancakes Condé Nast Traveler, November 1994
Shooting Party The New Yorker, August 21 and 28, 2000
Fertile Ground The New Yorker, June 7, 1999
Do We Transcend Before
or After We Purchase the
Commemorative Eel Cakes? Outside, October 1997
Game Plan The New Yorker, September 18, 2000
The Place to Disappear The New Yorker, January 17, 2000
PART THREE: EVERYWHERE
Homewrecker The New Yorker, August 22 and 30, 1993
The World The New Yorker, June 22, 1987
We Just Up and Left The New Yorker, June 12, 1995
Art for Everybody The New Yorker, October 15, 2001
Intensive Care The New Yorker, June 28, 1993
Royalty The New Yorker, September 10, 1990
Uplifting The New Yorker, September 22, 1993
My Life: A Series of
Performance Art Pieces The New Yorker, December 31, 1990
Shiftless Little Loafers The New Yorker, July 22, 1996
Where’s Willy? The New Yorker, September 23, 2002
Shadow Memory Flowers in Shadow: A Photographer
Discovers a Victorian Botanical Journal
(New York: Rizzoli, 2002)
Acknowledgments
Many, many people have made it possible for me to have this wonderful life—to wander the world, publish my dispatches, and, finally, gather those stories into a book. My wholehearted thanks go to my
editors at The New Yorker—Alice Truax, Virginia Cannon, Lee Aitken, and the incomparable David Remnick—who have encouraged me, supported me, and guided these efforts all along. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to have the magazine behind me all these years, and to have such exceptional editors to learn from and work with. Thanks also to my editors at Outside—Mark Bryant and Susan Casey—who did the same, with gusto and great warmth. My team at Random House is just . . . the best. There couldn’t be an editor more enthusiastic, wise, and inspiring than Jon Karp; he has piloted me through multiple books and each experience has been a delight. Thank you, Robbin Schiff, for making the book beautiful, and Dennis Ambrose for making it read properly, and to Gina Centrello, for putting it out in the world. Many, many thanks to Richard Pine, my longtime agent, friend, and adviser, whose brainstorm led to the book.
Most of all, thanks to my very dear friends (I’m happy to say there are too many to list here) and family (my parents, Arthur and Edith, and my siblings and sibs-in-law, David and Steffie and Debra and Dave), and especially my husband, John, and stepson, Jay, who are there when I leave for my travels and there when I return, and who always make me glad when I’ve come back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SUSAN ORLEAN is the New York Times bestselling author of The Orchid Thief, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, and Saturday Night. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. Her articles have also appeared in Outside, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire. She lives in New York City with her husband, John Gillespie.
For more information on the author, visit www.susanorlean.com.
ALSO BY SUSAN ORLEAN
The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup
The Orchid Thief
Saturday Night
PRAISE FOR
My Kind of Place
“Grounded in Orlean’s relentless curiosity, her slightly skewed take on human nature and her magnetic writing style, many of the stories are minor masterpieces.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“Pitch-perfect … Be prepared for a fun and funny ride to places you didn’t expect. There’s no questioning [Orlean’s] enthusiasm for what she does.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Compelling … New Yorker magazine writer Susan Orlean has developed a stellar reputation for her journalism. Her work involves hanging out with her subjects, allowing the personalities to develop themselves, then subtly folding in social and historical context.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“One of [Orlean’s] gifts is to find something serious or admirable embedded in what we might ordinarily laugh at or deride.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“[Orlean] has a remarkable openness to her subjects, resulting in articles full of dead-on details, odd facts and solid history.”
—The Kansas City Star
“What is it that accounts for Susan Orlean’s special gift as an observer? Her most obvious talent is a remarkably sharp eye for detail, but it’s inarguable that it’s her choice of subjects that is the sine qua non of her success. … [Her] portraits of places and people remain impressively detached but their lively subjects, and the wealth of tiny detail lavished on them, make them glow with vitality.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Orlean is still … one of our best essayists, and her ability to evoke a place or person in a sort of literary shorthand is as solid as it ever was. … My Kind of Place is sure to appeal to Orlean fans, as well as those of us just along for the ride.”
—The Sunday Oregonian
“Susan Orlean delivers a travel book that’s not really about travel—but who cares? The woman can write, period.”
—Tacoma News Tribune
“An insightful collection by an exceptional essayist.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A great read.”
—Library Journal
2005 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2004, 2005 by Susan Orlean
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2004.
Portions of this work were originally published in Condé Nast Traveler, The New Yorker, and Outside. In addition, a portion originally appeared in Flowers in Shadow (New York: Rizzoli, 2002).
“My Kind of Place” originally appeared in the anthology Cuba on the Verge: An Island in Transition, edited by Terry McCoy (Bulfinch Press, 2003).
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Orlean, Susan.
My kind of place: travel stories from a woman who’s been everywhere / Susan Orlean.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-432-6
1. Orlean, Susan—Travel. 2. Voyages and travels. I. Title.
G465.O75 2004 910.4—dc22 2004047192
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My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere Page 31
