LIFE

I could have traveled all over, I could have read every book and heard every song, I could have made it my object of study, and none of it would have helped me love the America I wanted to love as much as one good American friend. I already wanted to know what everything was, so just to hear Jack say that he was hungry, I would think, 'There it is - America, contained in one American man's hunger.'

All of a sudden, the America that was somebody's home came through to me through him. There was a love that an outsider had for America and there was a love that an insider had for it. I knew the first one through and through, because of watching and listening, and making the America that I wanted to love on my own. But I wanted the inside too, so I paid attention to a man who was American but was more than that too. We both felt ourselves inside and outside the world, so I knew he was a good person to pay attention to.

The first thing we agreed on was that the beauty of the world was ours. That was all I had been asking of Americans. I was going to find it in their country either way. I was going to find it in them. They could join me in that effort or not. I never thought about the lack of an American friend who sang of America until I made one. I had just figured that anybody who wanted to get inside the world was always going to feel themselves outside it, because it was moving so fast that trying to slow it down meant moving off to the side a little bit, whoever and wherever they were.

So I didn't think my outside-ness was a lack of hope in America until I met an American who sang of his American childhood and of whatever America was before him, and then I wondered why it had taken so long when there were Americans all around me and I was so ready to listen.

I was ready for its streets, its houses, its people, and everything running through them, and I had been ready from the time I'd arrived too, at age six. And I had the words for it, in wishes and dreams and memories. But what Jack had were stories. He had all of that plus action. What it meant was that a man did not have to be off to the side to love America. He could be the action. He could be the heart of the action. We would talk about how the real off-to-the-side was off to the side of life, and even if we were the only ones on the side of life, that was still the prevailing opinion. We would be sitting in a university library, with books to study, and we would be thinking of everywhere we were along with a university library: Seattle, Washington; America; the world. We couldn't go all over the world just then but we could write things that went all over the world, and we would, and we would exchange them and see that we were saying the same thing - that we were at a university but our hearts were everywhere - and we would quietly laugh and people would look up from their books at us like what were we doing here if we were just going to laugh.

There was an America that you had when you admitted that your heart was a roaming heart in America, and we had it in the first spring of our friendship as we rode on a Greyhound bus from Seattle to Madison, Wisconsin. But we didn't want to have that America as newcomers to it because our hearts had already been roaming for a long time before we set out. We wanted to have it like something old and remembered, and that was why his stories and his expression as he told them were so important to me. I could do it without them, and I did do it without them on the way back, as he stayed behind in Madison that spring. You didn't need American parents or American grandparents or homecoming dates with girls-next-door or any of that stuff in order to look out the window of a Greyhound bus and feel America mingling with your heart. But it was nice to have it come so easily as through an American who was trying to discover what he remembered himself. He wasn't telling his stories to teach, but to wonder, and I was proud that he would look at me at the end of a story like what I might have to say about life in America was as significant as what anybody else might.

The America that I saw through Jack's eyes was an America I loved because he was always growing and changing in it, and that seemed like the best way for an American to be. He was both lost and found in America, and I liked anybody who was both lost and found in the world, and knew that they were. Those seemed like the best things to be going back and forth between. If we were going to be doing that wherever we were, then the question was one of how did we make America our place to do it. What we discovered on the bus was that two people made an America when they opened up like a flower to everything there was between Seattle and Madison, Wisconsin. What we discovered later was that two people made an America while in Europe when they walked through a little town in Slovakia called Poprad and they sang Happy Birthday to a Slovakian woman celebrating her birthday in a restaurant. Imagine what we could do in our own country, I thought, if we could do that in a place where we didn't even know the language.

I'd be going back to an America where I couldn't travel with Jack to all the little towns, but I could tell him about the traveling I did do, from morning till night, in the new city of San Francisco. I could write letters from an American city that were trying to understand what a lost and found place it was, and how one place could have so much of both. I'd put down his new address in Boulder, Colorado and walk out to Market Street to put it in the mailbox and, knowing that it was going somewhere where someone would understand it, I would feel as American as anybody.

We didn't have to be walking down the exact same path, because we believed in the same kind of walking, which was, attentively, with an attentiveness that could only come out to the world if it made America the focus of its attention. That meant San Francisco and Boulder, Colorado, and everywhere in between. All it took was one other place on the map where I knew that someone was waking up with the same wonder about America, and then everywhere in between wasn't a geographic in-between. New York was between us on the map, and Chicago, and Atlanta, Georgia. Places we'd been to together and places we'd been to separately, and places neither of us had been to at all. All those places flew back and forth between San Francisco and Boulder, wondering if any of them could ever be what we thought a place could be, if any of them could ever be as beautiful as they looked when they were a dot on the map.

But most of all we wondered about our own places, which were places we had sought, me seeking American city streets and him seeking American open spaces. We were seeking the same thing though. We had both felt wonderful moments of America, and we wanted to see if those moments had been true. Or if they had just been wonderful moments of youth. Whatever beauty we had seen in America had its value in being an entryway, to something more stable than moments. There was no certain pathway of becoming an American writer or loving an American woman, and in that way we were both outsiders. We both felt like we were alive before anything else, and if that meant starting from zero at the moment of beginning an American undertaking, that was all right. There was an America inside us and an America outside us. There was the one we had and the one we aspired to, but the one we aspired to was completely different from anything that had come before because it had us in it. We were seeking to prove that any time back in youth when our hearts had been mingling with America, they had been mingling as equals.

I wasn't asking for anything more than a fifty-fifty relationship with America, and I saw that that was asking for the world. As the hole from which I was asking it got smaller and smaller, I thought about Jack and the way he was asking America to live up to the beauty of its open spaces. Our asking was America, I decided finally, as much as anybody's not asking was. And then it didn't feel like I was in a hole any more, or if I was, it was just the one I was in with everybody, and there was still a clear view of the sky from there.

There was no love for America without a struggle with it. I didn't know till I looked back on it how much our laughter and joking had been struggling. It was an awfully better way of struggling than a lot of other ways, but it was also why we had to go about it separately, each of us saying, okay America, I don't know what it is to love you, but I know that a man has to love the setting of his story, whether that is a little room in San Francisco or a shared bed in Boulder, Colorado, either way there is no way to do the thing he is trying to do without a love for the place he is trying to do it. And then we saw that we had been doing that all along, only we had needed each other to do it. We had needed each other not only to be the story, but to tell it, and to listen. And he had had more to tell, but there was one story that I told him that stayed with me because I had never thought that I could tell it to anybody.

I was in high school and we were coming back from a school trip to Sequim, Washington, on the northern coast of the Olympic Peninsula. All it was was that we drove through a little town that had an American-sounding name that had 'port' or 'landing' in it. But as we did, I saw the town through time. I saw its seasons and the changes they brought in the lives of its people. I saw its children growing older. There was nobody out but I saw the town the way that someone who was born there might see it looking back with their fullest heart. I didn't have any towns like that in actuality, but I had that one in my imagination, and that was plenty, and without any words I started crying in the backseat of the car where I sat with two classmates up front until we left the town and the conversation turned to something we could joke about.

I told Jack about it and I knew it was different from most of his stories because nobody got drunk or did anything crazy or got chased by the police. I knew it was more of a case of inside action than the outside kind, but I already knew by then that he cared about both, and he knew that the outside kind was often just a way to get to the inside.

And then one day we were in our dormitory cafeteria and we were talking to a girl who was from that town, or from close to it, or from Sequim. Jack turned to me and said, "You should tell her about the time you had your vision." He said it very matter-of-factly, like visions were part of everybody's everyday language.

That sealed it. I had an America that was as big as anybody's in its inside action, and that was the only direction in which the action was infinite, was inside. There could have been an American skyscraper in the middle of that town and it wouldn't have gone as far as my heart could go.

I tried to tell her, and it came out awkwardly, but it was only because I was distracted by a new story, of an American friendship, cemented in its cities and towns, and in trying to find something among them that went back to before there were any cities and towns as well.