Nora Holzinger

  We met way back in middle school. He was an awkward, gay, diplomat’s kid with a name Americans couldn’t pronounce. I was an equally awkward, too-tall misfit with red, flaky skin all over my face.  Only a few months into sixth grade we were so attached at the hip that we were mistaken for siblings - both fair haired, green eyed, pale.  Having a flair for the theatric, he would bring cake and balloons to school for my birthday. On those mornings, when he saw me he’d yell and run up to hug me. He’d tell people that we were twins and we’d act like those two creepy twins in the Shining, holding hands, blank stares, tilted heads. We went to the mall, the movies, all the typical hang outs for kids in the late 2000s. We were such frequent fixtures at each other’s homes that he and my parents used to joke that they loved him more than they loved me.  I had never had a friend that was so ecstatic to be friends with me. Who I was so close to, who I saw so frequently, who my p...

I pat the bed next to me almost frantically. I need my cat, Sammy, to lie next to me for the next 30 minutes and I need him to feel loved doing it. You see, Sam is a sensitive boy, and disruption to his routine, or even a feeling of disconnection from his primary caretaker (me) sends him spiraling.  And by spiraling, I mean he pees on things. And me. Repeatedly.   Sam came into my life as a foster fail. My first cat, Waffles, had died suddenly a little while before and the littermate he left behind, B, was deeply disturbed by Waffles’ absence.  I was too. I had had Waffles since he was a tiny kitten found alongside his littermates in a Baltimore City dumpster. When I came home from the emergency vet with an empty carrier, I laid on my living room floor and sobbed into the night, not at all numbed by the half pint of vodka I had drank to escape what had happened. Waffles’ premature death rocked my world.  A day like any other was shattered by a strange cry from t...

  Everywhere I turn I am confronted by my own rootlessness. I lack a connectedness to any place. There is no place I can say that I am from. No “homeland”, that is important to my antecedents. No single constant through the changing seas of time and generations come and gone.  I currently live in New Mexico - a place that in some senses hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years. Outside the cities, the economy and way of life is still agrarian, with some people working the same piece of land since the 1500s. Folks here identify strongly with the land and don’t typically leave if they can help it.  As an obviously Anglo person, the (correct) assumption is that I’m not from New Mexico. Nuevomexicanos often guess where I am from (always California or Texas) and each time, I have to make a choice about where I want to say I am from, because the answer is really “no where”.  I come from a specific kind of nomadic Americans - the ones that travel city to city, state to sta...

I had read about it in books before I had ever seen the Sangre de Cristo mountains. I had dreams about it before I knew where it was. It captured my imagination in a way I can’t describe. It seemed like a Wild West fairytale.  Nestled between the peaks of the Sangre De Cristo mountains snakes the Santa Cruz river. Along the banks of that river is a small Catholic church, el Santuario de Chimayó, that every year hosts thousands of pilgrims who are seeking the blessed earth, la tierra bendita , that can cure whatever ails them.  I knew I needed to visit it, to touch la tierra bendita . Not because I believe, but because I wanted to believe. There was some small voice in my heart that suggested that la tierra bendita of Chimayó might even cure me.  --- The lands which the Santuario de Chimayó now occupies are central to the creation myth of the Tewa-speaking Pueblo Indians. They called the area Tsimajopokwi . This area, like much of northern New Mexico, has volcanic mineral ...

I won't bury the lede - building community is at odds with modern life. I don’t mean in the sense that many of us are working multiple jobs, with long commutes, for little pay, raising children without much support, without even the prospect of retirement to comfort us - all of that matters too. I mean in the sense that our beliefs about how we and others should be in and move through this world are not conducive to building community.  Community is how humans survived the past 300,000 years and how we have come to inhabit nearly every corner of the earth.  Yet it’s only taken 75 years for Americans to lose it.  Many of us know little about the people who live next door to us. We don’t attend church, belong to civic groups nor social organizations, nor do we volunteer.  As Marc Dunkleman notes in his book “The Vanishing Neighbor”, Americans today mainly keep in touch with their closest friends and family members, and have very little interaction or relationship with ...