to boldly go...

We're almost to the ground when I look out and see it go by. SUNY Purchase. For years... four years, I lived down there in that landscape of brown brick and looked up as the planes went overhead. I'd hear them land and take off from Westchester airport. We learned to pause during outdoor speeches and lectures. There was no fighting with it. it was just plane noise. I remember sitting out on the mall and watching the jets descending overhead.

And here I am, 16 years later, looking down on that campus from the window of a landing plane. A long way from home and a long way from that tall child who ran off to art school hoping for someone to validate her talents. The mall of brown bricks was lovely on a sunny day and trecherous in the rain. I arrived there as a born again christian, 25 lbs. over weight and wearing ill fitted, conservative clothes. By the end of my first year I was a hippie. By the end of four years I had travelled all over Europe, come back, and was ready to try speaking with my own voice. Teasing that voice out of the layers of programming, assumption and fear would take... well it's an ongoing process.

I have more in common with that girl on the mall than I used to. I'm much younger than I used to be. I've come back to her hair color. I'm running around in suits now, although it all fits much better. I like my mom again. I paint again. Yet there's things she went through that just aren't a part of my life make up anymore. I don't get into religious conundrums and no longer rail at an indecipherable god. I no longer feel guilty about listening to music with a beat. I don't have friends dying of AIDS anymore. I don't sweat the differences. It's just about being further down the road, I guess.

At dinner I sit next to a woman who is Swiss. She asks after my surname and I explain the original german spelling, before a new country and a couple world wars warranted its editing.

"Oh! you know what that means, right?"

No.

K-u-e-h-n. that means "courage".