Several presidents ago, when a listserve was high-tech, I sent emails back and forth to my hometown friends. One friend in particular we labeled a “Buckshot Sender” because she never sent a single message; she’d send five, each with separate parts calculated to explode your inbox and clog your Outlook files with paperless shrapnel. One of her emails was a questionnaire, common then, asking a random assortment of questions about the minutia and ephemera of your life. Favorite color? Blue. Ever been arrested? A few times. Best feeling? Love, of course. One question sparked a fire: What is the worst emotion? “Injustice!” I wrote – with an exclamation point – and I wrote it standing in the street with my fist in the air, knowing with all certainty you must keep your eyes open. You have to fight.

* * *

People hate lawyers. They’re good for jokes, political indignation, and the wrath of the unduly served. You know what to call a single attorney at the bottom of the ocean. But sometimes you need one and a good one will change your mind. Doug wasn’t a lawyer when I met him. He was another kid smokin’, watching The Price is Right, complaining about Organic Chemistry. We spent our free time at shows, driving through the mountains, talking about music and making outrageous, frivolous plans. Being a lawyer, owning a home (or two), having a few kids and buying an acreage on a street you loved as a kid wasn’t on his agenda. Moving to Amsterdam and opening a coffee shop, maybe. But nailing down the American dream? Not so much.

So one day, a few years after college but before hearing his “calling”, Doug came home from his rotten temp job and declared, “It’s time to get a dog.” This notion was exciting and very grown up. We had a couple cats, but they were cats. When we scraped together the money to travel, we left them with extra food and water and the radio on. Our neighbors across the hall took a spare key and popped in to make sure everything was okay. A dog – that was a full-score investment.

Doug’s grandfather once raised racing greyhounds for the dog track in Pueblo and little Dougie always coveted the inarticulate sweetness of the breed. He was a lonely kid growing up in a giant family and he spent unsolicited hours feeding, grooming, and otherwise caring for his Grandpa Tony’s racers. One of the things he learned about racing dogs, though, was that a dog trained on rabbits could not be trusted near cats. The second part of that understanding was that no one who surrendered ex-racers to any rescue program would ever admit to the practice. So, to spare Francesca Fiore, our cat and the first pet of the house, from potential evisceration, we turned our search to Italian greyhounds, the smallest version of the dog Doug loved. Italian greyhounds, or I.G.s as they’re known in the trade, are basically cats minus the indifference. They’re not ribbon-ready fluffy dogs with panting underbites happily stuffed into plush animal purses. They don’t like to be picked up at all. But they are utterly devoted, needing a physical presence and touch as routinely as food, water, and a spare stretch of carpet to soil.

photo by Abhi Ryan

I.G.s are also good city dogs; which was perfect for us. Their fur is so short that handbooks suggest that rather than regular full body washes, you simply “massage their coats with a warm, damp towel” a few times a month. These dogs looked like porcelain statues most of the time, with perfect round eyes and mouths that often remained dry and closed. I never expected to have a dog, and certainly not one like this (which just didn’t seem like a dog at all). Lux Interior, an imperfect miniature, was the first little fella we met. In seconds, Lux stole Doug’s barely adult heart.

When Luxie was a puppy, he was small enough to hide under a washcloth. Full-grown, he wasn’t much bigger than a briefcase. He cried enough during crate training that the process had to be abandoned, and an ill-trained dog accepted, so that we were not evicted from our apartment for his wailing incarceration cries. He bore the peculiarities of the breed, including the habit of sleeping with us under the bed covers. At night he would whine softly outside the bedroom door until one of us walked him to bed, let him jump up and held the quilt so that he could burrow underneath. Once we put him to bed, we would head to the porch or out to the bars to meet our other barely adult friends for drinks. We didn’t want children then, and expected we never would, and so spent over a decade lavishing our affections on our pets.

Lux came with us from our three-room Capitol Hill apartment to a rented house in another city, where the advent of a real job brought me to an office just a bit too far for bicycle trips home for lunch and quick walks. Doug spent hours at the law library and our boy was left alone more often. We tried to make it up to Lux like guilty parents, taking him to “Dog Days at the Ballpark” and to bigger open space outside of our neighborhood to run loose. Shortly after, when we moved to a suburban house and full-scale careers back in Doug’s home state, Lux developed the nervous habits of the lonely. So we brought in another Italian greyhound, Ivy, to keep him company in the middle of his life. Together they were like meerkats, moving as form and shadow wherever they went. At the front door, they were an unbeatable fan club.

Italian greyhounds typically live 12 to 15 years. Lux was almost 16. The night before Christmas this year, five months after Francesca the cat curled up at the foot of the bedroom closet and turned cold, Lux had a stroke and lost the use of his back legs. By that time, his seizures, common to the breed, had progressed and his eyes were cloudy with cataracts. A benign, fatty tumor welled up under his back leg. He lay on the family room floor, scratch marks from his front claws raking the carpet where he tried to pull himself up. I carried him to the couch and nestled him among pillows and blankets and scratched his neck. I brought him food and water and twice, when he covered his back legs and the towel beneath him, I cleaned him with the baby wipes we normally save for our two-year-old son. As it turns out, the indignities of advancing death are not reserved for people after all.

Thinking back on the questionnaire I filled out in another lifetime, and the question about the worst emotion, I can see every year pass since then and follow the progression here. No puzzle pieces were coerced – no symphonic movement was misplaced. And I feel older. Not because of the years between that impassioned girl and this quieter, heavier woman (though there have been a few), but because I now understand the real answer. The worst emotion, the most devastating feeling, is not injustice. It’s grief; raw, churning, unceasing grief. Grief that grips your shoulders and folds you forward into a clumsy ball. That makes the grown man you married whine the high-pitched sobs of a once-loved dog lonely in a shelter cage. Grief that cleans out your guts and leaves nothing but tender pink string holding everything together. Grief is the injustice, and the love.

The cruelest part of grief is the recipient’s understanding (always too late) that it isn’t limited to deaths of loved ones – the mothers and sons and every other relation – but that its grip extends to abstract concepts, hopes, other lives. Sometimes that grief is paralyzing. Other times it quietly festers like a rotting stomach lining until repeated retching leaves you gasping for air.

On December 27th, the Monday after Christmas, I called the vet at 8:01 and set an appointment to bring in our dog. As we sat in the veterinarian’s office, with Luxie wrapped up in a clean blanket on my husband’s lap, my husband curled over him weeping. He rocked back and forth. After almost twenty years together, we had buried grandparents, aunts and uncles, several friends and even an acquaintance child. We had moved, earned professional degrees, found ourselves in long-term careers. Now we were the adults in charge.

Doug said to me, “Maybe his legs are working again. We should at least try to get him walking before the vet comes back.”

Doug said to Lux, “Come on, boy. Just stand up and we can go home. We’ll go right home!”

Lux lived his whole life following us through our mostly ups and some downs and I felt bad returning the utter constancy of his canine devotion with the common degeneracy of my humanity. I also understood my role to support everyone else; invent a better ending for the kids too young to know death, be the pillar to support a grown man (who, in the window of grief, is little more than a child himself), and handle all arrangements. Being a witness to grief is terrible for the guilty helplessness you embody. You cannot say something wise or important. You make the investment to empathize and leave the parasitic voyeur inside you locked up until it’s safe to come out again.

We waited for the doctor with the needle while I stroked Lux’s fur and listened to my husband cry.

Lux was a different life, a different world. Grown-up things: mortgages, ultrasounds, life insurance, landscaping, quarterly taxes, daycare, partnerships and tenure, did not exist when we brought him home as a puppy; they barely seem real now. What the angry girl with her fist in the air would immediately reject as stale trappings of the bourgeois – maybe even tools of sociopolitical enslavement – I now oversee as largely benign artifacts of family life. It’s an uncomfortable trade, and a trade hardened by the visceral sadness of losing a friend who moved with us as we morphed from nomadic up-from-the-gutter punks to mostly respectable citizens living in a settled home. In my recurring background gypsy dreams, I planned to be on my own bike riding next to the latest Ché Guevara, or being the next Ché, but with my little dog’s ashes in a box on the mantel and a few more decades under my soles, I feel more like I’m stepping up to a different firing line.

::

Johanna is a writer and teacher in Southern Colorado, and has just finished the M.A. English program at Colorado State University. She has written extensively for PULP, the alternative newspaper in Pueblo.  Check it out!

by Michael Schweizer

Rating: 3 out of 5 bullets

The Mosin-Nagant is a 7.62×54 caliber, bolt action Russian military rifle designed for the Red Army in 1891.  The original model was one of Russia’s first internal magazine repeating bolt-action weapons and was in use from 1891 to 1930.  Minor modifications have been made to subsequent models and the most widely available is the 1891/30 which was standard issue for the Soviets from 1930-1945.  The M91/30 weighs in at almost 9 lbs with a 29 inch barrel and a magazine that holds five 7.62×54 rounds.  Due to the massive quantity of M91/30s produced during World War II, over 17 million, Mosins became widely used world-wide when the Russians replaced it with the SKS and later the AK-47s.  In fact Mosins a still being used in old Soviet Bloc as well as Middle Eastern countries and can be found in gun stores all over the US for less than $100.

One of the more historic uses of Mosins was during the WWII Battle of Stalingrad when Russian sniper Vasily Zaytsev killed 225 enemy soldiers from November 10 to December 17, 1942.  “Enemy at the Gates” staring Jude Law and Ed Harris is based on the exploits of Zaytsev during the Battle of  Stalingrad.

Pros:

Less than $100
Accurate
Cool vintage look and feel
If you run out of ammo it makes an excellent club

Cons:

Ammo harder to find
Heavy
Kicks like a mule

Over all if you’re looking for an inexpensive rifle with a cool look and feel the Mosin-Nagant is the way to go. It is quite accurate and if you put a scope on it you could have a decent hunting setup for pretty cheap.  The 7.62×54 ammo is a little harder to find but if you get the Russian surplus ammo its reasonably priced, $7-9 for 20.  If you do get the surplus ammo make sure to clean the gun well, that ammo is very dirty.

His noise is everywhere. This teen, exploding with energy,

pondering his future and unearthing life’s options.

Blasting sunshine and hammering rainstorms precede

the crack of a grand slam ahead on his horizon.

He moves with anticipation and unending optimism

in his seemingly unrestricted chaos of existence.

Day’s rally, colliding with weeks. Years

supersede, one, five, now eighteen?

His images, activities and smiles, captured and cherished

in photographs. Collected to record progress and achievements.

History and connections with family and friends reflected

in tinted windows, equally reminiscent in life’s inept mirror.

Growth creates challenges, tears arrive, dropping by

unannounced at inopportune times, bringing truth of his

inevitable move forward, and our yearning for a reality

that was a universal continuation of tomorrow’s

noise, tomorrow’s everything.

::

Youths Congregate Around the Front Steps of a Home in New Ulm, Minnesota, to Decide What to Do on a Summer Day. Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives

Nestled in the southern folds of this equatorial Eden and shrouded in thick, seeping fog is Saraguro. Despite a sizeable mestizo population, Saraguro is known for its storied indigenous cultural heritage, or patria. Interestingly, Saraguro is the name of not only the pueblo, but also the people and their culture.

Perhaps most often noted for their vestido, or traditional dress, the Saraguro do right by Johnny Cash. Black is the color, which when filtered through the subjective film of taste, renders it either morose and somber or incredibly hip. Women add splashes of color here and there; most notable among these are the vibrantly colored and intricately woven beaded collars known as mullos. In addition to beads, women also wear a tupu. Made from silver, these pieces are highly valued and often passed down from mother to daughter as an heirloom. In terms of aesthetics a tupu speaks for itself, but its function is to pin together the loose ends of a shawl, also black, worn about the shoulders.

According to some, Saraguro means ‘place of corn’. Although this translation is a matter of some dispute among anthropologists, its presence is ubiquitous. Lives are planned around its planting and harvest; calling it a staple is an understatement. People cook with it in any number of ways, and during the Christmas season, the indigenous arrange mounds of it in the shape of an equal armed Andean cross. Over the course of the meal, handfuls are added to soup or eaten with cheese and cuy, a traditional Andean delicacy known in other parts of the world as guinea pig.

Try as they might, Spanish oppressors could not stomp out Pagan beliefs following the conquest, and as a testament to resistance and adaptation, these beliefs took on new life within the constructs of Catholicism. In the case of Saraguro, Christmas and Easter are celebrated with a Pagan twist involving a cast of characters unique to each holiday. Perhaps the most colorful examples of this surreal fusion are the masked Huikis that symbolize chaos and disorder each December. For several weeks prior to Christmas, the Huikis wreak a playful sort of havoc on people and property. They have been known to ‘borrow’ motorcycles from unsuspecting owners, are fond of chasing women and have an insatiable appetite for alcohol; only after the symbolic birth of Christ are                                                                                                            they brought under control.

 Of equal importance in this dynamic religious matrix are the celebrations of the summer and winter solstices, which honor the sun and its indispensable role in the processes of agriculture. Inti Raymi and Pawkar Raymi respectively, these fiestas bring the community together under the banner of the rainbow flag, which represents not a rallying cry for sexual orientation, but Pachakutik, an indigenous political party whose name refers to the dawn of a new era in time.

Ceaselessly churning, the wheels of time spin without repose, yet the Saraguro acknowledgement of a new era transcends the political to encompass the practical. As a people they have one foot firmly rooted in their collective history while the other strides confidently into the future, and while tradition grounds them in a context of shared meaning, it does not blind them to what is useful from the outside. They do not fear, resent or reject technology on the grounds of an idealized golden age gone by but rather welcome the pragmatic application of it, and this fusion is most poetically symbolized in the way they braid their long black hair. All folk, men, women and children, wear an intricate herringbone style braid known as the jimba, which represents the synthesis of their world with
all that is other, making it a paramount feature of Saraguro identity.

As I write this, the sparse melody of an Andean folk song rises from cobble-stoned streets to a second floor balcony where it lilts through open windows, mingles with candlelight and fills the room with the mystic. Lost in this moment, my mind’s eye sees fog covered peaks peppered with cloud forests. It fuels my wanderlust, and opens the door to a larger, altogether intangible dimension of sensory wonder.

Visit www.Saraguro.org for more detailed information about Saraguro. Drawing on forty plus years of experience in Saraguro, anthropologists Jim and Linda Belote created and maintain this excellent site. Among the first Peace Corps Volunteers in Saraguro, the Belotes have spent their careers understanding, explaining and working for the benefit of these people and their land.

Kip Sikora is a photojournalist, multimedia producer and digital artist based in Missoula, MT.  Prior to moving to Montana he was quite sure he had left a large part of his heart in Latin America, but after five years, Big Sky country seems to have made a compelling argument for sinking roots.  Aside from art his interests include dogs and music.  Check out his website, KipSikoraPhotography.com

By Michael Schweizer

Rating: 4 out of 5 bullets

The original Kodak Retinas were all 35mm, rangefinder style, folding cameras built by Nagel Camerawerk in Stuttgart, Germany pre and post WW2.  The Retina II type 014 was made in 1949 through 1950 and is characterized by the film type indicator dial located under the rewind knob.  The lens on the II is a Schneider-Kreuznach Retina-Xenon 50mm/f2 with the shutter built into the lens.  In exellent condition this camera is worth anywhere from $100-150.

Pros:

• Low cost compared to other cameras of that quality and era
• High Quality Schneider Lens
• German quality engineering

Cons:

• Small viewfinder
• No meter

 

The Kodak Retinas are all excellent cameras and are presently some of only Kodak cameras that are still sought after by camera collectors. If you’re looking for a quality rangefinder camera without having to pay the high cost of a Leica, then a Retina is the camera to look for.

Retina double exposure

 
Used and vintage cameras
can be found at:
The Dark Room in Missoula, MT
www.darkroomofmontana.com
and also www.keh.com

Photo courtesy of LiebeDich, Creative Commons

We tie a rope from the house to the barn in autumn. We have to. Winter is coming.

The Black Forest buries our truck. She buries our doors and our house and our neighbor.

Get a rope. Can’t stress it enough. Keep moving. Don’t sit. Never sit in the snow.

She buries mothers in snowdrifts and halts alcoholism and pauses poverty and traps me alive in a tiny, old shack on Holmes Road with three chain smokers and a sister that pinches and hugs me.

Oh, and I may as well forget about Santa coming when the she gets like this. No self-respecting man would ever go near a woman this crazy. I’ll never know if he thinks I’ve been nice or naughty, but I tie a rope to keep moving.

A very naughty bear steps into the nighttime springtime hay pasture, thirty miles south of the Forest, seventeen years later, and I’m two weeks from married. Nature is my father screaming for his rifle.

He’s afraid they’ll run through the fence, crushing chests, stopping hearts. These horses have never seen a bear, but they know this greasy stink means lights out. The smell flares their nostrils. Eyes are wide and wild and alive. I run for his gun, but forget the shells. Bang, bang, bang, we all scream and fire our fingers. Poor thing is afraid of the headlights and the noise and thunders off to the creek. I wish I could thunder off to the creek.

Thunder and hail on the roof of a Chrysler LeBaron five years earlier, parked on a deserted county road and only me inside, a huddled kid, kicking myself for chasing a storm I thought would produce a distant tornado. The tornado is not distant, but instant, and a lone tree the only shelter.

Visions of unwanted death. Unplanned death. A silver car, like an ornament, spinning on a mean, grey counterclockwise Christmas tree.

Mrs. Cizek, these are her parts. Sorry, ma’am. Yes, it was quick. Don’t cry, ma’am. Don’t cry, Traci. No crying in baseball.

No one knows where I am. Patsy Cline calls me Crazy and I make a heartfelt appeal to a God I don’t believe in to keep me safe.

A worm creeps from safety to dance in the hail farther down the road. He’s devoured alive by a nasty black bird when the clouds move along, stretching his pink segments until he pops. The magpie is fat from feasting on fast food fries found in a new parking lot on Ermel’s old hay field.

Weeds ease up from the cracks in the lot, oblivious to time and roads and us. Vines and roots crack and splinter the asphalt. Pavers and sealers come through and bury them alive.

Good-looking relatives of the weeds are coddled in nearby flower planters, where a passerby stubs out her cigarette and coughs cancerously. Ka-ching. Her child plucks a bloom. The plant shifts into overdrive making more blooms.

More distant and desirable relatives of the weeds and planter plants poke their green heads out from my soil and smile at the morning sun, until the hail storm arrives and tramples a few into yesterday. Today’s survivors, though, grow to magnificent sunflower heights on the side of the house where a squirrel mercilessly decapitates them, leaving behind a forest of strange, skinny rods. The rods produce a ton of tiny little alien blooms that produce tiny little alien seeds that scatter in the wind.

The windy child is now a storm of a thirty-something woman who hates the squirrel. I want that bastard dead, and his wife, too, living in my attic, chewing through my electric lines and fornicating and fighting in my insulation. I hate them. Squatters. Bums. A week later I find his old, grey carcass stiff in the grass. I cry a river.

The river I cry floods the creek nearby and rips out the soil and feeds the fish with insect-ual morsels that would rather not be morsels at all. Rushing water brims with oils and toxins and hobo piss from the tent-city ten miles upstream. My children hook a fish and crack the iridescent, polluted head of today’s fresh catch on granite rocks that litter the shore.

Upon returning home, we find Fluffy The Goldfish with turned up toes and we send her away on a loving, tearful flush. We fillet and flour and fry our fish.

After burying the dinner bones in the garden, I stop to gaze at my treasured aspen in the backyard. Then I mow her saplings down. I dump the grass clippings and the dead aspen babies in the garbage and return to the garden where I dote on several tall radishes. They have gone to seed, but I can’t bear to pick them. Can’t kill what I love.

What I love is a middle-aged beagle. Grey hairs infiltrate her muzzle and colonize her eyebrows, and I catch a hint of cataracts as I fawn. Half her life was spent pushing puppies out for greed. Now her privates are on display for everyone to see, never private. The other half she’ll spend eating off of my fork and deflecting marriage proposals, “Bernice, will you marry me?” She doesn’t answer. She plays coy and harvests flies midair, ending them with a snap of her sharp teeth.

Sharp teeth of excavators dig up my beloved old home five miles away. They disturb the worms and the magpies and loosen more oil and toxins and the smell of the bear and the bones of the horses and dogs and the skull of a little bull named Little Bull who broke his neck in a team-roping accident and they butchered him and I wouldn’t touch that meat with a hundred-foot-pole and dead Czech fathers and dead Italian grandmothers and a real dead past where I now know I could have been happy with someone I refused only to run off into the flowing, ebbing creek during the next storm. I could have been happy.

The next storm finds the kids and me cooking burgers in the kitchen—prime angus—a lean cut, brown-eyed, gentle cud-lover whacked like a mouthy mafia goomar. My daughter shrieks and points to the wall and we gingerly scoop an ugly black spider onto an unopened utility bill, past due with red ink, and scoot him out the front door where he does eight-leggy marathon sprints to the squirrel carcass.

We return to eat our burgers and crunch into store-bought lettuce while my best friends, the garden lettuce, enjoy a life of miracle grow and twice daily watering and steady company, and probably a good, long sycophantic laugh with the radishes, and now the beets, also gone to seed.

A seed grows. A river of interest feeds the seed. Longing floods my soul and undercuts my soil and spills toxins. I hook contaminated words from the past and hold them like his hands in my hands. Sun-kissed, wrinkly, lovely, empty words, read and re-read, deleted and recovered, decoding cryptic codes where no codes exist.

I grab the rope stretching from the house to the barn to protect me from the jealous, biting blizzard of words. I hold tight and close my eyes and blind myself to the storm that I would otherwise sit down in, and probably kill myself with the thinking and the contemplating and the overanalyzing and the worst—never truly knowing—where I just know I would finally give up and lay down and go to sleep and never get back up. So tired. A frozen thinker. A real Jack Nicholson number in the fucking paralyzing blizzard.

A blizzard like Apophis ’36. Bigger than two football fields coming for me. My version of nature. A twisted, romantic darling of a lover making no sense, but circling closer and closer and closer, and I can smell him and feel his damage and I am afraid of him—and decide to do no more imagining or pining for love, or for humanity from nature when nature is not human, and humanity is not human, and humans are not humane but never stop promoting humane-ness.

A bad riddle. A conundrum. Naming what is lovely after us. Claiming it. Dibs. The original narcissist. God in our image. Humanity in our image.

And I love you because you are like me.

I’m in love with you because we are the same.

I don’t understand you, yet I see you and I feel you and am afraid of you.

But blizzards, like Apophis, are waiting. Deny it, like the dinosaur, or ignore it while you can, like Bernice and I will, yet it’s coming, but please don’t tell my children.

Flu or famine or a plane in the side of a building where thousands of mothers and fathers and someone’s grown child performs Community Theater with emphasis on theatrics and who gives a shit about community?

A volcanic pyroclast shattering more than a Yosemite ranger’s windshield.

Only 18,000 days left in 50 remaining years if nothing else in the world goes wrong.

Nothing about us remains after that day. Nothing. Nothing to wait for. No more waiting. No more narcissism. Zap. Closing time. Leave or be locked in the waiting room.

I’m done waiting. I can’t waste anymore time waiting for ’36, or a tornado, or a blizzard, or the hail that beats on my roof—pounding, pounding, not stopping and harder—to break my senses, to break my nature.

I cannot sit and wait. I cannot sit and try to understand where I stand. I cannot wait to find out if you are friend or foe, because at any time you are both and the same. I am both and the same. I am weed and asphalt. I am seed and soil. I am worm and bird. I am storm and rope. And I can’t be bothered to care what lie in the days ahead because it doesn’t matter. I must move.

I’m getting up. You can sit here and wait if you want, but I won’t.

I’m moving. It’s time to smell and taste and dance in the rain and hail and fuck the consequences and swim in the euphoric procreative chemical sickness and spin in the dangerous funnel, all the while shouting and screaming and beckoning and heckling that dirty, awful, gorgeous maggot pie to finish me off alive, because I’ll be damned if he eats me dead.

::

Maybe they really do just want to get to the other side.

Rating: 4 out of 5 Bullets

If you’re an outdoorsy person who doesn’t desire manual settings, then this is the camera for you. You can take it fishing, boating, skiing, climbing and whatever else you want to do without having to worry about ruining your camera.  The TG-610 is durable and takes great photos for a camera of its size.  So get a TG-610, catch a big trout, let it go and photograph it as it swims away.

Underwater photo taken by a TG-610

For more information or to purchase an Olympus Tough TG-610, contact The Dark Room or OlympusAmerica.com

View from Blarney Castle, Blarney, Ireland. by Caroline McCarty

Of all the places, I never expected it to happen here. I figured these people in Ireland would understand my red hair, fair skin, and freckles. Being very distant kin, in mileage and lineage, I thought they might see things like me. I was wrong, so very wrong. First, let’s back up to the prime age of eight.

Mama met Dad at work. He was her prince charming and they quickly started a courtship. Eventually Dad proposed, she said yes and a wedding was had. My hair was quite short, barely reaching mid-ear, and was fixed by Aunt Patti. She had great affection for curlers which resulted in a hairdo making me resemble the main girl in “Annie.” I was not pleased since someone found it necessary to point out the overwhelming similarity. This was just the beginning.

Dad, most likely guessed by now, was not my biological father. Otherwise the wedding might have been slightly awkward and long overdue. Anyway, Mama and Dad made the decision of adoption. Dad was perfectly happy to adopt my two brothers and me. It should be noted, my brothers and I have red hair, every single one of us, as does most of my family. We were already genetically setup for getting teased since people are scared of us. Something about the devil and what not.

Dad’s name is David McDonald, spelled just like the fast food restaurant. Thus, we went from Markham to McDonald, red hair and all. It wasn’t so bad at first, until kids found out our last name. Suddenly I was receiving orders for hamburgers, hold the fries. Already used to brats ragging on us, my brothers and I weren’t fazed all too much. We just went along with the jokes, rolling our eyes and laughing it off. After a certain point, the jokes aren’t even heard and so by the age of 21, I rarely noticed a joke about my last name and red hair. It became expected from anyone. Now let’s jump back to Ireland.

In 2010, I went on a group trip to England and Ireland. I was to be the first of my family to go overseas to half of our “homeland.” My family proudly claims the Irish and Scottish roots of the family tree. Great Grandma Alice Buchanan-Holm and Grandpa Kenny Holm, originally McHolm, were both descendants of Irish and Scottish folk respectively. Even if we have red hair, we can out drink you any day and sing while we do it.

England was nice. Full of cheeky Londoners, found in every city or town we went to. York was the best in, my opinion. In a pub called, “A Hole in the Wall,” I met a fellow Alissa. She was extremely excited to have found someone with the same name and thoroughly interrogated me about why it was my name, how I spelled my name, and the exact number of Alyssas I actually knew. Apparently, my name is considered exotic in England, for what reason I do not know. Over a delicious mushroom burger and some tasty chips, the English version, my group and I were uncomfortably serenaded by Miley Cyrus, “Party in the USA.”

York is historically interesting too. The whole city is surrounded by a watchman’s wall. A person can walk around the entire town on this wall and see everything going on. There is also the Shambles, a group of buildings on crooked streets that sag quite a bit. In the rain, they seem quite dreary but have some of the greatest little shops I have ever been in. One shop made little bobbles and souvenirs made entirely out of trash and recyclables. I bought a picture frame made from the circuit board of a computer. I was sad to leave this place because it was the only town in all the places we had gone that not a single person commented on my long, red hair.

After England was Ireland, the most anticipated part of the trip for me. However, in order to get to Ireland we had to cross the Irish Sea. I hate water, a lot. I stood in the waiting area for the ferry, staring down the sea while drugging myself with as much Dramamine as I could find. I get motion sickness from walking; the ferry ride I knew was going to make me cry in discomfort. I was right. As soon as the ferry began to move, my head started spinning and I about threw up. Eventually a friend instructed me to lie down on the ground and breathe through my nose. I crawled under a table, pulled two jackets under there, built a nest and quickly forced myself to sleep.

About two or three hours later we had arrived in Ireland. Before we docked my friend told me to go up on deck and see the sights. Shakily making my way up, I could smell the sea. It isn’t my favorite smell but the blast of cool air as we walked through the door was a welcome reprieve from the muggy air below. Slowly turning, my eyes laid sight on Ireland, glowing in the dusk with a light fog lying over the land. It was beautiful and one of the few things I found picture worthy on the trip. Excitement once again took over me and I was extremely ancy to get off the ferry and onto Ireland. I had specific instructions from a cousin to lie on the ground in any park and chant, “Middle of Ireland, Middle of Ireland,” while pretending to swim on dry land. I was determined to complete the task and eventually did in Parliament Park. I received many odd looks at my outlandish tourist behavior.

As we docked, our guide instructed us to collect the luggage and form a line to go through Customs. I was ready in no time, luggage in hand and passport at the ready. I could not wait to have the stamp of Ireland in my passport book. Slowly but surely people inched through the lines. We were held up slightly when a group of Japanese students tried to go through. Between the Irish accents and the choppy English from the students, misunderstandings were running rampant. Finally, my friend went through her turn, with me right behind her, bouncing with anticipation.

The man called, “Next,” in a bored voice. I stepped up and handed him my passport.

“First time in Ireland?” he asked.

“Yep! I’m really excited,” I told him, as I watched elatedly for him to stamp the passport. He was taking his sweet time flipping through the pages.

“McDonald huh? That isn’t Irish,” he said.

“Nope, but we did have family from Ireland a long time ago.”

“McDonald is Scottish.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, getting ever more impatient.

“You wouldn’t happen to have an Uncle Ronnie would you?”

I was utterly confused by this question. There was no way he could know some relative of my father’s side of the family. What were the chances? I thought I was going to have some great story and awesome news for my dad, and then the guy ruined it for me.

“He has some really tasty cheeseburgers and I love the fries he makes. You look like him, ya know. With your red hair and freckles,” he said, while guffawing at his own humor. He stamped the passport and looked up at me. I glared back, stuck my hand out for the passport and mustered up some pride.

“Wow, good one! I haven’t heard that one before,” I said while walking away, albeit with flaming cheeks and a hurt ego.

Alyssa McDonald is a student in Colorado. She enjoys making people smile by cracking jokes.

Rating:  1 out of 5 Bullets

The Sony Mavica MVC-FD7 was one of the first digital cameras that recorded the images onto a removable disc. Sadly that disc was a 3.5″ 1.44mb floppy disc. The MVC-FD7 was precided by the MVC-FD5 the only difference being that the FD7 has a 10x zoom. Both cameras boast an astounding 0.3 megapixels, so you might be able to print photos up to 4×6 if you’re lucky. The MVC-FD7 came out in late 1997 and was a hit in the American market selling at prices around $900.

Pros:

• 10x optical zoom
• Big screen for the era (2″ across)
• Looks like it came from the 90′s

Cons:

• 0.3 megapixels
• Boxy
• Slow
• Takes a 3.5″ floppy disc
• Menu hard to navigate

All in all this camera was probably pretty cool when it came out, but 15 years later who even has a computer that takes a 3.5″ floppy? Not to mention 0.3 megapixels, thats worse than cell phones made 7 years ago. The only reason to look for this camera would be to add to your silly hipster outfit.

Available at The Dark Room (www.darkroomofmontana.com), or by mugging that kid at the art show.