“You want to take a picture here …” I smirk at my father. We’re standing in a graveyard in historical downtown Charleston and he is gesturing pleadingly towards my mother and sister who are posed in front of a blooming rhododendron bush. I squat down beside a crumbling headstone and flash a manic smile, “Here, Dad!” He lets out a heavy sigh and resigns the camera to his African-safari-worthy cargo shorts. 

We don’t often have the presence of mind to look carefully at the structures in which we live our lives, the physical materials that tell the stories of our past and scaffold others’ futures. On the streets of Charleston, though, architecture is all I see. Lining the streets are narrow single houses with piazzas built on the eastern side, welcoming in the ocean breeze for ventilation. Further on are towering domes, archways, and the vibrant stained-glass windows of Saint Michaels Church, outside of which women weaved sweet grass baskets by hand.  

They chortle about a secret joke and I remember I’m a tourist, an outsider in relation to this city and, to an extent, my travel party. Our destinations, primarily synagogues and cathedrals, only enhance the alienation; I’m twenty years old and an atheist, a detail at the time unbeknownst to my deeply religious family or my father, a member of the clergy.   

Nevertheless, there is a peace about the Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim Synagogue. My eyes flutter from the Corinthian columns in the front of the sanctuary to the Ionic ones gracing the back, echoing the Greek revival style throughout the city.

“Members have gathered here to worship despite fire, civil war, earthquakes, and Hurricane Hugo,” the volunteer leans one elbow on the pew and continues on to explain how the building we are seated in has been rebuilt after the massive fire of 1838 swept Charleston, and then how an earthquake left only one stable balcony.  

Beep-beep, ch-chee. 

I glance over at my dad, pointing his Kodak EasyShare at a pillar that looks to be growing out of a pew. I hadn’t noticed it when we came in, but it’s been there this whole time and another couple hundred years before that. 

*** 

“I’m sorry about the delay, folks. We’ll be heading out in just a moment.” 

The entire airplane sighs collectively. 

After forty-five minutes on the tarmac, I’ve exhausted the articles about rock ‘n roll in Beijing and tourism in Delhi. I open the pamphlet of passenger flight safety information.  

“Got a pen, dad?”  

I turn to the page with the pristine, winged airplane floating somewhere in the ocean with red arrows indicating emergency exits. My hand hovers over the glossy panel and then in a moment of passive aggressive indulgence, I begin to sketch stick figures bobbing around the aircraft. Some are waving stick-arms in the air; others crying for help as they are pulled under by carnivorous predators. I lean back.  

 Take that United Airlines. 

“That bored, are we?” my dad says, noticing the safety information open on the tray before me.  

“Just brushing up on my Spanish,” I hear myself say. (In my defense, there is some truth to this. After I say this, Ido start to glance over some Spanish phrases. In fact, if you find yourself needing to be informed, in Spanish, that tampering with smoke alarms in aircraft lavatories is prohibited by federal law, I’m your girl). By the time the plane takes off, he’s relaxed, leaning his head back and occasionally laughing softly, a laugh imbued with the warm, reassuring crackle of my parents’ wood stove back in Minnesota. We talk about our reading lists and thoughts about me joining the peace corps. And I come really close to telling him our church tour was the first time I’ve been inside a church all year, but I don’t. 

Instead, I reach in the seat pocket and spread the airplane safety brochure out on his tray. I wait for the shame to register on his face, for him to lower his voice and point out the unlawful and disturbing nature of my behavior. Instead he furtively glances over the headrest at the flight attendant making her way down the aisle with refreshments. Then he reaches in his breast pocket for another pen, clicks its base, and begins to sketch tiny dorsal fins encircling the plane.  

– Kristi LaFollette