You Can't Get There From Here

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As I stood in the checkout line at Walmart, in Garner, North Carolina I felt like a very small universe imploding upon itself. The fact that I was even standing in a Walmart in the first place is evidence enough to finally prove the controversial Big Crunch theory.

I’ve been working on a dynamic mathematical equation to prove my point.  It looks a little something like this:

If a =You messed up
And b=You are screwed
And c= Now you’re stuck and moving backwards in time and next year instead of living in your parent’s home you will be living as a single undifferentiated cell in your mother’s left ovary.

Then…a+c=b.   It works even if you square it, which works out nicely for everyone.

Lest someone bring up the point that I sound like a thankless child who does not appreciate a good thing when she has it, I would like to go on the record by saying yes I do.  I appreciate every single thing my wonderful parents, sisters and friends have done in their valiant attempts to pull me out of the quagmire I’ve somehow fallen into by choosing to leave a truly great job in Los Angeles in order to pursue creative and idealistic endeavors.

The dream of becoming a published writer and photographer with a fabulously small but somehow ultimately efficient and spectacular apartment in New York City somehow morphed into the reality of me walking dogs through urine-stained snowdrifts in New Jersey, in leaky Target rain-boots and working at a yoga studio, struggling to make ends meet and pay rent on my tiny and remarkably draft-ridden basement apartment in Jersey City crippled with heating bills that rivaled the national debt. That somehow morphed into me moving in with my friend Sarah, her boyfriend and her beautiful daughter in Sarah’s lovely and, thanks to me, then-cramped and one-bathroomed home in Hoboken.  Which then spontaneously combusted into me leaving the Northeast altogether and moving to North Carolina to live in my parent’s extra bedroom while attempting to get into nursing school along with the other 600-thousand other applicants somehow trying to do the same thing in this country---all while secretly wondering if I really even want to be a nurse in the first place or if I’m just petrified that I am going to end up living beneath a crack-soaked  freeway overpass …eating someone’s leftover Carl’s Jr. ,  all because I watched too many medical shows like ER when I was younger and somehow never completely grasped that being a nurse doesn’t magically come with its own riveting and catchy theme song and sexy doctors like George Clooney.

All within a 17-month period.

But I digress.

During all of this running around and in the midst of all of this confusion, and self-ploding, I realize I have actually done some things.

 I’ve met a special medical instructor who survived breast cancer by fearlessly opting to take on some of the most terrifying anti-cancer drugs imaginable. That teacher now makes me laugh and challenges my ability to think on my feet on a weekly basis.  I’ve met individuals who came to the US knowing less English than I knew at age 2, who are now competing against me for spots in Bachelor’s of Science nursing programs.  I’ve come into contact with pet owners who would throw themselves in front of 12 lanes of 18-wheelers in order to save their dogs from harm. I have dressed those same dogs up for Halloween parades in costumes far more extravagant than anything my own mother ever concocted for me in my youth.

And I have thumbs.

I’ve sprawled on my side on a mat, in the middle of rooms-full of prenatal mothers and silently shared poignant yoga experiences with them, as an un-mother interloper.

I’ve helped strangers eat when they could not feed themselves and helped them unwind themselves from IV tubing and critical and annoying THIS IS HERE TO SAVE YOU wiring that neither of us truly understands. I’ve walked around after more than nine 15-week old puppies and scraped their watery bowel movements from the pavement…and hugged and praised them for going outside.

(I hugged and praised them even when they didn’t.)

I was bitten by a dog when I did not have health insurance that covered the cost of a rabies vaccine.

Twice.

This week I donned a medical suit made  of lead and peered over the shoulder of a surgeon in an operating room as he performed a heart- catheterization on a man, wondering if the lead would ultimately protect my as-of- yet, unneeded ovaries,  and if the catheterization would save this one man’s very much needed, life.

I watched as someone had a pacemaker installed.

I took my own mom’s blood -pressure while practicing vital signs for a class and realized it was potentially high enough to cause a stroke.

My mom has since visited her doctor who put her on new medication.

 She hasn’t had a stroke.

I watched my little sister learn how to play the guitar and learned that she has a beautiful voice to go with her beautiful soul.

I cart-wheeled on a North Carolina beach with my niece and was there the week she discovered books. Real books. And how much fun they are to read. Out loud. With inflection.

I have waited tables. Stood on tables. Picked up shit. Wanted to throw shit. Hosted restaurants. Walked dogs. Dated dogs. Taken names.  Taken temps. Taken photos. Held hands. Taken notes. Taken a few deep and cleansing breaths. Shaken paws. Written it down. Sucked it up. Documented the record. Covered my ass. Cried my eyes out. Laughed myself silly. Wondered what happened.  And more than once, I’ve been mad enough to spit nails.

But when I think about how I can’t wait to get back to Los Angeles, which I will, soon---I do not regret what I have done, where I have gone, or the direction I went.

Really, there was only the one direction to march towards.

The one I chose.

-Tara Callahan

The Open Road



The petulant visitor worried the deadbolts on the front door as she sat in the close and airless room---a tinny Glenn Miller track trilling.

"Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me.
Anyone else but me.

With anyone else but me..."





She stood up and checked the locks. Then she checked them again. And one more time. Just to be sure.

He was sneaky, this snake-oil-slinging swashbuckler poised outside her door. He was also unexpectedly patient. More patient than she could ever hope to be.

The trembling tip of her cigarette leapt to life with each reckless inhalation as she contemplated his infuriating endurance.


Hiding inside the inky darkness she remembered the time he knocked on her window in Denver, and how, by the light of a waning moon, he somehow convinced her to move to Los Angeles, California where she didn't have a job. Or friends. Any home. Or a plan.

It would not be the first time she'd crumbled.

"Just pack your stuff. Just go!" he'd harangued her as the moonbeams puddled at her bare and frigid feet that stood in an apartment she could no longer afford, when he convinced her to move from New Jersey to North Carolina.

"Just one thought, can change your life."

And so, she left. She always left eventually. Even after "sitting on her hands" like her friend Debbie Devito had taught her to do whenever she contemplated saying or doing anything incredibly stupid or juvenile.

She sat on her hands a lot.

She also did a lot of leaving, because her gentleman caller was charming and alive and he smelled like the beaches in San Felipe and the hotel rooms in Europe, and cross-country Greyhounds, and vast open spaces and how you'd think think freedom would smell, if it had a scent.

The grandfather clock ticked off the fading moments of indecision as she wondered if she had finally outgrown him. If the fanfare and the new had somehow lost its lustre, or allure.


"Be fair to me and I'll guarantee...
I won't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but you, till you come marching home."

She placed one hand, upon the door.


-Tara Callahan

Skin Deep Beauty


As I stood at a gas station eking out its squalid existence on a stark stretch of road just south of nowhere, I glanced up to see a billboard sign emblazoned with a six-foot-tall elk head. Under the unfortunate head the sign read:

Taxidermy--1/2 Mile.



The ancient gas-pump coughed and whirred, its dingy mechanical digits heaving skyward as I propped myself on the hood of the car to ponder this macabre omen.

It was all very The Hills Have Eyes meets Night of the Living Dead and as I watched a discarded Diet Coke can rattle across the parking lot, I was fully prepared for a team of lurching zombies to burst out of the men's bathroom armed with a rapidly mutating virus and gargantuan elk heads.

I'm always fully prepared for something plausible to happen.

As the hairs leapt to attention at the base of my skull and the goosebumps on my arms sprang to life, I got to thinking that right about now would be as good a time as any, to own a gun.

Thankfully the gas tank filled and I hopped into my ride and sped away before I was forced to fend off any infected undead or homicidal maniacs. But my manic brain couldn't leave the taxidermy sign alone and while fishing around on the internet a few hours ago, I stumbled upon a website that was in some ways, creepier than the shiftless little zombie-infested service station.

"Learning Taxidermy the Fun and Easy Way---on DVD! 40% off the perfect beginner course!! Four-DVDs including Deer, Fish, Duck and Squirrel!"

Grotesquely intrigued, I clicked onto the informational link where an audio clip of a waxen and lifeless looking gentleman (pictured here)
informed me that whether I was simply looking to save hundreds by doing my own taxidermy---or looking to make thousands of dollars by starting my own taxidermy business, this was the course for me.

That audio must have been recorded right before his business partner turned him into a bipedal mount.

Now, far be it for me to find fault with someone else's hobbies. I mean, I have some whoppers of my own so I try not to be too judgemental. Or mental.

But taxidermy? I don't know. I think that might be a deal-breaker. Like, say I was asked on a date by a super good-looking guy who shared many of my dreams and aspirations, who didn't have any ridiculous emotional baggage and happened to be the head surgeon at Duke with a summer house in Vermont that he flew his biplane to every other weekend.

Say that same guy asked me out on a date and we got along like peas and carrots and laughed until our sides ached.

If that same guy brought me to his home and shared this little hobby with me?

I'd shut it down. Post haste.

It just seems that the next logical step after skinning an animal and stretching its chemically- treated flesh over a stuffed semblance of that same animal---- is skinning a date, and stretching her chemically treated flesh into some sort of suit jacket.

Call me crazy.

-Tara Callahan

Inside Out

"Well honey, the yard certainly needs weeding," my mother informed me over breakfast on the back porch just yesterday morning.

"Look at them. They're taking over the yard. The situation is out of control."

I glanced up from our daily Garner, North Carolina newspaper, otherwise known as "The Baptist Manifesto," and stared into the legion of trees flanking the lawn.

"You know what? I don't see any weeds Mom."

This wasn't the rhapsodic response she'd hoped to illicit. I could tell. So she tried again...

"Oh don't be silly honey, they're right there. How can you possibly miss them?"

We've been having the 'weed conversation' for approximately 3 months now, and seem to possess entirely different views on what constitues the nature of a weed. Where she sees a weed, I see an innocent sapling trying to sprout out of a maliciously shorn trunk. Where I see an innocent tree, she sees an invasive interloper hell-bent on making a mockery of her prudent pièce de résistance---aka, The Yard.

What I did not know until I moved into my parent's home a few months ago, is that my mom's diabolical definition of a weed is anything she didn't actually plant in the yard herself--- be it a rogue wildflower, a tangle of tulips, or an entire cluster of crape myrtle trees.

Against my better judgement and because this is not my house and I therefore do what I am told without asking questions--- today I donned a pair of raggedy gardener's mitts, grabbed a rusty hedge trimmer, and set out to singlehandedly rid the yard of unwelcome vegetation.

My Dad threw out a bit of local wisdom, just before jumping into the car and driving away--

"Remember, if it has three leaves, leave."

That bit of color commentary was supposed to prevent me from getting into a tussle with one of more than a thousand poison ivy patches dotting the perimeter.

It was at about this point that I started thinking about my former life as an adult, in Los Angeles, California. And my gardener who would show up every Wednesday evening to blow leaves from my stoop, pull actual weeds from my shrubbery and water the dusty pavement.

Now, somehow, I am the gardener.

I'm not a tree hugger by nature, simply because I don't have what it takes to actually put myself behind any sort of cause for more than three seconds before feeling that the cause is asking too much of me.

But today, I felt for the trees. And the flowers. And well...the weeds. Because they were simply trying to do their thing.

Manicured lawns and razor-edged driveways and woodchip-lined walkways never really made any sense to me. It's like systematically trying to make the outside of the house, be the inside of the house.

"Here is the carpet. We call it the lawn, but it's really the green carpet. We like the lawn to be approximately as long as the carpet fibers in the livingroom. Can you do that? And trim up those edges. We need a straight lines."

The guy next door mows his lawn so precisely that I'm convinced he's devised an exit strategy to prevent footprints.

But again, this is not my home. And when my services are needed, I must comply. So I trimmed. And I tore. And I traumatized not a few young tree-lings.

The morning sort of went as such:

"I'm sorry..." snip.

"I know, I should seriously consider growing a backbone..." clip.

"Why did I ever decide to go back to school? I hate school..." rip.

"Please don't hold this against me. Look, I'll save you. Let's just cover you in a bit of mulch. You can still breathe right? Just don't move ok? You can still photosynthesize through that one free leaf, right? Don't try to SPROUT for christsakes. Stay put. For the love of God, she's watching."

Euclid would be proud. We are now far more geometrically consistent than we were at 9am this morning.

I however, am not proud. But I can't deal with another fall now anyway.

--Tara Callahan

The Long Wait

So I'm back in school again. For the first time in 16 years. I'm trying to become a nurse.

Because no one else is doing that right now.

Below is what happens when I sit in a boring psych class and start thinking about the empty houses dotting the street where I now live--- (wait for it...)---with my parents. I didn't take any notes on that blowhard Freud. But I did write this blog about a spider I spotted while wandering through one of five empty homes in this cul-de-sac, which I just found out means 'blind alley'.

Go figure.

The writing is rusty and aimless. But then, so am I.

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I’ve been hanging around in this corner for some time now. Not sure how long really, as the people haven’t shown up with their couches, their cutlery or their calendars. It may have been a week. Could have been a month. Your guess is as good as mine.

The last person to grace these now dusty halls left a trail of muddy boot-prints from foyer to fridge. The big man with the starched white shirt and worn blue jeans sat on the bottom step of that staircase, just over there, his jaw hung on his thumbs, battered index fingers cupping his nose in a little steeple.

This is the church. These are the people. Open it up, and here’s all the people.

He never really said it out loud, but I know he was wishing for the people. Or one person… to buy this house. He has other houses on this street. They haven’t sold yet either. I know because he used to come here with his outdated adding machine and clackety-clack-clack-clack his way into the souless corners of night…crunching numbers and muttering at his blueprints and bank statements until the automatic sprinklers sprung to life in the early dawn.

He doesn’t do that anymore.

And so I sit on these silk strands. And I wait. And stare at the footprints as they flirt and fade with dancing dust motes.

This house waits too. It doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. The refrigerator enthusiastically hums and the air-conditioning faithfully churns and the electricity relentlessly electrifies. But no one is around to be wowed by it or care. Or admire the new Berber carpet on the stairs which I never really liked anyway but nobody asked my opinion.

I’m a rather silent and uninspiring audience. The house has made it quite clear that it is most certainly not here for me. And still.

On Monday it rained, and the bay window facing the front lawn buckled under the pressure and started to leak. As it wept, I traversed the mind-numbingly boring expanse of eggshell paint to sip and “survey the area,” as the big man would have said.

It doesn’t look good. Not good at all. The people, or the one person, who will come to see this house will not be pleased when he steps through that front door and sees this mess. I drank as much as I could, but I’m not that large. I barely made a dent in that vast pool.

Perhaps it will evaporate before the people come. Maybe the floor will dry and the ring on the wood will fade and it will be just as pretty as it was when the boiterous team of sun-scorched men nailed it down a year, (or was it only two months?) ago.

I guess I’ll just sit here.

And wait.

-Tara Callahan

I'd Rather Not

SATURDAY, MAY 2, 2009

I'd Rather Not

I keep seeing ads on television for The Nation of Why Not. From the sounds of it, NOWN's plutocracy truly wants me to become a citizen of its buoyant little nation. They've been taunting me for weeks with their seafaring rhetoric.

"Do you have what it takes to be a citizen of our nation? And will you solemnly swear to start every day by asking: "Why not?"

Declare your independence.

Royal Caribbean. The Nation of Why Not?"

I mean, I have to hand it to them. The ads make it look sort of fun in a Lord of the Flies meets Senor Frogs kind of way. And who doesn't consider himself a bit of a would-be maverick--thumbing a sun-burnt nose at boring traditions and roads most traveled?

After a few of the ads I was genuinely inspired to ask myself, "Seriously...Why not?"

Now that I'm looking at the NOWN's official website and not being bamboozled by some glossy, over-produced television spot featuring unbelievably beautiful people doing unbelievably terrific things, I'm pretty sure I have a handle on why not.

Take for instance, this little scene I'd like to refer to as, the 9th Circle of Hell:

What exactly is going on here? Are those blow-up icebergs drifting in front of the boat? Is that really an image you want to conjure up? And as much as I'd love to attend First Mate McGinty's "We don't have enough of these to go around, so what I suggest is that you hide these under your beds" lifejacket demonstration, I think I'll pass.

You really can't blame that dude in the distance for trying to make a break for it.

Especially after enduring this kaleidoscopic tragedy:

Now let me just go on the record as saying that I too have been known to make impulsive and oftentimes injurious apparel choices. And I understand that the NOWN's handbook encourages freedom of expression. And I know that as soon as people hear the words Cruise Ship they're compelled to purchase Hawaiian prints and visors.

But I think Marv and Donna may have taken the "We will cast off the conventions of life on land," tenet a bit too far.

The more I scrolled through the site, and the deeper I dove into the Nation of Why Not, the more I realized that I would rather have someone ram hot pokers underneath my fingernails while simultaneously lighting my hair on fire than climb aboard any sort of cruise ship. Especially one from this particular fleet.

And from the sour looks on these two NOWN Citizen's faces, I'm not alone.

-Tara Callahan