Onna & Craig

One of the greatest benefits of living a wandering life is all the people you meet and how you can just show up in their cities and demand to sleep on their couches. Seriously, the extended Kilometer Zero family acts like a worldwide shelter system, offering kindness, meals and bed whenever possible. In Boston, I am lucky enough to know two incredible people.



The first is Onna Solomon, who was in Paris during the Paris years and worked with Kilometer Zero to organize the 24 Hour theatre project at the Chateaudun Art Squat. She is now in Boston, taking an MFA at Boston Univeristy and writing really magnificent poetry. Here is one of my favourites.


Things Begin To Change

As workers scour the storefront windows clear,
Their plastic buckets slosh, a squeegee rakes
What’s left of winter down the stairs into
The streets. You don’t know what it means

To be anything but a pale-skinned girl
Men with drenched sleeves turn to watch in the early spring.
The knuckles of their bare hands gleam like pearl
Above the muck of sandy snow along

Your route each morning – so when they’ve gone
You think of how their gazes guided you:
The easy way your eyes met theirs while everything
Was opening – you smiled generously:

You knew that every lustrous day this year
Was still untouched and just ahead of you.


The second is Mr. Craig Walzer. He goes around telling people he is 24 but he is clearly lying. How could a 24 year old have attended Brown and Oxford, travelled the world, and spent two years opening the most joyful bookstore in Greece? (Atlantis Books. www.atlantisbooks.org. Visit sometime. I will be there February to May, 2006.)



Now Craig is taking a four year international law/human rights/hyper genius program at Harvard. He and his classmates had lunch with John Kerry last week. That’s the kind of place it is. (I find it amusing that Craig lives in the zip code 02138 which, according to him, is the zip code which writes the most letters to the editor in America.) This morning, Craig was such a gentleman and kind soul that he invited me along to a class taught by Michael Ignatieff. It was about how religions and human rights clash and it was brilliant for everyone but especially brilliant for me because Michael Ignatieff is Canadian and there are rumours he is going to enter politics. I accosted him after his class and vowed to support him. If he becomes prime minister, he could be Trudeau II.