Episode 9: Homesick

Alessandra, Ralph, and Barbara's Breakfast Bar

“It takes more than sunshine, soil, and rain to make a flower grow.”

Thus spake Alessandra, in her speech to the mostly-white-haired Board of the Junior Foreign Aide Brigade. (That’s how Alessandra thought of her speech—at sixteen, she was a budding nihilist, misunderstanding Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a call to rather than a warning against a philosophy of nothingness. She was well on her way to driving her parents crazy with her philosophizing, and if they complained, she shot back with “To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task,” and other exasperating Nietzsche-isms.)

Alessandra was a homegrown islander, and so, although love and creature comforts were available to her in moderate supply from the day she first graced this earth, she spent almost the whole of her childhood longing with every fiber of her being to get away. The Junior Foreign Aide Brigade, or JFAB, seemed as good an escape plan as any.

In her speech to the JFAB Board, Alessandra compared herself to a flower, a flower that needed more to thrive than the humble sun and soil and rain of Looser Island. She detailed her plans to shuck off the familiar and mundane, travel someplace wild and remote and untamed, meet eccentric and perhaps even dangerous people, and never return. She wanted, she said, to “shake the dust of this crummy little town,” hoping the reference to the Frank Capra movie was not lost on the Board. Looser Island, she told the Board members, was too tame for her wildflower soul. “Because it takes more than sunshine, soil, and rain to make a flower grow,” she repeated, and then she sat down to anemic applause.

Alessandra was not invited to be a member of the JFAB.

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Reminders

Find the Cast of Characters on this Substack and also on The Dogs of Looser Island website here.

Also, an apology to free subscribers: Ralph the Dachshund (pictured above - thank you Gini Chin for the marvelous photo!) does not show up in this episode until after the paywall. If you’d like to meet him, use your one-time free unlock, or drop me a note here, and I’ll send you the full episode.

And now I return you to your regularly-scheduled program . . .

© Shari Lane 2025
All Rights Reserved

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Alessandra is an Italian version of Alexandra, a name that means Defender of Mankind.

Alessandra’s mother was a first generation immigrant from Italy, estranged from her own father for marrying an American and then moving to America. The grief of that estrangement had never abated, and she’d been glad to call on her heritage in naming her daughter. Of course, she’d imagined a foreshortened version of the name in everyday conversation, something like Allie or Sandy or Lessie; Alessandra is a mouthful.

Alessandra, don’t let the dog eat that dead jellyfish! (But he wants to.)

Alessandra, you may not wear your fairy wings to school, Ella, I mean Ms. Bjorkin, will make you take them off in class. (No she won’t. She likes fairies.)

Alessandra, take this bag of food over to Mrs. Prewitt. The ferry workers are on strike and the Apple Cart’s had no deliveries of food for a week. (In a minute. I’m almost done with A Horse and His Boy.) You’ve read that a hundred times already. (I know.)

Alessandra, were you in the Village earlier? Forming a human chain to block the county workers from cutting down that tree? The one by the picnic tables? (Yes.) But the tree is diseased. They have to cut it down. (Is that what you’ll do to me if I get sick? Chop me down and throw me away?) Oh for the love of . . . . Sigh.

Somehow Alessandra precluded foreshortening in her name or any other aspect of her character, and so Alessandra she remained, four full syllables of passion, enthusiasm, and determination. Practically from the beginning she was, or saw herself as, larger than life. When she learned the meaning of her name she was ridiculously pleased, and assumed saving humankind was her destiny.

A destiny that could only be fulfilled if she could get off the damn island.

Having learned her lesson with the JFAB—don’t tell a bunch of people who love the island you want them to help you escape the damn island—her application for the island college scholarship included an essay that outlined the revolutionary role of the small town (or small island) ethos, which she described as a gentle blend of humility and perseverance.

She had personally never experienced notable humility or perseverance among the islanders, and privately believed if Looser Island exemplified the best hope for the world, humanity was doomed.

Alessandra suspected the people reviewing her application would smile with nostalgia at her words. She was right, though when she won the scholarship she was a little ashamed at the blatant manipulation, and felt she had been scholarshipped on false pretenses.

But she had to get away somehow, didn’t she?

To assuage her guilt at the success of her Machiavellian scheme, she studied hard in college, declaring herself now pre-med, now pre-law, and finally settling on education, thinking vaguely that she might like to work with children. She had always admired her third-grade teacher, Ella Bjorkin, and the two had formed a sort of friendship, a loosely mentor-mentee relationship, as she reached adulthood. Maybe that’s how she’d save the world? By teaching?

Upon graduating, unsure what to do with a degree in elementary education but no real propensity for working in the classroom, she joined a non-profit organization called Change Now!, and was sent to a tiny Central American town to help transmogrify the economy by growing corn for ethanol. (The project seemed in keeping with her destiny, until she discovered that the plan was much like bringing cane toads to Australia to control the pests: out with the old problems, in with the new.)

She’d been at her two year post for a little over a year when she realized Change Now! was a mistake.

Oh she loved the sound of the language. Spanish flowed from her almost without trying, as if the verbs and vowels ran in her blood. (And who knows? Maybe they did. Maybe her Italian genes created a biological link to all Romance languages.)

And she loved the arid cliffs and the brightly painted adobe and the loud, sometimes off-key singing of the people in her pueblo.

But she couldn’t ignore a growing sense of dissatisfaction, a sense that she’d fled south, across the continents, to escape the stifling smallness of home and landed at a Spanish-speaking, desert-cliffed, adobe-dotted version of Looser Island.

The moment of truth (as she later described it to postmistress Jenny) was this:

There was, like, the local patriarch. I guess that should have been my first clue. Fuck the patriarchy, right? I mean, not him personally. He was all right. But he was kind of the village’s, I don’t know, unofficial law enforcement? His name was Arturo. So one day Arturo’s yelling at this kid. I mean, not really a kid but like, a teenager. I think his name was Ramon. The kid’s name. And here’s Arturo shaking his finger in the kid’s face, and looking all disappointed. He’s kind of making that sound with his tongue, you know? That parents always make when you’ve disappointed them? And he goes on and on, and it’s all “What would your madre think, if she were still alive?” You know, rhetorical questions. “This is not how she raised you,” he says. “If you don’t have anything better to do than bother the chickens then I will surely find something for you to do, you won’t like it so much, es verdad.”

And that’s when I just kind of . . . knew. It was time to go.

That night, after the Arturo incident, Alessandra wrote in her journal: Arturo is just another incarnation of Sheriff Tom, paternalistic and ordinary and banal.

As she wrote, memories flooded her brain, an inexorable tide of events small and large with Sheriff Tom at their center.

. . . Scolding a local kid for knocking over mailboxes.

. . . Threatening to issue a citation to Cherry for allowing Pretty Boy to do his business outside the Community Center and failing to dispose of said business afterward. Even though there was a dog poop receptacle right there.

. . . Defending Seth, Jenny’s developmentally-delayed son, after an obnoxious tourist yelled at him.

That last one, the Seth-memory, was the one that clinched it for Alessandra.

Alessandra, a senior in high school at the time, was waiting to walk onto the ferry so she could join a protest on the mainland. The alternative was driving on, which entailed waiting in a long line of cars, which in turn entailed a very real risk of finally reaching the front of the line only to discover the ferry was full and there wouldn’t be another along for several hours. She couldn’t remember now what it was she’d been hoping to protest, or whether she was successful in joining the march, but she did remember looking down from her perch in the waiting area and seeing Seth.

Alessandra and Seth were in school together, and she’d developed a protective affection for the slow and gentle soul. She knew he worked part-time directing traffic onto and off the ferry, and he was on duty that day, visibly proud of his official ferry-worker vest and walkie talkie. When he looked up she waved at him, and he waved back, enthusiastically, apparently forgetting for the moment what he was supposed to be doing, which enraged one of the motorists waiting for his turn to board. Alessandra watched as a large man in an oversized land yacht whose license plate declared him to be from Texas shouted, “Son, I been all over this continent, and I ain’t never seen anyone as slow as you. Would you hurry it the hell up so we can get offa this goddamned island?”

Sheriff Tom often stationed himself at the ferry landing, ready to step in if tempers flared over cancellations, delays, line-cutters, and the other travails of travel to and from the island. He was there that day and, having observed the interchange, hurried over to talk to the tourist. Instead of backing down, the tourist said (still yelling) Sorry but and then continued abusing Seth. More quiet advice from the sheriff, more invective from the tourist. Finally, the sheriff issued a citation. Though there wasn’t an official ordinance against being a boorish ass, there was a law prohibiting harassing ferry workers, and Sheriff Tom brought the full force of the law to bear.

Alessandra saw the tourist take the citation and angrily toss it onto the seat of his massive vehicle. After she’d boarded the ferry, and the driver and his passenger had gone to the upper deck, she clambered gracelessly onto the Winnebago’s running board and peered in the window at the ticket, which was lying face up on the seat. Three hundred and fifty dollars, a significant sum in the history of Looser Island citations.

A few weeks later, while checking out at the Apple Cart, one of the other islanders told Lauren about incident, and Alessandra, standing behind the storyteller, volunteered what she knew about the amount of the citation. Lauren laughed, a cross between a shout and a decidedly unfeminine guffaw. “Bet we’ll never see that money,” she said, brushing her hair out of her eyes with her fingers running straight up her forehead and then bunching her bangs in her fist, before letting them go again, so it looked momentarily like she was tearing her hair out.

Alessandra had seen that gesture a thousand times, a thousand times a thousand, growing up on the island. She wasn’t sure there was any other way to brush one’s hair out of one’s eyes.

Which is why she decided now, suddenly, as if it was an emergency, that she had to leave, move out of the pueblo, quit Change Now!, the whole shebang: who wants to be limited to only one way of moving one’s hair out of one’s eyes? Who wants to spend one’s life surrounded by Sheriff Toms and Arturos and hair-grabbing grocery-store owners?

“I hate the thought that you may see me as a caricature,” she wrote to Ella. “Nothing more than a stereotype. The restless young adult, rebel without a cause, never satisfied no matter how far I roam. But really, I just couldn’t be there any more, and now I find I can’t be here any more. The myopia, the narrow little lives of the people—it’s stifling.”

Ella wrote back with uncharacteristic acerbity. “If you want to avoid being branded a stereotype, you might want to refrain from putting a label on the rest of us. I grew up in Seattle and lived for a while in New York City and San Francisco. I don’t think I’m any more ‘myopic’ than the next woman. Out of all the places I could have lived, I chose Looser Island. My dear, you might consider that.”

Alessandra was embarrassed that she’d insulted her friend, disgusted with Ella’s apology for Looser Island (of course she had to justify her decision), and angry at the insinuation that she, Alessandra, was just too immature to recognize a good thing when she saw it.

Notwithstanding Ella’s parochial wisdom, Alessandra was determined to try something different. She understood her need for change not as she comprehended Nietzsche or calculus, but in that depths-of-your-gut kind of knowing: it was time to leave.

As soon as she’d completed her stint with Change Now! she escaped, leaving behind not only the hideous, oversized spiders and scorpions of all sizes but also Arturo and Ramon and all the others who had welcomed her. She told herself she wouldn’t miss any of it, she was perfectly clear that she was doing what she had to do. She even dredged up another Nietzsche quote: Now I am nimble, now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me. (Though the application of this particular quote to her own situation was somewhat vague.)

And then she moved to Brooklyn.