City Wendy

Alphabet: A History (V)

Alphabet: A History (V) Valentine's Day

It's Valentine's Day, 2004, and for some extra money, I'm pitching in at the flower shop where I worked full-time until a few months ago. It's only early afternoon and I've already made 60 arrangements of long-stem red roses. I line up the vases ten deep on the counter and then fill them, one-by-one, with greenery — Myrtle, Eucalyptus, Bells of Ireland, Snake Grass, and Lemon Leaf — before dropping the roses in their place. We use Black Magic Roses, the most expensive, and in my opinion, most beautiful variety of roses.

"It's like a red velvet room," I sigh, opening the cooler two years earlier on my first Valentine's Day at the shop. An army of Black Magic Roses stands at attention, waiting stoically for its orders.

These days I'm less impressed. Roses are pretty, but they're the last thing I'd want to receive on a day like this, my fingers rubbed raw and red by their thorns. I prefer the flexibility of tulips instead, the way they bow in submission, almost humbly in their vases, against the aggressive presence of heartier flowers.

But it's not really roses or tulips on my mind today. My boyfriend moved out exactly four weeks ago — my ex-boyfriend, I mean — and I'm single for the first time in four years. Three years earlier, we'd moved together from Missouri to Chicago when I was 24 — and the apartment we shared, the place where I'm still living while I look for something smaller, something cheaper, feels enormous in its emptiness, feels empty against the aggressive presence of mass marketed love. I don't really want to go home today.

But I do. After 10 hours at the flower shop, I send my last arrangements out with the delivery driver and go home alone. I order Chinese food and listen to Nina Simone. I wait for the phone to ring. I wonder if anyone is thinking of me. I wonder if my ex-boyfriend is thinking of me. I wonder how long it will be before I find someone else, if I'll still be alone next year and the year after and the year after that. I wonder, suddenly, if it's possible I might always be alone, if maybe there really isn't someone out there for me, and if maybe I should have just stayed in my relationship after all. Maybe being with someone — anyone — seems better than this right now: an empty apartment and a half-eaten carton of Chicken Lo Mein.

The next morning I wake up and go to school. I go to school and come home and go to school and come home and I do this again and again and again. Some evenings are punctuated with dinner or drinks out with friends. Some days I stay in and study. On weekends, I worry about my solitude. I find a new apartment and move; I decide I don't like my living situation and move again. I date a little, have another failed relationship, watch a couple more Valentine's Days come and go.

And then it happens: I do find someone. And it's good. And it lasts. And those lonely years were not in vain. And I want to go back in time, back to 2004 and say: yes. Yes! It will be better.

But I'm still sitting in the dark, listening to Nina Simone and waiting for the phone to ring. I'm not ready for yeses yet.

Alphabet: A History (U)

Alphabet: A History (U) The Usual

It's October 1989 and I'm 13 years old. I've lived my whole life in Asia and now we've left Seoul and are moving to Bremerhaven, Germany. I've had anxiety about this for weeks — ever since my parents broke the news. School had already started and I liked my classes and I liked my friends and there was even a boy I liked. He liked me, too, but it doesn't matter. Because we're moving. Again. And like usual, I don't have any say in the matter. And this time, we're moving all the way to the other side of the world.

We've already left Seoul, but before we head to Germany, we're spending a few weeks with my grandparents in St. Louis. I've never been here when it's not summer. Well, when I was three months old, my parents brought me to St. Louis from Okinawa so everyone could see me, but that doesn't really count since I was so little. It was my first trip on a plane and my mom says I was so tiny and so quiet the flight attendants thought I was a doll at first.

Anyway, that was a long time ago and I've been on a plane lots of times since then, but I've never been in the states when it wasn't summertime, and it's weird to see autumn leaves on my grandparents lawn and carved pumpkins on their neighbor's porches and halloween decorations in stores and in people's yards. I've been coming here my whole life but I never really thought about how it exists when I'm not here. And now that I'm seeing it, I feel a little betrayed, like I've just found out my best friend has a secret group of people she hangs out with when I'm not around. I know that seems silly, but it's just how I feel. Like all this living has been going on and I've been missing it.

We're here for three weeks, which is less than half the time we're usually here in the summer, and I know this is a bonus trip and that I should feel lucky to be here at all — and I do — but I wish we could stay forever. I just want to stay here and go for drives in the country and eat pumpkin butter from the farmers stand and watch American cable and shop at the mall. And when spring comes, I want to be here for that. I want to quit missing things all the time.

But I don't have to leave yet and for three weeks I revel in the novelty of fall in the States. My grandmother makes all my favorite comfort food — chicken and rice, dumplings, mashed potatoes. On Saturdays, my grandfather goes out and gets donuts for all of us, just like he does during the summer, but somehow they taste even better now. In the afternoons, I put on my stonewashed jean jacket and help my him rake leaves. And at night, I stay up super late at watch "Love Connection" and then read until two or three in the morning. It's bliss.

At the airport I cry harder than I ever have saying good-bye to my grandparents. I don't even know yet that we won't be coming back for almost two years. I don't know that we won't find a house for nine months and I'm going to have to live with my family in a hotel room that entire time. I don't know that I'll only make one friend my first year in Germany and she'll move next summer and I'll have to start over from scratch. There's a lot I don't know, but like usual, it's probably for the best.

When we arrive in Germany and step outside the airport, I notice that the license plates are long and skinny and I wonder what other weird things I'm in store for. I take a deep breath and brace myself.

UPDATE

My sister was "kind" enough to dig through her photo files and find this gem from our fall trip to Missouri in 1989. Yep, that's what I looked like when I was 13. By then, I'd been wearing contacts for over three years, so I'm not sure why I'm sporting glasses in this picture. Probably because they were just too sexy to take off. I love everything that's going on in this photo: the glasses, side ponytail, braces, insanely chapped lips, and the oversized stonewashed jean jacket (with the yellow happy face pin!). I'd just had gum surgery a couple months earlier because I had severe periodontal disease and my gums, like, blew up in my mouth. So, I'm feeling pretty good about myself here now that everything's back to normal and I'm lookin' hot again.

Alphabet: A History (T)

Alphabet: A History (T) Truth or Dare

It's the last week of August — the last week of summer before school starts again. I'll be in ninth grade this year and I'll have my first boyfriend and we'll make out after school in front of the buses and the assistant principal will time us so he can tell my mother, who teaches at the school, how long we stood there kissing in public. It's the last week before school starts and I'm taking a trip with a church youth group to Garmisch for the weekend. I don't like church at all and in a couple years I'll stop going altogether, but I like this youth group because a lot of my friends are in it and we don't talk about the bible too much and sometimes we get to do cool stuff, like go to Garmisch for three days without our parents. 

We leave super early in the morning and some of us have spent the night at the church so our parents don't have to wake up at the crack of dawn to drop us off at the bus. Late at night we play Truth or Dare, and some of us stand at the pulpit and pretend we're giving a sermon. I want to kiss someone at the altar just because it seems so sacrilegious, but there isn't anyone in the group I feel like kissing, and besides, wouldn't it be weird to have your first real kiss in a church?

In Garmisch, we stay in dorms, and we wake up early in the morning to have prayer circles. This is my least favorite part of the trip, not because I don't believe in prayer, but because I think praying in groups or just bowing your head while someone else says words that aren't necessarily what you'd say to God is disingenuous. I like to pray when I'm in the bathtub or when I'm lying in bed trying to fall asleep or when I'm in my room and I can hear my parents fighting. I don't like praying in groups, so instead of praying, I count. I squeeze my eyes shut, bow my head and count to 100 slowly. Years later, I'll realize I count whenever I'm bored or nervous. I'll count in job interviews and in meetings and when I'm sitting in a bathroom stall waiting for the other people to leave so I can do my business in private.

After the prayer circle, we sing, which I actually enjoy because we don't sing church songs like I did in vacation bible school as a kid; we sing normal songs like "Leaving on a Jet Plane," and "Ob-La-Di, Ob, La, Da." These songs stay in our heads all day long, and later, when we're on the lake in our paddle boats or sitting at the dinner table about to eat some schnitzel, a bunch of us will spontaneously break into song and it will feel like the most normal, natural thing in the world, and I'll wish everything could always feel so easy.

We're all a little closer on the bus ride home than we were on the way out. We have inside jokes now that we repeat over and over and over so we don't forget — so we don't forget in that space between this moment and next week or next month or next year when we're all just faces in the hallway. And we sing our songs and we play Truth or Dare and we all say who we'd marry if we had to marry someone in the group.

A few months later the war in Iraq starts and our youth group leaders all get deployed. New leaders take their place, but it isn't the same. Besides, youth group is starting to feel a little young for me and we haven't done anything cool in a really long time and I've got a boyfriend now and that takes up a lot of my time. In a couple of months he'll break up with me and it will be a bit of a shock. He'll tell me he's bored and I'll spend weeks trying to figure out if he meant that I'm boring or if we were just boring together. I decide maybe I'm boring and I vow to be more exciting in the future.

The next year we move again and I don't have the energy to make new friends. They're all going to move anyway, or I'll move, and graduation is only two years away and I'll just wait til college to make new friends. In English, we have to keep a journal and I write in mine how much I hate school and how I think everything is so stupid and my teacher asks to speak to me after class. She talks to me and I can tell she cares — or wants to seem like she cares — but I can't hear anything she's saying. I see her lips moving, but I'm just counting until she's done. One-two-three-four...

I spend the next two years counting. Graduation can't come soon enough.

Alphabet: A History (O)

Alphabet: A History (O)

Oh, Oh Child

It's spring 1997 and I've just discovered Nina Simone. I'm in a play with an all-girl cast one of the other girls, Amy, is a big Nina Simone fan. She talks about her the way she talks about her sex life: with equal parts reverence and total fascination.

"I like to wear silk vintage nightgowns, turn on a little Nina Simone and screw my boyfriend's brains out!" she proudly professes during rehearsal one evening. "We made a pact to do it every single day this year, and so far we're right on track."

I drive to Barnes and Noble that weekend and buy my first Nina album: Nina Sings the Blues. It has a a green and red floral design on the cover with a black and white photo of a young Nina Simone staring into the camera almost vacantly. The picture stands in stark contrast to the music inside: the anger, the passion, the humor, the confidence.

I turn my roommate on to Nina Simone and we have livingroom dance parties at our place. Our favorite song to dance to is "Buck." 

Buck, you're a whole lot a man. Just take a look at your great big hands. You know you could crush poor me in two. But gentle, oh so gentle are the things you do.

Sometimes our friend Leslie comes over and the three of us dance around and belt that song out. Sometimes it feels like if we can sing loud enough and dance hard enough, we might able to freeze time.

In the summer, I get a car and I immediately make cassette tape copies of my Nina albums (I have two now) so I can listen to them while I drive. I like the way "Sugar in my Bowl" sounds when I'm driving slow on a hot day with my windows down. I want to live in a house with a porch where I can sit on a swing all afternoon fanning myself and drinking cool lemonade and listening to "Sugar in the Bowl" over and over.

The next summer I have a boyfriend. I introduce him to Nina Simone and he's an instant fan. He buys all her albums — he buys me ones I don't own yet. One morning, following a fight we had the night before, I find a new Nina album on my doorstep. It's got the song "Ooh Child," on it, which is one of my favorites of hers. "Things are gonna get easier" the note attached reads.

One day, a few weeks later, my boyfriend says if we ever break up, he'll never be able to listen to Nina Simone without thinking of me.

"Are you saying we're gonna break up?" I ask. He shrugs his shoulders.

In Chicago a few years later I finally get to see Nina in concert. Leslie lives in Chicago now, too, and she comes with me. I have a new boyfriend, but he doesn't like Nina, so Leslie comes to the concert instead. Our seats are in the back of the Chicago Theater — they were the only ones we could afford — but I don't care. I can still make out Nina's blue dress and the way she's wearing her hair.

Between songs, she has two young gorgeous men in tuxedos — one black man, one white man — escort her back and forth across the stage so she can wave this thing she keeps calling a "real horse tail." For all I know, she's telling the truth. She waves it up and down and in big, wide circles. She insists we stand up and applaud her and she swings that horse tail around and around, gesturing for us to "get up! get up! Stand up on your feet and clap!"

I think of that day when she dies two years later. I wish I could have made time freeze.

Alphabet: A History (S)

S: Simone*

I'm 22 when Simone comes into my life. She — I don't know she's a she right away — shows up at my doorstep several days in a row, and on the third day I pick her up and take her to the neighbors' place. The two girls live in the apartment behind mine and have said they'll take her in.

After five days, they bring her back, thrust her in my arms and say. "Here, we can't take care of her anymore."

"Well, what does she eat?" I call after them as they walk away. I've never had a cat before, let alone a 10-day-old kitten.

"We feed her hot dogs," one the girls replies.

The vet tells me she has fleas, ringworm, and ear mites. He also says she's got a temper, but with the right person she'll make a very good pet. I name her Simone.

My ex-boyfriend lives right across the street from me and this time of year he hangs out in the front yard with his shirt off playing hackey-sack with his friends. Sometimes I see him watering his garden and sometimes he just sits on his porch, smoking a pipe, staring off into the distance, thinking about God knows what. We broke up seven months ago and when I pass his apartment I still slow down and dare him to look at me. If he does, he sure makes sure I don't notice.

I get a leash for Simone and start taking her out for "walks." Mostly I just carry her in my arms and coo at her like she's a baby. I walk past my ex-boyfriend's place and stop right in front of his porch. I know he sees me. I know he sees my cat. "I am so over you!" I mentally scream at him. "I have a cat and I am so over you!"

In the fall I start dating someone else. We get serious. I stop taking Simone on walks. Now I take her to my new boyfriend's place. I take her over so we can all be together — my new boyfriend, me, his two cats, my cat. I want to show him we can be a family.

I want to get away from Springfield. I want to get away from my ex-boyfriend and everything here and go to Chicago and start over, but I don't want to go alone.

"You can come with me!" I say to my new boyfriend. "We can all go together — you and me and the cats and we'll be a family."

So we find an apartment and quit our jobs and load up a moving truck and drive to Chicago. I ride in front of him in my car with Simone and when Springfield is a dot in my rearview mirror, I tell her: "We're starting over, Simone!"

In Chicago Simone gets an infection on her tail and the vet thinks it's cancer and cuts the tip. It gets gangreen and won't heal. I take her to a new vet and he cuts a little more. The gangreen spreads and soon the whole tail has to be amputated. That summer, Simone lives with a plastic funnel around her neck and takes kitty vicodon at every meal, and I slowly realize Chicago hasn't solved all my problems like I thought it would. 

The year I turn 27 Simone and I are on our own again, just the two of us in an apartment I paint a rainbow of colors. For two years, before Miles and before Drew, it's just us. It's just me and this cat and these walls and my friends and I learn to stop pantamiming. I get a bike.

I get a bike and I ride all over the city and sometimes I think about old boyfriends and what could have been and what I'm glad is not. I ride for miles and miles and look out over the lake and think about how it's almost like an ocean and the horizon's so far away and it's fun to imagine another continent on the other side even though I know it's just Michigan.

When Simone is eight and I'm 31, and it's no longer just the two of us anymore, we pack up and move to New York City. I carry her in a bag under my seat on the plane and when we get to the apartment in Manhattan, I open it up and say: "Welcome to our new home!" I don't know if I believe it yet, but time will tell and I'm willing to give it a chance and see.

A few months after we move in, Drew asks if I think she likes it here.

"I do," I say, a few seconds later. "I think she's finally glad to be settled."        

                         **************************************************

* Simone posed very nicely for a whole little photo shoot we did the other night. Her photos were all very pretty, but then she yawned and I got this shot, which, for anyone who knows me in real life and has met Simone, will attest kind of captures her perfectly. It's also the face she makes when she hits the high notes in "I Will Always Love You."

Alphabet: A History (N)

N: A New Leaf

It's September 2001, and I've just turned 25. On the morning of the 11th, I watch from my computer at work as the twin towers collapse into a pile of dust and debris in downtown New York. During lunch, I stand on the street outside my office with my co-workers listening to the church bells ringing down the block against a city in shock, wondering how things will change now.

In November I quit my job and take a fulltime position at a flower shop downtown called A New Leaf. This is my third job in less than two years and the first one I've ever had that I genuinely enjoy. I like working with my hands, I like the people, I like the smells and colors of the flowers, and much to my surprise, I even like dealing with the public most of the time. The shop is in the middle of Michigan Avenue and between the filfthy rich housewives and plucky tourists, our customers are real characters. They never cease to amuse me with the ridiculous things they say. I start writing down all their crazy quotes on a long sheet of brown paper we use to wrap bunches of flowers in, and I keep it tacked on a wall behind the counter. It helps pass the time.

At work, I learn how to water plants the right way and how to strip roses and pull pollen and make the perfect $75 arrangement for a brand new baby boy and his family. I learn the names of flowers: Delphinium, Cockscomb, Protea, Lisianthus, Sweat Pea, Amarylis. I repeat them to myself for memorization.

One afternoon as we're prepping a new delivery of flowers, I tell my co-worker, Laura, that I might like to be a writer one day. Her brother's a writer and he has a short story published in the latest edition of Glimmer Train, so she brings it in the next day to show me. "You could be a writer, too" Laura says after I finish reading it, "You just have to sit down and do it." She wants to marry her rich boyfriend and cook gourmet meals all day and make a pretty house, she tells me. Another co-worker wants to be a professional sculptor, one wants to be a photographer, another one wants to be a fashion designer, and another wants to own her own flower shop one day. We all like our job fine, but none of us plans to stay here forever. Just long enough to figure out the next step.

My second spring at work, a terrible thing happens. A 19-year-old girl jumps from the railing on the 8th floor in our building and lands on the watch kiosk just ten feet from our store on the first floor. That morning I'm called to another location to help out and so I'm not there when it happens. I get a call from Laura and she says evenly: "I think we need to close up. They took the body away, but there's still blood, there's still all this blood everywhere."

The next day I get the full report: Laura was on the fourth floor when it happened, peering over the railing, talking with Lori about how to re-organize the merchandise on the first floor. They both say they saw the body fall right past them. "For a second, I thought someone dropped a jacket," Laura says. Stacy, Erin, Kathleen and Alexis were on the first floor. They saw the body hit the watch kiosk. They were close enough to see the expression on her face. "She didn't look 19," Stacy says. "How old did she look?" I ask. "I don't know," she replies, "Like she didn't have an age, I guess."

A few weeks later I take down my quote sheet from behind the counter. I stop wearing a jacket to work, summer comes. Then Fall. These days, when people ask me the names of flowers, I can tell them without even thinking: Delphinium, Cockscomb, Protea, Amarylis. These days, I can make a $100 funeral arrangement with my eyes closed.

None of us plans to be here forever, I remind myself one afternoon as I prep a new delivery. We're just here til we figure out the next step.

Alphabet: A History (M)

Alphabet: A History (M) Mattress

It's June, 2004 and I'm moving into a 1-bedroom apartment on Winnemac Street. I'm a ten minute walk from the park in one direction, a ten minute walk from the lake in the other, and I'm right around the corner from the Hopleaf. It's the first time I've lived alone in almost 4 years, so I've bought a new mattress to honor the occasion. It's a Sterns and Foster, which is the only kind my mom said is worth getting. She's 6' and my dad's 6'4" — not small people by any means — so I figure she'd know from good mattresses.

It's a hot afternoon — even for late June — and I'm painting the apartment in a t-shirt and underwear while I wait for my mattress to be delivered. None of my other furniture is here yet, I don't have AC, but I've got the ceiling fans turned as high as they'll go and all the windows open wide. I'm playing a song by Wheat called "I Met a Girl" that my friend Cory burned for me. I play it over and over on my little CD player and I dance around my empty apartment, barefoot over the newly-varnished hardwood floors.

A year and a few months from now I'll spend an entire evening lying on the same floor, staring at the ceiling, listening to Mazzy Star's "Halah" on repeat. It's getting cooler now, the bars and cafes have moved their outdoor tables and chairs to wherever it is they keep these things from October - May. I ride my bike around aimlessly, with the left leg of my jeans rolled up, my blue jacket zipped to my neck, sometimes I wear my hood up. I eat mussels for two at the bar at the Hopleaf, sharing my meal with a rotating cast of friends and  mostly forgettable dates, most of whom I meet online these days. Saturday mornings I spend at the bookstore, a stack of magazines and a small skim latte by my side. Sometimes I take pictures of my neighborhood after.

I adopt a kitten from the shelter where I volunteer a few hours a week. He's a grey striped tabby with a big white belly, and I take him home and name him Miles. I give my other cat, Simone, extra love now so she'll associate this new addition with getting more of me, not less. We feel like a family.

In the winter, Miles grow four times his size, easily twice as big as Simone now. He likes to sit in the living room window, watching the courtyard and street below, occasionally making little twittering sounds when he sees something he wants to chase. One afternoon I follow his gaze to a tree across the street and see two birds — pigeons, maybe — a black one and a white one. It's cold outside, I wonder if they could find some place warmer to hang out for the day, but they stay there all afternoon, never moving. Miles twitters away.

I have a new song I listen to over and over. It's called "Girl in a Hood" and it makes me think of living under water for some reason, floating through life in slow-motion. I lie on my bed, on my Sterns and Foster mattress, and sing along to some of the lyrics. "I wanted to ask you to run away..."

The walls of my apartment are all different colors. I painted my living room light mocha when I moved in, my bedroom a golden yellow, my bathroom light purple, and my dining room apple green. The kitchen has black-and-white tiled floors and a matching splash board that runs the length of the wall behind the sink. The black tiles on the wall against the white look like seeds to me, so I paint the kitchen raspberry red and green like a watermelon. In three years only one person ever walks into my kitchen and knows my inspiration immediately. "Oh, it's like a watermelon!" she exclaims and I want to hug her.

I live in this apartment longer than I live anywhere else my whole life — 3 years and four months. The ceilings are too short, the layout is awkward, I don't like the bathtub, but leaving it is bittersweet. It's mine, and when I go, I know it'll be the last place that ever is. I bring my bed with me to New York, I move it in to my boyfriend's place, we get married, the bed seems small. I think back to my watermelon kitchen, the kitten who grew four times his size, my Saturday mornings at the bookstore, and I think: maybe it's time for something bigger now.

Alphabet: A History (P)

Alphabet: A History (P) Patton Avenue

It's summer and I'm 9 and we're visiting my paternal grandparents in Illinois for a few days. In Springfield, they live in a 3-bedroom house on a street called Patton. It's the house my father grew up in and the only place my grandparents have ever lived together as a married couple. They keep a little bowl of hard candy on a coffee table in the living room and my maternal grandmother asks them once if they ever find wrappers tucked between the sofa cushions like she always does at her place. They laugh and tell her they do, and when my grandma says she even finds them in the air conditioning vents at the end of summer, I can't help but blush a little.

My grandparents have an enclosed back porch in their house on Patton that overlooks their yard and a huge tree that my grandfather hangs at least half a dozen bird feeders from. They both wake up really early in the morning and drink coffee, eat Frosted Flakes and do the crossword puzzle together. Afterward, my grandfather fills the feeders, sticks a corncob into a post for the squirrels, and then sets about watering the garden. I ask him a million times what all the flowers are called but it's not until I'm a florist many, many years later than any of the names actually stick. 

They have two big beds of flowers, my grandparents do, and that's just in the backyard. On the other side of the house, the side that faces their crazy old cat-lady neighbor, is another garden with lots more flowers — tall, unruly ones — as well as a bird bath and one of those reflective balls that sits on a stand. Behind that garden is a vegetable patch where they grow things like tomatoes that I sometimes take back to my other grandma in St. Louis who bites into them like apples and declares them the best she's ever eaten. 

There's a sidewalk path that runs from my grandparents backyard, past the big tree and the vegetable patch, all the way to the backyard of another neighbor. Sometimes I run as fast as I can from one yard to the other, back and forth so many times that I climb the steps into my grandparents porch afterward and collapse onto their black vinyl sofa, a little pile of folded limbs. In the summer — the only time we ever visit — the vinyl sticks to the backs of my legs and squeaks beneath me as I shift. I like to rest my head on my grandmother's lap there as she reads the tales of ol' Brer Rabbit from the Uncle Remus folk stories, the cadence of her voice lulling me to sleep. 

Years later when I'm a junior in college, I'll live in another house on Patton — this one in Springfield, Missouri. This house is a 2-story white duplex that I share with my friend, Becky, and though we have no yards or gardens or vegetable patches, there's a Rapid Roberts gas station across the street where I go for my daily candy fix. There's an old redheaded lady who hangs out there named May who wears long dresses, high heels, and big, fancy hats. When it rains, she ties a shopping bag around her head, knotting the handles just beneath her chin, and wears ziplock baggies around her heels. She usually sits at one of the three little tables in Rapid Roberts and smokes Virginia Slims, one after another. I like to wear sunglasses when I buy my candy so I can study her without being noticed. One day May isn't there and I brazenly ask the guy behind the counter if he knows where she is and he tells me she goes to Branson once a month to drop off her costumes. "Costumes?" I say, "Is she a seamstress?" "Yup," he replies, handing me my change. I decide I want May to be my Great-Aunt.

I live in that house on Patton for two years, and in many ways I think it's where I come of age. I'm a college graduate when I move out, in love for the first time, but jobless and broke, completely unsure what the future holds. The months and years that follow jar me, make me wistful for less complicated times, make me hopeful for smoother terrain. I move 7 times over the next ten years, from Springfield to Chicago and then to New York, and every month, without fail — sometimes even twice a month — I'll dream of those two houses on Patton and I'll remember when my biggest worry was where to hide the candy wrappers...and I'll wonder: why didn't I just throw them away?

Alphabet: A History (L)

Alphabet: A History (L) Lake Michigan

It's May, 2008, and I'm visiting Chicago for the third time since I moved to New York less than 8 months ago. May is tied with October for my favorite month here and the colors at the lake today are a big reason why. I'm with Chad who took a day off from work and we're the only people here. We run around and cartwheel with our shoes off and do a photo shoot on the spread of bright green grass between the water and Lake Shore Drive and for a moment it feels like I never left.

I don't feel at home in New York yet, not like this. From the lake I can walk to three of my old apartments in less than 15 minutes. I can peek into the windows from the street below and imagine the lines of my bookshelves, the curve of my couch, the shape of my cats peering from behind the pane. These images are like lifelines across a palm, filling the gaps between stories I tell, the moments between the events.

At Lake Michigan I can see half a dozen summers stretched across the beach, and countless rides through falling leaves all along the bike path. There's a grocery store a few blocks from here and if I went there right now and bought some cheese to have back at Chad's, the cashier would ring me up and ask where I've been. I could stop at the Middle Eastern Bakery and pick up some baklava and pita and hummus and the beautiful Palestinian owner with the black eyes and raven hair would hand me my change and say, "Thank you, my friend."

One time, when I still worked at the flower shop, I took home a small bouquet of white roses that only had one day left. Chad picked me up from work and we stopped by Bi-lo to get some wine. When the owner eyed the flowers, I told him we just got married and he raised his eyebrows at Chad, who flung his arm around my shoulder, kissed my cheek and said, "It's true, we did." For months after that, every time we'd go into Bi-lo together, we'd call each other "hon."

At the lake today on the grassy part between the water and the road there's only one tree that's in full bloom. The first weekend Drew came to visit, we lay on a blanket under that tree and he told me New York had a lot of stuff, but it didn't have anything like this. 

Over the next year, I went to the lake more than ever — every day when the weather was warm, usually in the mornings, sometimes in the late afternoons, always on the weekends. Sometimes I'd go alone, sometimes I'd meet friends for happy hour and we'd sit on the beach and hide our beers in bandanas until the sun went down. In September, the month I moved, fall took its sweet time coming. Each day we'd head to the beach and think it was the last, and the next day it would still be warm enough for bikinis. I moved on the final day of the month just as the leaves were starting to turn. It hasn't been warm enough for bikinis since.

Alphabet: A History (K)

Alphabet: A History (K) Kimbrough

It's 1998 and I've just graduated from college. I'm moving out of the 2-bedroom duplex I've shared with my friend Becky for the last two years and moving into a 1-bedroom apartment on the bottom floor of a big, white, dilapidated house on Kimbrough. It's the first time I've ever lived alone and I piece together a home with hand-me-down furniture and thrift store finds. I paperclip postcards to a long string and hang them across my ceiling, an idea I stole from some design magazine I saw in Borders one time. On the mantle above the faux fireplace I arrange a few candles, a couple of artsy greeting cards and a framed photo of my boyfriend and me. He has the same picture on his fridge in his apartment, just a few blocks away.

Just before I move in, he goes away for ten days, to stay in a log cabin on a mountain top in Colorado to meditate. I water his garden and watch his cat while he's gone and try to imagine the summer ahead. We've only been together for a couple of months but we're in love and he tells me he wants to marry me someday. Most of my friends have graduated and moved away and I'm looking for a job and I'm not sure I want to stay in Springfield much longer and he thinks this is where he wants to settle down and everything is just kind of up in the air and I don't really know what's going to happen exactly, but for now I just want to think about warm nights on his porch and cooking breakfast on Sunday mornings in my new kitchen.

I've never really watered a garden before and I'm not sure if I'm doing it right, but the peonies have started blooming like he said they would so I don't worry too about it too much. I write a lot of letters in those ten days and that's pretty much all I do. Well that, and I go to Borders almost every day, and I read books about writing and about finding a job, and I go for a lot of walks and I call my friends who have left town and I listen to their big plans. One afternoon I even make a key lime pie.

I won't find a job this summer...or even this fall, not a real job, anyway. I'll temp, and I'll telemarket, and I'll drive to Branson 4 days a week and give away Mel Tillis tickets to anyone who will sign up for a timeshare tour. I'll stand in a darkened wax museum next to a fake Johnny Carson and Bill Cosby and listen to a loop of their interview on repeat over and over for weeks before I quit. When I finally find a job in the  Spring, one with an office and a desk and a title — if not a competitive salary — I'll be so broken I'll hardly know even know who I am anymore.

But it's still early in the summer and I've got this new apartment on Kimbrough with a faux fireplace and hanging postcards and a boyfriend who grows peonies and says he wants to marry me. He calls me from the road on his way back to town and says he driving with my picture on the dashboard and his foot heavy on the gas. I don't see it coming yet, but he'll dump me in a few months, on a cold morning in January. He'll tell me to be happy and go live my life and for a long time I won't really know how.

But it's May now and the summer lies ahead and my boyfriend's at the door and I let him in and he's wearing a goofy smile and a baseball cap I've never seen. He picks me up and twirls me around and says in a big voice: "Girl, I missed you!" and I laugh and say, "Do you like my place?" because this is the first time he's seen it. So he puts me down, takes off his hat, looks around, and says "Yeah, it works, it's really you."

I move out four months later.