City Wendy

Home in the Summer

I made my first call about day care yesterday and, boy, was that weird. I mean, the call itself was fine. But just saying those words: "Hi, I'm doing day care research for my baby due in October. Do you accept infants?" was totally weird. My tentative plan right now is to drop the baby off at a day care place in the neighborhood about three mornings a week so I can have a little time to keep up with Dear Wendy and various other writing and editing projects. I hope to start this when the baby is around 3-6 months old, and I was told that if that's my plan, I need to get on waiting lists for day care now. As it turns out, I probably should have gotten on waiting lists about six months ago.

The lady on the other end of the line was nice enough. She explained that she accepts babies as young as three months old, but that she wouldn't have an opening for an infant until next summer. I guess at that point I should have asked some more questions, like if she's open to flexible scheduling and what are her prices and how many kids does she watch and can I come take a look at her place (it's just right around the corner!), but this parenting thing is so foreign and strange that I felt like I was playing pretend ... or, like, making a prank call or something, so I just stammered, "UhOkayThanksBye" real fast and hung up.

I used to do that a lot in college — make prank calls, I mean — back when I lived in the dorms and you only had to dial the last four digits of any phone number to reach someone else on campus. I'd never prank, you know, an adult with real responsibilities and stuff, but prank calling other college kids was always a good time. I thought of it as performance art, and it was just one of many of my "art projects." I also used to scream "announcements" at the top of my lungs out the window, like weather reports and updates on available parking spaces. And when I was a freshman, I'd drag a chair into the dorm elevator and sit there for an hour or so and "take notes" as people got on and off the elevator. If anyone ever asked what I was doing — and surprisingly few people did (I can't imagine why they wouldn't want to engage me in conversation) — I'd tell them I was working on an assignment for psych class. I did learn a lot about human behavior through these various ... activities.

This time of year always makes me think of college. Well, this time of year and the height of fall, when the leaves are all changing color and you can almost smell the scent of school books in the air. But my college town was always best in the summer, and I loved nothing more than sticking around when the campus cleared out and three quarters of the students went back home for summer jobs or internships and chillin' with their high school buddies. For me, home was right where I was from May to September. Those of us who stayed in town owned that place. We knew it the way the other students never would — the long drives out in the country with the windows down and the music blaring; hours spent in the best seat of the coffee shop, sipping bottomless cups of joe and reading books right off the shelf; sneaking into the campus fountain late at night for a quick swim under the stars; the way the air smelled at dusk in July. It was home.

Summer in Brooklyn is pretty good, too. I've only had a small taste of it so far — last summer, I was too new to really settle in — but I like it here. It feels like where I belong. But I'm 34 now and on the verge of parenthood and summer will never be like it was when I was 20. Sometimes I have moments that feel similar, and when I do, I'm reminded that I'm still the same person. I have all these adult responsibilities now and this transition period between being ME and being a MOM is a little unnerving, but I'll always be the same person, right? This is the question I ponder a lot lately. I think I know the answer, but like a lot of things, I imagine it's something you don't know for sure until you're in it. And I'll be in it soon enough.

The Cycle of Life

Mercury's in retrograde and I partly blame that, but whatever the reason, lately I've been feeling like I'm sort of lost. Lost in what, it's hard to say. But, really, if I'm being honest with myself it's been going on long before Mercury went retrograde. I'm not even sure "lost" is the right word. That makes it seem I don't know where I am or what direction I need to go; that's not really the case. More, I think it's a matter of simply feeling like I don't truly soak in where I am and take the necessary steps to move in the direction I want. I find "life" — all the tedious, mundane, not-so-pleasant chores and obligations of modern life getting in the way of really ... well, living.

I've been putting a lot of blame and pressure on myself, too. I should be more disciplined with my time, be more organized, practice better time management skills, work harder. And this way of thinking comes from a place inside me that equates "living" or "moving forward" as achieving something, when what it is I truly crave is achieving a sense of balance and peace. Maybe this is a little of New York seeping into me — this feeling that I have to always be chasing something. That, somehow, just being isn't enough — one must always pursue being more; being better.

I'm not sure what it is I'm saying exactly. Except that lately I've felt a bit like a rat in a race and I'm not even sure what I running for.

I miss the kind of friendships/relationships I had when I was younger — maybe even the quiet relatioship i had with myself. Now, everyone's so busy. I don't connect with people the way I used to, and some of that is my own fault. Maybe even a lot of it is my fault. But I also can't help feeling I'm kind of a product of my age and environment. I'm older now. I'm married. My commitments and priorities have shifted. I don't have the extra free time I once did. Plus, I live in a city where everyone is spread out. It's not like in Chicago where all my friends lived within two miles of each other and we could meet up at the drop of a hat and just hang out — not even really doing anything all that special ... just being together. It's not like when I was single and lived alone and took every opportunity — which came often —  to spend time with friends.

It's different now. And I like a lot of how it is. We make our own choices and for the most part, I'm really happy with the ones I made ... but sometimes I can't help by mourn what's been lost along the way.

Drew and I have been watching that "Life" series on the Discovery Channel. We record episodes and then save them up to watch or rainy afternoons or lazy nights so we can spread them out as long as possible. The whole series, which reveals the living cycles and patterns for much of the world's creatures, is narrated by Oprah Winfrey, whose voice, for some reason, adds this sort of believablity whenever she shares a particularly fascinating fact or insight at the same time sort of being like, "This is ah-mayyy-zing" in that sing-songy voice she does when she's introducing people on her show.

I love the series. Just from a film-making standpoint, it's incredible and awe-inspiring and gorgeous. The meticulous amount of work and planning that went into it is almost incomprehendable, and, yes, amazing. The other night Drew and I watched the episode about plants, which may be my favorite one in the series. And yesterday when I went on a walk through Central Park on my lunch break, I watched all these seeds falling from the trees like blossoms, like rain. And they danced and twirled as they fell because, as I learned from the Life series, these seeds have wings so they can float gently and directly from the tops of the trees to the ground below.

I stood under a canopy of trees for a few minutes — one very much like the one I married under in another part of the park — and I watched those winged seeds fall. I thought about the nature of life, the cycle of patterns, the way trees always bloom again every year in the spring.

This is just a season in my life, I thought. This is just where I am right now. I don't know how many times these seasons will come and go; I couldn't even tell you how many different ones I've lived through. But I know this one definitely that feels new to me. I'm trying to stop and stand under a tree and just be for a minute and enjoy the scenery, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't often preoccupied with memories of seasons past and fantasies of seasons to come. Maybe you feel the same way sometimes? ... Maybe this is just life.

Love, Life, Thanks

I did one of those Tweet Clouds yesterday where Twitter users can see which words they tweet most frequently. Looking at the cloud, it seemed my top three words were "love," "life," and "thanks," which I liked a lot and seemed fitting, but on closer inspection I realized that my three most-used words were actually "wedding," "time," and "night." Oh, right, there was that whole six-month period this year when I discussed almost nothing else but my nuptials. Still, I feel pretty good that "hope," "happy," and "people" are among my top words as opposed to, say, "despair," "sadness," and "nobody." Also, Chicago was at the top of my list, but no New York, not yet.

I was in Chicago a couple weeks ago. I wandered through my old neighborhood, danced and laughed with my friends, and drank champagne for breakfast, lunch and dinner. At Cafe Bong I sang my whole karaoke repetoire, hugged the owner multiple times, and left with a free Heineken stuffed in my purse. "I have to close now!" Jinny said at 2 AM, handing me the beer as a peace offering. "You drink it next place!" she said, pushing me out the door.

Earlier that day I walked along a street near Roscoe Village and felt a pang of homesickness. Actually, what I felt first was familiarity, and something deeper than that — comfort, I guess. That street near Roscoe Village, that street whose name I couldn't even tell you, a street I may or may not have ever walked along suddenly felt more familiar to me than anything else I'd experienced in recent months. It felt like home.

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Yesterday, by a combination of lucky mistakes, great timing, and some good old-fashioned sweet talk, Drew and some friends and I ended up in a most magical bar at the outskirts of Brooklyn, in Red Hook. The bar, Sunny's, is usually closed on Sundays, but the six of us or so were able to finagle our way in for the late afternoon into early evening. We caught up on each other's Thanksgivings, shared some leftovers, and listened to a college station on the small radio behind the bar.

Sunny's is a well, worn-in joint near the river with slanted floors, cracked red leather booths, and nautical-themed artwork and family photos on the walls. It's not a shiny place, but it glows. There's even a banjo made out of a bedpan in one corner. 

"I like your bar," I said to Sunny when he came back from having dinner with his wife and daughter next door. 

The booze had made me feel warm, but not yet dizzy, and I was in that zen-like spot between mindfulness and daydreaming. Everything, of course, was painfully significant.

"I appreciate that you like my bar," said Sunny, who has eyes like shiny marbles and a long, thick mop of grey hair on his head, "but when people say that, what they really mean is that they recognize something in the bar that they like about themselves. You like things that remind you of what you like in yourself."

Hope, happy, people, love, life, thanks. I guess he's right.

In The Driver's Seat

It occurred to me today that it's been well over a year and a half — a year and nine months, actually — since I last drove a car. Part of me wonders how long I can go without ever driving one again, and the more practical part of me thinks I better practice sometime soon before I lose the skill completely (or is it like riding a bike and you never really forget how?). If Drew was a driver I might not worry about it so much, but since he's a born and bred Manhattanite, he never bothered to learn how. When we fantasize about spending a summer traveling around the country, we can never really picture who's in the driver's sear since one of us doesn't know a clutch from a glove department and the other would rather swallow a gallon of antifreeze than spend hours behind the wheel.

I didn't always hate driving so much. Back in Missouri when I first got my car, the summer before my senior year of college, the summer I became friends with Chad, I used to love driving. Sometimes I'd pick Chad up around 10:30 or so, after he got done with his show, and we'd drive down Cherry St. out past the city limits into the country where the road was hilly and moonlit. There was never anyone else out there at that time of the night and we'd roll the windows down and listen to Paul Simon or Shawn Colvin and feel the warm summer air on our necks and imagine we could live forever like that and always be happy.

That fall, in an effort to educate me on different music, my friend Alex made me a mixed tape with a lot of Jill Scott and Lauryn Hill and the Fugees and the Roots and I wore it out on my drives down Cherry. My favorite was Lauryn Hill's cover of Bob Marley's "Turn Your Lights Down Low" and sometimes I'd play that song on repeat a dozen times or more, singing out the window, thinking only as far as the next three minutes and thirty seconds, life was just that easy.

After I moved to Chicago my love affair with driving came to a sudden halt. This was aided in large part to my crashing my car on Lake Shore Drive, the only remotely relaxing stretch of road in all of Chicago (but only during the weekday afternoons and definitely not on days the Cubs had a home game). I have a feeling that even if i hadn't been in that accident a few months before I moved there, which made it impossible to ever fully let my guard down on LSD, it wouldn't have taken me long to hate driving in the city. The traffic there is insane, the worst, absolutely the most miserable...maybe in the whole world -- certainly in all the midwest. I can't tell you how many traffic-induced panic attacks I suffered at the wheel. It's in the hundreds, for sure. So when I took up biking again in my 4th or 5th year there after a 15-year hiatus, it was such a relief to have another mode of transportation besides my car and the god forsaken CTA (oh God, don't get me started on the CTA).

So, anyway, I guess I sort of forgot — at least on a visceral level — what it was like to really enjoy losing myself in a long drive. Eventually driving became nothing more than a mostly taxing and stressful way to get from Point A to Point B. In my final years in Chicago, when gas prices soared and my car kept breaking down every other month, it also became an insanely expensive way to get around. And so when I moved to Manhattan, I was more than relieved to unload my car on the first sucker to take it off my hands, and free myself from such a burden. Since then I haven't had to worry about moving my car at 6 AM for street cleaning, or feeding a meter every half hour, or incurring hundreds of dollars in parking tickets. I don't study driving directions from mapquest at red lights anymore or accidentally take wrong turns down one-way streets 3 miles from where I supposed to be, or get asked for rides by anyone not "lucky" enough to own his or her own car. I'm free!

But sometimes, when I listen to one of those old driving songs, and I remember how easy it all used to be, I miss it. And I can almost feel the warm summer air on my neck and in my hair.

China Doll

This is my grandparents' china cabinet. Actually, it first belonged to my great-grandmother, but for as long as I've been around, it's been in my grandparents' possession, and now it's in mine. I inherited it from them around 6 or 7 years ago when my they moved out of the house they'd lived in for the last 4 decades. They were downsizing from a 4-bedroom home to a small, 2-bedroom apartment and had a lot to get rid of. 

In addition to the cabinet, I also took a cherry wood bedroom set from the 50s and one of those old buffet-style tables that folds down on the sides so you can push it against the wall and it hardly takes up any room at all. The table came with three leaves and could sit up to 14 people. I served Thanksgiving dinner on it twice in one of my old apartments. This was back when I was living with a former boyfriend and we'd have our neighbors and random Thanksgiving orphans over and everyone would pitch in with the meal. We'd cook the turkey in Pepsi because that's the way our neighbor friend's dad had always cooked theirs growing up. 

I sold the table on Craigslist before I moved to New York — it really wasn't worth anything. My grandparents had painted over the beautiful mahogany wood several times -- first in forest green and then in peach. I was ambitious when I first took the table off their hands and thought I'd strip it back to it's natural state, but I didn't get too far on that project. That's what tablecloths are for, anyway. 

The people who bought the table from me were a newlywed couple who'd just moved to Chicago for graduate school. I told them about the table -- how I remembered sitting at it in my grandparents' basement when I was kid and putting together puzzles on it with my sister and cousins. I remembered when my grandparents painted it peach, painted the walls and the door frames to match.

I hung on to the cherry wood bedroom set, as well as the china cabinet. The cabinet's my favorite piece of furniture and I'm always grateful when it successfully makes it from one of my apartments to the next. It's been in four of them now. I don't remember what my grandparents kept in it when I was a kid, but I remember the way it smelled -- a mix of Pledge and wood and my grandparents' musky basement. I don't know how it's possible, but it still smells exactly the same way —on the inside, I mean. Whenever I open it — which is often since that's where I keep my wine glasses — I smell a little bit of my childhood, a little bit of how things used to be. It's something I don't think I'll ever let go of.

Why I Believe in Love Connection

The System

I've always loved reading magazines. As a kid, I dug Highlights and Mad Magazine. By 6th grade I was into Bop Magazine, which instilled in me such a hatred of Alyssa Milano (that hair! her perfect wardrobe! all the cutes boys she knew!) that in 7th grade, my friend Kristy and I went through our archives of Bop and cut out all the pictures of Alyssa Milano we could find and created our own magazine with them that we called "Alyssa Milano Sux!" We taped our photos of her on stapled pieces of white printer paper and wrote captions beneath them like, "Alyssa heads to Satanic Gathering...because she SUX!" and "Alyssa can't keep a boyfriend...because she SUX!"

By 9th grade, I was obsessed with YM and Seventeen and I used to imagine winning the annual short story contest and getting published and winning a scholarship and the right to tell everyone I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I'd compose a story about a girl name Jennifer who had long brown hair, a love of Jordache jeans and Juicy Fruit, and a boyfriend named Ted. She'd have a dark secret she's never told anyone and the story would be all about her struggle to trust someone to share it with. Clearly, I'd read a lot of Judy Blume in my adoloscence.

Besides the articles on eating disorders, homemade facial mask recipes, and how to find the perfect prom dresses, there were a bunch of advertisements for a bunch of stuff I really, really wanted--stuff I knew would transform my life from boring old hum-drum, to something spectacular and wonderful. Among the things I was convinced would change my life, was a book I'd seen advertised in the back of magazines and fantasized about ordering for years: The Get Him System. The Get Him System promised to teach all the very important skills to lure the boy of your dreams and make him yours. Within days, you'd not only have a date with your crush, you'd be his steady girlfriend. It didn't matter if he didn't even know your name yet--the Get Him System would teach you everything you'd need to know to get his attention and make him your boyfriend once and for all.

I don't remember how much the book originally cost, though it's currently up to about 75 cents on Ebay, but I do remember that whatever the cost was, it was too much to warrant the potential embarrassment if anyone--including my parents...especially my parents--found out I'd purchased it. And since it would have to be mailed to my address--the one I shared with my parents--I knew there was no way I'd receive it without them seeing it first. Sure, the ads promised the book would be mailed in plain, unmarked brown wrapping paper, but my parents would want to know what was inside. Of course they'd ask, and there was no way I could risk that kind of mortification. And so I daydreamed. I daydreamed about what secrets lay inside the pages of the book that could make the current object of my infatuation fall madly, hopelessly, irresistably in love with me.

I never learned those secrets and even 10, 15 years later after lots of failed relationships, I couldn't help but wonder if there really was some special formula--some secret knowledge, that, if I could somehow just discover--life would be so, so perfect. So at 29 when I finally did "get him" and I learned that love has nothing at all to do with some set of rules or a special formula you can memorize and apply--nothing to do with logic or practicality--and everything to do with timing, luck, and yes, fate, I was so disappointed. Because actually as it turned out, "getting him" didn't magically make like so perfect after all, and if I didn't earn love through some kind of practical approach, then what else that I yearned for would I have to just sit around and wait for fate to make happen?

The answer, of course, isn't really black or white. There is an element of fate to most things that happen to us, but the reality is that we hold the power that put the wheels of fate in motion. I never won Seventeen Magazine's short fiction contest with the story about Jennifer in her Jordache jeans and her boyfriend named Ted, because I never actually wrote the story. And after all those failed attempts, I finally did meet--and catch--the guy worth getting, but I had to agree to a blind date first, I had to pursue a long-distance relationship for over a year, and then I had to move my life across the country! I guess what I'm trying to say--what I'm trying to remind myself of--is that things don't happen without some effort--constant, persistent, sustained, good, hard effort...even when we're really over it.

And also, that Alyssa Milano magazine I created was really pretty stupid.

In Its Purest Form

The thing about summer that I forget every year is the way it's only really great some of the time. I had this writing teacher once who, comparing something to love, said: "It sucks until it doesn't suck anymore."  I don't remember what he was comparing to love, but you could kind of say the same about summer, only in reverse: "It's really great until it isn't so great anymore."

I've had moments of great this summer, but to be honest, I've had more moments of not-so-great, due in large part, I think, to this limbo state I'm in. It's all my own fault, really. I thought it'd be a good idea to have one last summer here--to really enjoy the things I love about Chicago--my friends, the lake, biking around town. But the thing about enjoyment is that it's so rarely planned successfully. That is, in its purest form--it doesn't happen when you most want it to, when you plan for it--when you set out to have it:"I'm going to enjoy the hell out of my summer." In its purest form--in the way I prefer it--it simply catches you.
Oh hell, the truth is: I'm bored.

And in an effort to combat the boredom today--and the loneliness in the face of everyone being so  goddamned unavailable to me in my last summer here, oh, how dare they have their own lives, the audacity!--I rode my bike first to the lake and finding it too over-crowded and too unprotected from the midday sun, I turned around and, book and blanket still in tow, headed to Winnemac Park, a refuge for me on more than one occasion. On the way, I passed not one, but two vintage Chevy Impalas within a block of each other. I judged the latter sighting to be a '59 only because it reminded me so much of the only Chevy Impala I've ever sat in, which was a '59--a baby blue '59 Chevy Impala with white interior.

It was the end of summer 1997--late August...maybe early September. The fall semester had just started and I was 20 (my 21st birthday was a few days away). A boy in one of my classes drove the '59 Chevy Impala and one afternoon, he gave me a ride home from campus. I only lived a few blocks away, but still--I'd orchestrated the whole thing--the ride home in the vintage Chevy Impala with a boy named after a Credence Clearwater song (hint: he was a bullfrog, he was a good friend of mine). It was my second year in the white duplex on Patton, which sat across the street from Maple Park Cemetery, a fairly romantic cemetery as far as cemeteries go--this one had a pleasant gazebo surrounded by willow trees. I'd often go on walks through it with dates and we'd sit in the gazebo and tell ghost stories and what not, which, of course, always led to some kind of kissing. Sometimes I'd take these boys to "random" tombstones with catchy names and I'd say, "What kind of person do you think 'Levi Funk' was?" (Levi Funk was always my favorite). And before they'd have a chance to answer, I'd rattle off some made-up backstory for Levi--give him a wife and kids and a tragic end to his too-short life.

(Some girls wore short skirts and had great personalities--I just took boys to cemeteries and made up stories about dead people.)

Anyway, I can't remember if I took Jeremiah to Maple Park and the gazebo and Levi Funk's grave the first time he drove me home after class--it might have been the second or third time he drove me home. He drove me home all the way through the end of September when I made a conscious decision to make myself busy after class and avoid his offers for a ride. There was someone else in the picture by then--the only time I really remember ever feeling like I had two boys to choose from.

We were all media majors, but the boys didn't know each other. Separated by a year in school, they never had any classes together. The other guy--the one with a dog named 'Jazz,' cast me in a short movie he was directing for his senior project. One afternoon I orchestrated a wardrobe meeting with him in my walk-in closet on Patton. I tried on dresses for him and he chose the one he wanted me to wear and afterwards I took him for a walk in the cemetery. He wasn't too long out of a relationship at the time and he was only 22. But still, I thought if he liked me, he could probably learn to love me and then I wouldn't have to be alone anymore and I wouldn't have to keep dragging boys to the gazebo for attention and kisses.

Evetually I let both the boys know about each other. It was all innocent enough, anyway. But, of course, at barely 21, the drama of balancing these two love affairs was far too much of a burden for me to carry so long and so I told them. Much to my chagrin, neither one cared too much, but to his credit, Jeremiah did at least bother to feign some sort of hurt feelings that another boy had been the reason for my abandoning our post-class rides in his vintage Chevy Impala.

Well anyway, by January they were both totally out of the picture and only a few months later I fell in love with some other boy--a boy who also lived across the street from Maple Park Cemetery and already knew all about Levi Funk for himself and  didn't think so much about my own backstory for him--he was a writer and he  had his own version of things, anyway, and, well, within a year this guy broke my heart so bad I swore I'd never date again. That lasted all of six weeks and I bet you can guess the first place I took the next guy who looked twice at me.

I thought of all this today at Winnemac Park--after I found a shaded spot under a willow tree and spread out my blanket and lay down, rested my head against my bike helmet--after I passed those two vintage Chevy Impalas and had a flashback of the only one I ever sat in--a 1959 baby blue Impala owned by a guy named after a Creedence Clearwater song.  And despite myself and my bad mood and my general disappointment in the summer so far, it caught me: a moment of genuine enjoyment...in its purest form (and I didn't even need booze.).