The boys are outnumbered here, but they make their presence known.
(window) shop (Paris)
If I could do anything in the world on a Sunday, I would go shopping in Paris.
Many of the stores are closed on Sundays, but there are some good markets open.
Paris, 2006. My one-year anniversary of Parenthood. I went to La Leche League meetings when my son was little, and one way of encouraging new Moms to breastfeed was to pointing out one might save up to $3000 as compared to the cost of formula – enough for a very nice vacation. I promptly decided I needed a very nice vacation (husband and baby came with, of course!)
I’d buy flowers. Or pastry from the pastry shop.
My Birthday, 2006. Paris.
But, actually, my favorite kind of shopping of all is window-shopping.
When I was a toddler, before I could read or even speak, I used to study Best Catalogs in the backseat of the car. Best Products carried everything from toasters to toys. Apparently, this was my favorite “reading material” and I used to pour over the photos. There is a favorite family story about me. Once, my father turned the catalog upside-down to see if I noticed the difference. I paused, and then I started wailing. I was too little to even maneuver the catalog right-side-up again. My father was fascinated that I was capable of discerning that the catalog was upside-down. Family photo albums show my father was often performing these little experiments on me. Sadistic bastard. Me, with headphones on, crying. Me, holding an upside-down book, crying. Me, a sullen grade-school aged child, completing equations in the sand at the beach.
But, I digress. What I mean to say is I have always enjoyed looking at things. Things I’ll never possess, but admire nevertheless.
Paris, 2012.
Paris is the Best Catalog possible place for this, as they take their vitrines, or window displays, very seriously there. I also love how the little shops often do only one thing, but do it well. Like sell umbrellas. Or taxidermy. Or roses, just roses. Or regional ceramics (<— this one here is where I really would blow all my money if I could). Or stationary shops, oh the stationary shops.
Paris, 2012.
Yeah, window shop on a Sunday in Paris. That’s what I’d do today if I could do anything at all.
shop
We all called it “the shop”. This is what we would say: “We need to stop at the shop.” “Dad left his wallet at the shop.” “We have to pick up a car at the shop.” Some of my memories of the shop are very clear, and others I have to search for, sifting through scents and images, trying to find something to grab onto. It was located in Logan Square. At the time, that seemed very far away. In actuality, it was a 10 minute drive from where we lived. To me it was a long journey crossing into a foreign land, and in a way it was a foreign land, filled with tools, and dirt, and cars. At home my father was surrounded by girls, but the shop was definitely a place for men.
It was dirty. A layer of grime covered most everything. Cigarette smoke hung in the air like the fog that seems to hold the Chicago skyline on a dreary day. I suppose you might call the place dreary looking. Everything a shade of gray. Very little natural light could puncture through the sparse windows covered in years of neglect. My eyes would scan everything, simultaneously repulsed and absorbed in it all. My sisters and I huddled and laughed at the calendars with images of naked women on them. The years had gone by and passed, but the calendars remained. No one looked at those calendars to know what date it was.
There my father would be, working on a car or sitting at the desk. We usually came to the shop to pick up a car. My father owned the auto body shop with a partner and they fixed cars for a used car dealership among other clients. My mother drove around some of these cars, allowing us to always have a second car in our family, and always a different one. I’m sure this was amusing to our neighbors, who would wake up to find yet a different car parked in front of our house. The only constant was the dealer license plates.
Our arrival at the shop was a little event. Mack was always there. He was quite old and worked for my father. He was the sweetest man and loved to see how much we had grown since our last visit. On many of these trips he would hand over a huge pound cake that his wife had made for us. I can still taste it. My father’s business partner Lee, was there. Friendly and broken. Even as a child I could sense this. My parents always had a collection of broken people in their lives. They were always willing to look past all the ugly parts of people and just accept them as they were.
The parking area was covered in gravel and inevitably I would make my way outside to kick the pebbles, or sift through them, all the while someone glancing up to make sure I was okay from the open garage door. I could hear the sound of paint spraying, the sound of the sander sanding, and gruff voices yelling back and forth to each other. Inside were men who didn’t wear winter coats in the deadly Chicago winters, who had to take multiple trips to the emergency room to have pieces of metal removed from the squishy parts of their eyes because they didn’t like wearing safety goggles, they smoked all day, and there was a bottle of scotch always sitting on the desk. And they were mine.
The smell of the place offers the strongest imprint on my memory. The scent of the lacquer, and chemicals that screamed at everyone close enough to smell it, “I’m so bad for you”. And the dust coming off of the sander; the scent of auto paint and dust married together. It was so intense and was the companion of everything I saw, heard and felt within those walls. My father came home with it, dressed in the dark blue work uniform and gray-blue shirt, complete with his name embroidered on it. Every night he would walk through the door with those filthy clothes, stand at the basement door, strip down to his underwear, and hang the uniform on a hook on the inside of the basement door. He would go directly to the bath. Every morning he would wake and put on those same dirty clothes and go back to work. Every time I opened the door to descend into the basement, I was met with the smell of the Auto body shop.
Eventually my father sold the business. It was killing him. Income was inconsistent. He smoked too much and drank too much and had begun to look gray like everything and every person in that place. He went on to work for an actual company, doing something else, and had a consistent paycheck and medical insurance. He was free. His mood changed completely and he became a happier person once he shook off that place and the people involved in it. It didn’t bother me that it was gone, and that I wouldn’t go there again. Even now I don’t know exactly where it was located. I suppose I could ask my mother. I would like to drive by and see if it is still an auto body shop, or if it has been taken over by a condo or new building the way much of old Chicago neighborhoods have gone.
What I do carry with me is that smell. Occasionally I will walk down a street and pass in front of an auto body shop. There it is. That scent of paint, and dust, and rough men. I always pause, smile and inhale deeply. It’s like a time machine that takes me back for just seconds to a time when I was careless, completely protected and floating on the wave of my parents’s life, being pulled by their current, with no thought or care for what my own direction would be.
polish
1. My first thought about the word “polish” is that it’s the kind of word that is impossible to rhyme, like “orange.” And, yet, what is poetry, if not “polishing” words?
2. This week, I read the book “Bluets.” It was captivating. It is not a book of poems. It is not a book of essays. It is something in-between. It is exactly the kind of book I wish I had written. It kind of blew my mind, it was so delicious. I made a list of how the book riffs on blue. Just a few of blue’s meanings and the directions the book takes: sad, sexual (cf. Warhol’s Blue Movie), Yves Klein blue, the blues, celestial blue, lapis lazuli, relationship breakups, bluets, the flower, feeling like an imposter, feeling lonely, feeling horny, etymology, Morocco, abstract painter Joan Mitchell, Joseph Cornell, Marguerite Duras, Saint Lucy, Goethe on optics, Goethe on poetry, bowerbirds, Plato on color as a dangerous narcotic, Lucinda Williams, Isabelle Eberhardt, I could keep going…. What an incantation of obsessions.
3. The form of the book looks just like this blog post, my homage to its numerical poemlets. What would it be like to write about one’s obsessions? That is really all there is to writing, isn’t there?
4. Here is one of my favorite lines: “Some things do change, however. A membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of a can.”
5. Here is another: “The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, ‘The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue.’ In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.”
6. What I like about poetry: Science = blah blah blah. Poetry = “Blue is an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.” That is the memorable radicalism of language polished to a high sheen.
7. Sometimes you need to copy passages of another person’s writing in order to learn something about writing. It is like going to art school and copying a still life of the great masters in order to make abstract art. The underlying practice comes in many forms and is necessary work. Fuck originality (sometimes).
8. I want my days to be artful. Shaped by my obsessions and pleasures and desires. This seems quite radical.
9. Yesterday, we drove to a park, intending to take a hike in the woods. What we ended up doing was renting bikes and biking around a lake and over a green river. Afterwards, we bought our son a snow cone. Then, my husband spent three hours choosing pants at an outlet mall, while I forced my son to try on dress shoes, and kept him company on a variety of benches outside. It wasn’t a terrible day, but that is what my life feels like sometimes. More green than bluet.
polish
Everyone has their 9/11 story. Everyone in America who is old enough to remember it, has a story. Some people’s stories are so unbelievably painful and sad, that it’s hard to read or listen to them. The images of the flyers of the missing, pasted up around New York are hard to look at, the stories of the families of the dead are hard to hear. Even those of us who have no immediate connection to anyone involved, It’s all hard to think about, but we do.
The phrase “never forget”, plastered all over everything in the days and years following 9/11 seemed absurd to me. As if. As if it would ever be possible to forget. Actually, that day, with it’s burned in memories, and frozen in time quality, is one set of a pair. The next day is the B side of 9/11 for me, and one that ends up getting the most consistent play.
Waking up, the sun streaming in through the navy curtains in our bedroom, two kids asleep next to me, my husband across the bed, the dust motes streaking in lines though the room, I so clearly remember this. Opening my eyes, feeling the familiar bodies and breathing of my warm kids, the dog within arms reach, a dusty glass of water next to me. I was waking up from a dream, I hadn’t yet had a thought of anything really, and then I remembered what was happening, what had happened, where we all were, and I started crying, all of us hugging in the bed. And like everyone everywhere, we all got up and started our day, every day.
It is that exact feeling, the knowing that everything was different, that is never going away. I don’t wake up and cry every morning, for the people lost and the innocence lost, but the way we woke up on the morning of 9/11 would be the last time we would ever wake up without the weight of what was about to happen buried within us.
On 9/11, now, a day of memory, lest we forget that which we will not, could not forget, we take out our memories of that day and polish them, perhaps share them, or keep them to ourselves, but we all do it. We all think about where we were when we heard (Barbara’s Bookstore in Oak Park) what we did (dithered about getting Louise out of school or leaving her there, decided it was best for her to be in her happy classroom, went home and watched the towers fall on live television, watched it all, Piper at my side. John on his way home). Later, Piper and I went to the school to get Louise, and we sat in the grass waiting for the class to be released. Other parents were there too, none of us said much. I looked down and a praying mantis was at our feet. It turned it’s head, slowly, and looked at Piper and I. Piper asked it if it felt the shock wave. It looked at us for a long time. We went back home and sat back in front of the television. None of us could think to do anything else. We all remember how blue the sky was that day.
It is sad and hard to read the tributes, and watch the videos of the heroes and the rescue dogs, think about the bravery, and the sadness and terror. It’s good to unpack all of that, really polish it up and give it a good shine before tucking it away again for another year. That praying mantis gets shined up in my memory, and by the end of each 9/11 it’s been on my mind so much that it’s glowing like stained glass.
The thing is, it will be forgotten. Not by our generation, but by the next. I’ve been going to estate sales a lot, and looking at things that old people saved. Daguerreotypes of babies that have no longer any connection to any living person. Newspapers saved with headlines of calamities and wars and disasters that no one thinks to memorialize in any way. Bibles with entire family histories written in them, with no longer any family member with the interest to keep writing. A lot of these estate sales are the remains of lives who lived through the great depression. Grocery bags filled with rubber bands. Drawers filled with plastic silverware, rain bonnets, panty hose. Everything saved in multiples by people who had lived in times of great scarcity. My own grandmother was that way, nothing was thrown away, everything was useful. Now though, we find it interesting, or funny, that people saved like that. We’ve forgotten. We are the next generation, and we’ve forgotten, and that is what is going to happen here.
This might have been the worst thing that has happened in our country for a long long time, and it might stay that way, but none of us really believe that. We all still live waiting for the next shoe to drop. Our kids though, will forget why things are this way, what led us here- it’s all just accepted as normal. Only when some old codgers open up a drawer and pull out their yellowed Chicago Tribune and Sun Times with pictures of the twin towers collapsing, and listen to a recorded story about a rescue dog, or a lost husband, will they remember. But then they will forget. Eventually someone will be digging through an estate box, find that yellowed newspaper, look at the image of the buildings, maybe it’s the picture with the planes just about to hit, look it for a moment, and move on hoping to find something weird and old, something worth keeping.
Polish
“I want Frank Lloyd Wright’s windows.”
“I want the Chicago flag.”
“I want outer space.”
“I want nails for Valentine’s Day. maybe something like conversation hearts? You know, Kiss Me?”
“I definitely want blue, and I loved the Missoni print I saw on your Instagram.”
“I’d like something for the holidays, but I don’t what it to scream Christmas.”
“I know it’s only February, but i would like something Spring-like. maybe a butterfly?”
“I don’t know what I want. What do you think?”
All things I have said to Astrowifey (Ashley Crowe), and then the beautiful things she did.
Horizon
On the horizon:
New habits.
I am still meditating after one week. I am getting nervous, though, because the app I am using to learn how to meditate is going to bump me up from 10 minutes to 20 soon. The time goes by in a heartbeat. As I have always suspected, I have monkey mind. My mind does not empty out very easily. I guess the thing to say in response to that is, “I notice that” and then let it go. Hmm.
Writing. Inside and outside. Even if most of it, this week, was grocery lists.
Fall is on the horizon
But not yet…..
I think I was more serious at 18 than I am now, at 40. I am learning to be messy. To not worry so much.
This week, I had a minor decision to make. I was trying to decide whether to try out a little freelance job. I feel like I moaned to everyone about how I couldn’t decide what to do. I didn’t like the people who told me to do it, and I didn’t like the people who told me not to do it. My husband is a smart man and absolutely refused to tell me what to do, and simply listened. I volunteer a lot, but in the Spring, decided to clear a space in the Fall. I wanted a more slowed-down life, to have more time to enjoy the reasons that I am a stay at home Mom and to maybe scratch my way towards what my purpose in life might be. This little job wouldn’t have jeopardized all of that, exactly, but in the end I decided I wanted the time for me. This felt extraordinarily lazy and selfish great.
In the end, the decision was like an affirmation of meditation. Stop the chatter. Clear the space. Mindspace. Timespace. Part of what inspired me to say “no” was that a friend recently told me she was cutting way down on all the little things she does, in order to better focus on what was important to her. I am passing that wisdom along. I give you all permission to do what you want. That is really all there is, isn’t there? The rest is moaning and monkey mind and guilt and bullshit.
I turned 40 this year. I really hope that coming to peace with whom I am and how I live my life is on the horizon.
Horizon
When I moved here, I moved from the cornfields of central Illinois. There, when I was confused or unsure of my next move, I would drive out into the country and look out across the straight line between land and sky. I liked to follow storms, drive right on the edge, racing along through small towns, down one lane roads, deep into farm land where the only certain things were sky, field and road. When I moved here, I didn’t know where I was in the city. “The lake is always east” I was told again and again by people who had been born with a lake to their east, who could no more imagine a lake to the south, west or north than they could imagine no lake at all. But I didn’t know where east was, all of the streets looked the same to me.
I was often confused in my early days here, unemployed, broke, without the center pull of really belonging anywhere. There was no where that I could see that would set me straight, in fact there didn’t seem to be a straight line anywhere, just buildings and lights and trees and noise. It’s hard to admit this, but I didn’t really even know about the lake when I moved here. Only as an abstract concept. And then one day I discovered it. The simplicity of lake, sky- a straight line where water met air, and at last I felt like I could think, get my head settled. I went often. Lake and East suddenly had meaning to me. The horizon line, one that I could look out, and maybe past, became my field and storm.
painting: Helen Frankenthaler, Contentment Island 2002
I discovered early on that I need a big view and a lot of people around me most of the time, a solitary existence in the crowd. To live in a city, I have to be able to see air, and sky, and water, be quiet and look out at that line. Twenty two years in, I still need to spend a lot of time in that space, and spaces like that, in other places.
(first view of the Meditteranean Sea, RioMaggiore Italy 8/2013)
Horizon
The horizon. It is not an actual thing that exists. It is a name for an optical illusion that makes us feel better about floating out in space. If I sit on the beach, I can look ahead and see the line where the water meets the sky, and for a moment I might feel like I could go to that place and see the limit of space. Maybe it would be something like this. The possibility of reaching the end makes me feel comforted and claustrophobic all at the same time.
I have watched many sunsets as the sun slips beneath the horizon, appearing to drop into the water. The sun does not drop. It never does. I know this. I am self-centered enough to like the illusion that the sun revolves around me. It’s so hard for us humans to remember our place. I have traveled up to the top of a volcano in the middle of the night to stand and wait for the sun to rise above the horizon, above the clouds, and it was easy to fool myself that the whole happening was meant just for me.
Last week, while driving in the car, I almost pushed myself into a panic attack thinking that the universe could be infinite. Is it infinite? If it’s expanding what is it expanding into? Then I read this and started to think about an alternate universe that might put an end to this universe. I know the scientific speak, but how hard all these things are to actually conceptualize. It’s so much easier to think of the world as this flat city I live in.
This weekend I had brunch at the Signature Room and looked out at unobstructed views of the lake and city. There were two different horizons at each end of the room. To the west the sky was touched by miles of buildings all built by humans who expanded their influence all the way across the country until they reached the end of land. To the east, a massive lake with only water and sky to look at, carved and shaped by ancient glaciers. Two Horizons, one representing human progress and one nature’s progress. There I was standing 95 floors up looking at both, admiring both, feeling caught in the middle, wondering how many horizons are within me, how many universes are within me, and knowing that if I had many lives to live I could live in many different ways, in many different places, and call all of it my life and be happy with it. I would be happy, could be happy, but I would always wonder about all those potential horizons and feel their pull. I would be happy, but fated to never be completely satisfied.
Treat
Solitude – what a treat.
When I was a little girl, I was happy when the playground was empty. My parents found this odd. I guess I have always enjoyed solitude. Although, a coffee date with a friend is also a pleasure. Fostering friendships, collaborating in groups, feeling “busy” – that can all feel really, really good to me (now). In fact, it has been wonderful as a mother of a young child to find connections with other adults. Child-rearing and housework especially can make a person feel rather lonely.
But back to this: can I be comfortable being alone? It can push me outside my comfort zone to see a movie alone, or take a hike alone, or eat lunch at a restaurant alone, or even just be by myself in the house alone without turning on the radio or television for a little noise. (OK sometimes I still provide noise, especially to write by. Have you heard of this?) . What about waiting for someone to meet you and rather than hide behind a cellphone or even book or journal, just sit there. Alone. When I push myself to do those things, I never regret it!
And this: what is really scary about silence, solitude, alone time? Well, then I’d be left alone with my thoughts, wouldn’t I? I might actually confront emotions that are lurking beneath the surface of my mind. I might actually write that poem.
And this: what about a new definition of solitude as unplugging? I am contemplating a social media / websurfing break. I just waste so much time on those things, probably because I go there when I am lonely, or bored, or have 5 minutes, out of habit. But what if I found different ways of being alone?
And this: what if I were to meditate or otherwise empty my mind? Mindfulness and meditation seems to be bubbling up in my life from a couple of different directions. I am taking this as a sign and quietly investigating its possibilities. I read this. I downloaded this. I am on day 3. I will let you know how it goes.
We Do What We Want 