We know together

When we first came here

We were cold and we were clear

With no colors on our skin

‘Til you let the spectrum in


Say my name and every color illuminates,

We are shining,

And we’ll never be afraid again.
- Florence + the Machine, “Spectrum”

My office is 15 minutes away from the Art Institute of Chicago and a Roy Lichtenstein exhibit just opened there this week, so I went over to check it out last night after work.  I go to the Art Institute several times a year, and I’ve discovered that my favorite way to do it is to go alone, put in my earbuds, and listen to great music while looking at great art…it’s usually fairly quiet there, but pumping music into my ears puts me in kind of a cocoon that blocks out everything – my head’s full of music and my eyes are full of art and it’s like the rest of the world fades away.  So that’s what I did last night.  I’ve been enduring astounding amounts of jackassery this week and have been frustrated and upset; I could feel it building to dangerous levels yesterday and all I wanted was to switch heads with someone for a little while and get a vacation from myself.  In the absence of that possibility, I thought maybe this little field trip would help, and did it ever.

The Lichtenstein exhibit is pretty big, with a room for each phase in his artistic development, from his early experimental work through the things he did at the very end of his life.  I accidentally entered through the exit and walked through the exhibit in reverse, so when I got to the beginning, I turned around and went through again in chronological order.  They have a small room devoted solely to the sketches that he did to plan out and practice some of his larger pieces – they have actual pages that were torn out of his sketchbooks, with the little paper nubbins on the edges from the spiral binding.  I think that might’ve been my favorite part…there’s a feeling of intimacy when looking at those things, the stuff he probably never intended anyone to see or care about.  Most of the sketches are done in colored pencil, while his finished pieces almost assault your eyes with their sharp lines and vivid primary colors; the sketches are mostly small, while most of his finished pieces are big…it’s like the sketches are quiet little warm-ups in preparation for the big loud public performance.  They’re wonderful.

Afterward, I did a quick tour of my favorite pieces, starting with American Gothic (seriously, how cool is it that I can go see the actual American Gothic whenever I want?) and a handful of Impressionist paintings and the Chagall windows, then out to the Modern Wing, which is currently my favorite part of the museum.  I went up to the second level to say hi to Andy Warhol’s giant Mao and my favorite painting in the whole place, Jackson Pollack’s Greyed Rainbow.  The Modern Wing is wonderful for many reasons, but what I like best is the way the collection pushes you to think about what art really is – what’s art and what’s not?  Who decides, and how?  There’s a room there that is empty except for four film projectors showing a 42-minute movie on each wall – it’s Bruce Nauman’s Art Make-up, which shows the artist covering his face and torso in layers and layers of stage makeup.  That’s all…just 42 minutes of that, with no sound but the puttering of the projectors.  I stood by myself in that room and it was like I fell into a time-warp, because suddenly I blinked and realized I’d been standing there through almost half a Decemberists album, head cocked to one side, completely tranced-out watching this guy cover himself in makeup.   It’s the look in his eyes, I think, that hypnotized me…it’s hard to tell but I think there was a mirror off-camera that he was looking into, staring into his own face – his gaze is so steady that I think that must be it.  There’s an intensity in his eyes that I couldn’t stop staring at, dying to know what was in his head.  That’s art, for me…it can’t only be about what the artist was trying to say, because that implies that there’s a definitive answer and it makes art feel one-sided to me.  It’s about what the piece makes me feel, or think, or start wondering about – that’s interaction, and I think that good art is interactive.  I wandered around that wing for a long time, stopping briefly at certain things but mostly just walking, and I thought about how many of these artists are dead now and how museums can feel so much like mausoleums, full of these artists’ monuments to their own lives, walls splashed with their passion and pain and fear and exuberance for people like me to stare at and dance with on the inside, and I wondered if any of these people knew they were going to live forever like this, or if their work was just them bleeding themselves out into the world and asking, “Do you feel this too?”  And the hot, smoldering knot that had been throbbing in my chest for days started to feel cooler and not so heavy anymore…life hurts sometimes, but god, just look at what people have done with that truth – look at what they’ve made, look at how they’ve immortalized not just themselves but all of us in what they’ve done, whether their work is a soft abstract sigh or a rending howl.  It’s all so much bigger than me and whatever or whoever is bothering me right now, and even in its overwhelming bigness it still manages to feel like it’s looking directly at me and saying, “I know.  And you know too.  We know together.”

I walked back out onto Michigan Avenue feeling calm inside, smooth and cool like still water.

First great love

“She is my first, great love. She was a wonderful, rare woman – you do not know; as strong, and steadfast, and generous as the sun. She could be as swift as a white whiplash, and as kind and gentle as warm rain, and as steadfast as the irreducible earth beneath us.”
- DH Lawrence, speaking about his mother

I’m not a mom myself yet, but it seems to me that it’s one of the hardest jobs there is.  I remember the stuff my brother and I did to our long-suffering mother on a regular basis, and if it’s representative of what other kids do to their moms, I think my assessment is accurate.  So in light of this Sunday being Mother’s Day, I thought a post about my mom would be appropriate.

My mom, to put it succinctly, is a badass.  She would never, ever use such a word to describe herself, but it’s true nevertheless.  I guess you could say I’ve known her a long time, and I don’t remember a single instance when she failed at something.  She can do anything.  Seriously.  Need a fantastic four-course meal served on a flawlessly decorated table in the next four hours?  Fine.  Need someone to run your HR department?  Done.  Need a ridiculously specific, hard-to-pull-off, handmade Halloween costume?  No problem.  Need someone to meticulously plan out and care for your yard?  Easy.  Spill something weird on your shirt that no human being in history has ever spilled on a shirt and you can’t get it out to save your life?  Let her take a crack at it.  In a few hours you’ll get it back not only spotless, but also perfectly pressed and smelling like an enchanted forest.  And she will do all of these things in a cute dress and 4-inch wedges with perfect hair and nails.  This kind of thing must skip a generation, because I can barely cook a chicken breast, can pretty much never get anything out of my clothes, and have (seriously) failed to keep a cactus alive.   But while I have failed to absorb her culinary, laundering, and horticultural skills, she has passed on a lot of important lessons that did manage to penetrate my skull.  Some of these things she told me point-blank, while others I learned just by watching her:

1. Some people are worth being upset over and some just aren’t.  Figure out who’s who and act accordingly – don’t waste your time being upset over someone who is clearly just an idiot.
2. A woman can be sassy and classy at the same time.
3. If you sleep in it, you don’t wear it outside of the house.  Ever.
4. Be not half-assed: If you’re going to do something, give it 100% or don’t do it at all.
5. Champagne makes any occasion fancy…and there are few occasions that couldn’t use a little fancying-up.
6. There is always someone who is worse off than you, so take a deep breath and stop feeling sorry for yourself.
7. Stand up for yourself.  Period.
8. Few things are truly timeless, but Coach leather is one of those things.
9. A lady never shows up at a party empty-handed (and when in doubt, refer to number 5).
10. Family first.  Always.

In exchange for, and as a way to acknowledge, these important lessons, I have a few things I should probably apologize for.

1. I’m sorry about that time when I was really little and you were getting in the shower and forbade me to leave the house until you got out, and the first thing I did was leave the house and go across the street to play with the neighbor girls.  Even though I was only 3 or 4 years old, when you eventually found me I could sense your fear and panic so acutely that I still remember it.  You were just trying to take a damn shower and I turned it into trauma.
2. I’m sorry for the times that I broke your heart.  I don’t know when I did it, but I know that I did, because every kid does.
3. I’m sorry for the tone I used for pretty much everything I said between the ages of 13 and 17.
4. I’m sorry that I never said thank you enough.  You taught me to say thank you sincerely and often, but I still know that I didn’t say it enough.  So for the meals, the Halloween costumes, the birthday parties, the endless chauffeur duties, the ice cream when I was sad, the trips to the lake, the first-aid knowledge, the perfect Christmases, the patience, the generosity, the dancing to Stevie Wonder, the hand-holding, the story-telling, and the example-setting…thanks, Mom.  You’re a superwoman.

King of the wild things

“But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go, we’ll eat you up, we love you so!”

When the news broke this morning that Maurice Sendak had died, in a matter of minutes the internet had exploded into an outpouring of tributes and wistful remembrances of him and what his books meant to us. I grew up with the iconic Where the Wild Things Are, and I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who didn’t (or who hadn’t at least read it to their kids or grandkids). It’s always been at the top of the list of books that I loved most as a kid. I loved the pictures, I loved Max’s wolf costume, and as a shy, introverted little girl, I especially loved how he bossed the wild things around like he owned the place. Max’s mom banishes him to his room for behaving badly; he sulks for a while, and then in his imagination he sails across the sea to a distant land where the wild things live. They try to intimidate him by roaring their terrible roars and gnashing their terrible teeth and rolling their terrible eyes and showing their terrible claws, but he sasses them into submission and becomes their king and they have a hell of a party. In the end, though, he realizes that being the boss of everybody is only fun for a little while: “And Max, king of all the wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.” So he sails back home across the sea, where he finds his supper waiting for him, and it’s still hot. I don’t think there’s a person alive who can’t relate to this – we all had those times in our childhood when Mom or Dad punished us for something and we thought it was unfair and felt frustrated because we didn’t have any say in it. Max’s adventure becoming king of the wild things vents that frustration, and when he feels better, he returns to the comfort and familiarity of home, which is of paramount importance to a child…and to grown-ups, too. As adults we go out into the world every day to kick some ass and be the boss of our lives, but I think that when the day is done, everybody likes to go home where it’s quiet and familiar and we feel safe and loved. I could never have articulated this when I was so young, but Where the Wild Things Are, like any truly great book, made me feel like someone out there understood what it was like to be me. Even when I was little I lived very much inside my own head the way I do now – I was quiet, but that was because my mind was so loud and my heart was so full, and I was too young to know how to talk about it and find out if other people’s minds and hearts were full of wild things too. I often felt overwhelmed by my feelings, and Where the Wild Things Are helped ensure that no matter what else I might be feeling, I rarely felt alone, because someone understood at least one small part of what it was like to be a kid. Thank you, Mr. Sendak, for that gift.

Potential energy

 

OK, so I’ll say right off the bat that this post will probably be a bit of a mess because all this stuff’s been knocking around in my head in a very chaotic way and I haven’t really organized it yet, but I’m taking a crack at it anyway because I’ve found myself thinking about this stuff over and over again recently and I think that might mean it’s important.

I’m currently re-reading Breakfast of Champions because it’s been several years since I first read it, and also because reading Vonnegut is like a brain massage for me.   So I was reading over lunch today and I came across this:

But his head no longer sheltered ideas of how things could be and should be on the planet, as opposed to how they really were.  There was only one way for Earth to be, he thought: the way it was. 

Everything was necessary.  He saw an old white woman fishing through a garbage can.  That was necessary.  He saw a bathtub toy, a little rubber duck, lying on its side on the grating over a storm sewer.  It had to be there.

If you’re familiar with Vonnegut you know that there are a lot of fatalistic sentiments like this in his books…I’ve never been able to decide if he really believed these things or not, but many of his characters do.  The world is the way it is because there is no other way it could possibly be, and the lines I just quoted touch on the idea that maybe it’s futile (in that character’s view, anyway) to entertain thoughts of how things could be any different from the way they currently are.

To me, that is an absolutely impossible and ridiculous idea, because sometimes I feel like I do nothing but think about how things could or should be, as opposed to the way they actually are.  I drive myself crazy thinking about it, because so much of the time I see the way something could or should be and I can’t find any good reason why that isn’t the way it actually is, and that’s profoundly upsetting and frustrating for me.   I have a hard time shrugging it off.  I’m not an idiot and I’m not a child; I know that you can’t expect a perfect world when there isn’t a single perfect person living in it, but I also believe that most of us (I absolutely include myself in this) are capable of being much better than we are, and it just  kills me.  I spend too much time looking at the world through the lens of “this is how it could be” and it gets me into unfortunate situations; I catch a fleeting glimpse of the kindness or generosity (or any other quality I value highly) that a person has somewhere inside of them and suddenly that is all I see.  It doesn’t matter if that kindness or generosity is routinely demonstrated, or whether it’s ever directed at me; I just see that it’s in there somewhere and I swoon over it, and I forget that you don’t get credit for just having the capacity to be a really sweet person.  If you have the potential for great kindness but routinely treat people badly (or you’re good to other people but not to me), that potential doesn’t really count for much.  But so much of the time, all I see is the kind of person someone is capable of being, and I fail to put down my lens and see if they actually are that person.  And a lot of the time they’re not, but I hang around too long waiting for them to be, and then my heart is broken and it’s not really even their fault.  I’ve broken my own heart, I now realize, way more often than another person has.  It’s inexcusably naïve, and I think it’s unfair to myself and it’s probably unfair to other people too, but I don’t know how to not be this way.

And then, too, I recently stumbled across something Goethe once said:

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you will help them become what they are capable of becoming.

I felt like I’d been struck by lightning when I saw that, because I realized that’s how I’ve been instinctively regarding people my whole life but had never realized it or seen it put into words.  Goethe evidently didn’t see anything wrong with it, and he was a pretty smart dude…so do I have it right after all?   I don’t have the ego to believe that I’m helping anyone be a better person by being the way I am.  It’s certainly not a conscious goal or intention of mine, like I think I’m such an awesome person and I’ve taken it upon myself to help other people become awesome too.  Please – I think anyone who routinely reads this blog knows that I’m well-acquainted with my own fully-stocked menagerie of faults.  But it’s an interesting thing to ponder…in the bigger scheme of things, if we all made a habit of treating each other like we’re the people we’re capable of being instead of the people we currently are, would we become better people?   And at the end of the day, do we bear that responsibility to each other?  I don’t have an answer.  But maybe looking at things through my magical Lens of Potentiality doesn’t have to be such a terrible thing, as long as I remember to occasionally put it down and give reality its due.  Should is a dangerous and sometimes ugly word.  It’s loaded with subjectivity and judgment.  But could is a powerfully hopeful word because it implies that it’s possible for something to be different from the way it is, and if you deny the possibility of change, you deny the possibility of improvement.

So yeah, this post is kind of a mess, but my head is kind of a mess right now, and that’s fine.  (Anyone who says they’ve got it all together 24/7 is a liar.)  I’m in a phase where I’m looking at parts of my life that could use improvement and trying to figure out why they’re the way they are and how I might fix them.  It’s hard, confusing work.  Might need to get myself a really cute helmet.

Mind the gap

I’ve written previously about how, in the last year or two, I’ve learned a lot about what it means to be truly responsible for your own life.  Your life is the way it is because you choose you have it that way, and that applies to both the things you like about it and the things you don’t. This is all very easy to say, of course, and decidedly more difficult to actually accept and internalize and implement.  The bottom line is this: Excuses are easy and accountability is hard.  Every single one of us is guilty, at one time or another, of passing blame onto someone or something else when we’re unhappy about the way something’s going.  That’s just how we roll as human beings.  We shoot ourselves in the foot by doing that, though, because I think that when we really hold ourselves accountable for things, we make better decisions and when we make better decisions, our circumstances tend to improve, and isn’t that the whole point?

I think this idea applies not just to the lives we choose to live, but also to the people we choose to be.  I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, particularly the notion that sometimes there’s a gap between the kind of person I want to be and the person I actually am (i.e., the person I’m choosing to be).  At the end of the day, there is absolutely no reason for that gap to exist.  There’s nothing wrong with being a work in progress (we all are) but that isn’t really a valid excuse for not living up to a standard I know I’m capable of.

Details aren’t necessary, but I’ve been letting myself down in a major way recently, and I’m mad at myself for that.  I know what I want, and I respect myself enough to believe that I deserve it.  But I’ve been accepting less and I don’t really know why, and instead of dealing with it head-on I’ve been conjuring up elaborate rationalizations to make the situation seem acceptable when it’s really not, because then I get to take the easy way out and keep acting the way I’ve been acting instead of doing the hard thing, which is STOP IT.  The most infuriating part is that if I would just suck it up and be smart about this, I’d be way happier in the long run.  I want to be the kind of person who will walk away empty-handed before she’ll accept less than what she deserves.  And I’m capable of being that person.  I know she’s in here somewhere, because she’s been waving her arms and yelling “What the fuck are you doing?” for quite some time now.  But that person is scary, because she rocks the boat and steps on toes and calls for uncomfortably honest conversations and heretofore untapped reserves of strength and willpower.  She accepts that not everyone will see and value the parts of herself that she offers up, and she knows that’s not her fault.  She knows that sometimes doing the right thing feels awful but that never stops her from doing it.  She won’t settle for scraps, because she knows the feast is coming.  She scares the hell out of me, and that doesn’t make sense, because she is the best possible version of myself, and why should that be scary?  Why am I afraid to try to be that person – because I’m afraid that I can’t do it?  Because I’m afraid that I can?  I don’t have an answer to that right now, but I am officially calling myself out on my own bullshit.  I’ve got some work to do.

Born to go

let it go – the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise – let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go – the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers – you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go – the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things – let all go
dear

so comes love

– e.e. cummings –

In my assorted adventures, I have learned that one of the hardest things in life is letting go – of a person, an event, a memory, a feeling, a former version of ourselves – and it breaks my heart, because I have also learned that letting go of something that’s hurting you or holding you back, once done, is infinitely liberating and opens you up to better things. It’s one of the most difficult things we have to do, but it’s also one of the most worthwhile, and therein lies the rub. Why do we cling to things we don’t even want anymore, but can’t seem to put down?  How do we let go, and why is it so goddamn hard? I have several friends who are struggling with this right now in one way or another and it’s agonizing to watch, because all I want to do is jump in and FIX FIX FIX and I can’t do that for them.  I can’t even explain to them how to do it, and it’s horrible.

I’ve done my fair share of this – gripping something with both hands and not caring that it was cutting me to the bone.  (Emotional masochism at its finest.) I clung to my pain and let it continue to hurt me, day after day, and in a sick way I was almost proud of it sometimes.  I was proud and perfectly content to walk around bleeding all over the place like a jerk.  I wore my wounds like a badge, and woe to the person who tried to downplay my ordeal or put it into any kind of real perspective.  There is no perspective when you’re in that place, and that’s precisely the problem.  Your pain, your anger, that person, or whatever it is – it fills your entire field of vision and you’re blind to the notion that there’s a version of you without it.  What led me to my point of letting go, eventually, was plain old time.  And if I’m being truly honest, there was some pride in there too. There’s a world full of amazing things out there, and why should I miss it because of what some sorry excuse for a person did to me?  Someone else had plunged the knife in, to be sure, but I was the one twisting it, and I was way too good for that.  Even so, I didn’t let it go all at once like a balloon; it was more like carrying around a bag of sand with a tiny hole in the bottom.  It drained bit by bit over the years until I finally realized I was hauling around a half-empty bag of sand like an asshole, and when that day came, that sucker went straight into the trash.

I think that when we can’t let something go, a lot of the time it’s because we’re afraid to be without it.  If we let it go, what will we hold on to instead?  What’s going to replace it and keep us from sinking?  The thing is…when we let go, we don’t sink.  We float.  And, even better, we’re free to grab something else, and there are so many wonderful things out there just waiting to wander into our hands.  So comes love.

White whale

I think that when we’re out in the world living our lives and we’re looking and/or waiting for something we want (and figuring out when to do which) and we’re just not having any luck, even the most rational and optimistic among us can have lousy moments when we start to entertain the idea that maybe we’re not meant to have this particular thing. Lots of other people might have it, but that doesn’t mean that the universe owes it to us. We’ve been looking and waiting, and waiting and looking, and sometimes we just get tired and wonder if maybe this thing we want, our white whale, is an outdated idea, or worse, a joke, an ephemeral thing that nobody ever really has and we just manufacture facsimiles and call them real.

I was on the train to work this morning and there was a nice-looking youngish couple sitting near me, also on their way to work. I gathered from their body language and snippets of their conversation that the girlfriend had something important happening today that she was really nervous about and her boyfriend was reassuring her. The train stopped and the boyfriend got off. Just before the train started moving again, he came to the window and knocked on it. The girl looked over and he gave her a thumbs-up and mouthed, “You’ll be great. I love you.”

A small thing, I know. But it was enough to make me smile and reassure me that my white whale is not an outdated idea and it’s not a joke, because I caught a glimpse of it this morning.

Tough cookie

My parents raised me to be a tough cookie.  Self-pity is a waste of time, you can’t expect things to always go your way, and if life is really that hard then you need to stop, get a helmet, and jump back in.  And I’m grateful to them for raising me that way, because it prepared me to get along in the real world and not flip out or throw a fit every time life lobbed a little adversity at me.  And it turns out that this was the best possible way to raise a person like me, because I’m basically a turtle with a great handbag but no shell.  It’s getting better the older I get, but in my younger years, EVERYTHING hurt.  Had I grown up in a different kind of house, I would be an absolute disaster of a person because I’d spend my days crying under the nearest table.  But I was raised to be resilient, and to suck it up, and to not expect everyone I meet to be nice to me, and therefore I get by.  I’m easily wounded, but I usually bounce back pretty quickly.  As an adult, I’ve developed a certain degree of pride and a healthy amount of sass, so instead of my standard reaction being “Ow, that hurt, I don’t understand why you’d do a thing like that, why do you not care how bad that hurt?” a more typical reaction for me these days is, “Ow, that hurt, go f*ck yourself.”  At heart I am and always will be a bit of a Pollyanna, and that’s fine, but a girl needs a good healthy dose of sass and realism to get herself through the rough spots.

That being said, even the toughest cookie has a day when she’s not so tough, and unfortunately today was one of those for me.  I am usually very good at taking a lousy situation and finding a way to make it funny, even if I have to resort to the darkest humor imaginable, because it’s my way of not letting a bad situation get on top of me.  And this is a very good thing, because my work environment is chock full of crazy and if I couldn’t laugh about it, I wouldn’t make it through the day.  But every now and then, maybe one or two days out of every 60, I have a day when I JUST.  CAN’T.  DEAL.  Nothing particularly extraordinary or nasty happens, but someone lobs the usual dose of casual insensitivity or pettiness or misdirected anger at me and I’m down for the count.  Can’t get up.  Can’t say “go f*ck yourself.”  Can’t try to shield my poor vulnerable turtle body with my purse.  Can’t do much of anything but lay around feeling beaten.  I think even the toughest person finally reaches a moment when their knees give out and they need to lie down for a minute and just let themselves feel shitty.  Today is that moment for me, and I’ve made peace with it because I stumbled across this image and it made me feel better.

It reminds me that in the end, it’s a good thing that I can still be knocked down, because the day that nothing bothers me or hurts me is the day that time/life/the world have made me hard.  It’s good that it hits me this hard when the world looks ugly, because it means I still believe that, at its core, it’s not.

I’ll be fine tomorrow, because I always am.  I will wake up soft but sassy, scowling but then winking, like I always do.

Sweet home

Chicago celebrated its 175^th birthday this past weekend.  Yesterday a local blog posted its staffers’ recollections of when and how they fell in love with the city, and it made me stop and consider my own.  For me it’s hard to pick an exact moment or experience, because Chicago has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.  I grew up in the northwest suburbs, but we were close enough that it was easy to go downtown whenever we wanted, so my parents took me on pretty regular trips to the Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, Lincoln Park Zoo, and the Museum of Science and Industry.  When we were in high school, my brother was in the Chicago Youth Symphony so I spent summers going to his concerts in Grant Park, and my friends and I went shopping on State Street at Christmastime.  I saw Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables at the Auditorium Theatre and spent many an Air & Water Show melting into the sand at North Avenue Beach.  I remember vividly the first time I ate at R.J. Grunt’s and Gino’s East.  So I spent a lot of my young life doing more things in this city than I’ll ever be able to recall, but what I do remember very clearly is that it never, ever got old.  No matter what the reason for the visit was, there was never a single time that the sight of the skyline as we drove in on the expressway failed to send a thrilling wave of excitement radiating from my chest out to my fingers and toes.  It hits me right in the heart, that skyline.

I’ve been living in the city itself for almost three years now.  I can shop on the Magnificent Mile on my lunch break.  A nice dinner downtown isn’t reserved for special occasions anymore.  Going to a Cubs game doesn’t require days of advance planning.  My relationship with the city is different now, and sometimes it makes me worry.   I have moments when I’m afraid that the shine’s going to wear off the longer I live here.  I don’t want this city to ever stop thrilling me, and sometimes I’m afraid that eventually it will.  Even after only a few years, there are times when I have to fight to not take it for granted…to be fair, it’s usually when I’m freezing to death on a platform because the train is inexplicably delayed or I’m dodging panhandlers on Michigan Avenue or I’m ready to go postal because I’ve been standing in the street for 10 minutes and can’t get a cab to save my life, but still.   I don’t ever want this place to seem ordinary.  I know I should be grateful that I even have the opportunity for a place like this to seem ordinary to me, and I am, but it would make me really sad if it happened.  But then I stop for a second and think about the way love works, at least in my experience. Say you’ve fallen for a pretty girl and just the sight of her makes your pulse speed up and your breath catch in your throat, and you want to make a career out of making this girl smile because of the way her eyes light up and those dimples she gets at the corners of her mouth.  Say everything goes well and you and this girl decide to make a life together, and now you see her every single day.  Do you love her less now?  Of course not.  In my experience, at this point your love does change, but in a good way – it gets deeper, more comfortable, and more familiar.  You inhabit it, and it inhabits you, and while you no longer feel like you might faint every time she smiles, you still look for that smile as soon as you walk in the door after a long day, you still seek it out from the other side of the room at crowded parties.  You don’t know what you’d do without it, because even though it’s become as familiar as your own face in the mirror, the person behind it, the soul behind those eyes that you’ve come to know so completely, still makes you softly, quietly swoon.

I have a feeling my love affair with this city will play out in much the same way.   It may not so consistently electrify me the way it does now, but I’ll come to know it and appreciate it and love it in a deeper, more meaningful way.  And I think that, in the bigger scheme of things, that’s better.

Last month I spent a weekend in St. Louis and on the ride home, coming in on the expressway and seeing the nighttime skyline slowly growing on my right, I caught myself reaching for my phone to take a picture.  How many times have I seen it, and it still impresses me enough that I want to take pictures of it?  That’s love.

Four inches

When I was a senior in college, I almost got hit by a bus.

I was just moseying along Green Street on my way to class, listening to music and thinking about who knows what, and I was so lost in thought that when I got to Wright Street I didn’t notice that everyone around me was standing still because the cross traffic had a green light.  I stepped right off the curb and felt someone grab my backpack and yank me back, and I missed getting hit by a speeding MTD bus by about four inches.  I think it happened so fast that I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of what happened until several minutes later, so I remember turning around and looking at the guy who grabbed me and just exchanging a quick “Wow, right?” look and then going on my merry way.  I didn’t even thank him.  Ten minutes later when I was sitting in class, I got queasy and broke out in a cold sweat.  Maybe that bus would’ve killed me, or maybe it would’ve just hurt me catastrophically, but if I’d survived there’s no doubt my life would’ve been altered.  Think of that ripple effect – if I’d been severely hurt (and there’s no question that I would’ve been), would I have finished school when I did or would I have had to stay on after all my friends had left?  Would I have been able to finish at all?  Who would I have never met, and whom would I have met instead?  Where would I be right at this moment?  What would’ve happened if that guy had bent down to tie his shoe while waiting for the walk signal?  It’s a train of thought that can make a person crazy, because it’s hard to fathom the hundreds of both huge and tiny events that might’ve never happened that would add up to, potentially, a completely different life path.

When I was 16, a boy in my history class asked me to go to the movies with him.  I said yes.  If I’d turned him down I wouldn’t be sitting in this chair, in this building, in this city, at this moment.

When I was in college, I overslept and made the deadline to enroll in an honors English seminar by less than a minute.  If I’d missed it, I would never have met that professor, would never have read those books, and would never have been exposed to the ideas and ways of thinking that are a fundamental part of who I am now.

In 2008, a coworker invited me to his wedding.  I almost didn’t go.  If I hadn’t gone, I wouldn’t have met one of my best friends in the world.

Our lives are full of moments like that – not near-death experiences, necessarily, but moments that are pivotal because if they never happened, it would’ve changed your life.  Sometimes they feel important, but sometimes they don’t.  You step off a curb and someone grabs you.  Somebody asks for your number and you give it to them. You have one drink too many and hail a cab instead of driving home.   You answer a call instead of letting it go to voicemail.  You miss a flight.  Someone asks you to marry them and you say yes.  (Or no.)  You turn down a job.   You decide to forgive somebody one more time.   How many times have we missed a different life by a matter of inches?

When I say “different” I don’t mean better.  I mean different.  And that’s what spares me from being driven crazy by this, because I like this life that I’ve got.  This life is good.  It’s full of smiles and winks and surprises and happy little sighs.  So to the guy who grabbed me: I’m sorry that I didn’t thank you.  You probably don’t even remember that moment, but I sure do.  You’re only one of many, many things that put (kept?) me on the path that’s gotten me here, but without your outstretched hand, I might not be on any path at all.