Running with Stilettos

Roman Holiday

2011-12-04T19:47:00.009-06:00

I booked a guided tour of Italy because I wanted –nay desperately needed—to step out of my pressure cooker life for a week. “Let somebody else drive!” was my simple motto, no small wish for a woman who drives about 30,000 miles a year. I picked Southern Italy as a destination over France and Spain on the theory that while I was guaranteed to see a castles and churches in Spain and France, I was guaranteed to be nose to nose with antiquity B.C. if I made it to Italy. I was also guaranteed to be adrift in a foreign land if I got lost, since unlike French (of which I speak a little) and Spanish (of which I can ask where the bathroom is and tell a defendant “the official interpreter is running a little late, please wait here”), I’m like the lyrics of a Mary Chapin Carpenter song. I “don’t speak a word of Italian.”

What I thought I was signing up for when I dug my passport out of a dresser drawer was something along the lines of the movie “If It’s Tuesday This Must Be Belgium,” where you get on a bus with a bunch of strangers at the beginning of your trip and a tour guide shepherds you through all of your travels like Lassie and you make friends and sit back and wait for the next stop, your biggest worry whether your camera batteries will hold out.

What I got was a riff on a group swing dance lesson in a bar, where “change partners and dance” had me connecting with a new set of people on average about every six hours. Disorienting, exhausting, and nerve wracking on many levels. And as is so often the case with the unexpected … so much more interesting that what I ever bargained for.

Day One…we’re not in Wisconsin anymore.

I’m going to skate quickly over the preliminaries which had me stretched so thin that I packed my suitcase in the final half hour before leaving for the airport. The list of what I forgot to bring was longer than the things I brought, and included pajamas, a watch, and a hairbrush. I finally looked at the trip itinerary while between flights in Charlotte, North Carolina. When the man in my life was pulling up to the airport to drop me off asked “what airline are you flying out on,” I didn’t have the faintest idea before pulling out my paperwork. The lapse was symbolic. I got up to speed in Charlotte, however, and discerned that my travel plans included a great many “vouchers” for transportation and tours and included a three-night trip to Pompeii and Sorrento.

After crossing over the Atlantic through the night, I arrived at Rome’s airport and found the tour company representative who would get me to my hotel. My flight had been delayed by two hours, and so the young lady in charge of my transportation directed me to wait at a nearby airport café until a driver could be found. No better time to break into my new collection of Euro notes and buy something. I selected an ice cream bar, paid for it without excessive emotional trauma, and sat down. It was a brand I’d seen in the U.S., but I never found something like this at the local grocery store. Hazelnut ice cream streaked with chocolate ribbons filled out the middle under a chocolate coating. MMMmmm…

My driver showed up. He didn’t speak a word of English, but I showed him the address of the hotel on a piece of paper, he punched the information into a GPS unit, and we were off and running, with me in the leather-clad back seat of a Mercedes sedan. The driver looked like the handsome, dignified real estate manager with a soft spot for Diane Lane in “Under the Tuscan Sun.” There was sunshine everywhere. I could get used to this, I thought.

I checked into the hotel by early afternoon, and got my first major surprise. My room was barely the size of a tiny college dorm room, and felt more like a large closet. It was neat and clean and smartly trimmed, but with a single bed that had as much “give” as an ironing board, and a bathroom I could barely turn around in. “And I paid extra for this?” I mulled as I thought of the extra hotel charges for traveling as a single person rather than half of a couple. I was to learn later from a single traveler who had prepared for her trip to Italy by studying Italian for three years and reading all the relevant guidebooks, that the single traveler in Europe should expect to be considered the orphaned, bastard step-child of the tourist industry and get used to tiny and cramped accommodations.

At any rate, I shrugged it off, changed into a different pair of walking shoes, and asked for directions to the Coliseum which had somehow never made it on to my tour itinerary. How on earth could a trip to Rome not include the Coliseum, I thought, that site of blood and gore and lions and Christians and imperial excess. The concierge pulled out a map of Rome, sketched out our location and that of the Coliseum, and suggested that I could walk. Sorry, I replied, I was just WAY too tired for that. Plan B was to take the subway to get there. He drew the directions to the transit station from the hotel on the map, and instructed me to " take the blue line.”

I set off bravely, studying the map every other step as though I was navigating an unexplored continent. A left turn and a right turn later, I beheld the “Termini” transit station. It was enormous and imposing, with fleets of buses lined up in front. Somehow just looking for “the blue line” seemed a bit naive. I looked around for someone who might speak a little English. A woman of about thirty passed by. She looked unlike a tourist, and best of all, carried two books in English in a see-through shopping bag. I tapped her on the shoulder and asked for directions. She set me aright.

As I descended into the bowels of the Termini station on long escalators, I felt swept along like a lemming. Still, you ride a lot of subways when you grow up in Chicago, and certain principles are universal. I stepped on to a subway car covered from stem to stern with colorful graffiti, and two stops later emerged into the sunlight literally across the street from my destination. I skipped standing in line for a ticket, and elected to just walk around the Coliseum and stare. Utterly awesome to tread upon giant paving stones that date back for millennia. Sitting in the sunlight, with the Arch of Constantine looming tall and magnificent, and the Palatine Hill (where Romulus and Remus were reared by the she-wolf who saved them in Roman mythology) behind me, I had absolutely stepped out of my own world and into something magical. I strolled toward the Roman Forum, but got sidetracked by a beautiful church up a hill. I was completely alone in the church, but the bouquets of white roses decorating the main aisle gave an anticipatory hint that a wedding would soon occur.

Exhausted, I finally turned away after lighting a candle for my health, and caught the subway back to the hotel. I passed the arriving wedding party as I walked down the hill, limousines and vans and satin and flowers in abundance. The Termini station seemed the equivalent of a large shopping mall as well as a transit hub, and I ducked into a store in search of a few essentials like a nail scissors and deodorant and a hair brush. I found the scissors, never found a brush or comb, but homed in like a hawk on a display of European chocolate. I left the store twenty euros lighter, but with a substantial pile of sweets and the sudden knowledge that you didn’t need to speak Italian to look at the grocery total on the cash register in a checkout line and figure out how to buy stuff. By the time I returned to my hotel, it was with the newly won confidence that, given a map of the train system, I could navigate from one end of the country to another.

As night fell, I checked out the “rooftop garden” of my hotel, which advertised a happy hour of drinks and hors d’ouevres on signs posted in the lobby. No happy hour seemed in progress, but I introduced myself to a few Californians and ordered dinner and a glass of wine from the bar, sharing my pizza funghi e prosciutto with them under a gleaming white moon. They were leaving Rome the next morning to return to their cruise ship. I sighed, and thought that I’d surely meet my fellow travelers the next morning.

Day Two…viva gelato!!

On my second day in Italy, I was booked for a morning walking tour of “Eternal Rome.” Up at six, I showered and, still lacking a hairbrush, combed my damp hair with my fingers. I was picked up in the lobby by a young man from the tour company who did NOT have my name on his passenger list, and brought to the tour office where the young lady shepherding passengers on to a bus the size of a millionaire’s yacht took my voucher with a quizzical look. I trusted to fate. Why not? I still hadn’t met a soul that I would be traveling with.

Our guide that morning was Marco, who set the tour guide standard for the rest of the trip. Urbane and witty, he possessed a great knowledge of English, a bright yellow umbrella which he raised often to signal his location and, most important, the sense to tell us precisely when he would be leaving a certain place to walk to the next scenic location. We took in Trevi Fountain, Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers, the Pantheon, and ended up at Vatican Square where I saw the pope appear at Mass on a JumboTron. Is there anyone who goes to Rome these days and doesn’t look at the Vatican or the Fountain of the Four Rivers and think “Angels and Demons”?

As I walked, I chatted with a gal from the west coast who was about my age. She was lined up to take a walking tour of the Coliseum later in the day. I pestered Marco to call the tour company on his cell phone to get me on the same bus for the same tour. Yippee, I would finally travel for a few hours with someone I recognized!!

At the end of the walking tour, those of us who had not previously arranged to have lunch with Marco were on our own to get back to our hotels. The map of Rome and its subways was still in my pocket. Eureka, I could figure out how to get there on my own! I set off through the Vatican Colonade, past the Porta Angelica, and down the Via Ottaviano on my way to the nearest subway station. As I walked, I passed a tiny gelateria and stepped inside. Forget tiramisu, forget fancy coffees, if you want the essence of Italian sweetness, it's the gelato. I don’t know what makes it magic, by character it seems like soft ice cream, but judging by the number of places that carry it, it fuels the country. I looked at the colorful offerings, and pointed to a tub full of dark chocolate, labeled “tartufo.” The girl behind the counter cautioned, “that has rum in it.” Aaaaaayyyyyy! I gave her the thumbs up, and nodded happily when she asked if I wanted a blog of whipped cream on it. It was heaven in a paper cup, dark chocolate, rum, nuts, and cream, as the warm October sun reflected off the surrounding stone and stucco. Oh, I thought as I walked and dipped my spoon into the confection, it doesn’t get much better than this!

Returning to the hotel, I filled the time between tours with a trip to the rooftop garden to rest my aching feet. Sitting there on floral cushions in a sundress with a book and a bottle of Arancia, I savored the sunlight and the breeze that rustled the olive trees and geraniums and begonias around me. I seriously thought of bailing on the “Imperial Rome” tour later and just napping on the roof.

I returned to the tour company again for my trip to the Coliseum and the Forum. Running true to form, I was not on the bus containing my new friend, but struck up acquaintance with a pair of gals from England, one of whom, Marge, was originally from South Africa and had developed trouble walking. The irony of that was that we bonded over the fact that she had brought a suitcase full of stiletto heels to wear on her cruise. This particular tour guide was terrible. He was short, and old, and spoke English badly, raced through the sights, and kept disappearing in crowds. If there were any lions left in the Coliseum, we would have fed him to them. Nonetheless, I was in the heart of “Imperial Rome,” where emperors and senators had once trod while ruling an empire, and again, I was awestruck.

I discovered, upon taking the elevator to the rooftop garden again, that the place was closed on Sunday. However, a woman named Mindy had just discovered the same thing, and as we rode the elevator down to the lobby, we introduced ourselves and ended up dining at a little restaurant she had already discovered down the block. Although about half my size, she ordered three courses to my one, finding out later that her eyes were bigger than her stomach. She shared some of her risotto. It was sublime.

Before going to sleep, I packed everything up for the next day’s adventures. This would be the start of my three day tour of Southern Italy. Woo hoo, I looked forward to finally traveling in a pack for a few days!

To be continued…

FLORIDA BOOK OF THE YEAR!!!!

2011-10-27T06:55:00.007-05:00

If I had been wearing socks with my sling-back black suede pumps last Saturday night in Orlando, Florida, they would surely have been knocked off. That's because "Fabulous in Flats" was named published "Book of the Year" in the Royal Palm Literary Awards contest, which is put on by the Florida Writers Association.

Yes, I was a long way from home. And for such a great reason! WOO HOO!!!

A word about this competition, and how I ended up sitting at a table at the Lake Mary Marriott hotel that night. It all started with a link to Chicago, my home town. I'm a member of the Chicago Writers Association, clinging to my expatriate ties. A few years ago, the Florida writers group reached out to the Chicago membership, asking for book donations for a silent auction the group was holding for its literacy foundation. Instead of sending a book or two, I sent some matted photographs for the auction. And somewhere along the line, I'm pretty sure somebody down in Florida nudged me into joining the FWA so that I could enter their literary contest.

And now another word about this contest. It is a very exacting competition!!!! This is the only awards contest I've submitted essays and books to that judges everything entirely blind. In other words, the authors have to format their works into plain vanilla typed manuscript submissions, with all identifying markers (names, publishers, past credits) removed. So the playing field is really and truly level. No hoping to dazzle a judge with a cover design, or some kind endorsements. What an honor it is to win in that arena! Plus, it sounds like something straight out of "Casablanca," with palm fronds and oriental rugs and Humphrey Bogart in a white dinner jacket watching the action.

I've had my first book, "Running with Stilettos," and a couple of essays before this earn "finalist" status in the contest, but that was all. And I certainly never boarded a plane to Florida to sit at a pricey dinner in the hopes that I was going to win anything. But this year, there were a few cryptic hints from the folks in Florida that I might be pleased if I came down this time, and so I finally threw caution to the wind and booked the flights. These folks guard the names of the award winners with the same seriousness of the Academy Awards. It can drive a person crazy!
Total for the night: both my book "Fabulous in Flats" and my essay "Mink Recycling" took first place in their categories early in the awards ceremony, letting me sit back and think "okay, that was good. Now I'll finish my dessert!" Cheesecake that has chocolate involved always commands my full attention. But when the Book of the Year award was announced, I was quite humbled, and very happy, and very grateful...and really glad I'd flown to Orlando on a guess and a hope.

Italian Update!

2011-10-16T16:05:00.004-05:00

I have literally just returned from a six-day vacation in Italy. It was splendid. It was awesome. It was gorgeous and wonderful enough to generate about 600 snapshots and run through two cameras and three camera batteries.
It's going to take a bit of time for me to write a proper "Viva Italia" chronicle and post it here, but in the meantime, here's a link to a piece I wrote about just one tiny facet of the trip. It's called "The Limoncello Diaries."
Ciao for now!

http://open.salon.com/blog/runningwithstilettos/2011/10/16/the_limoncello_diaries

Ivanhoe

2011-09-05T21:21:00.006-05:00

I finally finished “Ivanhoe,” an epic adventure that spanned roughly eight hundred miles and fifteen hours of listening as I drove, raptly absorbing the audio version of a book about the Middle Ages that was written in 1819.

For this, I blame Hollywood.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

I first read Sir Walter Scott’s medieval saga some time in my teens. I may have read it again in my early twenties. Given my proclivity for “speed reading,” there was little I remembered of the plot other than the ironic conclusion to the mortal combat between the wounded and reeling Ivanhoe—coming to rescue the fair Jewess Rebecca who is about to be burned at the stake by the evil Knights Templar—and Brian de Bois Guilbert, the Templar besotted to near insanity with Rebecca but doomed by the Order to defend with his sword and lance their trumped up charges of witchcraft. ***Spoiler alert here…if you don’t know how the book ends two hundred years after it was written, that’s just too bad!! The image of Bois Guilbert being felled by a fatal stroke or heart attack, taken as proof by the Templars of divine intervention in the contest, was just one of those things that stayed with me.

I don’t know what possessed me to turn to Netflix and rent the 1952 movie “Ivanhoe” recently. But I did—I’d already run through everything I wanted to see at Redbox—and so I settled in for an evening’s entertainment in lavish Technicolor. With matinee idol Robert Taylor as Ivanhoe, Elizabeth Taylor as Rebecca, and the always exquisitely cavalier George Sands as Brian de Bois Guilbert, what could possibly go wrong? I had no idea (although I thought the castle siege went on for far too long)…until Ivanhoe and Bois Guilbert went at it in the lists at the end, and a robust and middle-aged Ivanhoe dispatched his rival with an axe to the chest.

WHAT!!! shrieked my memory, aghast at this literary treason. This cannot stand, I thought. And so I fixed the notion of re-reading the novel just to cleanse my palate and restore order to the universe.

Of course, I have little enough time these days while juggling two absolutely splendid part-time jobs to read a newspaper much less a historical novel of several hundred pages. And so it seemed that the time to finally make the switch to audio books was upon me. I grabbed my laptop computer and my keychain library card, and started to peruse the library online catalog spanning libraries in a great many surrounding counties. The audio versions of Ivanhoe and Moby Dick were the first things to arrive. Dear God, Moby Dick came with even more CDs, and so I popped Ivanhoe in and settled in for the fifty-mile drive to work the next morning.

One thing I’d like to make clear right off the bat—what a marvelous story!!! You’ve got all the bad blood still brewing between the defeated Saxons and the victorious Normans after the battle of Hastings distilled to the estrangement between the young blond Saxon knight Ivanhoe (played in the movie version by swarthy forty-year-old Robert Taylor) returned from the Crusades,and his father Cedric who has disinherited him and still hopes for a Saxon revival. There’s the strict code of chivalry (derived from “chevalier,” in turn referring to a horse-riding warrior), jousting and swordplay, the ludicrous excesses and moral lapses of the clergy, the lovely Saxon princess Rowena, the equally stunning Jewess Rebecca who tends Ivanhoe’s wounds and falls in love with him despite the unbridgeable gulfs of religion and social station, Robin Hood and his band of outlaws, Richard the Lion Hearted careening around the countryside incognito as “the Knight of the Fetterlock,” treachery and treason and Prince John scheming to assassinate his brother, avarice, Knights Templar engaging in most un-monklike licentiousness, and a castle to be stormed.

And another thing here—what amazingly stuffy writing!!! I did not remember that from the days of yore. These days my tastes run mostly to suspense novels like Lee Child’s “Jack Reacher” series, books that are swift and colorful and full of violence and near misses and daring rescues. My eyes probably register about one word out of every ten as I race to the ending, devouring chapters like a wave jumper anticipating the next big one and surging toward it in the backwash. And still, as the narrator’s voice took me from drafty Saxon halls to sylvan glades, from the colorful lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouch to the turrets of a Norman stronghold, I was enthralled.

There was so much I had missed before this. The contempt and cruelty that could be shown by knights toward any who were not of their own station or above them. Richard the Lion Hearted’s careless ineptitude for actually governing a country. The antipathy shown toward Jews in England at that time, and their precarious existence amidst the Christian fervor that spawned the Crusades.

The narrator voiced the many different characters, ably imparting gruffness and earnestness and fear and obsequiousness as required … but it was still a bit of a stretch when he voiced the female parts in falsetto. Still, there was a lengthy sequence which Hollywood had overlooked and I had remembered not at all, and which held me spellbound for miles. While the Norman castle of the murderous Reginald Front de Boeuf was under siege, the lord himself lay mortally wounded. And to the side of his deathbed came the hag Ulrica, to taunt him after setting fire to the castle’s fuel magazine in order to aid the Saxon attackers. Ulrica, we have learned, was once the beautiful Saxon lady of the castle, until Front de Boeuf’s father and his men at arms took it years before, slaying her father and her seven brothers as they defended their home to the death, the halls and stairways slippery with their blood. Ulrica then became the prize of the victor, but instead of killing herself, she took her vengeance by fomenting quarrels between father and son until her vanquisher was slain by his own son … who then took her for his mistress until he tired of her. Prematurely aged, a prisoner in the castle she once ruled, Ulrica has her fiery revenge on the Normans who slaughtered her family. And I was left wondering, how on earth had I forgotten so tragic and moving a part of the tale? I guess speed reading isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

My mind has been thus cleansed of most of the Hollywood bastardization of this multi-layered and eloquent tale. although the image of Elizabeth Taylor in tights climbing through a stable window in a completely manufactured scene has been a bit hard to erase. And I’ve become aware of how listening to a book read aloud is an entirely different sensory experience than reading it, one that slows down the brain so that each and every word can be measured and images jump from it.

I’m still not sure I’m up to tackling Moby Dick on CD. That would likely require about a thousand miles of driving to get to the last chapter. That’s a lot of time to spend at sea with a nutcase of a ship’s captain.

But as long as I’m still in the mood for jousts and knights errant, “Don Quixote” may not be very far behind.

Printers' Ball Ramble

2011-07-31T14:00:00.019-05:00

One of my BFFs, journalist Liz Welter, and I made an impromptu dash to Chicago to check out the seventh annual Printers' Ball at the historic Ludington Building on July 29 to see what all the advance hoopla was about. There was plenty of literary hoopla at the event, which was a free-to-the-public celebration of small press and independent publishing, complete with a giant Ouija board, dance music, costumes, poetry reading, and giveaways galore. We had a fine and interesting time, even though most of the jostling, teeming throng was (1) young enough to be our kids and (2) total strangers. Nevertheless, I still managed to run into one friendly face, Alba Machado, blogging doyenne of the Literary Chicago website, who was looking both adorable and absolutely unrecognizable in her face paint for the evening. After a couple of hours of milling around and grabbing samples of literary magazines, we stepped next door to the Eleven City Diner for dinner. (Hint: the slushy vodka lemonade was perfect for a hot summer night, and you just MIGHT get a dollop of hot fudge added to your cheesecake if you beg for it). The next morning we spent a lovely few hours exploring Michigan Avenue, from breakfast coffee and pastry at an outdoor café table at Starbucks to Buckingham Fountain, the gardens around the Art Institute, Millenium Park, and finally a visit to the Chicago Cultural Center where we checked out the beautiful stained glass domes and artwork, and located a copy of my second book, "Heck on Heels," on a shelf at the Chicago Publishers Gallery. Alas, it was finally time to head back to Wisconsin and pick up Lucky at the kennel. I'm sure he had a wonderful time talking to other dogs while we were gone!

Cursive Writing II

2011-07-12T10:57:00.003-05:00

And for a few more words on the subject of the value of cursive writing, here are some recent thoughts from my friend Cynthia Clampitt, the incredibly talented freelance writer and author of "Waltzing Australia."

Cursive writing does so much more than just get words down. Kids can no longer take notes in class because they can’t write fast enough; they can’t read notes from anyone more than a decade older than them; plus they lose the HUGE advantages writing by hand offers, primarily accessing the right side of the brain and processing/synthesizing information in a way that makes it more likely to “stick” in the brain.

“LOL” is useful in an email, but it’s not language. If we lose language, we lose the ability to think; we lose ourselves.

I’m really worried about a generation growing up without knowing cursive. How will they sign their names? Plus the fine motor skills developed in handling a pen actually have an affect on the ability to think.

One advantage to writing longhand that hasn’t been mentioned—if you cross it out, you can still see it. When you type over something on the computer, it’s gone. Especially when writing creatively, I love being able to look back and see something I’ve crossed out and being able to say, “oh, that would work here” and drawing a little line with a caret to insert it.

Non-creative writing, I can do directly on the computer. But even then, all my notes will have been taken longhand. By the time I’ve written a few pages of notes (whether an interview or from books), I can already feel the ideas forming as to where the story will go.

Don't Ditch Cursive Writing!

2011-07-10T20:36:00.006-05:00

There is no little amount of irony that I am "writing" this diatribe against Indiana's recent decision to quit requiring the teaching of cursive writing to students in favor of concentrating on keyboard skills while I am sitting on my living room sofa with my feet up, typing the essay on my laptop computer. My fingers fly over the keyboard, connected by "invisible wires" to the internet via a modem and a router that sit two rooms away. No paper, pens or ink will be involved at any point.

(Don't be fooled by the fact that I can use the words "modem" and "router" in a sentence, my technology skills are such that I still swear that interruptions in my wireless service are caused by pieces of dust on the internet highway.)

And yet...despite the fact that I personally work at various times from four different computers; blog regularly on four or five different websites; have been known to upload photos to my website from a table at Starbucks using a flash drive and a laptop, and routinely file electronic legal briefs with the court system with a few keystrokes, I still think the Indiana decision is a really bad one on a truly epic scale.

Losing the connectivity of cursive writing feels a bit like losing a shared language--a universally understood way of communicating that was instantly recognizable unless practiced by doctors signing prescriptions. The Indiana rationale was based on forward thinking, which has been the root of many really bad decisions, from nearly exterminating the wild bison of the Western plains to creating the atom bomb. Our wired society depends more and more on keyboard skills, the theory goes, and so that's where the emphasis should lie.

My first thought, of course, was from the practical side: so what do you do for communication when the power goes out? I asked that recently of my artist daughter, a fabulously creative child of this technology age. "Print," she replied practically. I posed the same question a day later to a pair of twenty year olds traveling to a Renaissance Faire with myself and my love, so that we could immerse ourselves in an atmosphere of greenswards and chivalry and party like it was 1599. "Print," they replied also, although one noted that a relative had had trouble with a passport application because he had printed his signature rather than writing it in cursive. Aha! I thought, strike a blow for detective work and the need on occasion for handwriting analysis.

Still, no one seemed to think that a temporary power outage would significantly curtail our ability to communicate in writing with one another. I guess they weren't as moved as I was by the turning point in the movie "Independence Day," where the pockets of rebel resistance around the globe were finally able to coordinate a battle plan against the evil alien invaders by bypassing current technology and communicating via Morse code. I suppose one could always print a message to be sent by carrier pigeon.

Various wits on the web weighed in and likened cursive writing to teaching the lost art of butter churning, learning how to hitch a horse, or how to make a quill pen, missing the point entirely that butter churning and snaffle bits have absolutely nothing to do with the moving of ideas from one mind to another.

I'm sure that there are reams of educators and statisticians who can calibrate just how our brains light up and work and process when we push a pen in linear, looping fashion to record our thoughts rather than let our ten digits dance on a keyboard. I'm sure that there are many educators who will opine on whether some important examinations and applications still carry a component of a written essay, or whether handwritten test answers might sometimes have a greater guarantee of authenticity and origination than something sent via computer.

But what I keep coming back to in my own mind is that feeling once again of a shared language, and the channeling of ideas and words into a flowing stream. I write differently when I put pen to paper, flashing synapses of discovery traveling with single minded intensity through the nerves and muscles in my arm, reaching the fingers of one hand and flowing through on to paper that I can physically touch like a flower bud unfolding. With a keyboard, the words can sometimes fly along just as fast as I can think them, diffuse, not terribly focused, in need of revisiting and moving around and cutting and pasting, my thoughts a mile wide and an inch deep.

That changes when I pick up a legal pad and a comfortable pen, and have to slow my thoughts down so that the words emerging on the page can catch up. Sometimes the thoughts are deeper. Sometimes they are totally surprising, like something from Pandora's box got loose as they were stuck in traffic.

I have no intention of giving up my computers, or my typing proficiency, or returning to the age of quill pens and inkwells, just to make a point. But I remember hiking to some bluff headlands along Lake Michigan a few summers ago, with a notebook and a pen, and writing--quickly and in cursive, of course--while the sun sparkled on the water and the red columbines danced in the wind beside me, and gulls soared beneath the cliff edge. My soul opened up, and the words poured out on to the lined paper, in fluid lines and loops and channeled into linear thoughts. I did not feel the lack of a laptop or a smart phone or an iPad in that place, where the smell of evergreens was like perfume and fox kits tumbled together over the next rise. I hope that children in this next generation won't find themselves in a similar beautiful place, moved by nature around them but without a way to simply write things down.

A Study in Orange

2011-06-16T20:06:00.009-05:00

The view from a patio chair tonight was a stunning mix of vivid oranges and yellows and tangerines. The little butterfly on the marigold was skittish at first, but came back later and positively posed for closeups.

Field of Greens

2011-05-30T20:09:00.009-05:00

In the cool mist of morning, under azure skies, I summoned my courage and my equipment, put on my protective armor, and set out to do battle on a Field of Greens...with Creeping Charlie rampant.

In other words, I set out to finally weed the flower gardens. With a tank-top and a sprayed-on double coat of sunblock and bug spray. When you added in the layer of sweat that came with the adventure, if any bug came in for a landing he was going to slide right off and sprain a wing.

Remember, I am still new to this "gardening thing." Over the past four summers, sparked by loving a man who solves every landscaping challenge by planting another flower bed, vast stretches of my yard have been turned into verdant collections of flowers nestled in shredded cedar. There was that first ground-breaking bed of perennials that transformed a couple hundred square feet of river rock over weedy black plastic into a lush paradise for birds and gophers...and won my heart. The former decaying woodpile that, burned to ash and rototilled to oblivion, now hosts a collection of irises and poppies and sunflowers. The garden around the raised septic tank cap that solved the problem of how to cut around it with a lawn mower. The smaller garden surrounding the fake boulder hiding the well cap, solving THAT lawn mowing problem. It looks like I have a miniature version of the Rock of Gibraltar sitting between the house and the garage...but the butterflies that land on it aren't complaining. And we can't leave out the gardens along both sides of the house, one of them devoted to daylilies and columbines, the other to butterfly bushes and hollyhocks.

As I was putting them in, happily running to the nursery for more plants, hauling many cubic yards of mulch home from the hardware store, choosing between perky floral visors and pastel gardening gloves, nobody mentioned I was going to have to keep weeding them. Apparently a two-inch top layer of cedar chips does not have the same weed retardent property as, say, asphalt. And just as I can turn a blind eye for quite a while to the drifts of dog hair and cat fluff that collect in the corners of the living room and the angle of the stairs, I can walk right past a lot of weeds and not notice that they're there.

There is, however, always a tipping point, and that was reached this weekend. Not only had I finally disposed of the last of a quartet of projects that had kept me chained to my computer for the better part of four months as the snows finally melted, this coincided with the arrival of the dandelions, whose cheery yellow heads drew my eye toward the gardens where they were settling in. I pulled one, then another, then another. And just like stripping wallpaper, there's no such thing as just doing a little at a time.

So Sunday morning dawned, and I girded for battle. After four years of this, I've learned a few tricks. Start in the cool of the morning, and keep to the shade. Music is essential, so out came the boom box, a patio end table, and a thirty foot extension cord. It was a little early in the day for a malt cooler (and I was absolutely NOT starting with an Absolut screwdriver at nine in the morning), but an iced tea kept the boom box company. The wheelbarrow came out too, and the gardening gloves, and the skinny hand shovel for assorted miscellany. Lucky did his part too, chasing blackbirds and deer out of the yard, chewing on tough stalks of last year's daylilies, flopping down in the soft bed of dianthus, finding it more inviting this year than the lavender.

I started with the very worst of the lot, the stretch of butterfly bushes and hollyhocks. Dear god, there were strange tall weeds--and lots of them--that were more than a foot tall. Along with the dandelions, of course, and clover, and the pervasive, invasive, strangling mint called "Creeping Charlie" that had moved in seemingly out of nowhere from the lawn. Well, that wasn't entirely true, I thought. Earlier this spring, I'd taken a whole ten minutes to spray a line of Roundup around the edges of the gardens on a still day, trying to stay a step ahead of the emerging crabgrass. But Mother Nature abhors a vacuum, and while the crabgrass had indeed been beaten back, it appeared that everything else under the sun had moved in.

The work was slow, and hot, and sweat mixed with sunblock dripped off my forehead and on to my glasses. Once in a while I gave up bending over at the waist, and finally dropped to my knees to give my back a break. The pile of limp weeds in the wheelbarrow grew higher and higher, and I took occasional work breaks in a plastic lawn chair, surveying my progress. The task at times seemed endless...but oh, the discoveries! The understoryheld such a story.

Under that dense canopy layer of weeds, mint and dandelion fluff, a half dozen new butterfly bushes had seeded themselves and begun to flourish. I dug them out and potted them to share. The hollyhocks had similarly spread their bounty as well, and dozens of little sprouts beckoned to be replanted far and wide. Moving down the line to a stretch of coneflowers, I found that there were more of those than had been last fall...and that the profusion of black-eyed susans that greeted me were perfect for filling in that sparse bed. Irony abounded at the thought that the day before, I'd bought more than a dozen snapdragons to plant between the rose bushes...and hadn't checked to see how many were already growing freely from last year's seeds.

The roses were the biggest surprise of all this year, simply because they were still alive. Winter is harsh here, and the temps dip to twenty below zero at least once or twice a year. It's a place where responsible gardeners cut back their bushes in fall and swaddle them in leaves and styrofoam cones to protect them from winter's harsh bite. Unfortunately, I found myself busy and distracted last fall, and when I finally turned around and thought about covering the roses, the snow had done that already. "Oops," I thought ruefully. Well this would give me an excuse to shop for new ones in spring.

When the Jackson & Perkins rose catalog first arrived, I drooled over it, in fact, like a teenage boy with a copy of Playboy. But to my great surprise, every single one of my "Lazarus roses" actually made it through. There's a lesson there somewhere, regarding resiliance, or adversity, or never giving up hope, or perhaps all three, and I think that it applies pretty well to people too.

At any rate, I finally put away the boom box, dumped the weed collection into the "burn pile," sprayed the rose bushes to keep away the aphids that were starting to congregate on soft new stems, and parked the wheelbarrow by the garage. A hot shower stripped away all the magical chemical protections against sun and bugs, but left me suitable to sit on the living room sofa again.

I'm not done of course, yet. With a garden, I've learned, there is no such thing as "done," until winter. But for the moment, I've beaten back the invaders. And at last count, at least, the coneflowers are holding their own.

The Forest in Equipoise

2011-05-18T21:10:00.004-05:00

With Lucky weighing in at close to sixty pounds these days and containing the spring-loaded energy of about five dogs, we’re getting out for a lot of walks in the woods and fields. Our usual off-the-leash jaunt takes us through stands of pines and along the edges of meadows, and through an ever changing tapestry of green and gold and red and brown. From the frozen cover of white the landscape emerges in spring, first just bare brown, then tinged with a faint shade of green. Then suddenly, as if God flips a switch, the meadows are covered with shiny grass that tosses like silk in the wind, and daffodils and crabapples and violets add bright splashes of color.

In a reminder that natural drama eternally surrounds us and we are just bit players in a larger dynamic picture, there is always something new to discover. The ribcage of a deer, picked clean in a meadow. Only days before it had been attached to the entire deer, which lay freshly dead next to a pasture fence. A scattering of turkey feathers and entrails. A freshly dug den—fox or woodchuck? And as the days lengthen, the sprouting of leaf buds and fresh branches and new foliage.

A few years ago, we hosted a French foreign exchange student, and I took him around the place for an introduction to the neighborhood. While I was trying to access my high school French to convey the concept of a “coyote” to Henri (pas comme un chien sauvage, mais comme un petit loup!) an explosion of noise and feathers caused our heads to snap in unison. There, across the meadow, was a red-tailed hawk in flight…being chased by a turkey hen, also airborne. The hawk wasn’t wasting any time. Like I said, there’s always something new. Try explaining THAT in French.

But for a brief spell, there is a tipping point to be found between winter and summer, and we were there just a few days ago. I’m not even going to try to throw “spring” into the mix, it just muddies the picture. Where I live, we have known blizzards on Mother’s Day, and sixty degree days on Christmas Eve. I was in a tank top three weeks ago. We’re expecting frost again tonight week. Just because the gophers are starting to come out to play and the bluebirds are hatching doesn’t mean you still don’t have to keep a watchful eye on your tomato plants. Switching from the flannel "winter" sheets to the summer ones requires a big leap of faith, and no small emotional investment.

No, this is simply between winter and summer. There is a short, perfect stretch for exploring, perhaps only a week or two, when winter’s snows have melted and the forest floor has dried up, but the trees and shrubs have barely started to bud. When the paths followed by deer and other critters are still visible, and the contours of the terrain are clear. I live in one of the areas of Wisconsin that were sculpted by the ebb and flow of great ice sheets, where the forward surge of glaciers pushing earth and rock and the following retreat of meltwater streams left formations known as kettles and kames and drumlins and eskers. A walk in the woods can be a strenuous and unpredictable adventure if you’re trying to get anywhere “as the crow flies.”

From where we stood on our usual route, however, I could see where the forest floor rose and fell away. Even better, I could see for a pretty good distance, with no scrim of leaves and brush to camouflage and disorient me like they did Hansel and Gretel. In other words, no need to think about leaving a trail of breadcrumbs! Lucky and I forged ahead noisily, dead leaves and twigs crackling underfoot.

It didn’t take long for inspiration and ambition to catch hold. It had been years since I’d walked this stretch, when the trees were a bit shorter and the brush was a little thinner, and there had been a groomed snowmobile path to follow. Now the path had disappeared from disuse, replaced with waist-high brambles. Still, the troughs and hills and slopes beckoned. After a few minutes of ambling, I could see more daylight, and remembered that a cornfield lay to the east. We picked our way down a slope to the edge of the field. A flock of turkeys scattered as we emerged from the woods. I turned north again, walking in a furrow next to the woods that fell away to a shallow ravine. There was a tremendous rustling going on in the ravine as I walked, and I wondered what forest denizens were lurking beside me. A herd of deer? Another flock of turkeys? My curiosity ran wild, but as I looked down the slope, I could see nothing with fur or feathers.

I knew that if I followed the edge of the field far enough, there was a perfect spot for sitting. At the top of the ravine, there was a rectangular black boulder about two feet high and four feet across. I pushed aside a sapling that had sprung up at the edge of the enormous rock, cutting into the spectacular view, and settled in on the warm familiar surface.

The first thing I discovered was the source of the clattering noise. Nothing so dramatic as Bambi and the Great Stag of the Forest. Nothing even as big as a fox or a woodchuck. No, the noise was the product of dozens of small birds hopping and rustling among the leaf litter on the forest floor. I had left my binoculars at home, and at this distance there was no chance of determining eye stripes or beak colors or feather patterns to narrow down just who was having all that fun. They just looked like a bunch of busy, happy sparrows, and I left it at that with a laugh. Small feet, big noise!

Lucky jumped down from the boulder and wandered around happily, following his nose down a hundred different tantalizing trails. There are times I think this dog would follow his nose into a brick wall, he sniffs with such concentration. His delicately drawn head ends in a precise, pointed nose, and when he really gets into gear, his dedication to following a scent around the front yard resembles an artist drawing a sketch without ever lifting pencil from paper. A post-modernist sketch to be sure, more Picasso than DaVinci, but you get the idea.

Without the heavy cover of summer leaves, I could see that the landscape was actually scored by parallel ridges. Not just one ravine cut the landscape, but several. I imagined an eight-point buck carefully picking his way along the top of one of the ridges. Then an idea took hold. It was a perfect day for exploring. The next time I had the time and energy, the leaves and the mosquitos and the deer flies that go hand in hand with all that splendor would surely keep me out of the woods altogether. So when we finally turned back for home, I took a detour from the cornfield and reentered the forest, looking for an entry point to the ridges that didn’t involve all fours. I found one, then another, and followed both, feeling triumphant and just a little bit like a mountain goat. The path running along the top was wider than it seemed from my spot on the boulder. Still, I thought, if any squirrel was watching me from that boulder, he would have been mighty impressed.

Curiosity slaked, I finally turned back. There were enough trees and vines between me and the cornfield that I puzzled for a while as to how to get back to where I started. Then I spied a familiar landmark—a blue and white beer can I’d passed on the way in—and got my bearings again. These were what I like to call “working woods.” Not the forest primeval, many of the trees are too young for that. Not a tended and groomed kind of place like you’d find at a British manor or in a Disney movie, either. The kind of woods where you’ll come across the occasional tree stand, and discarded shotgun shell, and a beer can or two. Sometimes all three together.

I left the beer can in place, as a marker for the next hiker.

The woods are starting to fill in by the day, the forest floor covered with violets and garlic mustard and trilliums and lush growth of all kinds. A blanket of green has fallen over the countryside, a translucent watercolor wash of chartreuse and mint green. Red maples begin to leaf, occasional maroon thumbprints on the canvas. Day by day it fills in, until the woods have achieve an impasto character of olive and emerald and huntsman greens, obscuring streambeds and stumps and drawing a curtain across the "welcome" sign. It won’t be long before I start weighing the virtues of fresh air against the smell of the bug spray needed to keep the impending mosquitoes at bay.

But I can still feel the warmth radiating off that big black rock, and imagine the noisy rustling of the birds is the ravine below.

Mink Recycling

2011-04-24T15:55:00.018-05:00

This essay took first place for "creative non-fiction" in the 2011 Royal Palm Literary Awards!

I don't know where the mink stole originally came from, or who it had belonged to before it ended up in my godmother's closet. But there were a great many things in Aunt Mary's apartment that I had either walked past over the years while visiting or had never seen at all.

Amber earrings, probably from her trip to Russia? News to me. A commemorative glass from the 1958 Kentucky Derby? I nabbed that immediately as we took inventory of the things in her apartment, preparing for the inevitable estate sale that followed her funeral. We both loved horses. She got me my first horseback riding lessons, in fact.

The full-length fake lynx coat in the hall closet? I'd helped her buy that coat at an upscale shop in Brookfield, Wisconsin on a bitterly cold day two decades earlier. I hadn't seen her wear it in years. But what on earth was my maiden aunt doing with a mink stole?

As we sorted and vacuumed and displayed and scrubbed and polished in preparation for the sale, the mink came out of the shadows and into the daylight. It was soft and clean and in good condition, but had obviously changed hands several times. The name monogrammed into the lining didn't belong to anyone in the family, so my best guess was that my mother or grandmother must have picked it up for a song at someone else's estate sale years before and brought it home "just because." Perhaps Prince Charming would come calling with an invitation to the ball, and it paid to be prepared. I've never lived in an income bracket where the words "I brought home a mink stole today" would fit in a conversation about shopping, and I can't think of anyone else in the family that applied to either.

So the mink got priced and tagged, and attractively staged where it would be noticed by foot traffic between the dining room and the kitchen on the sale day. A lot of things walked out of the house by the end of the day, I was happy to report, many of them pieces of heavy furniture we were glad to be rid of. But the mink was still hanging there at the end of business, plush and furry and forlorn, and looking completely out of place in a moderately middle-class second-story apartment in Chicago. Even the fire-sale price slashing we did right toward the end of the sale didn't get it to move.
And so the mink stayed on the premises a while longer, back in a closet, as most of the other remaining unsold clothing got donated to charity and the knick knacks were farmed out for sale on commission. Hopelessly languishing out of its proper social bracket, the stole managed to combine the appearance of a haughty society matron in humble surroundings with the touchable, comforting feel of Lassie. A few months later, when my German cousin Ingrid and her husband came to Chicago to visit, we held a family gathering of live music and reminiscence at my mother's apartment, and somehow the mink stole came out for an impromptu modeling session. I finally brought it home with me to Wisconsin, where it took up an entirely new languishing position in the back of MY closet.
Well, Prince Charming didn't come calling in a carriage with an invite to dinner at the castle, but a friend of mine who owns a set of white tie and tails came through with an invite to the Viennese Ball at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. I'd attended the ball for the first time the year before, with the man in my life on my arm in a rented tux and a pearl tie tack, and we'd enjoyed ourselves enough to make a second appearance this year a done deal. And with the weather forecast calling for snow snowers and temps in the low thirties that night, what's a woman in a strapless gown and opera length gloves who's channeling her inner Hapsburg empress to use for a wrap?
Out came the mink. Now, I'm not a "real fur" person at all. Ever since my first dog got her foot caught in a leg-hold trap thirty years ago while we were out exploring in the woods, I've had a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of fur coats and fur stoles and fur anything that involves killing an animal and displaying its fur to broadcast status and fashion. There was blood on both of us by the time I got her free. I remember Aunt Mary and I were both very pleased a long time ago when we located that faux lynx coat during our shopping expedition. She was an animal lover too.

On the other hand, I reasoned as I worked on my outfit for this year's ball, I was doing a lot more recycling these days in general. More cardboard and paper, more plastic, more metal, more styrofoam. My "recyclables" in fact often outweigh the trash in my house. And, I thought, the minks that made up this stole most likely died about sixty years ago. It's not like they were part of any viable stream of commerce after the Kennedy administration.
'
So...the mink came with me to the ball. I recycled the opera gloves from last year, came up with a pair of rhinestone and faux sapphire earrings that I've had for a good fifteen years and have NO idea where they originated, bought a sequinned evening purse at a second hand shop, and found a clearance-priced dress on a bridal website. And, just as I did last year, I made much of the fact that my name in German comes out to be "Maria Theresa," the Hapsburg empress for whom the main ballroom was named, and even danced a polka with the lovely gent who comes to this event dressed up as Emperor Franz Josef.

I think that if Aunt Mary (who taught AP Modern European History for decades) could have lived to see the pictures of me with the mink and Franz Josef, she'd have definitely approved. But she'd have to stop laughing first.

The "Nancy Drew" mysteries

2011-03-20T10:45:00.010-05:00

In my next life, I think I want to come back as Nancy Drew.

You remember her from your grade-school days, surely. Unless you're young enough to have had this definitive rite of literary passage supplanted by "The Babysitters Club" book series.

The Nancy Drew I remember was the fictional blonde teenage detective from River Heights, the pampered only daughter of widowed, well-known attorney Carson Drew. Daddy gave her a shiny new dark blue convertible for her eighteenth birthday. Money was never an issue for Nancy.

Nancy hadn't been more than a tiny footnote in conversation for about forty years for me. Every once in a while when I'm reviewing cases as a prosecutor, some little odd detail in a police report or some sequence of events in a criminal history makes me want to find out more before I march in to court on a bail hearing. On those days I've been known to call up a police department or a district attorney's office ten states and two time zones away, and after the initial pleasantries, introduce my mission with the words "I'm playing Nancy Drew this morning..." It breaks the ice, we laugh, and then we get down to the business of real crime, not the fake stuff. Just like everybody knows that Frank Sinatra was a singer, everybody knows that Nancy Drew was a beloved character in a book who always solved a mystery.

But then I cleaned out the garage.

Last summer was a whirlwind of ambition for projects in and around the house. The list included putting in a brick patio, expanding the flower gardens, getting the garage and house re-roofed, and cleaning and reorganizing the garage. Hard to figure which was the jewel in the crown of this assortment--the sight of the brick patio which warms my heart every time I step out the front door, or the fact that I see the walls of my garage for the first time in two decades. And they now have shelves!!

At any rate, cleaning the garage was an epic physical and emotional journey in many ways, an archelogical foray through the strata of my life, layers of history revealed by magazines, beach toys, cassette tapes, and scrap lumber, and ritually cleansed by several bonfires and a trip to a waste disposal facility. Where else does one take the ancient PC that my youngest bought for me for two dollars at a church rummage sale when he was around eight? It never worked ... but he was so happy about his "find' that I still waited until he left for college before I let it go.

And in the farthest corner, in the last of the "mystery" bags, I found a trove of books and gadgets I'd brought back from a different expedition to my past years before. Among them, and relatively untouched by the mice who had evidently had the run of the bag for quite a long time, were a couple of Nancy Drew mysteries, circa the mid-1950s. I remembered that while I'd loved to read the books as a youngster, our family budget didn't support collecting anything, so the bulk of the books I'd read had come from my neighborhood library in Chicago. At the time of the discovery, I was still up to my elbows in dust, dirt and wall brackets, so I vowed to sit down one sunny day and peruse them in more leisurely fashion.

That day came yesterday. While this morning brings a fresh sheet of snow and sleet to the landscape right before spring comes in like a lion, we'd been lulled by several days of warmth and sunshine and melting snowscapes. I'd brushed off the leaf litter and dirt shoved on to the patio by the snow plow, and pulled out my lawn chairs and a little side table. Then, with my pants legs rolled up to catch a few more inches of sunshine, I settled in to read the last of The Scarlet Slipper Mystery.

The book was a light confection of chance meetings, mysterious strangers, European accents, stolen gems, and a beleaguered little country of "Centrovia" apparently beset by civil war. I didn't really care who had smuggled the diamonds into the country in a series of ballerina paintings, but I was utterly struck by just how perfect a life Ms. Drew enjoyed.

Start with the lovely features and the perfect figure, followed by the three-story house on a shady street she shared with her dad, the new convertible, the rapturous, unceasing and fawning admiration of the community, and the perfect boyfriend Ned Nickerson, who came complete with a little green sportster, a cohort of good-natured fraternity brothers and a summer cottage in the family. Ned was a good guy to have along on Nancy's adventures, given his eternal willingness to tackle someone if needed, and to take Nancy out to dinner if her spirits needed lifting. Throw in a brave wee doggie named Togo, and the cheerful housekeeper Hannah Gruen who lived to fuss over Nancy and keep the teenaged sleuth and her friends supplied with a steady stream of delicious sandwiches and other homemade snacks. Yes, poor Nancy had lost her mother when she was very young ... but Hannah had clearly taken over the maternal fussing role, with none of the potential for family disagreements that lurk in actual marriages. She was paid to be that nice.

As I read, I picked up on a pattern of Nancy being able to turn every small temporary setback into gold, and consulted "The Secret of the Old Clock" for verification. Yup, there it was just as I remembered, the confrontation with the evil Topham sisters in the misses' wearing apparel section of Taylor's Department Store. The mini-adventure began with an unpleasant confrontation and tug of war over a "lovely pale blue dance creation" of lace and chiffon, and ended with Nancy getting the dress at fifty percent off and with a seamstress' improvement in the style of the chiffon skirt torn in the fracas.

It was a little like watching Barbie and Ken solve crimes, but Barbie never had it this good!! I could get used to a life like that. For a while, at least. I think after about a month of this treatment, I'd feel like I was in the land of the Stepford Wives. Still, a comfortable place to be, with an endless fashionable wardrobe, an eternal wellspring of good luck, and all meals prepared.
After I finished reading about satin toe shoes and gem smuggling, I turned to Wikipedia to get a little more perspective on the character who had been my youthful role model until she was replaced by imperiled heroines of regency romances. The first revelation that knocked my socks off was that there was no actual author by the name of "Carolyn Keene" laboring over her craft on a manuel typewriter while sipping tea and thinking up new adventures. Ms. Keene was just a pseudonym, the books ghostwritten under contract by many individuals to the plot specifications they were given. The person who actually thought up the "girl detective" series in the 1930s was Edward Stratemeyer, who had first created the "Hardy Boys" detective series for young boys not long before. As Hannah Gruen might say, "Well, I never!"

And the second big shocker was that Nancy had evolved as a character over the years. Go figure, don't we all? But in her case, I don't think it was for the better.

I'm eventually going to have to track this down for myself (shades of Nancy Drew girl detective coming to the fore), but "research has shown" that the Nancy who first appeared in the 1930s was sixteen, feisty, independent-minded, outspoken, even flippant at times. By the 1950s, however, she'd been recast as being sweeter, kinder, less bold, and less abrasive. "Cardboard" was the description of one critic. Descriptions of the Nancy that appeared in the 1960s and 70s include being more docile, more demure, relentlessly upbeat, a girl who has learned to hold her tongue. Even later incarnations add more romance (gasp ... she breaks up with Ned in 1995 when she goes to college!!), and cover illustrations include boyfriends or villains in the background rather than relying on just Nancy to carry the cover.

Hmmm... I've generally found that as time has gone by, I've gotten less docile, more outspoken, braver, more adventurous, and less compliant than the earlier versions of me. I was somewhat saddened to note Nancy's documented personality changes over the years, in some ways a backwards arc of revisionism.

Still, in any of her incarnations, I have to admit that Nancy had it pretty darn good. But if I'm coming back as Nancy Drew in my next life, I think I'll pick the version from the 1930s. I'll take "feisty" over "fatuous" any day of the week.

Mitchell Park Domes

2011-02-17T13:01:00.005-06:00

In the dead of winter, at Milwaukee's Mitchell Park Domes, it's possible to remember that there is still warmth in the world...and we'll feel it again eventually.

Snowmageddon

2011-02-03T20:07:00.003-06:00

Mother Nature hit the “reset” button the other day.

I’m still savoring the experience…though if you’d heard the swear words I was using while I shoveled the back porch, you’d think I have selective memory. Like women get about going into labor.

We got hit by a storm earlier this week that was one for the record books, at least in the Midwest. Chicago got nailed with a two foot snow dump that paralyzed the city, while in my neck of the woods, seventeen inches was still plenty of snow to shut the world down and tell us who was really in charge.

Weather forecasters had been beating the alarm drums steadily in the days leading up to when the heavens finally parted. Many took heed, myself included. The day before the storm was set to hit, instead of spending my lunch hour listlessly pushing the pedals of a creaky exercise bike, I dashed to a nearby grocery store to stock up staples like cat food, Charmin, and fixin’s for hot chocolate. Snow started to dust the streets as I drove home, the first chimes of an ominous symphony.

The next morning, there were a few inches of white on the ground, but I cautiously made my way back and forth the twenty five miles to a college where I had just begun teaching a class. I took the back roads rather than risk getting on the interstate, which appeared to be a parking lot from the string of unmoving red tail lights every time I crossed over it. The roads had a treacherous, “greasy” feel beneath the snow tires. Class over, I made my way back home, called my office to say that I wouldn’t be driving fifty miles to get there the next day, and settled in for the storm.

Mother Nature didn’t disappoint, as the winds picked up and the snow came down. The stretch of woods between my house and the road whipped back and forth in the wind like fronds of sea grass effortlessly tossed and pulled by ocean tides above. Some time during the evening, the thought occurred to me that if the power went out, water would be in short supply and so I filled the bathtub closest to the kitchen. Some time after than, I realized that if the power went out, I wouldn’t have heat either.

It was quite the conundrum, at first. I was already in my robe and slippers, in no mood to go outside for any reason. The man of my dreams was waiting the storm out twenty five miles away. Virtually all of the firewood we had split the winter before was sitting out in the garage, which is not attached to the house. It wasn't going to walk in to my living room by itself if I just said "bibbity, bobbity, boo!" Hauling it in would mean getting out of my fuzzy slippers, dressed and insulated like the Michelin man, cold, wind-swept, and dirty. But if the electricity went out, there went the power garage door opener. I doubted I’d have the strength to lift the door on my own. What finally sent me out to the garage was the prospect that if the power DID fail in the middle of the night, I’d be doing all of the above … while holding a flashlight in my teeth.

The fuzzy slippers came off, the work gloves came on, and eventually I hauled in enough dry wood to keep me warm for a full day. Then, with my cell phone and two flashlights on the nightstand beside me, I finally called it a night.

I tossed and turned to the sound of the wind rattling the windows all night. Then, finally, it was daybreak. The sixteen pound cat moved from his spot on the bed as my foot-warmer, and the dog started making “let me out” noises in the kitchen. I peeked out the window. The world was white. It seemed a good day to just stay indoors and stay in those fuzzy slippers. The best laid plans…

When I opened the door to let him out, we discovered that the drift in front of the door was deeper than the dog. And he is not a small dog. In fact, he’s approaching the size of a red wolf. Sigh. “C’mon, honey,” I wheedled. “Let’s go out!!” I waved my hand cheerily in the direction of the far side of the driveway, where the drifts were shorter and his tail feathers less likely to freeze. Lucky was having none of it. Two more cheery waves failed to move him any further from the warmth and safety of the carpet in the foyer. So once again I stepped out of the fuzzy slippers and suited up like the Michelin man, this time to blaze a trail for the pooch. Such are the responsibilities for the leader of the pack.

Stepping outside, all distinctions between patio and sidewalk and driveway and gardens were entirely obliterated, vanished like ancient ruins in the Sahara swallowed by shifting sands. Between house and garage were enormous, wind-sculpted waves of pure white, some as deep as my chest. Tree branches hung heavy under their burdens of snow. The sun shone brilliantly on this new world, reflecting off the shelf of white crystals that precariously overhung the living room window from the roofline above.

There was, of course, no way to travel anywhere. My tiny car has a ground clearance of about four and a half inches. I’ve made snowballs bigger than that. On a day like this one, the only thing to do is to wait for the local guy with the snowplow to show up, and keep yourself amused until then. It’s a rare day that I don’t find myself in my car driving somewhere. I complain often about the hefty number of miles I drive in a year … but I sometimes think that the feeling of the highway beneath my wheels would be a hard thing to go “cold turkey” on for any length of time.

Still, with no choice in the matter, I parceled out the day to do what needed to be done. My forays outside—to clear the front walk, take out the trash, shovel the back stairs—were punctuated with plenty of hot chocolate and the occasional episode of “Law and Order.” The nap on the sofa was entirely impromptu. Working from past experience, I knew enough to take a ski pole with me when navigating some of the deeper drifts to the back of the house. Lucky proved himself a good guide to finding the shallower stretches of snow, and I followed in his footsteps. The outdoor work finally done, I set to a writing project that was long overdue. There was solitude, and quiet, and—if you don’t count Lucky begging me over and over to throw a tennis ball for him in the kitchen—a great deal of peace to be had.

“Rescue” in the form of the snow plow finally arrived late in the afternoon, and in a matter of minutes, the familiar contours of my driveway reappeared, framed by vast mountains of snow. There was freedom. There was access. There was the ability to get in the car and … drive. At that exact moment, I really didn’t feel like it. I settled back into my favorite spot on the sofa, and flipped channels, a blanket over my lap.

The next day found me back in my usual groove. It was not a day where I had to drive to work, but still I put the key in the ignition and made my rounds like a hamster on a wheel. I picked up photographs, bought salt for the water softener, got some new printer cartridges, returned a DVD to the video store, bought stamps at the post office, mailed thank you notes, and took Lucky back and forth for a few hours of socializing at “doggie day care.”

All told, I accomplished a lot of the usual things. In very much the usual way. Nothing that will stand out in the tapestry of my life for any reason.

It makes me wistful, already, for that magical sea of white.

Health Care Manifesto

2011-01-30T09:09:00.002-06:00

As the mother of three adult children with serious pre-existing medical conditions—one case of cancer and two of Crohn’s disease—I’d like to add my voice to the current health care debate. After years of emergency room visits, consults, surgeries and medications, all are currently doing well. But the need for continuous and decent health insurance coverage perilously hangs like the Sword of Damocles over their futures.

So while Republicans and Tea Partiers cheerfully roll up their sleeves and dig in on their campaign promises to dismantle health care reform and let free market competition dictate the best values to be had for “health care consumers,” I’d like to point out that that basic term recasts reality for ideological convenience.

In the difficult world of trying to provide our families with decent medical coverage in this dire economy and job outlook, we shouldn’t be categorized as health care “consumers.” Health care “victims” is more like it. “Hostages,” at the very least.

Calling us simply “consumers” in this minefield of co-pays and deductibles and coverage limits and employer contributions implies some sort of sharp-eyed and dispassionate retail adventure akin to buying a refrigerator. Or perhaps a recliner sofa. An exercise in comparative shopping that puts the consumer in the driver’s seat, ready to walk out the door and take his money to the next store or provider if the deal being offered isn’t sweet enough. Under those conditions, yes, you’re likely to get a better price on that refrigerator or sofa. It’s the nature of the free market.

But “comparative shopping” for health insurance coverage for your family is entirely different game, and one with deadly stakes. Not only are you betting on trying to provide good medical care and cost coverage for yourself or those you love in light of unforeseeable catastrophic events in the future, you are blindly investing in trust. Trust that valid claims and reasonable medications will not be denied or delayed beyond their usefulness; trust that your doctors will be able to give you the proper medical treatment for your problems without a bean counter looking over their shoulders and casting a chill on their decision-making; trust that you and your family will be taken care of with compassion and wisdom and won’t be forced into bankruptcy at the end of the crisis.

If you buy a refrigerator and it doesn’t work, you have the option of having the store either take it back or fix it for you while live on peanut butter sandwiches or go out to eat. If the recliner sofa you bought as cheaply as possible after visiting a half dozen furniture stores has a defective reclining mechanism, neither your health nor your home nor your family nor your life’s savings are at risk while you find a replacement or demand a refund. But if the insurance company you have thoughtfully chosen on a sunny day in the free market from several slickly-packaged options elects to deny coverage for a transplant, or a course of treatment, at exactly the moment when it is most needed, you are helpless. A life may hang in the balance, hooked up to monitors and IV bags and catheters, and yet you are virtually powerless. The idea of exercising your power and right as a consumer to take your business elsewhere right then is a grotesque joke.

Years ago, I remember talking about health insurance with a “soccer dad” whose son was on the same team as mine. As we stood on the practice sidelines, he vented about his situation. His wife was the primary breadwinner, and she was seriously ill. There was a large deductible involved, as I recall, and under whatever rules of engagement applied, he was somehow precluded from choosing a cheaper radiological test provider. He was angry, and frustrated, and railed at the unfairness of not being able to better comparison shop for a cheaper result.

I felt stunned, like I had gone through the looking glass. Why, I thought, at this time of horrible stress and family crisis, should shopping for medical tests be his concern as though he was pricing tomatos? All logic and compassion dictated that at this particular time, his primary job should have been to reassure his young children that their world wouldn't end and to take care of his wife while the medical professionals did their jobs. And yet here he was, fixating on scrambling for dollars instead.

Given the position and vulnerability of the “consumer” in the vast food chain that makes up the health care system and health insurance funding, this is an area of our lives that absolutely cries out for governmental involvement and protection to guarantee the health and safety of its citizens. I slept easier for a short time after “Obamacare” was passed, knowing that my children could not be denied insurance coverage because of their prior health problems.

Now, with a new face on Congress intent on repealing those improvements, the sleepless nights begin again.

Thrillered

2011-01-20T13:42:00.006-06:00

I finally came up with a sentence in the English language scarier to my children than the “your Mom’s going on Spring Break” line was a few years ago. And those words would be …

“Your mother is on YouTube…” (pause for effect, note the holding of breath at this unforeseen announcement, the slight brow crinkle, the arch of one eyebrow slowly rising upwards in disbelief)

…"dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.”

Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha! With four kids to inform individually after the fact, trust me, I got all the mileage I possibly could in the maternal embarrassment department.

And doesn’t it feel just wonderful when that happens? A cosmic turning of the tables, a reaffirmation that you can still surprise them. Just when they thought—after the passage of the junior high and high school years—that you were okay to be around again, cue the theme music from “Jaws.” Gotcha!

I could write a thousand words or more about the look on my eighth grade daughter’s face when I showed up at the door of her classroom bearing Halloween cupcakes…and dressed like Pocahontas. Oh wait a minute, I did that already. But this was so much better.

Not that it was intentional to start with. I had been oblivious to the entire thing until I was sitting in my office one day, across the desk from a defendant and her attorney, ready to engage in what’s called the “pretrial conference” part of the case. I leaned forward politely and expectantly, thinking we would start talking about crime and punishment and alibis and mitigating circumstances, when he looked at me with an air of bemusement.

“Didn’t I just see you on television this weekend? In a park, in a really big group of people … dancing to Michael Jackson?”

I was BUSTED!!!!!!!

It was hard to keep a straight face after that for the rest of our official tête à tête.

As usual, when I’m engaging in silliness or risk of epic proportions, there’s a certain man that I hold dear who has his hand extended, saying “Let’s!”

This would be the same guy who has been responsible for my being on the back of a Harley flying down the interstate surrounded by a hundred other bikers coursing like blood through an artery, hanging on with one arm around his waist while I snapped pictures over his shoulder with the other. Or strolling around the grounds of a Renaissance Faire decked out in a lace-up bodice, long skirt and cleavage while he accompanied me in tights, period boots and a leather vest. Or cutting concrete pavers with a chop saw off the back of a Ford F-150. There’s rarely been a dull moment.

So when my friend Mary Kay announced that as part of a park promotion she was handling, she was organizing an effort to break the world’s record for the largest number of people dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” at the same time, it was just a matter of time before he said … "Let’s!”

Never let it be said that I didn’t try to prepare. An entire 48 hours before we were set to show up at the park, I put my younger daughter’s DVD collection of Michael Jackson videos in the disc player and tried to figure out what was going on. How hard could this be, I thought. The first hitch in the plan came in the fact that I have absolutely no sense of coordination or rhythm. Walking in a straight line is my fitness activity of choice.

The second problem came in realizing that if I was going to mimic what Michael Jackson was doing in the video, I was going to have to not only do the same steps … I would have to do them in reverse since his image was facing me on the screen. Oh, dear. I made it through the first thirty seconds and gave up, counting on being surrounded by a cast of thousands to mask the inevitability of my faking it.

A whole 24 hours before the dance started, my boyfriend’s daughter mentioned that there was an instructional website devoted to teaching the greater world how to master each and every turn, spin and lurch in the Thriller video. Three hours before we were scheduled to leave for the park, I finally looked it up on my home computer.

On the plus side, the website was a wonderful resource, imparting instruction in each movement via example, repetition, consolidation, music, verbal cues and prompts and the ability to repeat each step over and over and over until you got it just right and were ready to learn the next. Relentlessness is a great teaching too. On the down side … it would take me a week to get the whole thing committed to memory. Assuming I had enough room on the old hard drive to even remember the whole thing. Really, how many hundreds of times did you have to listen to the long version of “American Pie” before you could sing all the lyrics and not just the “Bye Bye…” refrain?

I stared diligently at the screen, pushing the “repeat” button often and jerking spasmodically on command. And then my escorts arrived, and my standard for the day’s performance slipped from “git ’er done” to “as good as it gets.”

We poured into the park with about sixteen hundred other folks and went through a few warm-up sessions at the edge of ye olde swimming hole before the actual event. Humanity—and other Michael Jackson fans—showed up in all varieties. There was a goodly contingent of folks like me, grownups who were dressed for a summer stroll in a park on a Sunday afternoon. Namely, wearing khakis or capri pants and sandals and T-shirts, and maybe holding a beer. Then there was a vast delegation at the other end of the spectrum who courted the spirit of “Thriller” and Michael Jackson and the local TV cameras with ghostly makeup, ragged lace, tattered satin and fishnets. And boy, did THEY have the moves! Oddly enough, none of them seemed to be over thirty. Somewhere in the middle fell the younger kids, and the dilettantes who came sporting perhaps a single glove and a snap-brimmed hat. My guy sported a bright red vest, a dangling earring and, of course, the glove.

Eventually, the time of reckoning was upon us, the music started and the cameras rolled. I managed some respectable “zombie shuffles” and “head snaps,” and otherwise tried to flail and lurch in sync, secure in the knowledge that since I was a good half dozen rows from the front of the group, my primary value was as cannon fodder for the official head count. I tried not to bump into anybody when the direction of the dance suddenly turned and the group’s movement channeled the swift synchronicity of a school of sardines changing course in a nature documentary.

Later, all laughing and sweating and exhilarated, I filed the experience under the “been there, done that!” category, and went back to work secure in the knowledge that absolutely nobody in the larger world had any idea what I’d been doing that Sunday afternoon. Until we started the pretrial conference.

I emailed Mary Kay, who moves with the speed and efficiency of a panther in her promotional work, for an update. Well as a matter of fact, she said, while we hadn’t managed to come close to cracking the world record for a group “Thriller” dance, we’d set a new U.S. record and videos of our local effort had run on local news channels, the Today Show and CNN. Oh good lord!

I checked out a few of the videos for myself. I was buried somewhere in the background of one, for about two seconds. If I hadn’t been looking for myself and known where I was standing in the day’s lineup, I’d never have seen my own face. My colleague must have been watching this on a Jumbo-Tron with a magnifying glass to recognize me.

And yet…in the annals of what you can use to ambush your kids on a slow day, it still officially counts.

The park is now covered in a blanket of snow, the TV cameras have long since moved on to cover other deranged souls like the guys who jump into frozen lakes in their Speedos on New Years Day, and I haven’t done a “zombie shuffle” in six months.

Still … my youngest son just got engaged over the holidays. There won’t be a wedding for at least another year or so. I’d say that gives me plenty of time to learn the rest of the “Thriller” moves before the reception. Just in case it's a slow day…

Angels in the Snow

2011-01-10T22:26:00.005-06:00

I can still remember the snow falling in buckets and clumps, drenching the landscape, cloaking the interstate and obscuring any sense of where one lane ended and another one began, muffling the brightness of the far-off street lights like a scrim on a theater stage.

We could see the street lights above empty, wind-swept streets as we passed by the highway exit that was our best hope of finding a motel and waiting out the storm. We drove past because we had been in the left lane of the highway when the exit finally came into view, and the road surface was too slippery to change lanes quickly enough.

Surely, we thought, we’d get off at the very next exit. We weren’t in the middle of the Gobi desert or Antarctica. This was the American midwest. There had to be a motel somewhere nearby, somewhere with central heating and clean sheets and a bathroom, where we would admit that a blizzard in northern Wisconsin had proven that there existed some times you should just stay home and wait it out. I cautiously and slowly edged the minivan into the right lane—or what seemed to be a lane—and kept watching the dark side of the highway for a snow-covered green blur that would be the next road sign.

My daughter pored over a map of Wisconsin by a tiny reading light above the dashboard. If that last exit was Menomonee, there had to be smaller towns up ahead.

We had started the journey hours earlier, a familiar three hundred mile trek from our home in southern Wisconsin to the Twin Cities where my daughter was a college student. Sometimes her dad drove and I stayed home with the rest of the kids, and sometimes I drove. The trip one-way took a good six hours in good weather.

The weather had indeed been good when we started, that much was true. There were a few snow flurries going on as we pulled out of the driveway, but four-wheel drive will make you cocky. The weather forecasters were predicting snow in our path, but who ever expected total accuracy from the weatherman? We blithely set out in daylight, with the goal of making it to the Twin Cities not far off our usual schedule.

As daylight faded, the snow picked up. For about an hour we vacillated over whether it was getting heavy enough to justify benching ourselves at a motel until morning, or whether it was starting to lighten up. Wishful thinking can be so disarming. And with every mile we drew closer to our destination, the more tantalizing the thought of completing the journey without interruption.

As we sailed past the exit and watched the street lights get swallowed by a blanket of white, we finally knew we’d overreached. Still, we were confident that a room for hire would be ours soon. I drove cautiously, slowly, along the set of tracks cut in the snow by the drivers ahead. There appeared to be only one lane left to use, and every car on the road that night seemed to be following an unspoken rule to stay in that single lane, guided by the faint pinprick of taillights in the distance assuring that there was still a road to find, like hikers traversing a narrow ledge.

There are instants in your life when you don’t know if you will live or die, and we suddenly had ours. From out of the swirling, snowy blackness, a set of headlights perched higher than ours came up on our left. A semi-trailer whose driver had less patience than everyone else on the road inexorably crept up on us, bearing closer and closer. I could see the headlights casting their glow through the driving snow, and I focused totally on keeping the minivan straight and completely in its lane. The truck never touched us. But as it passed, the wind force it created caught the minivan like a giant hand and sent us sliding off at an angle, completely out of control. I remember that the sides of the truck were yellow and white as our headlights turned toward the giant machine while it passed methodically, implacably, like Leviathan cleaving the silent, wine-dark sea. As the truck drew away from us and disappeared into the dark, a drift of snow swirled off its roof and plunged us into total whiteout. We slewed and yawed blindly out of control. I turned the wheel desperately back and forth, trying to get some purchase beneath the wheels, but my efforts were useless.

After a couple of seconds that felt like a lifetime, we felt the front of the minivan hit something hard. A guardrail had kept us from sliding into a ditch or worse. “Honey, are you okay?” I asked. “Sure,” my daughter replied. “How about you?” I was fine too…but as I looked toward her, I could see the pinpoints of light signaling the approach of the next car in the single snow-covered lane. We realized instantly that our minivan, positioned crosswise across the lane of traffic, would be invisible in the storm to oncoming traffic until it would be too late to stop. I slammed the van into reverse and hoped that luck would go our way. If it didn’t, we’d be out of the van and over the guardrail before the next accident happened.

The wheels caught, and we pushed back into the lane of traffic. Slowly we drove on, and took the next exit. The road had barely been plowed. The map showed a small town a few miles north, and we aimed the damaged van that way with hope in our hearts. We were deep in the middle of nowhere. The few driveways that we passed were unplowed and uninviting. No sign announcing a town ahead was anywhere to be seen.

We finally drew near what seemed to be a farm, with a tall yard light silhouetted in the snow, and a large sign out front that gave it an air of respectability. The driveway looked as if it had been plowed at some point during the storm. We drove up to a small house. I left my daughter in the car, and knocked on the door.

A young woman answered, her eyes cautious and wary. We’d been in an accident on the interstate, I explained, and were trying to find a place to stay. The map said we’d find a town in this direction. Were we on the right track?

No, she answered. The town ahead no longer had any type of lodging. More important, she said, there was a dangerous and winding hill not far ahead of us on this road, and we should not try to navigate it in this storm. Well then, I replied. My daughter and I clearly needed a place to stay in this storm. We were easy keepers. Could we just pay her forty dollars to sleep on her kitchen floor?

She was sorry, she said, but she would have to refuse. She had young children in the house, and her husband was away from home, and she just did not feel comfortable with letting two strangers in the door while he was away. We would just have to get back on the interstate and keep driving.

I returned to the car, crushed and stunned. Ahead of us lay a road we had no business being on. Behind us lay the interstate where we had nearly died. The seaworthiness of the van was a wild card. My daughter busied herself with brushing and scraping the snow from the windows as I tried to inventory the damage to the front end and tell whether or not the van would be able to make it much farther. I called my husband to report on the night’s events and tell him that we were safe so far…but uncertain as to where we would end up.

A man with a beard and a dark snow-covered jumpsuit came up to my side of the van as I said goodbye on the phone and tried to figure out what to do next. I was startled, but rolled down the window and explained our situation. He thought for a minute, then had us follow him to the trailer located behind the home we had just been turned away from. His wife was out for a little while, and so he couldn’t commit just then to letting us stay the night…but at least we could get out of the cold.

We followed meekly…and when the pair of them were finally together, they must have decided we posed no hazard to them and folded us into their tiny, cramped home. As the snow continued to mount outside and we finally tucked into some warm food, we exchanged our stories. The young woman who had turned us away was in fact their daughter-in-law, they said. Until recently, the man with the beard and his wife had lived in a state farther east. But their only son was a farmer. And when it appeared that he needed help to keep the farm running, they had left their comfortable life behind and moved here to help him keep his business and his family on solid ground. It was not the life they had predicted, but it was the one they chose without hesitation.

My daughter and I slept in their bed that night, exhausted but warm and safe. By morning, the storm had ceased and the skies had cleared and the sunlight positively glistened on the newly fallen carpet of snow. We scraped the heavy coverlet of white off the van and said our goodbyes and heartfelt thanks. I slipped a fifty dollar bill on to a nearby shelf before we left.

My daughter and I retraced our path eight miles back to the exit we wished we had taken the night before and dropped the van at an auto repair shop to get checked before continuing on. The whole world seemed swept clean, a glorious radiance and purity to the snow cover that extended to the horizon. The highway surface itself, plowed clean in the middle of the night, looked as well-maintained as if Martha Stewart had been running the road crew. We chowed down over pancakes and sausage and pondered the strangeness of fortune and the kindness of strangers.

It has been a good eleven years since that desperate night in the snow. A snow- covered road still frightens me more than it used to. When I look back, I know that I have never been closer to being dead than at that instant when our car spun out of control in blinding snow in a blizzard on the interstate. I wonder at the workings of fate, and the hand of God, and the presence of angels. There’s a lot that I’ll never know.

But I know for sure that every so often angels appear without wings or halos, celestial choirs or golden flutes or harps. Once in a while, they just show up wearing a watch cap and sturdy Sorel boots and a snowmobile suit.

Angel on my Shoulder

2011-01-04T18:56:00.004-06:00

It is entirely, absolutely, unassailably true that there is nothing cuter than a kitten. My son Robert and his fiancee Hannah brought this little guy home for the holidays, at six weeks and barely more than a pound. And with most of the extended family allergic to cats, guess who's babysitting until the next semester starts! He's growing by leaps and bounds, but still has a way to go before he's not at risk of being stepped on by the dog. Or by anybody else. In the meantime, he's mastered the trick of scampering up my pants leg and up the back of my shirt to reach my shoulders, where he perches like a parrot on the arm of a pirate. He'll outgrow it too soon...

Full Circle

2010-12-06T21:17:00.007-06:00

If living well, as they say, is the best revenge, I was sure having a red-letter day in the payback department.

Starting from the top down, I was standing in front of a buffet table of canapés that were both expensive and absolutely delicious. The holiday gathering was double-billed as a wine tasting event, so while my left hand held a beaded little black evening purse, the right held a long-stemmed glass filled with a German “Eiswein.” I have a predilection for sweet German wines, and so this was right up my alley in the palate department.

I was decked out in iridescent chandelier earrings and a sparkly white see-through sweater, with a Victoria’s Secret satin camisole keeping me both decent and legal. A plum-colored cut velvet skirt and black suede sling-back Brazilian high heels with tiny bows rounded out the ensemble. I’d bought the shoes on impulse the winter before, spending more than I ever do (and paying full price, which I almost NEVER do!) in a defiant act of faith that at some point, I was going to have an event to wear them to. It’s kind of a variant on “Field of Dreams.” I’m a big believer that if you buy the shoes, the occasion will follow.

I was newly divorced and happy about it, and my ex—who would normally be at this yearly affair since by all rights it was his bar association’s Christmas party—was spending the evening home with our younger kids. And as I stood by the buffet table, savoring the good food and the great company, an attorney who originally knew me as just "the spouse" at these gathering for nearly two decades, came up, his wife beside him, and asked “So…what can you tell me about the judges in your county?”

I cheerfully and obligingly held court. I’d been in my job for a good five years, so I gave him a complete, humorous rundown. I eventually wound down the evening swapping courtroom tales of valor with a group of young attorneys who had graduated from law school around the same time I did just a few years earlier. For the first time since I’d be going to these gatherings, I felt like I had my own posse—if just for an evening—and it felt really, really good.

It hadn’t been the most auspicious of evenings to start with. I’d only committed to attending the day before, in part because the organizers were still trying to fill the tables. Guilt over never paying my dues to the local bar association (except for the year I’d graduated from law school so that I could join in the group picture) tended to have me keep a low profile for most of these things. And there was a blizzard in progress as well that evening.

On the other hand, the venue was only a couple of miles from my house. I was still driving the Subaru, which was like a four-wheel-drive tank. And post-divorce, it seemed symbolically important to show up at some of the same things I’d attended as part of a couple for years, just to fly the flag and show that I was still standing. I didn’t know if doing so would cut down on local gossip or throw fuel on the fire, but that wasn’t the point. I just needed to show my face. And smile.

As I said, it was a great evening. It wasn’t until the next day that the irony struck me full force. Because I had been in the exact same knot of conversation seventeen years earlier with the exact same people. The same attorney, and his wife, and myself. The only person missing from the tableau was my ex-husband. And the contrast couldn’t have been deeper, or more moving, or more amazing in terms of a journey.

Seventeen years earlier, I was seven months pregnant with my third child. This was our first big local bar outing, a semi-annual gathering of most of the local lawyers, their spouses, and usually a guest speaker or some type of entertainment. My husband had recently taken a job with a local firm. I was as big as a house, and clad in a cheap, tent-sized floral maternity dress from J.C. Penney. We were all dressed up for dinner, and the entire thing—and all the people in it—was brand new to me. I really, really hoped that I’d make a good impression.

And in that venue, I was entirely peripheral. Nearly invisible. The stay-home wife and mother. I gravitated naturally to the other wives, and we swapped tales of motherhood and girl scouting and cake baking and car-pooling. I might have mentioned that I was a free-lance writer, but I don’t remember. The scene would be repeated for many years. Most of the attorneys (at least in the beginning) were men, and they gathered in groups like pin-striped gladiators, swapping tales of courtroom adventures and victories won and appeals mounted and opponents thwarted and justice demanded. The whole arena had a heavy testosterone base under the wall-to-wall carpeting of the country club dining room.

As the years rolled by, there were channel markers and growth rings and metaphorical roots to trip over along the way. The riding accident that put me in the body cast. Law school. The discovery that my brain not only still worked, it worked better than it had when I went to college for the first time. My youngest child starting kindergarten, and my oldest leaving for college. A few memorable meltdowns, a couple of them in the exquisite Gothic church where I got married. Arguing a case, and then another, and then another before the state supreme court. And finally, a long time in coming, the divorce. One step up, two steps back, a couple forward again, a sidestep here and there.

And so the contrast between those two face-to-face encounters with the local attorney, seventeen long and arduous years apart, stood out in my mind as a token of validation, with the brightness of a diamond in a platinum setting on a sunny day. Just look how far I’d come!! The irony made me feel warm and tingly all over. Like a snapshot of victoriously reaching that peak you attempted to climb in utter defiance of your better judgment and common sense and aching muscles when you were on vacation.

That was then. One thing you can always count on in life is that if you’re actually living it instead of just watching, there will always be more channel markers and more stumbling blocks and more growth rings along the way. Since that delightful evening when I stood sipping German wine while decked out in velvet and Victoria's Secret, I’ve gone through a lot more. The “year of turbo-dating.” The loss of both my father and godmother after terrible health complications. The serious illnesses of two of my children. Hundreds of miles on the back of a Harley, and my youngest child leaving for college. And two more command performances before the state supreme court. Just like that vacation snapshot of conquering the summit, the picture fades in importance as the life being lived just gets bigger. Gloriously, messily, sometimes tragically, oftentimes joyfully…bigger. And so inevitably, I revisit the snapshot less and less often. There will always be more hills ahead.

But it doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten the climb. And I've still got the Brazilian spike heels to prove it.

Home is Where the Chocolate Is

2010-11-22T21:17:00.005-06:00

There are less than forty-eight hours left before the kids float in from college for the Thanksgiving weekend, and a few more hours after that before fifteen people sit down in the kitchen to devour a turkey and a half. On one of those intervening days between I'll be at work fifty miles away. On the other, I'll be a guest speaker at a law school class. I'm cutting it closer than usual to the margins when it comes to getting ready for company.

The house is still a disaster from (a) living with a puppy and (b) relying on a "piling system" for all the detritus from family medical disasters, funerals and estate management that have wound up on my doorstep for the past three years, and (c) having housework take a backseat to all the unforeseen things that required making hay while the sun was shining this past summer and fall. Painting the storm windows, for example. Painting the garage doors. Cutting overhanging branches with a saw on the walking path. Laying the brick patio. (That was a real doozy of an project.) Redoing part of the patio project two months later. Reorganizing the garage. Right now there are furballs galore to be vacuumed, and dishes to be washed, and a kitchen to be cleared to make elbow room for passing the dinner rolls.

And what did I do with this evening? I got home from work, took Lucky for a walk, and then, with my last shreds of concentration waning, shoved a chocolate cake in the oven. Not just any chocolate cake, but my famous sour cream chocolate cake, whose seductive aroma is still wafting through the house like the welcoming arms of Venus.

This is the cake whose first four ingredients--soft butter creamed with white granulated sugar, then beaten with vanilla and two eggs added separately, then whipped to an impossibly light mousse with the addition of three and a half melted squares of unsweetened chocolate--make the epitome of "finger food." I confess to overindulging at this stage to just one more taste...and then just one more...ad infinitum until the only way to counteract the amount disappearing from the bowl is to wing it with decreasing the proportions of the remaining ingredients and hope that, as Julia Child used to put it, "you're alone it the kitchen." So far nobody who ever digs into the cake, smothered with buttercream frosting, has complained about quality control.

The day before, the kitchen floor got washed, and some beds got made. But the piece de resistance was a nine by thirteen plan full of "mint squares," a desert that comes in three layers and incorporates a can of Hershey syrup, a package of chocolate chips, and nearly three sticks of butter. There are priorities in my family caretaking, and dessert ranks high.

In the grand scheme of things, my children know that while they may not always be able to count on clean laundry or a carpet free of pet hair or a piano bench not covered in books and magazines, there will be desserts if they stick around long enough. I am a mediocre cook if I stray from my few standards--pork normandy, homemade potato salad, turkey tetrazzini, chili made straight from the recipe on the back of the seasoning packet.

But oh, desserts are a different story entirely. Chocolate chip cheesecake. Chocolate amaretto cheesecake. Crustless fudge pie. Homemade frozen custard (okay, we haven't done that in a while but it's still part of the record!). Apple pies and apple crisp and banana muffins with streusel topping and cinnamon rolls with cream cheese icing. Chocolate chip cookies made with brown sugar and real butter. Blonde brownies studded with chocolate chips. My love of transforming various proportions of sugar and butter and eggs into delectable sweets takes me back to baking cakes with my aunt when I was a little girl and life was far simpler.

At Christmas we have traditionally gone overboard on the sugar express, although the last few years have seen the baking get scaled down to accommodate more pressing family matters. The kids took over the baking of the rolled out cookies a couple of Christmases ago. The holiday still stands alone in distinction for being the introduction of the "bloody axe" cookies.

Memories of earlier Christmases inundated by dozens of cookies in several varieties linger. Gingerbread, butterballs, tri-color bars, pressed butter cookies, homemade fudge. I still remember one year when I started my baking early. I made my first batch of toffee bars just after Thanksgiving, and dutifully put them in a storage container in the freezer. They were out of sight but not out of mind, unfortunately, and I developed the habit of sneaking two or three frozen bars out of the freezer as soon as the kids left for school, thawing them in the microwave, and enjoying them with a cup of tea. I ate the whole batch that way, then baked another when the school bus left me with an empty kitchen. However, just as I was pulling the replacement bars out of the oven, I got a call from school. My youngest son--only in kindergarten--was not feeling well. Could I please come to school and bring him home? I did, of course, thanking my lucky stars that he was not quite tall enough to see over the top of the stove to the evidence cooling on the back burner. I tucked him into bed, carved the toffee bars into squares, and put them all back in the freezer. It was a close call, and taught me to never think I was capable of ignoring chocolate in my freezer for that long again.

I confess to feeling chagrined some years ago when one of the children came home from grade school with the results of a holiday class assignment. What family traditions did we share at Christmas time? Little classmates shared experiences of making presents, crafting handmade ornaments, visiting relatives, singing Christmas carols, setting up a creche together, cutting down a live fir tree in the forest. Our contribution? "We make a LOT of Christmas cookies," my child wrote. I felt like I'd been handed a "participant" ribbon in the race to responsible motherhood. Surely I'd failed SOMEHOW in not inbuing my children with more meaningful, soul-nourishing holiday activities. At the very least, I could have taken my cues from Martha Stewart and come up with something more substantial, or convoluted, than a butterball rolled in powdered sugar.

As the years have rolled by, I've learned to forgive myself more for things that used to bother me a great deal. Some are deeper than others. The timing of a divorce, for one thing, compared to the fact that I may never again fit into my "skinny" jeans that I wore when I was twenty two (and which I still hold on to as a relic of my past).

And one of those censorious thoughts that have softened with age is that feeling of dismay at discovering that an abundance of cookies were the highlight of our family Christmas experience. There is a heck of a lot of bonding that goes on over a plate of cookies, with milk, and cocoa, and coffee on the side. A lot of laughter that ensues when a kitchen full of teenagers turns the sedate routine of rolling out cookies on the kitchen table into a flour fight. A rhythm and joy in sharing the act of pouring sugar and flour into a mixing bowl with a four year old to make something special for a birthday.

So when the tribe arrives for Thanksgiving again this year, they may not come home to the cleanest bathroom in town, or to a living room entirely free of clutter, or to cups that always match the saucers. But they know that when they walk in the front door, more often than not they'll catch the smell of something chocolate baking. And that's how they'll know they've come home.

The CatBird Returns

2010-11-09T09:01:00.004-06:00

Meatball moved in a couple of days ago, a temporary gig until the end of the semester. He came with a cat carrier and a bag of “senior” cat food, in the arms of my prodigal college student son who was home for a 24 stretch of TLC and laundry service before returning to campus.
My son’s first official action upon returning home was to stretch out on the sunlit sofa in the living room and crash for three hours.

Meatball’s first official action was to put Lucky, the forty pound puppy, on notice that he’d be missing an ear or an eye if he got too close. Lucky is part Border Collie, so he’s pretty smart for a five month old. Rambunctious, but smart. He took the warning to heart and is keeping a three foot radius from danger most of the time.

We’re all making some adjustments here, but for now I’m still basking in the afterglow of kicking into “mommy gear” for an entire day. I cooked dinner—turkey tetrazzini—one of my son’s favorites. I actually had the oven and three burners going on the stove at the same time.

This was no small feat. I use my stove so rarely these days that after the holidays last winter, a mouse moved in under the left rear burner. I thought that Smokey, the sixteen pound house cat who likes to stage death scenes for my enjoyment, would take care of business, but in the end it came down to me and a “live trap” I picked up at WalMart and a dab of peanut butter. After contemplating the frigid outdoor release options, I finally set the little guy loose in the garage with a handful of bird seed. He repaid me by getting in to my car a few days later and drowning in my half-full bottle of Diet Coke. Yes, I know, one mouse looks much like another. But in my heart, I know that this was the same little guy who had thought outside the box for his kitchen living quarters.

I did laundry—five huge loads of T-shirts and socks and jeans—and folded it too. This, too, was no small feat, and these days is completely out of character for me.

I made pancakes from scratch for breakfast, and served them with “real” hot maple syrup. This too, was a departure. Back when I still had four kids around the breakfast table and everybody wanted waffles or French toast, I bought the kind of breakfast syrup that comes out of a plastic squeeze bottle and costs a fraction of the genuine article.

And for the crowning piece of nostalgic motherhood, I produced two new “Looney Tunes” collections of cartoon DVDs to watch as we chowed down on breakfast. You just can’t beat the classics. I’ve always had a bit of the “kill the fatted calf” thing going on when one of the kids has come home from college.

It felt great. It felt deeply satisfying. It felt like being a retired firehorse and suddenly getting back into harness.

And through it all, Meatball kept chirping away like a canary. Yes, “meow” has generally been the expected cat commentary throughout recorded human history. Meatball just comes with a more interesting vocal range. I don’t know how else to describe it, but if you were listening from another room, you’d think I had a pet bird in a cage in there. And his raspy purr is faintly, strangely, evocative of Peter Lorre in "Casablanca."

This wasn’t Meatball’s first trip home. He was the definition of Christmas for me just a couple of years ago.

Back then I was behind on everything because of simultaneous family disasters a hundred miles away that had started in early November with my mother's broken leg and gone downhill from there. I wrote no newsletters. I baked exactly two small batches of Christmas cookies before the kids came home, hung no garland, left the creche in the storage bin, looked for but never found the mistletoe ball. When the kids came home for a few days over the holidays, they were the ones who hauled out the ornament boxes on Christmas Eve and made sure that something was hanging on the tree. They made merry as they rolled out and decorated the traditional butter cookies in truly demented ways while I sat, exhausted on the living room sofa.

But Christmas day itself came and went with me driving solo on the Illinois Tollway to Chicago and back, making a round of two hospitals and a nursing home to keep an eye on things on the only day without snow in the whole week. I was not a happy camper.

I was feeling very "Grinchy" that morning as I pulled out of the driveway at eight in the morning. But then as I drove, the sunlight and the season and the fact that I've got kids that I adore got to me, and I felt a spasm of generosity twitch in my heart that up until then still felt two sizes too small. A half hour into my drive, I called my older son, who at the age of twenty-one was most definitely deep in slumber, and left him a voice mail. Hey it's Christmas, honey, yes, you can bring the cat home.

Simple words, but they masked a world of complexity.

Mike had adopted Meatball from an animal shelter and brought him home to his student apartment about eight months earlier, where the eight-year-old cat promptly became known for leaving his odorous "mark" on his master's clothing. The problem seemed to be resolved by Christmas, but I was still wary. There was a very large cat who already owned my house, and so I drew a line in the sand at the plaintive requests to bring Meatball home for the holidays. I was thrilled to death that Mike had a cat, since I always think that life is far better with pets. But two adult male cats who were strangers sharing space in the same house? I could foresee only disaster.

So Meatball stayed home alone at the apartment with a big bowl of cat food and a big bowl of water while the rest of the family gathered and visited. And on Christmas Day, I wasn't the only one on the road—my son would be driving eighty miles back to his apartment that day to check on his pet.

And so during my own Christmas drive, thinking of my baby spending half his day traveling back and forth just to make sure Meatball was okay, I took a leap of faith and relented. And felt better for the rest of the day. Three days of feline togetherness passed with no accidents and no bloodshed and a new era dawning in terms of pet visitation. Meatball proved to be no-fuss houseguest with the mind of a simpleton and the peskiness of a two year old.

Things are a little more complicated now. You could tell that Meatball knew something important was in the works as my son was leaving when his master carried out baskets of laundry … but not the cat carrier. He stood on the staircase, chirping, as I got my last, heartfelt good-bye hugs. Then there was a final pat from my son, and the household was suddenly minus one young man.

And so we are all adjusting. Meatball has taken to dogging my footsteps like a puppy, driving the real puppy in the house—restricted to the kitchen most of the time—absolutely bonkers with jealousy. Smokey the cat, sensing that this new arrangement may last a while, has taken to dourly stalking around in an existential funk and curling his vast, furry bulk into an empty laundry basket as though it was his Fortress of Solitude. I can’t bear to tell him that it doesn’t make him invisible. Lucky the puppy is putting up with the topsy-turvy reality of seeing the new cat sampling his dog food. It’s got to be a dominance thing on Meatball’s part.

And if you close your eyes and imagine, once in a while you just might think there’s a canary chirping in the other room.

Tool Time

2010-10-16T11:05:00.007-05:00

I had a meltdown last week over a power tool.

The meltdown shouldn't have been surprising. For the past thirty years I've noticed that the first week in October is always the worst for me in terms of emotional troughs and existential despair. I'm sure there's a serious "waning daylight" issue going on. It always passes, with a few days and a lot of chocolate.

What triggered it was a tool that worked just as it was supposed to.

What brought me temporarily to the point of tears, however, was that I knew how to use it. Go figure.

I was in the midst of sanding some storm windows before starting to paint them. There was a week of splendid painting weather, warm and sunny and dry, and the windows, with their white paint turned a dingy, peeling grey, needed attention before the fierce travails of winter. A shop vac would be involved, of course, to vacuum the paint chips and dust. I own one. It looks like a sinister cousin of the cute Star Wars droid, R2-D2. But what had brought me to the hardware store and ultimately to the meltdown a few days later was the purchase of a palm sander and a detail sander. I bought cheap, as usual. My store brand cordless drill has worked just fine for the past several years and I saw no reason to invest large sums of money in small tools I didn't expect to use much.

But somewhere along the line in the next couple of days of sanding and painting, my ambivalence toward my new sanders turned to horror. And when my friend Judy called to say hello one morning, I hit a flashpoint and then dissolved. Doing my own windows had been the tipping point in a march toward self-sufficiency that seemed, on that bright October morning in a day that would be just a little shorter than the day before, both symbolic and lonely. I finally hung up, blowed my nose, and went outside to paint some more.

The man of my dreams, who was tied up busily painting his own storm windows and trim during this stretch of idyllic weather, did his best to point out that (1) he would love to learn how to use a sewing machine and wouldn't feel his masculinity threatened if he did, and (2) on a self-sufficiency scale, my chainsaw was a whole lot more symbolic than a detail sander.

Well, yes. He was right on both counts.

But on the other hand, I could milk the subjects of the chain saw and the cordless drill for a lot of light cocktail party banter while dressed in stilettos and chiffon and dangly earrings. There was just something about owing a detail sander that bespoke renting space in the "small engines" department of the local Tennies Ace Hardware store, pulling up a stool at the counter, and debating the finer points of lawn tractor hydraulics. The place is very, very manly. It smells like oil and metal parts and gas and testosterone. A nice place to visit, but I always feel like I've landed briefly on another planet.

I kept brooding darkly on the subject for a full week.

Then, yesterday, I found myself back in Chicago at the two-flat which had been owned by my godmother and which was about to be sold. I was there to inventory the things that remained and to help my mother pack up for moving. And so I spent part of the day in my father's work rooms in the basement, poring over the contents, looking to see if there was anything I wanted to bring home with me.

This place had not been my home. I had lived there for less than a year as a teenager before we picked up stakes and moved to an abandoned farm. I spent another year there after high school living with my aunt and my grandparents, while I worked and took a few classes and contemplated starting college full-time. I lived there again for a single summer while in college, working as a legal secretary by day and training my horse at a stable on the edge of town in the evenings.

It was always a transitory destination for me.

But my parents had lived there for the past thirty years. And a lot of stuff could build up in a man's work space in that amount of time.

I had not been able to spend much time with my father during those years. Time and distance played a part, family dynamics played another. But I knew all that time that he loved me, and that he was proud of me.

I approached the work rooms with a mixture of curiosity and salvage on my mind. There were jars upon jars of used nuts and bolts, screws and nails, drill bits and routers, washers and grinding wheels. Things were stored in coffee cans and boxes, on shelves and on the floor. My mother had been in a wheelchair for most of the past ten years, and so she wouldn't have had much to do with things in the basement. I don't know if the hoarding was a product of my father's mental confusion in his final years, or just a by-product of the privations endured as a P.O.W. during and after World War II. But he had worked as an airplane mechanic in Germany during the war, and had worked a succession of factory machine jobs in the U.S., and he would have loved the smell and the feel of the "small engines" department in the hardware store.

Here and there were things I recognized. I rounded up as many drill bits as I could find. I didn't know if they would fit my cordless drill, but I could always figure that out later. Some of them were incredibly tiny, others were enormous. There was one drill bit that was very short, but with a diameter that looked like it was made for cutting woodpecker holes in dead trees. I took a couple of hand saws, and a box of wooden kitchen matches. An antique oil can, rusted on the outside but still workable. I tipped it over and pushed on the bottom. A drop of oil squirted on to the workbench. I'll clean it up and it will sit as a sentimental decoration in my garage. If the Tin Woodsman from the Wizard of Oz ever comes for tea and feels a little stiff, I'll be ready.

High on a shelf in one of the rooms were a couple of Good Housekeeping magazines, more than twenty years old. I pulled them down, wondering what these icons of femininity were doing in such a place. They were strangely two copies of the same issue. When I read the index, I knew. I had written an article about the dog that adopted me when we were up on the farm, and this was the issue of the magazine it had run in. I looked back at myself from the pages, black and white pictures of a much younger version of me cozied up with my two young daughters and the friendly brown-and-white dog with one blue eye. It was my first national by-line, and I smiled. The magazines went into the "take with me" box.

I took a leather "Bell & Howell" camera bag, stiff with age. I have his old camera somewhere in my home. A Craftsman folding metal ruler, and a pair of wire cutters. Along the line of spending time with the man of my dreams, I've learned that Craftsman tools are something of a big deal, not only because of quality but because they come with a lifetime guarantee.

And then I found the capstone to this journey through time--my father's Craftsman electric drill. It was heavy, with a steel casing and thick rubber cord, and a tiny drill bit still in position. It looked nothing like a drill today. It had something of that modern "futuristic" look of the giant robot in the original black-and-white version of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" with Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal. Lifetime guarantee? Ha! I thought. If this thing ever needed parts, customer service would be sending away to a museum.

Pressed for time, I didn't try it out, but just took it instead and went upstairs to pack some china. Whether it worked or not, I didn't care. I felt somehow closer to the man who used to try to teach me how to change a tire when I was sixteen, though at the time I never committed the instructions to memory. Now I can just call AAA on my cell phone.

I plugged the drill in this morning and pulled the trigger. It roared to life with a scream much larger than its size would imply. I smiled and coiled up the cord, and placed it carefully on a shelf in my new workbench in the garage, next to the palm sander. I will be my father's daughter. And I will quit pouting over the fact that I know what a socket wrench is. Because I brought home the wrench...and all the sockets I could find too.

Into the Woods

2010-10-04T18:34:00.004-05:00

I found the woods again tonight.

Not the woods that I own and I walk through on a regular basis, with the manicured path exactly the width of two lawn-mowers. I do that walk on average twice a day now, a convenient loop for letting off puppy steam that requires no leashes and no "doggie bags."

No, these would be the untamed woods beyond. With Lucky heeding my call more faithfully these days, I stepped confidently off the beaten path and into the woods beside us. There was a path we followed there too, but narrow and faint, with grass barely bent by the footfalls of deer at dawn and twilight rather than sheared by swirling metal blades. Even the width zigged and zagged, as branches crossed at waist height and brambles tugged at my sweatpants.

A thunderous noise greeted us, and Lucky sprang forward, the hackles on his back stiff with anticipation. What on earth could be making such a clatter, I wondered. Perhaps some deer, I thought, giving the crashing of branches and rustle of leaves. A glance upward revealed the mystery--a flock of turkeys had taken to the trees, springing from branch to branch as they landed and teetered and swayed back and forth, improbably large for their perches.

We retreated to the familiarity of the road more traveled, but stepped back into adventure a little ways on. Again we navigated a deer path, this one taking us into a stand of tall saplings with plenty of elbow room. Lucky cheerfully blundered about, then spied his first squirrel off the leash. He was a streak of greased lightning...though of course the squirrel made it forty feet up the tree before his pursuer arrived.

I caught a glint of sunlight off a tree-stand about fifty feet away, and once again we retreated. I couldn't tell if a hunter was sitting there or not, but just in case, I didn't want to spoil his efforts.

We rounded the back of the trail, and headed for home. But a few steps along the return leg, I felt the pull of curiosity again. "Hey Lucky," I called, and retraced another faint deer path up to the ridge behind the property. This was a trip back in time for me. When the children were little, we spent hours hiking back here, admiring the forest of sumac that fell away down the hill, meandering along the traces left of a snowmobile path than had been maintained before a highway and protective fencing cleaved the woods and fields. I stood in a familiar place, looking around me to get my bearings, searching for a "good" way down the hill.

But nature doesn't just abhor a vacuum, there are times it steps in and actively plants a "keep out" sign of its own. All around me, at waist height where I had once happily traveled with a pack of inquisitive children, was a forest of shrubs with wickedly sharp thorns. They looked like some type of demonic hydras of myth. Lucky snuck through, with his narrow head and thick coat navigating the sharp points. But as the light started to fade and the shadows deepen, I knew there would be no revisiting spots further down the path where I had picked violets in the woods with my children and followed streambeds through the forest of oaks trees down below.

At least not on this night. We headed back to the house as the temperatures dropped. I walked along at a leisurely pace, while Lucky tore through the tall grass on either side of the manicured path at ninety miles an hour, doing figure-eights in front of and around me in a giant herringbone stitch. So much for wearing him out. I can always dream...

One thing I'll certainly dream about, though, is going back "into the woods." It's going to take a little more daylight, and a little more daring. But somewhere along that Maginot Line of briars and vines has to be a narrow place where the deer get through and thread their way down the steep hillside to the forest floor covered with acorns. And one of these days, Lucky and I are going to find it. There are wildflowers, and memories, to be picked.

The Hair Sacrifice

2010-10-02T19:22:00.003-05:00

I went and got the “new baby haircut” the other day.

No, I don’t have a baby. The haircut was for me. But it was just the latest in a series of “cave-ins” to adapt to the new reality of being a single mother to a new puppy.

I haven’t been prone to too many radical changes in hair styles over the years. I’ve gone from short to a little longer, or a little shorter, or from shoulder length to a little shorter. Hair color has been an entirely different story. But actual, dramatic cleaving of hair-length has been reserved for some truly life-altering events.

When my oldest daughter was born twenty-odd years ago, I’d had long hair a few inches past my shoulders. I saw no reason to change that look…until she was six months old and started pulling herself up to a sitting position by seizing handfuls of my brunette locks. Off I went to the salon, and got a short and shaggy “do” that lasted many years, give or take an inch or two when the weather turned cold.

A decade and a half later, I had a toddler, a new puppy, and a marriage finally showing its stress fractures. I wanted to streamline. That, and it was summer, and I was tired of brushing sweaty hair out of my eyes whenever I bent over to pick up the kid or the dog. Off to the salon I went again, and came home with a short “pixie” cut that left the longest hair on my head about an inch and a half long. It was very edgy and “in your face,” with a touch of Joan of Arc style. Hers might have been longer.

My husband’s office was just a few miles away in town, and he was in the habit of coming home for lunch. He walked into the kitchen that day as I was washing dishes at the sink, and I could tell by his footsteps pacing behind me that he was stunned and cautiously circling what clearly was an unfamiliar and unpredictable entity. Had I come home with my head shaved, I don’t think he would have been more startled. Or wary.

That look lasted a few years, until I decided I was done with the hassle of wearing my contact lenses and went back to a softer silhouette to offset my glasses.

Fast forward to the present. I’ve been enjoying having longer hair once again, even if it meant spending extra time with the blow dryer and pulling out the hot rollers every other day. The payoff was great. I walked past my certain fella a few months ago while we were watching a DVD, to put the dinner plates in the kitchen. It was summer, and I was in some kind of fluttery sundress. When I walked back into the TV room he had a dazed smile on his face.

“What?” I asked. “Oh,” he replied. “I was just looking at you…with the dress…and the long hair…WOW.”

Trust me, to give up the long hair right now after a moment like that was asking a lot.

But four weeks with Lucky has brought out my practical, compromising side with a vengeance. In military parlance, it’s called “capitulation.” Or “surrender.” I’ve made peace with working at the kitchen counter on my laptop via a new wireless router that took me five days to install. I’ve brought back the custom-made, matches-the-wood-railings baby gate for the top of the main stairs that had been retired from use fifteen years ago when my youngest child learned to safely navigate stairs. I’ve sacrificed my fake bunny-fur bedroom slippers as decoys for my red suede high heels, and moved the cat’s food and water to a high shelf in the basement so that he can dine unmolested.

And for the foreseeable future, since this pup’s teething stage closely resembles a canine version of “Pac-Man,” to keep him from gnawing the furniture (or the cat) while I’m out of the room, I bring him with me into the bathroom. For showers, makeup, hair, the whole nine yards. All that’s needed is to toss his favorite squeaky rubber chicken or squeaky fluffy bone on to the bathmat two feet ahead of him, and he pounces in like a coyote on a fieldmouse, to then be held mournfully captive until I’m ready to face the world and say “I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille.”

But after four weeks of puppy howls (at first) while I showered, and then baleful puppy stares while I worked my magic with blow dryer and hot rollers, I gave up on the hair. Okay, that and the fact that while I stood there putting the rollers in and trying not to burn my fingers, he liked to try to lick the moisturizer off my ankles. Really, what woman my age even uses hot rollers, I asked myself as I drove off to the salon with steely determination yet again. I emerged several hours later with a new color, a new set of highlights, and a “wash and go” short style that should free up more time in the morning to toss a tennis ball down the driveway in a fruitless quest to wear this little guy out. What I spent would have bought a lot of Milkbones. When you’re a new mother, you do what you gotta do.

By the way, Lucky got his first official bath a few days ago. I’d bought him his very own bottle of two-in-one shampoo plus conditioner, and when he’d dried off, I noticed that his fur was looking a little more curly, and a little longer. No doubt about it, a lustrous glossy coat is starting to come in. There are the beginnings of “feathers” on the back of his hind legs, his tail is looking fuller when he wags it, and the fur on his back is starting to get some serious wave action.

In another six months, I’m pretty sure his hair will be longer than mine. Whoever said motherhood was fair?

Un-gardening

2010-09-19T17:52:00.008-05:00

The "obedient plants" finally got their just desserts today. After two years of teeth-gnashing and occasional trimming and thinning along the edges, I took advantage of the soft earth left by yesterday's rainfall and finally set to ripping out the whole patch by the roots. It took longer than I thought, since there were far more plants than I'd thought. Or even remotely suspected while I was plotting their demise. I felt murderous...and satisfied, all in one.

After all the thousands of words I've written about the joys of gardening that I'd discovered over the past three years--the butterflies, the hummingbirds, the romance, the exhaustion, the beauty, the fragrance, the new window in my soul--it feels a little ungrateful and churlish to confess to deadly intent toward plants doing what Mother Nature intended them to do. Go forth and multiply, in other words. Be fruitful and multiply, spread seeds, make like the lilies of the field. Not their fault if they got carried away.

Yeah. Well this year I got my education in just what happens to a garden when the gardener is too busy to tend it. Yikes! The strawberries have trippled their acreage, despite having been nibbled nearly to the ground a few months ago by a deer with discriminating taste. They've overrun the Jacob's Ladder a few feet away, are storming the ramparts of my favorite pink daylily, and apparently have set their sights and their tendrils on my hot pink phlox with the bi-colored leaves. (That was quite a lucky find at Home Depot one day early in my gardening career, it still tickles my imagination.)

There are some long and leggy chrysanthemums that give me blazing color in the garden pretty much until snowfall, but they've been flattened to the ground by the coneflowers behind them that have run amok. And as I started to part the outliers of the advancing strawberry army, I found nestled among their leaves and red ropy runners a gathering contingent of moonflowers. Lovely flowers when they all bloom at once, but after the first year I learned that they spread like a virus.

And so this year's belated "tending" of my garden has come down to containment, quite late in the game. Hold the line like the Russian front until winter, and then promise to be more vigilant next year.

I didn't plan it this way, but it's been that kind of a year. Dogpaddling in quicksand has been the feel for much of it, and I didn't look too closely at the flower beds. Just noticed the bursts of color and thought, "yep, doin' okay."

Though the obedient plants were a special case. They were a gift from my friend Rosemary, who loves to garden herself and was quite delighted when she discovered that the man in my life had upended my universe and put a garden where there had been just so much white river rock over smothering black plastic. Yes, there are a lot of metaphors in that sentence to mull over, but the point of it is that Rosemary wanted to share some of her joy. And so one day she came over bearing gifts from her own garden that looks like Martha Stewart did her entire stretch of parole digging and planting there and atoning for her financial sins in splendid artistic fashion.

She brought some daylilies, and some sedum, and some obedient plants. The daylilies died of neglect (so sue me), the sedum survived the winter sitting in a plastic bag on top of some gravel and tugged so at my heartstrings when I discovered they were still alive that I finally planted them, and the obedient plants went into the ground right away. The first year they grew, they were just lovely!! There were about a dozen tall spikes covered with tiny light purple tubular flowers with fringed ends that looked like itsy-bitsy orchids, and glossy narrow leaves with sawtoothed edges. They were captivating, and gorgeous, and gave absolutely no indication of wanting to outgrow their designated spot.

I learned better the next year, when the patch of "obedient" plants became quite disobedient and spread, and spread, and spread. The plants looked a little taller, the sawtoothed leaves started to look a little sinister. "obedient" my ass. They were delinquent, revolutionary, bordering on anarchy. They were shading the delphiniums, infiltrating the asters, overtaking the pincushion plants, creeping into the lawn. I pulled a few out here and there to keep the numbers down, but took no further action.

This year, though, it was clear I was going to need more of a wrangling approach to keep this unruly horde in check. Earlier in the season, before I got completely sidetracked by other projects and commitments, I'd made the rounds of the garden, admiring the pretty Arizona sandstone footpath, checking to see whether the phlox had made it through the winter, glorying it the emergence of dianthus and clematis, and taking rough inventory of the now quite disobedient plants. They had spread, again, but exponentially this time. There were dozens and dozens of tiny seedlings springing up and spreading in all directions like something from a cheap horror film. I ripped out what I could, and returned with a bottle of Roundup. The "extended use" version, good for killing everything underfoot for up to four months.

I sprayed a containment circle, and left feeling that between toxic chemicals and elbow grease, I'd won the battle and the war. A couple of months later, I discovered I had been seriously mistaken. I started to think in terms of explosives. Or flamethrowers. And the teeth gnashing started in earnest.

And so today was the day of destiny. Fresh off reclaiming the back of the house from the weeds and saplings that had flourished in the remaining stretches of river rock in our rainy summer while my energy got spent on patio building and garage cleaning and burning fallen trees, I trundled the wheelbarrow to the garden in front and started to pull. Lucky was there to help, of course, though I think his enthusiasm was sparked by the thought that if he grabbed at the plant I just pulled from the dirt, I'd play tug-of-war with him over it the same way. He finally got bored and sat down in the lavender, releasing a burst of heavenly fragrance.

I'm happy to say, I got most of it. What's left are seedlings so small they were hard to grasp with a pair of gardening gloves. So I'm giving them another few days and then I'll be back, "ungardening" the obedient plants and establishing a beachhead against the surging tide of strawberries.

What's the worst that could happen if I fail? Well, the obedient plants will just be facing a flamethrower next spring. And in the case of extra strawberries...I guess I'll just have to make more chocolate sauce.

Dog Days of Summer

2010-09-06T10:38:00.005-05:00

Shoes are on the menu these days. Particularly if they come with shoelaces as a garnish. And socks, the smellier the better. Newspaper too, the better to shred, like lettuce. Or a caribou carcass somewhere on the Arctic tundra.

I make sure I wake up early, even on the days I don’t have to put on makeup and go to work. And I take extraordinary pains to be very, very quiet after I’ve turned the lights out and said “good night.” If I need an Advil in the middle of the night because I’ve developed a splitting headache, I’m SOL unless I’ve planned ahead and banked one on my bedside table with a glass of water. I am constantly dogged by the quick pitter patter of little feet…all four of them. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.

There’s a puppy underfoot in my kitchen. His name is “Lucky,” and I’ve had him for a week and a half. I am currently a captive in the kitchen which has been gated off to forestall disaster. I am working awkwardly on my laptop on the middle counter beside the microwave because he howls so pitifully if I disappear around the corner to my home office area, out of the line of sight. Well, that’s what he did at first. After he settled in, he learned how to jump the shortest of the kitchen gates from the cat who happened to be escaping, and considers the rest of the house game for exploration. Or worse.

And yet, if I’m in the same room, he is the model of good behavior, napping frequently or politely gnawing on his new rubber chicken. You should see just how much fun he has with a seedless grape, chasing, pouncing, tasting, joyfully batting it around like a field mouse.

And so I have adjusted (some would say “been trained”) in a matter of days. Purchased a wireless router so that I can access the internet from the laptop in the kitchen and keep him away from the desktop computer that’s plugged into the wall. The kitchen is puppy-proofed, while the rest of the house is not. Yet. While I was typing the other day, Lucky sat behind me and quietly destroyed the cable that imports pictures from my digital camera to the computer where I can edit and tweak and adjust and crop and rotate them and make them finally approximate pristine images in Smithsonian magazine. And then he stealthily started in on the electric cord for my faux-leather massage desk chair. Outrageous!!! This cannot stand!!

And still, I am awash in estrogen surges and “new puppy love.” Good sense had absolutely nothing to do with it. Thank goodness our memories of previous puppies and sleepless nights mercifully fade away like memories of childbirth, given enough time, and let us go rushing right back in to where angels fear to tread.

The cat is not amused.

It’s been eleven months since there was a dog in the house of any size, after Bandit died. Bandit, who I called “the Lazarus dog” for the last two years of his life, had been the last in a nearly unbroken string of canine companions throughout my life. He’s buried out behind the garage, his final resting place marked with a stick and a tennis ball until I can get a suitable lilac bush to mark the spot. He’s in good company out there—my first dog Muttsie (who acquired me when I was still a teenager on the farm), then Shadow, then Rocket, now Bandit. After the initial heartbreak at a dog’s passing had subsided, and fueled by my children’s entreaties, I would start researching and/or shopping for a new dog almost immediately.

Not this time. There were too many other family emergencies and dramas involving elderly relatives falling ill and dying, and the ability to drop everything and quickly fly out of the house like my pants were on fire in response with just a toothbrush and some clean underwear suddenly got traction.

But those storms finally passed, and the demands on my time became gentler, and less frequent, and when I again looked around my large yard, it seemed empty again without a four-footed companion begging me to throw a tennis ball or take a long walk. The cat did his best imitation of a dog, I’ll give him credit for that. Without Bandit running him over on the stairs with regularity, Smokey started to meet me at the front door when I came home from work, and greeted me at my bedroom door with cheerful meows every morning. Still, he's not learned how to bark. Or maybe he's just not trying. Let’s face it, it’s an essential part of the job description.

And then the cosmic forces aligned. I’d long ago fallen in love with a mixed breed dog at the stable where my horses wintered for two decades. He was a border collie-australian shepherd mix, tall, leggy, with a silky black and white coat and the most optimistic, well-balanced and friendly disposition I’d ever encountered in a canine. He didn’t wag his tale, he swung it non-stop like a helicopter rotor. Three years after the last of my horses passed to the great pasture beyond, I ran into his owner in the supermarket and we caught up. She promised to keep her eyes open for puppy ads that might suit me, and left a voicemail message three days later. The very same type of puppies as her dog were now up for sale!! I called the number she left, and took a long drive into the country a couple of days later.

When I saw both parents and their six pups, I figured that the lineage was possibly suspect. Either there was a tall black lab somewhere in the family tree, or Mom had been fooling around behind the barn with a dark, handsome stranger. At any rate, they were all as cute as a bug’s ear.

Two days of vacillation followed. The last time I'd had a puppy in the house was thirteen years ago, and I swore then that doing it again would kill me. That was Rocket, who we took from his mother’s side at eight weeks and grew to be a doppelganger for “Marley” of movie fame…and who would die of exactly the same problem only a year later. I didn’t know that of course when we first brought him home to a household that had four kids, the youngest in kindergarten. All I knew was that Rocket howled so pathetically in loneliness while he was parked in his crate in the kitchen that I spent the first two or three nights sleeping on a mat on the floor beside him to keep him company. I remember admiring some breathtaking sunrises and breaking dawn skies as I stood on the front lawn at four thirty or five in the morning to make sure housebreaking continued as a string of successes. From east to west, the sky can turn from silver to smoke to a luminous collection of rose and purple that stops you right in your tracks.

Still, there were a few things that mitigated in favor of a puppy anyway. For one thing, I was determined to get a dog young enough that I could “crate train” it for housebreaking and traveling. Bandit, the “Lazarus Dog,” had been a six-month old shelter dog when we fell for him, and he never outgrew his anxiety at being cooped up. A dog crate was out of the question, as was leaving him alone anywhere but at home without a guaranteed disaster to return to. My gentleman friend and I learned that when we left him in the kitchen for a couple of minutes to look at something in the garage. When we turned back to the house, there stood Bandit at the window, on top of the kitchen table…next to a lighted candle. Lesson learned.

The other thing was that Smokey the sixteen pound tuxedo cat had a presumptive claim on the house as first-animal-in-residence, and whoever moved in was going to have to make nice with the kitty.

I threw caution to the winds. Enthusiasm is infectious, and when I finally drove back to the farm to pick him up, I was accompanied by three teenagers to assist in transport and soothing and picking puppy names. By the time we got home, the list included “Bailey,” “Maximus,” “Oreo,” “Russell,” and “Reilly.” As top dog in the bunch, I went with “Lucky.” It was exactly how I felt.

While I could write pages more about the little guy…he’s at my feet right now chewing on a three-quarter round at the base of the kitchen counter next to my right foot. It’s time to go out and see if I can channel some of that energy into another avenue. Looking ahead, if I can just teach him to read the collection of children’s books in the basement instead of eating them, we may both make it through the winter.

Chicago Cultural Center

2010-08-31T18:15:00.006-05:00

While I was in Chicago for the National Federation of Press Women's annual conference, I moseyed over to the Chicago Cultural Center, which in fact is the original Chicago Public Library, dating from the 1800s. Since I'd never been inside while I was a teenager growing up in the Windy City, it was the perfect time to get acquainted and appreciate the absolutely marvelous architectural features and accents.

Prisms, Perspectives and Paperbacks

2010-08-17T09:53:00.006-05:00

It was a dark and stormy night…

Well, I don’t remember if it actually was stormy, but it was definitely dark, and it was most definitely night. Dead of winter, in fact, the perfect time to settle in with a fire snapping in the grate, a blanket on our laps, some popcorn, and hot chocolate with kahlua and whipped cream and a sprinkle of nutmeg.

The movie playing Chez Mary was “Where Eagles Dare,” a winter WWII classic released in 1968 and based on the novel by Alistair MacLean. We settled in for an evening of sure-fire drama, adventure, entertainment, and, lest I forget to mention, Richard Burton with those mesmerizing blue eyes and crisp Shakespearean diction, and Clint Eastwood looking impossibly young. With the beginnings of his trademark squint… but no crows feet yet.

The puzzle box of a plot involved English and American intelligence agencies, a captured American general involved in planning the invasion of Normandy, and an impossible attack on an impregnable German fortress located high in the Bavarian Alps and accessible only by heavily guarded cable car. I’ve seen the movie at least a half-dozen times, and trust me, lots of stuff blows up. The body count is impressively high. I’ve read that despite Clint Eastwood’s reputation for cinematic violence in his other films, his character hit a personal record in this film. It’s very much a “guy” flick. Oh, but did I mention, it’s also got Richard Burton. Sigh...

Scenery, atmosphere, danger, betrayal, suspense, fireballs, murder, mayhem. Where else could my mind possibly wander? But it was something else entirely that caught my eye as the camera panned the snowy village streets at the base of the fortress.

“Man,” I said as I sat up straighter and took notice. “Would you look at the size of that pile of firewood!”

We both laughed. I’m sure it’s nothing that Alastair MacLean or the film’s director ever anticipated while writing the scene or framing the shot. But I look at split sections of hardwood with a new appreciation these days. And at the same time I was digging the irony of finding—if just for an instant—a pile of sticks more riveting than the demise of the next Brit in the lineup, I was remembering something journalist Bill Moyers said in an interview about twenty five years ago.

It was about how our perspective comes with a past.

Over the past several years I’ve come to grasp first-hand just how much work goes into cutting down a tree, sawing it into logs, lugging the pieces across the yard to the log-splitter, stacking the split logs in the garage for winter, and hauling all the spare cracked branches to a bonfire and burning them for hours. Now I look at every cord of split wood with new appreciation. And a pile of split logs the size of a bus in a German alpine village was indeed, to my eyes, epic.

Back when I was covering public television programming as a freelance writer, I had the good fortune to interview television journalist and author Bill Moyers for a magazine article. Moyers was promoting a series, "The Power of Myth," based on interviews he had done with philosopher Joseph Campbell, best known for his studies in comparative religion and comparative mythology.

Moyers had worn many hats in the course of his career. He was a respected journalist, but he was also an ordained minister. And at one point, he had served as fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson’s White House Press Secretary. I asked Moyers about whether it was difficult to keep his objectivity at times.

And the answer that he gave me, that we inevitably see life through “the prism of our own experience,” has stayed with me since then. I thought about it when my eyes lit up so unexpectedly at the sight of stacked cordwood.

It came back again recently in a completely different way. But, I think sometimes, you can come to see things through the prism of someone else’s experience too.

For the third time in six years, I was attending the “advanced writers workshop” at the artist’s retreat known as “The Clearing” in Door County, Wisconsin. The first time I had gone there I signed up as a regular student, dutifully trying to keep up with class discussions and assigned readings and writing activities. The second and third time I registered for “independent study.” This meant I could attend as many classes as I felt like—and play hooky as often as I felt like—and not feel guilty if I didn’t write a line that had been was assigned.

I admit that I skipped a couple of afternoon sessions to nap on a sandy beach, feeling my soul replenish to the sound of the waves and sea gulls nearby. And I blew off one day of classes entirely, taking the ferry boat over to neighboring Washington Island with my friend Paula.

But one thing I always looked forward to was hearing every word that came from our Master and Commander, Norbert Blei. Norb is a legend in Door County, and in his native Chicago’s writing circles as well. Poet, writer, journalist, instructor, he has long conducted these writing workshops at The Clearing. I know that every time I sit down at one of his sessions, I’m going to leave it with a few more windows opened in my mind, and with a new sense of wonder for some writer or form of writing that I had never contemplated.

Another one of Norb’s cornerstones is his small publishing company, Cross+Roads Press . Over time I’d bought a few of the books he’d published—one from the back of his car, in fact, at The Clearing. But I can’t say that I really paid much deep attention. For starters, when it comes to reading, I’m mostly addicted to state-of-the-art modern suspense novels. Lee Child, Nelson DeMille, Bernard Cornwell’s modern sailing thrillers from the nineties, a book’s got to have a strong whodunit element (and some righteous retribution) to keep me reading. Or even to pick it up from a shelf in the first place. I want an author with a reliable track record, some positive blurbs from major newspaper reviewers, and a catchy hook on the back cover to draw me in.

And then…well, I don’t know what else. Just go back to “the first thing.”

This time was different, though.

After an absence of a couple of years at The Clearing, Norb was back at the helm of the writing workshop. The group that assembled was largely a collection of familiar faces, writers who had been coming to Norb’s sessions for years for inspiration, guidance and fellowship, wrapped in the environs of a wonderful, thoroughly care free week in the piney woods by the shore.

Norb had been going through a very rough stretch in his health in the months before this year’s workshop, and the extent of his participation hung very much in the balance. He has since made a spectacular turnaround—read his recent essay about thanks and recovery and second chances in N.B.Coop News —but from the moment he walked into the first class, there was a stifled gasp and a collective holding of breath from the assembled writers at realizing what a tough road he had traveled. And how much uncertainty still lay before him.

As the week went on, Norb visibly drew strength from being back in his familiar seat, enjoying the give and take of challenge, and encouragement, and reminiscence, and providing our introduction, once again, to new frontiers.

But one session in particular seemed to have an echo of personal urgency, as Norb spoke at length about the importance of the “small press” in the publishing world, and his own efforts to give previously unknown writers a voice. With his own future a sea of dark and uncharted waters, he seemed a man determined to put on record, before this group of close friends and admirers, the gentle ferocity and depth of his devotion to this realm of art.

He spoke of his individual authors and their personal stories and voices and visions, of course. But he also described the complicated creative process of finding just the right design, just the right paper, just the right format, just the right art, to frame these voices and channel them to a wider audience. Not that much wider, since typically a press run topped out at perhaps 500 books, period. But words in print, nonetheless, available in eye-catching three-dimensional form to be picked up off a shelf and pondered, purchased, dog-eared and ultimately shared.

He described the evolution of one of these projects, a collection of poetry and prose called “White Shoulders” written by Wisconsin poet Jackie Langetieg and published in 2000. The book, a series of complex conversations between the author and her dead mother, is now out of print. But before it even saw print, an artistic decision had to be made as to how to showcase the words themselves. Langetieg joined in the discussion here, and described how she had envisioned a homespun sort of cover art. I think she mentioned something about a porch and a rocking chair.

Norb, however, had his eye on higher, finer things, and his vision and belief held sway. The book’s cover is stunning in its power and simplicity—white, with a symbolic close-up of classic white marble statuary, one figure resting its head on the shoulder of the other, a set of fingers relaxed and languishing at the back of a neck in casual embrace. Langetieg said that when she opened the box of her new books and saw their power and beauty for the first time, she wept.

And I finally “got it.”

The prism of my experience shifted right there. I began to look at “small press” books as labors of love assembled from many directions. Individual treasure boxes full of passion and hopes and dreams and unique talents. That surge of wonderment stayed with me, tumbling in my head, for the entire drive home, mile after mile accompanied by a sense of wonder and newfound recognition. It stays with me still.

The next time I manage to escape to a bookstore, I don’t expect I’ll be in such a hurry to blow past the smaller stuff to get right to the rack of mega-selling paperbacks. There’s a bright new pleasure I’ve discovered in exploring this different realm, seeing not just the words themselves but the passionate belief and creative energy that physically set them into print.

Kind of like how I can stare now at a neatly stacked wood pile and value it right back to when it was still a tree standing in the woods.

Just like your favorite eyeglasses...it’s good to get your prisms adjusted once in a while.

Garage Archeology

2010-07-23T15:08:00.021-05:00

The old leather bridle was stiff in my hands as I tried to pry open buckles and ties that hadn't been touched in more than fifteen years.

It was a hot, muggy summer afternoon, and beads of perspiration ran down the sides of my face and dripped off my chin and down my chest. A good time to sit in the shade, sip a glass of lemonade over ice, and watch the goldfinches alight at the thistle feeders.

Instead, I was dismantling pieces of my past on a beastly hot day in an effort to make more sense and order of my present. In other words, I was cleaning out the garage.

A project like this is almost never my idea, and that was certainly true here. But the man in my life has held sway on such epic undertakings for several years now. Once we'd finished the patio--okay, that one was my idea after twenty years of yearning for a patch of evening shade next to the house--reorganizing the garage was next. It was an offer I couldn't refuse. How often do you get help that's both eager and willing on such an awful task?

Plan "A" had been to rent a dumpster for a couple of days and spend a weekend joyfully pitching all extraneous clutter that had built up for a quarter century. Most of it not traceable to me. It had started out as a three car garage. At the moment it barely had room for two. Upon learning that a dumpster rental would cost me $350, however, I recalibrated and went to Plan "B". That considered that my own trash pickup service would work just fine if I made the effort to diligently recycle everything in sight.

We knew that this stage of things would require a more delicate hand and a finer sense of traige, so for the first two days of creating order from chaos, the field was mine. I knew I would inevitably be going back in time. I just didn't know how far.

The first order of business: I put an ad on Craigslist for the log-splitter with the hydraulics that were shot. I got thirty replies in 24 hours. It was gone in sixty seconds. So far, so good.

The first few hours of "pitch and toss" were like opening miscellenous door prizes. What on earth would I find? Two unopened Kleenex boxes dating from 1997. A cassette tape featuring Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake." Post-It page markers and a copy of a 2001 issue of Smithsonian Magazine. (Nowhere near my personal record of the 1987 copy I found when cleaning out the bedroom closets, but worth putting in the bathroom reading rack nonetheless.) Two itty-bitty pocket knives with itty-bitty scissors, and a pretty good magnifying glass. A "Magic 8-Ball" pen that still wrote.

I tried to look at the place like a newcomer--asking myself, "what doesn't belong here?" The child-size fainting couch with velvet upholstery missing two of its four legs, for one thing. The styrofoam tombstones that get put on display in the yard about every third Halloween. Where to put them? The extra basement, already cluttered nearly to the brim from emergency cleanings. I took one rusting children's bike to the end of the driveway and propped it against the trash can in hopes that the local "garbage fairy" might take it off my hands. By morning it was gone. I walked a second bike down to the end of the drive. It disappeared too.Inevitably, though, as I worked my way toward the far walls, the discoveries became less trivially amusing and more personal. In a collection of assorted papers, I found a watercolor of a bird I had painted in high school, illustrating some words in French I no longer remembered how to read.

I picked up a polyethylene grocery bag that had a lumpy profile and turned it upside down. A jumble of empty, clean plastic peanut butter jars and lids cascaded into the red garden cart. That one made me scratch my head for a minute ... until I noticed that the lids all had tiny holes drilled into them. Butterfly cages! Though not exactly.

But evidence that I'd spent years looking through fields of milkweed plants in summer after summer with the children when they were small, turning over hundreds of leaves to find Monarch butterfly eggs shaped like tiny pearls or nearly microscopic striped caterpillars munching away on fresh greenery. We brought them home and installed them in the jars, feeding them an ever-fresh supply of milkweed leaves, watching as each tiny caterpillar doubled and doubled and doubled in size until it was roughly the size of a little finger, then spun silk and hung itself upside down from the lid, transforming into a shiny green chrysalis with a row of tiny gold spots. Then waiting, and watching, and waiting, and watching, until one day the green chrysalis started to darken and turn black before, voilà, a butterfly emerged, wings cramped and crumpled like tissue paper, body huge and filled with fluid that would slowly pump into the wings until they were taut like kites over a frame. We set them free on the flowers in the garden and nearby trees, giggling at the scratchy feel of tiny butterfly feet clinging to our fingers as we searched for a good "takeoff" point.

Behind sets of rusting golf clubs lay a collection of plastic beach toys. They were covered with dust and spider webs, but sand from long ago still clunging to their crevices. I smiled and remembered blissful days of summer picnics on a blanket by Lake Michigan, a cooler full of bologna and turkey sandwiches, Doritos, Capri Sun juice bags with their colorful foil wrappers and tiny strawsm, Chips Ahoy cookies, seagulls hovering comically for scraps. No recycling bin for these. The beach toys were set aside for a good scrubbing with soap and water. I have hopes that some day I'll take grandchildren to the shore with a picnic lunch and an agenda of moated castles to build.

After disposing of the cumbersome and long-unused "grass bagging assembly" for the lawn tractor (Craigslist again, halleluiah!!), I finally reached the long neglected section that held my riding gear from when my horses and kids were both still young. My first saddle, bought when I was only eighteen, sat on a metal tree, miraculously intact. I pulled out a long-handled black horse whip with a longer braided tail--called a "lunging whip"--and it suddenly took me back to the age of twenty when I was training my first horse. Many sunkissed evenings pleasantly went by as my young buckskin gelding walked and trotted in thirty-foot circles around me at the end of a long line, guided by voice commands and the occasional tiny crack of the whip whistling in the air behind his haunches. Those days, and at that age, the world was still new and anything was possible.

I used to be pretty good with that whip, I remembered, able to clip the heads off daisys with precision. I stepped into the yard and took aim at a nearby dandelion. It had nothing to fear from me. A few more flicks of my wrist, and the dandelion was still standing, laughing at me. I gently stood the whip against the garage wall next to the saddle. Some things I would never part with, the memories they held were so rich.

But when it came to the bridles, this was another story. The bits and buckles had gone rusty, and the leather grown mildewed and stiff and dirty with cobwebs. And so there I stood, conscienciously dissassembling them so that the metal components could get recycled and some shred of usefulness in the cosmos remain. I felt a sense of my own history passing, and tried not to get impatient at how long the task was taking in the ferocious heat. Two bridles into the project, I took another direction.

Beside the saddle, a long flat cardboard box was resting across two saddle trees. It was addressed to my older son ... and it was empty. It took me a minute to conjure the meaning, but this took me back to another beach and another vacation. For several years we had taken the kids to St. Simons Island on the southern Georgia coast. During our last vacation, we had bought several "wake boards" for some beach fun.

A couple were made out of styrofoam, and it was no great loss to leave them behind. But my son had acquired one made of plywood, with a marvelous shark design, and didn't want to leave it behind. Besides, he was the only one in the family who could balance on a wakeboard instead of landing flat on their backside in the water. It was too big for carry-on luggage, so what were we to do?

Necessity being the mother of invention, we improvised as we drove to the airport. We found a K-Mart or something like it, and I ran inside to buy strapping tape, a magic marker and a cutting tool. Then we drove to the back of the store and scavenged for scrap card board. The package we assembled was more tape than cardboard ... but it did the trick, and the airline accepted it as checked luggage. Those were simpler, more innocent times in so many ways, not just for us but for the world. When you could walk on to a plane with a box cutter in your purse and nobody thought twice about it.

As I worked my way deeper into the corners, the excavation took on an air of real mystery. In a secret compartment of a forgotten workbench, I found what appeared to be the legendary long-lost "mouse graveyard." I whisked the tiny skeletons up with my newly purchased shop vac, but not before saving one as a souvenir...just for the day. Finally, there was just one opened bag sitting in a corner, large, silver, with contents that couldn't be determined by nudging from the outside. I opened it a crack, and the unmistakable awful scent of generations of mice and their leavings wafted up. Phew. Was this was Howard Carter was thinking when he first opened King Tut's tomb?

I heaved the bag, still closed, into the wheelbarrow, and took it outside where fresh air would make the sorting task less intolerable. I took a small peek inside again. In the musty gloom I made out the spine of a book that dated back to my teenage years on the farm. Oh my god. What a fitting denouement. This last bag was a portal to the years before my ex and I build this house or garage, a cache of relics I had grabbed from the farmhouse before my parents sold the place.

I pushed the wheelbarrow into a patch of shade, and pulled up a comfortable lawn chair. A treasure trove awaited me among the mouse doots. A four-album set of Benny Goodman records ... playable at 78 r.p.m. Homework from my sixth grade class at Maternity B.V.M. Catholic school in Chicago. I had never kept a diary or a journal when I was a young girl, but in looking over a program from a high school concert, I learned just what day I was on stage playing a Beethoven sonata at Immaculata High School near Chicago's lake shore. There were more watercolors, again, and high school group science reports, and a rusting egg separator. The mice, I noticed, had demonstrated discriminating taste when it came to books. They had cheerfully gnawed and burrowed their way far into a collection of plays by William Shakespeare ... but had left the tales of Edgar Allen Poe largely untouched. "Classics Illustrated" versions of Black Beauty and Robinson Crusoe were likewise well appreciated, along with a serious leather-bound tome of the world's greatest paintings. A book of fairy tales, on the other hand, didn't hold their interest. To my eternal gratitude, they left my Nancy Drew mysteries unmolested.

The last bag finally emptied, I returned to the garage to assist in the homestretch efforts of sweeping and cleaning together, building a new fireplace rack, and loading the pickup truck with items that were so large ... or hazardous ... that they drew a separate trip to a waste disposal site. By the time night fell and the garage was transformed, I was so tired I could hardly walk.

I'm all cleaned off now, the heat and the sweat and the exhaustion of the weekend starting to fade in memory. But I look forward to a time sometime soon, when I'll sit on that new patio with a glass of lemonade in the evening shade, watch the goldfinches and hummingbirds alight on their feeders, and take another, more leisurely walk back in time with Nancy Drew and "The Secret of the Old Clock."

Chicago by Boat

2010-07-02T12:59:00.005-05:00

My German cousin Ingrid and her husband, Reiner, recently came to Chicago to visit for the first time ever! We started the sightseeing by taking in an architectural boat tour on the Chicago River. I can't think of a prettier, more relaxing way to get introduced to the city where I grew up. And of all the historical and architectural talks my aunt Mary Therese Griffin took on after she "retired" from being a history teacher, this particular tour, with its lake breezes and soaring skyscrapers and colorful background, was by far her favorite for many years. You can book a tour of your own at www.chicagoline.com.

The Clearing

2010-06-19T16:56:00.006-05:00

If you've already been to The Clearing, the "folk school" and artistic retreat in Door County, Wisconsin founded by Chicago landscape architect Jens Jensen in the early 1900s, the place needs no introduction. If you haven't, check it out at www.theclearing.org. These photos are from 2007 and 2010. What a place of serenity and bliss!

The Prodigal Newshound

2010-06-08T20:37:00.003-05:00

The Sunday paper arrived at my house this weekend, tucked into its plastic delivery box just a little to the right of the rusting mail box. I carried it in with my groceries, thinking that it’s gotten a little lighter over the years, despite the raft of advertising inserts. I felt like I was bringing an old friend back to my house for coffee after an awkward estrangement.

This shouldn’t sound like a big deal, but it is to me. The newspaper box had fallen into disuse steadily over the past several years as I scaled back my newspaper reading from a daily schedule to the Sunday paper…and then to none at all. It became a convenient drop off point for unsolicited grocery store fliers, and home to the occasional family of large, black spiders.

Blame it on the Internet. Seriously.

Newspaper reporting was my first “real” job. I’m not counting the cocktail waitressing that paid the bills during my first three years of college. I started my journalism career as a stringer for the Milwaukee Sentinel, a large metropolitan daily, while I was still a college student. I then bumped up to the staff of the even bigger Milwaukee Journal after I graduated. There was a thrill and an immediacy to what we did as reporters back then. Of course feature articles took longer to percolate, and special investigative series could take weeks or months to put together.

But the bread and butter, the meat and potatoes of what we put into those column inches that appeared in print only hours after we phoned in our stories came with an adrenaline rushed, pressure-cooker immediacy. In the days before everybody and his mother had a cell phone, the ability to locate a pay phone in a courthouse or at a gas station somewhere in the middle of nowhere meant the difference between getting your story delivered to the copy desk before deadline and blowing it entirely. It was a thrilling, vital business to be part of. Woodward and Bernstein, the guys who broke the Watergate story in the "olden days" of typewriters and telephones with cords and dials, were our heroes.

People read newspapers on a regular basis for the actual NEWS, and then talked—or argued—about what they’d read. It was a shared experience, though who you shared it with depended on whether you subscribed to the morning paper or the evening one. Kind of like the way—before cable TV came along and fragmented the viewing public’s short list of what to watch—a lot of folks watched the same shows on the big three networks, and connected over the water cooler the next day.

The last time I remember having a conversation with anyone about something I’d seen on TV the night before, Tony Soprano was contemplating rubbing out another liability without much finesse.

As newspaper reporting gave way to motherhood and freelance writing, I eagerly awaited the arrival of the afternoon paper as my portal into what was going on in the world. Let’s face it, having toddlers around isn’t terribly conducive to sitting and calmly watching the evening news. But the kids started to grow up, and I switched gears and went to law school, and suddenly I got introduced to the world wide web.

Life got even busier, and the daily paper went unread more and more often, piling up in a corner of the kitchen in huge stacks to be hauled to the recycling center…or used to polish the glass doors on the fireplace. I scaled down the delivery schedule to weekends, then just Sunday. As I got more adept at navigating a computer keyboard, I flitted from website to website for the latest headlines—CNN, the New York Times, my local daily—a dozen times a day. I started to notice that the stories I’d seen on the internet were turning up in my local paper…the next day. The whole “deadline” quality of the print media seemed to have become a quaint anachronism n an age of instant updates and a twenty-four hour news cycle.

When even the Sunday paper started to pile up unread for days, I finally pulled the plug, letting my meager one-day-a-week subscription lapse. I must have gotten a dozen calls from the paper’s circulation department in the months that followed, trying to entice me to return, but I breezily declined. I was just too busy to read a newspaper right now, and besides, I got all my news on line. What could possibly top having the New York Times instantly at my fingertips?

I felt guilty every time I hung up the phone, like I’d spurned a faithful lover, but a combination of thrift and impatience and practicality carried the day. Reading a newspaper became a rare indulgence, relegated to killing time in airports or long road trips when someone else was driving.
And then, one day, I realized the things that I’d missed were things I couldn’t find on a desktop, and I couldn’t find in an instant. I missed the tactile pleasure of handling the pages and sorting through the various sections of the paper. I missed the three-dimensional element of reading deep into a story, and turning back to the front page to review some detail I wanted to ponder some more. I missed reading deeply into a story, period. I recognized, a little late in the game, that I never got more than two or three paragraphs into any story I read on a flat screen. I just hit the highlights and moved on, my curiosity sated, always cruising for the next interesting tidbit. Such is the nature of effortless instant news. There’s a lot of deep, meaningful stuff out there to be read, but my attention span for reading anything on a computer screen is a mile wide and an inch deep.

And doggone it, even though I’m over forty and I still missed the comic section!

My local paper came a’calling again recently, and this time I took the invitation. I felt a flash of spit-in-your-eye defiance as I wrote the check, but I felt a warm glow of reconnection too. I know the print media is hurting, and the future of many major dailies and newsmagazines around the country is a truly scary unknown.

But damn it, I’m glad I’m back on board for the ride.

Bluebirds of Happiness, Dandelions of Regret

2010-06-02T18:33:00.005-05:00

The bluebirds and the dandelions are a package deal at my house.

If you’ve ever seen a bluebird fly past on sunny day, you know the feeling of being awestruck by a flash of color that looks like it couldn’t possibly have come from nature. That electric, neon blue never fails to make my heart leap with joyful recognition. For me, it’s what seals the deal that spring has finally arrived, bringing the answer to the eternal question, “will the bluebirds come back to the yard this year?”

They’ve nested in wooden birdhouses in the backyard for the past twenty five years, and the sight of them still stirs my heart. Males wearing coats of brilliant blue, females a duskier brown, they perch on tree branches and rain gutters and the swing set, eyeing the lawn beneath them, swooping down for one tasty bug morsel or another from the short grass, then lightly flitting back up to their perch to savor the meal. They are grace, and color, and precision in motion.

Dandelions, of course, need no introduction. A gorgeous, deep buttery yellow, they turn the front lawn into a carpet of cheerful golden blooms virtually overnight. The warm fuzzy feeling of seeing that many flowers in one place lasts about three days, maybe four. Then the cute yellow flowers turn into leggy, ugly stems with seed-heads spewing dandelion fluff everywhere and the plants themselves start to flourish, making the lawn look like a ragged salad patch for rest of the entire summer and fall. The first snowfall finally puts them mercifully out of sight.

The dandelion profusion has been working its way over years around the back yard too. I’d like to nuke them into oblivion and start over with sod. Or at the very least, hire some firm with a large truck full of chemicals and a well-designed ad in the Yellow Pages to sprinkle the yard with toxic fairy dust to make the weeds go away and replace them with lush grass to tickle my bare feet.

It’s been a fantasy of mine for years. In fact, pretty much every spring as the snow starts to recede and the faintest hint of green begins to shade the landscape, I survey my domain and say “yup, I’ve gotta call a lawn service one of these days.”

And then hesitation sets in, in the form of that little voice whispering “but what about the bluebirds?” Do I really want to see them cheerfully scarfing up a smorgasbord of tasty bugs basted in weed retardants? And then I know I’ll wait and see. Again. And if they show up, I’ll put off the whole chemical fairy dust solution for one more year, and just enjoy the bluebird show.

I wasn’t always a birdwatcher. Growing up in Chicago, the birds I remember pretty much consisted of the occasional duck paddling in a park pond, and the thousands of pigeons who strutted their stuff on the sidewalks of the Loop downtown, dodging foot traffic and taxicabs, a faint lavender sheen gleaming off their staid grey and white topcoats.

But marriage was followed a couple of years later by a move to the country, fields and trees in abundance. We followed a pretty traditional division of labor back then—he left in the morning to go to the office, and I stayed home with the baby and the dog, changing diapers and making dinner. There is just not much conversation you can get out of a toddler who’s under the age of two, or a dog of any age. And so what was outside my kitchen window started to catch my eye.

And oh, what a glorious profusion of things were waiting to be discovered! I found a small telescope somewhere among our belongings, and stood at the window over the kitchen sink like Captain Ahab astride the forecastle of the Pequod. I got a Roger Tory Peterson guide to the birds “east of the Rockies” and started to identify the residents of the countryside around me. Red-tailed hawks, turkey vultures, cardinals, chickadees, goldfinches, nuthatches, the variety was infinite, the amusement factor high. I didn’t need a bird guide to identify the red fox vixen who moved into a nearby woodchuck den with her four fluffy kits tumbling around her in the sunlight. I just felt a tug of maternal sympathy as she stoically sat, stiff as a ramrod, while the kits tumbled and played around her and nipped at her tail.

Eventually I got a pair of good binoculars for Christmas, and I parked them on the kitchen counter, between the microwave and the dish rack. They still don’t get to collect much dust.

Somewhere along the line when we first moved into the new house in the country, my father-in-law bemoaned the fact that when he was a young man, bluebirds had been common, but that he hadn’t seen one now for years. I wondered whether I could fix that. An article in the local newspaper about the efforts of various nature groups to provide bluebird nesting habitats steered me to a place to buy a couple of suitable nest boxes. I never knew birds could be so picky!!

Then, while killing time in a doctor’s waiting room, I skimmed a nature magazine and spied a short photo feature about someone who had reasoned that if you could decoy a duck, you should be able to decoy a bluebird. He’d cut a rudimentary bird shape from some plywood and painted it the right colors, and then snapped a picture of a male bluebird sitting atop the fake. It was one of those “eureka” moments, and I asked my father-in-law, whose retirement vocation was working with wood, to chisel me a three-dimensional decoy or two.

I can still hear his response, equal parts laughter, scoffing and incredulity. Still, he delivered. I dutifully painted one with my best imitation of nature—creamy white underside, rosy red chest, blue topcoat the brightest blue I could find. As soon as the paint was dry, I set the decoy atop the birdhouse closest to the house, with the most unobstructed view from the window over the kitchen sink. To be honest, that’s where most of my birdwatching takes place. My rule of thumb is…if I can’t see it while I’m washing dishes, it’s just not there.

Five minutes, tops. That’s how long it took for a gorgeous male to check out the new digs, discover that his rival was just a piece of furniture, and decide to move the family in. Some serious nest building followed, a tidy swirl of dried grasses mixed with the occasional long strand of hair from one of the horses’ tails. My father-in-law was truly impressed.

I’d bought the style of nest box that had a side door I could pull open and peek inside with. From everything I’d read, I’d learned that a pair of nesting bluebirds were unlikely to be spooked by the occasional visit from a human, and watching the pair’s progress as parents was fascinating. Day by day, one tiny blue egg was followed by another, then another, until the count was up to five and Ms. Bluebird started to settle in for the long haul. Sometimes when I opened the nest box door she blasted out of the hole in front, other times she just looked over her shoulder at me, unflinching, one busy, preoccupied suburban mom to another.

One pair of bluebirds or another have been raising their chicks in that same next box now for a quarter century. Well, not exactly the “same” next box, the originals finally fell apart a few years ago and when I went looking for replacements, found that the boxes with the side doors went for about thirty five friggin’ dollars each!! I paid it, though not without grumbling.

Being able to look into the nest is more than half the fun! There’s the anticipation of waiting to see when the actual “building” will start. Then guessing how many eggs will show up this time. The then chicks themselves—freshly hatched, eyes closed, impossibly tiny bundles of dark fluff and spiky little wing feathers with pale yellow beaks. They grow by leaps and bounds from day to day, until they’re speckled and plump and bright-eyed, jostling and jam-packed so tightly into the crowded box that they resemble a car full of clowns in a circus.

There have been dramas along the way. English sparrows, notorious for displacing bluebirds in violent fashion, had come to the yard in abundance for several years, drawn by the horses and the grain in their feed. They booted the nesting bluebirds out of their nest one year, but not before killing the babies. I was heartbroken.

Yet another year saw a freak late-spring six-inch snowfall just after the female bluebird had started to sit on her clutch of eggs. She bolted from the nest. I made quite a sight that morning, in a pair of snow boots and a long pink chenille housecoat, sprinkling a handful of mealworms from the bait section of the corner gas station on top of the next box to lure them back to the nest. It took them a long time to return.

I had my local ornithologist’s phone number committed to memory by this time, and I called him for advice. The eggs were most likely frozen at this point, the embryos dead, he said regretfully. There was nothing that could be done other than let the female return to the nest and brood them until she realized that none would hatch. Couldn’t I just rip the nest out and let them start over? I asked. No, he replied. Let nature take its course.

The next few weeks were torture. My heart broke for this little bird, who was doing such a diligent job of keeping her clutch of eggs warm, tragically unaware of the fact that they could never hatch. I called my ornithologist weekly, pleading for special dispensation to step in and rescue her from this empty exercise of maternal duty. The answer I invariably got was “no.”

Then, one sunshiny day, there seemed to be more activity at the nest than usual. I dutifully slogged out there, cutting a path through the tall grass to the box, which stood about eye-level on a metal pole. I popped the door open and looked inside, pessimistically expecting to see a melancholy tableau of motherhood denied. Mom wasn’t in the nest, but five tiny nuggets of fluff raised their heads at the intrusion, eyes sealed shut but curiosity still strong .

Against all odds, she’d done it!! I mentally saluted the universal tenacity of motherhood in the face of impossible odds.

I wonder how long bluebirds live, and how many generations of the same family have made a home in that same nest box. Bluebirds are known to be territorial, and generally require a distance of about three hundred feet from the next nesting pair to be comfortable. How do they divvy up the occupancy rights to this prime piece of real estate? After migrating south for the winter, do the kids come back to the old neighborhood just to visit where they grew up? Who gets to live in the old house once the folks have passed on or moved away?

Every fall, when it’s just before migration time, I’ll see the pack of this year’s crop of nestlings, with youthful speckles and bellies so huge from gorging on a bumper crop of summer insects that it seems unlikely that they could fly for a block, much less fly south for a few hundred miles. They mill around together, four or five of them, hanging out on the swing set or the back porch, checking out the bird feeder full of sunflower seeds, sampling the hulled seeds out of curiosity, just to see what was drawing in every other bird in the neighborhood.

They are a captivating, feathery link to the past, and a fond link to my late father-in-law, and a perfect joy in the present, and a source of hope and optimism that, at some time, it will be spring again. And for at least one more year, I can pretty well predict that while I may again think of calling a lawn service to finally kill off my dandelions next March of April…the smart money will still be on the birds.

The Sisterhood of the Chop Saw

2010-05-26T18:13:00.013-05:00

My son looked at me and my accountrements with skepticism through narrowed eyes. This would be the son with the tattoo between his shoulder blades, the hand-rolled cigarette, the assortment of earrings, and the riot of curls that--at the right length--give him a jaunty, Viva la Revolución Che Guevara vibe.

He's a hard one to impress when it comes to sartorial unorthodoxy. But impress--or stun--I did.

"Mom, you look like you're ready to break into a chemical plant." From out out of the mouths of babes.

I'd be lying if I said I took the assessment calmly. Rather, I'd caught a glimpse of myself just a few seconds before, and was already hovering on the edge of hysterial fall-apart laughter. It was ninety degrees out, and I was decked out in a tank top, with a wet bandana across the lower two-thirds of my face ala Jesse James; safety goggles over my tri-focals; giant padded vinyl ear protectors that would have kept my hearing safe on an airport runway; and a pair of green suede work gloves. I personally thought I looked a bit like a galactic bounty hunter straight out of "Star Wars."

My son started to laugh, and that's all I needed to become completely unglued. Once the safety goggles started to steam up, I was done for. I pulled off the scarf, ear mufflers, gloves and goggles, and laughed and laughed, holding on to the porch, until tears came to my eyes. I kept laughing until I got just about all of it out, then suited up again. One piece at a time. Scarf. Goggles. Ear protectors. Work gloves.

Because frankly, my dears, operating a chop saw just isn't a laughing matter!

My composure marginally reclaimed, I finally approached the reason for all the caution: a rented "chop saw" sitting on the tailgate of the Ford F-150. It had a circular blade about a foot in diameter . The blade pivoted up and down, ready to slice through concrete, metal, wood, errant limbs, whatever was called for, with lethal efficiency. It looked menacing just sitting still, lurking beneath its bright red metal safety guard. It was about to give a whole new dimension to my acquaintance with power tools. Wow, how things change.

Six months ago, I'd never heard the words "chop" and "saw" used in the same sentence. I was feeling mighty pleased with myself, in fact, that I'd acquired a cordless drill and a battery-operated chain saw since the divorce and wasn't afraid to use them. Really, I thought I was pretty well set with a couple of hammers, a set of hex wrenches, some screwdrivers and a tape measure.

Then my aunt passed away, and I spent hours driving back and forth to Chicago with my friend Mary Kay to organize an estate sale for my aunt's things. As the miles sped by, the topic of putting in a brick patio next to the house came up, and I picked her brain for suggestions.

Mary Kay is a very handy gal, able to pull off both spike heels with a slinky black evening dress and home improvement projects with aplomb and panache. She is far more experienced than I when it comes to wielding a hammer, and routinely takes a more active role in shaping her environment. I tend to get backed into making repairs because things break, such as pasture fences, or when trees come down where they shouldn't. The most initiative and daring I show usually involves a paint roller. Mary Kay, on the other hand, has been known to dismantle and reconstruct her foyer while her husband was away on business for a few days, just for the fun of it. When it comes to using power tools, she not only talks the talk, she walks the walk. I'm learning at the feet of the master.

"You're going to need a chop saw," she said as I drove, and I duly made a mental note. I had no idea what a chop saw was, but I was assured that one was needed for cutting bricks. And for a person with her heart set on a herringbone brick pattern, I understood that some bricks indeed would require cleaving.

Months later, both the estate sale and the winter snow cover behind us, the plan was finally ready to roll. I had pallets of bricks and sand stacked in the driveway, lumber ready to be picked up for framing, two brand new shovels, weather that was warm and dry, and most important, a supply of "volunteer" labor in the form of three of my kids, one of their friends, and the man in my life. Don't think that THAT didn't take some coordinating! I'd played the "let's celebrate Mother's Day late!" card. It works.

I'd spent the day before cooking nearly non-stop to feed this busy crew, and naively assumed that once I'd picked up the saw from the nearby rental place, my project duties would mainly consist of finishing up the potato salad, keeping the beer cold, and bringing food out from time to time.

The best laid plans...

By the time we actually got started, it was one in the afternoon. Since the man in my life was the only one among us who'd had any experience at all in laying patio brick or in building and setting a wooden frame, the job of cutting the bricks suddenly shifted to me. Wielding a pencil and a calculator while sitting in the shade, I'd figured out that setting this particular pattern would require cutting a minimum of eighteen pavers into two parts. Never let it be said that you don't need math after high school!

We measured the first brick and lined up the metal guide together, and then he pushed the "on" switch and set the blade whirling. As blade met concrete paver, the noise level ramped from loud to absolutely searing. An incredible cloud of brick dust erupted and hung in the air, drifting toward the garage and filling the pickup truck with fine white powder. He stood back, incredulous at the magnitude of the mess a single brick had left behind. There were nineteen to go.

Well, he said with a shrug, the beauty of having an old truck is that you can mess it up and there's no harm done. Cleanup would come later, when he'd park it on a hill and run a hose over the inside. We left the chop saw on the back of the truck, and I gamely stepped in for the rest of the job. After I finally quit laughing.

Thank god for ear protectors. And safety goggles. And being able to find a cotton bandana to soak and cover my face with! Even with my ears covered, I could feel the screaming noise through the vibration of the machine. There was a primitive, visceral feeling of accomplishment to be had in watching the cloud of dust kick up as the blade cut a slot through one side of the brick. Then a short pause while I turned the brick over, lined it up again, and finished the cut. It was a thing of wonderous, smooth beauty, especially when compared to the Neanderthal alternative method of hitting it with a hammer and chisel. It was empowering and frightening all in one. And my triceps ached for two days afterward just from the effort of pushing the blade downward into concrete again and again.

Driving to work the next day, after I'd dropped the saw back at the rental shop, I called Mary Kay to bring her up to speed on my admission to the Sisterhood of the Chop Saw. When I got to describing the outfit and my son's observations, both of us were sputtering and laughing so hard we could barely talk. "Feels pretty good, doesn't it?" she asked.

Yup, it sure did.

A little later in the drive I thought about a much younger guy I used to work with and found myself grinning from ear to ear. A few years earlier I'd come to work one day and popped my head into his office, regaling him with my exploits of having to buy my first hand saw to cut up some branches that had fallen across a hiking path. At least I think it was the story about the hand saw. It might have been the cordless drill adventure.

"That settles is, Mary," he said. "You are officially manlier than I am!"

Well. If he'd so been impressed with my using a hand saw, what would he think about cutting bricks off the back of a pickup truck?

I didn't have to wait long to find out. I had an email message from this very man waiting for me in my "in" box, asking about the status of a case I'd argued months ago. We traded thoughts about the case, and then I filled him in on the "chop saw" afternoon.

He was impressed, but stressed that now that he was married and a homeowner to boot, he felt like he was finally started to catch up to me. He'd just recently finished remodeling a bathroom, in fact, and was now well acquainted with the art of cutting tiles. We were both justifiably proud at the ground we've covered, me since the divorce, him since he was a young single guy living in an apartment.

I suppose, if he's really nice, we'll officially admit him into the Sisterhood of the Chop Saw. And if he sends imported chocolate, we may even waive the part about the spike heels.

Relativity

2010-05-21T21:42:00.003-05:00

I was getting on my fourth flight in three days. Or maybe it was my third flight in two days. Details tend to blur when you’ve got an itinerary that has you touching down in one airplane ten minutes after your next flight has officially started boarding. Some days are like that. You just run as fast as you can, and hope that you don’t knock anyone over as you go.

But the “eureka” moment that still stands out like a beacon in my short-term memory came when I was standing still.

I was one of the last two people in line to board a very large jet. I was dragging a backpack full of necessities and things that weren’t necessary at all given the tropical temps awaiting me in Georgia at the end of the journey. The list of passengers was a long one, and as expected, when funneling many dozens of people single file through the cabin door and waiting for them to adjust their carryon luggage and magazines and seat belts and other accoutrements…the confines of the covered walkway to the plane are anything but comfy. Narrow, devoid of character, devoid of color, devoid of fresh air…not the best of places for passing time. Conducive to impatience, and irritability, and at best, collective sighs of resignation.

And yet, what struck me as pretty funny as I stood there was that I was smiling. And quite happy. And what triggered this novelty was the fact that I was standing still…and my back didn’t hurt. From the distance of fifteen years ago, it was darn near a miracle.

I refer once in a while in my essays to the horseback riding accident I had in 1995. The short version was that I took a hard fall off a tall horse involving a fence that I didn’t think I should be jumping. It was a turning point, and a second chance, and the three months I spent wrapped in a body cast from collarbones to hips was a crucible. Life divided into “before” and “after,” and every day I know just how lucky I am to still be walking around under my own steam.

But that’s the big picture.

There’s a small picture, too, or a series of them, that had nothing to do with life’s bigger questions and everything to do with just getting making it through the day.

The day I got cut out of the body cast, I remember having a wonderful hour-glass figure for a few hours. I also remember just how good standing in the shower felt, after three months without. I made the most of my temporarily sultry figure it that evening, in fact, dressing in a bright red “devil” costume and black leggings and little red horns in my hair for the annual Boy Scout Halloween party at the parish grade school. Years later, one of the dads in attendance could still recall just how “hot” I looked that night! The thought can still make me laugh. It was a triumphant return to reality…until I stepped out for a breath of cool air and slipped on some wet leaves on the sidewalk and came crashing down on my backside. The jolt that went up my newly-liberated spine when I hit the concrete took my breath away with searing pain. I was a lot more careful about where I stepped after that.

In the days and weeks and months that followed, I learned the hard way just how badly the muscles of my torso had atrophied while I was locked in the cast so that the fractured vertebra could heal, and what a long road back I had ahead of me. I exercised. Swam. Lifted weights. Got massages. Walked. It took years to regain some part of “normal.”

The hardest thing at first, and something I had never anticipated, was just standing upright. For some reason I’ll never understand without a degree in sports medicine or physical therapy, the act of simply standing still was virtually impossible. The ache in the middle of my back after just a moment or two made me feel like I would just collapse into a heap on the floor. I could walk for extended stretches with absolutely no problem. But when it came time to stand in equipoise, such as waiting in line at the grocery store, I was in agony.

Christmas shopping that year—not even two months after the cast came off—was torture. I would walk into the mall and purchase, at most, two items. The pain in my back was intense, and carrying packages made things even worse. Shifting my weight from side to side impatiently while I waited for my purchases to get rung up, I counted the minutes and seconds until I could return to the car and lay down in the driver’s seat with the back pushed into full “recline” mode. Then I’d get up, lock the car, and do it all over again.

The following year the “big picture” changed and I started law school. And the year after that, with more time to spend on campus, I started lifting weights at the gym nearby. One day a classmate and I started talking as we worked out, and the entire story of my accident came pouring out. It was the first time I had really talked about it since it had happened two years earlier. I believe I had just walled off the frightening experience in the interest of putting one foot in front of the other toward recovery.

Now, it all came crashing back. I remember clutching the steering wheel as I drove home from school that day, and shaking at the realization of just how close I had come to dying or being paralyzed. What a razor-thin near miss I’d been graced with. I knew it too, since my accident had occurred only three months after the actor Christopher Reeve hit the dirt in his own riding mishap and wound up on a ventilator.

I don’t know when I turned a corner in the past fifteen years about being able to stand still without difficulty. I can’t say I’ve had too many opportunities to stand still at all these days! Emergencies, funerals, weddings, gardening, working, writing, book promoting…the last few years have had the quality of living in a cyclone. I haven’t given much thought to how the middle of my back feel in the grocery store these days, given that other aches and pains have accompanied the fact I’m no longer on the near side of…forty.

But standing in the entry port of a large airplane, waiting for nearly every other person to settle in before me, I finally stood still. Shrugged my shoulders, wriggled my arms, reveled in the recognition of how much had changed, and broke into a big smile of gratitude. And thought that while we may go through our days thinking that we can’t really be completely happy until we get something big, or fancy, or rare, or coveted, sometimes all we really need to do is to take a step back—or even just stand still—and savor a moment of relativity.

Place de la Musique

2010-05-03T20:37:00.027-05:00

Oh, what a spellbinding night! The Chicago Writers Association held a benefit concert on May 1 at the gorgeous Sanfilippo Estate in Barrington Hills for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, which is still in development. The estate, also known as the “Place de la Musique,” is a private residence in Barrington Hills, Illinois, housing a truly spectacular collection of antique music machines, stained glass, chandeliers, and the world’s largest restored theater pipe organ, which was in turn played superlatively that evening by Jelani Eddington. Every time you turned around, there was something else that just rocked you back on your heels with awe. Here’s a small window into the experience. And thank you Rachel Madorsky for taking my picture on the staircase!

Calling H.D. Thoreau

2010-04-28T20:40:00.006-05:00

I just finished watching the movie "Avatar" this past weekend on DVD, and there are things about it that are still staying with me. I say "finished watching" because at this age, the notion of starting a three-hour movie at about 10:30 at night sounds great only in theory. This never was destined to be anything but a two-night engagement.

After all the hype, I can honestly say that it was visually spellbinding...with dialogue that sometimes sounded jarringly like it was written by fourteen-year-olds who grew up on video games. I found myself watching much of it with detachment, as though I was watching a role-playing video game that someone else was controlling.

But still, there were some stand-out concepts. Six-legged horses? No doubt a smoother ride than the ones that we've got here. Floating mountains? Sign me up for the tour. But the thing I'd really like to get a piece of is that whole "magical braid" thing, where the end of everybody's hairpiece has a collection of tentacles/filaments that allow mystical connection with everything else--your pet raptor, the memories of your ancestors, the divine earth mother.

I could skip connecting with the trees in my back yard, or reading my cat's mind. I suppose catching up on some family history would be nice. But if I had one of those things, there's one soul I'd use it to connect with, and that's Henry David Thoreau. Yes, that Henry David, of Walden Pond fame. The guy who basically took a two year sabbatical from his regular life in the 1840s to live simply in a cabin and observe nature without the interruption of daily routine.

His rationale was pure and simple.

"I went to the wood because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived," he wrote in a famous passage from "Walden." It's one of my favorite parts of the book.

I've been thinking of that passage, along with the magical hair connection from Avatar, for the past few days. My life feels like it's taken on the quality of dog-paddling in the middle of the ocean...and I'm losing ground. There are many reasons for this, the primary one being too many irons in the fire at once. Some of the irons are of my own creation, such as the business of writing, others have been thrust upon me by duty and family and deaths and funerals and the complicated aftermath of those sad but important things.

I found myself feeling entirely scattered yesterday, trying to focus on a dozen things simultaneously but unable to really concentrate on one. I had the tremendous sense that I had become somehow like those fading galaxies one reads about occasionally in a science magazine while waiting in a doctor's office. Expanding inexorably to oblivion, lacking a center of gravity anymore to keep its various particles and planets in orbit.

I called a temporary halt to my dog-paddling, and decided to list the various hats I was wearing, with the urgently spinning plates that went with each. By the time I got to the end of the list, it was nearly fourteen inches long, set in 11 point type. I typed and typed, using bullet points and subheads, and when I sat back and looked at it (after taping the two sheets of paper together for unity's sake), I had a pretty good understanding of just why I've been feeling like I've got too many things to think about at once.

Prosecutor, mother, writer, photographer, estate executor, homeowner, gardener, girlfriend...it was a recipe for a nervous breakdown. It looked like an organizational chart for the Securities and Exchange Commission, with spokes of responsibility radiating out in all directions from a central source. I taped it to my bathroom mirror as a reminder that if I feel overwhelmed on some days...I've got a darned good reason to take a deep breath and reach for another chocolate bar!

That task done, I returned to my keyboard and immediately booked a week later this year at a writer's retreat "up north" in the woods where somebody else will prepare three delicious meals for me every day and clean up afterward, I'll check my cell phone for messages only once a day, if then, and I'll concentrate on just one thing, writing. I've done it before, and there's always been a tremendous payoff in creativity to show for the week. One year I came back home with the first four chapters of a novel written, another year I ended up throwing my energy into writing essays.

There's a lot to be said for doing the "Walden" thing even if just for a week, and immersing yourself in wooded surroundings away from the madding crowd. I can't wait to put the daily routine of scrambling and list-making on hold, and instead stop to admire the lichen on a tree or watch a butterfly alight delicately on a coneflower, knowing that I'm not going to get interrupted.

The sheets of paper attesting to my stress level affixed to my bathroom mirror and the retreat officially booked, I stepped back into the regular swim of things, knowing that of the twenty-six things I should accomplish on any given day, only maybe six might get done. And that will be okay.

Nevertheless, when I got home from work today I decided to leave the indoor, letter-writing, multi-tasking estate-managing chores by the wayside and try to emulate good old Henry David for a bit. I finished unloading a bunch of topsoil and mulch around the base of a tree to start a new garden, and then I really hit the trail for some utilitarian fun. The branches of some of the pine trees next to the hiking path have been getting long enough crowd the path, and so I pondered the question I doubt has ever been presented to Ladies Home Journal--when setting out for a walk in the woods, should I bring the chainsaw or the hand saw?

I opted for the hand saw (who wants to lug the extra weight for more than a half mile?), and for the next half hour focused on one task alone--cutting low branches off of evergreens, and hauling them out of the way so that a lawn tractor could once again get through without trouble. It was not rocket science. It didn't require much precision. But doggone it, it felt good. It was simple, it was repetitive, and it could be measured in the sawdust falling from the blade as it cut through the wood fueled only by the strength of my arms, and the pile of branches as it grew higher and higher.

Two years of this would drive me bonkers, I know. I'm glad Henry David Thoreau got as much as he did from his personal experiment at Walden and then put it all into words for us to share. I'm too much of a "people person" to want to retreat from society for any real length of time.

Tomorrow I know I'll be back at my desk, thinking about search and seizure issues and wondering how I'll ever get all the other things on that fourteen inch list accomplished before I'm eighty. Multi-tasking is like breathing to me.

But sometimes, when the onrushing tide of details gets to be just a bit too overwhelming, I'll try to channel Henry David and his wish "to live deliberately." I'll return to the woods to trim some more branches, or to my garden just to plant something new and watch it grow. And for a little while, at least, those "essential facts" will be purely enough.

Hope and Joy

2010-03-30T09:32:00.008-05:00

It's a gorgeous spring morning right now, with crocuses blooming and daffodil buds pushing higher above the leaf litter and the last of the snow finally melted. There's a predicted daytime temperature somewhere in the mid-60s, with low-70s forecast for tomorrow. With the worst of the winter behind us, and memories of snowdrifts and sub-zero windchills mercifully fading, it seems like a picture perfect morning to throw a couple of sets of really great words to live by out there.

One is part of a poem by Emily Dickenson, proving that beautiful and inspiring language is absolutely timeless. The other is more recent, by author and motivational speaker Tama Kieves, and rings just as true.

Now, I've never been a poetry fan, but I keep thinking and hoping that some day I could be. Several years ago I had the opportunity while on vacation to either attend a group discussion of Emily Dickenson poems or take my shotgun to a range and shoot at some clay pigeons. Let me tell you, I waffled on that for an entire day before taking the road less traveled and bravely showing up at the literary group, feeling like a Neanderthal crashing an Edwardian dinner party.

My reading of poetry has largely been confined to some reading assignments at a week-long writer's retreat a few years ago in the fragrant, glorious piney woods of Wisconsin's Door County. I often joke that when I was fourteen, I took the "Evelyn Woods Speed Reading" course and it ruined me for life. I can read at the speed of light, but I retain almost nothing. That ability to speed read allows me to push efficiently through newspapers and magazines and suspense novels and legal cases to get to the important stuff REALLY fast. For decades, I haven't thought of reading any other way, just as a racehorse champing on his snaffle bit in the starting gate at Churchill Downs wouldn't think of walking the course once the gate flies open and the starting bell rings. Forging my way through a suspense novel by one of my favorite authors (pick one, from Nevada Barr to Nelson DeMille to Lee Child) is a sensation akin to throwing my body into tall waves at the beach, instantaneous gratification that's immediately behind me.

The week at the retreat was eye opening. With no phones ringing, no kids clamoring, no dishes to wash and dry, I had nothing to do other than to bask in my tranquil, rustic surroundings and read at a leisurely pace, letting the joy of recognition at words well and beautifully assembled stir my heart.

Which may be why these two paragraphs ran through my vision at different times and just decided to stay.

This is from Emily Dickenson's "Hope is the Thing with Feathers"...

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all...

Now, a century and a half later, comes Tama Kieves. Tama and I have never met, though my gratitude to her is boundless because she gave me--on the spur of the moment and with about a minute's worth of introduction--a lovely, positive blurb a couple of years ago for my first collection of essays, "Running with Stilettos: Living a Balanced Life in Dangerous Shoes." Tama is famous for her own book "This Time I Dance: Creating the Work You Love" (subtitled "How One Harvard Lawyer Left it All to Have it All") which in turn led to her "Awakening Artistry" alternative career coaching business. Tama sends out a monthly e-newsletter, from which I always take away some positive nugget of optimism. But one set of words last December really caught my eye and stayed, and I'd like to share them too...

Joy has a way of reminding you of who you truly are. Joy has a way of upping the ante for what you will settle for in life. Joy floods your brain with oxygen and suddenly new ideas, insights, and next steps become possible. Joy is the flashlight in the dark, when things you thought were lost become visible and sparkling.

Well thank you Emily Dickenson, and thank you Tama Kieves. Now, with spring officially on the calendar and--in Wisconsin--actually just around the corner, I think I'll step outside into my flower garden, inventory how many plants survived the winter under our deep blanket of snow, imagine the return of the foxgloves and the coneflowers and the delphiniums and the peonies, and experience some hope and joy.

The Mary Griffin Gallery

2010-03-09T20:46:00.009-06:00

A Lioness Passes

2010-02-21T20:32:00.003-06:00

The Chicago artistic and historical scene lost a bright fixture with the passing of my aunt, Mary Therese Griffin, 82, on February 6, 2010. Mary, who retired from a colorful career as a teacher in the Chicago Public School system in 1987, had turned her passions for art, history and lifelong learning to a higher calling as a docent at the Art Institute, the Loyola University Museum of Art, the Chicago Architectural Foundation, the Field Museum, the Lyric Opera, Old St. Patrick’s Church, and the Chicago Historical Society. Among her effects at the time of her death was a pin denoting 500 hours of volunteer service at Resurrection Hospital. The CAF honored her for fifteen years of service.

The world may never again see a docent so well-read, or broadly educated, or so lively and genuinely enthusiastic. “Her feisty spirit and her knowledge of scripture always added a wonderful dimension to our program,” said Ann Meehan, Curator of Education at LUMA.

A Chicago native, Miss Griffin was the daughter of Irish immigrants, and always cherished her Irish roots, becoming an active member of several Irish American groups including the Friends of Irish Literature. Father Tom Hurley, pastor of Old St. Patrick’s church in Chicago, had these words of praise. “We will remember her here at Old St. Pat’s and pay tribute to the energy and love she had for the Irish ancestors who built this wonderful church and the great people whose faith and prayer sustain it today.”

Mary would certainly have enjoyed her own funeral mass, which was presided over by two priests who knew her for most of their lives—her cousin Cmdr. Brian Simpson of the U.S. Navy’s Chaplain Corps, and Father James Kinn, who had been a friend since childhood. Most everyone assembled in St. Ferdinand’s Catholic Church for the mass cracked a smile when Father Brian stepped down from the altar toward the end of the ceremony and launched into a eulogy that was tender, and touching, and laced with humor and fond remembrance.

Mary had teaching in her blood, and found inspiration in the example of my great-grandfather, Joseph Griffin. He had been headmaster of the Templetuohy Boys School in Ireland’s County Tipperary, and was recognized three times by the British Government for his teaching excellence during a time when Britain still ruled Ireland and held no great fondness for recognizing native achievements across the Irish Sea and St. George’s Channel.

However, Mary’s vocation was not always apparent at an early age. According to a knowledgeable source who shall remain anonymous, Mary routinely earned good academic grades as a student at Maternity B.V.M. school in the Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago…but was constantly subject to reprimands for infractions of classroom decorum. And the reason?

“She could never stop talking in class!”

Nonetheless, Mary graduated from Chicago Teacher’s College, and then went on to earn a Master of Arts degree from Loyola University. Her instinctive refusal to be boxed in by convention as a teacher became a source of inspiration cited over and over by her students at the news of her passing. One man who attended her wake had become both a doctor and a teacher, and came to pay his fond respects to his former fourth grade teacher at Mozart School in Chicago. Mary Griffin, he said, had shown him at that early age what teaching could be, and he said her example had paved the way for his own teaching career.

For all her own clashes with authority as a youngster in school, Mary insisted on order and respect in her own classroom. One memorable example which was cited by several of her students was a certain day in 1972, at the height of anti-war protests and youthful self-expression, when the students at Foreman High School planned a “walk-out.” They may have walked out of other classroom…but not Miss Griffin’s.

“She placed herself across the classroom door and refused to let us out,” one student wrote. “That’s how much she cared! She is still alive in each of us! ‘Mr. Holland’s Opus’ has nothing on her!”

Mary’s subject matter in the public school system was often varied, but teaching Advanced Placement Modern European History classes at Foreman High School was a passion very dear to her heart. One of her keepsakes was a “thank you” letter written by a former student TWENTY THREE YEARS AFTER being in her history class. The student noted that Mary’s love of travel had inspired her students and captured their imaginations. “The year I had you for history class you had traveled to the U.S.S.R. after studying the language for several months in advance,” the former student wrote. “This made us realize that learning continues throughout life and can stimulate it beyond formal education.”

Another student wrote of “our beloved ‘Miss Griffin” in a condolence note, and described “the 'teacher extraordinaire’ who challenged her students to explore and question and see beyond our little corner of the world.” She “brought history alive” in the words of yet another student.

That love of travel ran as a constant thread through Mary’s life, and her trips abroad included China, all corners of Europe, Egypt, and South America. Her most recent passport bore stamps from Argentina, Ireland, England, Istanbul and Munich. She thought nothing of flying across the country for a weekend trip to take in a major art exhibition that would by-pass Chicago.

I was along for several of these excursions, and remember flying to New York City to take in the “Dresden Exhibition” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (we stayed at the Plaza Hotel, of course!), traveling to Washington D.C. by train to see the “Great Treasure Houses of Britain” exhibit at the Smithsonian, and driving to Pittsburgh to see the illuminated Irish manuscript known as the “Book of Kells” on tour from Trinity College in Dublin in the late 1970s. I believe that the statute of limitations has probably run on the speeding tickets we should have earned in that dash across several states, but that’s all I’m going to admit to in print.

A more recent jaunt was to Washington D.C. to see U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia—one of Aunt Mary’s staunchly conservative heroes—preside over a reenactment of some historically significant federal case whose name and import now escape me. In 48 hours on the ground, we managed to squeeze in an exhibit at the Smithsonian, the shindig at the U.S. Supreme Court, and a tour of Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Hillwood Estate and Gardens. I came away from the adventure with a photo of me with Justice Scalia that looks like I’m on a date with Danny DeVito, and a picture of a terra cotta statue from Hillwood of Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, with her bow and arrows and her faithful dog. I still post it on my office door occasionally when I’m working on an appellate case, since it illustrates my gut feeling that appeal work is a lot like bow-hunting in a thicket. And it reminds me of our mile-a-minute adventure.

Once she “retired” from teaching in 1987, Mary just turned her natural talent to a different direction. Freed up from the responsibility and routine of grading papers and earning a paycheck, she launched herself into the world of volunteering at anything that caught her interest with a historical bent. Never without a book in hand or at her side about art or history or politics, she brought her combination of intellect and passion and humor to giving tours at art museums and historical museums and doing book reviews for the Irish Literary Society group.

Without question, though, among all the tours and talks she gave, her favorite was to lecture on the architecture along the Chicago River and the lakefront from the deck of one of the tour boats run by Chicago From the Lake. The experience combined her love of the outdoors, and her love of being on the water, with the grandeur of Chicago’s skyline and the colorful richness of its history. Her audiences loved it, and so did she. As her health declined in the last couple of years and frailty finally stood as a barrier to doing the boat tours anymore, there was a genuine sense of mourning when she spoke of the experience.

In a moving, witty and eloquent note of condolence, one of her favorite Chicago From the Lake boat captains, Rich Dalton, paid tribute to the docent he called “my favorite, the best, an original, one of a kind.”

“We loved working together,” Dalton wrote. “Mary told it the way it was, or at least the way it was according to Mary, and I can’t say that I very often disagreed. That was our bond. A highly opinionated, unfiltered, yet well thought out point of view, and a willingness to tell anyone who wanted to hear it, and even more so, those who didn’t.”

Sherry Avila, co-host of “Avila Chicago,” met Mary when they were docents at the Loyola Museum of Art, and became a close friend. She described herself as being “devastated” by the news of her passing. Avila said she pictured her friend giving “grrrand tours of Heaven” on horseback with her beloved Irish wolfhounds and Dalmatian at her side, and “knocking the wings off” the archangels with her “grrrand” spirit.

Mary had a “larger than life” quality about her that extended to her love of physical challenges as well. In her younger days, she was passionately devoted to horseback riding, and loved to ski and swim as well. And those who knew her well knew that she regarded shopping for bargains in quality clothing—Talbots was a favorite label—and jewelry as something of a primal sport. We often traded victory stories (and laughs) over the spoils from the hunt hanging in our closets.

The world is now a little less bright, and a little less colorful for Mary’s passing. But she leaves behind memories that cannot be erased. To echo the words of Captain Dalton who accompanied her so often down the Chicago River…

“God Bless, Fare thee well Mary.”

Tiger Beat

2010-01-26T22:01:00.010-06:00

I’ve introduced myself—and been introduced—many different ways. I’ve been described as “the wife,” “the mother,” “the prosecutor,” “the photographer,” “the writer,” “the troop leader,” “the utility person,” “the ‘room mom’,” “the girlfriend,” “the mother of the bride,” “the award winner,” "the Hot Dog Fairy," “the driver,” and “the cocktail waitress.”

But this time, I was at the bedside of one of my children at an enormous university hospital, and when the specialist walked in, trailing a couple of medical students behind, I stuck my hand out for a handshake in greeting, and announced my status so there would be no mistake.

“Hi, I’m Mary. I’m the mother tiger.”

I don’t know why it took me so long. It’s not like with four kids I’ve had any shortage of opportunities waiting for test results to come back, or X-rays to be analyzed, or abdomens to be palpated, or medical gurus to be consulted. The title comes with the territory.

There’s something so primal, and visceral, and imperative about sitting guard at your child’s bedside when something’s gone wrong. All the medical professionals and fancy hospital technology and state-of-the-art monitoring are no substitute reassurance for parking yourself next to your cub to hold off the dangers lurking beyond in the dark forest. Danger can come from the things we can see (Man, that must have hurt when he hit that mogul!!) and sometimes from the things we can’t—microbes and antibodies and viruses and prions and environmental toxins and the dealer pushing baggies of crack in the shadows around the corner.

When we become parents, we are captives and keepers all in one. I remember standing beside the crib of this child as he slept, only a few days old. In the silent room, with the lights dimmed, I was hit by a tidal wave of emotion and hormones, thinking “I adore you. I worship you. I would die to protect you.” That was eighteen years ago. I still feel the same way.

Years ago I read an essay about parenting by Michael Kelly, the late Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large and Washington Post columnist who was killed in Iraq in 2003, and it has always stayed with me. Long before his death, he’d written a light-hearted yet poignant piece about parenting and what he called “the look,” that silly combination of worship and rapture that crosses our faces when we gaze at our kids when they’re not looking, regardless of the age of our offspring, or even their personal grooming habits.

I clipped it out of the paper to save, but running true to form, I can’t put my finger on the yellowing piece of newsprint that’s kicked around one dresser or desk drawer or another since then. I’d have loved to be able to quote some of it.

Suffice it to say that it captured, far more eloquently that I ever could, that universal surge of pride and protection and tenderness that comes with bringing the next generation into the world. I think the only thing he left out was that feral “mother tiger” thing. The certainty that anything that threatens the cub has to make it across a vast and vigilant expanse of claws and teeth first.

It came into play a couple of times during this last hospital stretch, and turned out to be good for a laugh or two…and, I think, some actual results. Or at least a little validation.

Before the specialist came in for the consult, we’d been handed off to a “hospitalist” to oversee the case during the stay at the hospital. Now this particular physician may have done very well in medical school…but still came up a bit short on people skills. Not very good at taming tigers either. Brusque, unsmiling, not terribly familiar with our situation, and dismissive of my questions and concerns to the point of rudeness.

“Hmmm,” the doc countered as she shot down one point after another. “And you have no medical training…” What could I say? Guilty as charged…and yet still vigorously challenging some fundamental underlying assumptions. So sue me. I aced high school logic, and this didn’t seem all that much different.

An unhappy doctor finally left the room, still not cracking a smile. The patient and I collectively exhaled in relief. “Geez, what a @#%$&!!” we concluded. I explained the dynamic that had just occurred with as precise an analogy as I could summon.

“Honey, what you just saw could be called ‘the clash of the middle-aged Alpha females.”

I’d like to report that I’d engaged in this Alpha-female test of wills while stylishly decked out in spike heels…but the fact of the matter was that I’d slept in my sweats on an excruciatingly short hospital sofa the night before, and had had to beg a nurse for a spare toothbrush. I felt like road kill…but with claws.

Vindication came, however, a couple of hours later when the specialist came in and sorted things out. Jovial, quick-witted, astute and experienced, he deftly poked and prodded, quickly sketched the outlines of the medical mystery that had landed us there in the first place, and suggested a course of medication I’d already suggested, and had rejected, by Dr. Grumpy.

“So,” he asked brightly as he gathered his notes and medical students. “Does this make the mother tiger happy?”

“Purr….” I replied.

My cub has returned to the forest, as he should, and I’ve resumed my usual routine of too many things to do in too little time. But I still get to laugh at the way things played out.

If there's one lesson to be had from this long and arduous day, it's this and it's simple. When the chips are down, put your money on the tiger.

Two Hens and a Harley

2009-12-06T13:10:00.006-06:00

Perfect days come in all shapes and sizes. Some people might require a stroll on a tropical beach wearing a sarong, and a fabulous sunset to make the grade. Others might require a Superbowl win for their favorite team and a really good pot-luck dinner while they're watching it on a 102 inch projection style television.

Mine usually involve some combination of a bonfire and an early autumn night, starry skies above and lightning bugs firing in the woods and the hollows at dusk. But I like to be flexible about these things. I had a perfect day just a month ago, and the two things that really made this particular combination "magic" and memorable were a Harley Sportster and a pair of delinquent ducks. I think that at the tail end of the day we even managed to fit in the bonfire and the starlit sky.

But really...it was still all about the ducks.

We're six days into December right now, edging closer to the first official day of winter though the temperatures in the morning have been jump starting me into the winter grumpies. Any day when the thermometer reads "something-teen" as I'm driving to work means that my winter mood has arrived already. And I hate winter.

If it wasn't five months long and didn't involve wind chills of forty or fifty below, I think I'd take it in stride a bit more easily. But this is Wisconsin, and I can still find pockets of snow in my garden in April. When I get cold, it can take me until the next day to really warm up, no matter how much hot chocolate with Kahlua and whipped cream and nutmeg sprinkled on top that I try to cure the chills with. And by the next day, we start the cycle all over again.

For me, the perfect winter would be about two weeks long. Over Christmas, of course, with enough snow on the ground to make a snowman, and some snow angels, and deep enough to make it worthwhile to bring out my snowshoes for my annual snowshoe trek around the edge of the property. Hot cider, cookies baking, fire crackling in the hearth, Currier & Ives feel to the holidays.

And then God can turn the switch to "Spring," and I'm ready to start looking at daffodils and crocuses and bluebirds again. So far he's still waiting on my suggestion.

In the meantime, we took one last glorious grab at a warm day on the motorcycle, and I have faith that it'll keep me going until April.

It was the first weekend in November, of all times, and the weather forecasters were predicting that temps could reach seventy degrees on Sunday. We hadn't had the bike out very often this year, and October had been a complete wash. Cold, relentlessly rainy, dreary, dismal, dispiriting. Forget the expectation of "Indian summer," that appointed time went by under grey skies and cold drizzle. We felt cheated, big time, by the loss of fall afternoons that should have been spent in the yard or on the bike. I walked around constantly grumbling that I wanted a refund for the month of October. Who even cared that we might get a few warm days later on, when the daylight was so short that the yard was dark by the time we cut loose from our actual jobs.

But still, a seventy degree weekend day is nothing to waste no matter what time of year, and we packed up a picnic lunch and broke out the bike. "Let's put the sun in our faces," he said, and I didn't need a second invitation. There's a reason the leather jacket and black boots sit in the closet closest to my front door. I brought sub sandwiches and chips and a cookie apiece, and we took the meandering back roads west to the city of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. We indeed had the sun in our faces as we rode past fields and evergreens and marshes with tall grasses and cattails bending in the breeze.

By two in the afternoon, we were ready for lunch, and pulled up to a spot beside a lake in the middle of the city. A stretch of raised concrete beside the water was the perfect picnic spot, and we settled in, our legs dangling over the side. A pair of identical mallard hens came swimming over to us as we unwrapped our sandwiches. These ducks were so cute!!!!! Bright eyed and buoyant, curious and friendly, they eyed us with precision and intent.

Our first inkling that something surprising might be afoot was when one of the hens launched herself in a flurry of wing beats out of the water and landed on my boyfriend's lap, then sank her beak into his sandwich, pulling away a chunk of bread. The brazen hussy!! He waved her off and back into the water, and then cracked up with laughter. We didn't get much of a break, though, because first one, then the other, then at times both, kept up in launch mode.

I'd never been that close to a wild duck before, but this was surreal and hysterically funny. I held my arm out to protect my sandwich at one point, only to have one of the hens fly up and land on my forearm like a raptor, balancing on her little wet webby orange feet until I jiggled her off and back into the lake. After the first few tries of lap landing, the pair changed their direct approach to one of landing beside us on the concrete, and trying to sneak their beaks into our laps to nibble at crumbs. At least a couple of times a minute, I'd be fitting my free hand under a duck's warm, feathered chest or tummy, and lifting her up off the concrete and casually dropping (or tossing) her back into the water without ceremony.

Crunching a handful of potato chips and throwing them on the water occasionally bought us a few extra seconds to take a bite or two of our sandwiches without being molested, as the hens scurried after the chips floating on the water like a pair of guided missiles. Though it's it's hard to chew and laugh at the same time without choking. I don't know what possessed me to leave my little digital camera behind, other than the desire to just have nothing to do for an afternoon than sit on the back of the bike and empty my mind as the countryside rolled past.

We eventually made it through our lunch, though I'd have to guess that the ducks made off with about a third of our sandwiches, most of the potato chips, and half of the cookies. Okay, by the time they were nibbling on pieces of macadamia nut cookies, we were officially volunteering the treats. The afternoon started to cool under the bright blue sky, and we finally got up to leave. Tossing our sandwich wrappers into a trash can nearby, I looked up at a small sign hanging in the parking lot behind us warning visitors not to feed the waterfowl.

Oops. It reminded me of hiking at the Grand Canyon with my son a few years ago and having a marvelous, memorable time feeding granola bars to a friendly squirrel, only to finally see the tiny "do not feed..." sign as we were leaving. Oops!

The rest of the day unfolded with familiar joys--cutting and stacking firewood, dinner, a bonfire on an unbelievably warm November evening, and an inky sky studded with stars.

But it's the ducks I'll be laughing about all the way through the long, cold winter, reminding me of a perfect ride in the country on a perfect warm fall day. I hope that bold-as-brass pair of mallards finally figures out the way south with the rest of the flock. That whole "shoreline banditry" thing only works when there are easy marks on a warm, sunny day.

The Coffee and Chainsaw Connection

2009-10-18T21:12:00.006-05:00

I pushed the familiar number on speed dial on my cell phone to let my friend Judy know I was running late for coffee.

This is nothing new, sometimes the "I'm running late" call comes from her end. We have four kids (now adults in varying stages) apiece, and two ex-husbands (one each). She has two grandkids, I have a dog and a cat and a "grand-pug" and two "grand-cats" that sometimes come to visit. Her house burned down about a year ago, my fifteen acres of fields and woods are starting to crowd me and look like something Maurice Sendik dreamed up. We both have things that make us stare at the ceiling in the middle of the night.

We're always trying to cram one too many things into our lives, but we try to make time for coffee once in a while, around hair appointments and sick children and travel plans and work schedules and the assortment of surprises life's always throwing at you. I invariably drink my coffee loaded with chocolate and whipped cream. Judy's the more adventurous one, she'll foray into things with pumpkin spice and caramel this time of year. Thirty years ago or so when we met, Judy was a dead ringer for the actress Kate Bosworth of "Blue Crush" and "Beyond the Sea" fame. I looked thirty years younger then too, and my hair was really and truly brown. I don't look like anybody famous, but I remind a lot of people of somebody they've already met. When somebody I work with told me they thought I looked like Annette Benning, I could have busted a rib laughing.

It's good to have friends who know where the bones are buried and always forgive you for falling off your diet. Because, as we all know, coffee loaded with whipped cream and chocolate will always be the slippery slope.

This morning, though, my excuse was a tad unorthodox, and eight hours later I'm still turning over the particular combination of words in my head.

"I'm running a little late because my chainsaw got stuck in a log."

Good lord, what being single has done to me!!

Now before you start to picture me as Paula Bunyon with a blue ox parked in the garage, picture this. Only two weeks before, I was doing the tango--badly, but with enthusiasm--on a vintage dance hall floor in a polka-dotted silk chiffon dress, magenta suede stilettos with tiny patent leather bows, and a Gerbera daisy the size of a saucer in my hair. I like shoe shopping, I'm absolutely addicted to chocolate, and I really like to be pampered.

Four years ago, when the ink was barely dry on the divorce that had followed a long and very traditional marriage (he worked long hours, I kept the home fires burning and the soccer uniforms washed), I didn't know a hex wrench from a jar of honey. But little by little, necessity being the mother of invention, I've accumulated a few tools and now know how to use them. A cordless drill was the first, sparked by the need to immediately fix a pasture fence to keep the horses in. A tool kit, though to be fair, it's really a pretty turquoise and opaque white fishing tackle box. A level. And the piece de resistance, the rechargeable-battery operated chainsaw. That purchase was made after one windy night when a large dead tree came down across my driveway and shattered, and I had nothing but a handsaw to use on some of the larger limbs. Aerobics classes be damned, that was hard work!

Envisioning yet more dead trees coming down across the driveway at inconvenient times such as when I'd be leaving for work, I took myself shopping and picked out the smallest, most benign-looking chainsaw I could find. It's not much bigger than a blender, though it still carries the requisite air of potential dismemberment that keeps me treating it with a lot of respect. And wearing heavy leather gloves. I remember still how terrified I was when, on one vacation, my ex-husband would disappear solo into the woods for several hours at a time to trim trees and brush on a lakefront lot we had purchased when the kids were still quite small. Death, disaster, life as a widow, all sorts of dire scenarios ran through my head like leaves in a storm until he'd walk through the door again, still in one piece. Now it's my friends who worry about me on the weekends as I wield my tiny chainsaw in the woods, battling nature and, to be honest, losing most of the time.

This morning's hitch came about as I was trying to detangle a Gordian knot of three dead trees that had crashed down on each other in a windstorm a couple of weeks earlier. I'd been working on it every opportunity where there was brief spell of dry weather. If a tree falls in a forest, nobody much gives a damn. But one of these trees had fallen into the beautiful crabapple tree at the edge of my yard that I had gotten from the kids for Mother's Day years earlier. Another rested in the branches of a smaller trash tree twenty feet away. And they had all come down like a giant three-dimensional game of JENGA. One fell east, one fell southeast, and one fell north atop each other, forked branches intertwining. As I cautiously worked on cutting the farthest, smallest branches and clearing out a thicket of leafy vines that obscured those complicated spatial relationships, I stood back often, trying to figure out what I could safely pull on that wouldn't have something else and something bigger fall on me.

I thought I had it all figured out, with several fireplace-sized cuts of wood already stacked on the lawn from my efforts today. But then as the little saw blade gamely tore through yet another good sized tree limb, something further up the line jiggled, and then something else shifted, and then the half-cut tree-limb closed down on the blade and the jig was up. I tugged, and tugged, and tugged some more, but it was hopeless. At least for me. I trudged back to the garage and brought out my hand saw and put a lot more elbow grease into freeing my stuck little battery-operated tool than I ever thought I'd do with a saw again. Then I put everything away and drove to meet Judy for coffee at a frou-frou coffee joint.

There have been a lot of little "self-sufficiency" markers in the past four years, starting with dragging out a ladder to change the light bulb in the foyer (always a source of much cursing by my ex, and, I've discovered, with good reason) and moving on to installing handles on the basement storage cabinets, replacing a bathroom fixture, and fixing a toilet. Twice. Nothing that I'd ever contemplated when my understanding of life roles came down to "his" and "hers." Much has changed since then, some of it still making my head spin if I think about it too much.

I still like chiffon, spike heels, romantic walks on the beach, and bouquets of flowers for absolutely no reason.

But dang it...I like my little chain saw too!!

Ship Out of Water

2009-10-08T07:49:00.024-05:00

A trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum is always such a visual treat, long before you even get to the artwork on display inside. Part "ship out of water," part mechanical giant butterfly, with a Dale Chihuly glass "tree" inside the lobby that looks like it's from "under the sea" and giant aspen leaves that never fall just down the street at Discovery World at Pier Wisconsin, it's always an excuse to grab a cup of coffee and just stop and stare for a while...

Tough Enough?

2009-09-13T08:49:00.004-05:00

The scene in the courtroom still haunts me ten years later.

I remember the tears that sprang hot to my eyes as I shut the door behind me and walked down the corridor, thinking "I am not tough enough to do this job." I was a law student then, a seasoned criminal prosecutor now. And from time to time, out of nowhere, still comes that memory. It is seared into my consciousness, a testament to "collateral damage," and a mother's grief--two mothers, in fact--and consequences reaped by horrific acts, and how nothing in life, either evil or good, ever happens in a vacuum.

But first, a bit about my job. For the past nine years I've been unbelievably fortunate to work as a criminal prosecutor in a part-time capacity. When I got hired, I felt like I'd hit the jackpot in terms of balancing life and work and family. I still do. I had four kids at home when I'd started law school, and still had three kids living at home when I finished. Getting to do the work I loved in a half-time structure meant that I could still make it to soccer practice and gymnastic meets and find the time to bake team cupcakes decorated like tennis balls and help with homework and volunteer at school and cook dinner on a regular basis. Okay, a semi-regular basis. My kids really got quite sick of "rotisserie chicken" and potato salad from the grocery store deli every Tuesday night.

This was a new position, not only for me, but for the District Attorney's office as well. And so little by little, my job duties evolved to make the most use of my time there and my previous background as a writer. While no one I work with would, I think, dare call me the politically incorrect "miscellaneous backup chick," I make sport of it myself. One cop, introducing me to another, described me as the office's "utility person." I have my areas of specialty--appellate work, child support prosecutions, seizing assets from drug dealers, responding to requests by inmates who are unhappy that their probation or parole has been revoked and want the trial court to overturn that administrative decision--and then I just get thrown into a lot of things with little warning. It comes with the job. I've argued four cases before the state supreme court, I've been admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court...and I handle a lot of speeding tickets as well.

But being the part-timer means that for the most part, I don't handle the big cases from start to finish. I may review their police reports, I may issue the charges, I may even brief or argue a pre-trial motion, but I'm rarely there for the finish.

Ten years ago, I was simply a spectator in the courtroom. And it has stayed with me every step of the way since then.

A young man's life hung in the balance. His was the last sentencing hearing of a trio of young men who had, months earlier, kidnapped and savagely victimized a young woman in a highly-publicized case. There were no reporters in the courtroom this time, no television cameras, no members of the public. Just the routine players in this type of drama. A judge, the defendant, a prosecutor, a defense attorney, the courtroom staff. And the families. Both his and hers.

His mother went first, a lioness trying to protect her son. She walked into the courtroom with a bearing that was so precise it was almost military. She was a flight attendant, and wore her navy uniform proudly, crisp white accents with glints of gold, her hair pulled severely back. The courtroom was a high security place, which meant that in addition to armed bailiffs being present as a matter of course, the "gallery" was separated from the court by walls of glass and wood. Sound was amplified and conveyed by microphone and speaker.

For nearly a half hour the young man's mother spoke before the judge, passionately pleading for mercy. Sometimes her voice was strong, sometimes it broke with emotion. In her hand she held copies of papers and artwork he had created in grade school that had hung on her refrigerator door years before. She told the tale of his life, which was in large part a tale of hers as well. Of a severely abusive relationship that she had finally found the courage to leave, of her struggle to claw her way out of a life of despair and establish herself as a professional in a field that leaves nothing to chance and relies on absolute accountability and responsibility. Her son's failings were not all his, she argued. He had been such a good child. But a cousin--one of the other defendants, in fact--had often led him astray as he was growing up. And she, in her job, had not always been there to counterbalance the influence.

And then the victim's mother spoke. The girl herself was not in the courtroom, but her mother and some other people were there to stand up for her. This mother was, on the outside, less crisply glamorous, more plain spoken than the woman who spoke before her. But she spoke eloquently about her child nonetheless, about a wonderful and responsible young girl who was the first in her family to go to college, who had a life bright and shining with promise and optimism. And whose life had been utterly broken by no fault of her own. Her daughter had had so much taken from her, and would never be the same. There needed to be justice here.

The prosecutor spoke then too, and the defense attorney, though I remember little of what either of them had to say. Real life and real heartaches trump the speeches of professionals most of the time.

And then it was the judge's turn. The words of the law fell heavily in the windowless courtroom. Punishment. Rehabilitation. Protection of the public. Concepts that judges apply every day in courtrooms across the country, elastic in their application but fixed in their importance as guiding principle.

But the moment that stays with me was one that was happening on the other side of the glass, in the gallery that separates the official participants in the case from everyone else. As the judge began to speak, the mother of the young man who had done such wrong walked around to the first row of the gallery, and knelt in front of the young woman's mother and put her hand on the other woman's lap. "I am so sorry," she said, and bowed her head, and then the two of them listened together for a verdict delivered in the pursuit of justice that would never make either of their children alright.

I fled the courtroom at that point, though not before hearing a sentence handed down which ensured that the young man would never see an ordinary sunlit day outside of a prison for most of his life, if not all. "I am not tough enough for this job," I thought as I wiped the tears away with my hand and then left the building.

It's been ten years since that day in the courtroom, nine years since I started working as a criminal prosecutor. I've had by victories and I've had my defeats, and none of them have shaken me to the core as much as this one did. I look back and still wonder whether I'm "tough enough" for the oath I've taken.

If I'm very lucky, I think and pray, I'll somehow make it to retirement before I ever find out.

The Vigil

2009-08-29T11:49:00.003-05:00

The air streaming out of the grocery store cooler is dry and cold and bracing. I stand in front of an assortment of premium gourmet ice cream in single-serve cartons with high calorie counts and higher prices.

What flavor to buy for a dying man to coax him into taking a little more nourishment, a few more molecules of fat and sugar wrapped in the dulcet flavorings of Haagen-Dazs? Chocolate? He has quite the sweet tooth. Coffee? He loves his morning coffee. Dulce de Leche? Oh why the hell not? I buy two of each, then drive a few blocks further to a liquor store.

I am waging a war against death, and my pathetic weapons are ice cream, chocolate pudding and German beer.

It has been nearly a week since my eighty-six year old father, already afflicted by dementia and Parksinsons disease, was admitted to the emergency room for the second time in a month with a perfect storm of converging handicaps—untreated diabetes, cardiac arrhythmia, a blood clot in his leg running from hip to knee, a raging bladder infection, and a foot in serious trouble from circulatory problems. Unable to speak articulately for months before this, he was unable to tell anyone the things going wrong in his body this time until they had reached critical mass.

He has now made it more than three days past the phone call from the hospital telling me—as I stood at the counter of a German gift shop buying him some more CDs of folk songs from his native land—that he would probably not live another half hour. This old soldier is tough…but he is still wasting away. He is now in hospice care, a method of care designed to ease suffering rather than aggressively try to change nature’s course. Treating him with something even as simple as an IV line for fluids and nutrition has been complicated by his dementia—he has spent most of the past month in hospital beds with restraints to keep him from tearing the IV lines from his arms. A hospice worker who knows nothing of the man wondered aloud whether he had pulled his IV lines out because he wanted no further treatment to prolong his life. No, I retorted, given that he spent four years as a prisoner of war, three of them working miserably in a French coal mine, I think he was more likely simply trying to escape.

The conundrums are many. Enough pain killers and sedatives to dull the pain in his tortured foot keep him too sleepy to eat enough to regain some lost strength. Intravenous fluids would require readmitting him to a hospital and placing him in restraints again, which must be a horror to him. The difficulty he already has swallowing make it more difficult to get any measurable amounts of food or liquid into his stomach.

And yet…I know I have made small inroads. A half cup of ice cream one day. A half bottle of German beer yesterday, a full twelve-ounce bottle this morning, sucked down through a straw to the accompaniment of German soldier songs on the boom box. I knew I was on to something the day before when I lifted the straw to his lips and he tentatively drew in the golden liquid. Afraid that he might take too much at one time, I pulled the straw away. He tried to speak, and I leaned closer to hear. It was one word. “Again.” Again what, daddy? More beer? Another single word answer. “Beer.” I look into his hazel eyes that still light up sometimes with recognition when he looks at me, and I know I will keep it coming. There is no “bar time” at this place.

I feel helpless to change the larger workings of fate, and so I focus on the smaller things that I can do. A promise to bring some Bitburger beer, an evening ritual from a family reunion in Germany a few years ago. The collection of German songs, which he sometimes taps his foot to or tries to sing along with. I try to remember to wear bright, colorful shirts, and perfume, and long dangling earrings to catch the light. My boyfriend, who speaks a little Deutsch from his time overseas in the Air Force, sat with us and spun a tale of taking my father to Berlin for Oktoberfest. We set up a bird feeder on a shepherd’s hook outside his window, and watched as goldfinches, bright as lemons, came to feed only minutes later.

I’ve brought my old chocolate lab to visit, tossing a bright yellow tennis ball around the hospice room to keep him busy. At one point I searched the room for the ball for another throw, but could not see it anywhere on the floor. It was only when I straightened up that I realized Bandit had placed it on my father’s bed beside his elbow. I don’t think my father knew this at all, but I still patted my retriever on the head in gratitude. “You’re such a good dog,” I told him.

This evening as I leave the nursing home I feel an inevitability settling in, a waning of hope. The odds are long against him.

And yet, as long as he’s still breathing and still smiles at the sound of my voice, I will keep trying to fend off death, one spoonful of ice cream, one Oktoberfest beer at a time.

Back Away from the Bunny!

2009-08-13T20:44:00.009-05:00

It's the dog days of summer, and that can mean only one thing.

It's time to go to the fair.

I've been to two this year so far, the county fair and the state fair. Marvelous opportunities to people watch, eat food on a stick, pay way too much for alcohol, weigh the relative merits of things you'd never make at home like deep-fried s'mores, deep-fried cookie dough and chocolate covered bacon, and traverse the midway looking for more and more inventive ways to spend $20 to buy a stuffed animal worth two bits. I spent only six bucks this time, coming out ahead of the average, using a mallet to pound a catapault flinging a succession of rubber frogs into a barrel with rotating lily pads, and winning a tiny white stuffed tiger which I promptly surrendered to my boyfriend's daughter. She's eighteen. What, I should keep the toy for myself? My traditional prize-winning duty done, I passed on any further opportunities to win goldfish, throw darts at balloons, toss basketballs, fling plastic rings at upright soda bottles.

Because for me, the fair's not about the games, the food, even the music. The essence of a fair on a hot summer day is ... the animals.

Oh, the black and brown Clydesdales gleaming like dark satin under the floodlights in their jingling ten-horse hitches, silky white "feathers" floating around their hooves like cheerleaders' pompoms as they thunder around the coliseum, tons of beribboned and disciplined muscle on the hoof. Oh, the incredible assortment of chickens, some weirdly resembling poodles, other looking like eccentric characters in a British barnyard comedy. Oh, the cows, spotless and brushed and shampooed, nearly odorless, chewing contentedly in their stalls surrounded by perfectly clean straw, while the calves nestle together as cute as a basket of puppies. Sigh... I could go on and on and on.

It's not like I haven't seen cows before. Or horses. Or chickens. Or rabbits.

Over the years, I've been in the position of living with and cleaning up after all of them, in ways that left lasting impressions. At seventeen and Chicago-bred, I'd been privy to an abundance of bovine company when living on a once-working farm with my family in northern Wisconsin. Call it a social experiment gone awry, for a few years we nonetheless packed our decrepit barn with a horse and some ponies and some calves and some geese and some chickens and ducks and a pig. I could drive the route to the feed mill blindfolded. Noah's Ark meets Green Acres. The barn swallows moved in on their own.

When it came time to milk the cow my parents brought home from an auction one day, I was the only person brave enough or stupid enough to step up to the job that evening with a bucket between my knees and a wooden stool to sit on. We named her "Queenie," and the two things I remember most are the fact that she came with some wicked-looking horns ... and she didn't like to stand still during milking. The stool didn't have wheels. It was quite the sight, watching me scoot my rear on my little stool to follow her, the milk sloshing back and forth in the pail, and quite the job to perform twice a day.

But milking was by far the friendlier task. What goes in must go out, and after hauling bale after bale of hay into the barn and shaking it out in front of Queenie's nose, I recall shoveling mountains of ... by-products ... from the trench behind where she stood into a wheelbarrow and out the back door of the barn to a large, fragrant heap. A lot of what I was doing back then fits in the "character building" column. I've been told that I'm quite the character.

Likewise, when it came to the two horses I owned for more than thirty years. Yes, I just loved to look at them in a summer pasture, their tails switching back and forth as they grazed, their ears swiveling like semaphores at every sound. The sight of a horse grazing in the sunlight on a warm summer day can still make my heart skip a beat in fond remembrance. But again ... I was no stranger to cleanups, and medications, and fly-repellants, and near-death experiences at night in freezing barns, and hauling heavy hay bales and fifty-pound sacks of horse feed around.

But the animals at the fair--they're like what Playboy centerfolds are to real women, what Marie Antionette's little hobby farm at Versailles was to a working farm in the French countryside. For the rest of us, not the hard-working exhibitors, these are purely eye-candy! Fantasy animals! Hollywood-groomed and ready for their close-up, Mr. DeMille!

Really, what little girl or boy watching the Lone Ranger and Tonto thunder across the mesa in pursuit of bad guys ever thought that Silver and Scout might throw a shoe? Or need a hay wagon following somewhere behind in the badlands? Did Timmy ever follow Lassie with a pooper scooper? Did Wilbur ever lift a shovel behind Mr. Ed?

So with that frame of mind--voluntary and total suspension of reality--I stepped into the fairs. Oooohhhed and aaaaaaahhhhhhed over the flashy Clydesdales as they threw their weight into harness. Chuckled at the chickens, cooed over the newly hatched baby chicks. Debated just where, on a "cuteness" scale, human babies fell in relation to puppies, kittens, and fuzzy ducklings. (The jury's still out on that one.)

Walking past the dairy barn at the tail end of the evening, I passed by a lovely Brown Swiss heifer placidly chewing her cud. She was spotless, she was dust-free, she could have stepped right out of a Gainsborough painting. My arm immediately crossed over the low wooden fence to stroke her neck, and in an instant I was enveloped by the smell of fresh hay and memory and in some ways much simpler times. My hand found its way up to her ears and her forehead, and the recollection of just where to scratch to make a happy cow came flooding through my fingers. The heifer leaned into it as I worked my scritching around the nubs of her horns and around the base of her ears. If cows could purr, this one would have sounded like an Evinrude motor.

It was a delight. Still, when I go to the fair, I know I'm in no danger of acting on impulse and bringing home a horse or a cow or a goat or a camel. The rabbits, however, are another story.

For decades of fair-going, the rabbits have been my real weakness. So soft, so plush, so cuddly looking, so clean, so touchable! Blank slates of fluffy goodness. I did, in fact, succumb the siren song of cuteness a few years ago. Wandering past rows of "Mini-Rex" rabbits, my oldest daughter, soon bound for college, stared longingly at a perky brown rabbit that looked like the Velveteen Rabbit come to life. "Oh, if I was going to have a rabbit, that's the one I'd want," she said.

About three weeks later, we had a rabbit living in a crate in our kitchen. Yes, he was extremely cute! But she left for college about a month later, and for the next three years reality hopped around on my kitchen floor with inevitable surprises. I think we could have weathered just about anything else, but this bunny came with, ahem, personal hygiene issues that were truly dispiriting. I think that if someone had invented bikini waxes for bunnies, he might still be with us. But eventually, the routine of giving a fat, kicking rabbit haircuts in unspeakable places proved to be one too many things for me to juggle at the time, and he was routed to the local humane society, along with all his gear, food, crate, litter box, yogurt treats and toys. The cat has since taken over his job of covering all surfaces in the house with gossamer fluff.

And yet...I felt that dangerous surge again this year as I dawdled past rows upon rows of rabbits in their cages, clean, odorless, non-threatening, fluffed and brushed and fed, with ribbons displayed proudly beside their name tags. Nary a rabbit dropping to be seen underfoot. No hygiene issues here. The pull was magnetic, nearly tidal. I could feel common sense fall away at the possibility of owning one of these lovely, cuddly little animals again. I could feel myself falling in love-at-first-sight all over again--that ridiculous moonstruck phase that never really lasts but fires that brain chemistry to dizzying heights nonetheless.

I shook my head and forced myself to take a step back from the cages. Focused my mind not on the bunny in front of me but the one that had hopped around my kitchen for three years, leaving deep scratches on my arms every time it was bath time at the kitchen sink. Recalled litter cleanup and bunny hair tickling my nose and the necessity of running interference between a six pound rabbit and a sixteen pound cat. I stepped out of the small animal barn and back into the sunlight. I had escaped!

There's one more fair to go to before the end of summer, and so I'm not out of the woods yet. Looking into the rabbit cages, for me, is like an alcoholic staring at a bottle, or Elizabeth Taylor staring at Richard Burton. Oftentimes surmountable, but sometimes not.

I just hope that next time, I'll continue to conjure some common sense to balance out the endorphins and optimism that no doubt will start up all over again. And if I can't, that whoever I'm with will just take me by the arm, give it a tug, and say...

BACK AWAY FROM THE BUNNY!!

The Volcano Diaries

2009-08-08T13:31:00.010-05:00

"You can always turn back!"

Not the most encouraging advice ever given to a hiker thinking about setting off on a trek up the side of a dormant volcano where the trail began at more than 8,000 feet above sea level and the difficulty rating for the 2.4 mile hike in the national park brochure was "strenous."

Gulp.

But then, I really hadn't been looking for encouragement. I'd been looking for validation ... or any other form of an excuse to not climb the mountain.

My son and I were on a week-long traditional mom-and-me vacation on the West Coast, a trip of particular poignance because he's the last of the brood and his departure for college means my nest will be empty for the first time in twenty-eight years. We'd stopped at Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California at the suggestion of a middle-aged couple we'd met at Yosemite when I volunteered to take their picture a couple of days earlier. I'd only planned for the first three days of the trip, figuring we'd make it up as we went along, and so we let ourselves be carried to higher altitudes on the descriptive phrases of our newfound acquaintances. This was my most wing-and-a-prayer vacation since I'd gone to Ireland for a month at the age of twenty-two with a backpack stocked with Carnation Instant Breakfast packets and a bicycle that I had to reassemble once I landed and the phone numbers of a few of my Irish relatives.

This time I was (much) older, and (much more) out of shape, and without the resiliancy of youth to cushion my missteps. And my left foot had been hurting like heck for the previous four months, making a reusable ice pack and a microwavable heat pack and a bottle of Advil part of my packing essentials.

My son and I had scoped out the park the evening before, after checking into our remote little motel that had been recommended on the fly two hundred miles before by the young man who had carved the bear I bought at a gift shop. Are we finding a theme here? One of the most memorable things my son said to me during the entire vacation was, stepping back into the motel room after phoning his girlfriend at twilight to chat, "Mom, I think I just heard a cow get attacked by a bear. Do you want to come outside?" What's a mother to say? Of course I stepped outside for a listen. And when the porch lights went out behind us, you wouldn't believe how fast we beat it back into the room!

But while he was outside on the phone, I'd been poring over the pamphlets and maps we'd picked up by the visitor center the night before. And by the time I went to sleep, I was convinced that between my lifelong acrophobia, and the troublesome foot, and the vivid description of altitude sickness that usually sets in at lower altitudes than we were even going to start hiking at I was going to chicken out in favor of a more leisurely walk half the distance to see a pretty waterfall.

All I was looking for when we pulled up to the park entrance the next morning was an excuse. I pled age, I pled infirmity, I pled forty extra pounds, I pled an appalling lack of stamina ... and then I threw in the vertigo and fear of heights for good measure. The heights thing is no laughing matter for me, in fact. I get dizzy if I climb higher than the first step on a ladder, and it's been like that for most of my life.

But the cheerful young lady in the Smokey the Bear ranger hat kept trying to steer me in the direction of optimism. Hikers of all ages and sizes were known to have made it to the summit, she said. Drink plenty of fluids to stave off altitude sickness. And remember, "you can always turn back." I didn't even have to turn my head to know that my son was grinning at the exchange.

We drove on to the base of the trail leading to the peak of Lassen Peak, topping out at 10,457 feet above sea level. We packed water bottles and granola bars and extra clothes in the backpack he'd be carrying. There were snow fields below where we even started. I felt out of breath at the first switchback, which was still so close to the parking lot it didn't even list how far we'd traveled. I wasn't going for glory here, just endurance, and so I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, watching my son's heels to keep from feeling dizzy just as I had hiking down the side of the Grand Canyon with my daughter a few years earlier. (It was a very character building experience.)

We met a delightful pair of teachers from Florida, Pat and Jackie, who went on hiking adventures during their summers off and decided to tackle Lassen this time. They each had a good dozen years or more on me, and were taking this adventure in stride. I didn't want to wimp out while they were watching, and so we overlapped each other's rest stops along the way up. They called out a lot of encouragement to me on the way up.

The higher we climbed, the more breathtaking the views became. The Sierra Nevadas were distant blue hills under a nearly cloudless sky. Lake Helen gleamed azure in the park below us. Snow fields were striped pink and white, but the air was still warm. The forests below looked as tiny as the shrubbery on a model train display. As we scrambled over loose gravel and larger rocks and tree roots, a doe picked her way across the side of the mountain above us, twin fawns scampering quickly behind her to the cover of some brush.

Continuing in the vein of being practical instead of heroic, I took plenty of rest stops along the way, chugging water and letting the faster hikers pass us by. And sometimes Pat and Jackie! There was usually a tree or two that I could sit under for shade, but inevitably we began to leave the tree line behind. Still, I kept going, watching my son's feet in front of me, occasionally getting a hand up over the rougher patches. And then, with less than a mile to the summit, I came to one more switchback and stopped. Up to my left, I could see the trail cross back and forth upon the bare mountain face. And to my right, I could see nothing but open sky.

Right then and there, my fear of heights suddenly nailed me to the side of the mountain. "Robert, honey," I said, "I'm sorry, but I just can't take one more step!" Of all the things that I thought would have shut me down long before--the extra pounds, the thin air at 9,000 feet, the gimpy foot--it was such an anticlimax to call it quits because of this!

Still, there was no going forward for me, and I sure wasn't going to go back down alone. I folded my fleece sweatshirt into a pad for my seat on a nearby rock, took custody of the backpack, and settled in to wait for my son to make it to the summit and bring back some good pictures. It took him two hours to get back, factoring in the half-hour phone call to his girlfriend from the top of the mountain, a lot of picture taking, and some time spent just glorying in the achievement.

As I sat, I basked in the sun and marveled at the grandeur surrounding me, and the total serendipity that had brought us here. Who knew, when we set out on this trip, that we'd be setting out to climb a mountain to its very top? Or photographing a yellow bellied marmot peeking out of his den near a set of volcanic vents? It was certainly an altitude on the side of a mountain that I never thought I'd experience.

A very long time ago, when a friend of mine was getting ready to leave college without graduating and faced a very uncertain future, I sent him on his way with an inspirational poster that read something to the effect that if you set your sights among the heavens, even if you fail you will fall among the stars.

I hadn't thought about that in quite a long time, but thought about it again recently. At the tail end of our vacation, we drove the well-maintained highway to the visitor center of Mount St. Helens in Washington state and realized that even though it looked rugged and awesome and hgh and imposing...we'd both made it farther above sea level than this national landmark.

But for me, an even bigger victory was just in getting as far as I had. I may not have made it to the top as I would have liked ... but I ended up sitting high enough that I could nearly touch the stars.

Grow, Dammit!

2009-08-02T18:29:00.008-05:00

One popular definition of insanity is that of doing the exact same thing over and over, but expecting a different result.

This might explain why for three summers in a row, I've planted blue butterfly delphiniums in the same spot in my garden, only to watch them die off. And I'm still pondering whether I should to run to the nursery and buy three more in four-inch pots...for the same exact place.

To be fair, I'm sure they had help on the way to their Valhalla of the Verdant. I have rabbits in abundance, little Peter Cottontails romping around the yard without the blue jackets. I have a chocolate lab that likes to dig at the roots of plants where I've sprinkled dried blood meal to repel the rabbits. I have little striped gophers who scramble in and out of the drain pipes for the rain gutters that empty into both sides of the garden. The frantic scratching of their tiny feet inside the metal pipes as I round the corner is a gentle reminder that out in the country, you're never alone. I've been known to neglect watering, neglect weeding, neglect fertilizing, neglect spraying. Are you sensing a theme here?

But still. Other things abound, and in fact reproachfully encircle those pathetic empty spaces. The line of strawberry plants that run along the front of the garden have sent out tenacious masses of tendrils in each direction like a Roman gladiator hurling a net over an opponent in the Coliseum. I have to pull and rip and hack them into submission. The coneflowers behind them are sinking sideways from the sheer weight of their tangerine and yellow and white flowers. The hot pink phlox with the bi-colored leaves--a prized find at Home Depot last year--are ready to burst.

And yet, for whatever reason, the delphiniums have perished. Repeatedly. And yet, I recall their brief, glorious bloom the first year I put them in, and I still hope.

This is the third summer since the man in my life showed up with a pickup truck full of mulch and music and the enthusiasm for transforming 200 square feet of bare gravel-covered plastic akin to Michelangelo eyeing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In just a few weeks, the fuse had been lit, an oasis born, a garden begun in my soul.

Planting a garden is such an act of faith! And in my case, blind faith. Where others may plan and coordinate colors and heights and growing seasons, I still take a more devil-may-care approach. Approximation was, and still is, my watchword. The only thing that I usually expect now is that if I put a plant in the ground, it will grow, at least for a little while. That's a big step up from the pre-gardening years.

There have been a few surprises along the way. Who knew ... that the little clump of "obedient plants" my gardening friend Rosemary shared with me, a tidy and demure two feet tall at the end of their first season, would spread like a virus and double in height, shading everything behind them like Godzilla looking down at a Manhattan subway station? Who knew ... that the white butterfly bush that I planted that first gardening season "just to keep him happy" would flourish like a spray of fireworks and make the view from across my ironing board such a delight as hummingbirds and butterflies and hummingbird moths looking like tiny flying shrimp hovered delicately and landed? Who knew ... how personally and even parentally involved I could feel as my little charges took root and grew ... or not. Hopes raised, then dashed, as sunflower and coneflower sprouts grew from seeds in peat pots in the house, then flourished for a few days in another new garden, then were nipped in the bud, so to speak, by the double whammy of the gopher next door and a finicky doe who didn't think the other fifteen acres of vegetation had quite enough variety for her palate.

I never imagined, in my wildest dreams, how much suspense and satisfaction could be sparked by finding a broken off stalk of sedum sitting on the checkout counter of the local plant nursery last summer. As a general rule, I don't even like sedum. But this forlorn amputee was both unusual and gorgeous, with sage green foliage edged in cream, and a large raft of tiny pink and magenta flowers on top. "Good lord, that's beautiful," I commented to the clerk as she rang up my purchase.

"Why don't you take it home," she replied. "Just stick in the ground and see if it'll grow." I needed no further urging, and did as directed. Watered, and hovered, and watered, and hovered some more. By the time of the first frost weeks later, it hadn't grown any...but hadn't withered and died either. Post-winter, as the snow receded, I was back in the garden taking inventory, pushing away the mulch to see if all my babies had come back. The delphiniums didn't make it, but there at the site of the sedum stalk, was a tiny white bud just breaking through the soil. Eureka!!

There's not that much planting that will take place for the rest of this year. The challenge right now is just to beat back the weeds and remember to water through the dry spells of late summer. Even my watering technique has evolved into a tranquility zone of sorts over the past three growing seasons. Where I used to drag the hose from plant to plant to efficiently dump a gallon or two on each at a time, I now pull up a lawn chair on the parking pad nearby and sit and spray from a distance, remembering all the heat and dripping sweat and optimism and romance and pipe tobacco and sore muscles and music that went into creating it in the first place, as the leaves and stalks and flower heads bend gently under the cascading droplets.

That gorgeous sedum plant is just about ready to flower, and I'm no longer hovering like a demented soccer mom on the sidelines (been there, done that!). But something tells me that before the week is out, I'll be back at the nursery looking for another trio of butterfly blue delphiniums. And as I dig them into the garden, I'll be muttering both words of encouragement ... and telling them to "grow, dammit!!"

Scenes of Yosemite

2009-07-20T17:16:00.008-05:00

The Romeo & Juliet song

2009-07-03T20:41:00.011-05:00

There's a guilty pleasure I just have to confess. And then explain.

Not that there isn't already a list. Belgian chocolates. High heels. Coastal Georgia. Guys in uniform. The movie "Gladiator." Tropical drinks with little paper umbrellas. Down pillows and flannel sheets...as long as the air conditioning is still on.

But this is a chapter, and a phenomenon, all its own.

I'm a grown woman over forty...and I like the Taylor Swift song "Love Story." There I said it. Out loud.

You know the song. You can't possibly escape it on the radio. It's the one where she's Juliet and he's Romeo and it's got pre-feminist-to-the-point-of-Neanderthal lyrics like "Romeo save me..."

Good God, I thought, the first dozen times I heard it...or heard enough of it to change the channel with a cringe. How utterly dopey! How ridiculous. How unreal. How...godawfully uncomplicated and fairy-tale and unconnected to the realities of love and relationships. And for heaven's sake, didn't anyone read to the end of the Romeo and Juliet saga and realize that the star-crossed lovers died?? So much for teenage romance!

So that would be the starting point of the journey to actual affection. Active dislike, morphing into something else. Just like real life. Or any number of romantic movie comedies, such as "You've Got Mail." Okay, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan had a lot to do with making that one work, but still...it's a formula for romance on the big screen. Even Harrison Ford got to be loathed by Anne Heche in "Six Days Seven Nights"...and nobody doesn't like Harrison Ford.

It was the beat that caught me first. Rhythmic and pulsing and steady and smooth (relentless, even), like the slap of a long plastic jumprope on a sidewalk during summer vacation. Three girls killing time on a warm afternoon, the jumper in the middle always changing, the rhythm as consistent as crickets chirping. Equilibrium as perfectly maintained--despite the occasional shift in positions--as a gyroscope spinning on a picnic table. I found myself humming along, even after I changed the channel. And then I quit changing the channel altogether, and looked at it through a new window.

Everything that drove me nuts about it at first--especially the cloying fairy-tale neediness of it--became a window into being a teenager again. Back in the day when all you could see was what you wanted, absolutely, with all your heart, right now, with no thought for the future other than the credo that love could conquer all.

Remember those days? Mine, I'm sure, were fueled by a childhood spent reading too many romantic suspense novels full of dukes and other noblemen waiting to rescue their damsels in distress and whisk them off to a life of happily-ever-after. It took me years to outgrow that template.

Well, by the time you've passed thirty-nine, you've grown up and figured out that no matter how grand love may be, it doesn't always conquer all. And it certainly doesn't get the toilet fixed or the living room painted or the dog taken to the vet. Real life is full of real frustrations, big and small, and tender eurphoric feelings sometimes have to get put on hold for just a wee bit of time while you run into the corner gas station to buy a carton of milk. Because you just can't live on love all the time...groceries and utilities and clean laundry are usually involved too.

But...

I've realized that when I listen (and even...ulp...sing along to) "Love Story," I don't have to think about real life at all. It takes me right back to being sixteen and absolutely blissfully ignorant of the myriad disappointments and compromises that real life will offer later. By the time the song wraps up with "Romeo" on bended knee telling our heroine to go buy a wedding dress because he loves her and that's all he needs to know...I get a quick fix of bottomless yearning fulfilled and a "when dreams come true" instant that's about as real as the Disney version of Cinderella, and just as much fun. Reality be damned for just a minute!

And as I've learned just not that long ago, those magic moments aren't entirely lost when your teen years are left behind. I had one of my own in the middle of a gardening project at my house with a man whose pickup truck and leather tool belt and love of blooming things beat out any central casting figure of a prince on a white horse.

One Sunday morning, after the plants were in and the mulch was spread and green things were watered and beginning to take root, the subject came up over coffee of how to create a footpath through the flower garden, which was rather deep in places. I, cursed with character flaws of ambivalence and a pathological fear of commitment and absolutely no imaginary sense of the visual, balked at every suggested solution. Hedged, even, at the idea of going window shopping. For rocks.

So we took the truck out to a local quarry anyway just for something to do, with the fig-leaf of understanding that there were always supplies for his own place that he could buy and therefore it wouldn't be a trip wasted. We walked, hand in hand in the sunshine, over pretty displays of granite and marble and slate and bricks. And when we reached a stretch of red Arizona sandstone, I could suddenly see my heart's desire. And imagine it among my flowers.

I still hemmed and hawed, pricing it out, trying to figure what I could afford, wondering at the enormity of the project, wondering whether I should go back home and think on it for a while longer. Like another week or two. And then Prince Charming cast his two cents into the pot, roughly rounded up to the fact that this was exactly what I wanted, we had the truck with us, it was a gorgeous day, and we might as well go for it.

I still remember the joy bursting in my heart as I threw my arms around him at that point and kissed him in the sunlight somewhere between the limestone and the crushed lava, casting caution to the wind and simply saying "yes!"

As blissfully simple and momentarily satisfying as the ending in "Love Story"? You betcha!

Sheboygan County Courthouse II

2009-06-22T20:15:00.004-05:00

An Art Deco gem on the Lake Michigan shore!

Sheboygan County Courthouse I

2009-06-22T19:56:00.007-05:00

I promised pictures of the Sheboygan County Courthouse, kid brother to the One North LaSalle building in Chicago. More to come...

One North LaSalle

2009-06-18T07:10:00.014-05:00

I sat in traffic as the rain came down, waiting to make a familiar turn to reach a familiar parking lot in what had become a depressingly familiar routine involving family matters and a courtroom in Chicago. I can't think of what drew my attention to the gloomy, dark scaffolding covering a high rise to my left, but as I idled, waiting for the light to change, I looked out the driver's side window. And a few square feet of ornate trim, nearly hidden from sight, sparked a flash of recognition. I searched for the address, and smiled when I realized I'd been driving past the One North LaSalle building all this time.

I'm not an architecture expert, I'm not a history buff. I can't tell a chevron from a Chevrolet. But for the past nine years I've worked in the only Art Deco courthouse in Wisconsin, in Sheboygan, and I know I'm a lucky person for it. Only blocks from Lake Michigan, the courthouse, built in 1934 as a WPA project in the Great Depression, is a visual gem. I walk down hallways of polished peach colored Georgia marble with dramatic black veining to reach my office, but not before passing beneath white ceilings sporting ornate plaster trim in geometric designs. Charming aluminum lighting sconces and heating grills decorate the lobby, and the mail box in the lobby is a work of art itself.

I was so entranced by the building's design that I researched it on the internet, and found that the Chicago architect on the project, K.M. Vitzthum & Co., was also the principal architect for the One North LaSalle building in Chicago. I found pictures of some of the architectural details from the building on LaSalle, such as the plaster trim on the ceiling, and thought "hey neat! Whodathunkit?" The similarity in the lines of the building are unmistakable, though as you can imagine, there's an economy of scale involved in comparing 49 stories with six, and a Depression era project with something from the end of the Roaring Twenties. It just felt good to walk around knowing that the place I love to work in had such sophisticated provenance, and a bigger, far more elaborate version standing somewhere in Chicago's Loop.

I parked the car, took care of family business, and decided to reward myself on the way home with a cup of Starbucks (soy mocha with whip, please) and a visit to the building on LaSalle. Between the rain and the scaffolding, there was no point in looking up to try to grasp the outer grandeur of the building. THAT, I figured, I could always scope out on line. But as I stepped into the lobby, I felt a thrill of recognition. The polished marble walls. The ornate light fixtures. The elaborate heating grills. The delicately angular ceiling designs in plaster above me. The mailbox!!!

The soul of the building was the same. My little courthouse in Sheboygan didn't just have a kissing cousin down in the Loop, it had a big brother! I added up the extra aggravation involved in returning to my car for my camera, slogging back through the rain, and getting at least a half hour closer to the brinksmanship of rush hour traffic...and decided it was worth it. I knew from experience that the parking ramp was going to cost me thirty two dollars anyway, so I might as well get some more fun for the money.

Enjoy! Pictures of the Sheboygan County Courthouse to follow one of these days!

In Plain Sight

2009-06-01T23:05:00.013-05:00

In all the years I've been picking Lilies of the Valley, plunking them into vases, swooning over their wonderful perfume and even buying a fragrance called "Muguet des Bois"... I'd never turned them over to look inside until now.

Voila!

Love in the Time of Cupcakes

2009-05-26T19:55:00.012-05:00

The last of the "tennis ball" cupcakes set sail this morning, a small but telling harbinger of the fact that I'm going to be facing an empty nest in the fall. Twenty seven years of "hands on" mothering symbolically reduced to two dozen clumps of devil's food cake in little foil baskets. They swooshed out the door with my youngest son, for what would turn out to be his last tennis meet of high school. He graduates in another couple of weeks, heading for college in the fall and instantly turning any use of the words "high school" into the past tense.

I've been making cupcakes decorated like tennis balls--light yellow frosting with the slightest tinge of green, arced with curves and swoops of white icing--for fourteen years now, ever since my oldest daughter signed up for high school freshman girls tennis before the school year even started. Call me OCD, I don't mind! I consider it a badge of honor.

There are fundamental differences between "girls tennis" and "boys tennis" and only some of them have to do with testosterone levels. Girls tennis season starts in late summer and continues barely to early fall, guaranteeing splendid and warm afternoons and entire weekend days watching budding young ladies flit around on the court in bouncing pony tails and miniskirts, suntanned legs flying. Girls tennis, from my experience on the sidelines, has involved matching hair doo-dads with color coordinated ribbons, team posters, lots of conversation, and a great appreciation for cute snacks. Hence the tennis ball cupcakes, a big hit for both my daughters and their teams for a bunch of years.

Boys tennis, on the other hand, starts just on the cusp of very early spring, when winter hangs on for dear life. And here in the upper Midwest, winter's claws are deep. More than one tennis season for my sons has started its first practice as snow flakes were falling. The weather leans more toward rain, and cold, and wind, and if there's coffee involved for blanket-wrapped spectators under grey, stormy skies, it's been hot, not iced. Very few boys sported pony tails, and nobody wore matching barettes. The guys still appreciated the cupcakes...but I don't know that they even noticed the decorative flair right before they inhaled them.

And still, despite the fact that for years my cupcakes have been nearly vaporized in haste (and without a single squeal of how "cute" they were) by their entirely masculine patrons, I clung to tradition. At least once a season I needed to send those sweet, fluffy treats along to a meet, even if, as the years went by and my job schedule got less flexible, another tennis mom would actually have to deliver them for me. Call me crazy, it's been done before.

While the tennis ball cupcakes stretch back fourteen years, the cupcake thing has actually been a fixture for something more like twenty four. Long ago enough that my oldest daughter would have needed to bring a birthday treat for kindergarten. Or preschool. So through the next two and a half decades, the miniature confections were a constant and a comfort amid the multi-tasking, crisis-response mentality that goes into raising four kids with a minimum number of trips to the emergency room. There were cupcakes with sprinkles for birthdays, cupcakes with candy dots for art shows, cupcakes decorated like little ghosts and jack-o-lanterns for Halloween.
This last tradition--the Halloween cupcakes--nearly drove me into the ground once. I had three kids in the same grade school at the same time. The youngest wanted Halloween cupcakes for his second grade class party. I signed on for two dozen, half of them orange and half of them white, with little ghost outlines and pumpkin smiles drawn on with melted chocolate, eyes made from chocolate chips. Then the fifth grader chimed in. I signed on for another two dozen. And then as I started the baking, when I thought of my daughter's class in eighth grade going without my cupcakes on this festive day, I threw caution to the wind. Halfway through decorating seventy two little ghosts and jack-o-lanterns with dribbley chocolate I rethought my enthusiasm...but it was too late to turn back.

I was planning to dress up for the second graders' party, and I tweaked my daughter with the thought of showing up in costume to deliver the goods. She's got a dark, sultry beauty to her, and she warned me off. "Mom, don't you dare!!" she said ominously, her eyes flashing like the fiery gypsy in Carmen. I filed that thought in the "hmmm..." pile. Made some soothing mention about bringing a change of clothes.

The next day I dutifully and precariously loaded six dozen cupcakes into the minivan, and set off for school. Fifth grade cupcakes were dropped off and put out of mind. The second grade Halloween party was so cute it could make your back fillings hurt. I think that was the one where I'd made my son a little royal blue cape with fake ermine collar, for his part as the "king" in a teeny tiny little play.

And then the lunch bell rang. I grabbed the last two dozen cupcakes from the van and walked them down the length of the school to my daughter's eighth grade classroom. As I stood in the doorway, her back was to me. A friend she was chatting with looked up, and announced slyly, "Sarah, your mom is here." Slowly she turned... and there I stood, a shallow cardboard box filled with treats utterly overshadowed by my appearance in a Pocahontas style beige fringed tunic with red embroidered trim, black leggings, and a feather in my hair. I bit back a grin, but it was really hard.

My daughter flashed daggers at me with those dark brown eyes. If looks could have killed, I'd be writing this from the great beyond. But at the same time, despite her fourteen year old peer-reviewed fury, I could see the corners of her mouth start to turn up in a smile in spite of herself, at the sheer perversity of my guest appearance. I delivered the goods and quickly exited stage left, fighting back a laugh.

Eight years later we were chatting on the phone as I drove to drop off yet another batch of tennis ball cupcakes for her younger brother's meet the next day. I was going to have to miss this contest too, and so once again the cupcakes were going to stand in for me, making me feel like I was still sharing a part of the adventure. We shared a good laugh about the day I showed up looking like Pocahontas at her eighth grade classroom. At the age of twenty-two, you develop a lot more perspective and forgiveness for antics like that.

I bemoaned the fact that with her in college, I didn't have the opportunity to bring festive or seasonal or downright ridiculous treat to her classes anymore. "Mom, you can bring cupcakes to my class any time!" she assured me. "We'll eat 'em!" I could resist pushing the envelope. If it was around Halloween, could I wear the Pocahontas costume again? There was just an instant of hestitation, then..."okay!" I could just imagine her eyes rolling across the miles between us. Maturity comes in many forms, and learning to humor a mother during a fleeting moment of insanity is a remarkable milestone for a daughter of any age.

I never did drive eighty miles to a college classroom after that to bring a sugary treat to a bunch of accomplished and sophisticated college students. Life just got a little too busy, it seems, though in hindsight I wish I'd grabbed the opportunity. But I still remember laughing at the memory with her, and the beautiful thread of give-and-take the offer and acceptance held, binding us tightly and preciously with love and affection despite the distance.

They were just cupcakes. And then some.

Back in the saddle

2009-05-21T18:06:00.013-05:00

The coastal breeze on Sea Island carried a bouquet of aromas. The tang of salt sea air from the Atlantic coast nearby, the lush marshes beside the causeway, palmettos, white gardenias in full bloom. But it was the familiar fragrance of horse hide and fly spray that hit me like a gentle glove across the cheek and made me smile and inhale deeply in recognition.

I was about to go horseback riding on the beach in coastal southern Georgia, and this was a very big deal for several reasons. Despite owning horses for close to thirty five years, I hadn't been on board more than twice in the last fourteen, ever since the riding accident.

I'm a very lucky person. I took a long fall off a tall horse in a jumping lesson when I was pushing my limits in more physical ways, and ended up in a body cast for three months with a fractured vertebra in the middle of my back. Every day, I remember how fortunate I am that I came out of the accident alive, and came out of the body cast hurting...but still walking. The accident was one of those transforming events that divides the world as you know it into "before" and "after." I got braver, I got more intuitive, I went to law school and tested my limits in ways I could never have imagined before. When you start law school with a severe tendency to hyperventilate when called on for public speaking, what are the odds you'll not faint from nervousness when you have to argue before the state supreme court? Pretty slim. If anyone had placed bets, they'd have a nice little nest egg now.

But the horseback riding, which had been part of my life since I was a pre-teen, fell to the side. At first it was a case of still recovering from the accident. I went for a whole year afterward, measuring just how much pain it would cost me to pick up a dirty sock, and keeping a running tally of the number of times I could reasonably bend over in a day before my back quit holding me up. And then I started law school. My theory at the time was that as my kids got older, they would need me less and I'd have more time to devote to school and other things. Any parent of high schoolers who participate in sports would have laughed his or her head off at my naivete. I found that as they got older, I only got busier...but by then it was too late to rethink the plan.

But free time was only part of the problem. As my body gradually regained some semblance of "normal," I found that by that point my horses had finally grown too old and decrepit with age to ride. One suffered from arthritis, the other from emphysema and the occasional case of "founder." They lived out the rest of their thirty-plus year lifespans as expensive and pampered lawn ornaments, their nearness a comfort and a thing of beauty but their "useful" lives done with as far as remotely earning their keep.

I climbed into a saddle only twice after that. Once was a trail ride a few years after the accident, with my eleven year old son and a group of other children who had taken some basic riding lessons through the local recreation department. This, I thought, would be easy. A nice, gentle, completely supervised reintroduction to a part of me that I truly missed. I confess I was scared to death the entire way, uneasy in the saddle, hestitant and unsure. The next time was a few years later, when I took one of my daughters out West for a trip before college. A trail ride through the woods near the Grand Canyon seemed like fun, we thought. Again, I remember an overlay of dread and not much else.

But here I was, staying down on St. Simons Island, Georgia, taking part in the "Scribbler's Retreat" writers conference, and visiting my favorite place on the planet with a whole new perspective. Recalling wonderful week-long spring vacations on St. Simons when the kids were all young enough to get the same Easter breaks, I had wondered, before I hooked up with the conference, whether I would ever have a reason to return to this serene place. And how it would feel to walk the beach solo, without a herd of four children to count heads on continually, like a mother duck checking her trailing brood.

I settled in just fine. Picked up a rental car for a day of "me" time before the conference started, sat on the beach beside a tidal pool and watched a Great White Egret move in stop-motion as he stalked his dinner, admired the last of the blooming azaleas in the area, climbed to the top of the lighthouse, shopped for souvenirs at a delightful stained glass shop, "Pane in the Glass," which had been completely off the register for me before despite driving past it dozens of times on earlier trips with the kids in tow. The same way someone leading a bull by the nose would be reluctant to take him into a china shop.

And in reclaiming myself on the island, I asked my island friend Jeanie to set me up with a horseback ride on the beach. No better place to confront the fears of the past, I thought.

And so here I stood, as the trail steeds rested in their shaded stalls, all freshly groomed and saddled and sprayed for the first ride of the day, steadily munching their hay and smelling like a familiar trip through most of my life. I was matched up with a well-mannered little chestnut mare named "Penny," and once we were properly cinched up and our stirrups adjusted for length, our little band of four riders and a guide set off at a leisurely walk to the shoreline.

I ached in various places for pretty much all of the two hour ride. Knees, ankles, thighs, hips--all were body parts that hadn't been shifted into this position on a regular basis since I'd started having kids. Twenty some years ago. But the rhythm felt good, and the morning sunlight on the ocean was beautiful, and for the first time since the accident I could say that I wasn't afraid.

The ride triggered a sea of memories for me. Weekend riding lessons with my aunt in grade school; Friday evenings spent cantering through the woods on the outskirts of Chicago with my friends in our high school riding club; lunging my buckskin in large circles with voice commands, a long-handled whip cracking the air gently behind his haunches for encouragement; Sunday mornings spent on trail rides when I was eighteen, worshipping at the altar of nature with just my favorite livery horse for company.

It was a delightful trip through banks of memories, and it's still far from over. And it all started with the smell of horsehide and fly spray...