Patch of Sky

2009-01-10T11:30:00.001-06:00

I’ve never been big on New Years resolutions. The changes I want to make to my life are usually obscured in a uniformly gray cloud of dissatisfaction; I have vague wants that adopt enormous, bleary forms. It’s hard to make practical, reasonable resolutions that one can put to page when that’s the case. It feels a bit like trying to pin an elephant to the wall with a sewing needle.

I can, however, put a couple down for the record. I want to rest more (a perennial favorite) and generally work on making more nurturing choices for myself. I also resolve to write more. For several years I’ve been struggling to keep this blog going. I write for a living, so often when I come home, tired from filing articles at work and editing page proofs, the last thing I want to do is sit back down in front of a computer. Yet, even though it’s hard for me to restart my laptop, words still bubble up in my mind relentlessly. I feel like I’m never not writing. I may have a hard time pinning down my wants and wishes, but everything else in my life easily, readily flows into words. I just have to get myself to keep putting pen to paper. More writing in 2009—that’s my main resolution.

Today is as good a day as any to start. It one of those winter days in Chicago that makes me believe (for a day or so) that I can endure the many more winter days standing between now and spring. It is snowing, which lays a blanket of diaphanous softness over the city. I swear that this kind of snow tempers not just curbs and sharp rooftop angles, but also softens people. I think the snow has an interesting dual effect on the people it encompasses. First, it draws out daydreams and quiet, personal thoughts, beckoning reflection. Watch those on the bus on days like this. They stare into the white static of the snow. The whiteness begs for the decoration of thought, just as an empty page pleads a writer for words and a blank canvass beseeches an artist for paint. People stare not just at the snow but also into the whiteness. It calms us—it is a hypnotic—the gray static coaxes shy ribbons of thought out, splaying them into vast murals of the complicated, beautiful inner lives of us. The snow gives us space to think and a safe cushion on which to place our most delicate, fragile self elements.

The snow also enriches a sense of community. It creates snow globe-sized villages within a large, sometimes-harsh city. I have lived in Chicago for a while. Because of this, it feels like a small city to me. I know it well and can navigate it easily. But in my dreams, Chicago is expansive and unknown, a winding maze, a pastiche of other places I have been and things I have seen. I sometimes wonder if this dream city is more the true city than the small, known one I walk in my waking life. When it snows, I move within a smaller globe and instead of making the city seem tighter and more compact, it makes it seem vast, as though I could keep trudging forever and Chicago would endlessly unfurl itself in three-block bits. The people I encounter in a snow storm like this seem both as familiar and as strange to me as my dream people, but there is a stronger intimacy—as if we finally acknowledge that none of us really knows where we’re going (aside from the grocery store or the post office) and that it’s okay to be a little aimless and even a little lost.

2008-09-05T16:49:00.000-05:00

It’s 4:35 on a Friday afternoon and I’m stuck in my office. I have a headache. I have an eyelash stuck in my eye. My boss is giving me unsolicited dating advice… again. I’m facing a weeklong business trip to Cleveland. This day will not end.

Last night I dreamed that I was in some sort of vague war. I was walking along a beach with people who were wearing bright swatches of clothing. There was shouting, but instead of bombed buildings, the scene was full of sandcastles in half-crushed ruins, more endangered by a rising tide. I was unfathomably tired in my dream, so I collapsed on a bright red beach towel, but I was unable to sleep. People kept walking by me, talking loudly and laughing sarcastically. I peered at them from behind leaden eyelids. All I wanted to do was to sleep on the beach in the middle of a war zone.

Eventually a good friend came by and rested his hand gently on my head while he conducted a business call in hushed tones. The weight of his palm on my temple and the familiar scent of his suit jacket were soothing balms and I soon drifted out of my dream and into blank sleep.

I woke up with a start this morning, thinking that I was in a hotel. The air had that distinct hotel scent that many people associate with vacation. It smells to me of loneliness. I’ve stayed in a hotel rarely for fun, but frequently for business. Even the particular scent of a Las Vegas mega hotel reminds me of work.

It was a bleak start to the day. I need a new job.

2008-09-02T16:30:00.002-05:00

There is nothing less inspiring than a suburban office building wedged in a corporate park between an airport and an expressway. Today is my first day in a new office and it is killing a sister.

I would like to thank the flagrant incompetence of our local phone company for my summer of 2008. This past spring, the company I work for purchased two more Chicagoland magazines and through a string of miscommunications and office sublet complications, we had no choice but to work from our homes this summer. The phone provider apparently was unable to install a phone system into our new office in less than 90 days. It has been lovely to once be on the benefiting end of a telecommunications nightmare, but the glory days have ended; I am back to the commute, back to the “eccentric” co-workers and back to the constant interruptions.

When you spend a lot of time alone, you start to think differently. This summer, I felt like I was thinking less. It was different from being thoughtless, but the silence enshrouding me entered my mind and expanded like a deep inhalation. At first, I fought against this because it felt like a dulling of senses; I worried that I was losing something vital. Maybe I was depressed or tired, I thought. But then I accepted it for what it is—a space that probably soon would be filled again with sound and noise, with a cavalcade of triviality.

I accepted this summer as a gift given to me by a dysfunctional communications company. It was a rest, a much-needed break from a long commute and interpersonal pressures; it was a simple summer. Between travel and editorial duties, my job is taxing. I haven’t had the mental reserves in the past year or so to write much on my own terms and when you move away from doing what you love, you get yourself in trouble. Discontent is measured in the space between where you are now and that other place – your heart’s place.

No heart resides in an office with white walls and a parking lot view. When I got off the bus today and walked into my office, I felt instantly sedated and institutionalized. Just a while ago one of my new co-workers popped her head into my office for no reason whatsoever and said, “114 days until Christmas!”

Confused, I smiled awkwardly.

“I programmed my voicemail so that whenever someone calls me between September 1 and Christmas, they get the countdown,” she explained with pride. I tried to look congenial.

Ten minutes later another coworker sent me an e-mail from three offices down asking me if the phone repair man working on our already broken new phone system is cute. When I responded that I hadn’t paid attention because I’M WORKING, she wrote back saying, “That’s okay! I already have a building boyfriend!” I did not respond. Unprompted, she replied, “the building manager!” and included a winky-face emoticon. Apparently, the building manager made an extremely lewd comment to her last week, which through her immense powers of distortion, she somehow internalized as complimentary.

Our new administrative assistant also reprimanded me for putting dishes away in the wrong cabinet. She called me “silly.”

I’m trying to stay positive and to find amusement in these little episodes so that I do not totally lose my mind, but day one has been rough goings...

2008-08-31T13:44:00.000-05:00

My apartment is decorated with odd objects in various stages of dilapidation. My dining room chairs have broken backs and most of the paintings hanging on walls are captured in battered frames. I’ve lived in eight places in ten years and my furniture bears battle wounds; I have been an avalanche, accumulating and dragging my belongings with me down the rough slope of my 20s. I feel that I owe my tired old couch an apology.

I know that it’s probably a character flaw to honor my belongings, but I love almost every item that I own. I select objects not because they are necessarily practical or because they fall into a predetermined color scheme, but because they speak to me. I recently came across a small antique painting of an ocean at night. There is a lighthouse casting a luminary pool across an oil dark sea. Wispy clouds are in the sky, but the stars and the moon pierce through. There are cliffs; it is darkly romantic. I bought the painting for a few dollars and hung it next to my bed so that it is the last thing I see before I fall asleep.

I’ve attempted to find commonality in the objects I love. I’ve found a few organizing traits. First, I gravitate to old things. I prefer objects that have been owned before me, that show signs of use and life. I’m also drawn to deep, rich colors and to intricate, natural patterns. I don’t worry about whether or not things match, but whether or not I feel a connection to them.

The people I love are excellent at selecting things that I’ll love. This makes me very happy. My mom, in particular, has a knack for finding things that will enchant me. She recently came to my apartment bearing two old aluminum dishes found at a flea market, both dull silver, the color of moonlight, dressed with etchings of flowers and grape vines. They are sculpted with scalloped edges that undulate softly like waves in a pool. I immediately loved them.

I am especially thankful when people bring me objects from their travels. My aunt, uncle and cousin recently took a trip to Turkey and they brought me back an earthen vase from Ephesus. It is painted with a bright floral pattern around the middle, while the top and bottom are glazed black. It is cool to the touch and smooth. Even though it is small, it has a grand and pleasing presence. A friend who spent a summer in Armenia brought me a roughly hewn clay pitcher with set of three small cups out of which it’s traditional to serve vodka. I have it sitting on my covered radiator, next to a sepia-toned photograph of a Native American woman herding sheep under a wide-open sky. I found the picture in a gift store in Long Beach.

I own a rice bowl that came from a Japanese WWII war ship. My grandmother gave it to me last year, about a month or so before she died. One of her several suitors, a man who was a high-ranking captain, gave it to her. He took the bowl from the ship after U.S. troops boarded. If you look closely at the porcelain interior, you can see small dents made by the repeated pounding of chopsticks. My favorite piece of jewelry is a ring that this same Captain brought from Mexico for my grandmother. He purchased it in the 1940s from a woman at a small market. It is bohemian looking, large and silver, shaped like a turtle, with a beautiful piece of turquoise set as the shell. I love it and wear it often. I sometimes wonder what happened to this man who sought my grandmother, but ultimately was rebuffed. I feel an odd connection to him as the unintended owner of his beautiful gifts of adoration. I am sure that he is gone by now; I think he was older than my grandmother. And Gram also is gone. I sit with my rice bowl and my pretty ring and feel caught in a strange net of connections that spanned several continents and funneled down to me, in my Chicago home. I feel honored and humbled by these relics of lives lived before my own, of world travels, wars and an abruptly ended courtship.

Some items in my home are family heirlooms and some are gifts. Some are simply things that I have purchased for myself because I like them, but everything has a story. If a friend came into my home and picked up a plate, I could tell him why I own it and what I like about it. I think this is important. Too often, we are content to live amongst accumulated things that have no meaning or to which we feel no connection. I’m not saying that I feel strongly connected to my toaster or to my garbage can, or that it’s necessary or even desirable to love everything you own, but contentment rises from surrounding yourself with cherished possessions. As I look at them, use them, live with them, they reconnect me to the Important Things; family, friends, love and the simple joy that comes from finding beauty in a thing, even a torn picture or a broken chair.

2008-07-19T23:11:00.002-05:00

I recently moved. I’m in a transitional phase. And I hate the word “phase” when applied to the arc of a life, but I can’t think of another word. Era is too epic. Moment is too narrow. I’ll just say that I now live alone in a pretty apartment in a quiet, mostly-immigrant-inhabited neighborhood on the city’s northwest side. I’ve moved a lot in my life, and it usually takes me a while to take to a new home (I’m a hard sell), but this place is different. I immediately felt at ease in this apartment; it is where I am supposed to be right now and that conviction is something worth celebrating. It’s rare to feel that you’re in the right place at the right time. It’s far too rare that you feel like you’re doing anything right.

“The point is now that I found a home—or a hole in the ground, as you will… My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light.” (I am re-reading Invisible Man.)

There is a large tree outside my window. Its trunk is covered with ivy and in the morning, the ivy’s dew catches the Eastern Sun and light caught in water becomes a million little illuminated globes hanging on a tree trunk. Inside, I have a chandelier in my dining room. It hangs heavily above my table, six dangling crystals per a candle, electrically lit. I turn it on, sometimes, just because it pleases me to have such a thing. I also have a pair of stained-glass windows in my living room. The design is simple; two plants growing out of the Earth, stretching to the Sun. My rooms are well lit and lovely for it.

Sometimes friends deride me for not leaving Chicago. Sometimes I question why I stay. I think that I don’t leave because, firstly, Chicago is my home. It is not where I was born, but it is where I feel most fully myself and that is how I define a home. Leaving a home is not an easy decision to make—sometimes people forget this. After all, I’ve put a lot into this city and it has put a lot into me.

Living alone suits me well. It’s true that I miss my roommates and that I’ve started talking to myself more than is likely healthy. I’ve progressed from half-verbal mutterings (“Where are…? Oh, right.”) to complete sentences in which I address myself by my first name, ask questions of myself and then, finally, answer myself. I think I’m okay with this.

I was downtown recently, waiting for a friend. I sat hunched on a bench, my elbows on my knees, my hands loose, barely intertwined, half-open. It was hot outside, but there was a breeze. Suddenly, something was in my hand. Gingerly, I closed my palm around a small, rough thing. I opened my palm. It was a dry leaf… a nothing, a tiny occurrence, curved perfectly into the crease of my half-open hand. This little, negligible bit of nothing found my hand, sought in my hand a resting place, a place, in my hand, where it would go no further.

I will eventually leave this apartment, but for now, it is the place where I choose to rest, to go no further. It is the place I sought out. I blew into it, have curled myself into its eves. To find a home is a grace bestowed, a thing of beauty and I am happy for this.

2008-06-23T22:03:00.002-05:00

I’m a big proponent of public transportation for all the normal reasons like collectively lessening our environmental impact and saving on fuel costs. I’m also, however, a fan of public transportation because I think it is good for people to be forced to sit close and stare at one another on a daily basis.

There is no better instructor in empathy than a city bus. Where else except public transit do you watch people sleep or notice how people act when they’re staring out the window preoccupied? A distant stare begs questions, such as, “What’s he thinking about?” or “She looks sad… why?” Holding these questions in our heads and honestly considering them paves a fast track a more conscious society.

But all that said, sometimes a bus will just break your spirit. My office has moved recently to a new, equally inconvenient suburban location. My commute now entails getting on the Chicago subway system, then transferring to a Pace suburban transit bus, which drops me on a slim ribbon of gravel off a busy road near O’Hare Airport with no intersection in sight. Once the bus pulls away, I stand forlorn, clutching my bag against my stomach, psyching myself up to make a mad dash across four lanes of Chicago morning rush-hour traffic. I whimpered the first time the bus pulled away and the cloud of gravel dust settled around me. “Oh……… shit.”

My first journey to the new office was disastrous. When you take a city bus, all the stops are neatly marked and usually there’s more than six inches between you and traffic. If you get off at the wrong stop, you simply cross the street to another clearly marked bus stop and wait about five to 20 minutes for the next bus to swing by. On Pace, however, there are few marked stops and you might have an hour before the next bus comes by. You really don’t want to miss your stop.

Knowing this, I was a little trigger-happy on the first rainy morning of my new commute and I accidentally de-bussed myself a stop early. I realized my mistake quickly as the bus pulled away. Another woman had gotten off at the same stop. “Is this River Road and Touhy?” I asked her. “Oh no,” she said looking very concerned. “I think that is the next stop. It’s…. way up there…” I thanked her and she wished me luck a little too sincerely.

I started walking along the gravel plank. A car whooshed by and splattered my legs with mud. A red pickup came by and got me again. Sighing, I decided the better option would be to cross the street and walk through a parking lot. After nearly biting it on my quick run across the street, I was happy to be walking on pavement. It started to drizzle, which I thought wouldn’t be a bad thing because it would at least clean the mud off my legs.

I walked. And walked. I passed another weary-looking pedestrian in a parking lot and glanced up at him, hopeful for a bit of rainy morning camaraderie, but it was not to be; the man was talking to himself and not in an endearing, eccentric way. No, he was talking to himself in the, “I just intentionally killed two cats and chain smoked a carton of menthols” way. He looked at me and narrowed his eyes. I looked down and picked up my pace.

Finally, I came to an epic suburban Chicago landmark: A 294 overpass. I knew my new office building would be just on the other side of this massive structure and sure enough, I could spy it through the concrete beams, a standard corporate office building, shiny as a dull penny, adorned with several sagging shrubs and a few token smokers on a bench, exiled and surly. It was a sight for sore eyes.

I assessed the underpass. It was under construction, but there were no workers present to tell me not to walk through. There were no sidewalks, no margins of error. The best option was to squeeze myself between a row of cement barricades and the cool, moldy underpass structure. The path was filled with water at points, but I could see my office building! It was too late to turn around. The smart Erin would have stayed put and called one of her co-workers to come rescue her in a car. The Erin who usually wins these debates, however, argued, “But I can see the building. I will make this crossing. I can do it if I’m careful.” As a kid, I always drowned fording the river in Oregon Trail.

I took a step. Mud squeezed between my toes. Luckily, I was wearing shorts and flip-flops because we were moving stuff in the office that day, not heels and not dress pants. The mud squelched as I pulled my foot up and sucked off my flip-flop. “Shit!” I swore and bent down to extract my shoe from the deep mud. A car whizzed by so close to my face that I almost lost my balance in the force of its speed. I took another step.

After slow progress, I had made it to the center of the underpass. The air choked me with its damp, moldy scent. I was covered in mud from toe to knee and also had mud on my hands and face from constantly bending down and extracting my shoe. I had been honked at five times and had almost slipped into oncoming traffic twice. Three times I had questioned my sanity, twice I had nearly broken down into tears and once I fell into a manic laughing fit that left me winded and weak. Now I faced a veritable lake. My phone rang; my publisher was calling. I told him I’d have to call him back and when he asked if I was okay I said, “well… I’ll… umm… I’m just going to have to call you back. I’m in a bit of a situation, but don’t worry.” He worried.

From the edge of the underpass, things hadn’t looked quite so bad. The water looked shallow and like I might be able to step on over the deepest parts. I now faced the ultimate error in my judgment and I was going to have to walk through water. Straight up.

I said a quick prayer and took a tentative step. My foot disappeared into the dark scummy water. It was so cold that it took my breath away. A cigarette butt floated by, cautiously circumventing my ankle. The squelching noise of my progress was obscene.

I had just told myself that it wasn’t so bad, that I could do this, for real, when I almost lost it. I looked down and saw a dead pigeon, mud caked between its splayed feathers, rotting just an inch or two from my left foot. I gasped and lifted my foot. Another car drove by and honked. I turned, and hobnobbing with insanity, I yelled, “I know! OKAY? I KNOW! This was a BAD IDEA! Just… just… just LEAVE ME ALONE!” I might also have shaken my fist at the car, which already was about two miles down the road.

As I was nearing the edge of the lake, I realized how emotionally drained my walk had left me. I’d used every mental trick to keep myself going. I’d told myself that people, right at that moment, were walking through far worse messes. I said, “It’s not that big of a deal. It’s just mud and rot. It’s all natural.” I’d told myself that this was character building and that my life was nothing if not interesting. I told myself that I’d write a letter to the city of Des Plaines, begging them for some sidewalks, for goodness sake. I told myself that things could, as always, be worse. I told myself many things.

In my heart, though, was one single thought: “You are an idiot.” This thought had many attendants like, “You could have died under 294 in the suburbs, next to the pigeon,” and “You might have contracted a weird foot disease,” and “All this to get to a job where you write about oil regulations and transmissions.” But again, the umbrella thought was my own idiocy and a general reflection on other times my “fierce independence” has nearly been the end of me.

Finally, though, I emerged, victorious. I was a mud monster and my nerves were rattled, but I laughed and raised a fist in the air, “HA!” I said, allowing myself a small, but satisfying, moment of victory. Then I quickly realized how I looked and scanned the area for a place to come clean before I walked into our new office suite with its white walls and fresh carpet. It looked like my best bet was a Shell gas station across the street.

I trudged to the station and saw that it had an outdoor bathroom, which was perfect given my state. Unfortunately, I needed a key from the attendant. I sloshed to the edge of the booth and stuck my head around the corner, not wanting to dirty the floor. “Uh, excuse me sir, but can I have the bathroom key?”

Gas station attendant, suspiciously: “What happen to you?”
Me: “I had… issues.”
Attendant: “You no go in bathroom.”
Me: “I HAVE to go in bathroom. It’s an emergency. I’ll clean up, I promise.”

The attendant stared at me with hard eyes and shook his head. I was ready to start lying. My first lie would be, “I took a bad fall and need to make sure my knee is okay.” If that didn’t work, I would add, “I’m pregnant and it’s an emergency.” That lie would be frowned upon from above, but my very last resort would be tears and I didn’t think I could conjure them without laughing first. My plight was too ridiculous.

Luckily, the attendant let me have the key before I resorted to lies. In the dirty, littered, unisex outdoor bathroom, I did my best to clean up. I nearly lost my balance a couple of times when I had one foot or another up in the sink. Once, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror and the image of my muddy leg in the bathroom sink, my hair falling across my face, which also was somehow streaked with mud, was just too much. I put the seat down on the toilet, sat and laughed until those tears finally came.

Thirty minutes later I walked into the office, all evidence of my brush with death erased. My boss said, “So, how’d the bus work out for you this morning?”

Me: “It didn’t.”

She asked for elaboration, but I just couldn’t muster the words or the strength. Another co-worker walked in and said, “Hi! How was the bus?”

Me: “BAD.”

My two co-workers looked at one another. My boss said quietly, reverently, “I think something happened to Erin…”

Me: “Yes….”

2008-06-19T19:27:00.001-05:00

I travel often and in the past three months, I’ve found myself at different coasts: The Gulf Coast in Alabama, the Pacific Coast in Southern California and the Atlantic coast in New York. I live near Lake Michigan, which is a lake that plays a sea, so I count this as a fourth coast.

I am deeply attracted to water, to the very edges of horizons and the ends of land. Someone once told me that this is because I have a lot of water in my personality. I don’t believe in astrology, fortune telling or the like, but I do believe that there are places, people and things we gravitate toward unknowingly and for me, one of these elements is water. It pulls at me and when I’m away from it, I become restless like a river trying to find the sea.

There is no greater peace than a walk on a beach and all are so different. Take, for instance, the Gulf Coast in Alabama. Water there is an emerald green, frothy and thick, dark and roiling. It is beautiful water and the waves are fast and muscular. The beach I know there is coated with broken shells, as if the sea had coughed violently and freckled the sand, forming a kind of jeweled mosaic, which is periodically studded with old man bellies rising from the sand, wiry haired, draped with gold chains, and large old lady chests clad in ruffled floral bathing suits. Old men and ladies alike lay sprawled in almost indecent postures, looking very still and very much like the driftwood and bands of kelp that escaped the rough tide and after all that struggling, can do nothing but drink in stillness and rest.

I returned at night to walk the same Gulf beach. As a city dweller, I’m always shocked at the darkness of sparsely populated areas. It is a dark that leaves you winded – an invasive dark that creeps in and makes you question whether or not you are even still visible. One’s eyes always struggle against darkness until that point when they accept that the light they do have really is all they’re going to get. When my eyes stopped fighting, I began to see inky forms: White crests of waves breaking, spidery light webs between clouds and distant lit windows.

A walk along the beach has a way of sucking thought from your depths, floating it to the surface. I think this is because the rhythm of tide mimics thought itself; powerful thoughts splay themselves out upon sand, sinking back, but leaving the limits of their reaches damply marked. Lesser waves lap upon these prints, echoing big thoughts---nuances are laid. On the Alabama coast, this process is fast and strong. The waves of the Pacific, however, are expansive exhalations spread gracefully across sand, like the laying of a sheet over a bed, or the release of a sigh. Grand thoughts can be cast against this expanse--- large and lovely thoughts that slowly unfurl and flow into delicate rivulets of meaning.

I believe there is value to walking on solid land and feeling its permanence under your feet, but I think that we often seek this solidity without stopping to think whether or not it is what we need. I know there is as great a value in motion as there is in stillness and the process of thinking thoughts and making decisions requires striking a balance between the things in us that run and the things that rest. The hard part isn’t so much reaching this balance, but separating the running and resting outside of us from motion and stillness within. Maybe this is why I like beaches; there is clarity. Water moves, land rests. The delineation is clear. Reaching decisions, is a clumsy, human process, but our imperfect quest for understanding is sewn together with thin threads of grace. Walking along these threads is our best bet, I think.

2008-02-14T22:29:00.003-06:00

I recently flew into Orlando for another press event. I feel like I can hardly complain about leaving gray, snow-mired Chicago for warmer climes, but there’s something fundamentally unsettling about going by oneself to a vacation destination while on business. I sat in the lobby of a bland, marble-floored hotel, wearing an inappropriately hefty wool sweater and glasses, studiously working on my corporate IBM laptop. I watched terribly sunburned tourists blistered and inflamed, wandering through the lobby, momentarily happy, taking pictures, mingling with two wedding parties, white and red and white and red, all completely, utterly drunk—but momentarily joyous, at least.

A middle-aged woman in a purple feather boa and ill-fitting Disney tee-shirt strode by. She wore it all without irony, but with the strained grimace that people get when they’re trying to convince the rest of the world that they are NOT drunk. My eyes straying, I watched a line of men at the bar unintentionally raise their drinks in unison (one of those odd synchronic group occurrences). The woman with the purple feather boa walked by again—this time with a pink duffle bag. She smiled (eyes shaded by heavily made-up lids) and faltered on her heels, almost biting it in the middle of the lobby. I flinched, blinking, but she seemed unfazed and ambled on, glancing around with her lazy, heavy eyes.

I dined alone that night, as I often do while traveling. I usually seek a restaurant that looks tolerable and, if I’m lucky, local. I feel like the few moments of freedom I have while traveling for work are best used to get a sense of where I am and what lies beyond the manicured avenues that lay supplicated at the feet of convention center hotels.

I wandered into a restaurant and sat at the bar. I ordered a glass of wine from the over-eager bartender. I ordered an entrée from another server. A third member of the wait staff brought my dinner and a fourth came by to ask me how everything was.

I looked across the bar and noticed another man sitting by himself. He wore a loosened brown tie and a light blue dress shirt. His hair was formed in a well-molded sweep to the left. His name tent read “Francis.” Noticing that I was looking in his direction, he raised his glass of wine to me and grinned licentiously. I frowned, feeling worry lines creasing in my forehead. I fixed my stare at the muted television. Francis eventually left, tossing his tan jacket over his shoulder, dropping his napkin on his chair with a maiden’s grace.

In the wake of Francis, I caught my own reflection in the restaurant’s many mirrors. I looked small and solitary, reflected not once, but numerous times. It was a sequence of endless Erin’s, each one smaller than the next. I was a nesting doll of my own image. I raised my glass of wine and a hundred other Erin’s raised their glasses in a dizzying mockery. I had a strange urge to sweep my arms out and gather up all my reflections, to scoop them back into my form, to save them from the flickering candles on the tables, from the many laughing white teeth of others, also reflected to infinity.

I felt claustrophobic, entirely boxed into the endless mirror, but also fractured infinitely. I stared back at myself, pale and wide-eyed. A familiar darkness lapped at the back of my mind, rising like the tide. I sat up straight and pressed my hand hard on the table, bracing myself. This is the worst moment. I feel like I’m being pulled back in a wave’s wake, watching something awful crest above my head.

And suddenly it breaks and I blink and open my eyes to an alien world. I feel like I’m an actor on a stage and that nothing is real and it’s all horrible. Closing my eyes for a moment, I use all my mental reserves to bring everything back, to banish this crushing sense of falseness and the accompanying feeling of betrayal. I fight against something in me that says, “The world isn’t here. You are not real. This life is flimsy.” It’s like an hourglass is tipped and my sense of self dissolves into sand, rushing through a narrow pass.

Sometime in my childhood, I learned to fight this sudden sickness by closing my eyes and, using the whole breadth of a child’s imagination, pushing myself to a sacred place—my grandparents’ house. I’d think about the cool air of their old home in Iowa. I heard the creaking of the narrow wooden stairs and feel several of my grandparents’ cherished objects in my hands: A heavy glass paperweight, the soft floppiness of my mother’s old Raggedy Ann doll, the smooth wooden folds in the carved skirt of a statue of Mary. These things all brought me peace, but the remembrance of objects paled in comparison to the force that grabbed me when I thought of my grandparents themselves: My Gram and my Bapa. Their sanctity in my heart’s place always was enough to pull me back into the present. It beat back the falseness of everything; it reconceived me, stood me up, and brushed me off.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized these spells had a name: Panic attacks. The horrible isolation of these spells made it so that it never occurred to me that they could be a shared human experience. But I found that my coping mechanism was solid. As a kid, I’d created my own haphazard behavioral therapy and had learned how to fend off the worst attacks.

I seldom have panic attacks now, so this one, experienced so far from home, spurred, I think, by the fractioning effect of the mirrors in a restaurant bar and the general unfamiliarity of the place, caught me off guard. Reflexively, I thought of my grandparents. In my mind, I went back to the house, back to their arms. I felt an electrical current pass through me; I was struck by the fact that Gram died last fall. It wasn’t that I had forgotten, but more that, with full force, I suddenly re-remembered.

The grief was deadening. It bludgeoned my panic into submission and instantly brought me back to reality, but the blow hollowed me. I paid my bill and walked outside into the unfamiliar Floridian night. I found a bench and sat under a tree, listening to the balmy wind blow through the palms; the sound was much like a cascade of small pebbles. I thought of nothing.

I haven’t been able to write about my grandmother’s death—the words won’t come. But I suspect that as the event calcifies in my mind, I will be able to form words to describe the massive totality of the experience. I expect words will fall like autumn leaves and that I will have my hands full raking them into neat piles. For now, it’s still too tender. I gingerly tiptoe around it and I know I’ve stepped to close when my chest seizes.

Traveling for work is rough. You keep long hours, eat unfamiliar food, you are compelled to socialize with people with whom you’d rather not. Panic attacks aside, I think it’s easy to find contempt for the false architecture of the business world. It is a giant distraction, and in those few moments of solitude, you puncture the ruse. Another editor I work with described it thus:

“One minute you’re in it and you’re laughing. You feel like, ‘Hey, this is my community. These are my people.’ And then you go to the bathroom, or you step outside or go to the bar to get a drink and it’s like stepping into outer space. You can’t breathe for a minute and you think, ‘I don’t like these people and I don’t like myself around them.’ And, like, what do you DO with that? Well, not a damn thing. You go back and keep smiling. You just keep smiling.”

2008-01-28T21:21:00.000-06:00

Last week at this time I was co-hosting an executive cocktail party for 2,000 people in the trucking industry. You might not think that there could be 2,000 executives in that industry, but there are. You have your manufacturers (both overseas and American), raw materials and parts suppliers, distributors (foreign and domestic), fleet managers for the likes of FedEx, government folks who pass regulations, members of the EPA and myriad forces that accompany these decision makers and money movers everywhere: Cadres of public relations representatives, ad agency executives and legal teams.

Five other editors, two publishers and a couple of ad sales folks in my company stood guard, pacing the marble floors of the Mirage in Las Vegas with hard-soled dress shoes, trying to make sure we saw all the people we needed to see, that we shook the right hands and didn’t make any egregious social errors. All this came after long, exhaustive days on our feet, attending other industry events. I certainly didn’t feel like I was my most capable self; it felt like hosting a dinner for professors just before the end of finals week when students are in the death throes of exhaustion.

I’ve always loved Tolstoy’s descriptions of social gatherings, his parsing of guest etiquette and the tense narrative sting on which he hooks every side glance and each errant smile, weaving a tapestry of social awkwardness and unspoken desire or loathing. I appreciate his sharp eye for detail more now that I’m frequently expected to host cocktail receptions, or to sit through five course meals with CEOs. Unlike gatherings with friends, or even awkward parties with people of your own station, these formal business events are incredibly nuanced in a well-moneyed language I don’t quite grasp, and therefore, they are flat out nerve-wracking.

The trucking industry is 99% male and 99% older than me by at least a decade. This puts me in an odd position. I am easily remembered because my gender and age don’t fit the demographics, but this also piles on the pressure to “prove something.” I don’t know exactly what’s expected of me, but all last week in Vegas—a week that turned into the press junket from hell—I felt layers of pressure being piled on my shoulders. I was expected (or expected myself, perhaps) to be articulate, smart, capable, quick, professional, but still winning. In the back of my mind always dances the image I do not want to project; namely, that of the flippant, silly blond girl playing at being a professional. I shun her, but I always hear her laughing in the back of my mind, saying, “This is so ridiculous. What are you doing here? You can’t think that you’ll be taken seriously!”

And so I fight the strong temptation to laugh it all away or to throw it all to the wind and down half a dozen gin and tonics before hitting the roulette table. I stand up straight and introduce myself to executives. I muster up the courage to talk about intellectual property laws as they apply to product branding in the distribution chain. I try to smile when appropriate and I drink my one glass of wine very slowly because to become drunk is professional suicide, but to not drink is regarded with suspicion.

Attending these types of events is an extreme exercise in self-control, but also, you start to run into trouble the minute you stop being yourself. Even an unperceptive person has a knack for feeling when someone is uncomfortable and an uncomfortable person comes across as an untrustworthy person. Really, the game in business cocktail parties is all about being the most controlled natural self you can be. It’s about self trust and I find that it takes an exceptional amount of energy to trust myself all the time.

I definitely slip up. At one point this week, fate sat me next to the CEO of a major automotive manufacturing company for the duration of a long, formal dinner. After the meal he shook my hand, said it was a pleasure to meet me. Then he looked at me with his head turned a bit and said, musingly, “You’re funny. A little strange, but mostly you amuse me.”

Uh, thank you, sir?

I mean, it could be worse. I’ve fortunately never put on a disastrous performance at a business event. I’ve never gotten drunk, for instance, though once as we waited for a group of Chinese businesspeople to arrive from the airport so we could commence dinner, the public relations firm in charge of the event thought it would be a good idea to extend the cocktail party by 1.5 hours. It was cruel, but all we members of the press were in it together. We stayed strong… sort of. I guess we stayed as strong as a bunch of writers can stay around continuously poured (free) wine. The editor of a Spanish language publication had an “incident” with a bottle of merlot and another editor sloppily knocked over an entire tray of shrimp, which set me into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. I went to the bathroom and gave myself a pep talk of the, “Keep it together! Go eat some bread, for the love of God,” variety.

Las Vegas is where people go to relax, but it is the town I associate with business meetings. The flashing lights and ringing slot machines are seizure inducing when over caffeinated and in a business suit going on hour 20. It’s discomforting to see blithe or bedraggled people playing craps and having a beer at 6am when you’re on your way to a breakfast meeting. Twice I got lost on the Mirage’s labyrinth casino floor. Once, running especially late, I almost sat down on a red velvet lounge chair and cried, “I just want to find the convention center!” More pathetic words have never been spoken.

Leaving Las Vegas and coming back to frigid Chicago means I finally can eschew society and do what it is I almost always want to do to the exclusion of everything else, which is to just simply sit at home and read. It means I can get back into my boring routines of riding the train to work and running on the treadmill at my over-heated, over-crowded gym as I stare at a brick wall. It means I can eat canned soup for dinner and not feel obligated to have a cocktail. It means being among people who wear clothes without sparkles or, simply, around people who wear clothes at all.

I sometimes hear talk about how per diems must be fun, or how business travel is glamorous and I probably also use to think those things. I was dead wrong. I could not have been more wrong if I tried. I mean, maybe business travel is nice if your business is to review resorts, but if you’re a business editor covering the transportation industry I swear, all you’ll want to do is transport yourself home.

2008-01-09T21:41:00.000-06:00

This week has been filled with odd occurrences cast against extreme atmospheric abnormality; the weather has been downright balmy. This city had highs in the upper 60s, which is unheard of in January—a month that usually leaves us cowering under woolen layers, hiding the smallest patches of skin from an unrelenting razor wind. I’ve heard some people mutter forebodings about global warming, while others are left speechless.

Almost no one seems to have enjoyed the unusual foggy warmth. Rather, it seems to have made the population uneasy and wary. “What does this mean?” I heard an older man ask someone on the train. “It’s got to mean something,” he asserted. His acquaintance, another old man, this one wearing a checkered beret, slowly nodded his head and turned to look out the window. He stared into the gray distance for a minute, letting the haze into his eyes, losing focus as if absorbed in a dream, or an antiqued moment. The ambiguity of his gaze lasted a full minute before he checked himself, the lines around his eyes tightening, snapping back into focus. “I just don’t remember anything like it,” he whispered reverently.

I had Monday afternoon off work, so I went for a long walk along the north branch of the Chicago River. I wanted to walk over to Lake Michigan, but the weather stopped me sooner with the clammy closeness of an ill child’s hand. Lots of snow had melted and the world was muddied and mottled. Strange, not-quite-Spring smells rose from the dirt, the pavement and the river, all caught off-guard by the premature thaw. All entities, pedestrians included, looked worse than usual—dirty, grimy, polluted. It was as if a million little processes had been arrested at their most embarrassing mid-transformation moments, and all was incomprehensible; no longer one thing, not yet the next. The day’s acrid scent caught in the back of my throat and bothered me with its unnamable familiarity. I couldn’t place the smell until the next day when I realized that the entire city smelled pungently of the subway tunnels.

After walking along the river, I decided to catch a movie. The film I chose was The Rape of Europa, an excellent documentary about the Third Reich’s plundering and destruction of great Western works of art during WWII. Art world ethics have become a recent and almost obsessive interest of mine, so the movie held great allure. I was, however, the youngest person in the audience by approximately four decades. I guess that is bound to be so when one catches a 4:45 p.m. art documentary on a preternaturally warm Monday afternoon. I did enjoy hearing an older couple directly behind me (incorrectly) repeat lines of dialogue to one another, prompted by hissed, “What did she say?” and “Robert! Who is that man? Is he with the Getty?” My favorite moment was when the man said to his wife, “Cheryl, give me a piece of that Nicorette, will you? I’m getting the dropsies.” (I do not know what it means to have “the dropsies,” but I suspect I too have fallen victim.)

The weather is cooling off nicely now, curbing Monday’s atmospheric oddness. Other curiosities have risen with the lifting warm front, though. My poor brother, for instance, suddenly came down with Scarlet Fever. I thought that was only a childhood illness, but he is 23. He says that he is 90% red now, and that his tongue is swollen past recognition. I am moved by his illness, but it’s possible that a lot of my emotion is tied to the Velveteen Rabbit, a book that made me weep as a child.

Another strangeness: I’ve dreamed that I am getting married for the past three nights. The first night, I had no idea who I was marrying, but I was in a white dress, standing in a barn at night, far out in a recently-harvested field. The second night, I was once again in a white dress, anxiety-stricken and running through a hotel, trying to find my mother so she could tell me that this would all be okay. I was to marry an old friend’s brother, but I barely know him and haven’t spoken to my friend in years. The third night I dreamed that I was simply standing in a white dress before a wooden platform that was an altar of sorts. I was alone, but I felt peaceful.

A co-worker who fancies herself a dream expert told me that to dream of a wedding signifies personal transition and change, which seems reasonable enough to me. I told her that I was afraid my third dream (alone and peaceful at an altar) indicated a forthcoming call to the Nunnery. She laughed, but I remain slightly worried about the possibility of being “called.” As if there are not greater worries to be turned.

2008-01-04T22:58:00.001-06:00

There is a woman on my block who is totally crazy. I see her every morning at approximately 6:45am when I walk to the subway. She is a tallish black woman, probably in her forties. She wears sweat pants (pushed up to the knees in the summertime) and a dirty flannel shirt (with a coat in the wintertime). Her hair is large and frames her face in an uneven aura of graying frizz, but somehow it looks regal rather than ragged. She shuffles her feet and her shoulders slope, but she has a way of keeping her face tilted at a rakish angle that, when combined with her above average height, lets her drop you a menacing look from the very bottom corner of her eye. That look has as much potential meaning as of a drop of blood for a lab, squeezed from a pricked finger.

It should be noted that this woman also wields a tennis racket—aggressively. The first time I passed her, she swiped at me with the racket, her arm moving with the agility and precision of a boxer. I jumped just in time to be grazed by the rush of air passing in the racket’s wake. It was truly a close call. What she lacked in punch, however, she had in bite.

“HOOKER!” she yelled at me. “Get out of here, HOOKER!”

Startled by her name for me and also still fearing for my person, I continued my hasty retreat down Ashland.

Things went on like this through the summer and into fall. The one day, Tennis Racket Woman (TRW) decided to make a friendly overture. I saw her ambling up to me with her tennis racket, but also with what looked like a crumpled newspaper. I approached with trepidation and offered her my usual weak smile that simply says, “I see you and know your ways. Please don’t hit me with your tennis racket, okay?”

“Here,” she said, and handed me a greasy, ketchup stained front page from Hoy, Chicago’s Spanish-language newspaper. I was pretty touched. Seriously. I accepted her gift and said, “Thank you.” She grumbled, “hooker…,” but the word was only breathy and half-felt this time. I eyeballed the tennis racket and kept walking.

This morning, I’m sad to report, we regressed. I hadn’t seen TRW for a couple of months and I was wondering where she was just yesterday. I think I conjured her presence because suddenly she was before me, looking all the more menacing in the dark, early hour. I didn’t like the look in her eyes; the look said, “I want to hit a girl in the face with my tennis racket this morning.”

As we got closer, I could smell the booze on her, even through the sterilizing chill in the air. I sighed and smiled with only half my mouth. The muscles in my shoulders tensed.

“There you are, HOOKER!!” she screamed, her voice cracking like breaking ice against the buildings. “HOOKER!” she shouted again, for good measure.

Now, I was wearing a large, brown down jacket. The jacket is, in fact, so large and formless that I have trouble getting a good range of motion from my arms. I also had on my moon boots (they’re just as they sound), jeans, a large scarf twice wrapped, a hat and gloves that would serve a boxer well. I’m fighting a cold, so my nose and lips were chapped and red, my eyes watering. There’s no way I looked like a hooker unless I was standing on a corner in Antarctica, trying to pick up a snowman.

As I scooted past her, TRW took a good, hard swing at my knee and made contact. “What the hell!?” I shouted indignantly. “Come on!”

“You’se a HOOKER. You’se a TRAMP.”

“I AM NOT…” then, more quietly, “a hooker… or a tramp…geeze!!!”

TRW put her hands on her hips and leaned her broad shoulders back, keeping her head pushed forward like a contortionist. She sized me up, looking at me with those smart brown eyes that only betrayed her craziness through that peculiar gleam of ever-present, punishing, desperate need. She straightened her back and let out a “humph,” then walked away.

I sincerely hope TRW and I can return to the days of the Hoy exchange. It’s going to be my winter 2008 goal to win her over… or to at least, keep her racket at bay.

2007-12-17T21:05:00.000-06:00

I woke up Saturday morning to hear the sound of snow shovels grating across pavement. That sound—the hollow, rough, rhythmic clatter of a shovel being worked across a sidewalk—is one that instantly brings me back to a childhood of many heavy winters. A sound like this pulls at a connective thread between my heart and mind. The pinprick of instant recognition and the tug of deep emotion combined create a sentimental resonance that’s difficult to dampen.

I spent most of last week in Alabama, where it was almost balmy. As I was riding to Birmingham to catch a flight, I was struck by how much Alabama in December resembles the Midwest in September with its burnished leaves and drying grass (but then, in the Midwest, the hammer drops and we suffer for a few months). Driving southwest along highway 20/59, you pass through hills covered with tall pines and shadow that pools in valleys between sun-drenched slopes. Occasionally, you spot shacks or trailers backed into the trees, silent as animals hiding. The air is thick with pine, red dirt and in the summer, pure heat.

Alabama is beautiful. Birmingham, specifically, is a city of rolling hills and trees. The city also has an appealing eccentricity. Twice during my many trips to Alabama, I have encountered men dressed head to toe as Jesus Christ walking downtown streets at night, preaching. The first time I saw such a character, I expressed surprise to a co-worker. She said, “Oh those people? They do that all the time. Sometimes they carry crosses, too.” Her nonchalance didn’t lessen the chill I felt upon seeing a barefooted man dragging behind him diaphanous white robes in the middle of a city street at midnight. I might have felt better if we’d been able to see stains on the edge of his robes, or maybe a tattoo—a relic of his pre-saved life. But from a distance, his untainted etherealness and steady gait were upsetting. I wanted him to be a crazy vagrant, but instead he was something else entirely.

I like what I’ve seen of the South and I never thought I would. But sometimes when traveling there, I almost feel as though I like it because it is foreign to me. It is not a land of snow shovels and wool sweaters, that’s for sure. I guess I’d like to know if I enjoy Alabama because of what it is, or if I enjoy it because it challenges my handle on normalcy. I feel that if I could successfully answer this question I would subsequently be able to navigate so many other thickets of indecision I scurry between on regular rotation.

2007-12-11T20:47:00.000-06:00

At about 8:32 a.m. this morning, I was sliding, laden like a mule with my laptop and bag, along the edge of a suburban parking lot, squeezed between a guardrail and a Pace commuter bus. I was wearing my big, brown, down coat, a wool hat, mismatched gloves, jeans with salt residue from the roads creeping up my calves, heavy socks and sneakers that are about a decade old. My name, “ERIN,” is carved into the arch of the right foot shoe. I believe that inscription dates back to an afternoon sociology course I took in college—seven years ago. I do not know why I so sorely needed to brand my shoe.

The weather this morning was problematic. It was all at once, raining, icy, cold, snowy, slippery, foggy and dismal. I had on full winter dress, but also was carrying a completely useless old black umbrella with one broken stretcher that made the whole canopy half-slack. This rendered it like a blackbird with a broken wing, or a bat. Everyone who’s lived in Chicago knows that umbrellas don’t do anything worthwhile. The wind currents rushing through the alleys and the fantastic badness of the weather in this city have torn asunder many a windproof umbrella. Yet, we suspend our knowledge of this truth and all still carry the things like worthless shields against an indomitable enemy. It’s very human of us.

I live in the city and work in the suburbs, but I am without a car. I have an almost two hour morning commute—first by subway, then by commuter train, then by walking. The last walk is usually what gets me. I have to get from the train station across a Home Depot parking lot, then past a Bennigans and another fast food establishment’s parking area. Next, there’s a bank that has a sidewalk that’s never shoveled. On the other side of the bank is a street with no stop signs or crossing walk and one large blind corner of death, around which cars full of over-caffeinated, distracted commuters zoom at high, negligent speeds.

This might not seem like much of a jaunt on paper, but anyone who has ever had to walk anywhere commercial in the suburbs knows that this is a long journey; these areas aren’t designed for pedestrian traffic. I’m not sure if you all know this, but—interesting fact—the parking lot of a Home Depot, when coated with ice (in the rain) is approximately the same size as the state of Nebraska.

This morning, when I was squeezed between a Pace bus and a guardrail, I used my sad, weak, broken umbrella as an instrument of my frustration. As the bus passed and sprayed me with muddy, salty road slush, a hot rage boiled within and I futilely grasped my umbrella and smacked the guardrail with all the force my 5’5-1/2”-frame could muster. Sociologists might call my angry outburst a schism between arcane human nature and the frustrations of modernity. I might know if I hadn’t been tagging my shoe so diligently seven years ago.

And guys, it’s only December. We have three or four months left of slugging through this crap. I do think, though, that there is something character building about a Northern winter. It keeps us tough to have to fight through atmospheric extremes every step of a day. This weather (and the extreme summer heat we have, too) instills a sense of camaraderie between all of us. I can glance at a fellow pedestrian trudging through snow and in one second we soundlessly say, “Yeah, this is rough, isn’t it?” It’s a small comfort to know that all of us need multiple layers of coarse wool and thick down to keep warm in this world. But that wouldn’t be a comfort if it wasn’t also true that sometimes, all it takes to pierce all those armored layers we don to combat the chill of a treacherous winter day is a sincere glance and a sympathetic nod of the head.

2007-12-09T22:26:00.000-06:00

This evening, my mom and I toured the Glessner and Clarke Houses on Prairie Ave. and 18th Street. The Glessner House was my favorite. It is warm, dark, ornamental and softly lit in a way that makes skin glow and silver sparkle. I enjoy the dimness of old-fashioned lighting because it coddles rather than exposes. I hate walking into a room and turning on a florescent light because I always get the fleeting impression that I’m catching objects in the middle of unflattering acts. Turning on a light should not be an “aha!” moment. Light should serve as a pathway that gently guides the eye around a room, pulling sight around forms and textures, allowing it to settle and rest. Obtrusive, artificial bright light belong to the likes of computer screens and televisions and to the soul-dimming confines of my office building.

The Glessner House lacks stuffiness or formality; it feels like a home one can sink into and trust. To me, it has the specific appeal of an oversized leather arm chair, which also reminds me of Chicago itself. I love this city for its livability and for the comforting familiarity provided at every turn. I realize that what I’m about to say has the ring of crazy old lady to it (and I do think that could be my inescapable fate), but sometimes when I walk around I find myself mentally addressing the city, affectionately calling it my big, gray city. I’ve spent a lot of time in Chicago and its streets have hosted the full range of my small human experience. To me, it is a city made gray less by the rain and fog that settles on brick and mortar than by the light of my happiest moments mixing with the darkness of my sadness. It holds the best and worst of me and keeps silent about both extremes. That’s a home.

2007-12-09T12:51:00.000-06:00

I just erased a year’s worth of posts that formerly occupied this space and I find the new blankness intimidating. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with my writing. But there is a voice in myself and when I stop writing, it stops speaking. When it stops speaking, I feel like I am half-asleep in a strange place.

I work a lot as a writer and editor and so I already spend my days staring at a computer screen in consternation, pushing words around pages, considering sentences and paragraphs and parsing quotes. I have long commutes and I travel often for my job. I drink lots of coffee and sleep far less than I should. All that makes me hesitant to start writing in this space again, but I’m going to do my best and see where it leads.

I am 27. I live in an old apartment on a busy street in a crowded Chicago neighborhood with two roommates. I read whenever I don’t have to be doing something else. I take a drawing class at the Art Institute. I run. I have vivid dreams and remember them almost every night, which is a mixed blessing. My favorite color is red… deep red with a sunset hint of rust.

That’s where I’m going to start.