Oh, Puff

You never particularly liked being a child. It was such a clumsy period full of indignities and half-understood sentences.

You were a melancholy child, a serious child. I know. I was there.

But still, there are times you miss it in your bones. And once you look backward, you realize it truly was a long time ago. And far away. Remember how you made all of those promises to yourself that you wouldn't grow up. I won't you'd whisper under the covers at night with your stuffed animals. To the trees above the trail. I won't. 

But you did. You had to. And, in the end, they make you want to. You tear it all down yourself.

A dragon lives forever/
but not so little boys

You are still under there, aren't you? I can feel you sitting quietly. Whispering I'm here. I'm still here.

10 Years

Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to read this piece as a featured reader at Story Club. Thanks JP for working hard to get this story told right before the 9/11 anniversary. 

Some kids dream about being a baseball player when they grow up. Or a fireman. Me? I wanted to be White House Press Secretary.

I declared myself a Democrat at age eight. As a teenager, I dreamed of a life of briefing books and tough questions from hard-nosed reporters. Oh, and saving the world, one liberal ideal at a time.

By 29, I was getting close. I was a Press Secretary for the Senate Democratic Leadership, which is how I came to be sitting at my desk in the US Capitol the day that something went very wrong.

I had just hung up the phone with a reporter when my coworker Chris walked into the press office.

“Do you know why they suddenly went into recess?” he asked me. 

Chris, you have to understand, was in charge of tracking the business of the Senate floor for the entire Democratic caucus. It was his job to know why.

“Why are you asking me?”

I followed his eyes over to the small TV on my desk just in time to see the clerks and Parliamentarian quickly rising from their seats at the front of the well and hustling out of the Chamber. Without warning, everyone on the Senate floor had just vanished. 

“This can’t be good,” Chris said.

My body already knew what to do.  I kicked my heels off, ready to run, when the yelling started in the hall outside. 

Chicago vs. DC

The budget reconciliation bill is not an acceptable topic of conversation in Chicago.  In DC, it is a vehicle for Saturday Night Live-caliber comedy riffs.

I think Chicago men are more attractive as a whole.  Wrigleyville has it's share of frat-daddy types, but they're so much less menacing, less sinister than the ones on the east coast.  They don't have that creepy core of entitlement, so they resemble Golden Retrievers next to DC's sharp-toothed wolves.

It's harder to make friends at work in Chicago.  Everyone goes home to their family/friends/whatever, even after grabbing a drink at happy hour.  Coworkers make polite office conversation about weekend bachelor parties, Bears games and trips to the Empty Bottle, but rarely is there a real attempt to bring one's worlds together.  In DC, by virtue of the intensity of the work I suppose, your work friends ARE your friends.  Any pre-existing friends, college roommates, sisters, whathaveyou get co-opted into your office-based tribe.  I miss that.

In the Metro -- you stand Right walk Left or deal with the wrath of the mob.  You are free/encouraged/pretty much obligated to enforce this by growling, cursing or shouting at any violators.  On the L: "c'mon and get on this train, it's freezing out there!  Have a nice day!"

In Chicago, I don't see other people out alone as often.  I like to go out to dinner, to a movie or to a bar by myself from time to time.  I'm almost always the only solo person in the establishment.  It felt less conspicuous to be out in public alone in DC.

Chicago people actually read In Touch and Us Weekly and stuff like that on the bus and in public.  I wouldn't even read Harry Potter on the Metro, keeping it on my nightstand only to be enjoyed in the privacy of my room.  Junk reading felt as embarrassing as porn in Washington.

I felt at home in DC.  Chicago is home.

This Was Just Like That

I was still sitting on the couch, laughing with David when They took back Florida.   

Took it back?   

"Too close to call," Wolf Blitzer said.  That’s ridiculous, we said.   

"They’re still going to call it for Gore", I said, "They just need to be sure. Those exit polls wouldn’t be that far off."  

" No", David said.  "This is bad."  I didn't totally believe him, but that’s when I left the living room – I couldn’t stand it, the suspense. 

Like the time in high school Cross Country practice when Amber Herlihy had a seizure in the country club pool we'd borrowed for the afternoon.  She wasn’t breathing and it had been too long since Coach G had pulled her out, started mouth to mouth.  Nothing was happening, she wasn’t breathing.  She wasn’t dead, was she?  Some of the girls on the team were crying, some were still in the water, lined up clutching the pool side, watching.  I had climbed out, dripping and watching from a distance for awhile.  Finally, I went into the locker room and waited in there alone.   

I couldn’t stand out by the pool waiting to find out if Amber was alive or dead.  We were so far out in the country, it would take the ambulance at least 15 minutes to get to her. She was definitely going to die, I decided.  Pacing the locker room, I tried to get used to the idea of her dead.  The scene at school.  At the funeral home, the air close with the smell of roses and too many people in a small space.  The hysterical, hugging teenage girls and the stone-jawed teachers in gray suits who had seen this before but had never grown used to it.   

I stayed in there, digging my fingernails into the surface of my palms and watching the clock in the orange-tiled changing space.  I stayed long enough that I knew by the time I came out, there would be an answer:  alive or dead.  I needed to know which so I’d know what to do next.   

When I finally came out and saw Amber splayed out on the pool deck where I’d left her, my throat contracted.   I thought “OK, dead.”  But the coach was still pumping her chest, and it seemed like only seconds before she seized and foamed orange vomit and fluttered her eyes.   

Alive, as it turns out.  And now it’s just a story, instead of a story. 

So, I left CNN and went to the kitchen because I couldn’t watch Florida dangle between “won” and “lost” anymore than I could watch Amber laying down between life and death.  I needed to distract myself before the final call, to perform my prayers and incantations at a distance from Wolf and the Balance of Power Desk and real time. 

What's With the Name?

When I was a kid, I loved superheroes.  Specifically, the kickass female superheroes of the late 70s/early 80s.  (well, and KISS, but that's another story)

Wonder Woman was my absolute favorite.  I had the underoos, the Wonder Woman utility belt (tiara, bracelets, belt and magic lasso) and I used to walk around with my long dirty blonde hair all wet because I thought it made it look dark like Wonder Woman's.

I also was really into this coloring book, "Wonder Woman and the Menace of the Mole Men."  Upon tracking down and shelling out an embarrassing amount of cash for a couple of these on eBay, I discovered that the plot was a little...shall we say...risque?  At least for a Kindergartener.

Odd Compliments

"My daughter was always very pretty, but now she's cute."

-- My dad, on the occasion of me getting a perm in the sixth grade.  This was said directly to me, not about me to someone else.  It must also be said that I was scorchingly awkward, with buck teeth, terrible hair and questionable taste in stonewash during the period in question -- I think he was overcompensating a bit.

"You look good.  Like, your face looks good."

-- Best friend, last Sunday night.

"You really get right in there, don't you?"

-- Sixth grade science teacher as our class was dissecting bluegill.

"About 70% of the time, when I'm...alone...I'm thinking of you.  Remembering you."

-- The Russian, 2005.  Unclear what the breakdown was of the other 30%.  Or what his girlfriend at the time would say about this. 

"Nice sunglasses.  You're kind of a badass!"

-- 22 year old who works in my office, June 2010. 

"I've been teaching this class for many years now, and I think this is the first time someone has written about owl pellets."

-- Writing retreat instructor, March 2009.

Evie Jo

Evie Jo Becker ate glue.  Not paste, which I could almost understand.  My mother bought me some once for preschool.  It came in a little bucket with a smiling cow’s face on it and the lid held a little white paste spatula for spreading.  It smelled fresh and heavenly.  But I didn’t taste it and it eventually dried up into flakes.

No.  Evie Jo ate glue.  Right there at our work tables.  Mrs. Shea would come to each one and dump a blob of Elmer’s on a piece of paper in the center for us all to share.  There were popsicle sticks that we were supposed to use to spread the glue onto our first grade craft project.  Some of us used our fingers.  But Evie Jo  – every single time –  would take a finger full of glue and pop it right into her mouth.  Some at our table would squeal, tattling to the teacher that Evie Jo is eating glue!  She’s eating it!  And Evie Jo would smile and say, “It’s good.” 

The whole thing was almost overwhelmingly undignified to me.  On top of the shared – and now contaminated by Evie Jo – glue blobs there were the shiny square wax crayons that came in boxes.  I hated that we were expected to use these oily, subpar crayons with corners that hurt our fingers and didn’t grip the paper the same way Crayolas did.  I couldn’t wait until second grade when you could bring your own box of crayons from home and store them in your very own desk with a lid, instead of sharing these impotent sticks that some of the boys would brace between their ring and pointer fingers, middle finger over the top and then *snap* down on their knee, breaking them in two.  They got in trouble for that, but the rest of us still had to use the greasy leftover nubs. 

Evie Jo was one of the gross kids.  Not just because she ate glue, but that was part of it.  She also had round, very thick glasses with pinkish brown plastic frames.  Dirty blonde pigtails tied with yarn ribbons.  She smelled like some of the farm kids, some combination of distant manure, wood smoke and vagina.  And she couldn’t speak very well.  She had to be broken of “ain’t” and “gots” and “them colors.”  She would address you loudly, embarrassingly. 

I don’t know what happened to Evie Jo.  She disappeared sometime around third or fourth grade.  What’s most likely is that her family moved.  Some of the gross kids stayed on through high school.  Looking back at them now, I can see that poverty and developmental delays and neglect were their real problems.  But who knows what drove Evie Jo to eat glue?