Overheard on Clark Street II

Two women, smoking on the corner outside of Tapas Las Ramblas:

Blonde smoker:  "I'm just glad he didn't die of alcohol poisoning.  That's what I was afraid of."

Brunette smoker:  "What did he die of?  Just...being a hamster?"

The Drive Home From Evanston

Sitting at the red light, the man in the left turn lane caught my attention.

I wondered if I should flag him down and tell him that I saw the face of a dead woman riding there next to him in the car.  But it didn't seem worth it.

It was an optical illusion.  Or maybe he was well aware of the mournful death's head along for the ride. 

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.

Mind Games

Or maybe it's Joaquin Phoenix!  Noooo!

It has gotten to the point where I'm blending every dark haired, slightly chubby guy with a bushy hipster beard into just one guy.

I see him around.  "Oh, there's that guy parking his car," I think when I"m walking down Glenwood after the gym.  Hey, there he is at The Coffee Studio, huddled over a Mac with a bleach blonde graphic designer.  He is making out with his bear boyfriend in front of the leather bar.  He is shopping at Edgewater Produce with his tattooed girlfriend.   

When I lived in Lincoln Park, there was a guy I referred to as "the chief extra in my life."  He lived in my building, frequently rode the same bus as me to Michigan Avenue, where he'd get off at the same stop as me and walk into the Wrigley Building just next door to my office.  I'd see him in the neighborhood, but then I started to spot him all over town.  I noticed him at the next table when I was on a date at Clark Street Ale House and I saw him couple of times in Logan Square.  I became convinced that if I actually spoke to him, the universe would contract and I would bring about the apocalypse.   I think he said hi to me once in the elevator and I responded with a sound somewhere between a yelp and a cackle. 

I haven't seen him in ages.  Maybe he got reassigned and this group of bearded ones has taken his place.  

In the Loop

I'm down here wearing work clothes, blending in with the office people while the wind picks you up and blows you out of town.  What else is there to do, anyway?

There's the rest of this day and then tomorrow and a Thursday morning meeting.  Everyone is walking to lunch, discussing the long weekend and their fantasy football leagues.  Standing in line for coffee this morning, I was surprised how numb I was.  Maybe it's a stages-of-grief thing or a medication side effect.  Either way, it has spread to my bones. 

Thinking of all of the terminally broken people I know.  Or those already in the late stages, the ones I stride past in the shade of Union Station, stepping carefully around their sprawled-out legs.  "That's coming for you, too," it whispers, fingers cold around my wrist.

"Are these shadows of things that must be or are they shadows of things that might be?"  But the season's all wrong for Dickens quotes. 

The Blight Man Was Born For

Some of you guys know that I'm working on a novel.  One of the major plot points and themes revolves around grief.  As someone who hasn't yet experienced a major loss, I wonder if it's crazy to try to put a character through it and to write about the grief that follows death in a meaningful way.  Sure, there has been serious pain and depression in my life.  There has been loss.  But for the most part, it's an experience that's more on the horizon than reality.

Grief and mourning and luck have all been kind of tumbling around in my head this week.  Last night, I watched Hotel Rwanda and struggled to imagine the burden of drawing a card like that out of the Universe's deck.  Even in our attempts to break genocide down and understand it on a human level through art and writing and documentaries, it's so hard to separate the individual lives involved from the capital-E Event of it.

About an hour ago, I finished Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which she wrote in the year after her husband John's sudden death and the catastrophic illnesses of her daughter Quintana.  This passage perfectly sums up for me the way our ideas about luck and grief are tangled:

Once when she was still at the Westlake School for Girls, Quintana mentioned what she seemed to consider the inequitable distribution of bad news.  In the ninth grade she had come home from a retreat at Yosemite to learn that her uncle Stephen had committed suicide.  In the eleventh grade, she had been woken at Susan's at six-thirty in the morning to learn that Dominique had been murdered.  "Most people I know at Westlake don't even know anyone who died," she said.  "and just since I've been there I've had a murder and a suicide in my family."

"It all evens out in the end," John said, an answer that bewildered me (what did it mean, couldn't he do better than that?) but one that seemed to satisfy her.  

 Several years later, after Susan's mother and father died within a year or two of each other, Susan asked if I remembered John telling Quintana that it all evened out in the end.  I said I remembered.  

"He was right," Susan said.  "It did."

 I recall being shocked.  It had never occurred to me that John meant that bad news will come to each of us.  Either Susan or Quintana had surely misunderstood.  I explained to Susan that John had meant something entirely different: he had meant that people who get bad news will eventually get their share of good news. 

 "That's not what I meant at all," John said.

 "I knew what he meant," Susan said. 

We are not supposed to live our lives with one eye looking wearily around the bend for the tragedies sure to come, and I don't intend to do so.  But they are coming.  They will be brought to us or brought on ourselves in a million different ways, big and small.  And it doesn't take an event like the Rwandan genocide or even a death in the family to remind us.

One of my favorite poems (and a really great YouTube channel):
"Spring and Fall To a Young Child" by Gerard Manley Hopkins 

Overheard on Clark Street

Two guys, smoking in front of Charlie's:

"There is some kind of fire that just burns in Eastern European women.  Makes them crazy."