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. 

Don't Wait Too Long

I tore out this picture of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from last week's New Yorker and tacked it up above my desk. 

I did this for two reasons. 

Coffee

Fixing my coffee feels like preparing a baby's bottle.  Sugar, lots of cream, get a spoon from the drawer or a thin wood strip from the bin and stir until it's toffee tan.  Don't skip a step.  Can't drink it if it's too hot -- I like to take big, bitter gulps to get it through the oblong hole and into my bloodstream as quickly as possible.

When someone tells me they don't drink coffee because they don't like the taste, I always say "tastes bad, feels good."  I get my personality from a bean. It makes my words flow, unsticks them from the tired places.  It makes my heart go and my pee smell.  Always keep my bag stocked with Listerine strips to wipe off the tongue filth it leaves behind, so I can speak to the bus driver or the man at Borders without broadcasting my preferences or my afternoon whereabouts.

I used to call bad days at work "40-ouncers." Two Starbucks ventis from the Senate Chef: morning and afternoon.  They were days I couldn't afford to go without the fight-or-flight feeling to carry me through the news cycle and into the night. 

Sitting in the coffee shop, music piped in and a cup on my table, I feel like an artist, a visionary.  It drags me out of my own brain.  It feels like a reason to live.

2006 July

I am sitting in an outdoor café waiting for a car to hit me.  Or: a bomb to explode right now, incinerating newspapers, cigarette butts and the stray page from some organization’s strategic plan that’s been blowing between the sidewalk cracks. 

I’m out this Saturday afternoon looking like a cancer patient – all dark undereye circles and unwashed hair.  I’ve stopped caring that these jeans are a little too short for flip flops and the zit on my right cheekbone isn’t adequately concealed. 

At least I walked out of the apartment building, down N Street to this corner Starbucks which is full of Europeans hanging around the flat screen TV cheering loudly for Germany, now battling Portugal for third place. 

At least I bought a newspaper and new sunglasses to replace my beloved Target pair from the beginning of the summer.  I must have left them behind on a shelf of the dressing room at Banana Republic.  Stupid, I call myself.  But then, more gently – this is what life is all about.  We get things, we lose things.  And so I make an unscheduled stop at Filene’s for a subpar substitute pair.  They don’t block my eyes as much as the lost ones.  I don’t feel as fashionably distant. 

I had planned to walk up 16^th Street to Meridian Hill Park to read, drink iced coffee and maybe meditate a little.  Even though I don’t technically know how to meditate.  I was thinking I’d just sit on some grass and close my eyes or something. 

But after the sunglasses selection and purchase, I felt exhausted, almost defeated, and in great danger of going home and getting back into bed.  After all of my getting out of the house struggle earlier today – the fight to get my feet moving toward downtown and a bra on my chest in the first place – I can’t let that happen.  So it’s here, outside.  

Reading the Style section – “former Governor Mark Warner dined Friday night with some friends at Oya downtown.  They shared appetizers, entrees and bottles of wine.” Oh god.  Something about this fills me with dreadful sadness.  Dinner with friends.  Bottles of wine. 

I put my head down on the table.  OK, now this looks a little crazy, I tell myself.  Why do you have your head down like a sleepy Kindergartener?  This makes my eyes well up.  Well for fuck’s sake.  Crying?  Crying outside at the Starbucks?  There is a car stopped at the stoplight right next to you.  I can hear the car stereo through the open windows.  Why can’t you put your head up so those people know you’re ok? 

Crying at Starbucks.  Well this is pretty low, isn’t it?  I finally sit up and my whole spine aches like I have finished some impressive workout.  The lifting up makes the tears actually squeeze out of my eyes like slippery puppies – down my cheeks before I can restrain them. 

Great.  Now it’s not that I’m tired or dizzy, I’m the girl crying in public.  Again.  There is one man at a table behind me.  What if he asks me if I’m OK?  What will I tell him?   

I start rubbing my temple and the third eye spot as soon as I’ve got the teariness under control.  Headache.  You know these migraines – how they jump out at you from nowhere.  That’s what I’m telling the people who may or may not be staring at me from the Starbucks inside.  Carry on.  Nothing to see here.

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.