In line at Walgreens:
"Aveda! They're like Earth Nazis, man!"
At Ipsento:
"He's worse than Bill Clin-ton. You remember Bill Clin-ton? What did he say? I did not commit no crime, I only had a little fun in the oval office. I did not have sex with anyone, I just had a little fun in the Oval Office. Isn't that what he said? He was a world class con-man. But I still like him, though. He did not drink moon-shine."
On the bus:
"My babies ain't never been. The closest they ever been to a zoo was some deers and a snake. It was hot as fuck though and they got flies in their eyeballs and shit."
Ah, the narrative possibilities abound....
20 June 2008
17 June 2008
Covert Ops
The feds never have gone for subtlety. Natalie said, "They should call themselves 'Not Selling Guns' or 'You're Not Under Surveillance.'"
The truck moved right after I snapped this picture.
15 June 2008
Iowa Update
My friends (and fellow Grinnellians) Liz and Andrew have started a blog to document the experiences they've had with the flooding in Iowa City. Today's post includes a video tour of their house. Check it out.
As with any disaster, the media will stay with the story as long as there's shocking footage and new developments to grab audience attention. As the floodwaters recede, so will media attention, and the press will move on to the next story. But Liz, Andrew, and the many, many other people in Iowa will be dealing with this flood long after the cameras stop running.
Keep them in your thoughts.
Local news stations have information on how you can help:
How to help Des Moines
How to help Cedar Rapids
and see www.2008flood.org for additional information on volunteers and donations.
As with any disaster, the media will stay with the story as long as there's shocking footage and new developments to grab audience attention. As the floodwaters recede, so will media attention, and the press will move on to the next story. But Liz, Andrew, and the many, many other people in Iowa will be dealing with this flood long after the cameras stop running.
Keep them in your thoughts.
Local news stations have information on how you can help:
How to help Des Moines
How to help Cedar Rapids
and see www.2008flood.org for additional information on volunteers and donations.
13 June 2008
Oh, (([Iowa]))!
A few weekends ago, five of my friends and I rented a van and drove down to Iowa for Grinnell's Reunion. It was our five year cluster, so the classes of 2002-03-and-04 were all lumped together on one side of campus. Grinnell does one big reunion weekend for everyone, so there were people on campus for their ten year (1998), twenty-five year (1983), thirty year cluster (1977-78-79), forty year (1968), fifty year (1958), sixty-five year (1943), and seventy year (1938). The older you are, the better the snacks.
The weekend was wonderful and intense and surprising and fun. The weather -- for the first time in MONTHS -- was absolutely perfect for two and a half consecutive days. Some kind of record, I'm fairly certain. There were more than four hundred people from my cluster there, so much of the weekend felt like freshman orientation, only instead of Where are you from/what's your tutorial/what dorm are you in/what do you think you might major in? it was Where are you now/what's your job/what have you been doing since graduation/what do you think you might do next?. Also, unlike freshman orientation, we already knew almost everyone, so instead of three days of deeply bonding conversations, it was three days of brief chats perpetually interrupted by "Oh hey! Um, forgive me a moment, but I HAVE to talk to --" and then a mad dash off to a new three-minute conversation with someone else you hadn't seen in five or six years.
In the middle of all this crazy chaos, somehow I also found time for a Dari Barn run (key to every Grinnell visit between May and October), a Harris Party, breakfast with my education prof Jean Ketter (which ended up being a sort of convocation of education nerds, in the very best way), a Titular Head screening, a bakery run (thanks for the donut, Mike!), some baby smooching and dog petting, multiple McNally's beer runs, coffee with my fiction professor and dear friend Mark Baechtel, a solitary stroll through the leafy streets of town, and a late-night Kum & Go run for oatmeal creme pies.
Reunion's a strange beast: so much hugging and partying and hanging out, a person might forget that Grinnell wasn't just a four year long huggy lovefest. I felt a little off-center for much of the time, like this wasn't exactly the Grinnell I remembered and I couldn't quite figure out why -- it wasn't that the buildings had changed or that not everyone I remembered from all my five years was there, or even the absence of a creeping dread about upcoming papers and books and guilt that you really should be working on something productive instead of lying around on Mac Field -- it wasn't until I walked by myself from Mark's house back to campus that I realized what was so different: I spent so much of my time at Grinnell alone, walking around the town on lovely spring evenings just like that one. Senior year I walked between 2.5 and 5 miles every day -- I particularly loved the loop west of the golf course out to Penrose and around. I took the long way back to campus, enjoying the satisfaction of a walk alone after coffee with an old friend.
I was surprised to find that the town itself is still as dear to me as a person. At times I have thought of Grinnell as a skeleton, fleshed out and breathing only with the addition of the people I love best. Turns out I have a deep connection to the streets themselves, the bones and sinews of my time under that Iowa sky. I miss the town. I miss the land. A part of me wants to away from this sooty gray city and claim a life for myself that includes a big green lawn, some dogs, leafy strolls through quiet streets at dusk....
I think if I'd been alone I would have spent an hour sitting up in the windowsill of the drawing studio, writing in my journal, just like old days, but as it was I had Natalie with me and so spent most of my unstructured time trying to show her what Grinnell was for me and help her to understand why all the Grinnellians she's met are so crazy about this dumb little town in the middle of Nowhere, Iowa. Hard to explain, myself, other than: it was home, and for the time that we lived there, it was the place to which we anchored ourselves and against which we pushed in our efforts to grow. And as such, I suppose, it's as much a part of us as anything else of that time.
Natalie has her own interpretation of her weekend in Grinnell here. I wrote about the weekend in my journal as we headed home that Sunday, winding through the green Iowa fields watching dark clouds give way to rainbows and listening the Garrison Keillor on the radio.
Whenever anyone mentions Iowa, I immediately say "It's a little gem." Iowa has the kind of beauty it takes a long time to see, unlike the states of the west with their showy, craggy, breathtaking beauty, or the states of the east with their crackling culture and deep roots and historical markers around every corner, or the states of the south with their shocking fecundity and abundance of bright, sensual flowers. Iowa takes time to love. I spent my entire first year there making fun of it, not realizing how deeply I loved it until the summer after my sophomore year when I was suddenly overcome with an intensely physical desire -- a yearning -- to walk along the wildflower paths between Quad and Burling, to stand beneath the budding fuschia crabapple trees and fill my ears with the heavy buzzing of summer bees.
Iowa. It takes time to grow into you, but once its wide horizons and July fields of floating fireflies move into your understanding of home, I don't know that you can ever unlock its hold on your heart.
Now, Iowa is suffering, and every time I read the news it hurts my heart. My friends are being forcibly evacuated from their homes in Iowa City; bridges are being shut down all over the state, barring access to cities like Cedar Rapids and Des Moines and Iowa City; houses and histories are being destroyed, daily. And there's no end in sight.
Reports from some of my friends:
Jeremy: "Driving home this afternoon, I got a phone call from a friend, saying he'd heard my street (Foster Rd. [in Iowa City]) was on the mandatory evacuation list. By the time I made it home, the cop at the intersection informed me it was true. In about 30 minutes, I randomly threw some clothes into bags, loaded up the dogs, turned off the gas, electricity, and water, and took off for Dubuque. The normally-90 minute drive took two-and-a-half hours. We had to detour through Cedar Rapids--a challenge since there was only one bridge open in Cedar Rapids (its entire downtown is underwater).
I don't know how long we're going to be evacuated; the property manager in our neighborhood said he'd heard three weeks. The latest I heard is that the Iowa River's flood stage is 22', the river is currently at 28', and the predicted crest on Tuesday is 33'."
and
Carolyn: "There was a team of 6 Grinnellians who were sandbagging until they were sent over the the Main Library to help bring up film reels from the Special Collections storage areas in the basement of the library. They had just finished clearing out the films when they were told that the whole operation was shutting down b/c the University is closing . . . so they left, leaving a huge part of the special collections materials sitting there in the basement."
and
Em: "i'm high and dry, thankfully, but am sick from what i see all around me here in iowa. mike's work is about to be flooded, so he's there shrink wrapping and loading what they can onto semis. my parents have a foot of water in their basement, and are pretty lucky to have that. my late grandmother's neighborhood is being evacuated - the entire area was destroyed in 1993, but the levee upgrades were a casualty of budget cuts and were never completed."
and
Liz: "last night at 1:30 AM the police knocked on our door to issue a mandatory evacuation for our neighborhood and told us we had 30 minutes to get out. Andrew ran up the street to get our car, as we have been parking it up the hill at a friend's house just in case the flood waters make the street impassable. There is already a low spot that has flooded, but as of Wed night it was passable by our camry. Because the police had just come to our door and told us to evacuate, he was worried that the water in the street was too high and drove on the sidewalk. And he drove at a faster than expected speed, as we were rushing to get out. The lovely Pigs of IC actually *pulled him over* and threatened to ticket, then arrest him. We stayed for 2 hours putting everything we could into a couple of friend's trucks and then getting everything up on blocks. Meanwhile the police harassed us that we needed to get out (even though the river wasn't rising and the street was no more flooded than before) and then finally they told us we had 5 minutes to get out or they would forceably remove us. 12 cops surrounded our house and continued to yell at us, despite my plea for them to find it in their hearts to let us get our house ready because this was our first home, we'd just moved in, and we didn't have flood insurance. And what difference would 20 extra minutes make? Luckily somehow we were able to get our house ready in those 2 hours.
This AM we went back down to our neighborhood and were again told we had only 1/2 hour to get our things and get out. We hid in our backyard and filled 25 sandbags using dirt from our compost pile, as we were afraid that if we went down the street to get sand we'd get arrested. I said a prayer of hope for our house and we left it, still dry. In '93 the river crested at 28.5 feet and was up to our sidewalk. It is supposed to get up to 33 feet this tuesday. This most likely means we will have 1-2 feet of water in our house. Sadly, we only put everything up 8" and we didn't sandbag our house because we helped with the levee in the hopes that it would hold back the flood waters. It's times like these when you're happy to have a roof over your head, your health and safety, friends who call/email to help out, and a partner to lean on through the whole thing." (See a picture of Liz's husband, my old friend Drew, in the Iowa Press-Citizen here.)
and
the University of Iowa: "UI employees who park in the Hancher and Main Library parking lots, the parking lots near USB, and the North Ramp, are asked to stay home unless they are essential personnel fighting the flooding. Those employees should also notify their supervisors." (UI's Floodblog is basically a record of the University shutting down, building by building and program by program.)
and
the City of Coralville (outside of Iowa City): "The Iowa River crest is now predicted to occur on late Monday night (assuming no more rain). The Army Corp estimates the current outflow from the reservoir is 34,000 CFS and have increased their projected peak rate on Monday to be 44,000 CFS. (Peak in 1993 was 27,000.) So it will get much worse before it gets better. The flow information on the Army Corp website is incorrect because their gauges are no longer functioning."
Iowa Governor Chet Culver has declared 83 of the state's 99 counties to be state disaster areas. Eighty-three.
Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan, and South Dakota are all struggling with flooding problems (or, in the case of Lake Delton, the opposite of flooding), but for some reason, it's Iowa that hurts my heart the most. It's like watching the baby of the family battle cancer.
If you're the kind of person who prays, you might want to say a few extra prayers for the people of Iowa today. If you're the kind of person who sends love out into the universe in hopes of positive manifestations, do that. If you're wealthy, send money. If you're close, go help sandbag. But whatever and wherever you are, keep Iowa in your thoughts today and in the days to come, because even after the flood waters recede, Iowa is going to need a lot of help.
28 May 2008
22 May 2008
The Weather Sucks, But the Cops Are HOTT... er, Doing a Very Good Job
Or: Why Chicago So Totally Kicks Your First Responder Ass, New Mexico!
Tonight I was lying on the couch, half wondering if I should go ahead and take a nap, half contemplating getting back into the Graham Greene novel I'm reading (half dreaming about the green chile cheese bagels currently in our refrigerator.... mmmmm....) when I heard a braking noise and then a faint crunching noise.
"Was that a car crash?" I asked.
Natalie called from the other room. "No, it was just the wind. Go back to sleep." But a moment later she went to the front window (aka Front Page to the World) and started making horrified little gasping noises.
"What?" I asked. "What happened?" She didn't answer so I was forced to run to the window and see for myself: there was a girl all crumpled up in the street in front of our house, surrounded by concerned women.
Like any good urban neighbors, we watched the drama unfold through our window. The girl had been hit on a vespa. She had a friend who hadn't been hit. They were wearing identical silver helmets. Two ladies stopped their cars in the middle of the intersection, but we couldn't tell who was the hitter: the black Pontiac, or the blue Mercedes? The girl who hadn't been hit kneeled down and talked to her friend with a huge smile on her face. It's easy to smile when you haven't just been hit by a car and thrown from your vespa into rush hour traffic on Western, I guess. You'd think the fact that your friend was just hit would make it a little harder to smile, but who knows. That's what keeps us glued to our windows.
We've seen a lot of accidents here. Most notably, of course, the best. car crash. ever! last summer. Natalie saw a girl get hit on foot, on her way to the train one morning. Yesterday, the Damen bus I was riding nearly ran a girl off the bridge into the Chicago River. Today a ghost bike showed up at one of the bridges on my commute. (Incidentally, Time Out Chicago was all about hardcore bikers this week, and every single one of them had been in several serious accidents. Natalie and I were JUST talking about how we were way too scared to ride bikes in this town, an hour before the crash. As we stared out the window at the crying girl, we said, "Looks like vespas are too dangerous in this town, too.")
We've also seen other kinds of drama. Two weeks ago there was a huge fire down the block from us, with giant flames engulfing an entire apartment building. When I was here taking a class at Second City in the summer of 06, a Blue Line train derailed not far from here. And of course, last winter, the bank robbery. In just under a year here, I've become quite the witness to Chicago emergencies.
And so, I would like to take a moment to give a big shout-out to some of the least lame people in this entire city: the Chicago Police and Fire Departments. Every single time I've been in or near a situation that warranted their attention, I've been impressed. For one thing, they are SO FAST. When the bank got robbed, the police were there in under five minutes. UNDER FIVE.
By contrast, when my truck was broken into in Albuquerque, I waited for the police for three hours. THREE HOURS. I kept calling the dispatcher and saying, "Look, I know you're all busy, but I'm a single woman alone downtown and it's four in the morning." They kept saying, They'll be there shortly ma'am, just hold on. Look, ABQ police, I get that a woman all by herself with a truck covered in shattered glass isn't a huge emergency compared to all the cows loose on the highway and people driving the wrong way on off-ramps, but if you weren't going to come for me, you should have just said so. I would have appreciated a "Look lady, we don't really care about your broken truck or stolen stereo and we're not going to do anything about it anyway, so why don't you just go home and get some sleep." Similarly, the Moriarty police could have cared less when my wallet was stolen out of my classroom & within two hours over $800 had been charged to my credit cards. Again, I get that my little dramas aren't a huge deal, but it's MORIARTY. Tell me you honestly had anything better to do. Or there was the time that a sheriff was murdered right outside my house in Tijeras and I was too scared to go home for days, and when I finally went home there was a policeman in my backyard, staring into my house, who yelled at me and asked what I was doing there. I live here, I said. What are YOU doing here? Surely the murderer isn't still hiding in my kitchen, four days after the murder?
New Mexico police could learn a lot from the CPD, is all I'm saying.
With the fire down the block, the firefighters did such a good job holding everyone back and getting their ladders up and making sure everyone was out of the building and safe. And again, they were there FAST.
By contrast. In high school, a car spontaneously combusted in the student parking lot and it took the Oregon Fire Department a half hour to get one truck there. A half hour! In Oregon! The fire department was only like three blocks from the high school. They could have CARRIED BUCKETS OF WATER all the way from the station in less time than it took them to drive their truck out. By the time they finally rolled up, the car had burned itself out and nearly taken a bunch of other student cars with it (including my poor, sainted Renault, who had to watch the immolation of one of her fellows from across the aisle, and was very traumatized and covered with ash when I came out of school that afternoon).
So again: Chicago Fire Department, 1. OFD, minus twelve.
I can't imagine being a police officer or fire fighter. I can't imagine the kind of spirit and dedication it takes to show up for work every single morning after facing emergencies and tragedies (both devastating and tiny) nearly every single day. I can't imagine what kind of heart you would have to have, to stand witness to all that sorrow.
But man, do I appreciate it.
Thanks, CPD & CFD. You're doing a great job.
Tonight I was lying on the couch, half wondering if I should go ahead and take a nap, half contemplating getting back into the Graham Greene novel I'm reading (half dreaming about the green chile cheese bagels currently in our refrigerator.... mmmmm....) when I heard a braking noise and then a faint crunching noise.
"Was that a car crash?" I asked.
Natalie called from the other room. "No, it was just the wind. Go back to sleep." But a moment later she went to the front window (aka Front Page to the World) and started making horrified little gasping noises.
"What?" I asked. "What happened?" She didn't answer so I was forced to run to the window and see for myself: there was a girl all crumpled up in the street in front of our house, surrounded by concerned women.
Like any good urban neighbors, we watched the drama unfold through our window. The girl had been hit on a vespa. She had a friend who hadn't been hit. They were wearing identical silver helmets. Two ladies stopped their cars in the middle of the intersection, but we couldn't tell who was the hitter: the black Pontiac, or the blue Mercedes? The girl who hadn't been hit kneeled down and talked to her friend with a huge smile on her face. It's easy to smile when you haven't just been hit by a car and thrown from your vespa into rush hour traffic on Western, I guess. You'd think the fact that your friend was just hit would make it a little harder to smile, but who knows. That's what keeps us glued to our windows.
We've seen a lot of accidents here. Most notably, of course, the best. car crash. ever! last summer. Natalie saw a girl get hit on foot, on her way to the train one morning. Yesterday, the Damen bus I was riding nearly ran a girl off the bridge into the Chicago River. Today a ghost bike showed up at one of the bridges on my commute. (Incidentally, Time Out Chicago was all about hardcore bikers this week, and every single one of them had been in several serious accidents. Natalie and I were JUST talking about how we were way too scared to ride bikes in this town, an hour before the crash. As we stared out the window at the crying girl, we said, "Looks like vespas are too dangerous in this town, too.")
We've also seen other kinds of drama. Two weeks ago there was a huge fire down the block from us, with giant flames engulfing an entire apartment building. When I was here taking a class at Second City in the summer of 06, a Blue Line train derailed not far from here. And of course, last winter, the bank robbery. In just under a year here, I've become quite the witness to Chicago emergencies.
And so, I would like to take a moment to give a big shout-out to some of the least lame people in this entire city: the Chicago Police and Fire Departments. Every single time I've been in or near a situation that warranted their attention, I've been impressed. For one thing, they are SO FAST. When the bank got robbed, the police were there in under five minutes. UNDER FIVE.
By contrast, when my truck was broken into in Albuquerque, I waited for the police for three hours. THREE HOURS. I kept calling the dispatcher and saying, "Look, I know you're all busy, but I'm a single woman alone downtown and it's four in the morning." They kept saying, They'll be there shortly ma'am, just hold on. Look, ABQ police, I get that a woman all by herself with a truck covered in shattered glass isn't a huge emergency compared to all the cows loose on the highway and people driving the wrong way on off-ramps, but if you weren't going to come for me, you should have just said so. I would have appreciated a "Look lady, we don't really care about your broken truck or stolen stereo and we're not going to do anything about it anyway, so why don't you just go home and get some sleep." Similarly, the Moriarty police could have cared less when my wallet was stolen out of my classroom & within two hours over $800 had been charged to my credit cards. Again, I get that my little dramas aren't a huge deal, but it's MORIARTY. Tell me you honestly had anything better to do. Or there was the time that a sheriff was murdered right outside my house in Tijeras and I was too scared to go home for days, and when I finally went home there was a policeman in my backyard, staring into my house, who yelled at me and asked what I was doing there. I live here, I said. What are YOU doing here? Surely the murderer isn't still hiding in my kitchen, four days after the murder?
New Mexico police could learn a lot from the CPD, is all I'm saying.
With the fire down the block, the firefighters did such a good job holding everyone back and getting their ladders up and making sure everyone was out of the building and safe. And again, they were there FAST.
By contrast. In high school, a car spontaneously combusted in the student parking lot and it took the Oregon Fire Department a half hour to get one truck there. A half hour! In Oregon! The fire department was only like three blocks from the high school. They could have CARRIED BUCKETS OF WATER all the way from the station in less time than it took them to drive their truck out. By the time they finally rolled up, the car had burned itself out and nearly taken a bunch of other student cars with it (including my poor, sainted Renault, who had to watch the immolation of one of her fellows from across the aisle, and was very traumatized and covered with ash when I came out of school that afternoon).
So again: Chicago Fire Department, 1. OFD, minus twelve.
I can't imagine being a police officer or fire fighter. I can't imagine the kind of spirit and dedication it takes to show up for work every single morning after facing emergencies and tragedies (both devastating and tiny) nearly every single day. I can't imagine what kind of heart you would have to have, to stand witness to all that sorrow.
But man, do I appreciate it.
Thanks, CPD & CFD. You're doing a great job.
20 May 2008
Name That Novel
My friend (and fellow writer) Mark needs your help. He's finished with his novel and currently in the process of sending out queries, but... he doesn't have a (good) title. He's burned out on brainstorming (and completely unimpressed with ALL of my suggestions!), so he's turning the wheel over to you. If you come up with a winning title for Mark's novel, he promises to buy you "many expensive Belgian beers and/or overpriced coffee concoctions."
About Mark's novel:
Seven years of bad luck, seven years spent touring in a van held together by duct tape and coat hangers, rehearsing in a loft infested by incontinent rodents, causing shallow pings in the vast music machine, and just before giving up, one last chance to make it.
Finnegan is a blink away from thirty-three, the talented lead singer/songwriter for indie rock band The Babylon Sonic. A last gasp demo snags the interest of a label, luring them from New York to snow-plagued Chicago. The show is three days away and nothing is going right. Sullen lead guitarist James disappears from a hospital after overdosing on absinthe. Cranky English manager Shemp paces the frigid loft threatening to quit. Longtime girlfriend, neurotic fringe theater actress Holly, abandons him without explanation. And dodging the smothering blanket of depression seems impossible with each sleepless night. What’s that one shot in music really worth? Can Finnegan recapture the intensity he had when adolescence was still winning the battle and everything was sharp inside, buzzing and humming with the strange electricity of youth?
YOUR TITLE HERE is a 130,000-word novel for anyone who loves music or songwriting and imagines what it might feel like to climb on that stage, and anyone whose compass has ever spun wildly out of control while chasing that dream they’ve had since childhood.
If that's not quite enough inspiration for you, check out Mark's music page, featuring music similar (and in some cases identical!) to that of The Babylon Sonic.
Submit your suggestions in the comments here, or email them to info@storystudiochicago.com. Have fun!
About Mark's novel:
Seven years of bad luck, seven years spent touring in a van held together by duct tape and coat hangers, rehearsing in a loft infested by incontinent rodents, causing shallow pings in the vast music machine, and just before giving up, one last chance to make it.
Finnegan is a blink away from thirty-three, the talented lead singer/songwriter for indie rock band The Babylon Sonic. A last gasp demo snags the interest of a label, luring them from New York to snow-plagued Chicago. The show is three days away and nothing is going right. Sullen lead guitarist James disappears from a hospital after overdosing on absinthe. Cranky English manager Shemp paces the frigid loft threatening to quit. Longtime girlfriend, neurotic fringe theater actress Holly, abandons him without explanation. And dodging the smothering blanket of depression seems impossible with each sleepless night. What’s that one shot in music really worth? Can Finnegan recapture the intensity he had when adolescence was still winning the battle and everything was sharp inside, buzzing and humming with the strange electricity of youth?
YOUR TITLE HERE is a 130,000-word novel for anyone who loves music or songwriting and imagines what it might feel like to climb on that stage, and anyone whose compass has ever spun wildly out of control while chasing that dream they’ve had since childhood.
If that's not quite enough inspiration for you, check out Mark's music page, featuring music similar (and in some cases identical!) to that of The Babylon Sonic.
Submit your suggestions in the comments here, or email them to info@storystudiochicago.com. Have fun!
19 May 2008
How's Your Soul Doing?
If this picture of an otter mama holding her little tiny grover doesn't make your heart rejoice, even a tiny bit, for all that is good and true and itty bitty on this often-wretched-but-still-full-of-baby-otters planet of ours,
then wow. You're really in trouble.
then wow. You're really in trouble.
03 May 2008
Plans, Facebook, and Why No Amount of Sheep-Throwing Will Ever Lead Me To Predict the Downfall of Human Society
Plans went down this week, and I’ve been thinking about community ever since. Do virtual networking sites like Facebook and Twitter really help to build stronger communities, or do they impede actual human interaction, until one day we’ll never leave our houses at all and merely communicate with people by sending them one-sentence updates about the minutia of our shut-in lives and then throwing virtual sheep at them?
I vote stronger communities… of shut ins.
No, I’m kidding. It’s just the gray skies and 49 degrees Fahrenheit talking. Clearly, Chicago hasn’t gotten the memo that it’s MAY and thus could bring on the sunshine and springly weather any day now. And until it does, I’m sticking to my winter policy of never leaving my house unless I have to, dammit.
And that’s kind of the point, I guess. Lately I’ve been feeling more connected than usual to the wide circle of people I’ve met in my life, thanks to the marvel that is Facebook. Look, I know that you probably hate Facebook. You probably think that it represents everything that is silly and intemperate about our stupid society with its one-sentence updates and its zombie fighting and its obsessive reports about who has added or subtracted what from their interests, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But Facebook is also like a giant living phonebook, with entries for everyone under (and some over) 35 that I’ve ever met, and in that sense it’s been an amazing tool of reconnection. And every time a new friend pops up in my inbox, it’s like turning another corner at a reunion and running into yet another person I really liked ten years ago but haven’t thought of or heard from in a while… but this isn’t just a school reunion, it’s a reunion of everyone in my whole LIFE.
Just in the last month, Facebook has reunited me with:
-- the children of my parents’ friends, those friends-of-convenience we all had in childhood because it was easier to play with them than it was to be a baby misanthrope as our parents drank too much wine and pretended to be normal people for once. Most of these people I haven’t seen since junior high, and yet in retrospect I realize that even though we were sort of just friends because our parents were friends, as it turns out they’re cool people in their own right, and I’m pretty excited to reconnect with them. Even if I have to drag my parents along to do so.
-- the first person who ever taught me improv. That’s huge, right there. He gave me the gift of Chain Murder Mystery when he was a skinny teenager with a mullet, and now he’s a high school theater teacher in Ohio. This morning we had a conversation about 1992 and high school musical.
-- my fifth grade pen-pal. I’ve never actually met her, but I have met her parents. They took me out for dinner in Albuquerque a few years ago, which was a little weird, since – again – I’ve never actually met their daughter, only sent semi-illiterate letters and HIDEOUS pictures of myself to her in the early nineties. And now she’s my friend on Facebook. (One day, Becca, we WILL meet. I swear. And it will be heartwarming enough to get into the Reader’s Digest. OH. Or if one of us gets cancer or something, maybe we could get Oprah to foot the bill. And buy us both new cars. Just a thought.)
-- the high school English student teacher who was cool enough to come to our Poetry Society and who we called Franz, who let me give him advice about writing and life when I was 17 (because really, who DOESN’T want advice from a precocious, overly-dramatic seventeen-year-old who’s never lived outside Wisconsin?) and who, after finishing out the year with us, moved to Turkey to teach, and who is now a travel writer based in Madison. Check out his blog here.
-- a bunch of the amazing people I met at Nadia’s wedding.
-- tons of people I haven’t seen since high school, which is great, because now if whoever’s in charge of these things actually gets around to organizing a ten year reunion for us, I’ll actually be able to match some names and faces. Not to mention the fact that, again, I went to school with some really incredible people, only I was too much of an idiot to actually recognize that particular fact at the time. It didn’t really help that I only thought about myself, back then. (And SO much has changed since then. Ha.)
So, I admit it: I’m kind of in love with Facebook right now.
For a while, I actually thought that my love of Facebook would eclipse my love of PLANS, which is to Facebook what Model Ts are to corn-powered jet packs. [If you’re not a Grinnellian, or if you haven’t already heard me explain Plans a million times, here’s a little (long-winded and perhaps overly-informative) History of Plans that I wrote about five years ago. (I just realized that I’m coming up on my ten year anniversary with Plans. Weird.)]
While Facebook has been one giant reunion, Plans has been a continuous community since the very beginning of college. Unlike Facebook, where you generally only connect to people you actually know in life, Plans allows you to meet new people, through the web of interconnected discussions and references. Over time, it’s not uncommon to become a regular reader of plans written by people you’ve never actually met in real life – and then, over time, to start thinking of those people as friends. Moreover, because Plans is nothing but text, it’s a place of discussion and reflection. Not that there’s no place in this world for virtually poking people, but… that place is Facebook. When I need advice, or want help sorting through my thoughts and feelings about some issue of ethics or current events, I go to Plans. When I want to find friends from sixth grade and then attack their vampires, I go to Facebook.
After graduation from Grinnell, we spread out across the globe. Recently I found something I’d written as a senior in high school, announcing my intention to find a college that drew people from all over the country, so that I could take a post-college road trip and crash on my friends’ couches in every state. As it turns out, I set the bar a little low. I ended up with friends all over the world, and Plans has helped me to keep up with many of them. A few years ago, I went out to dinner with a Grinnellian I hadn’t seen in years, and though she went around the table asking everyone what they’d been up to since Grinnell, when she got to me we just looked at each other and grinned. We were on Plans. We kept up with each other’s lives. We hadn’t seen each other since college, but we were still connected.
When Plans went down this week, I realized how much I’d come to rely on that community of friends, classmates, and colleagues for their insights and wisdom. A week without Plans and I had no idea what was going on in the wider world. Sure, over at Facebook they were all partying til dawn and playing Scrabulous, but I needed the Plans community to help me think about environmental legislation and the legal and moral implications of polygamy and what was going on with the democratic candidates and what cute thing Doug Cutchins’ daughters said this week. The Plans exiles ended up huddling in a chat room over at Facebook, bolstering each other’s spirits and trying to figure out ways to help. The Facebook Plans group felt a lot like the time there was a tornado in fourth grade and we were all stranded inside the school’s Little Theater for hours, sitting on the floor in tight groups, worried, and trying to make the best of things. We were survivors, exiles from the same community, joined in concern over our lost home. And when Plans finally went back online Thursday night, we straggled back and welcomed each other home.
Plans has been a great gift in my life, as it has given me access to a wide network of thoughtful, kind, intelligent people with tons of collective life experience to share. It’s an incredibly rich, deeply supportive community that – even though it’s just a bunch of text on the screen – feels an awful lot like a family.
And so I have to say that this trend of social networking doesn’t worry me at all, because I know that the best kind of social networking can help you to grow as a person, and keep you grounded and connected to people and events all over the world. Because after all, it’s about people, about building connections with other human beings, and in that sense it’s no different than writing on cave walls or composing blank verse: just another way to reach out to another human and hear them say, “I hear you. I understand you. I’m glad you’re here.”
I vote stronger communities… of shut ins.
No, I’m kidding. It’s just the gray skies and 49 degrees Fahrenheit talking. Clearly, Chicago hasn’t gotten the memo that it’s MAY and thus could bring on the sunshine and springly weather any day now. And until it does, I’m sticking to my winter policy of never leaving my house unless I have to, dammit.
And that’s kind of the point, I guess. Lately I’ve been feeling more connected than usual to the wide circle of people I’ve met in my life, thanks to the marvel that is Facebook. Look, I know that you probably hate Facebook. You probably think that it represents everything that is silly and intemperate about our stupid society with its one-sentence updates and its zombie fighting and its obsessive reports about who has added or subtracted what from their interests, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But Facebook is also like a giant living phonebook, with entries for everyone under (and some over) 35 that I’ve ever met, and in that sense it’s been an amazing tool of reconnection. And every time a new friend pops up in my inbox, it’s like turning another corner at a reunion and running into yet another person I really liked ten years ago but haven’t thought of or heard from in a while… but this isn’t just a school reunion, it’s a reunion of everyone in my whole LIFE.
Just in the last month, Facebook has reunited me with:
-- the children of my parents’ friends, those friends-of-convenience we all had in childhood because it was easier to play with them than it was to be a baby misanthrope as our parents drank too much wine and pretended to be normal people for once. Most of these people I haven’t seen since junior high, and yet in retrospect I realize that even though we were sort of just friends because our parents were friends, as it turns out they’re cool people in their own right, and I’m pretty excited to reconnect with them. Even if I have to drag my parents along to do so.
-- the first person who ever taught me improv. That’s huge, right there. He gave me the gift of Chain Murder Mystery when he was a skinny teenager with a mullet, and now he’s a high school theater teacher in Ohio. This morning we had a conversation about 1992 and high school musical.
-- my fifth grade pen-pal. I’ve never actually met her, but I have met her parents. They took me out for dinner in Albuquerque a few years ago, which was a little weird, since – again – I’ve never actually met their daughter, only sent semi-illiterate letters and HIDEOUS pictures of myself to her in the early nineties. And now she’s my friend on Facebook. (One day, Becca, we WILL meet. I swear. And it will be heartwarming enough to get into the Reader’s Digest. OH. Or if one of us gets cancer or something, maybe we could get Oprah to foot the bill. And buy us both new cars. Just a thought.)
-- the high school English student teacher who was cool enough to come to our Poetry Society and who we called Franz, who let me give him advice about writing and life when I was 17 (because really, who DOESN’T want advice from a precocious, overly-dramatic seventeen-year-old who’s never lived outside Wisconsin?) and who, after finishing out the year with us, moved to Turkey to teach, and who is now a travel writer based in Madison. Check out his blog here.
-- a bunch of the amazing people I met at Nadia’s wedding.
-- tons of people I haven’t seen since high school, which is great, because now if whoever’s in charge of these things actually gets around to organizing a ten year reunion for us, I’ll actually be able to match some names and faces. Not to mention the fact that, again, I went to school with some really incredible people, only I was too much of an idiot to actually recognize that particular fact at the time. It didn’t really help that I only thought about myself, back then. (And SO much has changed since then. Ha.)
So, I admit it: I’m kind of in love with Facebook right now.
For a while, I actually thought that my love of Facebook would eclipse my love of PLANS, which is to Facebook what Model Ts are to corn-powered jet packs. [If you’re not a Grinnellian, or if you haven’t already heard me explain Plans a million times, here’s a little (long-winded and perhaps overly-informative) History of Plans that I wrote about five years ago. (I just realized that I’m coming up on my ten year anniversary with Plans. Weird.)]
While Facebook has been one giant reunion, Plans has been a continuous community since the very beginning of college. Unlike Facebook, where you generally only connect to people you actually know in life, Plans allows you to meet new people, through the web of interconnected discussions and references. Over time, it’s not uncommon to become a regular reader of plans written by people you’ve never actually met in real life – and then, over time, to start thinking of those people as friends. Moreover, because Plans is nothing but text, it’s a place of discussion and reflection. Not that there’s no place in this world for virtually poking people, but… that place is Facebook. When I need advice, or want help sorting through my thoughts and feelings about some issue of ethics or current events, I go to Plans. When I want to find friends from sixth grade and then attack their vampires, I go to Facebook.
After graduation from Grinnell, we spread out across the globe. Recently I found something I’d written as a senior in high school, announcing my intention to find a college that drew people from all over the country, so that I could take a post-college road trip and crash on my friends’ couches in every state. As it turns out, I set the bar a little low. I ended up with friends all over the world, and Plans has helped me to keep up with many of them. A few years ago, I went out to dinner with a Grinnellian I hadn’t seen in years, and though she went around the table asking everyone what they’d been up to since Grinnell, when she got to me we just looked at each other and grinned. We were on Plans. We kept up with each other’s lives. We hadn’t seen each other since college, but we were still connected.
When Plans went down this week, I realized how much I’d come to rely on that community of friends, classmates, and colleagues for their insights and wisdom. A week without Plans and I had no idea what was going on in the wider world. Sure, over at Facebook they were all partying til dawn and playing Scrabulous, but I needed the Plans community to help me think about environmental legislation and the legal and moral implications of polygamy and what was going on with the democratic candidates and what cute thing Doug Cutchins’ daughters said this week. The Plans exiles ended up huddling in a chat room over at Facebook, bolstering each other’s spirits and trying to figure out ways to help. The Facebook Plans group felt a lot like the time there was a tornado in fourth grade and we were all stranded inside the school’s Little Theater for hours, sitting on the floor in tight groups, worried, and trying to make the best of things. We were survivors, exiles from the same community, joined in concern over our lost home. And when Plans finally went back online Thursday night, we straggled back and welcomed each other home.
Plans has been a great gift in my life, as it has given me access to a wide network of thoughtful, kind, intelligent people with tons of collective life experience to share. It’s an incredibly rich, deeply supportive community that – even though it’s just a bunch of text on the screen – feels an awful lot like a family.
And so I have to say that this trend of social networking doesn’t worry me at all, because I know that the best kind of social networking can help you to grow as a person, and keep you grounded and connected to people and events all over the world. Because after all, it’s about people, about building connections with other human beings, and in that sense it’s no different than writing on cave walls or composing blank verse: just another way to reach out to another human and hear them say, “I hear you. I understand you. I’m glad you’re here.”
30 April 2008
Oh, Those Crack-Smoking Badgers
If your average college band concert and Cirque du Soleil ate a bunch of Wisconsin brats and then got completely piss-drunk on Capital Brewery Wisconsin Amber at the Ice Capades, the UW Varsity Band Spring Concert would be their cheese-curd loving beer-soaked streamer throwing pyrotechnical Love Baby. On crack.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I grew up in Wisconsin, just outside of Madison, which means that I spent many a crisp fall day in the 1980s and 1990s at Camp Randall Stadium with my dad. (Incidentally, I was there at the October 30, 1993 Michigan game, but I wasn’t crushed. Badger fans know what I mean.) Of course, it also means that I spent many a fifth quarter polka-ing to the Bud Song (“When you say WIS-CON-SIN, you’ve said it all!”), doing the chicken dance, and waving my arms to “Varsity,” all in the stands of Camp Randall, all with my dad and thousands of other Badger fans.
And yes, I know all the words to the song, “If You Want to Be a Badger (Just Come Along with Me).”
I realize that this may come as a surprise to those of you who know me well. After all, I’m the girl who tried to console a boyfriend watching his hockey team lose in the last two minutes of the third period, “Well, they could still win! They have a whole nother quarter to play still!”
Yep.
It may come as even MORE of a surprise that I love Badger games. Love them. I love tailgating before hand, even when it’s freezing cold and you have to hold your brat in gloved hands and eat it fast before your sauerkraut gets icy. I love eating peanuts in the stands and dropping the shells into the hoods of the people sitting in front of me. And I love love LOVE doing the polka and the chicken dance in the bleachers and pretending I know the words to “Varsity.”
So, when I got the offer of free tickets to the UW Varsity Band Spring Concert this year, I jumped at it. Okay, to be honest, I probably – no, almost SURELY – wouldn’t have gone if one of the two Featured Guest Soloists hadn’t been my BFF Nat. But he was, and he got me tickets, and naturally I felt like the best person – indeed, the ONLY person – to be my date to a Badger Band concert at the Kohl Center was my chicken-dancing, polka-ing, Bud-song singing Mega-Badger-Fan Dad. Yes, I spent my weekend going to a band concert with my dad. Yes, I am awesome.
I didn’t really know what to expect. For one thing, I’d never been to the Kohl Center before – in my mind, it had only recently opened. Turns out it opened ten years ago. Well, I feel old. Anyway, it’s giant, and of course before the show there were like 10,000 people milling around outside as I tried to figure out a) where to pick up our tickets, b) where to find my dad, and c) wait, ten years? Really? I had a couple of cell phone conversations of the most annoying kind with my father (“Where are you? I’m standing by the C gate. Where are you?”) and finally put my foot down and announced that I wasn’t moving and he would just have to find ME when none other than Nat McIntosh himself walked right past me, carrying a (an?) euphonium. So of course I freaked out a little and jumped up and down and he said something about a Jumbotron and all of a sudden I GOT IT, I got that he was playing this huge giant solo concert for the 10,000 people milling around the Kohl Center, and I would have gotten shy but he was running late so I just hugged him good luck and waited for my father.
Our seats were way at the top of the first level of the Kohl Center, which provided a pretty good view of the huge giant space. We settled into our uncomfortable chairs, talked a little politics, reminisced about polkaing during Badger games in the 80s, and then the show started. And it was weird.
First of all, the UW Band Director Mike Leckrone flew in on a flying cheese wedge. A GIANT flying cheese wedge.
I thought, “OH. MY. GOD.”
From his giant flying cheesewedge, Mike Leckrone threw cheddar wedge hats to the audience.
I thought, “This is what the rest of the world THINKS happens in Wisconsin. I did not realize that this actually IS what happens in Wisconsin.”
And then I laughed for about ten minutes, while the band played some rousing Wisconsin-type music. After that, Nat came out and wowed the audience with his solos (including his famous “Warrior Comes Out to Play” which made my dad start talking about Robert Bly until I shushed him and whispered, “LISTEN. MULTIPHONICS.”)
Nat was great.
Also, he was broadcast on not one but THREE JUMBOTRONS, which I must admit was a little intimidating and I started wondering if he’d actually want to hang out with me after the show. I mean: Three. Jumbotrons. What do I have to offer someone like that, other than constant repetition of the joke “That’s what he said”? I comforted myself with the fact that I’ve known Nat since he was 16 or 17 and I could always hunt him down and loudly tell him about himself as a teenager if he tried to ditch me.
After Nat’s solo, the show got really weird. Weirder than flying cheesehead weird. I swear to god.
The drumline warriors came out and played percussion while fighting ninjas…..
A small child took over the band for a while….
There were streamers...
...lots of streamers...
Mike Leckrone flew through the air. Did I mention the fact that he’s 71? 71. And he did flips. Wearing a sparkly sequined silver vest.
And then he did battle with Bucky Badger. In the air.
I am not even making this up.
What this had to do with band music I don’t know. And really? I don’t care.
Because it was awesome.
The best part of the night was when Nat and Mark Pender, the other Featured Guest Soloist, played a duet, partially because it was great, and partially because it was directly preceded by Mark Pender telling 10,000 people about how much he liked my BFF Nat and how he wanted to be BFFs with him too.
After the show, Mark Pender smooched me (on the cheek; I’m not a TOTAL jumbotron slut). This is my latest claim to fame. Next time you watch Conan and see him go crazy and run through the audience singing and screaming until Conan yells, “Pender! Pender! PENDER!!” just think: that dude smooched Molly. Yep. I was pretty excited about it until I learned that his nickname is “The Loveman.” All right.
So, to sum up:
UW Varsity Band Spring Concert: Spectacle! Spectacle! And POLKA!!
Mark Pender: The Loveman. A man who loves… to smooch.
High School Friends on Jumbotron: Weird. Be ready to Blackmail.
My dad: Even though he’ll constantly interrupt you to ask your opinion on Obama, Clinton, and/or your sister’s new job, he’s still the best UW Band date there is.
Nat: Does multiphonics! On a SOUSAPHONE!
And also: a darn good BFF. Because after all, he was on three jumbotrons and got FOUR STANDING OVATIONS FROM AN AUDIENCE of 10,000, and still didn’t try to ditch me after the show. Now that’s a real friend.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I grew up in Wisconsin, just outside of Madison, which means that I spent many a crisp fall day in the 1980s and 1990s at Camp Randall Stadium with my dad. (Incidentally, I was there at the October 30, 1993 Michigan game, but I wasn’t crushed. Badger fans know what I mean.) Of course, it also means that I spent many a fifth quarter polka-ing to the Bud Song (“When you say WIS-CON-SIN, you’ve said it all!”), doing the chicken dance, and waving my arms to “Varsity,” all in the stands of Camp Randall, all with my dad and thousands of other Badger fans.
And yes, I know all the words to the song, “If You Want to Be a Badger (Just Come Along with Me).”
I realize that this may come as a surprise to those of you who know me well. After all, I’m the girl who tried to console a boyfriend watching his hockey team lose in the last two minutes of the third period, “Well, they could still win! They have a whole nother quarter to play still!”
Yep.
It may come as even MORE of a surprise that I love Badger games. Love them. I love tailgating before hand, even when it’s freezing cold and you have to hold your brat in gloved hands and eat it fast before your sauerkraut gets icy. I love eating peanuts in the stands and dropping the shells into the hoods of the people sitting in front of me. And I love love LOVE doing the polka and the chicken dance in the bleachers and pretending I know the words to “Varsity.”
So, when I got the offer of free tickets to the UW Varsity Band Spring Concert this year, I jumped at it. Okay, to be honest, I probably – no, almost SURELY – wouldn’t have gone if one of the two Featured Guest Soloists hadn’t been my BFF Nat. But he was, and he got me tickets, and naturally I felt like the best person – indeed, the ONLY person – to be my date to a Badger Band concert at the Kohl Center was my chicken-dancing, polka-ing, Bud-song singing Mega-Badger-Fan Dad. Yes, I spent my weekend going to a band concert with my dad. Yes, I am awesome.
I didn’t really know what to expect. For one thing, I’d never been to the Kohl Center before – in my mind, it had only recently opened. Turns out it opened ten years ago. Well, I feel old. Anyway, it’s giant, and of course before the show there were like 10,000 people milling around outside as I tried to figure out a) where to pick up our tickets, b) where to find my dad, and c) wait, ten years? Really? I had a couple of cell phone conversations of the most annoying kind with my father (“Where are you? I’m standing by the C gate. Where are you?”) and finally put my foot down and announced that I wasn’t moving and he would just have to find ME when none other than Nat McIntosh himself walked right past me, carrying a (an?) euphonium. So of course I freaked out a little and jumped up and down and he said something about a Jumbotron and all of a sudden I GOT IT, I got that he was playing this huge giant solo concert for the 10,000 people milling around the Kohl Center, and I would have gotten shy but he was running late so I just hugged him good luck and waited for my father.
Our seats were way at the top of the first level of the Kohl Center, which provided a pretty good view of the huge giant space. We settled into our uncomfortable chairs, talked a little politics, reminisced about polkaing during Badger games in the 80s, and then the show started. And it was weird.
First of all, the UW Band Director Mike Leckrone flew in on a flying cheese wedge. A GIANT flying cheese wedge.
I thought, “OH. MY. GOD.”
From his giant flying cheesewedge, Mike Leckrone threw cheddar wedge hats to the audience.
I thought, “This is what the rest of the world THINKS happens in Wisconsin. I did not realize that this actually IS what happens in Wisconsin.”
And then I laughed for about ten minutes, while the band played some rousing Wisconsin-type music. After that, Nat came out and wowed the audience with his solos (including his famous “Warrior Comes Out to Play” which made my dad start talking about Robert Bly until I shushed him and whispered, “LISTEN. MULTIPHONICS.”)
Nat was great.
Also, he was broadcast on not one but THREE JUMBOTRONS, which I must admit was a little intimidating and I started wondering if he’d actually want to hang out with me after the show. I mean: Three. Jumbotrons. What do I have to offer someone like that, other than constant repetition of the joke “That’s what he said”? I comforted myself with the fact that I’ve known Nat since he was 16 or 17 and I could always hunt him down and loudly tell him about himself as a teenager if he tried to ditch me.
After Nat’s solo, the show got really weird. Weirder than flying cheesehead weird. I swear to god.
The drumline warriors came out and played percussion while fighting ninjas…..
A small child took over the band for a while….
There were streamers...
...lots of streamers...
Mike Leckrone flew through the air. Did I mention the fact that he’s 71? 71. And he did flips. Wearing a sparkly sequined silver vest.
And then he did battle with Bucky Badger. In the air.
I am not even making this up.
What this had to do with band music I don’t know. And really? I don’t care.
Because it was awesome.
The best part of the night was when Nat and Mark Pender, the other Featured Guest Soloist, played a duet, partially because it was great, and partially because it was directly preceded by Mark Pender telling 10,000 people about how much he liked my BFF Nat and how he wanted to be BFFs with him too.
After the show, Mark Pender smooched me (on the cheek; I’m not a TOTAL jumbotron slut). This is my latest claim to fame. Next time you watch Conan and see him go crazy and run through the audience singing and screaming until Conan yells, “Pender! Pender! PENDER!!” just think: that dude smooched Molly. Yep. I was pretty excited about it until I learned that his nickname is “The Loveman.” All right.
So, to sum up:
UW Varsity Band Spring Concert: Spectacle! Spectacle! And POLKA!!
Mark Pender: The Loveman. A man who loves… to smooch.
High School Friends on Jumbotron: Weird. Be ready to Blackmail.
My dad: Even though he’ll constantly interrupt you to ask your opinion on Obama, Clinton, and/or your sister’s new job, he’s still the best UW Band date there is.
Nat: Does multiphonics! On a SOUSAPHONE!
And also: a darn good BFF. Because after all, he was on three jumbotrons and got FOUR STANDING OVATIONS FROM AN AUDIENCE of 10,000, and still didn’t try to ditch me after the show. Now that’s a real friend.
27 April 2008
PB at the Funeral (in memory of Aunt Marg)
I’ve been working on this entry for a couple of days now, and it’s been a difficult one to write. It’s a funny story with a sad background, and I think sometimes in the middle of such a giant loss you feel not only like you'll never laugh again but also like maybe you shouldn't, as if in this new and strange landscape built around this hole in the sky it's simply not okay to laugh anymore. Luckily, I come from a family full of laughter, and one of the greatest gifts my family has given me is the ability to find the humor in even the saddest situations.
So. The story begins the night before a funeral.
I spent the first half of last week in Peoria, Illinois, following the death of my aunt Margaret Sellers, who was the oldest of nine kids and one of four women in my family with the same name as me. She was my father’s sister, eighteen years his senior (he was the baby of the family), and was like a grandmother to my sister and me all our lives. Her death seemed sudden, even though she’d been in and out of the hospital for years; she was one of those people who was so bright in life that her absence was absolutely impossible to imagine. I spent the night before the funeral expecting to see her, and only after a moment’s search of the room would I remember that she was gone.
After the visitation, we all gathered at her house to eat and drink and tell stories and hold hands and work through the process of accepting her death together. I was sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace when my cousin Linda, Marg’s oldest daughter, came to sit with me and reached for my hand. “Molly,” she said, “I want to ask you to play a part in the ceremony tomorrow.”
I assumed she was going to ask me to read something. I’m good at reading. “Absolutely, Linda. I’d be honored. What do you need?”
“We’d like you to carry the gifts,” she said.
I gave her a blank look. “Um………”
I didn’t want to sound like an idiot, but seriously, I had no idea what she was talking about. Gifts? At a funeral? For who, for my aunt? I imagined carrying brightly wrapped presents down the aisle of the church and laying them on the coffin. “Um,” I said brilliantly, “…….….. gifts?”
“You know,” Linda said. “The host.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding. “Right. Of course.” (The host? That’s…. the wafers, right? The eucharist? Why do they call it the gifts? And how would I carry it? In a basket? Balanced on a plate? I had a brief flashback to a potluck in third grade where I carefully carried a big molded jello salad all the way down two whole flights of stairs only to catch my foot on the second-to-last step and fly through the air, landing right on top of the beautiful, smushed jello. I’ve been a little nervous about carrying things ever since.)
(Also, did I mention I was raised Unitarian Universalist? And the service was to be a full Catholic funeral mass? And pretty much my entire family – except, of course, my dad – is all Irish Catholic? And other than the part where everyone goes to the front of the church to get communion and I stay in my seat, I remember almost nothing about the Catholic masses – and Catholic funerals – I’ve been to in the past?)
“So,” I said. “Uh……….. what would that involve, exactly?”
Linda said, “It’s very easy. You and Stevie just carry the gifts up the aisle and give them to the priest.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure. Absolutely. I would be honored to.”
Linda patted my hand and looked away, her eyes glistening. “Good. It will mean a lot to the family.” I squeezed her hand back and we sat in silence for a moment, cousins reunited in sorrow, listening to the murmured conversations from other rooms.
“So,” I finally said, still holding her hand. “Um. You do know that I’m not baptized, right?
“Oh,” Linda said. “Hmmm.”
“So… is that a problem?”
She thought about it for a moment. “Well,” she finally said, “we’ll give you a one-day pass.”
“Cool,” I said. “Because, you know, I wouldn’t want my heathen ways to interrupt the mass or anything.”
She smiled at me. “We believe in baptism by desire.”
I glanced across the room, where my Unitarian step-mother was talking about architecture with my Catholic cousin, and my (at times fervently) atheist Unitarian father was fiddling with his briefcase. In high school, my sister briefly rebelled against our parents by announcing her imminent conversion to Catholicism. Once I met a friend of my mother’s and he asked her eagerly, Is this one of the PBs? I looked at her to explain and her friend said, Pagan Babies like it was totally obvious, like that’s the only thing he could ever imagine Megan or me being called, as if my mother had never referred to us by our first names, ever, when talking about us to her friends. I said, Yeah, I guess so, and my mother laughed and squeezed my shoulders and called me a PB for the rest of the day.
“I think my parents are pretty proud of my pagan-baby status, actually. My mom brags about it all the time….”
Linda seemed to be getting a tiny bit impatient. “Really, all you have to do is renounce Satan.”
“Oh!” I said, smiling broadly. “Well, I think I can manage that for a few hours at least.”
“Great.”
“Cool.”
There was a long pause.
“Um,” I asked, “so… how do I know when to carry the presents?”
Linda looked at me.
“I mean gifts?” I asked. “The little crackers? The body of Jesus?”
My cousin sighed. “Just follow Stevie. He just went through confirmation, so he’s an expert.”
“Okay, cool,” I said. I had a feeling that any more questions would get me cast out, not only of the funeral, but possibly of the extended family. “Great.”
*
Twenty minutes later, I sat down with my cousins Stevie, an eighth grader, Lindsey, a sophomore in high school, and a friend of theirs, who were sitting out on the sunporch. “Hey dudes,” I said. “Hope I’m not interrupting.”
“No problem!” they said. “We’re just talking about our shoes!!”
I laughed. “Cool. So… I’m supposed to carry the gifts tomorrow? With you, Stevie?”
Stevie looked guarded, as if hedging his bets against a trick question. “Okay.”
“So… I’ve never done that before. What do I do?”
Lindsey smiled brilliantly and said, “It’s really easy! You just have to carry them and give them to the priest!”
I nodded. “That’s what I heard. But how do you know when to go?”
Lindsey’s friend said, “It’s right after the Homily!”
“Cool,” I said.
They seemed happy that they could help me. I reached down to scratch my foot.
“So……… when is that, exactly?”
The kids looked concerned. “Um….”
“I know,” I said apologetically. “My sister and I weren’t raised Catholic. Don’t tell anyone.”
Lindsay’s friend thought for a moment, and then said, “Basically, as soon as the priest is like, ‘Blah blah, lord hear our prayer!’”
“Awesome.” This is why I love kids. They give you straightforward answers, and even if they’re secretly pitying you for being such an addled adult person, they’re usually nice about it. I figured I could chance a couple more questions. They’d understand. “You guy, what if I mess up?” I looked at my cousin, the eighth grader, the same age as the kids I used to teach. “I’ll just follow you, Stevie. I heard you were an expert.”
Stevie shrugged and said, “Well….”
“I’ll just watch you, okay? Maybe you should sit behind me, and then you can pinch me when it’s time to go.”
He smiled a little, and his sister Lindsay said, “I’ll stand up and point to the back of the church.” She demonstrated, standing up and waving like a traffic cop. We all laughed.
I said, “Make a big sign that says MOLLY -- GO NOW!”
The kids giggled. “We’ll just stand up and yell.” Lindsey waved her hands in semaphore, and traffic directed me toward the imaginary back of the church, and all the kids yelled, “NOW!!”
*
The next day, we sat in the car for a half-hour helping my father to re-write the eulogy. I watched the rain slash against the windshield as he sat next to me crossing his pen through lines and my step-mother added her thoughts from the backseat. Ducking in the rain, we ran across the street to Saint Mark’s where ushers stood outside with their giant black umbrellas. I stopped in the entrance of the church and saw my uncle and automatically looked for my aunt before remembering why we were there. And then I saw Stevie sitting on a bench near the door and he looked very solemn and grown-up in the way that teenagers do when they’re wearing suits, but he gave me a secret smile and I smiled back.
I held it together until my mother showed up. Even though she’s been divorced from my father for almost two decades, she still made the four hour drive south for the funeral, because Aunt Marg was like a mother to her. She hugged my cousins and my uncle and told them all that she’d loved Marg very much. She cried, and I cried, because I always cry when my mother does. She doesn’t cry very often. I stood behind her and watched her hug my cousins and introduced my younger cousins to her because they’re all gorgeous and in their teens and twenties and she probably remembers most of them as chubby toddlers.
And then the ushers ushed us and Lindsey gave me a watery smile. I sat with my mom a few rows behind Aunt Marg’s kids and grandkids, and looked up at the green columns and soaring ceilings of the church. I was overwhelmed by kinesthetic memory, the kind your body holds onto without any help from your mind or heart. Suddenly my skin and lips and hands and teeth were all remembering the last time I’d been in that church, at the funeral of my little cousin who was killed in a car accident just days before his twenty-second birthday. I remembered sitting in approximately the same place five years earlier, watching the somber young men in suits who should have been Jimmy’s groomsmen, not his pallbearers. We sat in silence for a long time and then there was music and the priest talked about death and life and I thought of all the things you think about at a funeral, all the funerals you’ve been to before and all the people you’ve lost in your life and all the people you’ll lose in the future, and how you never knew one heart could hold so much hurt and still keep functioning. As one of my genius students said, “It’s weird at funerals. Like there’s nowhere you’d rather be but at the same time there’s a thousand places you’d rather be.”
It was like that.
I thought of all the things I’d always meant to ask Aunt Marg about but had never gotten around to asking her, all the things I should have told her last time I saw her, not even important things, stupid things like Thank you for the birthday cake you made me that looked like a bunny and Thank you for letting me bring my recently-rescued dog into your house when I was twenty-two and thank you for letting him sleep next to me in the bed in the Ivy Room and What was my dad like when he was a little kid? and What was it like to be a girl in the 1930s and 1940s, not just any girl but a Backes girl, what does it mean to be a Backes and how did you raise such nice kids and did you know that I’ve always planned to name a daughter Margaret Mary just like you? And I thought about how my mom was younger than I am now when she first came into this family and I thought about how she told my uncle that she always appreciated the fact that he and Aunt Marg let her bring her big gross dog into their house when she was in her twenties and they let me do the same thing when I was in my twenties, and I cried.
Next to me, my mother wound her arm around my shoulders and squeezed me against her, and I thought about how it’s a good thing that she’s immortal because if I ever lost her I wouldn’t even be able to walk anymore.
And the whole time – crying, leaning against my mother, wiping my eyes with paper napkins I’d grabbed out of my dad’s car and shoved in my purse before the funeral – I was also watching Stevie, and worrying about carrying the host. Because this is how my mind works: put me in a church on one of the top ten saddest days of my whole life, and then give me a task that involves carrying sacred objects in front of a churchfull of people, and the whole time I’m mourning my aunt I’ll also be worrying about that molded jello plate in third grade.
What if I tripped? What if I tripped? What if I tripped?
And maybe I wasn’t raised Catholic and maybe I don’t believe in exactly the same God as they do, but I believe in the beauty of my family and the sanctity of love, and Lord, I did not want to screw up Aunt Marg’s funeral by tripping down the aisle and sending the holy bowl of Communion Wafers flying through the audience members like rice at a wedding.
So of course I tripped.
As it turns out, cute little maryjane crocs are not the best shoes to wear when carrying Communion Wafers down the aisle at a funeral, because if you’re really focused on not dropping the little gold dish they’re in, your crocs might just catch against the marble floor and make you trip. And I was, and they did. Just a little. Just a little tiny instant of almost-tripping and then half-skipping down the aisle but it was enough to make me smile in embarrassment because of COURSE I tripped, if there’s anyone who’s going to trip at a funeral while trying to deliver Communion Wafers to a very nice priest, it’s M. Molly Backes.
It was only a very tiny trip, but it was enough to make me pink-cheeked as I followed the example of my adorable eighth grader cousin and dipped my head at the priest and then hurried back to the pew where my mother sat. I flung myself in next to her, relieved at least that it was over, and I whispered to her, “OH MY GOD, I TRIPPED!”
She squeezed my hand reassuringly, and whispered back, “I was just shocked the Communion Wafers didn’t burst into flame in your Pagan Baby hands.”
*
So I guess the moral of this story has something to do with finding the humor and absurdity in all parts of our lives, not just the obvious ones. In fact, you could probably argue that those moments of laughter in the middle of heartbreak are exactly what define our species. That -- even in the face of death and the certainty that we will eventually lose everyone we love and even the world itself – we still fall in love, we still hang on to hope, and we still laugh: this is what makes us precious, and absolutely human.
And I have to believe that wherever Aunt Marg is now, whether it's heaven or our hearts or the kindness and generosity of her children and grandchildren or all of the above, she's certainly laughing.
*************************************************
Margaret Mary Backes Sellers, 9/20/27 - 4/18/08
*************************************************
So. The story begins the night before a funeral.
I spent the first half of last week in Peoria, Illinois, following the death of my aunt Margaret Sellers, who was the oldest of nine kids and one of four women in my family with the same name as me. She was my father’s sister, eighteen years his senior (he was the baby of the family), and was like a grandmother to my sister and me all our lives. Her death seemed sudden, even though she’d been in and out of the hospital for years; she was one of those people who was so bright in life that her absence was absolutely impossible to imagine. I spent the night before the funeral expecting to see her, and only after a moment’s search of the room would I remember that she was gone.
After the visitation, we all gathered at her house to eat and drink and tell stories and hold hands and work through the process of accepting her death together. I was sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace when my cousin Linda, Marg’s oldest daughter, came to sit with me and reached for my hand. “Molly,” she said, “I want to ask you to play a part in the ceremony tomorrow.”
I assumed she was going to ask me to read something. I’m good at reading. “Absolutely, Linda. I’d be honored. What do you need?”
“We’d like you to carry the gifts,” she said.
I gave her a blank look. “Um………”
I didn’t want to sound like an idiot, but seriously, I had no idea what she was talking about. Gifts? At a funeral? For who, for my aunt? I imagined carrying brightly wrapped presents down the aisle of the church and laying them on the coffin. “Um,” I said brilliantly, “…….….. gifts?”
“You know,” Linda said. “The host.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding. “Right. Of course.” (The host? That’s…. the wafers, right? The eucharist? Why do they call it the gifts? And how would I carry it? In a basket? Balanced on a plate? I had a brief flashback to a potluck in third grade where I carefully carried a big molded jello salad all the way down two whole flights of stairs only to catch my foot on the second-to-last step and fly through the air, landing right on top of the beautiful, smushed jello. I’ve been a little nervous about carrying things ever since.)
(Also, did I mention I was raised Unitarian Universalist? And the service was to be a full Catholic funeral mass? And pretty much my entire family – except, of course, my dad – is all Irish Catholic? And other than the part where everyone goes to the front of the church to get communion and I stay in my seat, I remember almost nothing about the Catholic masses – and Catholic funerals – I’ve been to in the past?)
“So,” I said. “Uh……….. what would that involve, exactly?”
Linda said, “It’s very easy. You and Stevie just carry the gifts up the aisle and give them to the priest.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure. Absolutely. I would be honored to.”
Linda patted my hand and looked away, her eyes glistening. “Good. It will mean a lot to the family.” I squeezed her hand back and we sat in silence for a moment, cousins reunited in sorrow, listening to the murmured conversations from other rooms.
“So,” I finally said, still holding her hand. “Um. You do know that I’m not baptized, right?
“Oh,” Linda said. “Hmmm.”
“So… is that a problem?”
She thought about it for a moment. “Well,” she finally said, “we’ll give you a one-day pass.”
“Cool,” I said. “Because, you know, I wouldn’t want my heathen ways to interrupt the mass or anything.”
She smiled at me. “We believe in baptism by desire.”
I glanced across the room, where my Unitarian step-mother was talking about architecture with my Catholic cousin, and my (at times fervently) atheist Unitarian father was fiddling with his briefcase. In high school, my sister briefly rebelled against our parents by announcing her imminent conversion to Catholicism. Once I met a friend of my mother’s and he asked her eagerly, Is this one of the PBs? I looked at her to explain and her friend said, Pagan Babies like it was totally obvious, like that’s the only thing he could ever imagine Megan or me being called, as if my mother had never referred to us by our first names, ever, when talking about us to her friends. I said, Yeah, I guess so, and my mother laughed and squeezed my shoulders and called me a PB for the rest of the day.
“I think my parents are pretty proud of my pagan-baby status, actually. My mom brags about it all the time….”
Linda seemed to be getting a tiny bit impatient. “Really, all you have to do is renounce Satan.”
“Oh!” I said, smiling broadly. “Well, I think I can manage that for a few hours at least.”
“Great.”
“Cool.”
There was a long pause.
“Um,” I asked, “so… how do I know when to carry the presents?”
Linda looked at me.
“I mean gifts?” I asked. “The little crackers? The body of Jesus?”
My cousin sighed. “Just follow Stevie. He just went through confirmation, so he’s an expert.”
“Okay, cool,” I said. I had a feeling that any more questions would get me cast out, not only of the funeral, but possibly of the extended family. “Great.”
Twenty minutes later, I sat down with my cousins Stevie, an eighth grader, Lindsey, a sophomore in high school, and a friend of theirs, who were sitting out on the sunporch. “Hey dudes,” I said. “Hope I’m not interrupting.”
“No problem!” they said. “We’re just talking about our shoes!!”
I laughed. “Cool. So… I’m supposed to carry the gifts tomorrow? With you, Stevie?”
Stevie looked guarded, as if hedging his bets against a trick question. “Okay.”
“So… I’ve never done that before. What do I do?”
Lindsey smiled brilliantly and said, “It’s really easy! You just have to carry them and give them to the priest!”
I nodded. “That’s what I heard. But how do you know when to go?”
Lindsey’s friend said, “It’s right after the Homily!”
“Cool,” I said.
They seemed happy that they could help me. I reached down to scratch my foot.
“So……… when is that, exactly?”
The kids looked concerned. “Um….”
“I know,” I said apologetically. “My sister and I weren’t raised Catholic. Don’t tell anyone.”
Lindsay’s friend thought for a moment, and then said, “Basically, as soon as the priest is like, ‘Blah blah, lord hear our prayer!’”
“Awesome.” This is why I love kids. They give you straightforward answers, and even if they’re secretly pitying you for being such an addled adult person, they’re usually nice about it. I figured I could chance a couple more questions. They’d understand. “You guy, what if I mess up?” I looked at my cousin, the eighth grader, the same age as the kids I used to teach. “I’ll just follow you, Stevie. I heard you were an expert.”
Stevie shrugged and said, “Well….”
“I’ll just watch you, okay? Maybe you should sit behind me, and then you can pinch me when it’s time to go.”
He smiled a little, and his sister Lindsay said, “I’ll stand up and point to the back of the church.” She demonstrated, standing up and waving like a traffic cop. We all laughed.
I said, “Make a big sign that says MOLLY -- GO NOW!”
The kids giggled. “We’ll just stand up and yell.” Lindsey waved her hands in semaphore, and traffic directed me toward the imaginary back of the church, and all the kids yelled, “NOW!!”
The next day, we sat in the car for a half-hour helping my father to re-write the eulogy. I watched the rain slash against the windshield as he sat next to me crossing his pen through lines and my step-mother added her thoughts from the backseat. Ducking in the rain, we ran across the street to Saint Mark’s where ushers stood outside with their giant black umbrellas. I stopped in the entrance of the church and saw my uncle and automatically looked for my aunt before remembering why we were there. And then I saw Stevie sitting on a bench near the door and he looked very solemn and grown-up in the way that teenagers do when they’re wearing suits, but he gave me a secret smile and I smiled back.
I held it together until my mother showed up. Even though she’s been divorced from my father for almost two decades, she still made the four hour drive south for the funeral, because Aunt Marg was like a mother to her. She hugged my cousins and my uncle and told them all that she’d loved Marg very much. She cried, and I cried, because I always cry when my mother does. She doesn’t cry very often. I stood behind her and watched her hug my cousins and introduced my younger cousins to her because they’re all gorgeous and in their teens and twenties and she probably remembers most of them as chubby toddlers.
And then the ushers ushed us and Lindsey gave me a watery smile. I sat with my mom a few rows behind Aunt Marg’s kids and grandkids, and looked up at the green columns and soaring ceilings of the church. I was overwhelmed by kinesthetic memory, the kind your body holds onto without any help from your mind or heart. Suddenly my skin and lips and hands and teeth were all remembering the last time I’d been in that church, at the funeral of my little cousin who was killed in a car accident just days before his twenty-second birthday. I remembered sitting in approximately the same place five years earlier, watching the somber young men in suits who should have been Jimmy’s groomsmen, not his pallbearers. We sat in silence for a long time and then there was music and the priest talked about death and life and I thought of all the things you think about at a funeral, all the funerals you’ve been to before and all the people you’ve lost in your life and all the people you’ll lose in the future, and how you never knew one heart could hold so much hurt and still keep functioning. As one of my genius students said, “It’s weird at funerals. Like there’s nowhere you’d rather be but at the same time there’s a thousand places you’d rather be.”
It was like that.
I thought of all the things I’d always meant to ask Aunt Marg about but had never gotten around to asking her, all the things I should have told her last time I saw her, not even important things, stupid things like Thank you for the birthday cake you made me that looked like a bunny and Thank you for letting me bring my recently-rescued dog into your house when I was twenty-two and thank you for letting him sleep next to me in the bed in the Ivy Room and What was my dad like when he was a little kid? and What was it like to be a girl in the 1930s and 1940s, not just any girl but a Backes girl, what does it mean to be a Backes and how did you raise such nice kids and did you know that I’ve always planned to name a daughter Margaret Mary just like you? And I thought about how my mom was younger than I am now when she first came into this family and I thought about how she told my uncle that she always appreciated the fact that he and Aunt Marg let her bring her big gross dog into their house when she was in her twenties and they let me do the same thing when I was in my twenties, and I cried.
Next to me, my mother wound her arm around my shoulders and squeezed me against her, and I thought about how it’s a good thing that she’s immortal because if I ever lost her I wouldn’t even be able to walk anymore.
And the whole time – crying, leaning against my mother, wiping my eyes with paper napkins I’d grabbed out of my dad’s car and shoved in my purse before the funeral – I was also watching Stevie, and worrying about carrying the host. Because this is how my mind works: put me in a church on one of the top ten saddest days of my whole life, and then give me a task that involves carrying sacred objects in front of a churchfull of people, and the whole time I’m mourning my aunt I’ll also be worrying about that molded jello plate in third grade.
What if I tripped? What if I tripped? What if I tripped?
And maybe I wasn’t raised Catholic and maybe I don’t believe in exactly the same God as they do, but I believe in the beauty of my family and the sanctity of love, and Lord, I did not want to screw up Aunt Marg’s funeral by tripping down the aisle and sending the holy bowl of Communion Wafers flying through the audience members like rice at a wedding.
So of course I tripped.
As it turns out, cute little maryjane crocs are not the best shoes to wear when carrying Communion Wafers down the aisle at a funeral, because if you’re really focused on not dropping the little gold dish they’re in, your crocs might just catch against the marble floor and make you trip. And I was, and they did. Just a little. Just a little tiny instant of almost-tripping and then half-skipping down the aisle but it was enough to make me smile in embarrassment because of COURSE I tripped, if there’s anyone who’s going to trip at a funeral while trying to deliver Communion Wafers to a very nice priest, it’s M. Molly Backes.
It was only a very tiny trip, but it was enough to make me pink-cheeked as I followed the example of my adorable eighth grader cousin and dipped my head at the priest and then hurried back to the pew where my mother sat. I flung myself in next to her, relieved at least that it was over, and I whispered to her, “OH MY GOD, I TRIPPED!”
She squeezed my hand reassuringly, and whispered back, “I was just shocked the Communion Wafers didn’t burst into flame in your Pagan Baby hands.”
So I guess the moral of this story has something to do with finding the humor and absurdity in all parts of our lives, not just the obvious ones. In fact, you could probably argue that those moments of laughter in the middle of heartbreak are exactly what define our species. That -- even in the face of death and the certainty that we will eventually lose everyone we love and even the world itself – we still fall in love, we still hang on to hope, and we still laugh: this is what makes us precious, and absolutely human.
And I have to believe that wherever Aunt Marg is now, whether it's heaven or our hearts or the kindness and generosity of her children and grandchildren or all of the above, she's certainly laughing.
15 April 2008
The Perfect Job (Please Don't Snipe Me)
Oh my goodness, I have so much news.
All through January… and February… and March, I felt like I couldn’t blog because I only had two thoughts in my head: 1) Oh my god it’s so effing cold I want to die, and 2) No, seriously, it is SO COLD and WHY GOD WON’T IT STOP SNOWING? Therefore, it was an effort to blog about anything that didn’t directly involve complaining about how cold and dark it was, both outside and inside my heart.
But!
Now it’s SPRING, and I have tons of things to tell you about.
Most exciting: I have a new job! One I’m very, very excited about and which took absolutely no hemming and/or hawing on my part to accept – in fact, I was worried that I’d come back from vacation and find that they didn’t want me after all. But they did. So. As of yesterday, I’m the new assistant to the director of StoryStudio Chicago, and I am sooooo excited about it. First of all, StoryStudio is an amazing place that offers tons of writing classes in fiction, memoir, creative non-fiction, and business writing. There’s always something incredible happening there, and it’s always full of people who are really excited about – and want to talk about – writing! You know what a nerd I am for talking shop, so getting to work with a whole bunch of writers is a dream come true for me. In fact, I’ve been in the Advanced Writer’s Workshop at SSC since the end of last summer, and it has been endlessly helpful to me. So I know firsthand what a fantastic place StoryStudio is.
Second of all, my new boss – Jill – has been the leader of my writing workshop & my teacher as long as I’ve been at StoryStudio, so I already know that she is fantastic. In the great tradition of my life, I have another smart, strong woman to work with, and I couldn’t be happier. AND she is very committed to making sure that I work on my novel, and don’t let my job get in the way of my book. (What? Do bosses really say things like that?)
Thirdly, a huge part of my job will involve my favorite pastime…. blogging! About writing! And books! I swear to god, doesn’t it seem like they invented this job at the Perfect Job Factory? I’ll try to post at least one blog entry a day, so when you get bored at work – or you really just miss me – you can check out the StoryStudio blog Cooler By The Lake. Oh, and when I’m not blogging… I’m working on Facebook, and Myspace, and LinkedIn, and generally just trying to strengthen and support our writing community. For real. That’s my job.
I’m thrilled, because the search for balance between writing and teaching has been a challenge in my life for years. I remember, when I was maybe seventeen, telling someone that I knew I’d always write and I’d always teach, but I didn’t know exactly what that would look like, and it wouldn’t necessarily be teaching in public schools or even teaching in a formal capacity at all. Hell, for years I played with the idea of becoming a minister (am I allowed to start that sentence with the word “hell?” Maybe there’s a good reason I didn’t head down that path…). This chance, to work with the development and organization of a writing school and a community of writers, seems like it will be a fantastic chance to prove to myself that the balance can exist!
Okay, clearly I’m a little giddy here, so bear with me. Luckily, the Perfect Job doesn’t pay a whole lot, so I don’t have to worry about any envious existential crisis snipers coming after me. Seriously, you could probably have the perfect job too, if you were willing to be ass-broke while all the people you graduated with were texting their assistants from their iphones about the new houses they’re buying for their gorgeous perfect children and their independently wealthy spouses on their chartered jets with their six weeks paid vacations and maxed out 401Ks and full health benefits including dental, vision, acupuncture, massage, hang-nail emergencies, and bad hair day coverage.
But still: the perfect job! For me!
I ALSO have to tell you about my birthday, and Nadia’s wedding, and the Fun Nuns in Barbados, and the Gran Fiesta we had here this weekend… not to mention all that’s coming up in the next two months! But for now, I’m off to eat spaghetti and submit myself to Firefly Inculcation, so that next time I see you, I can tell you all about Inara and Val, or Amena and Mal, or, you know. Those space folks.
Until then… see you at The Cooler.
30 March 2008
Travels in Chicago and Abroad....
Yesterday, my mother came down to Chicago and hung out with me for the day. Ostensibly, she was here to help me pack (which she did) and take me out for my birthday (we went to Zia! New Mexican food in Chicago! Best of both worlds!) but actually we spent the majority of the day driving around the city looking for baby hats. It's a long story. Anyway, even though tromping all over the city with my mom was fantastic, and the sun even came out for a few minutes here and there, the highlight by far was "Mamabackes's Tour of Homes (and everyone who was stabbed when she lived there)" in which she drove us around Old Town and Lincoln Park, showing us all the different houses and apartments she lived in when she lived here in her twenties. Every apartment came complete with a story like, "Oh, and that house three doors down? That's where a pregnant lady was stabbed in the stomach and pushed out a third floor window..... and that place had the BEST Italian bread! ....Where that bar is used to be our laundromat, where my neighbor got stabbed and then he was so scared he had to borrow my German shepherd for the night.... did I tell you about the ladies who used to make big plates of fried chicken and spaghetti at that church?.... and over there is where your cousin got stabbed in the neck......"
It was awesome.
I made her give me a similar tour a few years ago, when I was here taking a summer class at Second City, but I didn't yet have any frame of reference for the city, so I didn't really understand where we were at any given time. Yesterday, I saw that she lived in a pretty close range, and after taking the Armitage bus every day for six months, I am all too familiar with the area where the pregnant lady was stabbed. Luckily for pregnant ladies, and probably unluckily for local color, the area is now mostly full of ladies who are far too rich to do anything so undignified as get stabbed in the belly. The back, certainly.
I love hearing my mom's stories and trying to imagine what Chicago was like thirty years ago, even as I learn what it's like for myself now. Because my parents both lived here when they were my age, this place sometimes feels a little bit like an ancestral home. In a nice way.
So thanks Mom. You can tell me about walking your dog and people getting stabbed any day.
In other news, I'm heading off to Barbados tomorrow for my college roommate's wedding. Five of us lived in a house senior year at Grinnell (White House, for you Grinnellians) which we called "The Funnery Nunnery -- the last stop before hell." We were the Fun Nuns, also known as the Bad Habits. We're reconvening on the beach for a week of nuns in the sun, which will likely culminate in some sort of leaving the sisterhood ceremony. She may be leaving the sisterhood, but she'll always be our sister. Awwwwwwww.
So: I'll see you when I get back! Have a great week!
27 March 2008
March: The Book You Should Have Told Me To Read
Last fall, I wrote about my lifelong fondness for Louisa May Alcott’s timeless Little Women. I may have also mentioned, once or twice, my deep and profound love for reimagined stories. If you know me well, you also know that I love song covers – same basic concept. You take someone else’s story (or song) and spin it in a slightly different way. When you’re successful, you gain the ring of truth in your own story, set as it is in a world already established, and add depth to the original. Knowing all this as you do, how is it possible that NO ONE has thought to recommend Geraldine Brooks’s exquisite book March to me? Come on, Bloglandia! Where were you? You made me wait until my father just happened to pick it off the book table at church a few weeks before my birthday? In 2008?? When it won the Pulitzer Prize TWO YEARS AGO??
You guys!
Even MORE troubling than this gross oversight on the part of everyone I know are the blank looks on the faces of the people I’ve recommended this book to in the last few days:
Me: OMG, I just read this fantastic book.
Book-Loving Friend: Oh, I love to read! What is it?
Me: Geraldine Brooks’s book March. It tells the story of what happens to Mr. March when he goes off to the Civil War. It’s so good!
Friend Who Actually Might Not Be That Much of A Bibliophile After All: Who?
Me: Mr. March. You know! Marmee’s husband? Meg and Jo and Beth and Amy’s father?
Friend I Previously Considered to be Literate: (blank look) Uh… who?
Me: You know, like Little Women?
Friend Who Clearly Hates Books and Maybe Isn’t Actually My Friend After All Because How Can I Be Friends With Someone Who Doesn’t Know Who Marmee Is, I Mean Really: Oh yeah, I never read that book. Should I?
People!! I expected this kind of nonsense from my students, but from my friends? From adults? From the WRITERS in my workshop? You can’t not read Little Women!
I’m serious. Go read Little Women, and don’t come back until you can tell me what Teddy Laurence has in common with Sir James Chettam. I’ll wait here.
Okay, from here on out I’ll assume you’ve now all read Little Women. Isn’t it great? Don’t you love the part where everything’s just awful and Beth has scarlet fever and Marmee’s away in Washington and the girls are all by themselves, trying to keep poor little Beth alive, but then Marmee comes home and Beth can breathe and THEN Mr. March comes home on Christmas and everyone flies to him and smothers him in hugs and Amy falls at his feet and hugs his ankles and the girls make him go around and tell them how they’ve all changed in the year since he left them?
Ever wonder how Mr. March changed?
Geraldine Brooks did. In her splendid March, she tells the story of what happens to Mr. March during his year in the Civil War, doubling back in the narrative to cover his youth as a traveling salesman, his courtship and marriage to Marmee, how he won and lost his fortune, and why he decided to leave his four little women and his wife for the grueling hardships of war. Just as Louisa May Alcott drew on her own family to craft her novel, Geraldine Brooks turned to the journals of LMA’s father, A. Bronson Alcott, to fill in some of the narrative gaps, lending historical and familial truth to the figure of Captain March. Additionally, Brooks peoples her narrative with familiar figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Day, and Henry Thoreau, with whom the Alcotts themselves were acquainted.
As the best retellings do, March adds layers of pathos and depth to the pages of Little Women, its shift in perspective bound to change the way you read the homey scenes in the March home forever. After what he witnesses on the battlefield, the carnage and the cruelty, how can Mr. March possibly come home unchanged? And yet, the story of his family is clearly the story of the women, who focus on their growth and development without allowing much room for their father to do any of his own.
I don’t even like historical fiction, and the Civil War is by far my least favorite period of time to read about – and yet – I love this book. I read so much and so quickly that it’s rare for a book to strike at my heart. Even more rare are the times I find myself looking up from a page in quiet thankfulness, almost disbelief, that this book is SO GOOD and doesn’t lag or lose my interest at any point. March defied my every expectation.
It was folly to let him go. Unfair of him to ask it of me. And yet one is not permitted to say such a thing; it is just one more in the long list of things that a woman must not say. A sacrifice such as his is called noble by the world. But the world will not help me put back together what the war has broken apart.
21 March 2008
An Open Letter to the State of Wisconsin
Dear Wisconsin,
How’s it going? Things are pretty okay here, I guess. I mean, Illinois is all right and everything, even though we used to make fun of it a lot. Those were good days, huh Wisconsin? Remember? Those long lazy days of summer, when it seemed like everything was funny and nothing could go wrong? I know you’re one hundred thirty two years older than me and everything, but our age difference never seemed to be much of a big deal, back then. We were pals.
Wisconsin, I have a confession. I took you for granted. I know I did. I didn’t realize how much I cared about you until I left. I went off to Iowa and though – I know this is hard to hear Wisconsin, but it’s true – though Iowa is very lovely in its own way, and will always be dear in my heart, it was YOU that I missed, Wisconsin. Did Iowa introduce me to deep fried cheese curds and beer baseball? Does Iowa have a cave full of smurfs and towns full of trolls? Can Iowa brag about its Circus Museum & Mustard Museum? No, Wisconsin. That’s all you. Iowa doesn’t even have a professional football team, babe.
I tried to make it work, Wisconsin. I came back to you, remember? I came back. We had a whole summer full of five mile walks at midnight, the Milky Way spread thick over the quiet cornfields, wildflowers by the sides of the highway, bobbing with fireflies. Music on the Union Terrace, the colors and textures of the Farmer’s Market in June, ambling through the prairie grasses of the biggest dog park I’ve ever seen… the hills of Lacrosse and the Mississippi bluffs… Picnic Point in autumn, with merlot and burgundy leaves overhead and orange and gold at our feet…. You, Wisconsin. It was you I loved.
Okay, okay, I know I left again. What can I say? New Mexico had a certain je ne sais quois. It was exotic, all those lavender mountains and wide open skies. I never left you for very long, though, did I Wisconsin? I came back to you at least twice a year, and believe me, I thought about you a lot. Look, New Mexico’s gorgeous, but it doesn’t have your trees, Wisconsin. It doesn’t have your gorgeous autumns or your velvet summer nights. All that humidity we used to complain about? Turns out it makes for some pretty fantastic early summer mornings, the mist rising off the lake…. New Mexico doesn’t even have lakes, baby.
Look, Wisconsin, it’s always been you. You’ll always be the one I come back to. You’ll always be the one I’m talking about when I talk about home. But honestly Wisconsin? I have to admit that I’m getting pretty tired of this winter shit. I know, I know, you’re in your rebellious phase. I get it. You’re trying to punish me for leaving you. Last winter you rubbed your mild winter in my face with your 55 degree days and your sparkling turquoise lakes as I flew out of Madison for the tundra that was Albuquerque, and this year, now that I’m back, you’re nothing but snow and ice. Just like your heart, right? I get it, Wisconsin. You never were very subtle with your metaphors. But seriously, enough. Enough.
Wisconsin, it’s spring. It’s March 21, Wisconsin. It’s Easter. If you weren’t in such a snit today I would be with you RIGHT NOW, Wisconsin. That’s right! I was going to drive up today and hang out with you all weekend, did you know that? Until Monday, Wisconsin! I always spend the holidays with you, Wisconsin, you know that. Of course I was going to spend Easter with you. But no, you had to be all 8-10 inches of snow, winter driving emergencies, winter weather warnings, Dane County Sheriff’s office sending out memos begging people to stay off the roads if at all possible…. And then you drag Illinois into it? That’s pretty childish, babe.
I’m losing my patience here, Wisconsin. Look, of course I love you, but if you’re going to be nothing but winter from October 1 to April 1, then maybe it’s not worth it anymore. No, this isn’t an ultimatum… I’m just saying, Wisconsin, that… you know, I’m still friends with New Mexico, and I could always go back. I could. Cause babe, I really don’t need this right now.
Give me some sunshine & I’ll reconsider.
Love and kisses,
Molly
19 March 2008
The Mysterious Elderly Gentleman
By Mamabackes
When I got home from work yesterday, 15 year old Zeke was not at the back door to greet me. About half of the time he seems to hear the car or otherwise sense that I will be opening the door and is there waiting. I let Basil out of his crate and went to tell Zeke that it was time for a walk. When I left the house nine hours earlier, Zeke was sleeping peacefully on the couch, but he was not on either the couch or the loveseat. I went upstairs to look for him on his bed and he was not there either! I did a frantic search of the entire house, including the closed bedrooms and closets, under beds and in hidden corners and Zeke was no where to be found! I thought maybe Molly had been homesick and had driven up and taken him for a walk but that didn't make any sense. Then I (seriously!) thought that Zeke had died while I was gone and the creatures from his planet had landed in the back yard and retrieved the body of their king to take back home.
Finally, I went to the basement and found Zeke disoriented, sleeping on a pile of dirty laundry. I do not believe that he has ever been in the basement before, and I can't even imagine how difficult it would have been for him to make it down the cement stairs when he has such difficulty with the carpeted ones. I don't know if he went looking for a quiet place to die or he got lost looking for cheese. He was unable to climb up the stairs by himself so I carried him up. Once he was back in the kitchen he started bugling his moose call and jumping in the excitement of being readied for a walk, all thoughts of demise banished, for now.
Love, Mama
27 February 2008
A Letter to My Students
Recently, spies at my old school informed me that some of my former students thought to google me. Apparently, they found this blog and came back with the information that A) Ms. Backes is writing a book! [True] and B) Ms. Backes has friends!! [Also true, and how flattering that it should come as a surprise to them. Reminds me of Valentine’s Day a couple of years ago, when my students were shocked to hear that I had managed to find someone who wanted to date me.
George: Are you married Ms. Backes?
Me: No.
Dan: Do you have a boyfriend?
Me: Yes.
Haley: YOU have a BOYFRIEND??????????
Me: (dryly) try not to sound so surprised.
Haley: You must be a LOT more exciting outside of school.
Anyhow, yes, children, Ms. Backes has managed to trick several people into being friends with her over the years, and yes, she’s probably more exciting outside school.]
As usual, I can’t resist the chance to hang out with students for a bit, so if you’ll forgive me, this next part is for any kid I was ever fortunate enough to work with, from the current 8th graders who are clever enough to google me but wouldn’t actually talk to me when I was there in December (hi 7th period!) to the now-in-their-mid-twenties folks who were in the first theater class I ever taught, in the mid-90s.
To My Students
Hey you guys,
I miss you! You probably don’t believe that, because you remember all the times I threatened to make you pay for my therapy bills. You probably assume that when I think about you, I think of all the giggles and whispers I was constantly shushing, the big round zeros in my assignment book I was always nagging you to complete for me, the notes full of middle school drama I liked to confiscate and pretend I was going to put in my imaginary book Whuz UP: Linguistic Particularities in Colloquial Pre-Adolescent Discourse. Of course I remember those things, and many more, believe me. But really? When I think of you guys I don’t think of picking up your candy wrappers after I expressly told said no food in my classroom, or of buzzing the office to send someone to find you when I knew you were ditching my class, or of washing my board for the third time in one day because you just couldn’t stop yourselves from drawing little doggies with circles for paws next to your name and basketball number, even when I hid all the chalk.
What I remember best are the times you made me laugh.
I have hundreds of pages of funny things you said, hundreds of snippets of conversation and quotations that made me laugh then and make me laugh still. I kept the stories and drawings and notes and cards you gave me, and over the years I’ve gone back to them, and they’ve helped me to face another day of whispers and candy wrappers. I miss the way you could always take me by surprise, how you were always far more clever and sly than anyone gave you credit for, how pleased you seemed when you could make me laugh out loud, even if it was for something ridiculous. Especially then.
I miss reading with you. A few years ago, some teachers and I were talking about what we’d do if we won the lottery, and of course the general consensus involved closing the school and moving to Mexico, but I said if I won the lottery I’d keep coming to school, I’d just stop giving grades, and turn my classes into writing groups and book clubs. We’d just hang out together and write stuff and read books together and talk about why we liked them. The best days in class were the days closest to that model: last year, when we pushed all the desks back and sprawled out in a circle on the floor together, or the year before, when we did nothing but read The Diary of Anne Frank for two weeks straight, no tests, no journals, no worksheets. We just read and talked. The time we did Nanowrimo together and did nothing but write novels for a whole month – that was awesome. The year before that, when we picked a country in the world and wrote a story about someone who might live there, with the understanding that ninjas can live anywhere. So fun.
You guys were also my favorite people to be around when things got sad and hard. Those of you who were in seventh grade in the fall of 2002 (and will be graduating this year, my goodness!), after the one year memorial service we had on September 11, you guys talked to me about the whole terrible event, and you helped me to keep faith in the goodness of the world. Or the following spring, when my cousin was killed in a car crash, you were the only people I could talk to, because you were the only ones who didn’t feed me BS about it. All the grown-ups gave me platitudes like “It was his time” and “He’s in a better place now,” until I wanted to scream. You guys just looked at me and said, “Are you sad? If my cousin died I would be really sad.” I was, and you were the only ones who just let me be sad without trying to gloss over anything. Thanks for that.
We talked about some tough stuff over the years: the Holocaust, the KKK, Hate Crimes, homophobia, racism, sexism, violence, fear, September 11, the Birmingham Church bombing, slavery, Matthew Shepard, Columbine, Hurricane Katrina, the deaths of people in our communities, suicides, addiction, alcoholism, domestic violence, murder, rape. We kept tallies of how many times in a day we heard people using racist or sexist or homophobic epithets (and it was a LOT). You asked me why Hitler hated the Jews and then you told me about who you hated, two weeks later, and I tried to make you see that your reasons were just as dumb as Hitler’s were. We talked about Matthew Shepard and you brought me articles from the local newspaper about a similar Hate Crime that happened in our own town. Most of you made an effort to stop calling people fags and using “gay” as a synonym for “dumb” – at least in my presence. You wrote a lot about yourselves, and tried to find your own voices in spite of the fact that middle school pushes you to conform. You thanked me for giving you permission to be weird. You took my suggestion to use your imagination and ran with it. You came back from high school and told me that I would be proud of you: you’ve dropped a lot of the posturing you had in middle school and now you’re much more of an individual.
I am proud of you guys. I’m proud of you all. Don’t forget the things we talked about back then. Be weird and wonderful and creative. Be yourselves. Be kind to everyone, even the freaky kids. Don’t listen to gossip, and don’t spread it. Don’t let other people make up your mind for you. Judge everything for yourself, and always keep an open mind. Let yourself be surprised. Remember the power of language, and please call people out when they use racist or sexist or homophobic language in your presence. Be thoughtful and true to yourself. Keep reading. Keep writing.
Thanks for all the awesome times we had together, the great discussions and the games of Silent Desk Tag. Thanks for making me laugh. You guys were the funniest and best students a teacher could have.
Keep being awesome.
Love,
Ms. Backes
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