Places I have known...

On Tuesday, my son and I took the Green Line to the Brown Line, and rode that in a long zigzagged path across the middle of the city, to near the end of the line, where the famously elevated train points its nose down and riders find themselves at street level. The Rockwell stop is almost jarringly different from any other stop I can think of in Chicago's long, wide train trail. Instead of looking out at grey back porches, behemoth steel buildings or crowded streets, when one walks out on the platform at Rockwell, it's like a little slice of quaint Americana suddenly: there are trees, human-scale shops, open sidewalks that look freshly swept right there at street level. No need to descend down a vertiginous stairwell to get to the street below: one is where she needs to be practically as soon as she grabs her son's hand and hops off the train.

This was my stop years ago, back in the early nineties, having moved there not long after another George had sent soldiers and a fusillade of gunfire to Iraq. I came to live here, in the residential area between Lincoln Square and Ravenswood Manor, after living at my parent's home in the northern suburbs for six torturous months post-graduation. Living with my parents was a rude, harsh awakening for a girl who had been coming and going as she pleased for four years, on the phone whenever the desire struck, stumbling through the door in a loud, wow-I'm-lucky-to-have-made-it-home-alive whoosh of keys and purse straps. Admittedly, my habits at twenty-one left a lot to be desired. The me of today is rolling my eyes at this once-me, and she is rolling her mascara-flecked eyes defiantly right back. Still, if you really thought about it, you'd feel sorry for this once-me at twenty-one: I had come from a town I loved, left the friends I adored, to return to the place I had dashed out of years before, a house with so many unhappy memories and more in the making, still under the dictatorship of an authority figure with whom I fundamentally and frequently clashed. To say I was eager to leave this home again is an understatement.

Back home again, to a place that now felt like anything but, I had just one good friend, Eric, whom I was close with in college. One day Eric decided he wanted to take black-and-white photos of me at the beach - it was chilly but sunny and beautiful, from what I remember, a perfect autumn day - and afterwards we wandered back to his apartment. Eric was my lifeline then, a rumpled, brilliant, hilarious friend who dabbled in socialism and wound up at the University of Chicago on an academic track. He was leaving town, though, lured to Miami (a place he hated and left before long) but he felt terrible about leaving my sad sack self behind after we had dreamed of playing house together and buying leafy plants and French presses (I didn't have the heart to tell him that I killed plants and was revolted by coffee - it didn't matter). Eric was leaving, though, which was awful enough, and the likelihood of an early release from the North Shore seemed to be swirling in a cruelly drawn-out fashion down the drain as well. I think Eric felt terrible about leaving me, and so on that October afternoon back at his apartment with all his taped up moving boxes depressingly all around us, he introduced me to Judith, a friend of his roommates, someone who was also in search of a new life.

Judith, a recent Detroit transplant, wasted no time in convincing me that we had to go to bars in cute black dresses together, discuss literature and writing up into the wee hours, shield one another through the slings and arrows of life, and if we were to do all this, we should be roommates. Judith was very intense and protective; she was both an opera singer and a poet so she required a particular degree of drama in life. She was tall, with long, curly dark hair and olive skin. Judith was also very maternal, which was useful as I was in the market for being adopted and my marketability was diminishing.

Within a matter of months, we were roommates, living in a beautiful, large two-flat with wood floors and a bright sun room in Lincoln Square. Judith had the place picked out and I eagerly signed on, knowing nothing about the neighborhood or what the future might hold, just eager to be pulled to a dramatically different tide as I tried to figure out what to do with my fine arts degree and life in general. I bought an antique bed and vanity from Judith's ex-boyfriend, a gay musician who came to accept and embrace his homosexuality after their break up, and to this day, I still have that set in our guest room. At the time, it was the only bit of furniture I owned and I was so proud of it. Today, I climb on that pretty dark wood bed to read the morning newspaper, and every day, I am reminded of our apartment on Leland, a place I lived for a relatively short amount of time, but a time that is etched deeply in my mind nonetheless.

The Lincoln Square of the nineties was quite a different scene than it is today, though some things remain unchanged. There is still the European feel but back then, there were more actual Europeans, retired college professors and landlords who sat in the sun across the street from the German deli. The square, a cute little diagonal strip between Lawrence and Lincoln, was a ten minute walk from our apartment, and this was the hub of the neighborhood. There was the Brauhaus, still in operation, a German restaurant into which no vegetarian should ever tread (a thickly accented server there once offered me hassenpfeffer, or rabbit, as a dish suitable for a vegetarian, but thankfully I spent much of my childhood watching Bugs Bunny cartoons and was wise to her). There was the Merz Apocathary, also still standing, an ancient, long and narrow shop, all wooden counters and thick but pleasant herby scent throughout. This was the place to get homeopathic hangover remedies and Dead Sea bath salts; as a lover of both vodka tonics and aromatic baths, this place received a fair percentage of my paycheck. Lincoln Square was also lined with bakeries, trinket shops filled with miniature glass pieces and under stern German management, burrito joints, an imported shoe shop, a crowded antique emporium, a couple of Thai restaurants. The L tracks curved sharply overhead, intersecting the square at Western Avenue, above the bus terminal; gangs of pigeons noisily shot up each time a train rumbled past. This was home.

Specifically, though, home was a few blocks west, down Leland to where the trees start pushing together and the earth begins to buckle up around the river. If one were to venture a little farther west, she would find a pretty natural area in Chicago, almost wild in places, formed around the river that feeds into our beautiful Lake Michigan; there are docks and boats in back yards, geese floating past. On my block, though, it was pretty removed from this more natural setting, living so close to Western and Lawrence.

Just down the street from me, two blocks away, was Rockwell, where my son and I left the train. Trains pass frequently here, and, as I said, they are right there at street level, so one has to wait behind the long arm of the gate often. My son doesn't remember this, but back when we went to the Waldorf school on Friday mornings during his toddler days, we would often come here afterwards to sit and watch the trains go by: for a small child in love with railroad gates, also known as ding-dong lights, the Rockwell stop is a mecca. There's a cute little shopping district right here, now known as Rockwell Crossing, which was then known to Judith and I by the much less evocative but perfectly useful phrase "by the train stop." Back when I lived here in my early twenties, there was a grocery store on the corner, one with a friendly woman behind the cash register who also was the owner (was she Hispanic? Middle Eastern? I don't remember, but I do remember that she was very sweet). I could buy my basic necessities there - in my case at the time, the list was short: chips and salsa, laundry detergent, not much else - and they had a little produce section that grew droopier as the week progressed. There was a scary Chinese take-out place in a forbidding brick building with obscured glass blocks; I ventured into here only once or twice as it was unsettling even to my low standards. Across the street, there was the WomanMade Art Gallery, and for a time, I briefly thought I might have found my place here, drawing with others on Saturday mornings, but they moved out shortly after I moved in. Down the street, on the other side of the train tracks, was a bizarre southern bar, not southern-themed in a kitschy, ironic, post-modern sort of way, but in a Confederate flag hanging out front, too-scary-to-even-go-inside-to-make-fun-of sort of way. There was always a motorcycle or two out front and occasionally a dude with lots of facial hair and a Camel t-shirt face down in the sidewalk planter. I always gave this place a wide berth, crossing the street whenever I needed to pass.

In the Rockwell Crossing of today, which I see laid over the train stop shopping district of the past like a transparency with a different Sharpie-drawn details over the same raw structures, that southern bar is now a bar and grill (or is it a grille?) with an expensive awning and American-style menu but no passed out bikers or Confederate flags in front. The grocery store is long gone, replaced by a successful parent-and-child yoga studio. There is a doggy boutique, bagel shop, photography studio, a midwife's office, an upscale shop for the home. If anything reflects the changing nature of the neighborhood, it is this little section off the Brown Line.

This was where I lived when I met John, the father of my son, my partner. But that marked the end of my Lincoln Square days. Before I met John, there were languorous Sunday brunches in our apartment, and this was where I learned that I loved to cook. There was the three women group Judith had put together as a cappella singers, practicing once a week (it would end badly one day, with slammed doors and I remember shock at the ease with which angry curse words could shout from the mouths that had once formed angelic harmonies together). There was the sad family upstairs: a very passive, nervous wife, a wavy-haired toddler and a hotheaded, wild-eyed husband who stalked across the creaky wooden floors downstairs, screaming at them both every day. I remember grilling corn on a little Hibachi in the tiny square of grass in our back yard, and I remember the time Judith accidentally knocked an air conditioner out of one of our windows and held on to it by the cord as she called for me frantically (and I remember seeing our Arabic neighbors in the building pressed up close to ours next door, a group of two or three men, watching the scene wordlessly of us trying to coax that precarious and expensive machine back up to the window as if they were watching a movie). I remember boyfriends and break-ups in a way that seems unbelievable now, a revolving door of would-be and ill-fated suitors. I remember our European landlord, a man who inflamed Judith with his patronizing airs and hit on me every time he stopped by. I remember my horror as a man beat his girlfriend in front of our house in the middle of the night and Judith's response, which was more irritation at being awaked then anything: she came from Detroit, after all, she had witnessed a murder up close as a child. (I also remember the woman's horrible, guttural crying - like a mortally wounded animal, a mother who had lost a child - and that she threw up on the grass; I ran outside to help her but by that time, she had disappeared into the night.) I remember the woman who sat with her son on the front porch of a two-flat down the street, telling him in a voice that rang up into my ears like it was spoken for me alone to hear, "Danny, that is not a need, it is a want." I vowed right then that I would be a mother like her one day.

And now, seventeen years after Judith and I parted - again, not well, with me feeling overwhelmed and her feeling abandoned - I was walking down Leland with my son, my very own. He got a juice at the bagel shop and we walked past my old apartment, the one where I slept off too many hangovers but also the one where I fell in love with the tall, long-haired and recently divorced Scandinavian looking man who was part of the Green Mill poetry slam after-party that found its way to our home. I pointed out our house, and my son remarked that it was beautiful. "That's where I lived when I met Dad," I told him, with so many other memories flooding through me it was almost hard to talk. We stopped at the playground on the end of Leland where it meets Elizabeth, a tiny playground with the bare minimum of equipment but one that my son enjoyed nonetheless. On this day, a van from the park district was in front, and there was a long table set up with chairs. The Craftmobile apparently sets up here with watercolor paints, brushes, cups and paper every week. There was nothing special about the materials - just the same cheap stuff one could get at any dollar store - but as with so much in life, the idea of shifting things up a bit, of painting outdoors in this case, brought droves of kids and their caregivers to the little playground. My son did a quick painting of a space ship, whipping it out one-two-three like Picasso did as an old man, confident and impatient, and then he was ready to go.

We walked back to the Rockwell stop and we waited behind the gate for another train to pass. It whizzed by, just a couple feet from our noses, and I held on to my son extra tight. The Rockwell stop never ceases to shake me up a little.

City kids, country kids

In the span of an average day,
our city-dwelling children might be exposed to dogs, cats, squirrels, birds – especially pigeons, robins, those little guys I maybe mistakenly call chickadees, geese and cardinals – and if our children are very lucky, they might be startled by a sharply-striped chipmunk darting past. In the summer, they can see ducks and even the occasional heron passing through town like a traveler with an intriguing accent. There are so many advantages of urban living with children, too many to list and you already know them but I’ll still give it a whirl: museums, great restaurants, a diverse population, public transportation, cultural richness, so many possibilities for diversions.

As with most things, there are distinct disadvantages to urban living with children as well. The tall buildings can blur out the sky, especially when downtown. How does this influence their sense of vastness, of both ambition and humility? Do they ever feel a gasp catch in their throats when face-to-face with a force of nature that is truly immense? There is not much more ripe with possibility than a whole expanse of stars shimmering in a pitch-dark sky, like pulsating, illuminated holes punched out of black paper, and this is something we city people with our light pollution and towering buildings just get a dim, truncated view of at best. And it’s not just the sky. I worry about my son and his friends having enough trees to climb, meadows to explore, rivers to dunk cups into in order to study the murky contents. And there is always noise – of car alarms and voices nattering on cell phones and the recording on the train (beep… ”An inbound train toward the Loop will be arriving shortly…” beep) not to mention the aural onslaught of the El itself, so much so that my internal radio dial takes at least an hour to switch off when I’m trying to sleep. How does this affect those who are immeasurably more fine-tuned and sensitive?

For me, the benefits of city living outweigh the benefits of a more rural setting and I think this is true for my son as well. We are raising him as a vegan and I think it is pretty easy to live as one where we do, with access to so many well-stocked grocery stores, so many vegan restaurants in relative close proximity and an active, diverse community. At the same time, it is an interesting experiment we are undertaking with raising our children as herbivores. Veganism, it could be argued, is distinctly urban in concept and demographics. On the other hand, it is intricately interwoven with something that was once completely in the domain of the country: how our food is produced, how it arrives on our plates and in our stomachs. So while many city dwellers may be raising children whose palates swoon for cuisines from far-away nations (injera bread from Ethiopia, dal from India), who can easily tell you the difference between omnivores, vegetarians and carnivores, it is a very good possibility that these same children have never seen a four-legged being larger than a St. Bernard up close. The danger of raising our vegan children in an urban setting is that most animals become purely conceptual and our practice becomes merely theoretical. For it to stick, we need to make the animals they are protecting real and the lifestyle they practice an active, personally-rooted conviction.

Insert SASHA Farm.



My family is part of a great group of interesting, dynamic vegans called the Chicago Vegan Family Network. We usually only see one another once a month, but we are a big part of one another’s lives. In addition to our monthly potlucks, our children play together and become passionate friends, the adults offer wisdom and support to each other and we do things like track down gelatin-free marshmallows once a year and flood nearby states with a big ol’ camping trip. Another thing we do, for three years running now, is visit a farmed animal sanctuary called SASHA Farm in tiny Manchester, Michigan, home also to some sort of famous chicken broil. This is where our city children feed voracious goats (is there any other kind?) carrots, learn that pigs loooove grapes, that the safest way to feed a cow is to hold an apple flat in your hand and smoosh it up close. They also learn that cows are slobbery when eating apples. They learn that pigs are covered in bristly hair, cats raised together will eat one another’s food and get a little chunky and that the fluffy reddish dog Toto nips but does not bite. The sheep stay back on the hill in a group, the horses have impossibly soft, velvety muzzles and one of the goats is not too friendly. They learn these things in a very short amount of time and the animals transform from idea into flesh-and-blood in the matter of a couple of hours on a farm. What is sort of staggering to me is how quickly and effortlessly a rooster crowing can become integrated to our minds. At first the sound is unexpected, then it becomes charming and before too much time has passed, the rooster crowing in the background is accepted as part of the environment. As part of our environment. Of course it was. It was as natural as hearing a train overhead and quite a bit lovelier.


This is Nick, contemplating a goat with the most delightfully inscrutable expression.



Tewa, our newest member, originally from Ethiopia, feeding a goat.



Jack here, Alice and her little sister, Eden. Alice is one of the "big kids" now.



City kids, taking a relaxing sojourn on a swing together. These kids are so comfortable together.



Alice with a horse. What more can I say?



You may notice by now that I find it impossible to not try to kiss the various creatures. It's compulsive. I can't help myself.



Jack, Eden's best friend from earliest childhood, also contemplating a SASHA animal in the most beguiling fashion.



Alice again with a cow, ever mindful of avoiding the droolies.



Kids and horses. Pretty self-explanatory.



Sylvana loved the horses.



Justice feeding a goat.



One lucky chicken.



This is Levi in the cat house, which was a very popular destination point for our kids. I think those cats probably got a well-deserved nap when the children finally left.



We had a picnic, played duck, duck, omnivore on the grass outside the barn (Tewa learned this game with astonishing speed), and huddled together to decide which animals we would sponsor as a group. We decided on a goat and a turkey. The turkey was one who was in particularly poor shape. His bones, bent and painfully warped, struggled under the weight of his enormous chest, genetically engineered to grow to immense proportions to supply the boneless white meat of the sandwich and filet, slapped between two slices of bread and never thought of again. This turkey, and so many others like him, was simply not designed to live past a certain age, usually not past a few months. He was without a name; the children, after floating names like "Cool Dude' and so forth, came to the name Al, which was an abbreviation of Albus Avis, White Bird in Latin. Monte Jackson, the wonderful cofounder of SASHA Farm, was so happy that we'd adopted this bird. He told us that he was hoping that Al would make it through the winter.

Unfortunately, we received news last week that Al died. I haven't told my son yet. Our sponsorship money will go towards another SASHA turkey. It is very bittersweet, of course, the little bit of sweetness present because we know that Al got to live out the last of his days at a sanctuary, that he felt human kindness, human tenderness. You see the worst and the best of humanity in stark relief when you are at an animal sanctuary. I am so grateful that our city kids could see this with their own eyes, helping them to develop into even more compassionate, engaged children as they grow up. These animals aren't just conceptual, suffering isn't just theoretical, and living compassionately isn't just an ideology: the animals are flesh-and-blood, suffering is real, and living compassionately is an active, dynamic and personal commitment.



And, of course, SASHA Farm, and the roosters crowing, and the pigs begging for scratches and the goats waiting to be fed and all the magnificent muzzles designed for nuzzling will be around next year, for us city folks to get our country fix.

Shalom, everyone.

Lettuce Wraps of Gratitude...

So hallelujah and huzzah and hurrah, the fearsome Technology God has smiled down upon us (or at least taken the appropriate measure of pity) so we've finally got working email/phone/TV-we-can-ignore functionality back at the bungalow and suddenly things are a little less "Pa, could ya go fetch some water from the well? I'm feeling mighty parched," around here and for that, I am deeply grateful. Six weeks - six weeks and you're midway through a trimester! - without have made us all a little more resourceful, a little more apt to suggest an early evening stroll, and a lot less reachable, and through the fresh lens of being unplugged for so long, I can see how technology has its benefits and drawbacks - don't throw that lightning bolt at me, scornful Technology God, oh, please be merciful - in a way I was only theoretically clued in to before. And though I was tempted to cackle all melodramatically "See ya, suckers!" at my fellow library computer room denizens - with the occasionally loud personal electronic devices and weirdly stretched way-the-hell-out arms totally crossing into my territory and giggling teenaged boys punching one another on the shoulder to show off soft porn on their monitors - when I skipped out of there this morning, I also feel like we endured something together (a hostage situation, getting stuck on an elevator without power) and while I don't exactly have survivor's guilt, I will always have empathy for those who are at least somewhat unmoored in the ocean of technology. I can see that all this talkety-talk is making the Dark Lord of Technology raise an overgrown eyebrow contemptuously towards me so I will end it now with a good recipe you should try at home and the acknowledgment that I am truly grateful to be plugged back in.

Lettuce Rolls of Gratitude

2 cups dry rice, your preference

1 bunch broccoli, cut into florets
1 1/2 cups frozen peas, defrosted

1/2 cup smooth, natural peanut butter
2 cups water
4 cloves garlic, minced
1-inch piece of ginger, grated
2 tablespoons tamari or soy sauce
1 tablespoon umeboshi vinegar (found in the Asian section of your natural foods store)
2 teaspoons cumin
1 teaspoon coriander
1/2 teaspoon turmeric

Two small can water chestnuts, drained and slivered
1 or two heads of Bibb, Butterhead or Boston lettuce, washed, leaves separated and allowed to dry
1 lime, cut into wedges

Cook the rice. Meanwhile, steam the broccoli for three minutes. Add the peas and steam until the broccoli is bright green, about five or six minutes.

In a blender, add the peanut butter, water, and garlic. Squeeze the ginger into the blender, releasing the juice but not the pulp. Add the rest of the ingredients up through the turmeric. Blend that sucker up until smooth.

When the rice is done, put it in a large saute pan with the broccoli and peas. Mix this together with the peanut sauce, stirring over medium heat until the sauce has thickened. Oh, yeah! Add the water chestnuts.

When it's all thickened and thoroughly combined, serve portions lovingly spooned into individual lettuce leaves. Roll up or eat taco-style with the filling in the middle. Serve with extra tamari, lime wedges and Sriracha or hot chile sesame oil. You will love this, I promise, and it will taste like a big production but it's really not.

This produces a lot of the middle part, the stuffing, which is delicious on its own as vegetable rice with peanut sauce. I brought some of the leftovers along with us to the farmer's market last week and this guy with bright blue eyes came over and asked which booth he could also make such a purchase. I smiled but let him down gently. "It's from home," I said, "I'm sorry." He thanked me anyway. Make this delicious vegan meal, bring some leftovers out in public and see if the same thing doesn't happen to you.

So with that, I'm back, babies. And it feels good.

XO

June 12, 2002 (Part one if you can believe it...)

[This as written a couple of weeks back for my son's birthday but things have been in disarray technologically at our home, so there are a bunch of hoops to jump through in order to post. I'm writing more to be uploaded whenever possible. Hopefully the computer limbo should be cleared up in mid-July. In the meantime, please accept this humble offering...]

I had an idyllic pregnancy, considering everything that could and often does go wrong. There was no threat of gestational diabetes, no placenta previa, a weight gain within the range of what is considered healthy, and only a quick episode or two of morning sickness. Aside from freakishly swollen ankles my last trimester – I came to learn that I am a water retainer, as my midwives openly admired the oceanic environment of my abdominal region - and some difficulties getting my iron levels up, my pregnancy was blissfully free of health concerns. Everything measured up as it should, heartbeats were easily detected, and, for the first time in my life, I actually looked forward to warming up an examination table.

I found my midwife practice on the recommendation of a friend who is very involved in the Chicago natural birthing community. Once the little plus sign appeared in the window of my pregnancy test, a little like a Magic Eight Ball, I moved toward the birth of my dreams with a gusto fueled by equal parts naivety and revolutionary zeal. My child’s emergence into this world would be natural, calm and gentle, the perfect entry for my little peacemaker, and it would be such a staggering, personal insult to George Bush that it would make him boil with impotent, red-faced rage. Two rules became evident while my future baby was just a shrimp-like mass of cells as if they were chiseled onto a tablet. Rule #1: I would not use painkillers. Rule #2: my baby would only be caressed by those with selected, loving hands. Anyone deemed to have bad personal vibes was forbidden to touch my child’s perfect, satiny skin. Every night, I would stay awake reading passages from Ina Mae Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery, that goofy, dated and perfect manual to having the back-to-the-land, patchouli-scented birth of my dreams and I grew even more resolute in my pursuit. It was a given that my child would breastfeed until all his adult teeth came in and that I would shield him with my own body from menacing, zombie-like pediatricians with their vaccination needles: before all that, though, he’d need a birth befitting such a perfect creation. He’d float down from my uterus and land on a cushiony pile of organic rose petals. He’d be a Raphael angel come to life. Thus, he’d need a midwife-assisted birth.

My friend was surprised that I didn’t want to give birth at home.

“Marla, I’m surprised. Home birth is so you,” she said, unable to avoid sounding just a little disappointed.

I asked her if she’d been to my home lately. With the addition of my landlord’s three dogs, there were five unruly ones in our residence, including a senile Yorkshire terrier who would start a session of ear-piercing yipping for unknown reasons and not stop for an hour or two, and a basset hound with the world’s most blood-chilling howl. At any given time in our apartment, there were drawers crammed with batteries that needed recharging, a distinct lack of functional light bulbs and soap dispensers in need of refilling not to mention the dog fur that rolled like tumbleweeds in a 1950s western. Outside our home was a whole different environment to consider: ice cream truck recordings, cars screeching and honking down Humboldt Boulevard, the incessant dinging bell of elote vendors, the occasional gun being discharged, and then, of course, police cars wailing. No, John and I were in agreement. We wanted the baby to be born in a calm, quiet, well-prepared environment. In other words, definitely not at home.

To me, having a midwife offered the ideal middle ground – I wouldn’t be laboring in a field between shifts picking corn, nor would my child’s birth be a hyper-medicalized surgical procedure. Was having chanting friends with bindis on their Third Eyes or sage rubbed on my belly really necessary? I just needed to give birth.

I made an appointment with the midwives my friend recommended early on in my pregnancy. I was probably just eight weeks pregnant at the time. Their office was not much different than a regular medical office, except there were no pharmaceutical salespeople in business suits and there were issues of Mothering magazine with their cover shots of contentedly breastfeeding babies neatly stacked throughout. The pictures on the wall of radiant mothers and their babies made their clients seem healthier and earthier than in any other medical office. Also, the receptionist Yolanda was exuberantly, existentially happy: in fact, everyone who worked there always seemed to be in a good mood.

So this became the practice that measured and touched and listened to the growing belly of mine. Week after week, I’d get weighed and examined, and I’d be given book recommendations (“Get Red Tent,”) and other recommendations (”You’ve got to try Hypnobirthing!”). And I gobbled it all up, scribbling in the little blue notebook I’d dedicated to midwife appointments, having convinced myself that George Bush had an undercover Agency Of Pregnancy and they didn’t like what I was doing one bit. It turned out, though, that not all the lovely squishy things one can embrace on her way to a joyously natural delivery worked for me. There was Hypnobirthing, for example, which was a class was taught by a nurse in my midwive’s office. While it was fascinating to watch the video in which a woman went through all the stages of labor in a seemingly pain-free, trance-like state, that wasn’t me. Taking the class confirmed for me something I had long suspected: I am not someone who is easily hypnotized. I could relax, I could even space out, but truly believe that the hand that touched my belly would instantly numb it of any feeling? Try again. My husband, however, my coach in all this, was eminently suggestible and highly hypnotizable it turns out. So hypnotizable, in fact, that during our practice sessions, he would inevitably put himself in a hypnotic state. He would put the Hypnobirthing cassette in and he would follow the instructions gently prompted by the soothing voice on the tape. Before long, I’d be lying there, staring at the ceiling fan and twiddling my thumbs impatiently, listening to his increasingly trace-like, droning monologue. “Relax…My hand has a soothing blue gel on it…Where I touch you, you will feel a pleasant numbness…” His hand on my belly, I’d roll my eyes and count every last bone. “Now you are numb…You don’t feel a thing but a sense of calm throughout your body…You feel goooo…oood… Soothing blue gel…Now I will go out…On the back porch…And drink some lemonade…”

“John!”

He’d bolt upright. “Wha – what?!”

“You were doing it again.”

“Doing what? I was totally awake.”

“Whatever you say, lemonade boy.”

Despite the occasional Natural Thing That Didn’t Work, I pretty much loved and embraced it all. I loved the midwife-recommended Bradley Method class, despite the fact that the instructor seemed to be phoning it in at times. I loved the breastfeeding class with the hungry baby dolls to practice feeding. I loved my subscription to Mothering, perhaps most of all. My future baby would be a Mothering magazine pin-up one day, all bright-eyed and vaccine-free and breastfed and swaddled in organic cotton. I also loved the way I felt, wholesome and part of an exclusive club, sitting in the waiting room before my appointment, smiling and sharing little details (“I’m due in six more weeks…” ) with the other pregnant women.

As the week of my due date edged closer, nothing much was happening. I was measured and examined by Gayle, my primary midwife, a toned, cheerful blonde who seemed far more likely to be a soccer mom than a Red Tent-quoting advocate of empowered birthing, and while everything looked good, not much was happening yet. I was one-and-a-half centimeters dilated, though, which thrilled me. I hadn’t even felt that! Only eight-and-a-half more to go. It would be a breeze. This was what my body was designed to do. Ina Mae and Mothering magazine had told me.

The weekend before my baby was due, John and I drove to Madison for the day as I needed more tie-dyed onesies and Chicago has a distinct shortage of groovy headshops. It was time to pack the bag for the hospital and I finally found the perfect dark purple one. The woman with the dilated pupils behind the counter asked when I was due. “Oh, in four days,” I said as she widened her eyes. “Whoa.”

I was five days overdue – which I really didn’t mind, as it gave me more time to get work done, and during that last trimester, I felt like I had the energy of several hundred women inside me – when my midwife suggested moving things along. I was still at one-and-a-half centimeters and no contractions had occurred. I agreed, because while I enjoyed this productive free and unfettered time, it was all about having the baby eventually, right?

Gayle did something called scraping the membranes to gently stimulate labor. It was every bit as delightful as it sounds. Okay, I thought, if birth hurts as much as that, I may actually be in for something. A half-hour later, John and I were eating lunch at the Thai place downstairs from the midwive’s office when I felt that first contraction wave through me between bites of pad sei eiw. Hmmm. It didn’t exactly hurt but it was distinctly different from a cramp, which was the prevailing description I’d heard. On the way home, John was distracted by thoughts of boiling water and last minute phone calls, and I was thinking to myself, “Why the hell didn’t I get more done? I’m not going to have a chance to sweep again until the baby is, like, three.”

Once we got home, we called Gayle and informed her of the news. She seemed a little blasé, honestly, given the momentousness of the situation. My contractions were erratic and at least twenty minutes apart, but still. Gayle told us to get some good rest while we could and to call her when the contractions were consistently closer together and around seven minutes apart. John scribbled furiously in his sketchbook, where he’d already begun recording my progress (“3:17 – strong contraction, lasted twelve seconds; 3:42 – medium contraction…”) and he called my doula, Prem. Prem is a good friend who happened to have some great stats as a doula: she lived on a commune for ten years (where she herself gave birth) as a onetime follower of the Yogi Bhajan, she had been a practicing midwife in the past and she knew Ina Mae Gaskin personally. Prem arrived about an hour later with her overnight bag and a radiant smile.

For the next twenty-four hours, my contractions gradually nudged a little closer together. As I predicted, this was not going to be a quick birth, where one goes from that first contraction to a speeding car on its way to the hospital in the blink of an eye. My mother had had two c-sections so I wasn’t able to establish any hereditary predispositions. We ate take-out from the local Thai place (Thai food was a big player during this time in my life, so much so that I still associate wide rice noodles with being pregnant) on the balcony, we walked around the neighborhood, me shuffling and gripping onto cast iron fences when the contractions rolled through (they had become less mild), I tried to relax as John followed me around, jotting down my progress into his sketchbook. At one point, we took another stab at Hypnobirthing and he fell into a trance again at record speed (“You look really pretty…”) and I thought to myself, Well, I’ve always got Prem. We updated Gayle every couple of hours, who still seemed remarkably unmoved by my headway, suggesting glasses of wine and hot giant pregnant lady sex as labor facilitators. Between contractions, I briefly entertained the image in my mind of being a sloppy drunk woman in labor, slurring her words (“I’m not drunk!”) and behaving inappropriately flirty in my hospital gown, but I decided to call my mother instead of following Gayle’s suggestions. My mother’s unintentionally hilarious commentary brought my contractions a little closer together(“Shouldn’t you be in the hospital yet? What are you and John trying to prove? This is irresponsible. Your contractions have to be seven minutes apart? Put John on the phone. This is ridiculous. Why didn’t you see a regular doctor? I don’t understand why you insisted on seeing this mid – what’s it called? Midwife person. Is that even legal? Why wouldn’t you listen to me? Back when I was pregnant, we were already in our hospital beds before labor even started.”) and a day-and-a-half after my contractions began, we were ready to turn off the lights and head for the hospital. Prem followed in her car.

John drove to the emergency room entrance, which was what we were advised to do, and a valet took our car to the lot. The perks were rolling in already! That night, though, there had been a shooting so the hospital staff was a little less than impressed by my laboring self. We were led to the examination room, a tiny, Spartan room we’d seen during our tour of the hospital maternity ward weeks earlier, when one of the more spacey fathers said, incredulously, “This is the Alternative Birthing Suite?” after the whole thing had been described in great detail. The Alternative Birthing Suite, or ABS, was the crown jewel of the maternity ward. It was a huge room with wood floors, a patchwork quilted four-poster bed and a deep tub, more befitting a Vermont bed and breakfast than a hospital room, and it was run by the midwives. To get to the Promised Land, though, first one had to be admitted, and a visit to the examination room was a prerequisite. As the nurse examined me, I thought to myself that I would be disappointed after laboring for more than a day if my dilation was less than, say, six centimeters. The nurse dully informed me that I was dilated at one-and-a-half, the same as I’d been a week earlier in the midwive’s office. The three of us were crestfallen. How could that possibly be? How? My contractions were seven minutes apart, long in duration and intense. A day-and-a-half later and I still had eight-and-a-half more centimeters to go? I had barely taken two steps on the marathon of my labor. Okay. It was over. This whole giving birth thing was a ridiculously ambitious pipedream. My body was clearly not designed for this. I’d have to cancel my subscription to Mothering and George Bush, that asshole, was somewhere smirking at me.

I couldn’t be admitted into the ABS until I had progressed more, so John, Prem and I commenced with more of that infernal shuffling, this time down the hospital halls. Thankfully there were rails throughout for me to cling to like I was on a ship being tossed between violent waves. Prem gave me some noxious oil to drink to bring on labor, which came erupting right back out of my mouth, causing John to say “Ew!” as he jumped away and prompting me to want to kill him for the first time. Finally, my water started to trickle out just a tiny bit and we could be admitted to the ABS. We informed the nurse eagerly and she granted us entry. I swear, I heard harps playing as we walked in the room and I felt like I had just reached our world-class hotel after a white-knuckled journey. I settled onto the bed and John called Gayle. Again, wine was suggested (wasn’t that contraband in a hospital and what was her obsession with wine about, anyway?) and she also suggested that I take a shower to help with the discomfort. John relayed this back to me and I wanted to shout, “It is not discomfort: it is pain!” but I couldn’t speak. My contractions were coming on fast and furious at this point. I must be progressing, I thought between teeth-gritting, patchwork quilt-clutching waves of pain so fierce that sometimes the only reaction was to meekly laugh afterward. I hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours in the past two days. John and Prem weren’t so well-rested, either. Of course, the Jew in me managed to squeeze in a little time to feel guilty about this fact, too.

I hobbled to the bathroom and I thought about all the other women who d stood exactly in this spot in the shower, laboring, waiting, worrying. They were silly to worry, though. I was the one who had to worry. After forty-something hours, my bag of waters had not fully ruptured yet. For all I knew, I was still at one-and-a-half centimeters, I was certain that I would end up in the news for carrying a three-year-old child in my womb. “He just doesn’t want to come out,” I’d say, shrugging, and the natural segue would be to blame it on George Bush. I’d be an old lady with grey hair and an adult-sized form would be sticking straight out of my feeble body. Well, that way I could always keep close tabs on my child.

By the time I was out of the shower, I could hear other voices in the room, a conversation. Gayle was there. John and Prem, bleary-eyed and a little wobbly from sleep deprivation, were doubtlessly relieved to have someone else to bring into the marathon of my birth. John relayed the details again of my contractions. Prem offered her observations. Gayle took it all in in her friendly but nonchalant manner. She examined me again, observing aloud, “Marla is not someone who really enjoys examinations,” causing me to briefly wonder about those who really do enjoy them, and finally, the rest of my water broke, a great gushing, Biblical flood. Unfortunately, in the amniotic fluid, Gayle found something that caused her fine little eyebrows to knit together. There was meconium in the water, which is a tarry substance and is otherwise known as baby’s first poop. It can appear when pregnancies are carried past forty weeks (as was in my case) or there has been some distress in the uterus. Meconium is fairly common but it’s not something one wants. In my particular case, this meant that I was now risked-out of the glorious birthing suite personally crafted with Gaia’s loving hands herself; I now had to shuffle down the hall to the regular old maternity room, with its starched, white sheets and medical-looking hospital bed, to labor like a commoner who had her baby’s room already filled with plastic crap. But I wasn’t her! I belonged in that other room, with Pachelbel's Canon quietly playing on the stereo and the way better vibes. This wasn’t just about me: how was my future child going to recover from this staggering, self-esteem crushing blow? I saw his future stretched out in front of him like a carpet of disappointment and mediocrity and my stupid, dysfunctional uterus was to blame. This is where the mind goes after so long without sleep. At the very least, I thought, I could still have a natural birth and usher us out of there as soon as possible. The scars to my baby’s psyche would be minimal. Maybe this would help my labor to progress; in the ABS, I was already a little paranoid that someone with a more showoff-y uterus would materialize and I’d be kicked out as there was only that one suite. In a regular plebian maternity room, there was no concern about this. Maybe the pressure of the Alternative Birthing Suite and all it seemed to represent to me was what was keeping me from dilating.

It turned out that that downscaling my hospital arrangements was not the magic bullet I’d been hoping to find. According to Gayle, checking in on me a couple of hours later, I was still barely dilated, this despite the intense contractions, confirmed by the monitor. My brief moment of levity occurred when, while squeezing his hand during a particularly intense contraction, John reflexively said, “Ow!” I thought to myself that I could break his goddamned impregnating wrist right there and then, and he’d just have to go down to the emergency room, get a cast, fill his prescription for painkillers, and get his ass back up to the room, and I’d probably still be struggling to get to two centimeters. I laughed at this thought then told him with dead seriousness to never say “ow” in my presence again. Ever, I emphasized, gripping his sore wrist.

At some point during this time, a different midwife, Hillary, was on call. Hillary was pretty much Gayle’s opposite, the yin to her yang: she was very maternal, kind of hippie-ish, definitely earthy. She looked at my chart then turned to me and smiled. “Wow, you’ve been in labor since Monday. [It was Wednesday afternoon at the point.] You must be tired, huh?” I nodded feebly, tears brimming my eyes. She studied my monitor, and, with a now-familiar knitting of her eyebrows, said, “This doesn’t look so good. Look at this,” she pointed to a faint line that was going way up and then plummeting. “That’s the baby’s heartbeat. It’s unstable, going way up and way down with the contractions.”

She shook her head, squinting again at the monitor. “Not good.”

I started to cry, drained from it all and feeling genuinely scared for the first time.

She patted my hand empathetically, sitting down on the bed at my side. “Oh, I didn’t mean to scare you. We just need to try a different tact.”

I sniffled. John put his arm around me. Prem stood nearby.

“You know that we try to avoid this, but I really think that you should do an Epidural and Petocin at this point. We need to move things along and your little guy is getting stressed. You need to progress. You have been giving it a valiant effort but…” her voice trailed off and she tsked, watching the monitor through yet another horrendous contraction.

“Okay,” I whispered.

She squeezed my hand. “Again, I really think it’s for the best at this point.”

I knew enough from reading all the natural pregnancy materials I had that the Epidural and Petocin were evil twin temptations created by Big Pharma and pushed by misogynistic OB-GYNs at vulnerable women in labor. I read Mothering Magazine plus a good deal of the back issues: I was no fool. These drugs were an almost guaranteed fast-track to a Caesarian section. Still, so many of fantasies of a natural delivery had already been shattered by that point that I consented without much regret. It was now approximately forty-eight hours after I’d begun getting contractions. In short order, a friendly man with thick black hair and a Middle Eastern accent came in and gave me a shot on the base of my spine, if I recall correctly. He talked admiringly about how I had not gained too much weight (“It makes pregnancy so much harder”) and within minutes, I had a pleasantly melting feeling throughout my body. I slept for the first time for more than an hour in more than two days. John sacked out in one chair, Prem in the other. When I woke again, two or three hours later, another examination was underway.

Hillary was there again with a nurse. After giving this labor the best everyone had, I was at a measly four-and-a-half centimeters and the heartbeat in my womb was still erratic. Hillary left to consult with Gayle and a hospital OB-GYN; the nurse stayed behind and adjusted things around my bed. I was numb in every way possible. The nurse looked like she wanted to say something, then stopped herself. Finally said to me, in the most compassionate way possible, “You know, you’ve done everything possible. You don’t have to prove that you can do this. You’ve already proven you can. It doesn’t work for some people. It’s not your fault. Sometimes that’s just the way it is.”

For me, this was the first real moment of relief I’d had since labor started. Somebody was finally giving me permission to raise the white flag, to say uncle. Instead of my labor being a beautiful extension of my healthy, blessed pregnancy, it had jumped my poor starry-eyed, delusional self in an alley and worked me the hell over. I had started, oh, at about hour forty-three, to see labor as something that was both outside and inside of me, like a demonic possession. Labor reveals astonishing facets of our character: strength we didn’t know we had, courage, incredible resilience, a guttural intensity. With me, my labor revealed that I really don’t like to be a quitter. With the nurse’s acknowledgment of my effort, I felt that it was now outside of my hands. I could get off the natural birth platform I’d placed myself on and finally accept the actual cards I’d been dealt. Maybe if I’d been in Tennessee at Ina Mae Gaskin’s farm, she could’ve coaxed this baby out of me, luring him by humming Appalachian birthing songs and rubbing poultices of local herbs and moss over my uncooperative belly, but I wasn’t in Tennessee: I was in an urban hospital, and we all gave it our best shot.

About an hour later, I was wheeled into the operating room with John at my side. Hillary was there, as was the kindly nurse and very, very nice man who administered and managed my drug levels, who I’d come to know as The Magic Man. From that vantage point, looking up at them from the gurney, I felt a little like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. After what felt like a short time of tugging behind a curtain separating us, the surgeon said, “Ah. I see why this baby couldn’t be born. You have a very short umbilical cord. I’ve seen short ones before, but this is like six-inches long. The shortest I've ever seen. Wow.” And then, moments later, she held up my baby, a red-faced, wet little sea creature. “It’s a boy,” she announced, and the group smiled, John and I gasping. He was immediately whisked away before I could say anything so the nurse could suction the meconium away from his mouth – I came to learn in a very personal way that meconium can be dangerous to aspirate into the lungs - and The Magic Man said for the first time something I would come to hear many times down the road. “He looks just like you!” It was all very surreal.

We could hear my baby – my baby!? - screaming from somewhere nearby, perhaps the next room, demanding to be heard in no uncertain terms. Moments after birth, he was kicking ass and taking down names.

We obviously shared more than just a physical likeness. This was my child of temperament, too.

End of Part One. Yeah, you read that right: Part One. To be continued…

Driving the devil off of Whipple Street...

Back in the days before we set up shop in the quaint, tree-lined community where we now reside, John and I (and, for a time, the newborn-to-toddler version of our child) lived in a neighborhood called Humboldt Park, its stark opposite, on the near west side of Chicago. We came to live in Humboldt Park when the apartment we had been living in started to get on our nerves for reasons that are no longer burnished upon my memory, the landlord of the new apartment we quite nearly signed a lease on decided, apparently on a whim, to go condo (surprise!), and we had approximately two weeks in Chicago’s frosty early December in which to find a new residence for our bed, John’s art supplies and my big pile of books. I remember I was sitting on the couch on my day off, little cartoon swirls of desperation zipping around my head, when the classified ad for our future apartment leaped out at me from the Chicago Reader. (This was before the Internet, a time that seems deceptively naive and sepia-toned today, like a Victorian-era film reel.) The ad described a huge, turn-of-the-century (I believe the descriptive word was “vintage”) apartment with incredible craftsmanship near a park. The rent was on the low end of reasonable. ”You’ll have to see it to believe it,” the ad teased. My head dizzy with anticipation and my blood surging with the kind of competitive spirit unique to urban dwellers circling in on an apartment, I drew a cartoon heart around it with my red Flair pen, jumped up and ran to the phone, tripping over our dog and burbling out apologies. The realtor answered on the first ring and we set up an appointment to meet that night at the building.

I immediately called John and breathlessly told him of this possible bonanza. He, while hopeful, asked for the address, being much more pragmatic than I am in such matters. It hadn’t even occurred to me to factor its location into my enthusiasm. While we had some sentimental attachment to our neighborhood – it was, in fact, where we’d fallen off our barstools and in love –it was well on its way toward an all-points-bulletin yuppie invasion, something that John and I had a role in creating, too, no doubt, but couldn’t abide much more. I was tired of all the insufferable art majors (having once been one myself, I know of whence I speak) brooding in what had been my favorite café, the pervasive bar culture, and the countless Urge Overkill-esque bands practicing in seemingly every other living room were working my nerves. Plus every block seemed to have it’s own crackhead or schizophrenic: on Crystal, ours would literally pull out a plastic lawn chair each evening and shriek at pigeons and pedestrians and passing clouds with her caterwauling voice deep into the night. Long after we’d gone to bed, she would keep me awake, screaming a seemingly endless stream of invective – her superpower appeared to be that she did not require breath - with her terrifying voice ricocheting against the houses like a skittering bowling pin. Come to think of it, maybe this was why we were annoyed with our apartment. Was it really so outlandish to consider something new, at least a fresh crackhead with a less familiar bag of tricks?

We had been planning to stay in the neighborhood but the new address was west of it by a couple of miles. I was unbothered by this. When John said, “You know that’s in Humboldt Park, right?” though, that did make me blanch a little. Humboldt Park was notorious in Chicago for gangs, especially at that time. I also had the misfortune of having ridden my bike once through its fabled park, designed by the famous landscape architect Jens Jenson but then in a serious state of decay, on an ill-considered summer afternoon jaunt. It was a white-knuckle ride, dodging whiskey bottles and syringes the whole way, not to mention all the glassy-eyed men who shouted offers at me from the path, apparently under the impression that I was one of those newfangled bicycling prostitutes. By the time I got home, just a ten-minute bike ride away but seemingly in a whole different galaxy, the crazy lady of Crystal was dragging out her lawn chair and she may as well have been Santa Claus, I was so giddy to see her again. She called me a whore and accused me of stealing her mail, but still…

Okay, I told John, so I would avoid the park. Every neighborhood has its little “thing,” right? A no man’s land you will go out of your way to avoid, whether it’s that block littered with all the hipster bars or a sprawling, turn-of-the-century park littered with drug paraphernalia? It was not so hard to avoid once one understood the parameters. The gangs? Well, I said, we’d just have to decide where to put our allegiance. My money was on the Maniac Latin Disciples for obvious reasons.

We met the realtor the night I saw the ad. As we pulled up to the house, a proud and stately brownstone, she was standing by the front steps. I remember that the realtor had blonde hair and that she was very friendly but not much more about her. The building was a three-flat, massive but with just three apartments running the whole length, one in the basement, one on the first floor and one on the second floor, which was the one that was unoccupied. As we walked up the steps, I was already bewitched. I’ve always loved old buildings, and this one was perfectly Addams Family-esque. As we started up the stairs, I fantasized straightening my hair, putting on a black dress and tossing withering bon mots at my personal Gomez. (Indeed, a couple of years later, we would adopt a tradition of “haunting” this particular stairway for the neighborhood children, the street smart, prematurely hardened little guys who couldn’t help clutching one another with a thrilling little apprehension and squealing with delight at the unexpected embellishments in our Stairway To Hell.) By the time we took the little turn up the steps and I saw the dark-stained oak door with the brass lion’s head knocker, exactly like the one that stuck with me all those years from the old black-and-white Alastair Sims version of A Christmas Carol, I was definitely a goner. As someone who loves old movies as much as romantically spooky old buildings, I was intoxicated from the start. I might have even signed the lease on the apartment sight unseen just based on that stairwell. Once the realtor opened the door to the apartment, though, it was clear that the stairs were just a teaser.

John and I stared, unabashedly astonished and gasping, as we happened upon one incredible feature after the next: the high ceilings, the sweeping balcony, the opulent built-in dining room cabinet, the colossal claw-foot bathtub, and, most impressive, the intricate parquet floors with geometric patterns that belonged to a patient, diligent craftsmanship of a different time. (In fact, John would spend a lot of time painstakingly gluing those many little pieces back together when his foot would sink through a soft spot while roughhousing with the dogs. While the floor was beautiful, it was just a very fragile and thin platform, all rotted out underneath. We didn’t know this at the time, and, frankly, we wouldn’t have cared.)

I started packing when we got home that night and we signed the lease the next day. While we were going over the paperwork, the realtor happily prattled on about the house. The landlord lived with his family in Minneapolis. The last tenant in that apartment was a dentist who broke his lease and suddenly moved out – she was fuzzy on the details, but there was some sort of disagreement with the tenants on the first floor that had turned ugly. The tenant on the first floor with whom he had his disagreement was kicked out after gluing toothpicks in the dentist’s locks. The house was peaceful now, with a “really cool girl named Vanessa” in the basement, a “musician dude named Mono” on the first floor, and a property manager named Bob, a friend of the landlord, maintaining the building.

We moved on an ominously overcast, rainy December morning – to me, ever the doom-and-gloom enthusiast back then, it was perfectly invigorating - with just a couple friends and a random guy who offered his moving services on the street. The move itself was unremarkable and relatively easy, other than that little turn in the steps, and we immediately settled in. That night, I took my first bath in the deep claw-foot tub, filled up to my chin in luxurious, scented water, and I savored the peacefulness of the quiet, blue-tiled bathroom as the faucet dripped every so often and echoed. There were no amplified guitars shrieking from every direction, no drunken hipsters stumbling down the block, no crazy ladies wailing at the moon. Yes, I heard the occasional sharp popping sound from outside – firecrackers in the winter? I wondered – but still, it felt serene and right to be there. I was grown up. Those self-conscious wannabes back in the old neighborhood could have their drink specials and open mics, I smirked to myself. I had something real.

There are so many stories to tell about our time in Humboldt Park, so many that this will be a regular feature of my little blog here. Though I’m not sure how to spin it from the feminist or vegan angle, it was certainly formative to me, and through living there, this or that conviction became deepened, was transformed, abandoned. At the very least, there are some incredible stories and characters. It will be five years in July that we left that neighborhood for one with a good school district and enough proud little Boston terriers to warm each and every lap. When we left Humboldt Park, we were certainly ready but it still hadn’t worn out its welcome. For someone who loves collecting and telling stories, it was the perfect place to reside. Once or twice a month, my brother would call and demand fresh stories from Humboldt Park: people John encountered on dog walks, random and hilarious conversations I’d overheard, the latest vehicular mishaps along the boulevard. I was happy to supply these stories, committing them to my internal file as they occurred. And now I'll share them here.

All the good stories originated with the house itself, of course.

There was Bob, the twitchy, accident prone, malevolent but pathetically ineffectual troll who managed the property, which he interpreted to mean that he would do the least possible whenever he couldn’t avoid ducking all responsibility. There was Vanessa, the basement dweller, a blonde, eternally grinning but deceptively multifaceted Deadhead with the beloved VW bus she covered with swirly paintings like bandages on every last scratch. And there was Mono for a short time, a hip-hop fan who was fond of late night parties but otherwise mellow. When John mentioned to him that there were feral cats living in his car in the garage, he just sort of grimaced and shrugged. These were the people in the house we started with, but it went through many incarnations of new residents as such buildings do. When I think back to our early days in Humboldt Park, this is the house I remember. Those were the halcyon days.

Outside of our house, there was the schizophrenic Polish cleaning lady who would apparently silence the voices in her head long enough for work and then wander the streets on her way home, shrieking animatedly and unintelligibly at anyone who happened to be on her path. There was Cowboy Bob and his bird-like, squawking wife, holdovers from when the neighborhood attracted Appalachian factory workers in the 1950s and 1960s, and their very shell-shocked, in-need-of-a-doggy-Valium-and-country-sojourn tan shepherd mix. There was the man John befriended he called Squeaky, another transplanted Appalachian with the barest whistle of a voice (lung cancer, we came to learn, robbed him of his vocal chords, which made my husband feel terribly guilty about the nickname he’d affixed to him) who told John the story of his life shortly before he moved to live with his daughter in Tennessee. There was the friendly Puerto Rican guy who lived in the building on the corner, recently released from prison, crashing at his sister’s place and eternally in need of a break. There was the world’s most jovial crossing guard, who presided over the corner at Armitage and Humboldt Boulevard with smiles and laughter every school day. There was the guy who sang from his apartment window each and every time he saw John walking our two hound dogs, imitating Elvis’ baritone as he warbled “Hound Dog” as though John hadn’t heard him do this hundreds of times. There was the guy who lived in the halfway – halfway from and to where, I wondered – house down the street, who was fixated on our basset hound and the TV show, The Dukes of Hazzard, recapping various episodes without punctuation as apparently Buster resembled one of the stars. There was the neighborhood prostitute who propositioned John one early winter morning as he was walking with two dogs and a plastic newspaper bag of their waste. There were the countless other prostitutes, the bangers, the children who would bring us stray animals, the people who would argue loudly on their fire escapes, the shopkeepers, the nervous new building owners, the families who had lived in the same house for generations, the white dudes from Lincoln Park looking for heroin. There are so many stories to tell.

Today I’m going to tell a little story I was reminded of the other day, when my son and I were bicycling down Augusta and we heard someone yelling into a megaphone. “What’s going on?’ my son wondered and I started laughing. Hearing that voice shouting into the megaphone, I was transported in an instant to a late summer afternoon in Humboldt Park.

That day, John and I were returning from somewhere and as soon as we pulled into our alley, we could hear someone shouting into a megaphone and a chorus of other voices, also rising above the usual din of garbled ice cream truck recordings, elote vendors and car alarms. Ever in search of an interesting story, we followed the voices to Whipple.

Chicago is unique in that neighborhoods can and will change abruptly from block to block. One block is well maintained and placid, children are playing in the front yards, and on the next block, inexplicably and suddenly, everything changes. It’s like you went through some sort of invisible transformer machine that changed everything in a split-second. In that split-second, garbage streams and blows out onto the street, liquor bottles line the gutters, windows are covered with spray paint-tagged plywood, the cars are up on cinderblocks for weeks at a time, the residents are either strung out or very, very wary. Interestingly, this usually just remains contained on this block, with little spillover. The 1900 block of north Whipple, exactly one block west of us, was this block, what I referred to as “ no man’s land” and where John had once been asked by a kid on a bicycle if he knew in which house he could buy “some rock.” Whipple, a word with positive associations to me because it was the same as the name of that adorable man in those commercials when I was a child who implored that grocery shoppers please not squeeze the Charmin, was to be avoided at all costs.

John and I turned the corner onto Whipple and there was a small group of people clustered together, maybe fifteen to twenty, under a tree. A man in a suit was standing in the middle, and his was the voice on the megaphone. John and I stood a little outside the group, taking it in, when someone passed us flyers in Spanish.

“We are gathered today to drive the devil off of Whipple Street,” the man shouted unnecessarily into the megaphone – as a seasoned activist, I wanted to tell him that while I understood the temptation, you just need to talk into one of those devises as it amplifies one’s voice sufficiently and if you shout, it distorts – and the group gathered around him cheered and prayed aloud in response.

“All you prostitutes and you drug dealers, all you junkies and you gang-bangers, you need to get off of Whipple Street,” he thundered to the crowd’s delight. “You need to go! Leave! Good, hard-working Christian families live here. We’re not asking you, we’re telling you. We are here to do God’s work, and we’re here to tell you to leave now.” The crowd cheered. “Now!” he screamed, punching an impassioned fist into the air, the megaphone emitting a piercing tone. The assembled shouted, “Yes!” and “Leave now!” The man with the megaphone repeated what he’d said in Spanish and then the crowd walked about twenty feet and repeated the same speech. And then again and again. Our curiosity satisfactorily sated, John and I walked home.

Going through the back yard, which was about a three times the size of an average Chicago lot, a relative country estate, we immediately noticed that our landlord was having a garden party. At this time of our residence, we had a new landlord, Christine, a tall, single woman in her forties with three dogs and a cat, who was a judge downtown, determining whether people could continue receiving disability compensation or not. The house on Humboldt Boulevard was the first home Christine owned, and through living there, she discovered that she had a love of gardening and a very green thumb. In the spring and summer, the yard was ripe-to-bursting with roses and peonies and bunches of tulips, not to mention all the flowering bushes, herbs and tomatoes our dog would pick off the vine. Christine took great pride in the yard and it was a far cry from the wide stretch of three-foot-high thistles and weeds it had been when we first moved in, the one Vanessa valiantly tried to single-handedly tackle with her little clippers. Christine finessed it into the sort of yard usually only found in the suburbs or the wealthiest neighborhoods of Chicago.

That day, though, as I said, Christine was having a garden party. The guests were sitting around in her nice lawn chairs and eating appetizers off little plates on their laps, sipping wine, as we walked through the back gate. Christine, while earthy and warm in a Waspish sort of way, had many lawyer friends from work who were clearly most at home in a very controlled, predictable setting. Going to a party in the city, especially in this part of the city, was a rare occurrence and a test of mettle in and of itself. Her guests were invariably well-dressed and made polite, restrained conversation. When I think of Christine’s parties, I think of people sitting in a circle and talking about their jobs, current events, movies they’d recently seen, all in a way that seemed very subdued, at least compared to my raucous friends. So they were sitting in a circle of lawn chairs, surrounded by Christine’s lush garden, having a conversation their taxes and it would be easy to imagine that they were on a country estate in Connecticut or wherever it is that people gather in gardens and have polite conversation. Except for that thundering voice on the megaphone calling out the various sinners on Whipple Street, that is.

“Well, when I got my property tax –“

“All you prostitutes and drug dealers! - ”

“ – bill, I did a double-take. I couldn’t believe it.”

“I know what you mean,” the woman in a lavender dress chimed in. “Me, too.”

“You need to go! Leave!…” the amplified voice shouted over everyone.

The conversation at the garden party hit a lull as the voice on the megaphone hit its stride again, something I suspected they had been through at least a few times by now. The guests looked at one another uncomfortably, sheepish smiles all around and they looked up as John and I passed.

“They’re driving the devil off of Whipple Street,” I said by way of explanation.

“What’s that?” Christine asked, her head cocked, canapés in a plate on her lap.

“There’s some sort of ministry, and they’re driving the devil off of Whipple Street,” I said, pointing west. “You know, like, so it’s less evil.”

“Oh!” Christine said, her eyes bright. She turned to her guests as if they were small, uncomprehending children. “They’re just driving the devil off of Whipple Street. That’s what you’re hearing.”

The guests listened to the voice again, railing against the prostitutes and gang-bangers, the assembled crowd a block away whooping and hollering, and they nodded in recognition, as if this suddenly made sense.

“Well,” the woman in the lavender dress said after taking a sip of wine, speaking aloud for the group, “that’s a good thing, I guess.”

The party continued and the conversation was slightly less stilted now that some sense had finally been made of that voice on the megaphone.

On days like this, thank god for iPods...

Today, you are having one of those days. It doesn't seem possible to turn it around.

One of "those days" started out with another insomnia-plagued night in a seemingly endless string of them. You woke up late, too late for your son's piano class with the teacher who you think is marvelous despite your sinking suspicion that she regards you as a hopeless ditz. You aren't hopeless. You do have hope, though whether it's warranted or not remains to be seen. Your son cheers a bit too vigorously at hearing that piano class is cancelled for the morning, which makes your itchy, tired eyes feel like they could pop and - plink! - roll out of your head like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Your child may not grow up to be a soloist at Carnegie Hall, may not even grow up to be able to play Chopsticks on that scuzzy piano at the bar with the boarded up windows and the Schlitz sign on Division Street, and it'll be your fault. It is your fault in that your body seems to not be able to successfully accomplish the basic function of sleep.

The day just gets worse as days like this do.

Bad news. Disappointments. Your spam filter is powerless against Viagra and easily distracted by the promise of an enlarged penis. Your spam filter is apparently a 20-something party boy in the Castro. You try to write but your sentences are clunky, your ideas are a-dime-a-dozen and you are a fraud about to be outed. At dinner you learn that the boy your son loves in kindergarten more than anyone else told him that he loves only one person in his class and it isn't your son. Your son tells you this in a matter-of-fact manner but a part of you wants to crumble into tears at hearing this story of unrequited six-year-old love and then you know that it's time for a walk.

Your husband has filled your iPod with twenty more songs today, music he has heard and knows you will love, music you don't know because you're cloistered alone with your little writing mind during the day. He knows what you like, though, better than anyone but you. Are you that predictable? Yes, you think as you slip on your shoes. Your son is balking at helping with the dishes as you head out the door.

At first you observe with clenched teeth that your husband didn't organize the songs right as they are all shuffled with the ones you already had, but that first song was pretty cool. And the next one. You start to notice the daffodils. When your son was three, he called them daffodilos and when you corrected him one day, he said, "But I like to call them daffodilos." This makes you smile to remember.

Regina Spektor is finally on your iPod. The sound of her trilling voice, all bop bop bop bop ba dop makes you happy. Oh, your husband is a good man.

You see robins, all puffed up and proud, hopping along the grass, rolled out in front of them like a green carpet. Cardinals dart by, squirrels corkscrew up the oak trees, chasing one another. It's like all the little creatures got a memo on amplifying up the cuteness quotient. No room for the lethargic or self-pitying here.

There's a sapphic version of "Shenandoah" on your iPod now, and a new version of an old Cure song ("Pictures Of You") and June Carter Cash, singing in her senior years about the ring of fire around her and her Johnny. It's all women singing, but it's not Lilith Fairy, thank goodness, and it's actually all perfect. The new songs are sentimental at times, full of bravado at others, weepy when appropriate, confident and proud always, and this music matches your need just right. You walk through the town and you think to yourself that it's not all bad, or at least that which is bad is temporary.

When you come back home and take off your iPod, your son has still not begun the dishes but it's okay. You draw with him for a few minutes then he skips off to wash the dishes. Your perspective has returned. Life is bearable again. You hug your husband. Somehow he just knew.

Shalom, everyone.

An inspiration...

Sitting about two feet from me while I work is my grandmother’s photo. The photo is taped to the piece of foam board that is propped up behind the computer, blocking the most intense rays from our sunroom window and from this spot, I check on my grandmother every day and she smiles warmly back at me. She is wearing a loose grey sweater, seated in a park somewhere on an iron patio chair, her cinnamon hair bouffant-y and red lipstick applied. She was probably in her seventies when this picture was taken, I would guess, which would put her in Houston, where my grandmother moved for a time to be closer to my aunt, her daughter.

Like many who write, I sometimes need to turn elsewhere for inspiration, for courage, for reinforcement that I am not just an fraud. (Of course, I am more than just a fraud: I’m also irresponsible, naïve, a dreamer…) In the midst of a let’s-hope-this-is-brief case of writer’s block or fitful existential crisis, I turn to my grandmother, or at least the complex chemical reaction that allowed her image to be imprinted on film, for a feeling of relief. I also have meaningful quotations up on that foam board meant to lift my spirits copied down in a pique of passion, but I ignore them. My grandmother is usually all I need.

Grandma is probably the most comforting word to me in the vast universe of the English language, a strange one for a person who works with words to choose, but it instantly fills me with the feeling of peace that meditation is supposed to (doesn’t), that chamomile tea claims to (fails). I think of the essence of my grandmother – her sing-song voice, her easy smile, her ability to make those around her feel nurtured, happier, appreciated – and it helps to make what Holly Golightly referred to as the “Mean Reds” within me dissolve, those feelings of freeform anxiety, of biting sarcasm. Interestingly, if you mention my grandmother’s name to anyone who knew her, the memory of her has the same effect: the person will reflexively smile, relax, share stories of her warmly. She made those around her feel better in an instant. What is the word for this gift? Does anyone know?

I have looked at her photo many times in the past, wishing she were here, wanting to smell her cold cream again (she swore by it and did remain unwrinkled for the most part), to touch the soft skin on her arm, squeeze her hand, wishing to transport her over whatever it is that separates us – layers of time and space and realms of existence - to be here now with me. I have done this, felt this way, many times, even before she physically passed, when she began pulling away from us, drifting off on the waves of memory loss and dementia. It was like I had to say goodbye to her twice: once, when I came to accept that she was not the same grandmother I’d always known (this new person couldn’t remember names, she became easily impatient and irritable) and then again when she passed away, about ten years later. A strange – or maybe not strange – thing happened to her as her dementia began to take root, though. Although she was initially quite upset with herself for being forgetful, for her diminished capacities, once my grandmother found a place of acceptance or she simply couldn’t fight it any more, she returned to being the person I knew, at least temperamentally: she flirted with my husband whenever we visited (I’m pretty sure she didn’t remember him in between visits), she lit up whatever room she was in, she was the most popular one on her floor of the nursing home. The workers who would come in to dance the Charleston with the seniors, to sing ragtime songs with them, always ended up being bewitched with the coquettish lady in the front row, so put together, always engaged and deeply alive.

My grandmother was aware of the ways in which she fell short of society’s beauty standards (a long, bumpy nose, a voluptuousness that would not be restrained) but she also knew that these things were not her: she was bigger than any of that superficial silliness, and, even better, she dared to be proud of what made her different. She held her head high and taught me to do the same. My grandmother was confident to her very core and that, mixed with her compassion and unstoppable joie de vivre, was what made her so delicious and intoxicating to be near. If someone felt stifled by her radiance, well, that wasn’t her fault. (Personifying Marianne Williamson’s potent, vitally important prose: “We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?…Your playing small does not serve the world.”)

She was a proto-feminist naturally, without any graduate level gender politics classes or hours building an airtight critical theory. My grandmother let her voice be heard; she would take a back seat to nobody. At the same time, she internalized this self-assurance so essentially that she was always good-natured about it. She simply believed in herself and didn’t begrudge anyone else doing the same thing.

It’s easy to see that I idealize my grandmother. I’m sure that there was someone, sometime that she slighted, maybe more than once. I’m sure that there was an occasion when she didn’t really listen, when she was short tempered, when she was judgmental. She may have raised her voice once or twice and maybe she had moments of pettiness. There may have been someone she disliked for no good reason. I know this. Maybe it’s because I know my grandmother was fallible and flawed, essentially human, that she still has such a powerful pull to me. She chose to audaciously embrace life, make no apologies for it, and be the best person she could be.

I’m grateful to my grandmother for many things – for her rollicking sense of humor, for being there when I felt horribly alone, for teaching me what was important in life – but mostly I am grateful to have loved and been loved by such a marvelous being. She will always be my inspiration. I hope everyone has a Grandma Dora in her life.

Shalom, everyone.