We found out a few days ago that Sonny passed his comps, making him officially *almost* ABD. Next up, orals. Then he puts together his prospectus, gets it approved (of course!), then we head down to Mexico so he can do his fieldwork. Meanwhile, he was accepted with a full scholarship/fellowship to study Zapotec in Juchitan, Oaxaca this summer, and there's enough money for me to go too. What a life. I tell you. We'll spend six weeks down there beginning July 1.

Plus, I'm almost done with my project. Phew. We fly out to LA next week. I can't wait!

I intend to start blogging again after next week. I'm thinking about moving the site to my .mac space because, well, I'm already paying for it and it includes nearly 1G of space, and Salon has stopped supporting its blog community (no new blogs, no clear link on their front page). But who the hell knows!!

I've got a couple of photos I'll post later and a billion ideas running through my mind. I just wanted to give our handful of cyber friends the good news. Yippee!

I'm sleeping better now that I'm in our basement, and perhaps it's the snow that gently drapes across the city now that helps too. I have our house to myself for a few days while we wait for the insulation to come in (we're using recycled denim insulation from Arizona), a welcome break from the last few days of constant ceiling activity. The contractors are great (how many people have ever said that?) but it's still hard to have people who need attention in the house day after day.

S and I have talked a few times the past week. Not today, but that's because he's back at his backward base at the craggly edge of Pakistan, the base that just two days ago began to have running water again. We talked about our marriage and our relationship, in part because of something I wrote to him about. I didn't share it here; it was too painful, the entire experience, and too personal. This painful experience I haven't written about was prompted, in part, by something I wrote on this blog. The entire experience made me think of the destructive potential of this chronicling of my life, and it made me nervous -- could I inadvertently destroy everything that I care about with my writing? That question scares me, in large part because I don't have the answer.

I think of blogs differently than I do of books. My blog attracts friends, of course (and some of you I've never met in person though we're still friends), but more often my readers are stumblers, people who had no intention of ending up here. If they stay around, sometimes it is because they share a kinship with me, but sometimes it's because they are voyeurs who come for a week or so then disappear back into the cyber ether. It's scary sometimes to think of it that way, how what I write here may be read by someone who doesn't care at all about me or S or anyone or anything I care about, and in fact might hate all that I love. Books are different than this, I think, because they involve a commitment, a pact, from the moment you put out the cash to buy them. If that commitment, that pact doesn't work out in the first hundred pages, the book is put down and forgotten, but the intimacy remains because something drove you to buy it in the first place. It wasn't just random google-chance. I think if I were to write a book about this year I would write about all of it, even what I've held back from sharing here because of the intimacy a book offers.

Yet still I write. And still here.

Today Zach posted about what he's done in Iraq, the regret he feels and whether anyone can be proud of him. His post made me think of the heaviness of what it really means to own your actions, the good and the bad, and how regret is part of the deal as soon as we are forced into the world as a tiny, bloody mess. It made me think, too, of how destructive the entire idea of "pride" is, and how false. How many lives have been lost from that one idea? It's heartbreaking to consider.

Last night I had the JOT workshop again, and a writer I'd never met who is battling cancer came for the first time in months. He shared this incredible short story about a pilot forced to land on top of a mountain because of his own mistake. He'd failed to check the plane over before taking off, so when several fuses were blown causing him to make an emergency landing, his first thought was how he'd have to record "pilot error" in the log book. The pilot managed to fix the plane himself and fly back home, only to fall asleep and dream of landing on a mountain top. It was seeped in a quiet sadness, this story of regret. Since the ultimate disaster was averted, it was also a story of how we can save ourselves sometimes, even when we're the reason we've ended up on the mountain top to begin with, and even if what we've done continues to haunt us in our dreams.

I've just started reading Salvador Placencia's The People of Paper, a novel that's being promoted as "magic realism" though it seems more like "mythic realism" to me with its story of an adult bedwetter yearning to free himself from the pain in his heart and his young daughter who eats limes whenever she can. I'm only 40 pages into it and already there is regret, for that is the one constant on this crazy journey, I guess. I suppose some people never feel regret. Some people are sociopaths who feel nothing for anyone but themselves. Others are so hardened against regret they feel nothing at all. Some people are so overwhelmed by their regret they destroy themselves because that's the only way they can rid themselves of it. I think most of us worry about the shards of glass we leave around us.

I wonder if it is regret that makes us feel more tired as we grow older, and why we sleep less. There is so much more to rework in our minds in those early morning hours, actions and conversations and emails to rewrite after the fact, impossible as that is.

When I read Zach's post about regret I thought about one of Thich Nhat Hanh's lectures on time, about how the present is made of the past just as the future is made of the present. He lectured that the past can be corrected by the present moment, which I took to mean that our actions today can make up for what we've done in the past. If we pay attention to the present moment, Hanh argues, we not only take care of today but also yesterday and tomorrow. I wonder if that is the way to work regret out of our dreams, to get off the mountain top for good.

Sound is like water. It will seep through any opening and find its way into a room unless it's stopped or "decoupled". This is why when they replace my ceiling they have to seal the edges with soft, plyable caulk, and why the walls and the ceiling can't touch. If they do, the sound will simply travel through the walls and enter into the room, no matter how many sound clips they've used to separate the ceiling from the joists. It's a delicate job, this soundproofing. If it's not done correctly the entire enterprise will fail.

I feel like that painful experience, the one that went from blog to email to regret so quickly, was like sound traveling through a floor and hitting the joists then the ceiling and the walls. It seeped through and affected not just my relationship with S but also my relationship with my mother, and when she and I had our argument over it all last Sunday (which we made up quickly because we can actually see each other, unlike the days of emails it took with S since we haven't seen each other in months, again), I desperately wanted to be alone and away from everything. I had this overwhelming desire to flee and be quiet, but since my house has been far from peaceful the past four months, I felt like I had nowhere to go. I went to the zen temple for their afternoon service, something I hadn't done for over a year. It's more of a 'beginners' service, with chairs instead of cushions and a question and answer session afterwards instead of a lecture. It's already dark at 4 now, especially when the sky is muffled with cloud cover as it was last weekend. I went up to the main room and it was cold and lightless and the cushions were still out from the morning service. There was only one other person there, a woman seated on a cushion in the back. I sat on one of the cushions across from her and after about ten minutes I realized that there would be no service at all. The woman left and I sat there in the dark and the cold and the quiet and I meditated for about a half hour, then I got up and walked around the room in an attempt at walking meditation, following the contours of the room around the cushions and the chairs and in front of the giant gold Buddha statues. When I worked around the room twice, I stopped in the back and did three prostrations, perhaps because I felt like I had to do some kind of penance, or perhaps because I needed to do more than sit and walk. After the three prostrations I left, the room still dark, still cold, still quiet.

I know we can't escape what we've done. We can't flee regret. But maybe Hanh is right, and the pilot in the story too. Maybe we can correct our own mistakes and therefore change the past, and the future, for the better.

It's unseasonably warm today, with the sun shining bright and the air not crisp or cold at all but rather sweet and breezy, a mid-May day, perhaps, but not a late November one. Tonight it's supposed to drop 40 degrees, which may sound impossible if you've never been to Chicago where the weather can turn from tropical to arctic with a wind change. I've had an excellent mail day: the check from NPR came, and an incredible postcard drawing from Doc. How lucky I am!

It's been days since I've written, in part because of the holiday (wasn't that fun!) but also because of my ongoing ceiling saga, soon to be remedied when my contractor tears apart the existing one tomorrow morning. My neighbor will not even let me buy her carpets, and so here we are. I am going to propose to the board that new rules and regulations are adopted that will force her to buy some of her own (and make her subject to fines if she continues to come home at 3, 4, 5 in the morning making a racket like she did again Saturday night), though meanwhile I will spend thousands to have my ceiling soundproofed as much as it can be, which admittedly isn't much because it really needs to happen on her end. Six years with no problems and now this. Got to love city living!

Pero basta. I've had it with the ceiling, the ceiling, the ceiling, as I'm sure everyone who knows me has too. Enough already!

Thanksgiving I spent at my mom's with two of our friends who own the gallery where my mother is represented. We had a traditional turkey, etc. meal and around dessert time my friends Molly and Eric came by with their darling son Etienne. It was so good to see them, to hear their stories. And Etienne! He's such a doll. Though he's only sixteen months he talks up a storm and can go up and down stairs on his own. On Saturday I saw them again. I took them to a couple of south side neighborhoods -- Pilsen and Bridgeport -- then we went to my friends' house for the most delicious sweet potato pie I've ever had (and that's the truth, Maria!). It was more fun than I've had in months.

S has been out of the bush for the past few days so we've talked on the phone several times. He had the hardest, most dangerous mission of his deployment: firefights, rockets, two of his soldiers nearly killed. I miss him so much and he's desperate to come home. We're down to just 80 more days. He's been living in extremely primitive conditions (no water, no electricity, etc.) that has only recently gotten better because of his and his partner's initiatives. They had the water pump repaired and purchased a new water heater (the old one held only 10 gallons). Right now he is back with the special forces for a few days, so he can email and call unlike at his new base. He's ready to be done with it all and I'm ready too. It will be great to have him home again.

The past couple of days I read "The Kite Runner" because too many people had told me I should. It's a compelling story, but it is way too contrived, and the writing is, frankly, rather pedestrian. Over and over I found myself rolling my eyes, letting out a heavy sigh because what came next was exactly what I had expected to come next and the telling of it was so plain. The book is not subtle. The emotions are placed right on the page, out in the open, requiring absolutely no work at all. No passages jumped out at me and held me for minutes, even longer, as passages in my favorite books do.

Several times the narrator talked about how his writing teachers admonished the use of cliches but how he liked them and therefore used them: "Here is another cliche my creative writing teacher would have scoffed at; like father, like son. But it was true, wasn't it?" Why even include such lines? Why not let us see through the action and beauty of the prose that yes, the father and son were similar, rather than telling it to us? And then why tell it to us in the frame of cliche?

I have no doubt "Kite Runner" will be made into a film and unless they hire a know-nothing director the film will be better than the book. Am I the only one who feels this way? I wonder because the book received excellent reviews and so far everyone I know who read it loved it.

Soy como un chile verde, llorona, picante pero sabroso, and that's just the way it is.

I purchased two excellent CDs this weekend: Chavela Vargas' "Sentimiento de Mexico" and Corey Harris' "Daily Bread." If I could, I'd sprinkle some of these beautiful songs right here on my blog so everyone could hear them.

So that's it. All caught up. I hope to get back in the frequent posting rhythm this week. More to come!

I've been fighting the mild depression these long, silent periods seem to bring me. That brief conversation with S on Saturday morning was not enough. He left his old base nearly three weeks ago now, and since then I've talked to him twice via sat phone ("the phone that talks to the moon," as the Afghans call it) and both conversations were not much more than short reportage: "I'm just calling to tell you I'm okay" and "I don't know when I'll be able to call you again," the mantras of separation.

I did get a wonderful surprise call today, though. One of my New Orleans neighbors, Eric Julien, called me this afternoon from the steps of the Shedd Aquarium down on the edge of Lake Michigan here in Chicago. He and his wife Molly Day and their darling son Etienne (pronounced the Haitian creole way, "Eh-shawn") moved to Chicago a little over a week ago. Since Katrina they have been nomads, floating across the country from relative's house to relative's house, friend's to friend's. Though our area of New Orleans didn't flood much, their house, the famous ghost house of Carondelet and Washington, was badly damaged by the winds. The roof blew completely off (did the ghosts finally escape?), and now the house is uninhabitable, though Eric said a couple of their neighbors are living there anyway, "basically camping out." Since he and Molly have a baby son, "camping out" was not an option, especially since no one knows when, or if, the city will resurrect.

Imagine having your entire life jumbled and tossed about, thrown out like dice on a craps table. And then think the same thing happened to 500,000 other people who used to be your neighbors. It's hard to comprehend the vastness of it all. New Orleans has become Pompeii; her people roaming, homeless nomads and my neighbors are nearly my neighbors again, but now in this shockingly different place. Here it is winter already. Even when it's bright, it's bitter. Tonight the temperature is supposed to drop even further, and tomorrow evening there may be snow. And it's only going to get colder in the months to come.

How sad Eric sounded. They lost about 50% of their things, if you don't count their way of life, their community, their home town. And their jobs. Both of them are now looking for something to tide them over while they squeak out a living as all of us restless artists are condemned to do. We're going to talk again tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be able to see them soon. They're living down in Hyde Park, though I don't know exactly where. I want to take them around and introduce them to everyone I know so they won't be alone. I want to help them get started here if I can.

This is a city of rough edges. I hope Chicago is kind to Eric and Molly and baby Etienne.

Apparently some families have found better places for their kids since fleeing Katrina and being washed out of New Orleans. The schools cheated them there. I know this because I met so many incredibly bright freshmen who had graduated unprepared for even basic introductory classes. They had been abandoned by a system that seemed designed to keep the basic social and political structures of the city in place, to keep it "authentic." I remember the first time I was told "this is all you can expect from these kids."It was my first semester teaching at Delgado Community College and I was in the copy room where I spent most of the first month of class xeroxing my own thrown together text book. (I couldn't bear the thought of teaching from our uninspired text book, so I put together my own with some of my favorite essays and poems I'd collected over the years. The beauty of no-code copy machines!) The teacher who said it was one of the full-timers, a tenured professor who the next semester would be my 'mentor.' I had to give her a stack of graded papers so she could review them and tell me whether or not I was grading correctly, even though I'd had to do the same thing my first semester there, and even though I had been awarded because so few of my students failed. I had one student my second semester, an artist with a mop of black hair and horn-rimmed glasses, who turned every essay into a short story. His essays were so smart, so funny, each punctuated with little snips of dialogue. Of course my "mentor" said his As were Fs and that the kid would fail the exit exam if she had anything to do with it. Well, he passed. She was wrong about a lot of things.

I only bought one piece of art down in New Orleans and that was one of Eric's Haiti photographs. His photographs are visions, not mere documents. My photo, "Temps," floats next to our bed and dances on our fuschia-red wall. It's beautiful. I remember Molly told me that to get pregnant she had kept a special sugar bowl next to her bed so the spirits would get enough sweetness and wouldn't want to taste hers. I always meant to ask her what kind of sugar, what kind of bowl. Now I'll be able to, though I wish I could ask her over a glass of wine in our leaky apartment on Washington Avenue instead of over coffee, perhaps, in this city of rough edges. I wish they hadn't had to go through these piled-on weeks of hardship, that everything was still as it was. But it's not. The roof's been blown off, and here they are in my blustery, brumal city.

Winter came suddenly yesterday and today it is 20 degrees or so, perhaps a little warmer in the sun. There are even a few snow flakes on the ground, nestled between gathers of curled-up, fallen leaves. The lake is the blue of lapis lazuli and the sky, the sky! Today it is clear and shining bright from that white winter sun.

I've spent the day reading and working on a few things and answering emails. Because of that little essay several friends who I hadn't heard from in a while wrote me. One wrote to apologize, fearing that she had said "at least he's not in Iraq" to me last fall, more evidence that I didn't write the essay quite the way I intended. How terrible that she would feel bad! I assure all of you, the half dozen who read this thing, that while I have heard this countless times this year I have never been insulted by it, but rather affirmed by the sentiment that Afghanistan really is our forgotten war. After all, I was relieved that he was going to Afghanistan when he was first called up. I had no idea it was so dangerous either.

I fear that sometimes I'm being misinterpreted and that makes me worry. I write to figure myself out, following the Socrates idea that "an unexamined life is not worth living." Even when something distresses me, I don't write about it to punish someone but rather to analyze my own reaction and my own thoughts on it all, and sometimes simply to discuss the larger issues my reaction and thoughts are related to (like how Afghanistan is our forgotten war). This was certainly the case when I wrote about "that question." Yes, I'd have rather not been asked it at all. But the sad truth is that I reacted to it strongly because I'm on an emotional teeter-totter since S left. It was my strong reaction that interested me most. Why had it thrown me off? What was most distressing about it, and what does that say about this unnatural separation we're going through? In theory at least this examination will make the next question easier to deal with because I've already looked inside a bit to see what sort of fall-leaf clutter I could clear away.

Unfortunately S is out in the bush (well, the mountains) and so he doesn't know the essay aired. I doubt he will for a week or two either because during our brief conversation on Saturday he said he'd be out of touch for at least a week and probably longer. His new base is seven kilometers from the Pakistan border, nestled in the mountains that dominate there.

It's odd not getting to share this news with him. He was the first person I wanted to tell and yet he will be the last person I'll be able to. I've sent him a dozen emails about it, though I know he can't access them and therefore can't read them. It's part of the deal, I know, but it's still odd.

I feel exhausted. The last few days have been busy. Just a couple of hours after I recorded the essay, I met with the JOT writing group at a library branch in Uptown while the wind blew the remaining leaves off the trees and scattered lake effect snow across the north side. We talked about constructive criticism and how to be respectful of each other because it's so damned hard to write. Then we looked at poems and an essay and talked about how to make them better. Afterwards I drove home, my car shifted this way and that by the wind. I cooked a simple omelette and some sauteed squash, onion, and tomato, and watched a completely silly movie, Batman Begins, and thought about what a crazy, wonderful day I'd had on our first day of winter. Then I nestled myself in our too-big-for-one-person bed and thought about S and how he left in winter and now here it is winter again. How I miss him.

There has been one nightmare this year, one that I've had more than once. The last time was Halloween night. It is the dream of S coming home only to leave me for another woman, a woman he met in Afghanistan or somewhere between here and there. A woman named Stephanie.

The puzzling thing about this dream is that S is not a cheater and he is never around women. Truly. Afghan women are shrouded from view, hidden in their bedrooms, herded through streets by their uncles and fathers and husbands. They are ghosts. And S is in a Ranger unit. Women are not allowed to go to Ranger school. He works with men exclusively. Lives with men, eats with men, runs missions with men. My subconscious worry is irrational, but then it is a subconscious worry. Still I wake up from this dream disturbed and angry, angry that S has put me through this at all.

One of the things that first attracted us to each other was our shared sense of true loyalty. It still transcends everything. We rarely argue. I've only slept on the couch a couple of nights the past six years and that was in our first year of marriage when he decided to become a Chicago police officer and he was actually going to do it. He'd passed all the exams, gone through the background check, been interviewed by a couple of detectives, neither who were half as smart as S. He was unhappy with his job as a chemical engineer. He was desperate for a change. We worked out with cops and federal agents and firefighters, and they filled both of us with stories about "the job" and how it offered security, financial stability, and "excitement." Because of his military training, he didn't see any other options for himself except law enforcement, so he first applied to the DEA and the FBI. He passed all of the written exams and physical tests for both agencies easily and quickly. He wanted the DEA position because it involved travel (even if that travel was to war-torn Colombia) and because he thought their agents were smarter, more down-to-earth than the FBI agents he'd met. And then he told the truth about his past drug use and he was nixed. Later, one of the agents we'd met told him that no one ever tells the truth, but it was too late. S didn't bother with the FBI because they seemed like an agency dead-set on having only the most mediocre agents they could find. Our karate instructor, a gang crimes specialist with the CPD, convinced S that he should become a Chicago cop instead, and so he applied.

I wasn't bothered by the idea of S becoming a federal agent. In fact it sort of excited me. I had this vision of joining him later and the two of us hunting down serial rapists or Medellin drug runners. I was a fighter then. I trained all the time. I was confident in my body and like other amateur athletes, I had fantasies of testing myself beyond hard training sessions and little bare-knuckle karate tournaments. I even went so far as to send in the preliminary FBI application, though as soon as I got a letter back from them I realized how ridiculous it all was, especially since I was in my final year of my MFA program (yes, MFA and FBI...insanity), so I threw it out and stopped thinking about it. But S was desperate for change. When he decided to apply for CPD, I thought it was a fine idea, though deep inside it worried me. I wanted to be supportive, so I was. At first.

I'd known more cops than S. I was part of the "inner circle" of my gym. As the first female student of my gang crimes specialist instructor to get a black belt, I was afforded certain privileges. The day after my black belt exam, a five-hour ordeal that included a weight-lifting warm-up, 500 squats, a couple hundred push-ups (and not "girl" push-ups, thank you), a zillion sit-ups and standing basics, breaking boards, 22 kata (including three weapons), and 30 rounds of sparring against men (10 rounds each of bare-knuckle, full-contact karate, muay thai, and grappling), my teacher brought me into his office, a cramped space wallpapered with polaroids of dead and busted gangsters and cops holding confiscated guns and rifles, a giant bucket full of shanks and improvised weapons right next to the door, and he told me I was now part of the "inner circle" and that anywhere I went in the world I had people I could call on. It was so "godfather" it made me chuckle, though I knew he was being serious. "Roll with the dogs long enough you're bound to get fleas," he used to tell me, and I knew it was true just by seeing this gang crimes specialist act so much like a gangster. Our Christmas dinners were held at a local red sauce Italian place whose owner was famous for his garage filled with Ferraris, and my teacher would sit at the end of a long table there and hand out gifts and blessings to all of us who were lucky enough to be there, all the time sucking on a genuine Havana cigar. He was a capital-letter Gangster.

After becoming part of this "inner circle" suddenly I was included in conversations, conversations that over the years included more and more stories of "the street." Cops love to tell stories. They exaggerate. They probably lie. The stories expand with each telling, become mythic and too large, though usually they are based on truth. Many of the stories I heard scared the crap out of me. There were stories of housing project "sweeps," invasions to ostensibly look for drugs and felons. There were stories of finding decapitated bodies and bodies so decomposed they had literally become one with the chairs and carpets. There was a story of finding a dead man on the thirteenth floor of a highrise at Stateway Gardens housing project, and since the man was large and the elevators were broken, they threw him out the window. The funny part, I was told, was that there was a tree and the body got stuck in the tree so these cops, cops I knew and trained with, had to call the fire department to come and get the body unstuck so they could put it in the paddy wagon for the long drive to the morgue.

I understand the need for gallows humor. I know it can cut through the horror, make it speakable, and often horrors need to be spoken of if only to get them out of our heads. But to me, the horror of this story was not the cops finding a dead man. These cops had found plenty. It was how disrespectful they had been of this dead man. They threw a man out a window as if he were a bag of garbage or moldy drywall. It made me nauseous with regret and left me with this gripping tingle in my stomach that I'd let myself become a part of something wicked and wrong, and that even if I enjoyed the workouts, even if I got a sort of high from teaching young women how to trust their bodies and defend themselves in dangerous situations, that all the good had been thrown out that Stateway Gardens window.

When I was told that story, I was working part-time at the Neighborhood Writing Alliance, the organization I would later direct and the one I am volunteering for now, and I was assisting two workshops in the vacinity of Stateway Gardens, one of the housing projects that lined State Street from 35th to 75th until the "transformation" of the past decade tore them all down. One of our workshops was held at a small library directly across the street from the highrises, the same highrises where that man lived, and I could see the bedraggled and half-dead trees that surrounded the buildings whenever I went to the workshop, and I could see the children who ran among them, circled them and climbed them. I knew women and men who lived at Stateway. I heard their stories of police abuse, of those "sweeps" and of cops pissing in their hallways, trashing their bedrooms, extorting money from their neighbors. And so when I was told that story of the man thrown out the window, I knew I could have known that man. He could have been a writer who stopped by the group or perhaps an audience member at one of our readings. He very well could have been the grandfather of one of the writers I knew, or an uncle to their kids. He was without a doubt their neighbor.

I couldn't get the image out of my mind, the image of that man in that tree and the dozens and dozens of children who lived there too, some of whom had to have seen that man in that tree, and their parents too, who also must have seen that man. I thought about what horror it must have been to witness this end-of-the-century lynching of a dead man. And I thought about how it was told with a "funny part."

There were stories about corruption floating around the city, as bands of crooked cops were caught on all sides of the city. One gang ran drugs from Nashville to the south side on their shifts. Another handcuffed west side residents while they robbed them, being so brazen as to do it all in uniform. Another gang stalked the immigrant bars in my neighborhood, shook down illegals for cash and then pooled the money for weekend gambling trips to Vegas. They managed that racket for a decade before the FBI finally caught them, and if I remember right, they only got caught because one of them told the story to the wrong person.

I was supportive of S changing careers. I knew he was miserable. I was even supportive of him becoming a cop, at least until he was about to get hired. Then suddenly I was scared to death that he would become a part of that world, turned into a capital-letter Gangster. It didn't seem escapable to me. Since he knew our teacher and he knew these other cops, how could he not end up working with them, and if he did, how could he not end up horribly tarnished and ruined by the experience? I talked to him about the hours and how crappy they were. I talked to him about the man in the tree and the corruption and how impossible it was to escape it, and how dangerous it was to try. He told me that he believed the only way to change something for the better was from the inside and that if more "good" people like him became cops the less corruption and wickedness there'd be. I told him that "good" people didn't stay good in that job. They got corrupted or they got out, or they got bored because the only jobs that didn't expose them to all that crap were the boring jobs. This was a couple of years before "Training Day," but I didn't need to point to a movie as an example. The examples were all around us. S just needed to see them.

When the projects started coming down, one cop I knew said they "weren't fun anymore," because now there were no more gun fights in the courtyards, no more sweeps and battles. I think my cynicism grew tenfold when he told me that. It was growing steadily while S was in the process of becoming a cop, and it grew so deep that I couldn't stand to sleep in the same bed as him anymore so I slept on the couch. Yes, I'd been supportive at first. Yes, it was a crazy turnabout to be against it, but it came out of this overwhelming fear of losing him and losing our nascient marriage. I didn't see us making it if he ended up throwing dead men out of windows, or even driving the bodies of those men to the morgue. He told me again and again how he'd "never do that" and I believed him, but I also knew that there would be times when he'd have no choice, when the job would demand that he abandon himself, and in doing, abandon me.

S decided not to become a cop. Perhaps because I slept on the couch, or perhaps because the thought of working with people like the cops we knew was just too much for him, or perhaps because he knew it would not be intellectually or spiritually fulfilling the way archaeology has become. For whatever reason, he chose to abandon the thought of that job instead of abandoning me and our marriage.

And so there it is. The crux of the nightmare. I'm not afraid of S abandoning me for "Stephanie." I'm afraid he will abandon me for the military. I feel this most accutely when I get an email from him like the one in Houston with the big gun, one that seems to be from a man I don't really know, a man who could be standing up in that window. I felt betrayed when he signed that contract a year and a half ago. I felt like he'd chosen his army buddies over me, because I knew he would get called up even if he was sure he wouldn't. I know he wishes upon wish now that he could go back in time and erase his signature from that contract. And I no longer feel betrayed, at least not during my waking life. Soon after he was called up, I decided that if I were to be angry at him over this, resent him, then we might as well not be married anymore. I decided our marriage was worth saving. I've only been in love twice in my life, and the first time was nothing like this. I know real love is rare and it's worth these months filled with worry and "Stephanie" nightmares. I know he won't abandon me for "Stephanie." It is just in those minutes before I wake up to the pitter-pat of my neighbor's footfalls, those minutes when I hover between my two selves, only halfway in this world, that I worry.

I'm sitting in my kitchen listening to Billy Bragg's "Greetings from the New Brunette" from his album Talking with the Taxman About Poetry and thinking about how a few hours ago I was standing in my building's doorway talking with the Jehovah's Witnesses about Zen under a bright cloudless sky.

The Witnesses paid us a visit when S was home, but he answered the door. Ever polite, he took their tracts, smiled, and closed the door. I don't think they talked more than ten seconds. Not me! I'm a realistic optimist, if such a thing exists, and I'm ever hopeful that things will change for the better with just a little painless nudging here and there. Of course I have my darker days, days when I'm convinced that substantive change is impossible, at least in my lifetime. But then I get over it and realize that it's up to us and say to hell with it, why not give it a shot, and then I get off my ass and find myself arguing about the existence of god with three middle-aged Witnesses. What else can we do on this cock-eyed journey we're on except try?

I answered the door and they said hello and I said right away, "Thank you for coming by, but I'm a zen buddhist." One of the men (there were two and one woman) said "Really?" in that I-don't-believe-you sort of voice, then he asked me if I'd converted or if I was born into it. I told him that I was born an atheist and that really freaked them out. "What do you mean you were born an atheist?" he asked me and I told him that neither of my parents believed in god when I was born, so I wasn't raised with religion. I didn't go into how I had done some searching myself in high school, how I went to a lutheran church because I had a crush on the son of the minister (he was really cute) and how because of that boy I even sang in the choir and went to a youth group camp and really did want to believe. I didn't go into how I dabbled in Catholicism too because I loved the iconography and the saints and I still do. I didn't go into how I never did believe in Jesus or god because the whole thing seemed so preposterous to me and that even so I had lived my life conservatively, even if my politics have always been liberal. I did say, though, that I didn't have to believe in God to not be afraid of dying.

"So you believe in reincarnation then?" he asked me, and I told him that our western idea of reincarnation is from Hinduism and that in zen it's different. I said that we don't come from nothing and when we die we don't become nothing, in the literal sense. "If you burn a piece of paper it doesn't just disappear, right? It turns to heat and smoke and ash, and we're the same way," I told him. And then he asked me about evolution and I said that yes, I believed in evolution, and he said that if I believe in evolution I must believe in god because there was a beginning and god did it, and I told him that belief in a "beginning" is an idea we made up and that there was no beginning and there will be no end and he nearly laughed at that in disbelief. I told him that in zen there is not the same linear idea of time when it comes to the universe, and that therefore there is no 'beginning' and no 'creator.' Then I told him that zen buddhists don't need the threat of hell to behave well, and we don't believe we have to earn merit with god in order to go to heaven because we don't believe in heaven either. "We try to act right today because this is all we have, this moment, and we have to take care of each other. We have to try to leave the earth a better place than we found it, not worse, and we've got to be kind to each other right now," I told him. The other man asked me "How do you help, with money or something?" And I said that yes, I give money, but that I also volunteer and give my time and try to treat my family and friends and strangers with kindness because this is all there is. "Can you give me some money then?" and I told him if I had some maybe I'd give it to him, and then we all laughed.

They knew it was time to go, that there was no convincing me. "Well I didn't know all that, so thanks for telling us," said Rene, the one woman in the group, and then asked if I'd do something for her and take a tract and I did. From "A Peaceful New World: Will It Come?":

"Just imagine, in a Paradise earth, all sicknesses and physical infirmities will also be healed! God's Word assures us: 'No resident will say: "I am sick."' (Isaiah 33:24) God's Word also promises: 'He [God] will actually swallow up death forever.' -- Isaiah 25:8."

Just another day in the neighborhood, and I didn't even get to the important stuff, like the myth of a separate existence and how our actions are our only true possessions. Somehow I doubt they'll come back to chat. But a girl can hope!!

"So I want to ask, why is your husband's name on your outgoing message? I mean, he's not there to answer it or anything..."

Yesterday I went to the zen temple down near the Whole Foods on Ashland for the first time in months. I've meditated a handful of times in my house since my previous visit, but my practice has been erratic at best. On Saturday night I knew that if I did nothing else on Sunday I should to go to the morning meditation session. And so I did.

I don't sleep well without S and even less well with my new neighbor and her hammering away on my ceiling, her steps here her steps there, her dog's scritch-scratch patternmaking across the floor. I woke up when my neighbor came home around 2 or so in the morning, then again when she got up to take the dog out around 7. Since I fell back asleep, I didn't leave the house until 9:30, the same time the first gong sounds to begin. I got there a half hour late, snuck into the main room and sat on one of the chairs that were lined up behind the lines of cushions toward the back. The chairs are for people whose knees can't handle sitting down on the cushion and for people like me, late people who don't want to disturb the sitters by walking in front of them or tripping over the knees of the taller folks whose legs are just too long.

The Sunday morning service consists of two 20-minute meditation sessions, some chanting, and a little sermonette at the end where everyone gathers together on the floor and the meditation leader discusses a topic, perhaps reads a poem or two, and then gives the announcements. The sessions are perfectly quiet. Everyone tries to sit still (there are always some fidgeters) and the purpose is to try to stop thinking about anything at all except the fact that you are breathing. It's hard. Really hard. Especially if you're tired or distracted, or like me, always battling the revision of past conversations and the fantasies of future ones. In my mind I will run through every possible scenario for any given situation, even situations that have yet to come to pass. And there are endless possibilities. Even when I sleep my nights are cluttered with subconscious chatter, dreams and images and scenarios, an endless stream of one after another. It's exhausting, which is why zen teaches that you're only truly at rest when you're meditating even though you're wide awake and sitting up with your back straight, your legs tangled together, and your eyes open. When I concentrate on my breathing and stop all that patter for even a few moments I see things just a little more clearly than before. It's a wonder to me why I don't do it more often when I know it's so good for me, but then I guess I'm not the first to know what I should do and not do it anyway.

Yesterday's sermonette seemed to have no real direction, which is not so unusual. Every time I've gone to the Sunday service I tell myself that the next time I'll skip out before the little get-together starts. Every time, though, I stay anyway because I think that perhaps this time will be different, this time the sermonette will be filled with insight and send me off for the rest of my day thinking about how beauty is found in impermanence or how change is inevitable and it's okay. Yesterday's sermonette was too much like a sermon for me. It was about how we have to eat right and not be promiscuous and "take care of the earth" and all that other blah blah blah, platitudes that sermons from all religions fall back on out of laziness, I guess, laziness on the part of the sermon givers and the listeners. I'm not promiscuous. I already eat fine. Anyone who's meditating at a zen temple already knows we've got to "take care of the earth." The whole thing seemed like a thrown-together, thoughtless preaching-to-the-converted little speech. It left me feeling empty.

I drove back home from the temple and the heavy clouds above me moved swiftly toward the lake as if the wind were pulling her thick winter blanket across the sky. Half way home the sun burned for a moment then slunk back under the covers, left the rest of the day that day-for-night that makes winter what it is. Autumn has been coming and going this past week. One day a January day, cold and dreary, the next, a late May or early June day, the sun shining so brightly through the half-bare trees the dingy city seems to sparkle even though the shadows are impossibly long and somber.

In the dark and dreary dead of winter S left, and in those first weeks I read and watched everything I could find about war, particularly our new twin wars that are crashing down like the twin towers they were meant to make up for. I bought Purple Hearts, a book of photographs of Iraq war vets with missing limbs, faces turned into craggily topographical maps from the flames of their burned-to-the-core humvees. I watched every Frontline special I could about the wars and the "soldier's heart" over the internet and cried when I thought of S having to kill someone in order not to be killed. I feverishly read several books about Afghanistan and poured over essays and polemics about our wars and our policy, analyzing it all on my blog and tearing apart arguments I found on the web. I went to the Op Truth website every day to read the accounts of soldiers who'd come back and veterans from our other meaningless war and I knew I was there on that site reading their stories and looking at their pictures because they reminded me of S. I watched C-Span religiously because it was only there that I could hear the stories of soldiers in our forgotten wars (Then it seemed Iraq was forgotten too. Now it is somewhat in our consciousness, even if Afghanistan is as far away as it ever was.). I remember seeing an interview with a Blackhawk pilot at Walter Reed seated next to her husband, who was also in the national guard, as she cradled the prosthetic for her leg in one hand and scratched her arm with the hook at the end of her other prosthetic. A RPG shot through the bottom of her helicopter and exploded, leaving her a one-armed, one-legged woman. They were deployed to Iraq at the same time, though they had different jobs so they weren't together when she was injured. During the weeks before their deployment they had talked about possibility of one of them dying and had made amends with each other, made decisions regarding how each would adapt without the other and go on. Yet they had not talked about injury. They hadn't anticipated it and didn't know what a one-legged, one-armed life would mean. She was dead set on getting back to flying, didn't want to leave the military, but the whole time she talked her husband stared down at the prosthetic in her lap. Only occasionally did he lift his eyes and look to the camera, and when he did his eyes were water-glazed and tired.

I've thought about the possibility of S being injured in Afghanistan, and since I mull over such things and fill my mind with endless possibilities, I've had dark dreams of how we'd make our house accessible if he came home in a wheelchair or if we'd have to move. I've thought about an article I saw in Dwell about building accessible kitchens and how the countertops need to be lowered and how drawers are better than cabinets. I've thought about what it would be like to have him come home a shell of his former self, his mind blown, literally, by a too strong blast. I've imagined his skin turned into the surface of a blown volcano from a flame-fired blast, wide swaths of spilled and hardened lava, lumps and waves and craters and creases where once there was nothing but smooth skin and hair follicles. I first imagined this in Killeen when I saw a soldier whose neck was that way. The gentle dip beneath his adam's apple had been turned into a snare of balled up yarn; across his neck were raised bumps of whip-borne slashes. I've imagined buying a modified car to fit a legless S in, or rigging our computer to translate voice to text if his hands and arms were gone. I've imagined all of this and I've known I could live with it all. I've known it would be horrible, overwhelmingly so. But I've known we could deal with it.

But that question. That question.

I've thought about it ever since it was posed to me last week by a radio producer who talked to me about writing something that may or may not ever air. I've thought about that question and why it bothered me so much, why it made me want to retreat and not write for days, why it made me want to hide away and hardly do anything at all. I thought about how I was confused when she asked me that question and incensed in the way I've become accustomed these past eight months because it seemed so lacking in empathy, so insensitive, even if that wasn't the intent. I thought that perhaps the producer had never been in love, had never had a true commitment to a live-in lover, let alone ever been separated from that person. But the question didn't just anger me, it also depressed me, made the cry-at-a-moment emotion that hovers in me all the time (I feel it behind my nose and in my throat and of course behind my eyes) envelope me finally, giving me no space outside of myself.

Until yesterday I couldn't articulate why that question had bothered me so much. I knew it had, and I could articulate my anger and even my puzzlement, but I didn't know why it had made me feel so bad. After meditating yesterday morning, though, it came up in me, the obvious reason why. That question brought up the ultimate worry, the one and only worry. The one of S being gone forever, lost to me in Afghanistan and dead there.

There are only a few reasons why I'd take his name off our outgoing message: he left me or I left him, our marriage lost to that dubious statistic of "50% of all marriages fail," or he was lost to that even worse statistic, that growing number of soldiers killed in action. That question brought up the worst that could happen. It made me imagine a time when too much time had passed after his death, when I would be urged by friends and family to finally get his name off the machine, when I'd know myself it was time because it was really over and he was never coming back. And the thought of that was too much.

It seems the Latin Kings have taken over our neighborhood gang, UAC, and now they're tagging the neighborhood, leaving cryptic drawings on the sides of buildings, up and down the olive drab mail collection bin on our corner. Last week "they", those anonymous someones, went down the street with a baseball bat or perhaps a wrench or perhaps with their fists covered in gloves, and broke the passenger-side windows of five parked cars. The road was coated in the gem-clutter of shattered tempered glass until the street cleaners came. That gem-clutter was like a decorative trim next to the sewer waters that have been backing up along our curb and the dead leaf muck that is mixed with it.

Doesn't that producer know I am like a car window, really just a collection of gem-clutter pieces ready to shatter apart? That I am no different than that pile of glass pearls crushed on the side of the road?

I've still not written anything for the radio program. I'm not sure how to begin. I might go back and look at what I've written and adapt it anyway, even though she asked me not to. I'll try to settle my mind tomorrow morning and then get to work. Or perhaps decide to skip it and get back to what really matters to me, the chronicling of all this gem-clutter laying waste on the side of the road.

It's a day-for-night day today, dark and quiet and just a little bit rainy. A plane just flew overhead and it sounded unbelievably loud because the sound travels so quickly when the air is steady, and the buffer of tree leaves is more than half-way lessened now that so many have fallen to the ground. On my way back to my car this afternoon I walked in a goldenrod tunnel, the trees above me and the ground below me both the color of daylight, when I took a shortcut through Grant Park. The city is becoming its sad gray of winter, my neighborhood its own sad brown. The white trim around the front door across the street appears whiter than usual because everything else is so dark.

I went to a reading by the Neighborhood Writing Alliance, the organization I used to run, for the Chicago Humanities Festival downtown. I saw some of my old friends, writers I worked with for years and who I missed terribly when I was down in New Orleans. Charlie, who is one of the best poets I've ever known; Sharon, who is a poet and essayist and an adjunct college teacher constantly looking for work (we often share stories); and Virdajean, dear Virdajean, who saw me and said she would cook me greens as soon as the first frost hits because I'm looking too skinny and my eyes too sad. "Where's the sparkle in your eyes?" she asked me, and I told her about my last few months and then we hugged again.

S is packing up and moving south. His base is to be closed up for the winter since it is at the foot of the Hindu Kush and already the wind is starting to rush through the mountains and push against their buildings and tents. He'll be working with marines again, this time just a handful of kilometers from the Pakistan border. The special forces base was smaller and safer and better equipped. I'd hoped he could stay but he can't. It is back to the same-old of the past year, more danger, less equipment, and working, again, with the less-experienced, embarrassingly young marines. S was a marine when he was their age and like them he thought he knew what he was doing. Now he knows better.

Later I'll post a few pictures S sent me that show how Afghan bread is made. Ramadan is over, Eid is over. Afghanistan, too, is settling in for the dark days of winter.

My good friend Gabe, an exceptional poet I met down at University of New Orleans, came into town today from Santa Fe where he's been exiled since his house was flooded and ruined by the floodwaters of Katrina. We went to my favorite southern Indian restaurant just blocks from my house, Udupi Palace, and we talked about hurricanes and war and poetry and chapbooks (he's meeting with his editor this weekend here in Chicago), and then we drove to see the underpass virgin on Fullerton Avenue. I'd not visited her since she first appeared last spring when a young Mexican-American girl spotted her on her walk home from school. Within a few days, the image was adorned by candles and notes and offerings and visitors, all asking for ayuda from the mother of God. I went and visited her and I was moved by the spontaneity of the event, how ordinary people made a church out of a dirty, dusty underpass beneath the highway to O'Hare.

Within days of my visit she was defaced by an angry Mexican-American man who spray-painted a swastika across her face and beneath it "BIG LIE." The news traveled quickly, made the evening news, and within twenty-four hours the streets and sanitation crew had come (they are incredibly swift here in the City That Works) and painted over the entire image, leaving only a two-dimensional stalagmite in industrial muddy brown. The image of the virgin was gone; the visitors vanished. The notes stayed for days, but the candles burned out, abandoned.

It was caused by water, this image, so it sat above the surface of the concrete wall like a calcified scar and therefore was easy to discern beneath the paint. A handful of believers came and removed the paint from the image, leaving only an outline of it around her head and body. They placed cinderblocks around her as a proper altar, placed potted flowers in front, and on the stepped edges, carnations in vases. Her image was not the same, a bit of the likeness had disappeared with the peeled-off paint, but with the outline and the cinderblocks she had become more edified even if a bit of her had been lost.

Gabe and I walked and read the messages left for her, these 21st century petroglyphs. Most were RIPs or pleas for ayuda for whole families. Some were about careers, some about lovers. One asked for help in getting a dad out of jail. Another said simply "I miss you grandma." Gabe noted the whirring sound of the speeding trucks and cars above us and how they sounded like war. They sped above us violently, screeching, creating a harsh echo throughout the underpass that was deafening at times. I hadn't noticed this noise when I visited last spring, perhaps because the place was filled with the scuffing of work boots, the whisper of prayers, or perhaps because I don't pay attention to sound the way I should. Gabe stuck his cell phone up in the air and captured a bit of this highway clamor.

Here are a few pictures of the water stain-turned-virgin, once defaced but again revealed. She is Our Resurrected Lady of the Underpass:


The new altar with flowers and a handful of burning candles. Who checks to see the candles stay lit? And who changes the flowers?


Scribbled on the Emergency Parking Only sign: "Take care of all of us sinners to let us all in when our time comes -- Mel"


The algebra of faith: "I love God times ten to infinty plus four."