Kate Ingold: Chicago

HE PASSED!!

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 19:59:36 GMT

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!

How Sound Travels

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 03:32:48 GMT

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.

The Kite Runner and Other Sagas

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:32:57 GMT

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!

A city of rough edges

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 03:11:51 GMT

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 Begins

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 20:21:26 GMT

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.

The Stephanie Nightmare

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 04:01:23 GMT

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.

Talking with the Witnesses about Zen

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 02:14:04 GMT

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!!

That Question

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 23:13:30 GMT

"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.

Day for Night

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 19:32:12 GMT

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.

Our Resurrected Lady of the Underpass

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 23:50:35 GMT

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."

Jinx Prevention or How the White Sox Won after 88 Years

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 21:19:04 GMT

"Finally," Luis told me last night, "Shoeless can get some rest."

The Sox won the World Series last night, the first time since 1917. The curses, too many to remember, have been lifted. And in their place, a whole host of good luck charms and jinx preventions. Lucky World Series shirts. Lucky World Series underwear. Lucky World Series hats and shot glasses and jeans and pizza parlors and bartenders. Finally!

Earlier in the day Luis called me and asked if I wanted to come by his brother's place in Bridgeport to watch the game. I was invited, he said, because it was known already that I wasn't a jinx. I'd been at the studio with him and my mom when the Sox won the pennant, so it was okay for me to be around for the game. Lucky me! One wife was a jinx so she couldn't come. One of the girlfriends was an "unknown" so she couldn't come either. The game was too important to take chances.

Jinxes, and how to prevent them, are a delicate part of the sports calculus. Players and athletes have a host of superstitions that help them overcome their nerves (or contribute to them, I guess). One fighter I knew at our gym would wear the same socks the entire time he was training for a fight and not wash them until the fight was over. (I can imagine how painful it was to be in the locker room with him!) Another did the same with his karate gi, though we protested enough that eventually he washed it. (The thing was rumored to be growing furry creatures before he finally gave in. And the odor! I won't even go there.) Then there is the king of jinxes for fighters, the "no sex when you're training to fight" business. Supposedly your fighting spirit is tied to your virility, and in this logic if you orgasm while training then your fighting spirit leaves your body and you will lose, lose, lose. Along with swallowing raw eggs every morning for breakfast, this particular regimen would lead to an awfully fun train-up, I'd think.

Fans, though, outdo the athletes and teams they admire in the areas of jinx prevention and good luck charms. There seemed to be more "rally caps" on the heads of Astros fans last night than not. They wore them inside out, backwards, sideways. Then there were the clinched hands held up in prayer (apparently they didn't know that God was on the Sox's side -- Cardinal George said so) and countless lucky jerseys. And in Bridgeport? Well I won't name names, but one of the brothers I watched the game with hadn't showered in six days (you know who you are!) and another had worn the same underwear for two. The other, reasonable enough, had worn the same tee-shirt throughout the series. And then there was me. I was dubbed the "good luck charm" after the game, practically guaranteeing me a place on the couch whenever the Sox play an important game again, which hopefully will be around this same time next year.

Well, whatever worked worked.

"I can't believe it," Luis said. "I've waited 30 years for this. Every spring I say 'Maybe this year they'll do it' and then every June I say 'Fuck them, I can't believe they screwed up again.' This year they finally did it. I can't believe it!'"

The game was won and the neighborhood came alive. In the distance we heard fireworks and gun shots (in the air, of course), honking horns, billowing "White Sox!!!" screamed out for several seconds. The brothers' compadre Leo came in with his crooked teeth and his Sox tee and cap. Luis said, "We should go out and streak like that redhead guy a few years ago who streaked at the game," and Leo said "Yeah," and Luis said "I'll be right behind you" and then we all laughed. Fernando called local bars to see if we could get into one (they were all packed and therefore closed), then called neighborhood tattoo parlors. He wants a world series/Sox emblem on his right arm, but he's got to wait since none of them were open, maybe because it was nearly one in the morning on a Wednesday night.

We wondered how many cars would be turned over that night, and on TV they said that the celebrators near 'The Cell' (Sox Park) were cordoned off in the C section of the parking lot. José said "Yeah, Cell Block C!"and we all laughed again. Nothing bad happened at all, probably because Sox fans were too stunned and falling-down-happy to burn anything. As usual, though, the TV coverage was crap. They showed footage from two bars: Jimbo's in Bridgeport and a place called Bourbon Street down near 111th in Beverly, the more upper-crust Irish neighborhood that has the "authentic" south side St. Patrick's Day parade each year. One newscaster waxed (hardly) poetic on the south side, naming ethnic groups from the neighborhoods: Lithuanian, Polish, Irish, Italian. When he stopped there, Fernando put his hands up and said "No Mexicans?" And I said "No African-Americans?!"

If your only knowledge of the south side of Chicago came from watching Fox's coverage, you'd think only Irish-Americans lived there and they all went to the same two bars. The city is 25% Mexican and 34% African-American. It was downright silly (if not worse) to leave out Mexicans and African-Americans. Bronzeville, an historic black neighborhood, is one of the most famous neighborhoods in the country and it's directly across the highway from Sox Park. It's where Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote; where Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday stayed and played along with every other black entertainer, sports star, or celebrity when Jim Crow was still in effect all the way up here. It was home to Gerri's Palm Tavern and the Wabash Street Y, the hotel of choice for all of those celebrities who were refused by the Palmer House no matter how famous they were because of the color of their skin. It was the home of the Chicago Defender, the newspaper of record for African-Americans across the country. And all this doesn't even get into other famed neighborhoods like Pilsen and Back of the Yards and Pullman and Hyde Park and Kenwood and South Shore. And none of them are Irish!

When we went out to our cars, everyone honked and waved on the streets and rolled down their windows to say hello to Luis and his brothers. The neighborhood had finally won. No more jinxes. It was drizzly cold, but who the hell cared. Fans ran through the neighborhood and waved Sox flags. In the rain I left the brothers and drove down Loomis through Pilsen, the historic Mexican neighborhood home to the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, down to Roosevelt (which Chicagoans pronounce "Rooosevelt" not "Rowsevelt") then down to Lake Shore Drive. I drove down the drive where the skyscrapers half-mooning Grant Park were dark except for lit-up windows spelling "SOX" and "GO SOX" in big screaming letters. And then I drove all the way north to the end of the drive, up Hollywood then Ridge to the corner where Clark Street and Ashland become one, to the neighborhood of cab drivers and junk collectors. Lining both sides of the street were countless cabs from a dozen companies and up the road sat several sloppy, stooped junk pick-ups, their cabs weighed down with thrown-away water heaters, broken-down dryers, and toilets. Ah, sweet home Chicago.

Today Luis is going to buy tees for his brothers, the same championship grey tees the team wore after the game. They are the good luck tees of next year, the guaranteed jinx preventors. Hopefully Luis won't have to wait another 30 years to buy another championship tee shirt and next June won't be filled with cries of lement bur rather cheers and joys as the team inches its way toward another World Series victory. If I can manage to keep my lucky charm status, maybe I'll get to watch the game with the brothers, enjoy another sausage pizza and Sam Adams Octoberfest beer, and help the diehards ward off the jinxes that are bound to slither back in.

One Down, Three More To Go

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 04:59:04 GMT

"Houston U Have a Problem" at Huck Finn Donuts, corner of Damen and Archer, Bridgeport, Chicago.

Sox Park is on 35th, about a mile east and one block south of this place. Across the street from Huck Finn's were sidewalk vendors selling Sox merchandise, like special edition World Series hats for $40, tees for $25, satin jackets, and woobies (wool hats). I was down in Bridgeport today and stopped to take a picture of this sign and pick up a tee for S. One of the special hats was tan with this pseudo-authentic, 'old-fashioned' design on the front. One of the guys shopping next to me said "That hat is fricking ugly" and it was! Everything's at a premium because of the rareness of this whole thing. Luis' brother was at the game tonight. He tried to get another ticket for Luis, but the going rate now (all scalped of course) is $1400 a piece and that's for the upper deck. Insanity!!

Driving through Bridgeport today I was thinking that perhaps one of the reasons I like it and its hum drum diners is that it reminds me of my far north side neighborhood: solidly working class and always immigrant. Bridgeport has changed over the years just as our neighborhood has. Both are battling the same-as-all-the-others condo developments that seem to take over neighborhoods block by block and suddenly make the place unrecognizable. But they both remain traditional Chicago neighborhoods with people from all over the world living next to each other trying to make their way in this workaholic city. Down the street from my house there are a string of furniture shops hawking $199 bedroom sets and dining room tables in Roccoco white with gold trim. In the window of the one closest to us is a sign that reads "Going Out For (sic) Business." That sign has been there since we moved into our place six years ago, just underneath the Help Wanted sign that's written in English, Polish, and Spanish. Across the street is a do-it-yourself car wash that's busy even in the dead of winter. Last year they spruced the place up with 20-feet high plastic, neon palm trees with blinking yellow coconuts. They don't sway much in the wind, but that's okay. They bring a bit of the tropics to cold and dreary Chicago.

I watched the first 6 innings of the game, most at the little piano bar on the second floor of the movie theater in Evanston, then went to see Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. We had three previews: one for a Kurt Russell flick about a dad and his daughter and a horse (the daughter/horse combination is common...curious); one for Steve Martin's newest, "Cheaper by the Dozen 2" about a family with 12 kids; and one for a new Rene Russo/Dennis Quaid picture about a second marriage between two parents of eight kids each. Quaid is the stern military father with the perfect "J. Crew" kids and Russo is the artsy type with the multi-cultural, messy messy kids. Gosh, I wonder what will happen when they throw them all into the same house. Somehow I don't think I'll ever find out.

Two films about massive families out of three previews. Is it a not-so-subtle urging to have bundles and bundles of children? A family of twelve, a family of sixteen? Be fruitful and multiply, right? Very, very curious.

The Sox won, by the way.

Why Astrology Works Better Than Therapy

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 03:38:42 GMT

Tonight I sit on my couch with a half-flamed fire in the fireplace, alone. I've just finished a thrown-together dinner -- simple sauteed pork chop, leftover black beans, sauteed white onions with tomatoes -- made from a handful of groceries I picked up just an hour ago at the Whole Foods on Ashland Avenue. I spent the day with my mom. Lunch at Flo, a little shopping at the shoe store next door, a trip up Milwaukee Avenue to Max Gerber to check out affordable kitchen sinks. Afterwards we went back to her place and made a couple of decaf cappuccinos before heading out to the Boyd Gallery on Wells for the opening of their newest show, a collection of square canvases by an Italian abstract painter. Painted on the canvases were different shades of the same color, like white and white and white or black and black and black or blue and blue and blue. All of the colors were in squares or rectangles and were differentiated by texture, not just tone, like rough and smooth and some with brush strokes and some with none. At the gallery I talked to several people about how much better free internet phoning is than any phoning that's not free and how hard it is to paint black oil enamel over kitchen cabinets and how, miraculously, one writer's house across the road from Delgado Community College got only an inch or two of water and no real damage at all. I don't know this writer. My writer friend whose house is close to Delgado got several feet of water, I found out today, which meant the loss of over 350 books. It was like losing 350 family photographs because each book had a story and a place and a time it was associated with, though most (not all) can be replaced, unlike photographs. He and his wife are in Santa Fe because they still can't live in their water-logged house, their house without those 350 books.

My mom and I were to meet her boyfriend Howard at the gallery then go to dinner. But when he got there, after I'd talked with those several people for an hour, maybe more, and when we left the gallery and were walking toward the car, I had this overwhelming desire to leave and get home to be alone. The last thing on earth I wanted to do, suddenly, was go out to dinner with the two of them.

So now here I am: alone on the couch with my half-flamed fire and my thrown-together dinner cooked from a handful of groceries I picked up at the Whole Foods on Ashland. It's one of the saddest ironies that depression brought upon by loneliness makes you want to be alone.

It's not that I didn't see my abrupt departure coming. All day I was grumpy. I was quick to tear up. Over lunch, I found myself weepy over our uncertain financial future, over the house, and mostly over the fact that I feel like my writing is going nowhere and even the blog I find no purpose in at all most days.

I am, again, completely irrational, and I know it. That should make me feel better, in theory, but instead it makes me feel worse. I ought to be able to do something about it if I can see it for what it is. This irrationality is cyclical, but it's not connected to the cycles of the moon or of the waves or even of the sun. It's not even connected to when I speak to S (though it most certainly is connected to the fact that he's in Afghanistan and not here next to me in front of this half-flamed fire). I talked to him this morning via Skype for fifteen minutes, maybe more, about the beastiality some of his ANA troops participated in this past week (and no, I'm not joking), about how he blinked and blinked while boxing a guy on base (it's been a few years since he last sparred), and how today was "Fuck Off Friday," the Afghan equivalent of our Sunday, a day of rest and of doing-whatever-you-damn-well-please. I talked to him this morning and still I spent the day feeling out of control and irrational. It's the cycles within my heart that move from deep in the crater and out again, over and over without end.

The insecurity over my writing came up when my mother told me she showed the post I wrote about nanotechnology and Carmen and green building and passion to Howard and how Howard had forwarded it to Chuck. Suddenly I felt a twinge of panic. Did I write something offensive? What the hell is wrong with me writing about people I know and posting it to a public blog? Even conversations? And, worse, why did I feel so betrayed when she told me this?

I've had a hard time being around my mom and Howard these past few weeks and I've tried to figure out why. I've wondered if I'm jealous or if I miss having my mother to myself. I've wondered if it is that when I'm with them, a couple, and without S, I'm therefore not a couple. I've wondered if it is that I'm sick of being around my mom's friends because I have no friends of my own here in Chicago after being gone so long, except for a couple who I hardly ever see and none of them are writers. In New Orleans I had friends, a lot of friends, and I had S. I had the poetry group and I had our roommate Rebecca, and I had S. Now New Orleans is a flooded wreck of what it was. The poetry group is scattered and I haven't even talked to any of them in weeks, and Rebecca is in Nigeria, and I haven't talked to her in weeks either. And, of course, S is still in Afghanistan, still away from me, and I know I feel his absence more acutely now because we spent those two weeks together and they were such good weeks. We're still not pregnant and we're still not parents. It's only the last two days that I haven't felt completely exhausted.

On my drive to my mom's place this afternoon I passed two trees on Lake Shore Drive that looked to have been dipped in red candy, the kind candied apples are dipped in. Just the leaves at the tops of the trees were red while the rest were still green. I didn't think there would be much fall color this year because our summer was so dry and so hot, but I was wrong. The city is goldenrod and ochre now with hints of chartreuse and crimson, though that is most rare. So many of the old trees have died the past decade -- oaks, elms, maples, hickories -- from foreign bugs and diseases, and they've been replaced with these thin-trunked Kentucky Coffees and others similar that have groups of petite, diamond-shaped leaves rather than the hand-sized, star-shaped leaves of the maples or the Dadaesque leaves of the elms. These new trees turn yellow and nothing else.

It is, I know, impossible to lessen this loneliness through activity because though I miss my friends and even that crawling, stinky city, I really only miss S. It's his absence that I feel most, and it's his absence that I can do absolutely nothing about. Which is why this loneliness is so irrational.

I'm writing every day. I'm applying for work. I'm getting the house together. I'm not exercising or meditating or doing yoga or any of the other things I know I should, but I am reading and I'm reading good books. I'm eating right and I'm trying to dress appropriately so I can avoid getting that deep chill I had last spring when I first came back from New Orleans, when I felt cold even if the temperature outside was in the upper 60s. I'm leading a workshop for NWA at a library in Uptown (it's all mine starting next week) and I'm writing, every day, even if I think it's all a bunch of crap. None of it seems to matter.

By the sliding glass doors at the Whole Foods on Ashland was a pink paper flyer: "Why Astrology Works Better Than Therapy." I'm not the only lonely heart in town, I guess. But tonight in front of this half-flamed fire that doesn't matter either.

Passion is enough

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 06:36:17 GMT

Last night I went to see Carmen at the Lyric Opera with my mom, Howard, and Howard's friend Chuck. Oh Carmen. The most passionate character in opera, and that says something given that opera, at least late 19th century opera, is all about passion. Carmen is a seductress, a tease, a talent beyond measure, and also a woman whose driving ambition is true, honest emancipation. I've seen this opera twice and I've had the pleasure of seeing Denyce Graves sing it both times, though it seems her voice has improved the past five years so much so that now it cascades into the auditorium and tumbles right into you.

Graves's Carmen is luscious and irresistable, and so in the end when she's left one broken heart and the cards have read death, death, death, condemning her and her broken lover to die, we root for her, the one who wronged, when he comes for her with a dagger strapped to his boot. Even as she taunts him and denies him in her falling lace mantilla, as she shifts across the bullring gallery gesturing to her new lover, the star-studded toreador, we want her to live even if it means Don Jose will die. She was cruel until the end, and yet we still love her.

There were half a dozen Carmens at the opera house, women in blood red flamenco skirts and laced-up corsets, their hair pulled back in buns with silk roses and just enough locks of hair loose from their moorings. This expression of passion unleashed, uncontrolled, and completely free of constraint, makes sense right now when it seems it's the 'passion of the christ' that more Americans care about.

Before the opera we met for dinner at Cyrano's, a charming French bistro on Wells in River North that has the best pommes frites this side of the Atlantic and homemade ketsup that once tasted makes eating Heinz impossible. Over dinner Chuck told us about his main passion, nanotechnology, which coincidentally is featured in Salon this month. Chuck is burning with hope for this technology, in part because he sees it as the actual fountain of youth, a way to make disease, and perhaps even death, obsolete. I questioned whether if we made old age and death things of the past we'd have to make birth also, since quickly we'd find our little planet even more serried. He answered that with nanotechnology we'd be able to populate the moon and other celestial bodies, making the issue of overpopulation obsolete as well.

With the example of Deep Blue and its slapping about of Kasparov in the late 90s, Chuck said that by 2045 nanotechnology will be to a point where there will be no separation between man and machine, but rather a melding of the two, not unlike the nightmares of Philip K. Dick. It is no nightmare to Chuck, though, who sees a future made brighter when we're all, regardless of race or class, implanted with miniscule chips holding all the knowledge of the universe, leading to breathtaking advances in knowledge and technology, advances so fast that we reach "singularity" when the changes happen at the same pace as time itself. The potentials for good are incredible, of course, but there are also potentials for bad, as the articles in Salon discuss. I pointed out how impossible it seemed that everyone in the world would have this nanotechnology within my lifetime given that most people live in mud-brick homes with packed dirt floors and no running water let alone electricity. I wondered, too, how we'd manage all this when we can't even get a handle on chronic hunger or AIDS or genocide or corporate-driven wars, and Chuck said that with nanotechnology there would be enough food for everyone and disease would be something of history. There is enough food for everyone right now, at this very moment, I told him. We're just lacking the political will and cooperation to get it to the people. The desire, the passion, for power is extreme enough that politicians across the world leave millions to suffer if it means fatter pockets for them.

I can see how intoxicating the hope of this technology could be, and how much more comfortable it would be to deny how this same technology could take us down an even darker road than the one we're already on. The lessening of human suffering has always been the promise of technology. The Salon piece points out, though, that right now most of the money being funneled into nanotechnology research is for the military (surprise!), including the creation of uber soldiers with artificial muscles and uniforms that could mend wounds on the battlefield. Sad, isn't it, that we can imagine a suit that performs surgeries but we can't imagine a future without war.

One of my hopes about this cyber-future is the role of the arts. I said that perhaps, finally, the arts would be valued as they should be because they would be the one area of human experience and intelligence that computers couldn't compete with. Chuck said that they could, and that in fact one day computers would create better art than humans are capable of, including poetry. I can only think this is because Chuck doesn't know much about poetry. How can a computer replicate passion when it is passion that is the most unpredictable, most irrational side of us? I'm not sure I want to live in a future without decay and death (we could alleviate suffering without turning ourselves into meaningless machines, couldn't we?), and I'm completely certain I don't want to live in a future without passion, especially a future peppered with "perfect" wars.

Chuck is an optimist, sees only the good and not the bad that can come of our out-of-control technology, and perhaps it's a reflection of my state of mind these days that I see possibilities in all of their dark and somber shades. But his optimism is also pragmatic and admirable. Besides the nano-obsession, Chuck is a real estate developer and all of his upcoming projects are "green," buildings that will sell electricity back to Com Ed's grid and will be built with eco-friendly materials. It sounds so exciting that my mom may buy one and move. She's been thinking about moving for years, and here is this, a green condo in the middle of the city. His other project is to do large-scale affordable housing, again all green, that will be targeted to low-income families and former public housing residents. There are vacant lots scattered across the city -- some neighborhoods have more vacant lots than full ones -- and the thought of them being green, sustainable (no utilities!) houses for our most vulnerable neighbors is truly exciting.

So then it is passion that drives all of us, even the nano-developers who see passion expressed in deathless soldiers and encyclopedic minds.

I've had such a culture-rich week: an opera, two plays (including Tennesse Williams' "Orpheus Descending" -- miraculous!!), and a couple of books. I'm working through a stack of new memoirs. I read Persepolis Vols. 1 and 2 by Marjane Satrapi, and also Satrapi's Embroideries, three memoirs in the graphic novel form about Satrapi's life as a progressive Iranian woman during the height of the Islamic Revolution. The books chronicle her life and give insights into the paperclip-curved shifts from dictator to intellectual revolution to religious overthrow that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The books are matter-of-fact and quick, but also funny and heartwrenching. And just yesterday I finished Jason Christopher Hartley's Just Another Soldier, a blog-turned-book by a former national guard soldier who spent a year in Iraq as an infantry soldier. I'd read Hartley's blog a little before it was taken down by his commander (which led to his demotion) and so I expected the book to be more than just a recantation of events, but rather a true memoir with insights into his heart. Instead, it is a recantation with only hints at that heart, more a blueprint for a future book than a book itself. I kept thinking about Tobias Wolff's In Pharoah's Army and how he needed more than a dozen years to process his war experience and turn it into a book. I don't think everyone needs that much time, but in this case I'd have appreciated a little more time and a little more depth. I think he's got it in him so perhaps the next book will be better.

In sharp contrast, I've just begun reading The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's memoir of the death of her husband in December, 2003. I've only read the first few chapters and already it's full of insight, superfine prose. She finds the meaning in every last detail and the passion along with it. I think I will zip through this book because it's so easy to read, even if what she's writing about is so painful.

S is back at his tiny fire base, the special forces outfit that is fully equipped with wireless internet even though it's in the middle of nowhere. I talked to S tonight briefly via Skype and he thinks I should write a novel about this year, and perhaps he's right. After tonight's JOT writing group at the library in Uptown, I'm in the mood to write poetry again, inspired by the writers I met whose lives are complicated beyond measure. One writer is in hospice, dying of leukemia, and still he writes. He submits work each week to be critiqued by the group and returned to him by the workshop leader.

Perhaps passion is enough. At least for the Carmens of the world.

The Big Shoulders Team Is Going to the World Series

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 05:40:57 GMT

I've not written much the past two days because, frankly, I have been taken over by our house. Between the kitchen that is on hold until S comes home and the ceiling, which I fear we'll have to redo if we're to be able to sleep past 6 any morning, I feel like I need to get away from here just to get a good night's rest and to get a break from my repair obsessions. No doubt it's all made worse because S isn't here and he's feeling down too. He's back in Jalalabad today and soon he'll be returning to his small FOB along the border. The only thing we both want right now is to be together. If he were here right now, I'd feel fine and so would he, even if the kitchen remained half-baked and the neighbor continued to clip-clop across her bare floor.

The White Sox crept up on me this year. Suddenly half the cars in my neighborhood and across the north side have White Sox stickers, their drivers sporting matching caps. It's nice to see Chicago's home town team doing well and finally being appreciated by the north-of-the-loop city. S and I used to live in Wrigleyville and it was in that apartment that we developed a particular disdain for Cubs fans. It's not that the team, which is more a national team than a Chicago team, doesn't have it's charm (there's something adorable about the perennial underdog), it's just how utterly uncharming the fans are when they stagger to their cars loud and drunk, knock about on the street corners beneath trademark drafty windows, and piss on the sides of turn-of-the-century walk-ups. And that's after they've snatched all the prime parking spots in the neighborhood and clogged up traffic for hours before and after. Dressed in their matching Cubs caps and fraternity sweatshirts, they strut around the north side boistrously, and leave a trail of fender benders and worse accidents on their trails back to the suburbs. Back in the day night games weren't allowed, and I suspect it wasn't so bad living near Wrigley Field then. Those 1980s "About Last Night" yuppies used to have parties on their rooftops and watch the games from there, peering over the tarred ledges to see if any of the diehards on Waveland managed to catch a homerun ball. Now those three- and four-flats have been bought up by corporations and their roofs have been turned into x-bleachers custom made for x-burbanites. They reach up as high as the park lights in some places and have led to bullshit lawsuits from the Wrigley franchise. And did I mention the traffic?

I guess that's the difference between the Cubs and the Sox. The Cubs, sprayed across the country with their WGN broadcasts for years and years, have become more associated with fans outside of the city, either in the 'burbs or even farther afield, those folks who think of the north side as the "safe" side and see Chicago as this place for adventure and danger. They say they are "from Chicago" when people ask, but really they live miles and miles away from the mythical "City," that alien, frightening, out-of-control place that exists in their minds outside of the amusement park around Cub field. These fans come with their equipment and their toll money to see the game then disappear back into their perfectly symmetrical subdivisions, their towering expressway-side mansions and townhomes with open atriums and three-car garages.

The Sox, on the other hand, are the south side team, the team of the "big shoulders" city. Comiskey Park, now called "U.S. Cellular Field" (no more corporate than "Wrigley Field"), sits across the highway from the northernmost highrises in what was the country's largest concentration of public housing, the State Street Corridor. (There are still a handful of Stateway Gardens buildings just south of 35th Street, but that's it. The rest, including the notorious "Hole" of Robert Taylor Homes, are gone.) The park is in Bridgeport, the old neighborhood where Mayor Daley grew up, famous for its machine politics and sunken first floors (the sidewalks suspend a dozen feet above the houses, just as they did before the sewers were put in after the fire of 1871). The houses are tan and brown and utilitarian -- working-people houses -- and the streets aren't lined by fluffy trees or centered with majestic flower boxes as so many streets on the north side are. Holiday decorations are tacky, not tasteful, with plastic glowing Santas in the winter and painted-plaster Uncle Sams for the 4th. The diners are dull, the food standard. Even the alderman's office is flatly marked by a humdrum sign with small American flags painted in the corners. It's all just as it is. But walking through Bridgeport you imagine Carl Sandberg walking through there before you, or even Nelson Algren, or Upton Sinclair, and you see the Chicago of the past alive in the present, the "City That Works" working damn hard.

The Sox are the damn-hard-working team in this city. They are the ones who actually try to win because their fans don't drive home to four-bedroom ranches with expansive backyard decks. They actually care. After a game, Sox fans walk to the "El" and hop a train to their tired apartment, or walk home to their post-war bungalow, or maybe their turn-of-the-century walk-up, and go to bed early so they can get up early, and not because they've got an hour's commute to Schaumburg in their SUVs. (At least not all of them -- even Bridgeport is changing along with the rest of the city. Those desert sand city blocks of four-room bungalows are being razed and replaced with variable single-family homes with "designer kitchens featuring stainless steel appliances and granite counter-tops".) Most Sox fans are actual, bona fide Chicagoans.

If the Sox do badly, some fans go nuts and get violent and storm the field and demand the team do better. They get pissed. Cubs fans, on the other hand, love the Cubs even if they lose. They get mad at other fans (remember that poor kid who caught that ball last year and then received death threats?), but they rarely get mad at the team. Their loyalty is lauded and esteemed by many, shown as an example of true blue fandom. I've always thought of it as a sham. They love them unconditionally and the team has repaid them by playing like crap, year after year. Why win when the fans don't give a damn if they win or lose? Cubs fans have always struck me as being more in love with going to the game than the game itself, which isn't inherently bad, of course, but it does fit in more with the conformist, frat boy mentality and behavior S and I saw exhibited below our leaky windows in that one-bedroom apartment in Wrigleyville.

I admit I've never really liked baseball. This is another reason S and I fell in love so quickly, I suppose. He puts on baseball games if he wants to take a nap and he's too exhausted to sleep. The whir of the crowd is like white noise to him. Puts him out immediately. We met in karate class and fell in love watching pay-per-view boxing matches, New Jersey Devils hockey games, and college football. We both like contact sports. Neither of us understands the appeal of baseball exactly, except that it's fun to sit out on a beautiful summer day and drink beer with your friends. (Of course, it's more fun to sit out on a blustery, rainy fall day and drink beer with your friends, which is why one of my strongest sport memories is seeing the Bears in the Fog Bowl, bundled up and still freezing my ass off, the ball more an imagination than a physical thing as it billowed through the white air. I wasn't old enough to drink then, and I was sandwiched between my mom and my step-dad, but still. It was Walter Payton on the receiving end of that ball, one of the greatest athletes of all time.)

So if I don't like baseball, why am I rooting for the Sox this year? It's simple, really. I was born on the south side, and that's enough in this town. And the only baseball games I've been to in my life were Sox games, back when Comiskey Park was still Comiskey Park. My step-father, a native Rhode Islander, preferred the Sox over the Cubs, probably for the same reasons I do. He was a self-made man who grew up in east coast immigrant Irish tenements that were probably no different from the Irish tenements that once stood row by row on the streets surrounding Sox park. He worked damn hard too.

Last night my mom had a dinner party and my friends Luis and Diana were there. Diana was born on the south side like me and she's lived in Bridgeport her whole life. Luis moved to Bridgeport when he was nine or so from Texas. Last night he had on his lucky Sox shirt underneath his dinner party sweater. We had the game on in the kitchen on mute, and every now and then Luis would sneak back there, catch the score, and come back and tell everyone at the table. When I talked to S this morning and told him about the Sox, he said "It's about time," then ranted again about those annoying-as-hell Cubs fans. I told him about all the Sox stickers up north and about how Luis, Diana and I are going to have a couple of World Series-watching parties next week. I know if S were here he wouldn't sleep through those games!

Temper That Heart (the links are fixed!)

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 16:55:41 GMT

I've realized that I'm becoming angry again. I'm not surprised; I'm missing S badly and it seems when I do I lash out at those around me, even those I don't actually know. I've gotten snippy in comments on other blogs (not here, because my snippy comment to one wingnut was appropriate, thank you very much!), and that's not good. I need to find myself again. This afternoon I'm meeting with my former co-workers at the Neighborhood Writing Alliance. We're hoping to find a new location for a workshop that I'll facilitate. Their workshops are brilliant, really. They are free and open to all adults in the city. They're held in neighborhood locations that don't require much travel for the writers. They're based on the idea that "every person is a philosopher" and all work is valid. As a facilitator, I won't "teach" but rather make a safe place for everyone to share their poetry, prose, rants, snippets without fear of ridicule. Later, work by every writer who participates will be published in NWA's quarterly magazine, the Journal of Ordinary Thought, should they want to be published. This little magazine has won two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards (one when I was ED), going against well-known journals like Another Chicago Magazine and Rhino. And in support of this magazine and the workshop, our group will host readings that are free and open to the public, where writers can meet one another, exchange ideas, and share their work with family, friends, and strangers. Cool, huh?

As usual, there's some fine writing floating through cyberspace:

Sam at Feral on loss and laundry (beautiful);

Clayton at Operation Eden on Charity Hospital, New Orleans, and the "Third World version" of America;

Rob at Realtique on cleaning house, rescuing pets, and being harassed by NOPD;

Harry Connick, Jr. at Habitat for Humanity on humanely rebuilding New Orleans;

Yan at Glutter on dissent and censorship, American-style;

Joe the Heretik on the "Tragedy of the Real" in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan;

and a shout-out to Daniel at All the Kings Horses, whose name and writing I came across at n+1.

Last night I saw Bill Maher's Real Time and Salman Rushdie asked what the difference was between yellow and orange fear, the daily alerts put out by what Rushdie calls Bush's "Ministry of False Alarms." I was shocked to find myself agreeing with nearly everything Andrew "Sully" Sullivan said. Ann Coulter was on too, but really, is there anything to say about her that hasn't already been said? The fact that she's still invited to be on television shows all that's wrong with our country.

I need to erase her face from my memory if I'm ever to get past this angry phase. Temper that heart, girl!

Here and There

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 04:39:36 GMT

Last night I went to see Luna Negra Dance Theater's performance at Millennium Park featuring my friend Luis' backdrop for the world premiere of Quinceañera, a dance piece about the latin american coming-of-age party for girls on their fifteenth birthdays. The backdrop was beauitful: a lush sunshine dress with a fully opened rose around the waist, the folds and shadows reminding me of the pedals of Georgia O'Keeffe's desert flowers. Luis also created three stand-alone dresses that the dancers slinked up from behind at the beginning of the performance. Along with the Quinceañera piece, there were several others including one about Don Quixote that was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival last year and a fabulous piece called Flabbergast, where couples dressed in mid-century housedresses and ties with trousers moved among bead curtains carrying brightly-colored suitcases. Sometimes the suitcases overwhelmed the dancers, a clear visual metaphor for the difficulties of taking your life with you when you're forced for political or economic reasons to leave your home for a new place.

Just minutes before the show began my friend Lisa called from her home on Napoleon Avenue near Fountainbleu in Mid-City, New Orleans. This afternoon we finally got a chance to talk while she was taking a break from cleaning out her basement. Luckily the floodwaters missed the living area by inches, elevated as it is about eight feet above ground, but the basement was wrecked with debris smashed against the walls and mold crawling through the insulation. She and her roommate are staying with her sister in Metairie (which along with Kenner is coming back again) and driving into town to clean and assess every day. Before the storm, Lisa parked her truck in the neutral ground, the New Orleans name for the parkway separating the north-bound traffic from the south-, hoping that it would be spared. Normally it would have been. During Isidore and Ivan, the neutral grounds of many Uptown boulevards were safe because the waters only rose a feet or so. Of course this storm was different, and the water line on her truck comes just below the top of the vehicle. When she called her insurance company, they settled the claim over the phone based solely on her address. Knowing how much the neighborhood flooded was enough.

Lisa told me that today was a beautiful day in New Orleans, the temperature perfect and the full light of the sun shone down on them while they worked. In all directions, she told me, were piles of debris pushed in front of houses by the waters or stacked there this past week, waiting to be cleared. She drove around the city a little, where she was allowed, and said the place is essentially a ghost town. Most residents still haven't come back in, and it seemed the guard troops were driving out as Lisa was driving in, though she has seen a couple of humvees cruising down Claiborne Avenue.

Lisa's family is originally from Mexico. They moved to Texas several generations ago and then settled in New Orleans during the middle of the last century. Her father speaks Spanish though Lisa does not. This past week her dad met three men from Equador who had been brought over the Mexican/US border by coyotes trafficking in laborers to work in New Orleans. They were hired by a local meat shop owner who wanted them to clean out the coolers sick with rotten steak and chicken breasts, and repair the outside of the building. He told them to cook up some meat and take a couple of drinks from the shop when they asked for food and water, and they were locked in the shop to sleep. After several days of hard labor, the owner refused to pay them, telling them he would call immigration if they didn't work for free. That night after they'd labored for hours the men sneaked out and escaped and found themselves at a latin american market. Lisa's dad met them later and hired them to help them clean out his family's home.

During the eighteenth century New Orleans played a major part in the slave trade. Men and women stolen from their west African homelands were taken to the Caribbean, through the Gulf of Mexico to Veracruz, and then to New Orleans, where they were sold by the French then the Spanish then the French again (and then Americans) to wealthy landowners and homesteaders. New Orleans, "the city that care forgot," became one of the major slave trade ports just as it was home to the most free African-Americans in the country, who helped create a culture world-renowned for America's indigenous music, jazz, and our most distinctive indigenous cuisine. One of the neighborhoods badly flooded by Katrina was Faubourg Tremé, the birthplace of Louis Armstrong and home to the notorious Storyville. It is the oldest, continuous black neighborhood in the United States.

Lisa and I talked about how this one disaster has caused the displacement of so many New Orleanians, scattered as they are across the country (even in rural Arkansas), and how it has simultaneously brought displaced persons like these three men from Ecuador to New Orleans. How will New Orleans change in the coming months, years? When so many of its residents, new and old, are here and there?

I talked to S this morning and he was in somewhat better spirits. He had felt some of the earthquake that struck the Pakistan/India border yesterday, but he had no idea how tragic or devastating it was until I told him. Our conversation was typically short. Perhaps we'll be able to talk longer tomorrow.

Katrina and the War on the Poor

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 23:55:49 GMT

First LBJ and then Reagan had the "War on Poverty," but we all saw it for what it was, a war on the poor. Twenty-five years later, and here we are with an ever-rising percentage of us living below the poverty line, tens of millions without health care, and all making a wage nowhere close to life-sustaining. It took a disaster of epic proportions, and the disturbing images that it produced, for us to start talking about poverty again. All over the place are little hints and discussions about the role of class and race in the mess left from Katrina, and what role both should play in the rebuilding of New Orleans. Seeing that NOLA is one of the most corrupt cities in the country, making even the corruption of Chicago pale in comparison (well, maybe not pale), and that it has long been run by and for elites (first white, now mixed with the "talented tenth" of the black creole population), it will be a miracle if the city included any of its tens of thousands of poor citizens in the decisions being hatched out over martini lunches right now.

Salon ran a two-part roundtable discussion on how to rebuild, and I thought this from Angela Glover Blackwell, the founder and CEO of PolicyLink, was a highlight:

The television coverage of Katrina's impact on New Orleans, for the first time, showed the American people the reality of black poverty in this country. The American people were shocked and embarrassed. The last time the country had a sustained glimpse into the conditions in black America was during the civil rights movement -- then, however, the cameras captured the determination of black leaders and the courage of the young civil rights workers. This time it was the face of black poverty directly. Despite some early attempts on the part of some media to turn the victims of the hurricane into lawless vandals, what the American people saw was individuals and families and community members, just like themselves, trying to do the best they could for their friends, relatives and neighbors. They saw children and the elderly suffering because of decades of neglect, not just days of neglect. For the first time they saw their fellow U.S. citizens and they were ashamed that such neglect could exist in the land of abundance.

The people of the United States responded with their dollars, but where is the vehicle to allow the American people to send their political will to Washington to demand that the country do something about persistent poverty? This is the big opportunity: to have a sustained conversation about the continuing causes of poverty, why it is still disproportionately concentrated among African-Americans, and what strategies can effectively reverse this trend and open up more opportunties for all.

This is the time to help the American people understand the unsustainability of current development patterns that promote vast investments in suburban communities while concentrating poor people in areas that are isolated from job opportunity, not well served by public transit, and defined by failing public schools and the absence of essential amenities like supermarkets.

The Nation this week ran a number of essays about New Orleans and the role of class as well, including a gem by Adolph Reed, Jr., one of our country's most eloquent writers on class and race. I'm reading his book Class Notes right now on recommendation from one of his friends who I know here in Chicago. Reed was born and raised in New Orleans:

I don't have space or words to catalogue the horrors and outrages associated with the plight of New Orleans and its people. In any event, the basic story is now well-known, and we're entering the stage at which further details mainly feed the voyeuristic sentimentalism that will help the momentarily startled corporate news media retreat gracefully to their more familiar role as court heralds. The bigger picture will disappear in the minutiae of timelines and discrete actions.

What will be lost is the central point that the destruction was not an "act of God." Nor was it simply the product of incompetence, lack of empathy or cronyism. Those exist in abundance, to be sure, but they are symptoms, not ultimate causes. What happened in New Orleans is the culmination of twenty-five years of disparagement of any idea of public responsibility; of a concerted effort--led by the right but as part of a bipartisan consensus--to reduce government's functions to enhancing plunder by corporations and the wealthy and punishing everyone else, undermining any notion of social solidarity.

[snip]

Natural disasters can magnify existing patterns of inequality. The people who were swept aside or simply overlooked in this catastrophe were the same ones who were already swept aside in a model of urban revitalization that, in New Orleans as everywhere else, is predicated on their removal. Their presence is treated as an eyesore, a retardant of property values, proof by definition that the spaces they occupy are underutilized. And it's not simply because they're black. They embody another, more specific category, the equivalent of what used to be known, in the heyday of racial taxonomy, as a "sub-race." They are a population against which others--blacks as well as whites--measure their own civic worth. Those who were the greatest victims of the disaster were invisible in preparation and response, just as they were the largely invisible, low-wage props supporting the tourism industry's mythos of New Orleans as the city of constant carnival. They enter public discussion only as a problem to be rectified or contained, never as subjects of political action with their own voices and needs. White elites fret about how best to move them out of the way; black elites ventriloquize them and smooth their removal.

Also in this week's Nation, Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenat ask 25 questions about the "murder" of New Orleans, and Naomi Klein calls for a "people's reconstruction." I don't have much hope at this point that the reconstruction will be mindful of class given how rents have already skyrocketed in the city, landlords are evicting tenants before they even return, and soaked-through houses are being gobbled up by hungry developers. It's sad, truly sad, that so many who were left behind when Katrina first stormed in are being left behind again, and will most likely continue to be. When I read Clayton Cubett's blog about his mother's loss, I thought of how many tens of thousands of others like her there are down in the Gulf Coast, and how most of them don't have a child or relative who is financially capable of helping them out.

I was struck by the lack of philanthropy in New Orleans when I first moved there three years ago. It was so different than Chicago, where though there is poverty and shameful segregation, there are also a lot of individuals and organizations commited to social change and working hard in neighborhoods across the city to make life better for the city's residents. When I first moved to New Orleans a close friend introduced me to two of her cousins, local socialites, because she thought they might be able to help me get a job in the non-profit sector. Before moving to New Orleans I was Executive Director of the Neighborhood Writing Alliance, a small community arts program in Chicago, and I wanted to stay in the same sort of job. They told me in very frank terms that New Orleans was about church and family and Mardi Gras, and that it was to those three areas that money went. Over the next three years I found out how true this was. There was money in New Orleans, no doubt. Dick Cheney came to town for a lunch before the election and raised $500,000 in an hour for David Vitter's successful senate campaign. But the money wasn't going into the communities that needed it the most, unless you count the aluminum doubloons made in China that were thrown out to the masses during the many days and nights of Mardi Gras.

The poverty was obvious in that city to anyone who lived there. I wrote about it the day the hurricane struck, thinking like so many others that New Orleans had once again been spared the worst. Reading over the note I sent to that prominent Sir back in the fifth grade, I thought how my grammar and spelling were better when I was "9 1/2 going on 10" than many of my college freshman students in New Orleans. It was heartwrenching and frustrating to see how low their level of skill was. They had so many interesting ideas, so many stories they wanted to tell, but they were crippled by their failed educations. (And it wasn't just the public school students, by the way.) Many had to take remedial English for several semesters (with no financial assistance) before they could take my freshman comp class. And many others failed my class, then failed again, trying to get to a basic level of competence. That level was far below what was expected of me when I was a freshman in high school (the students had to write a four-paragraph argumentative essay at the community college and a five-paragraph essay at the university). The class ended with a pass/fail exit exam that was neither administered nor graded by the instructors that determined whether the student passed out of freshman comp or had to take it again. Some of us instructors talked about how much cash the public university system was making off of this freshman comp business and how, perhaps, the elementary and high school system was kept at a lower level on purpose to create legions of low-wage workers unable to critically think (and therefore question their lot in the city) while simultaneously being sold the idea that they needed college educations to earn anything more than minimum wage, only to go to college and pay to take the same class over and over again because they were so lacking in skills. It seemed like a racket, and perhaps it was.

Part of me thinks that the evacuees I met in Houston are better off there -- their kids will get better educations, the parents higher-paying jobs. But the other part of me thinks this is a monumental failure of the city of New Orleans and its elites and they owe it to these residents to include them in the city this time around. I've never understood how some people can be so blindly selfish as to think that if they protect their own little corner of the world that's enough. Don't they realize that everyone benefits when everyone is taken care of?

In the Garden District, signs are posted on telephone poles declaring that the neighborhood is "Patrolled by Off-Duty NOPD." We lived on the northernmost edge of the Garden District Private Patrol route, which was fine with us since we heard gun shots nearly every night. (Not that the private patrol made any difference -- after all, we heard gun shots every night even with them rolling around in their Ford SUVs). The first time I saw that sign I thought how absurd it was -- why wouldn't the neighborhood be patrolled by on-duty NOPD? -- and how completely opposite it was to my hometown Chicago where you can't go a night or day without hearing sirens (this is a fortified city with 14,000 sworn officers) and where even in my working-class and immigrant neighborhood cops respond to calls within minutes. I got rear-ended on St. Charles one fall and called 911 to have a cop come by and write up a report. Several cops drove by and told us we had to wait for a "traffic cop" who, they promised, was "on the way." After a full five hours of waiting for the mythical "traffic cop" we drove ourselves to the police station on Magazine and Napoleon and got harangued by the lieutenant in his office lined with Rex posters about how we were supposed "to wait at the scene of the accident and not move the vehicles." It was infuriating, and we were two white women with out-of-state plates and on the main tourist drag outside of the Quarter. Imagine the lack of service in the 9th Ward.

Will New Orleans change for the better? I don't know. But if I still lived there I'd stock up on supplies and pretend I lived in the middle of nowhere with no prospect of governmental support. Because that's probably the way it will continue to be.

It's always been a struggle...

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 16:54:32 GMT

Monday night I went to see Lhasa at the HotHouse with my mom, Luis, his wife Diana, and two of their friends. Lhasa clutched her left hand in a fist, held it tight to her stomach while she sang, her face contorted as if each word was a struggle to get out. Opening for her was DeVotchKa, an odd Denver trio that uses a theramin in their show. Nifty!

Before the show I had dinner with my mom at her house, and she gave me this draft of a letter I sent to "Sir," a nameless man-in-charge (government-type, no doubt) when I was "9 1/2, going on 10":

Dear Sir,

My name is Katy Ingold and I have a terrific idea. If fuel ever runs out and nobody knows what's happening around the world because they can't watch television 'cause it is runned [sic] by electricity then why don't we make big batteries and put them in the televisions and lights and other things so we can still have these things.

Your Friend,
Katy Ingold

P.S. Please send me a letter saying if it is a good idea or a bad idea.

Surprisingly, I never got a letter back from Sir about this idea.

When I wrote this I was in the fifth grade, and my mom and I lived in a railroad apartment on Pleasant Street in Oak Park, Illinois, a self-described progressive suburb just west of Chicago where Ernest Hemingway grew up (and so famously said it was a city "of wide streets and narrow minds"). We had a rickety black-and-white RCA TV and it was in my mom's room. I remember my favorite shows were re-runs of The Cisco Kid, Hawaii Five-O and Emergency!. Apparently I was quite concerned with keeping up with my "information" and worried about what an energy crisis might do to my quality of life.

I don't remember too much about my teacher, Mr. Morelli, except that he always had a five o'clock shadow and it looked green from his black hair and pale skin. I remember, too, that we had to memorize one poem that year and recite it and I chose "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost (which I still remember, by the way). I guess he had us write letters to powerful Sirs too, which I'm sure suited me just fine since I already saw myself as a political person.

I wonder, do fifth graders still send letters to powerful Sirs in their classrooms? And if they do, what do they write about? Their desire to learn "intelligent design" in science class? How prayer should be a part of school? The inequities of our economic system? Or are they still sending letters about our on-going energy crisis and the wars we're waging in relation to it?

S has not received any letters from kids, but he has received a couple from adult strangers, including an elderly woman from New Orleans who knows one of the men on his old lacrosse team down there. She sent a kind letter to him wishing him well and hoping he stays safe. He wasn't sure if he should send a response back now that her city has no mail service and is struggling to emerge from the flood. I'm not certain, but I think he sent her a card anyway, thinking one day it would reach her, even if it came a little soiled around the edges.

The Second Goodbye

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 21:10:13 GMT

I've been trying to get my mind back in order these past two days, still a little delirious from our two weeks together and the heavy days I've had since he left. It was so good to see him, to touch him. I hated saying goodbye to him again.

It turns out we were both apprehensive about seeing each other. I started to get nervous about it down in Houston, worrying that we would not know each other anymore, or worse that we would be irritated with one another after such a long absence. His flight was changed at the last minute so he ended up leaving Dallas later than he'd hoped. I was to pick him up near 11 p.m. instead of 8, and since it was a Friday night, there was crawling traffic around the airport made worse by late-night construction work. He'd told me I could get a pass and meet him at the gate, so I left the house early to get to the airport on time to get the pass. With the traffic, though, I missed that chance. I called him when his flight was supposed to land and left a harried message while my car idled near the exit for 294, still a mile or so away from the airport, then rolled down the windows and sighed. What the hell can you do.

I drifted to him waiting at the car pick-up area at Terminal 1, a dead-end traffic-wise. He put his bags in the back seat, sat down in the front. I burst into tears. We hugged and kissed and the light from the bug-juiced overheads streamed inside, surrounded him, made me cry more. He was in the car with me. Right there! It took a couple of minutes before I could drive us home, a couple of pets on his shoulders, his arms, his legs. A brush of my lips against his cheek. It was too much, finally seeing him, touching him. It had been more than seven months, and really two more before that when we'd said our first goodbye. I'd driven him to a buddy's house in the south suburbs, a mid-century ranch with a large American flag pinned to the garage door, a handful of smaller flags stuck in the frozen lawn around the walkway, and helped him load up the van for the drive to Indiana to catch a bus for Ft. Hood. It was a blinding-bright day, deeply cold. The sun's shadows were long and black, each bare hickory and oak cast across the salt-rimmed frontage roads as Brancusi sculptures. I hated that drive home.

When I drove away from S in Ft. Hood two months later it didn't feel as final as it had that day in Chicago. I wasn't driving home alone to an empty house but rather back to Austin to check in my car and fly away. (Perhaps it was that sense of false goodbye I wanted to preserve these past months, traveling as I have.) I have only a few solid memories of Kileen, Texas, those days were so blurred with worry and so intense. There were the crashed cars at the fort's entrances with LCD signs giving how many days since the last person was killed in a crash ("13 Days," "16 Days," then back to "0 Days"); the tanks and anti-aircraft guns sprinkled in front of dusty brown administration buildings and barracks, the 1st Calvary's and 4th Infantry's very own sculpture gardens; Hell on Wheels Avenue, Tank Destroyer Boulevard; the cardboard tents set up on tables in the PX advertising life insurance -- at a special Military price, of course! -- and the hollow-eyed men quietly eating pulled pork sandwiches and pepperoni pizza together, or alone; the tent-covered book sale outside the PX, where soldiers could buy, at a discount of course, romance novels, self-help books, and countless versions of the illustrated Bible; the internet cafe run by a middle-aged Vietnamese woman in a strip mall near tattoo parlors and pawn shops, and her stories of buying homes, renovating them, and selling them again; the screaming "We Support Our Troops!" banners hanging in the windows of competing car dealerships that sold brand new cars at high interest rates to young boys before they flew off to Kuwait and then to war; the check-in den at the mouth of the fort, not so different than a check-in den at a prison or jail, with every "visitor" required to show ID and car registration after taking a number and sitting and waiting, waiting to prove who they were to the tired bureaucrats behind the counter (I went in once and there was no one in line so I went straight to the counter. The man told me to take a number -- "we have a procedure" -- and to wait my turn, which was, surprise, next.); the "welcome home" messages outside the cav's staging area made out of green and red and blue and white plastic cups stuffed in chain-link fence pockets; the boy-young soldier with a prosthetic where his right forearm and hand used to be, shopping in the Target off the frontage road; and the mass of blackbirds howling at dusk in the squat tree across the road from my pasty room at the Super 8.

We drove home from the airport and it was a warm Chicago summer night, and when we got home he told me stories he'd stored for the past seven months, then I told him how I needed him to write me more while he's gone. We got it out, then made love and made love again, and filled ourselves with each other so much so that when I discovered yesterday that I'm not pregnant, again, I was more puzzled than sad. How could I not be when it was so intense, so true? (I already know the answer to that.) By our third day together we both said "It's as if I/you never left," and went on to just be together, again and again, day after day, as if there was no war and no hurricane and no political turmoil. We talked about our dog Casey and how silly and adorable he was. We went to silly movies and S baked three apple pies (he is the best baker I've ever known -- better crusts than my mom's or my grandmother's, which, honestly, were the best crusts ever baked, ever, before S started baking them). We both gained a few happy pounds, made every bite count as we filled up with that luscious goodness.

Saturday night we stayed up late getting his stuff packed. We stuffed four pairs of boxing gloves, thai leg kick pads, focus mitts, hand wraps, and a pair of five-ounce Harbingers into his green duffle, then topped it off with his shower sandals and a couple of mud brown towels. The rest of his gear he crammed into his sandy backpack, including one newly cleaned and pressed uniform, a little scruffy at the seams from river-stone washings and life in the harsh mountains. The next morning we rose early, stopped at the coffe shop to get a couple of lattes, drove to the airport and parked the car on White Sox, 3rd level, 3rd aisle, and I wondered out loud why the parking czars would have levels and aisles both numbered, not one with letters instead. He got to check in at the special "group" check-in, which on first glance seemed to be a shorter line but was in fact as long as the others. I was issued a special pass to go with him to the gate, then we went through security, and since S is a soldier he is also a potential terrorist, so they searched him and his gear, rubbed his hands to test for bomb-making residue, then confiscated his beard-trimming scissors. The TSA man felt bad, really, then threw the scissors in the trash. S told me that he was searched extensively on the way to Chicago too, and he said he resented being treated like a terrorist when he's fighting in this supposed "war on terror." "They treat us like kids," he said, "and fucking criminals."

We roamed the United terminal, reminiscing about all of the flights we missed in the late 90s when that airline was so greedy they booked flights they had no intention of flying, and when the customer service lines stretched the length of the terminal in either direction (and if you've been to O'Hare, you know just how lengthy that is) filled with irate customers trying to get home. We stood around and held hands and made small talk. It's impossible to have a real conversation when you know it is going to be interrupted sometime soon with that call, "All rows are now boarding." I walked away when he handed his ticket to the check-in woman. I knew he wouldn't look back -- it's not his way -- and I didn't want to see him walk away from me down the aluminum tube to his plane. I follwed the signs out of the airport and found my car and drove home, where I stayed holed up until last night. I cooked an omelette, watched foolish shows on television and pretended to read "Massacre of the Dreamers," a collection of essays by Ana Castillo. In reality, though, I flipped through the pages, my eyes glossed over, and glanced up at the TV which may as well have been showing snowy static. That night just disappeared.

I have finally emerged, quicker this second time. The first time I stayed in my house for three days straight, only tumbling out to walk our sickly dog. I cleared our cabinets of canned goods that week and watched Sex and the City, the entire series, straight through. I feel like I've come a long way since then, seeing that my time-of-distraction was only a little more than 24 hours after this latest goodbye.

I know we're at the shorter end of this mess now. We don't think he'll be gone longer than five more months, so the worst is behind us. But I still miss him. I still worry. I can't wait to see him again and know, finally, that there will not be a third goodbye. Some, like my friends Daniel and Zach, have no idea when their last goodbyes will be. The army will not let them go. They've served tour after tour, their contracts long ago expired, and their families ache for them just as I ache for S. It's a travesty.

Here are S and Casey standing below a Live Oak at Audubon Park, New Orleans last December. The picture at the top of the post is from Ireland soon after we married six years ago.

Why, it's our anniversary!

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 21:44:41 GMT

Today is our sixth anniversary. How fortunate that S is home right now, and how wonderful! Tonight we are going to a new restaurant that is supposed to be spectacular, Alinea, for a very late dinner. We couldn't get a reservation until 9. Last year we were living in New Orleans and spent our anniversary at Le Pavillon, a classic hotel that serves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and hot coco in the lobby late into the night, and had dinner at the world famous Galatoire's in the Quarter. The food was, well, okay, but the atmosphere! My god. Really, everyone who visits New Orleans ought to go there once. Hopefully one day both the hotel and the restaurant will again serve eager guests in the top-notch way they have for over a century.

We've been doing all the things we love to do together (some too secret to write in a blog - ha!) and having loads of fun doing them. Yesterday we saw Penn State, one of S's alma maters, beat Northwestern 34-29. It was all the more sweet because as an alum of U of I, I love ot see Northwestern beaten by any team at all, and because the game was full of late-quarter drama with the Lions squeaking out a victory in the last ten minutes or so. Plus it was one of those dreary early fall days, not to cold, with the threat of rain all afternoon. Lucky for us the sky didn't open up until we were waiting in line for the shuttle bus back to downtown Evanston. And Penn State won! Did I mention that already?

Friday night we went to the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum and hooked up with our friend Luis who had a piece in their exhibit in honor of Carlos Chavez, a Chicago artist and activist who died last year. Afterwards, we went to Flo for delicious nouveau Mexican. The place is owned by a couple of local artists who we know by a degree or two of separation. It's intimate and fun and the food is fab (plus it's definitely in our budget). The joy never ends.

Here's S in front of the score board. Ah, sweet victory.

Here's Luis next to his piece. Unfortunately, the museum didn't hang it on the wall, so it was hard to see that on the front of the doors there were also images, skeletons of the coyotes painted on the inside. Luis is a talented artist whose work connects the contemporary Mexican-American experience with the culture of pre-Colombian Mexico and modern politics. He's got a number of interesting projects going on right now. I'll post about them as they come along.

Odyssey Redux: The Long Trip Home

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 21:53:17 GMT

I forgot to include this little nugget in my post yesterday, so here it is. It took S over 60 hours to get home from Afghanistan. The military sent him on a C-130 to Kuwait, where he and the other soldiers going on leave got to wait for almost 24 hours until they were wisked away on their private air carrier (ATA -- "on ATA you're on vacation!") to Budapest, Hungary. From Budapest they were flown to Shannon, Ireland. It was a packed flight, every seat taken up by an American soldier, so the duty free shops, restaurants and pubs were no doubt extatic to have so many shoppers deplane for no other apparent reason other than to spend money. From there they were flown to New Foundland, Canada, where they got to get off the plane again to a completely empty airport where S was told he couldn't drink the water (who knew?). Finally, then, they were flown to the United States, to the beautiful Dallas airport, which, in my experience, is one of the worst airports in the country, significantly less fun than Austin's where if you're lucky you can catch a local act playing near the bar in the center of American's terminal. In Dallas S got to find his own flight home to Chicago.

For every leg of the trip, more money to the gas companies, to the airline, and to the airports (duty free shopping!). What other reasons could there be for such a long, zig zag trip? A trip so different than the one S's dad took from Vietnam yeras ago? From Afghanistan to Kuwait to Budapest to Shannon to New Foundland to Dallas, no one got on and all of the passengers were soldiers going home on leave.

Ah, the beauty of privatization. What were the benefits again?

My husband went to war and all I got was this lousy t-shirt

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 04:37:15 GMT

So here we are, finally together after too many weeks, too many months. It's been a delirious last few days in the best possible way. Right now he is asleep on the couch, exhausted still from the past months and because Afghanistan is nine and a half hours ahead of us (yes, a half). It has been as if he never left. We are so happy to be together.

This picture is emblematic of us, really. Rebecca used to tease us that we were always punching and kicking each other in the kitchen on Washington in New Orleans, doing our little flirtatious martial dance left over from our first years together at the karate/kickboxing gym. S is going to take our equipment back with him because some of the special forces guys he works with are interested in buying it from us, and since these days I'm more interested in zen than boxing, and S would like to pick up Aikido when he gets home (and I'll probably join him), we don't really need three pairs of focus mitts anymore, let alone thai leg kick pads and all those gloves. We have a lot of equipment.

The tee. S's last commander had them made up for PT. The new commander, though, wants his own tee, so these are now useless. Yes, for every commander there is a new t-shirt. The souvenirs of war! S told me that at Camp Phoenix, where many soldiers spend their entire tours (and where one high-ranking officer gave all the officers under him bronze stars for nothing more than staying safe on the most secured base in the country -- a lot of honor in that, isn't there?), soldiers can pay to have a flag flown for ten minutes and their picture taken beneath it, and get to take the smallish flag home with them as a memento of the war. Curious; not too many of the men like S who spend weeks on end on missions along the Pakistan border have much interest in these miniature flags, let alone posing for a picture beneath them blowing in Afghan winds.

S is full of stories. We spent the first couple of days talking and listening to each other. Some of his stories I'll be able to share here, but some he'll have to share himself, hopefully when he's home for good early next year. When his contract expired, he emailed his friend from his unit stationed on the other side of the country and told him that he was officially out of the army. His friend, whose contract expires in a couple of days, answered back, "Please tell me you're writing me from the United States!" Alas, he wasn't. He was north of Asadabad in a small fire base on the northernmost extension of the coalition (though not the northernmost border of the country -- yes, there are whole provinces we have yet to explore four years after the invasion). Some of the stories have to do with the overwhelmingly screwed up priorities of national guard leadership. Some about the desires of the vast majority of Afghans to have peace and stability and an end to war. Some others are about how most of the Taliban remnants and other "ACMs" (Anti-Coalition Militias) are foreign fighters from Pakistan and the Arabian peninsula, including a number who were "trained" in Iraq. There are stories of egregious lack of planning leading to the deaths of soldiers (American and Afghan), just as there are stories of lack of support and equipment leading to near-misses and unnecessary anxiety. Finally S is at a base that has proper equipment and support, but he considers himself lucky as some of the men he worked with the first six months are still stuck with nothing. The biggest question S has is why we're not fighting the war on terror, but again I'll leave it to him to go into that one. I have a feeling he'll be writing up a storm when he comes home for good.

The weather has cooperated this week so far. Fair in the day, finally some rain in the night. There is just the hint of autumn in the air, especially in the mornings. We don't have any big plans, just more hanging out and being together. It's such a joy!! I'll try to write again soon, perhaps about John Kerry's speech today on the Katrina Administration and their heartbreaking failures in our lost city in the south and "over there," that war-of-liberation turned civil war in Iraq. Afghanistan remains far off the television screen, buried most often in the bowels of the daily paper, brought out to the open only with elections or particularly disturbing bouts of violence. Soon S will be away from there and home, home. I can't wait.

Bush's banana republicanism and S's homecoming

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 17:31:55 GMT

Jackson Square is the center of the French Quarter. Tarot card and palm readers are usually set up on the pedestrian ways on the side of the square, with mimes and street performers sprinkled between them along with a handful of artists selling prints of Quarter scenes. The Quarter represents New Orleans to most Americans, though when I lived there I went to the Quarter infrequently, and when I did it was usually to eat at a specific restaurant or to go the market. The heart of the city was out in the neighborhoods where there were fewer tourists and more day-to-day living, where a tuba player might walk down the street playing his horn while a handful of uniformed school children made their way home at the end of the day.

Last night Bush chose to give his speech at Jackson Square in the heart of the only New Orleans he knows, a place he spent forgotten time during his long, cloudy days of alcohol and drug abuse. From his speech, we learned that Bush is still capable of reading a speech someone else wrote and that Jackson Square sustained no visible damage. That's good.

My maternal grandmother Marceline used to say "the proof is in the pudding," and when it comes to Bush's endless promises gift-boxed in righteous rhetoric, his words are meaningless until his actions rise up to them. So far, there's been no pudding, only rotten leftovers here at home and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I'm sure his speech worked for many who don't seem to mind when his actions mismatch his rhetoric so profoundly. Bush's numbers will rise again, and Rove will be triumphant once again, secure in the president's popularity and giving Rove the time and energy to devote to his new project, the rebuilding of New Orleans. It's a sick joke, really, having Karl Rove, a political opportunist and manipulator and nothing more, in charge of the most massive rebuilding effort since FDR's New Deal. Considering how hostile Bush and his crew are to government (in terms of service, not in terms of budget -- they have grown the largest, most inept government in our nation's history, spending trillions and getting only chaos in return), I think it's fair to say Rove will fail just as his boss has failed time and time again.

Yes, Bush has taken "responsibility." But what does that matter? What are the consequences of Bush taking responsibility? Will he fire Chertoff? Remove FEMA from the National Security umbrella, and appoint actual emergency management experts as the directors of both agencies? Will he order an independent investigation, and courageously acknowledge that such an investigation might find him most at fault?

Frankly, I have no tolerance for excuses or his words words words. Too much has come to pass. He has failed on so many levels, for so many years now, that I trust nothing he says and expect nothing but more failures. Bush is a corrupt, greedy liar whose policies have caused the deaths of thousands here and elsewhere. His only interest is in enriching corporate interests (and that goes for corporate churches, too). Considering that Halliburton has already received the first rebuilding contract, and we already know that they are a corrupt corporation that cheats the government at every opportunity, it is pie-in-the-sky foolishness to expect anything other than our continued swift spiral downward to the bottom levels of banana republicanism.

Iraq is in a civil war. In Afghanistan, a seventh candidate has been shot dead. Louisiana and Mississippi were already bastions of corruption and cronyism, which means things will only get worse with Halliburton in town. And tens of thousands of Americans are still stuck in shelters, some ineptly run, with no hope in sight for a future away from our toxic policies.

There are no excuses for such failed governance. Bush should be impeached. I think Nagin should be fired, too, and while we're at it, why not fire Blanco. I think she and Nagin are at significantly less fault than Bush, but they are still at fault. The entire government, on all levels, failed the people of New Orleans, and there is no reason to think they will be capable of rebuilding the city in the thoughtful manner we need right now. Blanco and Nagin were inheritors of a tradition in Louisiana of catering to the few wealthy residents at the expense of the many not-wealthy residents. The "talented tenth" of the African-American community ruled New Orleans just as the white political families rule the state. They all have had narrow interests and I doubt that will change now. In terms of the federal government, there is no reason to think that an administration who has said they are "rebuilding" Iraq while deconstructing it and throwing it deeper into chaos can do any better in New Orleans, a disaster that was made worse by their ineptitude and negligence.

I continue to be shocked and dismayed that so many Americans are comfortable with our shift toward fascism. On my brighter days I think it is ignorance that is driving so many to continue to support this disaster of an administration, but on my darker days I think it is greed and selfishness and false patriotism. The future is always uncertain, but sometimes it is at least bright. Now it's not so bright at all.

Yesterday I had lunch with two New Orleans friends who are up here staying with their folks in the suburbs. They are engaged, Dave and Dianne, and Dianne is from England so she is not eligible for FEMA assistance. The whole thing has been incredibly hard on her. She has been depressed and anxious, aggravated by living with her future in-laws, of course. Their car is floating somewhere in New Orleans, so they took the train in from Dave's parents' house thirty miles away, then I picked them up and we went to Devon Avenue for a delicious Indian lunch. After, I drove them to the Red Cross down at Racine and Roosevelt, a community center surrounded by our city's newest incarnation of public housing. I just got an email from Dianne and it seems the Red Cross was extremely helpful, giving her a debit card with over $600 to help them the coming weeks. They bought plane tickets back to New Orleans for next Friday. They don't know if they'll be able to stay at all (probably not), but they should be able to get into their apartment and collect some of their belongings, and if by chance the car hasn't floated away, they'll take a road trip to Houston or somewhere else and sleep on someone else's couch. I know so many nomads, and they are the lucky ones, people with family and friends and resources. Imagine all who aren't so lucky.

Tonight my darling S comes home for his 15 days. He gets in after 8 p.m after traveling for more than 48 hours: Baghram to Kuwait, Kuwait to Germany, Germany to Dallas, Dallas to Chicago. He called from Kuwait yesterday morning to tell me what flight he will be coming in on and to tell me how he had been stuck there for hours, waiting and waiting. I've been a crafty beaver around the house since I returned from Houston, hanging curtains in the living room, straightening up and doing a deep clean. I've been on the road for months now, leaving the place to the peculiar dust the city produces and sends floating down around us. The weather has cooled off here. The trees are losing their leaves, though not from fall color. They are starved for water and their leaves are turning brown in patches. We had a sprinkle last night. What we need, though, are days and days of soaking rain.

I don't know how much I will post the coming two weeks. I suspect I'll continue to write fairly frequently, now with S seated next to me on the couch, he on his ibook, me on mine. I know he's got a lot of writing to do himself, from sending emails to the miriad of friends who he's not had time to write, to the grants he needs to look into for his fieldwork in Mexico next year. There will be a time after this war for him, we hope. I have no idea what he will want to do the next two weeks. Our kitchen cabinets arrived and I'm going to store them here in our place. Who knows. He gets antsy after a few days of not doing much, usually. This is a different situation, though, so maybe he'll want to just hang around and not do or think too much. I'm flexible.

I'll try to post a few homecoming pictures tomorrow. I can't believe this day has finally come. It's been seven months since I saw him last, and nine since he left our house. So much time has passed. It's crazy.

Our slippery days at the beginning of the end of the American Empire

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 00:56:11 GMT

You will emerge from the flood
In which we have gone under
Remember
When you speak of our failings
The dark times too
Which you have escaped.

(from "To Those Born Later" by Bertolt Brecht)

"They didn't have to die", the coroner tells us when talking about the deaths at St. Rita's Nursing Home in the floating parish of St. Bernard. No, they didn't have to die, and neither did those who died from lack of water, who died of gunshot wounds, who died of rising waters, their bodies then consumed by water reptiles, wild dogs, carried away in a toxic slumber. How many didn't have to die? We may never know.

We know of the deaths at St. Rita's and now the home's owners' wrists are ringed in steel, their fingers licked with printing ink. Where are the other arrests? Why hasn't Chertoff been arrested for gross negligence, Brown for negligent homicide? Why is there no talk of Bush's culpability? He has taken responsibility for the failures of his government, but he has not faced the consequences of those failures. Will he ever? Or will we choose to forget the failings, shameful as they were, and let him slip into the drifting sands of history?

We are living in a soaking wet, cardboard house, and the walls have already collapsed around us. We are fooled by the dark night that fills in the space, giving us the appearance of shelter. The stars don't shine -- the air is too polluted. The moon is hidden behind storm clouds. We are here in the floodwater, and many of us are unable to swim. Though the waters haven't succumbed us we know we are losing to the deluge. We can't stand. The ground is slick with petrol and the slippery mess left from the dead.

It is too much to think of all this just days after the anniversary of that failure of the imagination four years ago. Here in Chicago the leaves of young trees are ringed in umber; they are thirsting for water this summer of drought. Storms circle our eastern coasts while the sun shines mercilessly on grain fields across our country's center. Our leaders fight against science, insist we are living in the American Century of progress and hope, oblivious to the thermometer on the back porch and its ever-rising temperature. We are drowning in a flood of our own making and dying of thirst.

On CNN, a doctor cries in Houston after his rescue in New Orleans, after he was forbidden to practice in the makeshift hospital of Louis Armstrong Airport by the feeble-minded minions of a horse show operator. He has nothing, again, the same feeling of emptiness as when he fled Saigon thirty years ago, but now he and his wife have no assumption of a better future. Minutes later, a young girl grieves for the death of her lover, a man she saw die in the waters around her house as he swam between two wafting houses.

A haggard white couple tells us why the Crescent City Connection failed to connect New Orleanians with safety, dry ground. The police chief of white flight Gretna tells us, "If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged." His officers shot above the looters-to-be and turned them away, certain that the dozens of wheel-chair bound grandparents and women with young children would breach their "locked down and secure" village. Still Bush's faith-filled supporters insist the man-made disaster that came after the nature-made catastrophe had nothing to do with race.

And to think that now we are in the time of "good news" spreading. Steven Segal has his SWAT suit on, ready for action, in the parking lot of Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas, and now we know forty-five people died in Tenet Hosptial, that Uptown shelter that called out for help just a day after the levees broke. Remember them? Heretik Joe forwarded their email to me. But still it was days and days before they were rescued, leaving the already dead and the recently dead in the hospital-turned-bathtub.

I wondered where our heart was, then went to Houston and found it in the overflowing numbers of volunteers. Our leaders and their followers have no moral center. Their souls are bankrupt, running black with the blood of these four years of death in New York, Afghanistan, Iraq, New Orleans. And they have the gall to call themselves "pro-life." All evidence shows that they are in bed with Santa Muerte herself, and like her, dangle our stolen hearts around their sinewy necks.

I'm still heartsick, as you are too. Even now, when I know that it is just days before I will be with my husband again, my heart is broken. S called me today and he might leave tomorrow, getting him here in our house sooner, sooner. I can't wait to be with him, to be held by him for days in our little house, our domus, our shelter. It feels like a card house without him.

In Brecht's closing lines is the assumption that there will be an emergence from the flood and that through it the past will be remembered and learned from. But clearly we have no sense of history, no sense of the past. Across the blogosphere are discussions, pronouncements, of how exceptional this event was ("unprecedented!"), and how even the violence that followed the flood was unique to this catastrophe. Only a few decades after violence peppered Louisiana (remember the white picnickers who ate their red beans and rice while the lynch-dead's feet rustled through their bonnets?), violence so extreme and so random that it led to a mass exodus to Chicago and Saint Louis, there has been another exodus of internally displaced persons, Americans forced to flee in their own country, again from a lack of security and the black hole left by failed government. This isn't exceptional and it wasn't a surprise. Ask the raped women of Sarejevo, the torn-apart children of Rwanda what happens when there is no security, when government fails. They will tell you.

Still, over forty percent of our neighbors and relatives think Bush is doing a good job. They think this is all government is capable of (or worse, should be capable of), forgetting, as usual, that this is all this government is capable of. How can we last three more years? Will there still be a United States of America at the end of this running disaster's term, or only varying states of misery here and in those corners of the world we can't seem to stay away from? Today I passed a bargain-basement fortune teller on Ashland Avenue who promised $10 readings for all walk-ins. I thought about going in and asking her for a story of the future of this place that defines who we are, but I knew my ten dollars would be better spent with a donation to Red Cross.

The future is made of the present moment, and our actions are our only true possessions. It's no wonder our house is soaked through, contaminated with human waste and chemicals, and that we're here without a roof under a blood hot sun. Four and a half years into this disaster and here we are. We've got no choice but to rebuild. I just hope we have the good sense to reinforce the levees, restore the shorelands, build on higher ground. Meanwhile, we've got to get out of the house and start helping our neighbors swim out of this mess. If we don't do it, no one will.