Ghosts of Summer

When we arrived in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, a little before midnight, the streets were deserted. There is something incredibly warm and cozy-- romantic even -- about a summer town in the off season. The crowds are long gone, but you can still hear the lazy rumble of leisurely strolls, taste the sweet satisfaction of ice cream racing down the side of a sugar cone.

It wasn't exactly the quaint bed and breakfast we had planned on, but the Best Western was inviting enough in the dark. At least none of the letters in the lighted sign were missing. The lady behind the desk seemed bored and sleepy, a little surprised to see us. Sue. That's what her name tag said. She didn't look like a "Sue," though, and she didn't seem all that interested in chatting; after a couple of attempts, we gave up -- never even reached the point where it would seem appropriate to call her Sue. Or anything.

Sue seemed the perfect desk clerk for a Best Western, off season, off hours. Her kinky gray hair was pulled into a tight pony tail, her white shirt stained with shadows of a thousand fast food meals. I was able to squeeze in two trips to the bathroom and four to the water fountain while she processed our paperwork, and I returned just in time for the finale -- the programming of the key cards. Swipe. Beep. Click. Swipe. Beep. Click. Her face remained impassive, and she did the same with a second key card. Swipe. Beep. Click. Swipe. Beep. Click. Still expressionless, she put that one aside, and went through the routine again with a third, then a fourth.

"One is fine," I told her. "Don't worry about the second."

"I don't even have one yet," she snapped. Well, snapped is a strong word, but it was the first thing she had uttered with any sort of inflection. She kept going.

"Maybe unplug and replug the machine," one of us suggested.

"Nope." Not an option, apparently, although she did move it over a few inches, which seemed to have a bit of an unplugging effect because now when she swiped there was no beep. After a few tries, she moved it back. Swipe. Beep. Click. Swipe Beep. Click. Hmmm.

She went in back, came out with a large stack of brand new key cards, still wrapped in cellophane. We stood there, staring at our bellybuttons, afraid to look at each other. Swipe. Beep. Click. Swipe. Beep. Click. She tried three or four times.

"Maybe if you try to swipe faster?"

She obliged, looking a bit self-satisfied when nothing happened. I refrained from suggesting she start pulling cards from the middle, fearing she would.

Finally, she let us in with her master key, warning us that if we left we'd pretty much be shit out of luck. We collapsed into our prison, laughing. We half expected to find Sue in the lobby in the morning, buried under a sea of key cards. We did not.

The streets are not quite as deserted here in daylight, if only because it's the day of the big Halloween parade. Stores are open but empty, despite scores of straw-stuffed-pumpkin-headed people sitting like ghoulish welcoming committees on the cold benches outside. Not a lot of tourists, but clusters of local folks of all ages, all in costume. Cows, Disney princesses, a smattering of Harry Potterish wizards, a tiny family of loraxes. Nothing suggestive or in the slightest bit risque. A sleepy, summer town in Wisconsin, in the off season. Except for a few overtired toddlers, everybody seemed very content.

Who knows where we'll land tonight? The only thing we know for certain is it won't be the Best Western with no working keys. And it's a pretty sure bet that, in the off season up north, it will be warm and cozy and even a little bit romantic, no matter where we end up. Fall colors are past peak, and some of the trees are already bare. But the dim rumble and sweet taste of summer still lurks, behind the pumpkins.

Times Always A'Changin

Transformation. 

The regular yoga teacher was absent, and the woman gliding toward the front of the room looked to be the polar opposite of what I had grown accustomed to on Tuesday mornings. It's not that I was disappointed, but I had become a devoted fan of the yoga instructor with the decidedly un-yogic and somewhat voluptuous physique and her uncanny ability to push me toward my edge with her deceptive sweetness. She dresses more modestly than most yoginis, and my guess is she is less chiseled. She is strong and graceful, though, when she demonstrates a pose, and her flawlessly called complicated sequences (not once has she confused left and right) make me sweat like nobody's business.

Looking as if she had just stepped off the cover of Yoga Journal, the sub flashed us a broad smile and suggested we start on our backs. Look up yoga teacher in the dictionary and there she would be, rail thin but in a sinewy kind of way, muscular without bulk, tucked neatly into light-colored print tights without an ounce of love handle in sight. When she pulled back her wild mop of curly hair, her eyes gleamed, her teeth got even whiter. I would have despised her completely, had it not been for the starting on our backs part.

The list of detestable qualities grew as she told us she would be walking around with some sort of magic box, from which we should choose a card. An "intention" card for our practice, so we would not have to come up with one on our own. Seriously? I never have any trouble coming up with an intention. My intention is always survival, with a big lunch to follow. Had I not already rolled comfortably onto my back, I might have fled.

She tapped my toe and I reached into the magic box, drew a card. "Transformation." Transformation? Was this what my goal of the day would be, to change? Into what? A kinder person? Yoga Barbie moved on to the next mat too swiftly for me to grab her ankle and beg for a second chance. I am almost 58 years old, and the only transformation I can hope to experience is the gradual amplification of my most negative traits. I desperately wanted a realistic intention card -- wait until noon for lunch; don't drink before five (ish); do not turn on MSNBC. 

On my oldest daughter's first day of first grade, her teacher taught the class a new word: metamorphosis. I had thought it was an interesting opening vocabulary word for a six year old, but it made me feel good about our move to suburbia. With such an auspicious beginning, my daughter would certainly be elite-college-bound. Our decision to avoid twelve years of private school tuition in the city had been prudent, my fears of a bland suburban upbringing for my children unfounded.

In the years since that first day of first grade, my daughter -- and her younger siblings -- have indeed gone through a zillion metamorphoses, shedding the charms and problems of each childhood stage as they acquired new ones, for better or for worse. I miss their plump cheeks and their wishful eyes and unabashed dreams. I miss the chaos, as much as I miss my own youthfulness -- the absence of wear and tear that helped me deal with it all. As much as I cherish all the transformations, in all of us really, I wouldn't trade where we are now for where we were then. For the most part.

The yoga class was different, as it should have been, no matter what the instructor looks like. Her voice was not quite as clear, and she occasionally mixed up left and right, but still, I felt better at the end than I had before it started.  And not just because lunch was fast approaching. Dare I say, it was even a bit transformative, as every new experience tends to be. She told us we could keep our intention cards, but I unintentionally left mine on the floor. Maybe someone else will read it -- maybe someone less set in her ways.

Sunny with a Chance of Meatballs

If breakfast is the most important meal of the day and I love Italian food and meatballs are an essential part of any Italian meal (as far as I'm concerned, anyway), then the prospect of eating a baseball-sized meatball for breakfast is the obvious explanation for the extra spring in my step today.

There are a lot of reasons for my sunny disposition this morning; the meatball simply iced my cake. I was reminded, yesterday, of how lucky I am: thriving children, great friends who are in it for the long haul -- no matter how nuts I get, a return to town of someone whose brief absence had been surprisingly difficult, and, yes, I sleep with the most handsome dog. The clouds of stress have scattered, at least temporarily.

I even chuckled yesterday when someone told me he couldn't wait to get home and settle in to watch Fox News. All news is leaning toward the ridiculous lately, as pundits puzzle for hours on end over our president's basic incompetence as a human being (as if there was ever a reason to think otherwise) while his extraordinary incompetence as the leader of the free world could very well turn us into an ash heap. Maybe I'll switch over to Fox soon too.

Needless to say, I am not always this chipper. (Who is?) In a moment of uncharacteristic insecurity and neediness the other day, I had asked my good friend to tell me how great I am.  Worse still, I even tossed some adjectives her way, helped her with the script. She obliged, even made the shamelessly begged-for compliments seem heartfelt by adding some examples. It helped, but I'm smart enough to know when a friend is just doing her job.

She added something, though. Something that had not occurred to me to solicit as I desperately sought some stroking of my fragile ego. "Finally," she said, "I’m still upright. Thanks in no small part to you!" My friend, whose world was shattered when she lost her oldest son almost two years ago to some fluky genetic glitch. My friend, whose world remains shattered and always will, while the rest of us are able to tuck the catastrophe away -- in varying degrees -- as we move forward with our lives and our petty and not so petty crises. For me, Adam's death remains raw and unfathomable, but it is not the first thing that pops into my conscious brain when I wake up in the morning. Sometimes it is, but today it was meatballs.

As the months tick by, my friend's new normal becomes, in some ways, better, but in some ways far worse. So, she bakes. Challahs for my daughter's wedding, cookies because she's coming to visit me, cakes that don't look all that pretty but taste spectacular.  Give me a meatball over a cookie any day, but when it comes to my friend's baked goods, I make an exception. When she bakes, she creates order out of chaos, makes sense of a mess, and it moves her forward, keeps her upright more than I ever could.

Sunny with a chance of meatballs for breakfast, maybe some cookies later. Climate change is real, but sometimes it's a guilty pleasure.

Resettling the Ping Pong Table

Four years ago, I did my best to squeeze my five-bedroom-four-bathroom-cavernous-great-room life into a townhouse, one suburb over. As my nest had gradually emptied -- I was down to only one un-launched child and a blind dog -- I felt dwarfed by all the unoccupied space.

Dwarfed, and, at the same time, claustrophobic and crammed in, the way I used to feel when I was much younger and I would lie down on the bed to stuff myself into a pair of tight designer jeans, back in the dark ages of non-stretchy denim. It was hard to breathe; the walls seemed to close in around all the excess air.

I struggled to keep only what I needed, get rid of the rest. It was easiest to let go of furniture, the post-crib bedrooms that had made me realize how fast my children would grow, though it never occurred to me that they would actually leave. The boxes filled with art projects and report cards and the crudely illustrated manuscripts of youthful, unfettered imaginations were tougher; I spent hours traveling through time, trying to select only the best samples to keep for posterity. I gave away more "stuff" than most people acquire, and I took comfort in knowing that somebody whose life had been less bountiful -- at least materially -- than mine would enjoy and appreciate that which, to me, had often been superfluous.

My daughter and I eventually settled in to our new space, organizing what we had held onto to create a home, for us and the dog. It was far more difficult for her than it was for me. The large suburban house had been the only house she ever knew; her friends would have to drive what seemed to be a great distance (a few miles) to see her. Unlike me, she was nowhere near ready to shed the excess; she was too young to feel overwhelmed by clutter. For her, as they were for me, memories may have been a double edged sword, but her memories were more anchor than constraint

I had been determined to avoid the need for extra storage. I would take only what would fit. And I succeeded, except for the ping pong table. My father had bought it for my kids when we first moved to the suburbs. Whether they played or not, it made sense. The wide open spaces of suburban life cried out to be filled. And they enjoyed the ping pong table for a few years, before it became invisible under piles of stuff. By the time of the move, I had almost forgotten it was there.

Still, I couldn't part with the ping pong table, even though it had done nothing but gather dust -- and piles of crap --  for a long time. It captured so much for me: my growing family, the life we built, my father's love. He was either already or soon to be on borrowed time (I can't remember) when he bought that ping pong table, and it was an outsized, tangible version of his legacy. To get rid of the ping pong table would be like cutting myself off at the knees, again, the way I felt when he died. He didn't get to watch his grandchildren grow up, become the adults they are today, people who would make him so proud. But, in the relatively short time he had with them, he gave them so much more than the ping pong table, the stuff you can't really see but that I sense all the time -- in their goodness, their smiles, their generosity.

It's time to retrieve the ping pong table from my old neighbor's basement. He's moving on now too. It was easy enough to fold it up and wheel it around the corner to his house, four years ago. It's a little more complicated now, but I'll manage. My father's been gone for a long time, now, but, no matter where life takes me, he still occupies a fair share of space.

Up on the Roof

I'd had a permanent scowl on my face for days when my friend suggested I should live my blog. It would take a bit of soul searching to wipe off the bitchiness, but the idea certainly gave me pause.

Sometimes it's tough to put a positive spin on things. After almost 58 years of sinking my teeth into perceived petty offenses and foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog whenever I occasionally get the urge to share the joy of my bad mood with someone close, I often need to take a few extra blinks to see the glass as half full. Writing helps, I suppose. My fingers tap away, making sense of the nonsense. My jaw relaxes its death grip as I conjure up life as I think it should happen, or, at the very least, imagine an optimistic take-away.

I've always wanted to sit up on a rooftop on Waveland, enjoying a bird's eye view of a Cubs game from a perch well beyond left field, high above the clusters of fans on the street below hoping desperately to catch a hard hit foul ball. I've sat in perfectly good seats over the years, close enough to see the stitching on the ball -- and to appreciate the way uniforms can accentuate the contours of athletic physiques -- but still, I  have yearned to sit among the chosen few, the glorified bleacher bums getting wined and dined and generally keeping their shirts on. As far as I could tell, anyway, from my seat so far away.

After taking a break to warm up and dry off inside (and get yet another plateful of steak and Italian beef -- tasty, but not nearly as good as satisfying as a ballpark hot dog passed from a vendor through the outstretched hands of a dozen strangers -- we ventured back up onto the roof. It seemed wrong to sit inside after shlepping all the way downtown for a rooftop gathering when it would have been a lot easier to sit in a local sports bar. I pulled my sweatshirt hood up, and my rain jacket hood over that, tightened my scarf; we toweled off the seats, again, and prepared to focus more seriously on the game, to shout inaudible encouragements to the struggling Cubbies who, in eight innings, had managed to get only one real hit. I hunched my shoulders against the rain, watching it as it moved in waves of feather dust against the backdrop of the right field seats. I felt superior, out there in the damp cold, watching a blur of players in stark white home colors try to fight off the visitors in drab gray. I could barely even make out home plate, although I had a close-up view of more than a few stray paper plates blowing in the wind.

The Nationals had walked their way to loading the bases; our pitcher had finally been replaced. Only moments earlier, a different pitcher had somewhat gracelessly picked off a runner taking a provocative lead off first base. A small and ugly victory, but it had kept them at bay, at least for a bit longer.

I could barely even hear the crack of the ball, could not even tell whether the ball was going to sail over the wall. It took me a moment to realize I had just witnessed the thrill of a grand slam, for the wrong team. I could feel my scowl returning. We left. It's not that we saw the glass as half empty. At five to nothing in the eighth inning, in the cold and relentless rain, it was not a question of perception. The glass was broken.

But the walk/jog to the car, more than a few blocks away, was invigorating. We had sort of forgotten exactly where we parked, so we were relieved to find it, downright joyful when we fell into our seats and cranked up the heat. The glass is half full again. I decided to be happy that they got the grand slam out of the way today, when they didn't even need it. Their single run from earlier in the game, as it turned out, would have been enough for the win.

I am living my blog, and until I am proven wrong, I am hanging on to my faith in the Cubs. They will win tonight, as I watch from the warmth of my living room. Not like sitting up on the roof, but, even in blogland, life can't' be perfect.

Pulling Rabbits out of Hats and Other Illusions

Two Jewish moderate Democrats walked into a bar. . . .

It's bad for business in patches of north suburban Chicago when Yom Kippur falls on a weekend. My friend and I were surprised to even find a place open when we decided to unwind with a quick nightcap after stuffing ourselves at a "Break Fast." Soon, it was just us and the bartender, schmoozing away while the tabletops got wiped down and the chairs gradually went upside down around us.

It's a relatively new venue for me, this bar a few suburbs away from where I live, in my cozy bubble where most people seem to think the way I do and, if they don't, they try not to advertise it. My cozy bubble where I am not the only idiot who falls asleep to the soothing voices of MSNBC hosts who, like me, still struggle to understand how our country was hijacked last November. We are from both sides of the political spectrum here, with many of us overlapping somewhere toward the middle, but I believe with all my heart that my despair has little to do with political ideology.

My first time in this new place, I felt instantly at home. I liked my drink -- more because of the bartender's enthusiasm about it than the quality of the drink itself, although it was both tasty and potent. The bartender regaled me with magic tricks -- cards, coins, inexplicable sleights of hand. By the time I left, I was exchanging more than a few hugs with relative strangers. By my second visit, I felt like family. Hugs when I walked in, more magic tricks, another pleasing drink. More illusions of oneness, my bubble-borne delusions still intact.

The details aren't important, but suffice it to say I knew things were not going to go well when the bartender told me he was about to stop watching football. It all went south from there, as I listened, polite and mute. I heard about all the patriots who had died for the flag. I heard about how Obama did nothing for blacks (because, apparently, he was elected to be President of the Blacks -- POTB). I heard about the horror of open borders, the hardship of rising health care premiums. I remained polite and silent, assuming it would be pointless to launch into a discussion of all the gray areas: the complicated morass between "open" and "closed" borders, the daunting responsibility of representing everybody in a vast and diverse country, the difference between silent protest and disrespecting the flag, my willingness to absorb certain costs, if it means others will benefit from my country's wealth and freedoms as much as I do. The dangers of viewing the world as Muslims and the rest of us, or any brand of "us and them."

Yes, I support the right to protest. No, I don't think the best way to do it is to take advantage of the very public platform bestowed upon you by virtue of your employment, especially if your socks depict the dedicated people who protect you, personally, as pigs. Yes, I always stand for the flag and the national anthem in public, and my eyes always well up. No, I don't stand when I'm home on my couch, eating Doritos, but I still love America and everything she stands for. Yes, I think 45 has, once again, brilliantly reframed the issue so that even more folks than just the ones in his loyal base are missing the point, and I hope football teams continue to come up with intelligent compromises, the way they did in Baltimore yesterday, to help disentangle the issues and stand (or kneel) for unambiguous messages.

Two Jewish moderate Democrats in an empty bar on the heels of Yom Kippur. Close on the heels of much repenting and reflecting and resolving, on my part, to do better. The bartender was taken aback when I finally confessed that my centrality leaned a bit to the left. Was our new friendship just an illusion? I hope not. We hugged, awkwardly, but I am determined to go back, maybe find my voice and have a more measured conversation about all this muck. Maybe recapture the magic.