Heaven's Bells

The ugly Christmas sweater, bells and all, remains in the back of my car, jingling each time I turn. The dollar bill, petrified into a tight fold after a few spins through the wash, sits in my wallet.

When my father died, I kept only a few things.  Among them: the ring he had always worn when I was a child, and the sweater I had bought him for his 78th birthday, his last one. Silly reminders that make me smile.

The ring still sits in one of my jewelry boxes, along with assorted other keepsakes, there for no reason other than, well, for the sake of keeping. Unworn and useless souvenirs of other places and other times. I had assumed I would get the ring appraised, maybe do something with the raspberry red stone that might or might not be a ruby. Eighteen years later, all I can say is I have kept it.

It's different with the sweater. He wore it the day I gave it to him, at the tail end of what we knew to be borrowed time. I had convinced him and my mother to abandon the comfort of proximity to his doctors and celebrate his birthday in Chicago. I was hanging on to our new normal, pretending that it would last. Cancer had made my father thin, overly thin, but in the sweater he looked almost like his old self. It was tan and it looked warm, kind of like dad. It had maroon piping on the v-neck and on the cuffs, the same color as the first of many Cadillacs he drove. My brother used to call it (the car, not the sweater) "the Maroon."

Only a month later, just before Thanksgiving, the new normal was shattered. His cancer was back with a vengeance, and there was no more putting off the inevitable. I still have the picture of us on the stairs at my cousins' home, smiling with the bittersweet knowledge that this was it.  The last time we would gorge ourselves on turkey and stuffing and pecan pie together. In the picture he is wearing the sweater, the tan sweater with the maroon piping. The sweater that is still in my closet, long after the clean and comforting scent of my father has faded away. I still throw it on sometimes, when I am cold and don't have to go anywhere. It's strangely soothing, in an itchy sort of way.

It's been only two months since Adam died. Adam, my dear friend's son, a son to so many of us, at least in the way that we raise our children together, as a village. I like to think I shaped him a little, imparting to him my own special brand of wisdom, quirkiness, and bad habits, just as I like to think his mother did the same for my children. I know my daughter may have shared some lessons she had learned from me, like the carelessness with money that led him to leave wads of singles in almost all his pants pockets. Years ago, we took him shopping for "nice" jeans one day. He worried that the pair he had chosen might be too expensive; he searched in vain for the price tag.  Becca told him not to worry; he would find out at the register.

I helped my friend, the other day, as she emptied out whatever was left Adam's possessions in his apartment. No baby clothes, like the ones I still carry with me, the boxes of useless items I cannot seem to throw away because they remind me of my own children in other places at other times. These were Adam's things from his adult world, his life as a twenty-something. Nicely folded jeans with wads of laundered one dollar bills in the pockets. Orphaned socks. Nice sweaters with the tags still on. An oversized Michigan banner, torn and bearing the stains of undergraduate beer pong.

And the ugliest Christmas sweater I have ever seen, loud by virtue of its colors and its many bells. I wore it as we carted bags of trash down the hall. I wore it as we loaded bags filled with Adam's still good clothing onto carts, headed to Goodwill. With every move, it jingled. I know his roommates wanted it, but I could not let it go. I never saw (or heard) Adam wear it, but it is so Adam. Bold, a little out there, snagged and imperfect, notwithstanding all the eulogies and the glowing articles. His mother always wants to interrupt people as they gush, tell them how he never wrote thank you notes.

The snagged, jingling sweater is just like Adam was, perfectly imperfect. Music to my ears.

Unholy Trinities

Hope, resilience, no diet Coke. The key to happiness, at least according to a fitness instructor who, as far as I can tell, is always happy. Easter is not my holiday, but I'm always open to new ideas, especially if they promise a giant step on the road to Nirvana.

Father, Son, Holy Ghost. What little I know of Christianity comes from the Italian Renaissance art class I took when I was a sophomore in college. It was the class that gave me some modicum of hope (and, come to think of it, resilience) while I came to terms with the sad truth that I would never become a doctor because I just could not grasp the relevance of -- much less memorize  -- even the most simple hydrocarbons.

To this day, I would not recognize an organic compound if I tripped over it, but I still remember the  stories that inspired the vivid ancient depictions, the uncanny juxtaposition of allegory and realism. Ascensions, Assumptions, Annunciations, infinite Pietas. No more far fetched than the stories I had been fed in a Jewish Sunday School, of dictation from a mountain top and parting seas and burning bushes, but more fascinating, if only because these stories had been kept from me for so long.

I had entered a college of "Arts and Sciences" committed to the latter -- to that which is quantifiable, empirical, and, I suppose, exact. But a combination of laziness and a desperate need for wiggle room led me away from organic chemistry and dashed my pre-med dreams. I gravitated toward the inexact. I realized how much I liked bullshit.  And, by that, I mean my own bullshit.

It's carried me through, this affinity for the gray areas, an acceptance of the inexplicable. I rarely expect things to go as planned, and though I am fully capable of experiencing a wide range of reactions, I am rarely surprised. This political season has tested me, but I still await that second coming, an utterance that will literally knock my socks off. Until then, I will continue to watch CNN well into the wee hours, and wait.

Easter got in the way last night, and even CNN took a break from non-stop coverage of presidential candidates and terrorism (talk about a juxtaposition of, well, not so much allegory and realism as ridiculous and tragic). Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery. A six-part series devoted to an intellectual verification and/or debunking of various stories and relics, with commentary from brilliant and thoughtful theologians and reenactments starring really pretty people. I admit it -- and I mean no disrespect here -- I would follow the guy who played Jesus just about anywhere. Sensitive, soft-spoken, and devastatingly handsome. I get it.

I also have to admit I drifted in and out, and only half paid attention. It was engaging, fascinating, and instructive. I didn't feel as if I needed a shower after listening to the various viewpoints. There were no insults hurled -- at least not while I was awake. Faith, fact, forgery? Yawn. Spiritual exploration be damned, I yearned for a more entertaining trinity --  misogyny, immaturity, inarticulate bombast. Religion suddenly seemed way too scientific and tangible. I craved bullshit. The odd juxtaposition of reality TV and sad reality. The ridiculousness, apparently, is what fuels my soul. Even in the wee hours of Easter Sunday, when resurrection and ascension seem far more believable and mundane than what we see, these days, in the news. And, let's face it, believable and mundane do not sell.

Hope, resilience, no diet Coke. Hope is easy -- there's no other option. Resilience, a little tougher, but, again, the alternatives suck. No diet Coke? No way. That's as ridiculous as saying Donald Trump could be President.

A Center of Gravity

A gal walked into a bar.

A friend recently complained that my posts are too depressing; write something funny he suggested. A gal walked into a bar. All I need now is a duck or a rabbi and a priest, and I'm onto something.

Or maybe someone from the "Republican Establishment?" Yesterday I was at least a little amused when I listened to Mitch McConnell explaining the "principle" behind not giving the POTUS SCOTUS nominee a chance. My personal favorite: even the New York Times reported this nomination would move the Court to the left (duh!), which not only makes the NRA so angry it wants to shoot someone but is also just wrong because, darn it, the royal GOP "we" wants it to move -- or stay -- to the right. Close second favorite: this could mean a pinko-liberal oops I meant to say leftward leaning Court for a quarter century or more.

I did some math/brain exercises. The nominee is 62. In twenty-five years he will be 87. Young, compared to Justice Ginsburg, who will be 105. In twenty-five years, Justice Kagan, the youngest member of the current Court, will be 80. Half of them will be wearing diapers. The other half will be too busy playing shuffle board in Boca to make any decisions at all. If McConnell is right, there will be far bigger problems on the High Court than incontinence and a shift to the left.

A gal walked into a bar. This gal walked into a bar. A bar in the West Loop, which has morphed from a dreary neighborhood of warehouses into the latest hot spot for Chicagoans in their twenties. I walked in to pick up some pizza for dinner with friends. I walked out wondering when everyone in the world became younger than I am.

My adulthood began in Chicago.

I was in my twenties, off my parents' dime (and on their shit list), a plane ride away from all that was familiar. I was unaccustomed to the odd mix of urban accessibility to restaurants and shops and quasi suburban style housing that offered ample space and even an occasional patch of green. Chicago has always seemed the perfect place to be twenty-something. When I moved here, I don't remember noticing anybody who wasn't twenty-something. A quarter century later (more or less), I'm a lot older, but the twenty-something population in trendy neighborhoods in Chicago remains, seemingly unchanged.

This gal walked into a bar, and, within minutes, unbeknownst to her, a guy walked into the same bar. From where I stood, I was all the way to the right, and he was all the way to the left. With a tightly packed row of twenty-somethings between us, we did not notice each other. Bookending the bar, we were both there to pick up the same pizzas. It was my friend's husband; they had not gotten my text, had no idea I would be there. Not knowing what name they had used, I had only identified the pizza by its ingredients, which was close enough until "the name" showed up.

I watched from the far right as the bartender disappeared into the kitchen and emerged holding two pizza boxes. I began to salivate, as I always do when things are going my way. I watched as he suddenly paused, listened to something or someone, and disappeared back into the kitchen. He emerged without the pizza. He went to the register, right smack in the middle of the bar, and looked puzzled. I was puzzled. But I was feeling invisible in the land of twenty-somethings, so I decided to be patient.

Finally, he came over to me, apologized, offered me my money back but no pizza. "The name" trumped a vague identification of possible ingredients. The pizzas -- and the bill -- would be shifting to the left. It never occurred to him that the guy on the left and the gal on the right might have been searching for the exact same thing. I peered down toward the other end of the bar, waved to the guy trying to claim my pizzas, a guy I have known for over a quarter century. I have known him since we were not much older than all the twenty-somethings at the bar, as unaware of the drama surrounding them as we were of each other.

The guy and the gal walked out of the bar with two pizzas -- one veggie, one meat. Okay, not all that funny, but at least a happy ending.

The Morning After: A Walk of Shame

I'm embarrassed.

While the world chuckles, the guy who has made a mockery of our country boasts that he will simply renegotiate every deal ever made on the planet. And, by the way, it will be swift, and it will be terrific.

You just can't make this stuff up. I'm reading All the Light We Cannot See, a novel set in France and Germany as Hitler rose to power. A brilliant German boy, orphaned by the coal mines, lands a chance to pull himself out of the muck when he is chosen, for his talents, to be groomed at an elite academy for Hitler Youth. In a letter to his younger sister, wise beyond her years and appalled by this bargain with the devil, he tells her what he has heard, hoping she will come around: the fuhrer has collected scientists to help him control the weather; the fuhrer will develop a rocket that can reach Japan; the fuhrer will build a city on the moon.

I suppose you can make this stuff up, although, in the fictional version, nobody claimed that Japan would actually build the rockets that would be launched its way, or that the city on the moon would be surrounded by an impenetrable wall. Amazing. Terrific.

No, of course I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler. That would be gauche, and, anyway, he's not nearly as articulate. He thinks reporters are disgusting, but he would never kill them. He'll only kill the "bad people" -- a rather broad group which happens to include every man, woman, and child born into a particular religion. Everything else he'll just renegotiate, just sit down at some global conference table and figure it out. Now why hasn't anybody else thought of that?

As humans, we hear what we want to hear sometimes, and when the going gets tough, we might even be tempted to put our faith in someone who promises to make all the bad stuff go away. Especially since a lot of us have been raised to not make promises we cannot keep. We forget that some folks just don't follow the rules. History should teach us, but sometimes temptation just gets in the way.

But this? Really? I just don't get it, how the runaway Trump train is now chugging toward an almost certain nomination. How scapegoating and hate and finger-pointing bullying and misogyny and self-aggrandizement and volumes of empty hot air have rendered this idiot qualified to sit at the helm of my country.

Overseas, they're chuckling. I'm terrified. Mostly, I'm embarrassed.

Springing Forward

Every year, for as long as I can remember, I have handed over a small wad of cash so I can fill out something called a bracket. My head spins as I randomly put my faith in one college basketball team over another, mildly excited when I recognize a team I can support on principle -- i.e. somebody I care about went there, or, with apologies to close friends who are Duke alums, UNC. Can't help it; I just love robins egg blue.

This is a big week for harbingers of spring. March Madness brackets are in. The Chicago River goes from puke green to kelly green for St. Patrick's Day. It's the Ides of March, a date so often marked by tragedy -- Julius Caesar, stabbed, 44 B.C.; Ed Sullivan Show, cancelled, 1971.  Super Tuesday, part two. Daylight Savings Time makes it a little harder to get out of bed, harder still to leap into your sweats the minute you get home and hunker down for the evening under a blanket on the couch while you binge watch TV and shovel in comfort food. Not impossible, but still harder, with the sun still so high in the sky.

It's been about five months since I've seen our neighborhood homeless woman, the woman who, at a quick glance, seems just like the rest of us but who, upon closer study, seems not like us at all. The "us" being a pretty varied and motley band of neighbors who may have nothing in common except for the fact that we are not homeless.

She stood at a safe distance from my parked car the other day, so still I barely even noticed her as I juggled my coffee and my laptop and my keys. I felt her eyes on me, looked up. "Hi!" I smiled, greeted her as I would greet an old friend, well except for the part about not moving closer. She let me off the hook, told me she had a really bad cold, as if she really thought I had any intention of closing the gap. I was relieved. By my estimate she was wearing about six layers of outfits, and the layer on the outside looked coated with dust.

"How's Eli," she asked me. The last time I saw her, Eli was sporting a lampshade so he wouldn't lick his phantom testicles, and she had expressed some despair at the idea of Eli's charms stopping with Eli, never getting passed down. My male friends had, for the most part, crossed their legs in empathy, astonishingly tuned in to Eli's discomfort. The homeless woman had taken a broader, more long term view. Lost potential, a bleaker future, limited possibilities. Something she knew a lot about, this woman who was once a girl with a life full of potential and unlimited possibilities and a bright future.

She had spent the last five months living in a shelter, technically less homeless, I suppose. And now, with Daylight Savings Time and March Madness and green rivers upon us, she is back in the neighborhood. Her body doubles as her closet and her suitcase, the sky is her ceiling. And the other folks in the neighborhood will talk to her, at a safe distance.

She told me a little bit about the shelter, how viruses spread like wildfire there.  She didn't call it the shelter; she called it her community. Her community. As opposed to my community, the one she visits for seven months out of the year. Yet she seems content. Content and very much at home.

When she and Eli again cross paths, he will wag his tail and lick her face.  His greeting will be joyous and genuine, unlike my immobilized "hi." In Eli's world, there are no brackets. No playing favorites because someone's wearing robins egg blue, or smells nice. Anything is possible. He will close the gap.

House of Trump Cards

Ben Carson. The race card on steroids. The yin to Donald's yang. Ben's a whole deck of cards all rolled into one dark complected fellow who has never uttered an Ebonics phrase. The Evangelical card. The Ivy League card. The Jewish mother card (oy, he's a doctah!). 

The hatchet has been buried, and Dr. Ben has swallowed whatever pride he has left and endorsed Donald. The martyred Trump, whose First Amendment rights were somehow trampled when he cancelled his own rally, back in full buffoonish form within a day of the "civilized debate" experiment. Poor Donald, victimized by mean dudes everywhere, not to mention CNN for its unfair coverage. Enough with playing nice. He's back, mocking little Marco and lying Ted and, yes,  democracy and political discourse at its core -- the "town hall meeting." Too small, he explained. Where would the other 25,000 love festers go? The campaign slogan of the new millenium: Size matters. 

The "cerebral" and "thoughtful" guy described by Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon and total whack-a-doo in his own right, is nowhere to be found. But Dr. Ben did his best to sound earnest when he stepped up to the podium and gave his cringe-worthy explanation of why he and Donald would now be bedfellows. All righty then. 

"We do have fun, don't we," Trump asked a boisterous Ohio crowd, to their delight. Fun? Is he for real? Unfortunately, he is. Worse than real, or worse, at least, than what passes for reality these days. Real reality TV cannot actually be real because it's about people pretending to do things the way they would do them if they were not being filmed.  Silly, but good fun. After a few seasons, it gets old. (I don't think I've heard much about the Kardashians lately.) Unfortunately, by the time the Trump Show gets old, he could be sitting in the Oval Office. 

I can see it now:

"Hey Doc, get North Korea on the phone!"

"Okay, Chief." VPOTUS Dr. Ben Carson, M.D., neurosurgeon, puts down his bible, whips out his cell (in its blingy TRUMP case) and selects "2" on speed dial. He hands the phone over.

"Little Kim!" roars our new President. Dr. Ben re-immerses himself in his Bible, tries hard to ignore the incomprehensible screaming on the other end.

POTUS kicks his feet up on the desk, almost knocks over the large flickering TRUMP pencil holder. "How are those cute little miniaturized nuclear warheads, Little Kim?" 

He's not worried about getting one of those miniaturized nuclear warheads shoved up his ass. He's got Secret Service agents, and, if things go too far, his VP is a surgeon. But what about the rest of us? I'm worried. I'm really worried. 

The alternatives are not great. And no matter how many super important people and even regular folks start campaigning against Trump, Canada and Mexico still look like the only viable options. But Canada's cold, and, at my age, scurrying over that massive wall ain't gonna be easy. 

House of Trump Cards. Season One. 

Electile Dysfunction

Little Marco, lying Ted. Tumescent Donald. Dear John.

These guys do a better send up of themselves than SNL could ever hope to do. The nightmare continues: images of the White House dwarfed by an oversized TRUMP marquis,  images of outsized Trump components that I try desperately to unsee. Without needing to boast, Canada is more alluring and intoxicating than Donald's energetic man parts could ever be. Even if he promised not to talk.

As I prepared for my trip to New York City this weekend, somebody asked me to sniff around, see if it's as Hillary-loving there as people think. What I discovered is this: I don't know. Word has it lots of folks still feel the "Bern" here, but nobody in my small cadre of revelers really talked about it. In fact, super Saturday passed before I even remembered it was Super Saturday, and I woke this morning with a pleasant hangover that had nothing to do with a buffoonish political debate.

Growing up in New York, I always assumed the rest of the country was just like us. It was a rude awakening, when my Greyhound busload of like-minded and like-raised teenagers pulled up to a luncheonette somewhere west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies and the locals sitting on a bench outside looked as if they had just spotted a UFO. New Jersey, they whispered. Not New York. New Jersey. They couldn't go that extra step, couldn't wrap their minds around the real alien truth.

Wandering through Central Park on a crisp and sunny March afternoon, I fell in love again, as I always do, with New York. The colorful mosaic of people on the move, all at their own pace, always some small group paused along the sidelines for a chat or a photograph or just to take it all in. Performance art. In the heart of New York, a place that can seem alien and daunting and even distasteful to the uninitiated, I don't remember hearing a harsh word or witnessing anything rude, for an entire weekend.

Could this be just a tiny oasis in a country gone mad? Or was I simply too engrossed in personal contentment, thrilled to be among family and friends celebrating a much needed happy occasion in a year that has already begged for a do-over in so many ways. In the span of less than three months, I've been devastated by personal loss and, though it matters far less in the grand scheme of things,  disheartened by the spectacle of American politics. My suspicion of politicians in general has turned into disgust, and I cannot help but wonder how this happened. Certainly, nobody in my little world gets it. My world, obviously as small as the world of the folks sitting on a bench somewhere between the Mississippi and the Rockies, as alien to me, maybe, as I was to them when I stepped off the Greyhound spaceship. I'd like to think we have all gotten better since the summer of 1975, when we didn't have social media bringing us together, that there's a clearer definition of good and evil that has nothing to do with race or religion or geography. But all I know is there are a whole lot of people out there, somewhere, who are buying into something that is at best comical, and at worst frightening, at least to me and the people I hang with, and I just don't get it.

Good things, like bad things, should happen in threes, and by my count, we still have some wiggle room on the good side. Maybe little Marco or lying Ted or tumescent Donald or poor, dear John will do something surprising, or rational, or good. I suppose there's always Canada, eh?