22, 23...

There is always a day that becomes an endpoint (or a beginning, depending on which side you take) – a day from which you move forward. Of course, it’s always forward, because last I heard no one is able to step back. From August 22, the only way to move is toward the 23rd.


This morning was so poignantly bright that again I brought out a thinly strapped sundress to wear. This became a topic of conversation as people would nudge me and ask – aren’t you cold?

Am I? No, the sun is out! But it does feel more like fall…

No, no, don’t rush the season for me. Just because tomorrow is no longer the 22nd and the next day is the 23rd and so on, still, it’s August and some people haven’t even taken their summer vacations, I’m sure of it!

But I have.

The Westside Community Market has been neglected by me this year – I’ve been away so many Saturdays, that I never even noticed that my old baking friend Mary has a stall here (Honeybee Bakery). And she has been here the entire market season. Remarkable!

Mary used to be the head baker at L’Etloile, at the same time that I did my week-end baking stint there. She now has her own ovens and I was told by another shopper that I must buy her peach cake, but by the time I got to the stand, her peach cake was history. So instead I admired the tarts. They look exactly like the freshest homemade tarts should look.





I was nudged also to the Edelweiss Creamery stand, because they were, for the first time I think (or is it because it is the first time that I noticed?) selling butter. You have to sample it to understand that there’s butter and then there’s their butter. Great butter is like a cheese – something that can stand alone on a slice of bread.





But I think these heirloom tomatoes, sliced thickly, would add another dimension to a slice of bread and butter. Yes, I picked up three.





And a head of cauliflower, because just this morning I was reading about how good cauliflower can be when sliced lengthwise and roasted.





And corn. You don’t walks away from corn in August.





And of course flowers.






By the way, you know what the saddest moment of the day was? When I realized I had to put away the extra bike until next summer.


But, the morning begins gloriously. Or at least half of me believes it is absolutely splendid.

Even as the clock moves forward, closer toward the 23rd. And the closer I get to the end of this day, the emptier the house will be.

Ed, coud you run upstairs and get me my yellow sweater? It feels too nippy for the sundress after all.


In the late morning, my little girl (okay, not that young) and I, together with Ed, go to the downtown market. Both daughters have such a sentimental attachment to that place that it’s impossible to focus their attention on the splendid market just across the street. Yes, yes, do your shopping there if you want, but can we also walk around the Square? They have such magnificent pan fried cheese curds there to sample!





The downtown market is crowded – is it that it’s the week-end before the university wakes up from a summer nap? Is it that everyone has really returned from vacation?


At the shop where I work tonight half the customers are parents with university bound offspring. At least I'm past that now. This day is memorable in that it is the last time that I am sending my child back to school.

Did I mention that my daughters live too far from home?


It's dark now. Late. My shop hours are behind me. I take out an ear of corn, an heirloom tomato. I put them back. I turn on the TV, I turn it off. Music? Nah. Maybe a quiet listen to the clock move closer to the 23rd.

cheerio

We’re in the grocery store just down the hill. Ed is on the floor, peering into the depths of the shelf where his discount cheerio-like cereal should be.

Let me go ask. He goes off to find a clerk.

My daughter and I wander up and down grocery aisles, looking for nothing in particular. Dinner is half done – I started it before the movie we'd just seen. We’re now walking back (via the grocery store), picking up Clif bars for my daughter and cheep Cheerios for Ed.

Five minutes later I ask the grocery clerk who is passing through the same Cheerio aisle, looking at the same empty shelf – are you checking for the cheap Cheerios at the bequest of the tall guy? No, not really. He’s out back in the store room, hoping to find them there.

My daughter and I continue to stroll down the aisles. I’ll miss her arm in mine when she leaves tomorrow.


Back at home now. Ed and my daughter are dueling with country music on their computers. Cole Miner’s Daughter trumps the Six Days on the Road. Tomatoes, pre-cut early, are bubbling away for the risotto.


Earlier, we pass a car in the grocery store lot. The car had ducks on it. Lots of them. I think about writing a duck post.





But we’re listening to country now and I am cooking dinner and my older daughter (who, unfortunately is not here tonight) loves country and life is very intertwined that way. Ducks are so yesterday.


In the movie (you’ll guess which one if you’ve seen it), there is a character who is hopelessly romantic and one who is cautiously pessimistic and I try to fit myself and my world into one of these two spheres, but of course, it doesn’t work. What a surprise. Even as I like the movie, because everyone else’s romantic problems seem so beautifully young.


It’s almost fall. I know it. Asters. Cool rains. Emails from incoming students. Tomorrow I’ll make sure my daughter gets on the bus to O’Hare. And then I’ll go to my moonlighting shop. And return home late to a very very quiet place.

certainty

During my teens and for a few years after I passed the point of no more childhood (it was long ago) I was troubled by uncertainty.

As a high schooler in Poland, it bothered me that I could not imagine a professional future that I liked (this had much to do with the fact that I entered the university too early – without a clue as to what I wanted to do afterward).

And it bothered me then that the boy I liked and deemed worthy of husband material really didn’t like me nearly enough. And, though you’ve heard me say now that my occasional traveling companion and I have little in common, I think it has become clear that at some level, Ed and I share some vision of what a day ought to look like, where as my teen love and I, at a fundamental level, did not.

Moreover, I hopped about, with nerve racking frequency between Poland and the States, uncertain as to which should be my home for keeps.

And so I was at an impasse. With lots of question marks about what came next.

My own indecisiveness drove me nuts. And even as I (eventually) made life-altering decisions that narrowed things down a bit, there was still so much that I could not control! I was deeply troubled by the uncertainty of where my then husband and I would settle down. All my Polish friends knew that they would wind up exactly where they began – in Warsaw. Here I was now, considering such off the wall (off my wall at least) places as L.A. and Wisconsin to call home. I knew no one in either place. At least Wisconsin had birch trees and farms. I could relate to that.


Eventually, kids were born and my work life stabilized and the fear of uncertainty morphed into the fear that too much certainty had now entered my days. It was a certainty of what would not be: I knew I would never have a summer home in France where my kids could learn to be fluent in French. I knew that the climb toward professional success would be neither fast nor lofty.

I knew, too, that the minute I finished weeding one end of the too-large-for-one-person-to-be-doing-all-the-weeding yard in our suburban home, I would need to start again and that, at the rate that I was weeding, I would lose the weeding war before the age of social security eligibility.


Much can be said about the years where uncertainty turned into certainty and even more could be said about the years where certainty was destroyed and I entered into a new period of uncertainty (let’s put that last jump in a time frame: say about four years ago). But in this post, I’m not interested in transitions. I’m interested in the juxtaposition of certainty and uncertainty and in declaring myself to be, as of this summer, once again, quite close to a certainty that has some peculiarly pleasing elements:

First of all, I am certain that where I am in life now, is where I am likely to be 'til I have my conversation with the governmental death squad (just kidding!). [This assumes no cataclysmic events of course; cataclysms cannot be brought into this conversation because by definition, they cannot be predicted.]

And, the essentials have been taken care of: I know the family I had is the only family I will ever have and the job I have is (again, barring cataclysm) the only one I will ever have, and I know who the important players have been in my life and though I expect to add a few more, they will be mine by attachment – procured perhaps by daughters (their partners, children, etc.). And I know I will never live in L.A. (thank God).

What uncertainties remain are of the joyful kind. They are potential door openers: I may still finish my book. And even write another. Maybe from the writer’s shed. Which may, someday, get finished. Or, I may spend an entire summer on a houseboat. Or not.

I write this toward the end of a year riddled with open ended questions about who will live where and for how long and doing what and with whom. But I realize that these are not my questions. I have run through my big ones. And I’m fine with that.



younger daughter's next to last night home

broken down into little pieces

It is the summer of small pieces of food. Last night, as we chopped roasted vegetables and mixed them into little kernels of bulgur along with a chopped tomato vinaigrette, I thought the cutting board was getting a healthy workout.

Today, as I strip the corn cob of its kernels and chop tomato and onion and garlic and who knows what else, I’m thinking chopping is become as frequent an exercise as riding a bicycle. The summer of chopping and pedaling.

Did you ever notice that small pieces – slices, morsels, kernels – invariably taste better than large chunks of anything?

It is also the summer of chocolate covered raisins. And granola and berries. And fragments of a dream where I link together all the unmatched pieces of life’s puzzle and come out with a sensible, finished whole.


[On a more prosaic note, it is also the summer of market flowers.]

reading

When authors Eggers and Russo write, I listen. And this month, both have come forth with shiny new books for me to really really want to read (well, Eggers’ cover doesn’t shine, but it sounds good to say it does).

But this isn’t merely a rhapsodic post on books (even as I admit to loving previous books by both authors). Instead, this is an admission that I have now lingered over coffee at Borders, long enough to read through the entire Eggers book (“Zeitoun”), and I have exercised excessively today (hours!) because the deal was that I could pause from work and read That Old Cape Magic (Russo’s new book) only if I pedaled like crazy on a machine.

I know many of you wont buy this, but the truth is I love good books much more than the average lover-of-good books. It has to do with the written word.





To me these manuscripts demonstrate where I could be, had I the talent and time to be there: creating Eggers-like sentences that are so evocative (in his newest work, for example), even as they use few adjectives to describe, say, a horrendously difficult life event (Eggers would not have had to put in “horrendously” nor “difficult”); or producing absolutely brilliant phrases in the way that only a brilliant Russo can write.

I am not jealous of talent. (Jealousy is an odd bird anyway: how can you envy something that belongs to another? I cannot understand this.) But I love being exposed to greatness, especially when it touches on my own dabbles (writing, of course; photography, cooking – the obvious culprits). These two, Eggers and Russo are that: great. Not loud. Rather – understated. Perfect.


My youngest daughter is here again. Just for a few days. We cook and roast vegetables, and we spin tales about events that most likely will never take place.

I look at the weather channel and note that for the rest of the week, we may have rain.

We eat, I clean up the last oil splattered surface. A ride on the stationary bike would be good now, don’t you think?

the ship that has sailed

I’m not beyond writing in clichés. And I admit it: it's difficult to take uniquely original photos when the day is filled with work.

But, on my ride back from campus, in addition to seeing the sky unfurl its great gray masses of cloud over the lake, and watching the summer sailboats take off from the UW sailing club, seemingly indifferent to the iffy skies, I thought for a long while about boats in general. Metaphorical boats – the once that take off with your past and never come back.






My kids stayed in the same public school district their entire elementary/middle/high school years. Most of the kids they knew in second grade were still around for the high school graduation. And so it does not surprise me that they should now keep tabs on who’s doing what.

My sister and I had quite a different and confusing educational trajectory. I did first grade in a Warsaw public school, second through seventh in New York, eighth nowhere at all, and finally ninth through eleventh in two different public schools back in Warsaw. I’ve been able to trace two friends from my New York school, and I’ve been in contact with one kid from my first grade.

But these are exceptions. Most of my school classmates have sailed off and I would not be able to locate them if I tried.

And maybe that’s a good thing. I thumb through photos of my end of Warsaw first grade school party (the year: 1960) and I don’t feel any special pull toward the girls I’m standing next to. (It could be that the pain of not being dressed like the others – in lacy fairylike stuff – is still coming through; I can hear my mother now – oh just wear the dark tights. They’ll be fine. That, and the unfortunate reality that I appear clueless on how to daintily hold up a dress corner.)





I write about this because I heard from my sister (who lives on the other side of the ocean) just today. She writes about a meeting she had this week with her best friend from first grade. Imagine sitting down to coffee with someone you haven’t seen for fifty years…

I wonder if connections we make at an early age can be significant -- more meaningful than we would like to believe. As a parent, I didn’t give much thought to the possibility that either daughter’s first grade playmates were anything more than, well, playmates. Relevant to that hour, not beyond.

So I’m biking along the lake shore path and I’m wondering: does something profound happen in that hour of play between very young friends? And therefore, discoverable again after many decades? Or is it that the early friendship is only an excuse to have a coffee later? Creating a platform from which you can ask someone their life story (because people are otherwise reluctant to open up about themselves)? (Except, apparently me, here on Ocean.)

Big clouds outside now. Who knows – it may even rain.

slaw

Did you know that most dictionaries regard slaw as a synonym for cole slaw? But that if you dig deeper, some will tell you that slaw is shredded cabbage? While the historically thoughtful few will explain that it’s a nineteenth century abbreviation for salad (as in “sla”)?

For some reason, probably traceable to the erratic manner in which I acquired the English language (on again, off again throughout my childhood), I thought that the word slaw was also a verb. And that it was shorthand for slaughter. You know, you can chop up somebody well and hard. Slaughter them. Slaw them.

I thought, therefore, that slaw would be an apt heading for a post on a day when I learned that a slaughtering may take place at my place of moonlight employment.

As the story goes (and believe me, I am not about to give more than a shortened and squeaky clean version of it), a co-worker did something that is not within company rules. And it was, most likely, an intentional act of defiance. For this she may suffer (appropriately, I think) the slaughtering I mentioned above.

This in itself is not an interesting Ocean story (especially since, due to privacy issues, I wont say more about it here). But what is interesting was my immediate reaction. I said this: how utterly foolish of her! Didn’t she realize that she would get caught?

Now, that may seem like an okay blurting of my incredulity at the lack of foresight on the part of the employee. But note that I did not say this: didn’t she realize that what she did was wrong?

I have two thoughts on my own reaction: the first is that I have joined the ranks of the fearful: our goal is to stay employed. That’s it. Do the job and stay employed. Don’t get in trouble and get fired. Hence the incredulity: how could you do this, knowing that you may be fired????

[It’s a good thing that I work for two entities (the university is my principal employer and the little shop on the corner is my secondary, moonlighting employer) whose ethical standards are quite exemplary, because I seem to rely on them to define for me what’s right and what’s wrong.]

Secondly, I’m thinking (hoping?) I was governed by a need to see justice done (“punish the guilty”) rather than by thoughts of finally rising to the second rung of the retail ladder (the bottom one being the last to be hired; if the offending employee is replaced, then I am no longer the one who knows least and is, therefore, worst at getting things right).

Retail jobs are, for so many, extremely short-lived. You get hired, you get fired, you quit, you go elsewhere. It is a world that I almost cannot understand. I'm thinking that the absence of loyalty to the place of employment is especially an American phenomenon. Though there are American company towns, where everyone and their brother work for the same employer, most of us move around as if there were infinite possibilities out there, each better than the last.

Fickle us. Tonight, I’m on the side of loyalty: do good work for the company that treats you well. (Shred and slaughter those who misbehave.)





So, I leave you with these thoughts on work, ethics and loyalty.

On the other hand, it could be that this post is, quite simply, about a boring walk home, where the only interesting thing to photograph was a crate of cabbage.

the next day

I think the happiest people are those who can transition from one setting to another effortlessly. Pluck them out of one pond, dump them into another – they’re fine. They adjust. And chances are -- the more they had to be dumped into a variety ponds in their youth, the better they become at finding cool comforts in the next murky pond.

Put simply, a bizarre and everchanging childhood at least puts you in good stead for all those back and forths that are going to be thrust upon you later in life.



So, here I am, back home, falling into the simple routines of a Saturday – the Westside Community Market, with all the sweet flavors of late summer…










… yes, fine, I'm liking the stroll across the street, the return to dinner planning, to reading cases even, to eating granola on the condo balcony.

But that doesn’t mean that I have put aside thoughts of my quick spin into Chicago life.

Chicago.





Chicago.





Yeah, Chicago.






Okay, let me switch focus. Madison. Madison.





And tomorrow, I’ll do Sunday cleaning and shop moonlighting, and for dinner, I’ll fix…

Yes, I’m back home again.

a city day

It is again near midnight and I am riding the El from Addison up north, to Clark and Lake – the stop for my hotel. I am reminded of the tail end of my college years, when I rode the midnight subway in New York after closing down the bookstore where I worked the late retail shift. The noise of the train, harsh during daylight hours, isn’t grating now. At nighttime, nothing matters except getting home to bed. I close my eyes and think of myself moving closer to the many pillows and the cool, cotton white sheet. Mmmm…

Summer in the city. If you live there, you want to get out. Paris in August empties so quickly that it sometimes feels like someone took an eraser to the city and wiped the residents out. Stores are closed, cafes shuttered. New York on a summer week-end is the same. Walking down an avenue, you can hear your cell phone ring, it’s that quiet.

Chicago is different. Oh, I know, it’s not the week-end now. The Loop, that rectangle of office space and lunchtime retail trade will look less vibrant if I wait until tomorrow. But I’m not waiting until tomorrow. And I’ll bet anything that the places we walked through yesterday and today, will feel equally delicious tomorrow. Full of people looking to unwind in the heat of a summer day in the city.

This is what I find most thrilling about Chicago: in the last ten years, it has thrown a lot of resources into creating wonderful public spaces. For this alone it deserves the 2016 Olympics. Not convinced? Read on. And tell me if any other urban center on either side of the ocean has done anywhere near as much to change and improve the nature of communal outdoor life.


I’m waiting for my wee family to join me downtown. They’re poky and so I meander through the Loop in search of a good cappuccino. That part is easy. But what do I eat with it?

On the Daley Plaza, I happen to find the Thursday Farmers Market. It’s different than our downtwon Madison market: fewer vendors, larger quantities in each stall – that’s predictable. What’s funny to me is to watch the buyers. I'm in a city. Yes I am.















There's a Picasso at the plaza. The Picasso. It’s so fitting: a gift of steel (that would be Gary, Indiana steel which in itself is fitting). Looks like… it’s not clear what. No one seems to know. The artist’s wife? His Afghan dog? Today, it serves another purpose.





And in front, the Chicago Park District has set up a boxing ring. Welcome all, we want to present the young boxers of Chicago! The 70 pound class! The future champions of the 2016 Chicago Olympics!





I eat my oat and peanut butter baked bar (like in Madison, bakers are popular at the market) and sip my coffee and watch.


The sky is a deep blue. One isn’t accustomed to seeing a clear sky like this in a city, but Chicago rarely gets the hazy pallor of a New York summer sky. The air is dry and warm and I’m ready for a brisk walk.





I’ve not done the River Walk before. I haven’t much time now, just enough to take it toward the lake and back.

I pass by the love it or hate it Trump tower…





… and, further down, I stroll by cafés and strips of green grass where office workers take their noon break. At the “river’s” edge, the Park District has set up a fishing tent. Come learn about the fish in our waters. We'll lend you a rod. You’ll catch something for sure.





Kids sit in life vests, dangling bait in the aqua waters of the canal. Surely this is a catch and release thing? Or do they take it home? Guess what I picked up downtown!


It’s my lunchtime now and I meet my family at Pastoral – a place where sandwiches and salads to go are as good as in a Provencal café in southern France. We pick up a bag of food and take it to the Millennium Park.

The Millennium is the most glorious contemporary public space of all time! When I lived in Chicago some thirty years ago, the area was a wasteland of old rail tracks and concrete blight. The 24 acre park that grew out of it is a jewel of art, concert space, gardens, fountains – all inviting, telling you to shake off your mad rush to nowhere and exhale.

And splash in the Crown Fountain reflecting pool, in front of digital images of Chicagoans.
















And see yourself reflected in a different way in the Cloud Gate (or “the Bean,” the Kapoor sculpture inspired by a drop of mercury, but made to loom large, so much so that it is one of the biggest sculptures, anywhere, ever).





Each time I am here, something else about it strikes me as remarkable. Today, I take a photo from the “mouth” of the Bean, looking out, so that my horizon meets the Bean’s upside down image of it.





You know, I could do pages on the Park. But, Ocean is just a snapshot on a mood, so I have to move beyond it, past the Buckingham Fountain…





...past the Field Museum, where I deposit daughters for a short while. I’m not ready to give up on the late afternoon summer sky. I walk along toward the Shed Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium – places visited by us many times as daughters moved from young toddlerhood to childhood to teenhood. Now that they’re adults, there is nothing to explain, to clarify. No cautionary scold out here by the water either – be careful! Don’t get too close to the edge! Other parents can now take up these words (and they do!). Me, I’m focused on the fantastic skyline. Or, I'm staring at the sails out on the gently breezy waters.










And now we turn around and head back toward the Loop.





Whereas evening comes slowly back in Madison, so that you hardly notice when it stopped being daytime, in the city, it is an obvious and quick change. Shadows take over the narrow strips of sidewalk. The rush hour comes earlier here than on the east coast so that by 6, the crowds start to thin.





My daughters suggest the rooftop bar in my hotel for an evening drink. The rooftop here is, they tell me, a hot pick for young professionals. Indeed, there is a line that weaves around the block just to get in. As a hotel guest, I am allowed to go straight to the top.

This is a new world for me. I explain to them that I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have been to a cool city bar. And I don’t need all my fingers for the count. This, in spite of the fact that I lived in cities for many many years. By the time I joined the ranks of the professional world, I was no longer young and I had two kids waiting for me at home. The drinks I learned to mix had things like fruit and honey and yogurt in them.

Being on the young side of motherhood (at least as measured by the demographics of the urban professional set), I get to now savor the Rooftop with daughters at the helm. And they tell me what to order and how to regard the social dynamics that unfold before us.





Some readers here may counter that a glass of rosé at a café on the other side of the ocean (which I have savored more times than can be counted on the fingers of many hands) counts as bar hopping (especially since my daughters are now are asking the bartender for a glass of rosé), but I think that at café-bars, the people watching is of the world outside, where as here, I get the sense that people watching is within.

They tell me that, as measured against similar venues out east, this is a friendly, nonthreatening place. (Meaning, I think, that the patrons don’t cut each other up visually) I am mesmerized. Aided by the delicious lime-cucumber-ginger something or other. Oh, and toasts with eggs and just a hint of truffle.





Feeling utterly urban and very professional, I linger and listen and occasionally take a photo, so that the bartender asks if I am with the press. No, just with fantastic daughters and my little Ocean somewhere out there.

Dusk is now quickly merging into an evening darkness that makes the city looks extra wonderful.





We walk back to the El and head north to meet up with their dad for a late dinner at a superb neighborhood Italian place (Terragusto). The crowd is boisterous and the food is so fresh and honest it hurts to finish it. Swiss chard in custard with a mushroom ragu, inky black pasta with shrimp, mascarpone cheesecake with summer fruits.





A day in the city. Nothing more than that. But could it be more perfect?

tall order

Like so many who moved back and forth between small places and big New York City type places, I have had a wildly fluctuating attitude toward skyscrapers.

Think of it: I moved from a village in Poland to Warsaw, where in the 1950s the highest building was 34 stories high and it towered over the rest of the capital. Then on to Manhattan, where everything was beautifully, monstrously tall. And back to Warsaw, where I retreated from loving the tall stuff to enjoying wide avenues and quiet parks.

Along comes New York again and once more I am in love with it all – from the top of the 666’s where I have my first grown-up coctail, to Rockefeller Tower, from which I can see that other perfect pencil of a building, the Empire State. I live on the eight floor, then the eighteenth floor and it all seems cool and very very adult.

After, I’m in Chicago, where, of course, I come face to face with the newest tallest giant – the Sears tower. (Though personally, I prefer the Hancock. Something about that curve that appeals to me.) Moving to Madison to raise a family feels very anticlimactic.

But then comes September 11 and, of course, my love of tall buildings is shaken to the core. Madison, with its skyline of pea-sized structures suddenly feels gentle and soothing.

Still, while I am plowing through Wisconsin winters and pedaling along its country lanes in less harsh seasons, the city just to the south of me buffs and polishes the steel and glass structures of its downtown, throws in some splendid new ones and comes out looking quite nice, in a Chicago sort of way.





I’m here for just two nights and this time I am staying downtown. My daughters, ever savvy in the ways of the urban world, point me to the Wit (see photos above) – a wonderful hotel with the sound of birds in hallways and the El just outside, and with tall windowed walls in all rooms, looking out over the city beyond and below.










And I have to say, I am taken in by it all – as if the city, which has held for a while now sentimentally bittersweet memories, is coming back in another shape and form – the place where I can come back and watch my daughters perform their adult lives (one held a summer job here and the other is a frequent visitor, for work and family reasons).


Last night, we ate in the west of the Loop neighborhood, in a wonderful new place that is as steely glassy as the best of them (Province) and again I feel the pang of cool city life, as I stare at my terrific softshell crab and wonder why Madison’s restaurant foods have to be so repetitive (the menus in my sweet home town rarely change and hardly ever innovate).





After the early meal, we do what we have so often done in the past – go to hear the talent of Second City. A dozen years back, my daughters would be the youngest in the audience. Now, I feel like tapping them for an explanation of that line or the next one. They are suddenly the ones who are in command, tuned in to the nuance of the wit, while I trail behind, laughing with just a touch of delay.





The show ends at a decent hour and even though Chicago is the Midwest, it is the new urban Midwest, so that walking back alone at midnight seems hardly different than if it were four hours earlier. I remembered the night smell of a city, and on this warm summer walk, when the moon is as beautiful as it so often is back home, I remember how once, the city mesmerized me thoroughly and I swore I’d never move away from its squalor and magnificence.






This morning, I look out my 20th story windows and watch the sunlight do its weird city thing of moving into the narrow tunnel between tall buildings, only to disappear and show up elsewhere.





For the first time in a long long time, I like this place. I forgive it its grit and grimy past. I’m remembering that a huge part of me was fed round the clock city air. The taste for it has come back now. In small amounts, but it’s there. Like the candy bar that you go back to after a prolonged stray toward better foods.

midnight

Technically, I did not fit the post into the hours that, when piled together in a 24 unit heap, constitute Wednesday. I know that. As I made the call to walk from a late night stand-up comedy show to the downtown Chicago hotel where I'm staying, I knew I'd lose a "day" of posting. And I knew that Ocean readers are accustomed to this: I have been late in my posts before.

But I'll add this further injustice: I wont put up my story for the day until tomorrow. I owe you a better text than one I can compose now, in the wee hours of the night.

In the meantime, I'll put up just one photo -- something that I snapped with my little camera as I finally crossed the river - during the last quarter mile on my long walk home to the hotel.





It all seems so darn twinkly and bright and this just really goes to show that, in a city, the texture and feel to a set of blocks can change very very quickly.

tight knit

Small town folks often think that they form a tightly knit community. But I wonder: what does that even mean? That they track each others comings and goings? I believe that.

I think of Warsaw as a tightly knit community. And I think of Madison as not especially tight, though it is a very generous and forgiving (for the most part) community. At the very least, we tend to smile at each other's eccentricities. For instance, this morning, at our local grocery store, a customer brought in her dog, just to show it off. Now, it’s probably in violation of the health code to walk in with a dog (we’re not French after all), but this woman carried her little pooch in and we all admired the dog properly, so that she could walk away with pride.





Elsewhere, she may have been called names. Or politely escorted to the door. Or to a waiting van. Here, we smiled.


At the shop on the corner, I did my share of smiling at people. But, that's work. One smiles at customers. America expects it. By contrast, you should not look for the vendor to smile, say, in Poland. The market economy has not made a significant dent in the demeanor of the sales clerk yet. She or he appear forever to be at odds with the world, or at least their position in it.


If I had to apply the word "tight" to any one set of people, I'd say it describes well my wee family. Very tight. [But not exclusive. There's a difference.]

Tonight, after another late night at the shop, my daughters, Ed and I ate at one the family favorites: Sardine.





And tomorrow, as each summer, I am following daughters to Chicago, where, for at least a day or two, we'll romp and play. In a very tight-knit way.

Communities are formed by grouping people together, right? We were once grouped under a roof and now here we are, still banding together at every opportunity. Amazing (and lovely) how that works.

missing cyber calm

Once you move past middle age (don’t ask me to define it – you’ll know when you’re there), if you’re like so many of us, you suddenly have an opportunity to sit back and chill out.

If you’ve been reading your own internal meter well, you understand that you are neither as smart as you once thought you were, not as stupid as you once feared you could become. You know which words provoke and which words help to calm things down. You know what not to say even though sometimes you’re tempted to blurt it all out.

You are at a point where life (baring tragedy) can be very smooth and you have the power to make it even smoother.

So you wake up in the morning, and if the Times is right, you (like me) turn on your laptop and you check things out: email, facebook, blogs – your favorites, to jumpstart your day.

And aren’t you just shocked at how agitated and blood-thirsty the world of cyberspace postings has become? It’s harder and harder to find the careful writers who worry about getting their story and their words out in the best possible way. Mostly, the concerns seem to be with getting every last angry syllable out before someone beats you to it.


Ah well. It could be that I am regretting too much the hour spent this morning on Net readings. By the time I pushed my sweet Mac Book aside, I was drowning from an overload of others’ bad vibes.

And after? The day simply disappeared. My watch tells me I am just about into the next day now. Sure, that makes sense. I finished my moonlighting stint just a few hours ago. Daughters and Ed pulled me out for a late meal at the Old Fashioned, where even after 10, it was loud enough that you could bring a howling dog and no one would notice.

We ate sandwiches and salads and I could feel the tension dribble out of me so that when we left, I was again drifting in mellow straights.

I leave you with a photo of an amused, but less chilled Ed. I would guess that for him, segueing from a quiet shed with two cats to a loud dining hall with three happily animated women is as tough a transition as the one I face each morning now as I turn on my computer.






But I'll say this: loud good cheer at the Old Fashioned is far calmer than quiet ill-temper of a cyber fight over one issue or another. Truly, I wish the Net was a sweeter place. In the alternative, I'll settle for a Door cherry salad with blue cheese and salmon anytime.