My Favorite Moment of the Summer

The playground at Tower Road Beach in Winnetka has a modern kind of merry-go-round that is simply a circular rubber track, six feet across, supported on four posts. Two of the posts are slightly higher than the others so the angled track begins to shift under your feet when you step on its six-inch-wide black surface. The girls and I played gingerly on this playground toy, sitting on the nubby track and shuffling our feet in the sand to get a spin, or trying to stand and keep our balance as it moved.

I had retired to a bench to watch the girls and flip through a magazine when a pack of three or four tween boys came over to play on the merry-go-round too. Their legs and bare torsos were muscular and brown from the sun and they looked like they had done nothing all summer but swim and run and yell. In the unspoken deference to the older kids' size, the girls stepped out of their way.

The boys jumped on the rubber circle, took a moment or two of experimental balancing to figure out its physics and wordlessly started a game where they ran in place, spinning the entire track like a revolving conveyor belt. When one lost his balance or his nerve, he would fly off into the soft sand. Their flying legs were nimble and they unconsciously jerked their arms like tightrope walkers to keep balance. They seemed to know secrets of gravity and equilibrium that the girls have not learned and that I have forgotten, if I'd ever known.

Mia and Nora watched off to the side, but it didn't take long for my fearless five-year old to jump back into the fray. She took her place on the line between two of the boys, nearly a head shorter than any of them. The line of kids, four boys and one little girl, started to walk, then accelerate into a trot, then into a run that was thrilling to watch. They stayed in place, their legs working furiously and I was laughing and shouting, "It's a hamster wheel!"

Nora didn't last long, a few strides before she fell on purpose, but after jumping off the side, she twisted back and dropped to her belly on the wheel again, a sudden obstacle on the treadmill that the boys had to leap over as they ran, or fall off to avoid her.

I was laughing, laughing and calling out, "Nora, no!" when she leaped back on. "You're road kill!" The boys did not complain, just took the added challenge as part of the game, while Nora screamed with delight at her trouble making, spinning at their feet, my little wrecking ball, scattering boys in her wake.

I Really Want To Tell You About My Sandwich

October 4, 2009. Copenhagen, Denmark.

Sunday we had the hotel spread (granola, yogurt, meats and cheeses, butter, butter, butter) for breakfast. Brazilian delegates were everywhere looking like the celebration was so over. How was I supposed to know Hotel Skt. Petri was the Rio de Janeiro command center when I booked? Eh.

We took the 6A bus from the front of the hotel, easy-peasy, all the way to the Copenhagen Zoo. The girls negotiate who will push the STOP button, who will hand the coins to the driver. We work out a deal where I will whisper to Nora, who will signal Mia with a high five and Mia will push the button. The sky is busy today, the wind brisk. I'm wearing my last clean dress that I packed on a 70 degree day in Wilmette, blue tights, a cardigan and my purple 3/4 sleeve cotton jacket. I have a warm beret but no gloves.

We skip the turn of the century observation tower that resembles a short black Eiffel Tower and right away get an eyeful at a hands-on display of animal skins and tusks. Even the faces of the tiger, the wolf and the leopards are intact, which I find sad, but doesn't bother the girls.


It's a great zoo, with cool new houses for the elephants and hippo (Flodhest is the cool Danish word). In the cold, the animals are frisky and what animals! Huge polar bears and brown bears barely ten feet away from us. Local musk ox, foxes and reindeer get us so excited, we hardly mind the start of the rain. Well, Mia has a pink umbrella, Nora and I wear hats and Dad has his big beer from the kiosk next to the skins display. What a country.


A huge tiger momma and her five kits! And an enormous tiger father! Fighting over a rack of bloody ribs for lunch! A big lion pack watching their wrestling kids! We oo and ah and take refuge from the cold wind in the steamy tropical house. Lunch is in a warm and dry cafeteria with beers on tap. I have four kinds of salad with bread; my plate looks like a rainbow compared to Nora's field of white. A hot chocolate after is warm and just sweet enough - totally satisfying. I swear I can taste the difference between sugar and the cloying aftertasty bittersweet of high fructose corn syrup.


The underground tunnel to the children's zoo has the Danish design touch - cool angular light boxes that shine strips of light on the walls and ceiling. (Have I mentioned that every immaculate bathroom has yet another beautiful sink and faucet and dual flush commode?)


In the children's zoo there are shaggy ponies and a rabbit hill with tunnels where the children can enter, then peek their heads out through clear plastic domes next to the bunnies on the grassy slopes above. It's beyond cute.


Nora falls in love with a black and white goat in the petting pen and pulls a little Heidi, hugging him and caressing his horns. I just want to stand next to his warm body to heat up my cold legs. I had bought some socks in the gift shop for my hands and actually eyed the largest of children's pj pants. The wind is picking up and an ominous cloud is covering the sun when we pull the girls away. Wait -- before we left the zoo Momma needed a bit more sustenance so we stopped at a sweet looking cafe next to the cafeteria where we had eaten lunch.

Warmth inside. A camel in his pen walked by the window and relaxed families around us enjoyed the same spot. The clouds had retreated and the afternoon light was spectacular through the high-angled windows. African spears and tribal standards hung on the walls next to the elaborately carved fireplace. Of course, as always, there were cool Danish lamps and a sweet waitress. Most Danes speak English with a British accent; our waitress had a broad Midwestern twang - she could have been an exchange student in Michigan.

But what I really want to tell you about is my sandwich - my cured tuna sandwich with preserved lemons, cucumbers, tomatoes, dill and mayonnaise. Open-faced and beautifully constructed. Phenomenal and unexpected. Beautiful. This place just has got the love, man.

Mia and I really want to show Dad and Nora the yellow palace in the park Frederiksberg Hav next to the zoo. Dad takes pictures of the surreal linden tree alle and the girls scoot down and climb back up the steep slopes. I feel like we've stepped into a Constable painting.

We try to do a lot on the way home - drop by the miniature model of Renaissance-era Copenhagen in front of the city museum, show Dad the Shooting Gallery Park behind. He gapes at the enormous wall, just like I did, and pushes the girls on a traveling rope swing. They bounce at the end and sail back, squealing.

From the window of the bus heading back to our hotel, I spy a tub filled with flip-flops outside a shoe store. The sign on the tub reads: SLUT SLURP KLAP KLOP.


The girls are tired so we go back to Dalle Valle next to the hotel for dinner. The hostess makes me smile when she shrugs at all the full tables. "People tend to stay here." It's the first time anyone we've met on this trip has been less than accommodating and kindly deferential. I'm amused at the change. We wait forever for someone to come once we get a table and the waiter does not speak enough English to get a girls a pizza but the couple next to us act as if we made their day when I oo over their sweet two year old. The baby has white blond hair and rolls around on her mom's jacket on the floor. The dad had a student's wild curls and a slightly better grasp of English than the shyly smiling young mom. We watch them through the front window wall after warm goodbyes, as they put the toddler in her push cart, wave once more and head out on their bikes in the dark.


You can find all our Danish and Swedish adventures here.

Grief, Redux: Nothing Gold Can Stay

(If you don't already have sympathy fatigue after reading my other grief posts over the hard summer of 2010, feel free to let this story burn up the last of your kind feelings.)

I don't believe coincidences have any more meaning than what we place on them. But I did think of John McGinnis that morning, I did, as I stepped outside the I-94 hotel to get something from the car. I was walking out of the canned lobby air into the morning and its freshness and the sunshine spurred some upbeat musings. Usually when I've thought of my old friend over the years it has been tinged with a bittersweet wonder why I've never met anyone finer. But the night before we had had dinner and swimming with a lovely family and the memory of Mia's happy face and the ease of it all made me think of the possibility.

That morning we had planned to head north to spend the rest of the weekend at Camp Wandawega in Wisconsin. But when I returned to our room from the car, Nora's coughs, little barks we had hardly paid attention to, turned into a bout of throwing up. We decided I would take her home and Randy would go on to camp with Mia.

There was another coincidence that day. Later, a couple of hours before I got the email, Nora and I were resting on our bed, a towel and plastic wastebasket nearby, and I grabbed a book at random from the shelf above the bed. It happened to be I Wasn't Ready To Say Goodbye: Surviving, Coping and Healing After the Death of a Loved One.

And how odd that my last post was partially about him.

I could say the universe was sending me a warning that I was about to get some bad news. Or I could say that the idea of Loss and the memory of this good person who was my friend a long time ago are so often in my thoughts that today was just a day when they happened to come together. Or I could give up on trying to do anything but feel sad that he's gone.

Because John was awesome. A phenomenal guy. Brilliant, kind, gentle, principled, wise, and funny, so funny. Special. His voice was beautifully deep but his laugh boomed even larger and invited you to join in.

He would joke that deep down he was a dull guy with simple tastes, but I found him endlessly fascinating.

We met sophomore year at Notre Dame in a seminar that all arts and letters majors took - a kind of survey of all the disciplines. We read some mind-blowing texts, including The Denial of Death and Invitation to Sociology and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and I squirmed silently as the class complained about having to watch Fellini's magnificent 8 ½. They were annoyed it didn't make any sense - I felt like Fellini had tapped into my dreams and put them on celluloid. This was my first year at the school; I was a transfer student from a dinky Baptist college in Libertyville, Missouri we called Billy Jewel Bible School. Here, I felt so intimidated by all the smart kids at the university I could barely speak in class.

One day early in the semester, our professor didn't show up at class time - I later wondered if this was by design to see what the students would do. I sat quietly, like I usually did, too shy to chime in, as people wondered if and when we should leave.

Then John stood up with the assigned book in hand and said, "My parents are both high school teachers. Maybe I'll give this a shot. Let's figure out what was going on in the book we read this week."

I was shocked at his earnestness and his confidence. How brave. But I couldn't admit my admiration. I had to roll my eyes and groan a little as he tried to start a discussion and write salient point on the blackboard.

I must have been groaning a lot, actually, working really hard at showing my contempt for thinking and effort, you know, too cool for school, because John suddenly stopped talking to the class, exasperated, and said, "I'm sorry, Cindy, but I'm trying here!"

My face burned. I was instantly so sorry. And so smitten.

After the discussion stumbled on for a few more minutes and John and the others decided to call it a day, I rushed out of my seat and up to him to apologize. And we became friends.

Friends of a sort - the kind of friend you talk about the David Letterman show with, about how funny Paul Shaffer is and how great Mitch Ryder looked singing "Devil With The Blue Dress" on last night's show. The kind of friend you have a secret crush on but don't tell him because you can't say that. I hung out in the studio when he had his radio show and he let me help him with his set list but I picked some eighteen minute dirge for him to play because I couldn't admit I didn't know as much about Lou Reed's songs as I pretended to.

His favorite poem was Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay." I have the poem here in front of me, I'm holding a Xeroxed copy that John made for me. It only took a few minutes to find it in the boxes downstairs, a few strata above the letter with which he took his leave of me. Looking at it burns.

But before the letter there were road trips to see the band X at the Metro in Chicago and to Champaign to watch Nebraska trounce Illinois.

I gave him a ride home from Omaha one Thanksgiving break, not just because I would be visiting my cousin Jeanne, as I said was my reason for being in town, but because I wanted to spend the hours in the car talking with him and sneaking peeks at him when he slept.

(I don't want to write about this. Because I want you to know how incredible he was, how filled with life and this is turning into something about Me and me being uglier than I can even believe now, me being a greedy child at twenty-one, starving, desperate to hold on to any love she can get, lying to myself that it was innocent because it was chaste, panicked into cruel omissions that were really cruel lies and stupid with fear and he was never any of those things because he was fearless. He got up in front of that class and he jumped out of airplanes when he was living in Hong Kong and he was always the same vital and good person, not trying too hard, not afraid of the truth, not needing to try to be anything but the boy who was already a man, filled with integrity and truth.)

I'm going to let the camera fade to black here and let's take it up later because I was shitty to him and he didn't deserve it and he was smart enough to get far away so we weren't speaking when we graduated and I couldn't even let myself think about it because it hurt so much.

He said his favorite poem was "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

Later, later, years later, when I had moved back to Chicago after Iowa and Boston, I ran into some friends of his at The Gingerman and we reconnected and he sent me a letter from Hong Kong where he was interning at the Asian Wall Street Journal.

And I read it and reread it with mixed relief, of course. It felt like I may have been forgiven a little, which I wanted but didn't feel like I deserved. The years since school had taught me what I had done and what it meant. And the letter had a friendly distance that said I had been forgotten some too. And it hurt again to think of what had been broken.

A few years later, the summer of 1997, I was in New York taking a film course. I looked up John's number and called him with a pounding heart.

We met at his Wall Street Journal office in the World Trade Center. At some point in the night he looked at me with something like surprise. Surprise that I still thought of us as friends, perhaps, I don't know, perhaps surprise that the past was still so present for me. He was courteous, cool. Introduced me to the woman he would later marry. We had dinner and talked about a giant table they had brought back from Hong Kong, the city where they met. They walked me to the subway train and we said goodbye.

Perhaps I should believe the Joanna Newsom song I'm listening to right now.

The unending amends you've made
are enough for one life.
Be done.
I believe in innocence, little darlin.
Start again.
I believe in everyone.
I believe, regardless.
I believe in everyone.

When I first got the news that John had died, I sat at my desk, sobbing. Nora came over and rubbed my back with her little five year old hand and said, "Don't think about it, Mommy. It's okay. Let's play Monopoly." So we got down on the floor and we did play. Instead of the top hat and the shoe, she uses her little plastic animals with big heads and oversized eyes for playing pieces. When our two plastic kitties land on Jail at the same time, she'll have them turn to each other and say, "Hello!" "Hello!" "Just visiting!"

We played Monopoly and here was life in front of me and goodness. And every stupid thing I ever did in my life had to be forgiven because this beautiful child and her lovely sister are the wonders that I find at the end of the chain, made with links of iron and gold, thorns and flowers, the chain that I have forged with each day of my life.

John's obit is here.

Maddie Dawson's The Stuff That Never Happened

The From Left To Write Book Club discusses new books in a particular way - instead of reviewing what we've read, the contributors share their personal experiences that have been inspired, or, as in my case this week, dragged up by the text.

It was hard for me not to sit as judge and jury when reading Maddie Dawson's first novel, The Stuff That Never Happened. The story of a young adulterer stirred up all sorts of muck from the shallows of my history and it was not a fun time to recall. So I hoisted all my discomfort back onto Dawson's protagonist Annabelle McKay and read her antics with ire and a self-righteousness it was difficult to resist.

The illicit sex in The Stuff That Never Happened occurs between two married people, in the same home they share with their spouses and young children, but this flagrant cheating, for me, did not seem like Annabelle's biggest betrayal of her even-keeled yet distant husband, Grant. It was her casual lying about meeting with her old lover twenty-six years after the affair that felt even more deceitful and had me scribbling "LIAR!" and "O.M.G.!!" in the margins.

Like this passage, where Annabelle defensively misrepresents her reunion with the old lover to her husband: "Come on, this is ridiculous! Okay, fair enough, I saw Jeremiah Saxon. Twenty-six years have passed, and big deal! I run into him in a market, against all odds. And then, yes, I go for coffee with him. I sit in Starbucks with the man and hear about his boring, trite, dull life."

She omits the part about she and Jeremiah making out in the park, "like a couple of teenagers."

We've all heard the adage from a cheated partner: "It's not the physical relationship that hurts the most, it's the lying." Dawson's book brought this line roaring back into my head.

We all operate in the social world by interacting with the people around us on a bedrock of trust. Any question we ask of another human, from the innocuous ("Can I have this by Tuesday?" "Would you like fries with that?") to the most vital, ("How can I help?" "Will you marry me?") presupposes an answer that corresponds to a shared reality. We build our plans, our hopes, our work, our relationships on the presumed truth in those answers. That's why, when faced with a suddenly revealed lie, we can have a hard time understanding or accepting that we've been deceived. And that is why, when caught in a lie of our own, we can experience the deepest shame. We haven't just chosen the wrong words; we've ripped the social contract. We've messed with the rules of logic that run our world. And for the people we have lied to, finding out that their version of reality is broken can be torture.

When the man who is now my husband and I had been dating six months or so, we flew to Florida to meet his parents. I had never had such a well-matched boyfriend - he was kind, respectful, fun and funny, open about his imperfect past and willing to listen to me pour out long, if somewhat edited, stories of my own. And, most importantly, he seemed really into me. And he was gorgeous. (Still is, but back to our story...)

One night on Sanibel Island, during a lull in the family drama, Randy and I stepped outside to sit by the pool. My head was spinning from all the emotion and hasty intimacy at my first gathering of his unusually close family and I suddenly felt an urge to come clean to this man.

"I have something I need to tell you." And with that I fell silent. Here I was again, standing in front of a beautiful trusting man, the hard truth stopped up in my throat. But this time would be different. This time I would make good. I wouldn't change the subject and commit the sin of omission; I wouldn't slip into another lie to avoid an awful truth. I pressed on.

"I need you to know something about me. I have never been faithful in any serious relationship."

My announcement may have been immature dramatics or a compulsion to stir something up, but it was also true.

"Okaaaaaay...," Randy replied, still smiling. "Why are you telling me this? Is there something I need to know?"

"Oh, no! I'm not talking about now, with you!" I had to stop to think. "I'm not completely sure why I'm telling you this. I think...it's because...I want us to be honest with each other. And I don't ever want to go through that again."

I need to emphasize how much I really didn't want to go through that all again.

I don't know if Maddie Dawson has ever seen the face of someone she has hurt deeply or if the cuckolded husband of The Stuff That Never Happened is purely a work of the imagination. I hope the latter. No mind-blowing sex, no thrill of getting away with it, no sweetest taboo, is ever worth the pain or the long-living guilt of knowing you have inflicted that pain.

Maybe I wasn't confessing to Randy so much as professing - letting the man who I would marry know that I was done done done with cheap drama, that I had outgrown honky-tonk over-romanticizing. Letting him know that I could no longer believe in the excuses of loneliness, immaturity, confusion, deluded ideas about passion, bad examples, desperation, indecision, tattered self-esteem, cowardice, alcohol, or Billie Holiday. Letting him know that I had grown up a little since that stupid time in my twenties. And that I could now hardly recognize that cowardly lyin' girl, even though she was me.

Randy's response to my big reveal, "Well, you let me know if there's anything I should worry about," was the equivalent of a shrug. He would tell me later that he did worry a little about what I had said, but in the seventeen years since then, jealousies and suspicions (except about those two bitches, Ms. Bar and Ms. Work) have had little place in our relationship. Honest.

May it ever be so.

You can find more posts about The Stuff That Never Happened here, at From Left to Write.

The participants in From Left to Write Book Clubs receive from the publisher a copy of the book discussed.

"Teddy Told Me Nostalgia Means The Pain From An Old Wound"

When I wrote about karaoke nights at CND Tavern a few weeks ago, I was trying to make a point about the pleasures of lingering in the limelight, but I neglected to mention another reason being there is especially precious to me. There is another sweetness to these last nights that is less about ersatz Stardom and more about community, the communal and democratic experience of singing for the sheer love of the song. You follow along with the words on the screen, you hear the voices joining in around you and it's as stirring and soul-satisfying as singing together from the hymnal.

Despite the occasional rap from a Fergie wannabe, most of the songs listed in the tattered black karaoke binders are a few years older and much more, shall I say, embedded? Sometimes the actual lyrics on the tiny screen surprise us ("Jeremy spoke in class today?" Who knew the song was so grim?), but most of the time the old favorites are as familiar as good friends and the first few bars elicit gasps of recognition. We sit and watch the singer and drink (sparkling water for me) and sing along to "Ray of Light" and "I Am the Walrus" and "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" and it's like an American version of Brit filmmaker Terence Davies' movies, where 1950's Liverpudlians gather at the neighborhood pub and sing songs together long into the night.

In the films Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, director Terence Davies forges an exquisite art form from the tailings of his nostalgia for a very particular time and place, the working class neighborhoods of post-war Liverpool, England where he spent his childhood.

I have not yet seen Davies's latest film, Of Time and the City, but I was blown away by Benjamin Schwarz's beautiful review in a recent Atlantic.

Here are a few gorgeous lines from Schwarz's review:

"Davies grasps that family life and childhood contentment are orchestrated by a presiding intelligence, almost always female, and nourished by a thousand domestic details, meaningless in themselves.... Of course the fleetingness, and the awareness of the fleetingness, of childhood and family happiness is hardly a novel artistic theme. It lies at the heart of, say, Hopkin's 'Spring and Fall,' and Little Women--and, for that matter, 'The Folks Who Live on the Hill,' Meet Me in St. Louis (one of Davies's favorite movies, which he has discerned 'tapped into something primal, almost like a fairy tale'), and, well, that famous Carousel scene in Mad Men. But usually the accompanying emotion is merely rue, and the intended effect cathartic--the acceptance of loss. This film insists that the loss is absolute and all-consuming. Davis has often said of his childhood, with a conviction as though freshly wounded, that he will never again be so happy. At first that remark seems naive or perverse or, at the very least, immature. But Davies's genius--and no doubt much of his chronic discontent, a psychological state to which he readily attests--lies in his inability to reconcile himself to that passing. Davies's nostalgia, I think it's fair to say, isn't exactly that of an integrated adult, as the mental-hygiene professionals would put it. But owing to his immaturity and his solipsism, that land of lost content has rarely been recalled so insistently and its loss raged against so defiantly. In averring that his wound will not heal--I will never be so protected and I will never be so loved, he seems to mourn--Davies forces his audience to recognize that they are similarly afflicted."