Christy Potter's Blog, page 8

Christy Writes: Retro Reflections on September 11

It’s early morning here and I’m drinking coffee and looking out my writing room window at nothing in particular. It’s too soon to tell what kind of day it will be here weather-wise, but emotion-wise, it will be the same as it’s been for the past few years whenever September 11 rolls around – melancholy, subdued, but with a distinct flavor of life going on, as is its wont, while in the back of our minds, we remind ourselves that we will have persevered, and will keep persevering, because that’s just what we do.

I always give a wry little smile when I see the now-fading “Never Forget!” stickers on the back window of cars. I doubt anyone who was able to comprehend what was happening on that beautiful sunny September morning will ever forget any of it. I remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news. I even remember what I was wearing. It’s my generation’s only true understanding of why our parents remember in similar detail the day President Kennedy was shot.

On Sept. 14, 2001, I wrote a column for my hometown newspaper about that whole horrible day. It was my way of sorting through my thoughts and sharing them with the people who, eight years before, had given me a wonderful send off as I headed east to pursue my dreams. As I am reading through it again this morning, I’m taken by several things. The rawness of my young emotions, the ripping away of my naiveté, many things I realize now that I couldn’t see then. I can also feel it all again – the panic, the confusion, the devastation.

Rather than writing today about my September 11 reflections as they look now, I thought I’d reprint that article and share my feelings as they were then, as the dust literally settled around me.

I’m sad, I’m sickened, I’m scared and I’m mad as hell.

 

Since Tuesday morning, when I heard that two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center, I’ve been experiencing a range of emotions I never thought possible. And I know that just about everyone out here – in fact, in the whole world – feels the same way.

 

I moved to the East Coast eight years ago to fulfill a lifelong dream to live and work in the New York City metropolitan area. My walls had always been decorated with New York City posters, the famous skyline glittering at me wherever I looked. I could never explain the draw I felt to New York, only that I had to be out there, to be, in the words of Frank Sinatra, a part of it.

 

And now I am. In every sense of the word, I’m a part of it. When I got a call from a friend on Tuesday morning telling me about the disaster at the World Trade Center, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t grasp what he was saying to me. I kept waiting for the punch line that never came. It didn’t make any sense. Two commercial jets could not just crash into the Twin Towers. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I turned on the radio on my desk and went to my window to look out. The announcer’s frantic voice was confirming what I’d heard, and I could see smoke where I had once been able to see the tops of the World Trade Center towers.

 

I was numb. Just two days earlier, I had been in the city with a friend, walking around lower Manhattan and taking pictures. It was about 5 p.m. on an idyllic Sunday afternoon and I had taken a picture of the World Trade Center because it looked so pretty with the late afternoon sunlight streaming between the towers.

 

And now it was ablaze. Lives were being taken away behind that curtain of smoke and there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t help. I couldn’t even cry.

 

Some of my co-workers came into my office to listen with me. The radio screamed that one of the towers had collapsed. I began to cry. My mind raced to the Wilkinsons, the family I lived with for two years when I first moved here. Pat and Nancy both work in the city. Please God. Please God, not my friends.

 

Fighter jets flew over our office building. The knife-like sound of helicopters followed. The radio screamed that the second tower had collapsed. We were all crying, holding each other, somehow wanting it not to be true, but knowing that horribly, irrevocably, it was.

 

When I got to my apartment that evening, I stood in my front yard, staring at the smoke that hung over my beloved Manhattan like a funeral shroud. I still couldn’t understand how such a thing could have happened. And now that I know what happened, I understand it even less.

 

As the story has begun to unfold over the past three days, we’ve all found out more about what actually transpired on Tuesday morning, and I have to tell you, I am furious. Foreign terrorists, coming onto American soil, taking American lives in such a brutal, terrible, vicious way that even countries that are our foes have condemned the attacks. It’s being called the worst act of terrorism ever on US soil, and it happened right in my backyard.

 

These things happen in Beirut, in Belfast, in Serbia. I see news footage all the time of foreign faces running scared down unfamiliar roads and I feel bad, but it’s nothing like the hollow ache I feel now. The images of Americans running down the streets of New York, stark terror on their faces as the city falls to ruins behind them, will be burned on my mind forever. The happy little world I’ve built around myself has been shattered. My safety net is gone. I feel violated. Every time I look out on the horizon and see faint smoke rising from where my beautiful Twin Towers used to stand, I feel it all over again.

 

Each day I wake up wondering if this is the day I’m going to hear that someone I know was found beneath the rubble. So far I haven’t, but that’s little consolation when I’m surrounded by people who are no so fortunate. I have friends who are still awaiting word on missing family members. And every day, the hope grows a little dimmer.

 

I suppose at this point all I can do, all any of us can do, is keep praying. Praying for the families, the victims, the survivors, our country, and the future. Because right now, it’s all we have.

The post Christy Writes: Retro Reflections on September 11 appeared first on Christy The Writer.

Christy’s Celebs: Legendary Bass Guitarist Tony Levin Goes Jazz

When the opportunity landed in my lap to interview musician Tony Levin, I said yes.

To be specific, what I actually said was “Yes, wow, seriously? Wow, yes! Wow, please!” Because I’m wonderfully eloquent, you see. I’m also a huge fan of progressive rock (as my longtime readers know), so to have the chance to get to know a musician with the colorful and amazing rock history that Tony Levin has, what else could I say but yes? And how else could I say it but in the style known as Yammering Fan Girl?

Tony is a bass guitarist who has played with the likes of King Crimson, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, David Bowie, John Lennon… you get the idea. Hard core prog rock fans already know who he is. For everyone else, allow me to introduce you to the amazing, multi-talented (and very witty) Tony Levin.

Me: First of all, I have to ask this. Thanks to being raised by music-loving parents, I’ve long been fascinated with any musical instrument that’s out of the ordinary (I seriously remember asking my dad what a wah-wah pedal was), so I’m excited to talk with the man who is pretty much considered the daddy, if you will, of the Chapman Stick. What can you tell me about it and what is it that drew you to it?

Tony: Hah… glad you are interested in that instrument — really it’s the same attraction to the unusual that drew me to the Chapman Stick. When I heard about it (way back the year it came out, in the 70′s) I had to check it out. For me, being a bass player, I used it at first just to come up with a different bass sound and parts. But it also has a side with guitar strings (and good players can play both together) so eventually I expanded to playing that side too, and writing music on it.

The thing that makes it different than a guitar, besides its looks, is that you play it only by ‘hammer-on’ or ‘touch guitar’ technique. Really easy – you just thump a finger on the note you want — no need to pluck the string with your other hand. So, as you can imagine, you can get a lot of notes on it — much like a piano.

Me: You’ve played with some big names. Some freaking huge names. I won’t ask such a ridiculous question as who was your favorite, but maybe you can tell me one or two of them that were particularly memorable, and why.

Tony: You’re right, picking favorites wouldn’t be up my alley. But, gee, playing with Peter Gabriel for his whole solo career has been fantastic, both musically and personally. Lots of fun and great playing experiences in those years on the road.I was honored when John Lennon had me on Double Fantasy – I never asked why I was the bass player chosen, but it was a great experience, and, as I said, an honor to be part of that album. Likewise Pink Floyd, with their “Momentary Lapse of Reason” album. And when I had a chance to play bass on some of the David Bowie songs for “The Next Day,” I was thrilled. (Brought the Chapman Stick in on one song too, which was a hoot.) Let me not leave out King Crimson, whom I’m rehearsing with right now for upcoming US tour… my years in that group have been probably the most musically influential to me, and it’s still my biggest challenge, in a good way, to be part of that band.

Me: I’ve always thought it would be interesting to have been a rock musician in the 60′s or the 70′s, and still be playing today. I understand you’re really focusing on jazz now and we’ll get to that in a minute, but what’s it like, looking out at the rock landscape now?

Tony: The rock scene, playing live and even recording, is changing fast, and it keeps changing. Yeah, things were simpler back in the 60′s and 70′s when, though it was tough, at least you knew what the parameters were. Now, it’s a wide open field and the groups that are the smartest at figuring out marketing and publicity issues are doing better than the ones who just make the best music. For me, (and most of the players I work with), figuring out the biz has never been a priority — just trying to make good music. So I’m one of the ‘followers’… i.e. if I see how somebody else made the right moves, I’ll maybe try it out with my band.

Me: Paste magazine named you the second most underrated bass guitarist of all time. What was your reaction to that? I imagine it was a kind of thanks-I-think feeling.

Tony: Hah, ‘thanks-I-think’ is a good expression — I’ll use it in the future. I didn’t know about that particular thing, but I do find that as I get older, there are slowly more honors bestowed on me… and I’m always gracious about it, I hope, but there’s always a little of knowing, really, it’s for sticking around so long!  Or should I say ‘Sticking’ around.

Me: Tell me about your new project, with your brother.

Tony: Interesting back story – we’ve both been musicians since the earth cooled (!) and have played together some, but never set out to make an album together. A couple years ago I found myself re-examining the music we loved when we were kids — a type of easy to listen to jazz called ‘cool jazz,’ and I thought, hey, we loved it, why don’t we write songs in that style and be a band, just for the love of the music. When I asked my brother, Pete, it turned out that, like me, he totally remembered every song and every solo. Hey, that’s the kind of truly ‘classic’ music I want to be writing – that stays with people and becomes a little part of their musical life. So that’s what we’ve tried to do with the “Levin Brothers” album – even for people, like I was as a kid, who are not jazz fans.

Me: What’s one thing that someone would be surprised to learn about you?

Tony: Realistically, I’m not famous enough that even prog rock fans know a lot about me… let’s say this: since I’m somewhat known for having a bald head before any other musicians did… that the first year I did it was a hot summer, and I only shaved off the hair to be cooler. Not to be ‘cool’!

Click below to hear an audio sample from the Levin Brothers’ new album.

 

Levin Brothers album cover

 

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Christy’s Shorts: Falling for Autumn

She always felt the same toward the end of summer – somewhere between melancholy and resigned. She knew she had to accept that it was over, but she didn’t have to be happy about it.

She tried, various years, to pretend autumn wasn’t coming, insisting it was still early August until well past the 20th, until people started to argue with her. It didn’t matter anyway, how much she tried to deny summer’s end. Even if she stopped looking at the calendar altogether, she felt it in her spirit – the slight shift of energy, that vague sense of impending change, the feeling of veiled urgency in those around her who were trying, as she was, to wring every bit of summer out of what was left. They crowded onto the beach, into the farmers’ market, the pool, the museum, forced jollity thick in the air as everyone tried not to glance over their shoulder at what was coming.

Oddly, this autumn dread was a fairly recent development for her. As a child, she had enjoyed summer, like any kid, swimming and going to camp and chasing fireflies and savoring the faintly naughty feeling of staying up well past her school-year bedtime. But she had also loved autumn – going back-to-school shopping with her mother and sisters, picking out school supplies and stiff new jeans, wondering who her teacher would be, anticipating seeing all her classmates again. Autumn had always felt to her like a clean slate, a chance to start over, to be something she’d never been, and to leave behind all the squirmy stuff she’d rather forget.

But now… well, now she was crowding up on middle age, and autumn was just different. What had once felt like a beginning now was tinged with sadness, finality. She knew, in the part of her brain where she kept her rational thoughts, that the year was a circle, a cycle, and she’d get summer back again in a few months. But like Brussels sprouts standing in the way of ice cream, it wasn’t easy to swallow.

She’d tried, last year, to cheer herself up by buying school supplies. At a tiny, ancient dime store downtown, she’d found a cigar box and filled it with glittery pencils and a rubber eraser and a pen that wrote in pink ink that smelled like bubble gum, and in the very back of the store she discovered, with a little cry of happiness, a Big Chief tablet. Her feeling of elation lasted until she got home. Then she looked at her school supplies, remembered that she was 42, opened a bottle of wine, and spent the evening writing depressing poems and bubble gum-scented expletives in the Big Chief tablet.

She could easily identify when she’d fallen out of love with autumn. She was just never quite sure why.

Maybe it was the reminder that she was getting older, that her own seasons were changing. The color-shifting leaves now just made her dwell on her own mortality, on missed chances and wasted time, on spilled milk and spilled Chanel No. 5, on what had been and what never would be. These days, autumn wrapped her in a feeling of sadness and dread, and in quiet introspection that lasted until the first crocuses made their appearance.

Well this year she wasn’t going to let that happen. It was a spontaneous decision she made one morning as she drank coffee at her kitchen table, absently stroking the cat with her bare foot. This year she was going to learn how to love autumn again. In fact, she was going to start today. In fact, she was going to start right now.

She was filled with a sudden, surprising determination that carried with it a lightness she hadn’t felt in ages. She was relieved, revived, reborn. In five minutes, she was dressed and out the door, her heart pounding hard. She knew what she had to do.

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Christy Writes: Alone at the Water Park

Fueled by the realization that nearly all of my time these days is spent holed up in my writing room, immersed in my new novel and interacting with no one but my cats, I finally admitted to myself that I need to spend more time with fellow bipeds (in other words, I’m on the fast track to becoming That Crazy Writer / Cat Lady whom neighbors pity and children fear, and I need to get out and see people, stat), so I joined a writers’ group.

Yesterday a few of us gathered at another member’s house for a writing and critique session. It was my first time to do anything with this group, and as I was driving over, I got a familiar nervous feeling in my belly. It was like the first day at a new school: What if no one likes me? What if they laugh at me and ask where I got the idea I should ever write anything more complicated than a want ad? What if no one will sit by me? What if they make fun of my clothes – stylish though these thrift-store yoga pants may be?

I’m rather proud to report that I did not turn tail and flee back to the safety of my writing room. I went to the writing session, I met four very nice fellow writers, we talked shop a bit, and we wrote. And we shared what we wrote. And we talked some more. And I left there with a true feeling of having spent time with people who get me. When I mentioned having broken down and cried once after killing off a character, no one gave me a weird look or backed slowly away. They just laughed and nodded. I also left there with a short story I’m in the process of polishing up now and that will be posted here (under “Christy’s Shorts”) later in the week.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, the times when we as adults still get that first-day-of-school feeling? I hadn’t experienced it in some time, probably since the last time I had a first day of school, but it made me realize just how vulnerable we can be, at any age. If I spend day after day in my apartment, just writing, and I discover at some point that I’m lonely, well that’s my own fault for isolating myself. It was a choice I made. But if I put myself out there, out among the living, and I end up lonely, it gets a whole lot harder to convince myself that there’s nothing wrong with me.

Once, when I was about 16, I went with my church youth group to a water park in a town about an hour away from our hometown. It was the usual youth group scenario – all of us piling on the church bus, overloaded with teenage energy and extra buzzed at the prospect of getting out of town for awhile. When we got to the water park, everyone splintered into little groups and took off in different directions. And I found myself alone. It was a little odd, really, because I had plenty of friends in this youth group. Most of them I’d known my whole life. But for whatever reason, on this particular day, everyone grabbed a buddy or two and took off. And, like the climactic scene in a John Hughes movie, the crowds parted and there I was, by myself, feeling horribly and suddenly self-conscious in my bathing suit and towel. The cheese stands alone. I spent the day sunbathing and telling myself it didn’t matter. But it’s now 30 years later and I’m telling you that story, in disturbing detail, so clearly it did.

That “alone at the water park” feeling can still sneak up on me. It’s similar to the first-day-of-school feeling, just a little more intense. I’m sure that somewhere in my mind that day at the water park, I consoled myself with the thought that once I was an adult, life would be all cocktail parties and backyard barbecues with friends, and I’d never find myself standing alone in my bathing suit ever again.

Guess what? Some days I’m still alone at the water park. Some days I’m still standing in the doorway of my new classroom with trembling hands. We all are. We all are. Just something to think about when you look around you at everyone else. At one time or another, we all feel alone. But at the end of the day, I believe in a world where you can reach out your hand and someone will always reach back.

Although I still don’t like water parks.

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Christy Writes: On Youth, Becoming, and Robin Williams

I was waiting in the car this morning, caffeinated and fidgety, and I first turned on the radio and then saw, in my open purse, a lipstick I’d just bought. So I took it out and, with Information Society singing “What’s On Your Mind,” I got very caught up in experimenting with that lipstick. At some point during those few minutes, I completely lost track of everything but that exact moment and the fact that in my mind, without me trying, it was 1987 again.

My mind is blown when I think of all the money I’ve spent over the past 20 years on products to make me look younger, smooth out the lines, cover the gray… when this morning made me realize that in my own head, I’m perpetually 18 years old, blasting techno and trying to see how much lipstick I can get away with.

I think that’s one of the myriad reasons I, like the rest of the world, was knocked completely backward by the death of Robin Williams this week. I’m one of the generation that grew up on Mork, and I mean belly laughing at Mork. And somehow, still having his infectious energy and manic wit always out there, always around, kept me connected to my youth. Just seeing his face and that big grin was so comfortingly familiar. When I laughed at one of Simon Roberts’ lines on “The Crazy Ones,” I was ten years old again, rolling with laughter on my living room floor and asking Mom if I could get rainbow suspenders.

For me, it’s an interesting mental phenomenon that while I’m now living what were only dreams when I was a kid, I look back at my younger years as when I was truly myself. I’ve started to think we don’t “become,” we just are. The things I’ve become, while positive overall, are characteristics that have arisen from circumstances, my environment, people encountered, lessons learned. But the Christy I am at my core is the Christy I was when I was a kid.

I wasn’t more than five the first time I told someone I was a writer. Not “Well, I’m a writer and I’m a bit neurotic and could stand to lose a few pounds and sometimes I have trust issues and also I think my checking account is overdrawn again.” No, as far as I was concerned there were only two things that mattered: I’m Christy Potter, and I’m a writer. Now it’s 40 years later and when I think about the fact that I’m now making my living with my writing, everything else is superfluous. I knew who I was then, I know who I am now. And it’s in those too-rare moments like this morning, when I allow myself to connect with the part of my mind that isn’t so much frozen in time as just chilling out there, I find peace.

The empty set of “The Crazy Ones.” Los Angeles, April 2014. Rest in peace, Robin Williams.

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Christy Writes: Twenty Years Down and Where Am I Now?

I have these ridges on my fingernails.

They haven’t always been there and lately they’re more pronounced. I asked a doctor about them recently and he said they’re a common sign of aging. I remember when doctors used to say “This might sting a little” before unleashing something painful, but no matter. I notice these ridges every time I do my nails, but they seem particularly relevant today: the 20th anniversary of the day I left Kansas and headed east, visions of New York City beckoning me.

Twenty years seems a long time in some ways, a mere blink in others. As Gretchen Rubin says, the days are long but the years are short. I was 25 when I got on that eastbound plane, full of the same shallow confidence and borderline manic enthusiasm that today makes 25-year-olds seem like little kids to me.

Over the past 20 years, I’ve had people tell me how impressed they are that I packed up my stuff and moved 1,300 miles away from my family, friends, and job to a place where I knew no one and nothing. I’ve always found that partly flattering, largely puzzling. I was simply following my heart and mind, going where I felt I could grow as a journalist, but perhaps even more than that, where I could expand the circle around me to include more people, more adventures, and more life in general. Like the old cartoon of the little kid heading out, belongings tied up a handkerchief and dangling from a stick over his shoulder, I wanted to seek my fortune (Dear Fortune: still seeking you…), see new faces, hear different accents, walk unfamiliar streets, shop in weird stores and, because I was headed east, to find out once and for all just how much cream cheese constitutes a schmear.

It’s easy sometimes to look back at the last 20 years and regret not reaching all the goals I had in mind when I got on that airplane. I didn’t win a Pulitzer by the time I was 40. I have never had an office in the Empire State Building with an amazing view. I never dated Jerry Seinfeld. I don’t own a house or have creative, hilarious kids. I’m still trying to lose ten pounds and figure out what to do with my hair.

But then I remember the goals I have reached. I’ve challenged myself, inside and out. I took up running when I was well past 30, I published my first book when I was on the shady side of 40. I’ve traveled to places I once only dreamed of, I’ve gotten to know people who have broadened my mind and changed my thinking. I’ve fallen in love. I’ve read books I’d never known existed. I’ve grown as a writer. I’ve interviewed some amazing people. I’ve eaten too much and drank too much (separately and at the same time) before re-learning for good the concept of balance. I’ve laughed until my sides hurt, cried until my insides didn’t, lost friends and found new ones, and every day, I’ve started again. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve learned that I doesn’t matter as much where I’ve done all these things as much as the fact that I’ve done them at all.

I still can’t believe it’s been twenty years. Even with these ridges on my fingernails, I wouldn’t change a thing.

I did go to a party at the Food Network with Mo Rocca a couple of years ago. That was pretty cool.

 

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Christy Writes: Remembering to Look Down

I’ve been on an internet detox lately, curtailing my usage to the point that some days I don’t go online at all. I’m doing this for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is my own mental health. I find that a steady diet of social media and online news alters my psyche in not-good ways. I’m also deep into my new book and doing a lot of reading, both of which are better for me in both the long and short-term than anything the internet could drag in and drop in my lap.

But probably the biggest reason I decided to do this internet detox is that I needed to remember to look down.

I’ve always been a downward looker. I like little things – flowers pushing stubbornly up through cracks in the pavement, sidewalk chalk art, various tiny life forms whose entire focus at the moment I see them is staying out from under my shoes. Looking down netted me a twenty dollar bill once, but it’s worth pointing out that I was already a downward looker when that happened, and looking down just in the hopes of finding money defeats the purpose. Also it hasn’t happened to me since.

I do look up, of course, to exchange smiles with strangers or to make sure I haven’t inadvertently walked to the edge of the earth. But I find that looking down connects me with so much life on this planet that is easily overlooked from our comparatively great height. As a little girl I loved to watch birds, squirrels, bees, even ants as they went about their business. A budding writer even then, and one who had learned to read in the anthropomorphic worlds of Peter Rabbit, the Berenstain Bears and later the Chronicles of Narnia, I was fascinated by the fact that all of these creatures had lives and routines and a role to play in making the great machine keep working.

But the truth is, my phone (everyone’s favorite modern scapegoat) was keeping me from looking down. Or at least from looking down at anything other than its shiny, smooth, comfortingly scuffed screen. It gave me music when I was out for a walk, told me the time, kept track of how far I’d gone and at what pace, and fed me email and texts the way a mother funnels Cheerios into a fussy toddler.

The detox started one morning when I was out after a heavy summer rain the previous night. I was messing with my phone when something on the sidewalk caught my eye. It was a worm, a fat and confused little nightcrawler, that had been washed out by the rain and was now squinching along the pavement in the hot sun, blindly seeking the soil. I put my phone away and gently carried the worm over to a nearby garden.

I didn’t take my phone back out for the rest of the day.

I’ve never been one of those people who believes that my life is of more value than any other creature simply because mine happens to take this form. I’m a share-the-earth kind of girl. Giving that worm a lift reminded me how far I’ve drifted from my old days of communing with nature and the three-dimensional world. Communing with the internet just doesn’t leave me feeling the same at day’s end.

Bees on Flowers

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Christy with a Camera: Summer in the City

Fence view

 

Hydrant

Sassafras!

Nom nom nom

Forgotten ball

 

Flowers ‘n butts

Hot pavement

Cool pool

Green oasis

Rooftops

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Christy Writes: The Unseen Couple Outside My Window

There is a couple who talk outside my writing room window every morning.

I live in a city, so people giving me my daily dose of their noise is not unusual. Silence, on the other hand, is unusual. And generally cause for concern. But these two people fascinate me. He is always out there, at the same time every morning, waiting for the bus. And she walks past, at the same time every morning, and they talk. Her voice always chirps a happy hello when she sees him, I can usually hear him laugh at some point.

This is not a flirtation, it seems important that I point out. Their exchanges never have that tone, and as a longtime student of interpersonal interactions and human social mores, I know flirting when I hear it. This is a genuine appreciation of each other, a high point in each of their mornings.

The bus stop he’s waiting at is directly beneath my window, which is always open in the mornings as I sit there, drinking coffee and writing in my journal. I have never stood up to see what they look like, although I easily could. I don’t, for some reason, want to know. My ears fill me in on the basics. She is young-ish, black, and cheerful. I don’t know where she lives or where she works, all I know is that she doesn’t take that bus. He is older, white, and he smokes. The sweetly acrid smell of cigarette floating on the morning air always finds me first, heralding his arrival at the bus stop before I ever hear him speak. I don’t know where he lives or where he works, only that he takes that bus to get there.

Soon she passes, and they greet each other. There’s a little banter, some pedestrian observation about the weather, local happenings, and whatever the current situation is right there right then on this part of the street. Then she pushes off, on to work, to the rest of her day, to the rest of her life, and eventually he grinds out the stub of his cigarette and gets on the bus and disappears until he turns up again the next morning, like a slow-moving boomerang the bus is playing with. I don’t need to know what either of them look like. I know all I need to know.

“Call me later!” she usually tosses over her shoulder as she’s walking away.

“Call me later.”  This adds a whole new dimension to my audio observations of these two. “Call me later” is nothing I’ve ever said to someone I chat with on the street, even someone I see regularly. The whole purpose of sidewalk talk is to exchange pleasantries, to prove to the world and maybe yourself that you are capable of interacting in polite society, then to get on your way again. In his essay “Imperial Bedroom,” Jonathan Franzen says “All I really want from a sidewalk  is that people see me and let me see them.” I concur. That’s why these two are an endless fascination to me. They see and are seen. Their chat is not of the variety in which “Call me later” seems necessary or even relevant. Yet it must be, because nearly every day it is her parting comment, and his gruff rejoinder is always “Yeah. I’ll call ya.” I’ve no idea if he actually calls her later or not.

These two are slowly restoring my faith in people, in our ability to interact with each other without a screen between us, with our inherent knowledge that it doesn’t matter our age, our race, or our gender, because the bottom line is we’re all in this together.

When I was a little girl back in Kansas, I remember being in the kitchen with my mother one evening and hearing the tornado sirens go off. Any kid who has lived in Kansas any real length of time doesn’t immediately panic, as you might expect, when the siren goes from its low guttural groan to a full-blown wail. The sirens are part of the sounds of summer to a Kansas kid, and we took our cues from our parents anyway. They were the ones who were tasked with listening to the weather reports and keeping us safe. If they didn’t seem worried, we went right back to the Dukes of Hazzard without batting an eye.

On that particular night, I remember my mother glancing out the window at the sky, then turning on the kitchen radio. Worry level: medium. I went to the sliding glass patio door which allowed me a better view of everything. Beneath the gathering clouds, which were getting angrier by the minute, I could see our neighborhood, each of the houses surrounded by lawns all the kids trampled all summer long, the sandy alleyways that made up our personal juvenile road system, the familiarity of every tree, every garbage can, every light in every window, and I thought, “Well, at least we’re all in this together.”

That all of us could end up sucked into a funnel cloud to rival Dorothy’s didn’t particularly frighten me because a) Dorothy got some awesome shoes out of the deal and b) there was strength in numbers. As long as the world as I knew it was right there together, we’d be fine.

It’s the same feeling I get listening to the pair outside my window in the mornings. They have become part of the world as I know it, and as long as they are out there, engaging in their morning chatter, I feel safe. Because they are kind, because they are connecting with respect and affection, I connect with them. When I read in the news about murders and robberies, rape and abuse and neglect, I disconnect. I don’t choose to link my world with that world. It’s foreign to me, distasteful and distrustful. The man and woman outside my window are part of a world I link to. We’re all in this together. And as they wrap up their chat and she sings out “Call me later!” I am suddenly completely certain that he will.

 

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Christy’s Shorts: Ain’t No Cure for the Summertime Blues

Summer, Amanda thought as she looked out the window at hot metallic Manhattan spread out so far below her it looked like a big board game, used to be fun.

Actually, it had been more than fun. It had been everything. When you’re an adult, she thought, summer isn’t really any different than its three seasonal counterparts. Maybe it was to truck drivers, to whom icy roads and soaring temperatures were important daily factors. Maybe it was to construction workers and road maintenance guys and gardeners. Amanda felt an unfamiliar longing wrap itself around her throat and squeeze until she was overwhelmed with the desire to run her Harvard MBA through the shredder and go ask one of those beautiful, blissfully free people for a job.

Summer didn’t matter up here, in her office on the 98th floor of the Empire State Building. The climate was controlled, her hours were controlled, her every movement was controlled, choreographed.

“Work-life balance is vital to your well-being and success,” the HR rep droned with mechanical, practiced enthusiasm at the quarterly staff meeting. He’d apparently never been given the script that explained how exactly to do that, or at any rate it never came up, and Amanda would go back to her office to find that her work had multiplied during the hour she’d been gone. Her boss always seemed to use that time to slip her ludicrous revisions to projects she’d nearly finished, and sent “Where’re we at on this?” email about projects she hadn’t had time to even look at yet. Work-life balance had become a punch line. She’d be happy enough just to balance work.

Amanda had reached the age when thinking back on her childhood was a luxury her mental health could ill afford, at least not the happy parts. The parts her parents had meticulously and doggedly destroyed through years of the subtlest form of child abuse – making her doubt herself – those years had been dragged out and inspected in soothingly-lit therapists’ offices so many times over the years that Amanda now tended to remember them with the vague distaste one feels when recalling a movie they saw once and didn’t like. The happy parts were what hurt to remember now. Especially summer.

Summer is like parole to a kid. That last day of school in June, the weather already hot and waiting impatiently just outside the building’s double doors, watching the clock that definitely must be broken, fidgeting, not making any attempt to concentrate, and the teacher, used to this, expecting this, had planned nothing more for that last afternoon than popcorn and a movie, and even those rare-in-school treats couldn’t keep the kids focused. Some thirty years later and the smell of popcorn when she wasn’t expecting it still gave Amanda a quick, excited jump of anticipation in her belly. The last minutes had always been the longest, stretching out agonizingly while she sat, every muscle on taut alert like a sprinter waiting for the crack of the starter pistol, so that by the time the dismissal bell rang, she almost screamed, grabbing her backpack and bolting out the door of the classroom and streaming down the hall with the other kids in a flood of eager, sweaty puppybodies, until they burst through the doors and sucked in great, hot breaths of sweet, sweet freedom.

Summer always carried with it a bit of mystery to Amanda. She would sometimes see kids from school at the pool, or at the townwide Fourth of July fireworks and watermelon festival, but for the most part they splintered apart during the summer, going off to camp or on family vacations, living their own little private lives for those few months, and when fall came and they all went back to school – a slower stream this time, weighed down by stiff new jeans and backpacks full of school supplies that had traitorously appeared in the stores in early August – they were familiar strangers to each other. Bodies had grown a little taller, faces had slimmed down, sun-darkened freckles and lightened hair bore testament to themselves and each other that it really had been summer, and that probably it would be again, but not for so long it was best not to think about it too much.

Grace, whose office was next to Amanda’s, stuck her head in just in time to keep Amanda from going into a full-on summer-related midlife crisis.

“Hey, that client meeting on Monday has been pushed to 3:00,” Grace said. “Do you want me to send it to your Outlook?”

“No, thanks. I got it,” Amanda said. “Hey, Grace, doesn’t it seem messed up to you that we don’t get summers off anymore, now that we’re adults and could really use it?”

Grace laughed.

“Totally. If you can sell that to HR, I will be right behind you.”

Yes, Amanda thought, watching Grace’s figure retreating down the hall. Yes, be right behind me, Grace. Let’s run out of here and go to my house and change into our swimming suits and fill my new plastic pool with shockingly cold water from the hose, and later we can have ice pops and run through the whole neighborhood and find new shortcuts to nowhere, which is exactly where we were headed. Let’s get grass stains on our feet and sunburns on our noses and mosquito bites on our arms.

From far down the hallway, she heard the elevator doors chime as they arrived for Grace, and she pictured them waiting for five seconds before sliding shut again.

Amanda slipped into the heels she didn’t realize she’d taken off, pulled her purse out of the bottom drawer, got into the elevator and made her way down the 98 floors and out onto the sidewalk, melting slowly into the vast, anonymous population of New York in the summer.

 

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