Archive for the ‘Essays’ Category
Aging Slowly in the Big City
1.
On my birthday last month, I watched with narcissistic glee as the obligatory well wishes piled up on my Facebook wall. I’m not a big Facebook user–I prefer the news sense and black humor of the people I follow on Twitter–but my birthday is the one day of the year I check the Social Network first. It’s not the same as a surprise party or thoughtful gift, but at the very least it makes me feel like someone thought about me for a second, even if “Happy birthday man!” is the most they’ve said to me in 15 years.
Most of my birthday posts this year had the same drive by quality, but of the handful of friends who added a little extra (mostly wise-assery, but still appreciated), my friend Kevin added the comment that struck me the most. “I hope you write something poignant about aging slowly in the big city.” I didn’t ask him what exactly he meant by “aging slowly,” but until then I hadn’t thought much about getting older. I’m 34, and after I passed the milestones of 16 and 21, I stopped thinking much about how old I was at all. In fact, I’ve actually had to stop and calculate my age a couple times in the past few years when someone asked me.
Legoland
Carter is almost six years old and we just had Christmas, which meant Legos, lots and lots of Legos. He already has a huge bin of them at home full of pieces for cars, submarines, a pirate hideout, and a fire boat with a plastic hull that can float in the bathtub. But he wanted more of course, so this year he put the Lego police headquarters and fire station at the top of his list.
Sunday Mornings
This piece originally appeared at The Millions
1.
My parents spent the weekend at my house recently, and besides the standard good feelings of spending time with the people who raised me, I’ve come to look forward to these visits because they are two able-bodied adults who can help watch my kids. Once the initial greetings are shared, bags unpacked, and meals cooked, their presence in the house offers the unusual chance to sneak away to check my email unmolested and go to the bathroom without being interrupted mid-stream by a door-pounding demand for apple juice.
Proof
My first day of school is crystallized in a now 30-year-old photograph taken by my father, of me and my friends Mark, Clint, and Chris on our first day of preschool. Ready to become Pooh Bears at the Kinderschule in Wadesville, Indiana, we stand holding hands in front of the entrance. Mark is wearing a powder blue polo shirt with matching shorts. Clint has on a striped tank top. Chris has his mouth open as if he was talking, and I’m about to insert my index finger into my mouth, my version of thumb-sucking. I remember nothing from this day, but the wary, apprehensive look on my face in that photo describes the moment perfectly.
What you remember from your first day of school is cobbled together from what your parents told you, from images in your mind of what the school looked like, which friends were there, and how much you liked your teachers. But most often it’s defined by the photos, which replace the memories themselves. When I was a kid, I assumed my dad took pictures like this expressly to torture me and my sister. No trip was complete without a family photo posed in front of a row of bushes at my grandparents’, standing against a railing over a scenic outlook in the Smoky Mountains, or backs to a sunset on a Florida beach. Now that I have my own kids I understand why he did this. He needed to take those pictures to remember being there, to make sure it really happened, because our real memory falls apart so quickly.
What’s Left Behind
I know I’ve driven on US-45 in southern Illinois on sunny spring and summer days, but I always picture it in the winter, with gray skies and two-week-old snow on the ground, the kind that’s been there long enough to start melting into ugly, misshapen ice and turn filthy black along the edges of the road. It’s one of the many routes I can take to get from Chicago to my parents’ house in Poseyville, Indiana. The towns along US-45 are drab and desolate, some slightly larger than others, delineated by whether they have a McDonald’s and a Marathon station or a Citgo with a quickie mart. Louisville, Geff, Hord, Cisne, Flora: they appear universally tired, towns you remember from childhood but left long ago, returning briefly to visit your grandparents once or twice a year, for only old people still live in towns like this. The houses themselves appear to be asleep, hunkered down on their lots, dirty clapboard sidings mirroring the mottled, sagging skin of their inhabitants. Some children must live there or at least visit regularly, according to the broken down Playskool cars and rusty swing sets scattered around the front yards of houses lining the road, but they’re never present when we drive through, as if they hibernate through the bleak winter days.
National Burger Association
When I was younger, I was a rabid Indiana Pacers fan. I vividly remember watching Game 1 of the 1995 Eastern Conference semifinals against the Knicks on TV with my dad, screaming my head off while Reggie Miller scored 8 points in 11 seconds to win the game. I lived and died by Reggie’s clutch shooting, helped along by the Pacers’ supporting cast of Rik Smits, Mark Jackson, Jalen Rose, the Davis “brothers,” and an aging Chris Mullin. Good but never great, those teams were fun to watch if only because I knew every other fan in the league hated Reggie Miller. No player but Reggie could get away with all the trash-talking, flopping, and manufactured fouls that he did, but it made all those dagger-like 3-pointers that much better. He was my guy.
Through an Unlocked Door
A portion of this piece originally appeared in the South Loop Review, Volume 12, Fall 2010. This version is an adaptation of my master’s thesis for the Northwestern University Masters in Creative Writing program, which won the Distinguished Thesis Award.
AN OLD, TWO-STORY, WHITE CLAPBOARD HOUSE used to sit on a gravel lane just off Indiana State Highway 165, south of the town of Poseyville. On any given summer evening, you could stand outside the house and see the lights from three separate baseball fields. Strains of “Hey batter, hey batter, hey batter” might have wafted over from Robert E. Hunt Little League Field on the edge of town to the north of the house, competing with the churning, cyclical whine of cicadas. Over the corn and soybean fields to the southwest, the lights of North Posey High School burned into the night, illuminating games between junior high, varsity, and American Legion teams. And to the east, the lights of the St. Wendel community diamond would glow in the distance like a real-life Field of Dreams, enclosed on all four sides by phalanxes of corn that part for just one lonely gravel road. The spot where this house stood, at 8100 Indiana 165, was quiet even in daylight, the solitude unnerving for those used to the hum and throb of the city. Years ago freight trains hauling grain and livestock on the Illinois Central line past the edge of town occasionally punctuated the silence with a wail, but the track is abandoned now, and the only sounds come from passing cars or the wind, blowing through the massive maple and cottonwood trees that surrounded the house and lined its driveway.
Found Memories
Winter finally released its grip from Chicago this week, giving me the occassion to peel the fleece lining out of my heavy coat to convert it into a spring jacket. This uncovered a hidden pocket inside the lapel of the outer shell, inside which I found the remains of the ticket stub from a Chicago Cubs game against the Milwaukee Brewers at Wrigley Field on April 29, 2006. It was torn in four places: one, along the perforated line that the ushers rip when you enter the ballpark, and three less exact gashes through the top half that looked like they were caused by absent-minded handling or the trauma of several spin cycles.
Purloined
“I’M NOT TOO GOOD AT THIS, SO TELL ME IF I’M BEING TOO ROUGH.” Such a comment, coming out of the mouth of a rookie shoe clerk fitting a pair of loafers or a novice tailor tugging on the lapels of a jacket, might pass unnoticed. Their imprecision, while momentarily annoying, would cause no lasting injury, for the things they are jostling with rough hands aren’t attached to you, after all. But put that statement on the lips of a woman holding your genitals and wielding an electric razor, and it takes on quite a bit more significance.
I heard it while I was laying on my back in a procedure room in Northwestern Hospital, naked from the waist down except for my socks, waiting to get a vasectomy. Desiree, the young, attractive, African-American medical assistant who would be helping the urologist that day, was already mowing away at my crotch with a beige set of clippers when she confessed her inexperience. The handout the urologist gave me during my initial appointment suggested that I shave myself the morning of the procedure to save time, but a new job and the two kids who led me to this state of affairs left little time for special grooming that day. So now Desiree was doing things to me that some men would pay good money for a woman like her to do.
Washing Windows
In a former life, before I went back to my old job, before I was a stay-at-home dad, before my old job was just my job, I was a consultant. This involved a lot of travel, the kind of fly out Sunday, fly home Friday travel eagerly tolerated by recent college grads who see it as a sign of prestige, but the kind of travel that slowly grinds you down until all the airports feel the same, no one concourse or food court or rental car counter in Chicago different from another in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.