Last month The Moth came to Chicago for the first time to do a StorySLAM. I went on assignment for Gapers Block, and even came prepared with a story to tell in case my name got pulled from the hat. I didn't prepare very well though, I typed the story up that very morning, and spent the day trying to memorize it. I was so caught up in my notes that I forgot to put my name in the hat once I got to the event, and I was feeling insecure about how little time I'd invested in rehearsing. I did get a decent Gapers Block piece out of it though.
It would be a shame to leave the as yet unperformed story in its dusty little corner of my computer, so I thought I'd publish it here even if I never manage to tell it on stage:
School
I almost didn't graduate from high school because I failed gym. I'll say that again - I almost didn't graduate from high school because I failed gym. Not calculus or AP French - no, gym.
I went to a tiny Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, a town about 60 miles north of New York City that might qualify as a rust-belt city, but with none of the accompanying cache. A percentage of the student body was on the fast track to success, but it was widely known as a second chance school, and several of my classmates had repeated a year upon entering, or had been given the choice between boarding school or military school.
As boarding schools go, it was pretty lax. There were no uniforms, no football team - only soccer, and it was co-ed. We had dances, but no prom - that went against the Quaker aesthetic of not making people feel bad if they don't have a date - or whatever, I can't remember exactly which tenant of Quakerism is compromised by prom night.
The PE requirement was, to say the least, relaxed. While I'd spent two seasons on the cross country team - becoming a Hudson Valley Athletic League All Star, by the way. I even got a letter, but since the cross country team didn't have jackets I never sewed it to anything.
I was never a great student, I had trouble concentrating on anything that didn't interest me, and had perfected the art of self-sabotage to the point that every semester it seemed I might fail all my classes, but by some miracle of last minute studying I passed. By the spring of my senior year I had developed a serious case of what is sometimes referred to as senior-itis, and the most athletic endeavor I could bring myself to sign up for was Outdoor Club. Yes, we had something called Outdoor Club, and it counted as PE credit. A few times a week the Outdoor Club would load up in a van, drive to some out of the way, picturesque locale in the Hudson Valley, and go for a walk.
And I failed.
I was in my Outdoor Club coach's office, if that's even what his title was, I'm not sure. It was about two weeks before graduation. My family had made arrangements to rent a car and drive up from Brooklyn to watch me graduate under the shade of a 100 year-old oak tree in a ceremony that featured the puppeteer Kevin Clash - best known for bringing Sesame Street's Elmo to life. My coach and I were having what I thought was a friendly conversation. Jack was somewhere in his fifties, he was balding with a monk's fringe of gray hair on the sides of his head, he had a pot belly and all the menacing presence of Santa Claus.
"Well," Jack said, his eyes on an attendance sheet spread out among a pile of other papers on his desk, "it looks like you've missed four sessions of Outdoor Club." It was true, I had. That spring I'd met my first real boyfriend and together we cut class and idled the hours away. By the time I was accepted to college, most of my academics, including Outdoor Club, had fallen pretty low on my list of priorities. Who cared if I wasn't out walking with Jack and the rest of the club? I was so out of here, my life was just beginning, and what kind of a gym class was Outdoor Club anyway?
"Yeah," I said.
"You know the maximum number of absences is two," he said.
"Yeah," I said. As bad of a student as I was, I never made excuses for myself, I took whatever punishment came my way as a result of my bad habits. I spent hours in what was called "special study hall", where all the under-performing kids were sent. We sat together in the dining hall under the supervision of a teacher, who sat at a table grading papers. They didn't care what we did, as long as we didn't leave the room. I spent my time writing notes to my friend Cori. I never did a lick of homework in special study hall.
"Well I'm sorry," Jack said, "but I'm not going to be able to give you a passing grade."
Suddenly the future that I was no longer going to enjoy flashed before my eyes - college, career, family, success - and in its place came a new future, an unpleasant and dark future filled with menial, backbreaking jobs, cigarette smoke and a terrible soundtrack - songs like Irene Cara's What a Feeling.
"But Jack, I..." I stammered, and the rest became in incomprehensible blur of half-choked pleas and stammered explanations, "I... can't... not... graduate... I'm ... already accepted to college..." My tears were so forceful they practically shot out of my eyes like water from a lawn sprinkler, I couldn't see anything. All I knew was that my life was ruined, and that it was all my fault.
"Okay, okay," Jack said between my outbursts, "now let's just take it easy, just settle down." His tone was soothing, listening to Jack was like listening to a bedtime story. "If you go outside right now, and go for a nice long walk," he said, "I'll just erase two of these absences, all right?"
My tears stopped. Could this really be true? Could one walk really make the difference between working in a gas station or becoming a tenured college professor? Was this even ethical, could Jack really do this? I didn't care if it was or not. "Uh, okay," I said, and left Jack's office.
I went outside and walked like I had never walked before. I walked all the way around the school campus, up the hill past the auditorium and the gym, past the boys dorms and beyond to the other side of the hill, past the main building, the science buildings, the infirmary, the girls dorms and the dining hall until I was back in front of Jack's office. When I was done circling the campus I did it again for good measure. To this day I don't know if Jack was watching me.
Two weeks later I graduated under the shade of a 100 year-old oak tree with 65 other students, in a ceremony presided over by Elmo, and never told any of my classmates how close I came to not graduating.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Uncle Lloyd -or- How I Met The Funky Drummer
A couple weeks ago, M and I drove north to Madison to visit my aunt Mary and uncle Lloyd. My uncle had just started dialysis treatments, and we hadn't seen either of them in about six years so I figured a visit was overdue. I didn't know my uncles when I was growing up; my family lived in Switzerland when I was small, my uncles lived in Maine and Wisconsin, and neither of them ever visited us. The only childhood memory I have of either of them was the year my uncle Stuart sent us a huge package of American candy for the holidays. I was overwhelmed - while there was no shortage of chocolate where we lived, I had never seen such a cache of sugary bliss: candy corn, Tootsie Rolls, Razzles, Pop Rocks... it made quite an impression on me, and the irony that my uncle Stuart was a dentist never dawned on me. The night after my mother told me we'd be moving back to America I had a dream about all the candy that I would find upon our return; I wasn't disappointed.
Dad still lives in Switzerland, and he visits me from time to time. Not long after I moved to Chicago he visited me and we took an Amtrak train up to Milwaukee - halfway between Chicago and Madison, to meet Lloyd and Mary for lunch. On the train ride dad read a copy of the Wall Street Journal, folding it in thirds when he was done and holding it out into the aisle with an outstretched hand to the passengers seated across the aisle. The two men seated across from us were in mid conversation when one of them noticed dad's unsolicited offering. "This is for you," he said, "I'm finished with it." Amazingly, they accepted his gift. The train driver made periodic announcements, telling us about points of interest along the way. Dad found this unbearably funny, he laughed loudly and repeated the announcements as they were being made.
Dad only has one volume on his laugh - loud. It starts with an outburst, an uncontrollable exhale of air, and quickly devolves into a full body, rhythmic shaking with an accompanying noise that's similar to a saw moving back and forth on a 2 x 4, while his eyes grow wide and glisten with manic hilarity. It's a snakebite that has no antidote; once dad starts laughing you just have to let it run its course. I can't tell you how many times I've missed movie dialogue because of dad's laughing, and while I'd like to say that I inherited none of this, every once in a while something tickles my funny bone so hard that I find myself laughing until I literally weep. Dad's laugh attracted the attention of the woman seated in front of us, and she turned around so that her knees were on the back of her seat and her hands on the headrest. She was traveling alone and looked to be somewhere in her sixties, but carried herself like a seven-year old. "You sound like fun," she said to dad. I could barely handle the embarrassment of being in public with the challenging sixty-year old that I happened to be related to, let alone one who was just along for the ride. I gave her what must have been my deadliest stare ever because we made eye contact and she promptly turned around in her seat and stayed put for the remainder of the journey.
In Milwaukee we had lunch with Lloyd and Mary at a brauhaus, and during the course of our conversation dad asked Lloyd how his diabetes was going. This was the first I'd ever heard of it. "There's diabetes in our family?" I asked dad, my pulse racing, "why didn't you ever tell me this? For years I've been going to doctors and handing them blank forms that ask for check marks next to diseases that run in my family because I don't know of any!" Dad mumbled something about it being a "mild diabetes" that I shouldn't worry about. Our waitress cleared the plates and dad asked her if they served espresso. "No," she said flatly, "we just have coffee."
"Dad," I hissed once the waitress had left the table, "we're in Milwaukee, not Florence."
I left that lunch wondering: if there's diabetes in my family and I never knew about it, what else didn't I know? I began an email correspondence with Lloyd and Mary, and visited them several times in Madison. My aunt - a retired librarian, had cataloged every piece of information about the Cohen family that existed on paper, and arranged them in scrapbooks that lined an entire bookshelf. I stayed up until three in the morning the first night I stayed at their house, poring over news clippings about my grandmother, who died in 1957 and was a concert pianist; my grandfather, who died in 1962 and was a chemist; and childhood photographs of my dad and his two brothers: photos of them dressed in cub scout uniforms, wearing mortarboards and gowns at graduations, and posing with cars and girlfriends. It was at once engrossing and alienating - if I was a Cohen, then why hadn't I been indoctrinated in the family history years ago? What wasn't in the scrapbooks I asked my uncle about. I learned more about my family in one weekend at their house than I had ever learned from dad.
When we weren't busy catching up on family history, we had fun. Lloyd is a retired car salesman, and a classic car enthusiast. He had a cherry red 1957 Thunderbird that he kept in a garage all winter, and took for joy rides in the summer. He even has a mailbox shaped like a Thunderbird, with plastic windows that fog up with condensation in the morning. He took us for rides in the T-bird, one at a time since its a two-seater. We visited for the fourth of July and watched as choreographed music played in time with exploding fireworks at an annual event called Rhythm & Booms; we walked up and down State Street, Madison's shopping district; and Lloyd treated us to his famous eggs Benedict, and homemade gazpacho made with tomatoes and cucumbers from his garden.
My dad and both his brothers came to our wedding, and we saw Lloyd and Mary in Chicago once about a year afterward, but then somehow the fragile ties that we'd built began to erode. One year passed, and then five more without either of us making the effort to visit, until Lloyd sent an email saying he was scheduled to begin dialysis, and I picked up the phone.
We borrowed my mother in-law's Mini for the journey, and I found a mummified banana in the passenger side door that I'd left there the last time we borrowed her car - in June. It was completely shriveled and black, the moisture having completely escaped, and had an unused Band-Aid stuck to it. The ride to Madison was familiar; we drove up through Rockford and crossed the state line into Wisconsin, passing through Janesville and driving up Highway 14-18, known as The Beltline, past streets with names like Old Sauk, Rim Rock, and Fish Hatchery Road, until we pulled into my aunt and uncle's driveway.
Lloyd greeted us outside, and the first thing we noticed was that he'd slimmed down. He's been heavy his whole life, and had dropped 40 pounds in order to improve his health and qualify for a kidney transplant. He was drawn to the Mini, and asked M several questions about it before we entered the house.
New floors had been installed since our last visit, and Lloyd had bought himself a new, large screen digital TV as a consolation prize since his travel options were now severely limited - his dialysis schedule is three sessions per week, three and a half hours per session. He'd also adopted a friendly orange tabby cat named Fernando who's about two years old. Fernando was the name given to him by the shelter that Lloyd and Mary found him in, and they kept it because Mary has a great love of all things Spanish.
Lloyd served us homemade gazpacho for lunch and got us up to date on his condition, telling us everything there was to know about dialysis. Lloyd can talk for as long as you let him, a trait that he shares with his brothers and that served him well as a car salesman. The morning after our arrival a couple Jehovah's Witnesses came to the door, and he out-talked them. Lloyd's condition did nothing to dampen his spirits or his sense of humor; at a trip to Copps, the local grocery store, we walked through an aisle of sugary treats. "Do you want some of these?" He asked, pointing to a bag of mini-donuts dusted in powdered sugar. "I can't have them, but you can."
"No thanks," I said.
"Are you sure?" He asked, "I really get a kick out of buying them for other people."
We accompanied Lloyd and Mary to the dialysis center, driving along a stretch of road that was under construction and hadn't been repaved yet; it felt like we were driving on square tires. A woman wearing a t-shirt with the word: Single...ish stood at the front door of the dialysis center. Once inside, Mary, M and I sat in a waiting area while Lloyd got hooked up to the dialysis machine. An aide pushed a woman in a wheelchair to the seating area, she had a beehive hairdo and a cone of soft serve ice cream, which I'm guessing was a reward for having undergone treatment. I flipped through a copy of the dialysis center's newsletter and tried not to get anxious. Lloyd had explained everything, but something about being there made my pulse rise; we were surrounded by people with failing organs, and it made me nervous.
"Lloyd sits in the same chair every time," Mary said, "and the man next to him is a famous drummer, maybe you know him - his name is Clyde Stubblefield." M's eyes popped and he leaned forward in his chair.
"Clyde Stubblefied?" he repeated.
"You know of him?" Mary asked.
"Are you kidding? He's the one who invented boom-boom siss, boom-siss," M said, holding his arms out and playing air-drums as he sounded out the beat to Funky Drummer.
"Oh," Mary said. "He lives in Madison, and he still does a show every Monday night."
We walked into the treatment area, where Lloyd sat reclining in a chair. He was attached to a machine the size of a refrigerator via two tubes in his right arm - one taking his blood out, the other pumping it back in. "This is my kidney," he said, pointing to the machine. I could see his blood being filtered behind a circular glass window, like laundry in a front-loading machine. A curtain separated him from the other patients, creating a semblance of privacy. "I've got everything I need," he said, "right here's a TV and headphones," he said, pointing to a TV bolted to his chair. "And right next to me is Clyde Stubblefield," he said, lowering his voice, "he's world famous."
"Yes Lloyd," Mary said, "I told them."
On the other side of the curtain Clyde Stubblefield was being attended to by a nurse.
"Can I get you anything else?" She asked him.
"Just some eggs, grits and bacon," he joked. The nurse returned to her desk and Clyde put his headphones on, and turned on the TV attached to his chair.
"Hey Clyde," Lloyd said - loudly, since he couldn't see around the curtain. When Clyde didn't respond he called for him again, and then a third time.
"Clyde," the nurse on duty finally said to him, "Lloyd is talking to you." Clyde removed his headphones and asked: "Yes Lloyd?"
"Clyde, this is my niece and her husband, they're visiting from Chicago," Lloyd said, as M and I sheepishly waved and smiled from Lloyd's cubicle. "They know who you are," he added. M and I continued to smile, our eyes darting from the floor to Clyde and then back again.
Back at the house, Lloyd said he'd bring Clyde a set of drumsticks to sign for us.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Okay, now I'm just bragging...
But I can't help it, this is so exciting for me. More of my work is up on Gapers Block.
More stories from my life coming soon.
More stories from my life coming soon.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Buttered Noodles - Now With 30% More Theater Reviews
A while back, I had the good fortune of having a piece that was originally published on this blog re-appear on Gapers Block, a web publication that covers all things Chicago. More recently, through a series of coincidences and small-world connectedness, I've begun writing for their arts & culture section, and - eventually, their music section. I just wrote my first theater review, don't I sound like I know what the hell I'm talking about?
Damn I'm good.
Damn I'm good.
Friday, September 25, 2009
West African Dance
I didn't realize that I'd actually wanted the job until I got the rejection letter. Or more accurately - the rejection email. I opened my inbox and saw a message titled "Employment at RI" from the H.R. director. I scanned it quickly, enough to see that it wasn't a job offer (I pretty much knew that already, they would have called with an offer), and closed it again.
M really wanted me to get this job. We have repairs to make on the house, and our car is unreliable - we borrow his mother's car for any trip over twenty miles. And then there's the news. I've been avoiding it, someone told me early on that its bad for your mental health to hear job loss statistics when you're unemployed, that it will just get you down, and I haven't watched much news - or much TV at all, since I lost my job. The otherwise useless job loss counselor who was brought in the day after layoffs had sealed it with: "People who lose their jobs tend to get depressed because they watch too much Judge Judy." The words conjured up an image of me sitting on the couch - no, laying on the couch, in my pajamas, an open tube of Pringles on the floor and the TV remote in my listless, extended hand, slack-jawed and glossy-eyed. That was the moment I decided not to watch daytime television for the duration of my unemployment, and I haven't - apart from a couple episodes of The Ellen Show, and the one time I watched Barney Miller on channel 23 for it's inherent kitsch value. And who doesn't love Ellen? With her dancing and her disarming, genuinely upbeat attitude, she is the antidote to a thousand horrible daytime programming decisions. She even gives money away to her unemployed audience members from time to time. I love Ellen, but I don't even watch her show because she's on at 3pm and the TV stays off until at least 6.
I sat in front of the computer for a moment before pulling myself up off the chair, the weight of the flesh hanging from my bones feeling suddenly much heavier than when I'd sat down moments earlier. I had somewhere to go; I changed into a pair of sweatpants and a tank top, took the glasses off my face and pressed clear plastic discs onto my eyeballs in their place, got onto my bike, and rode to the Old Town School of Folk Music for my dance class.
The first time I saw Idy Ciss' West African Dance Class was through the windows outside the school on Lincoln Avenue. I was on my way to another class, and as I walked up the street the riotous sounds of live djembe drumbeats escaped from the open windows of the dance studio. I stopped in front of the picture windows and watched as a roomful of students danced from one side of the floor to the other using big, expressive movements. The drumbeat was infectious, and the energy of the dancers captivated me. I enrolled for the next session as soon as I could get to the registration desk.
Something about the movements of the dance - big, uninhibited, fearless movements that take my whole body to create, makes me feel so fantastic. I was never what you'd call agile, I never did ballet as a kid and I don't have the flexibility or grace of a natural dancer. I can keep time with the beat, and I do my best with what I've got. The most intense dancing I'd done as a youth was square dancing at summer camp, which while fun in its own way, is calculated and careful in comparison, and has none of the unbridled energy of West African Dance.
Idy can make any step look lithe and effortless. I sweat so much during my first class that I had to take my glasses off and dance blind. I took several sessions of Idy's class, even moving to level II, until I got a job that took away the extra energy I needed for this kind of activity.
I got to the dance studio early. There was only one other student when I arrived, and we sat in silent communion on the glossy wooden floor, stretching our bodies and waiting.
Idy started us slow, but soon I was drenched in sweat. The force of drumbeats willed me to move past my depression and into another space entirely, forcing a catharsis. Idy clapped out the beats with his hands so loudly it sounded like wooden sticks making contact. People sitting at the Bad Dog Tavern across the street looked up from their drinks, passers-by on the street stopped and looked in the windows as I had once done, and small children pressed their noses to the glass door leading to the hallway. Everyone on the block knows when there's a West African Dance class in session.
After the class was dismissed I rinsed my hot face in the water fountain in the hall, stepped outside into the early evening breeze, got on my bike and rode home.
M really wanted me to get this job. We have repairs to make on the house, and our car is unreliable - we borrow his mother's car for any trip over twenty miles. And then there's the news. I've been avoiding it, someone told me early on that its bad for your mental health to hear job loss statistics when you're unemployed, that it will just get you down, and I haven't watched much news - or much TV at all, since I lost my job. The otherwise useless job loss counselor who was brought in the day after layoffs had sealed it with: "People who lose their jobs tend to get depressed because they watch too much Judge Judy." The words conjured up an image of me sitting on the couch - no, laying on the couch, in my pajamas, an open tube of Pringles on the floor and the TV remote in my listless, extended hand, slack-jawed and glossy-eyed. That was the moment I decided not to watch daytime television for the duration of my unemployment, and I haven't - apart from a couple episodes of The Ellen Show, and the one time I watched Barney Miller on channel 23 for it's inherent kitsch value. And who doesn't love Ellen? With her dancing and her disarming, genuinely upbeat attitude, she is the antidote to a thousand horrible daytime programming decisions. She even gives money away to her unemployed audience members from time to time. I love Ellen, but I don't even watch her show because she's on at 3pm and the TV stays off until at least 6.
I sat in front of the computer for a moment before pulling myself up off the chair, the weight of the flesh hanging from my bones feeling suddenly much heavier than when I'd sat down moments earlier. I had somewhere to go; I changed into a pair of sweatpants and a tank top, took the glasses off my face and pressed clear plastic discs onto my eyeballs in their place, got onto my bike, and rode to the Old Town School of Folk Music for my dance class.
The first time I saw Idy Ciss' West African Dance Class was through the windows outside the school on Lincoln Avenue. I was on my way to another class, and as I walked up the street the riotous sounds of live djembe drumbeats escaped from the open windows of the dance studio. I stopped in front of the picture windows and watched as a roomful of students danced from one side of the floor to the other using big, expressive movements. The drumbeat was infectious, and the energy of the dancers captivated me. I enrolled for the next session as soon as I could get to the registration desk.
Something about the movements of the dance - big, uninhibited, fearless movements that take my whole body to create, makes me feel so fantastic. I was never what you'd call agile, I never did ballet as a kid and I don't have the flexibility or grace of a natural dancer. I can keep time with the beat, and I do my best with what I've got. The most intense dancing I'd done as a youth was square dancing at summer camp, which while fun in its own way, is calculated and careful in comparison, and has none of the unbridled energy of West African Dance.
Idy can make any step look lithe and effortless. I sweat so much during my first class that I had to take my glasses off and dance blind. I took several sessions of Idy's class, even moving to level II, until I got a job that took away the extra energy I needed for this kind of activity.
I got to the dance studio early. There was only one other student when I arrived, and we sat in silent communion on the glossy wooden floor, stretching our bodies and waiting.
Idy started us slow, but soon I was drenched in sweat. The force of drumbeats willed me to move past my depression and into another space entirely, forcing a catharsis. Idy clapped out the beats with his hands so loudly it sounded like wooden sticks making contact. People sitting at the Bad Dog Tavern across the street looked up from their drinks, passers-by on the street stopped and looked in the windows as I had once done, and small children pressed their noses to the glass door leading to the hallway. Everyone on the block knows when there's a West African Dance class in session.
After the class was dismissed I rinsed my hot face in the water fountain in the hall, stepped outside into the early evening breeze, got on my bike and rode home.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Family Camp 2009
Family camp was challenging this summer. I went with my sister and her husband, my twin four-year-old niece and nephew, and my six-month-old nephew, the latest addition to the family. I’d spent whole summers here as a kid in the 80’s, and first attended family camp - a one week session at the end of August after the regular camps have shut down, in August of 1998 with my sister. Neither one of us had been on this land in years. Its just like regular summer camp; there are lots of outdoor activities, crafts, and a talent show at the end of the week, but you sleep in a cabin with your family instead of a bunch of kids your age, and there’s far fewer staff. My sister met her husband at family camp the first year we attended - he was on staff, and they’ve been back every year since except the summer she gave birth to the twins. I make it back about every other year.
We slept in a rustic open air cabin that had a doorway but no door, and a section along an entire wall starting at chest height that was open to the elements. Bunk beds lined the three remaining walls, ten in all. The twins each had their own bunk, and my sister and her husband slept with the six-month-old on two air mattresses pressed together in the middle of the floor. At night after everyone else was asleep I climbed into my bunk as stealthily as I could, my sleeping bag squeaking against the cheap thin mattress underneath it that was covered in plastic ticking. I was amazed that I didn’t wake anyone up in the process. At regular intervals during the night first one twin and then the other would wake up needing to pee. One of their parents would help them down from their bed, pull down their pajama bottoms, and sit their bare bottoms onto a plastic potty on the floor, inches from my head. From my perch I listened as a rain of piss exited their blameless bodies, and they settled back into their bunks. Sometimes one or the other of them would wake up inconsolably cranky, and with no closed-door space available, would keep the rest of us up for as long as it took to settle them back down.
It’s not like I didn’t know how this arrangement would work. I’d done the same thing last summer, in the same cabin in fact, but in the way that its easy to forget the pain of stubbing your toe, getting a paper cut, or giving birth (so I’ve been told), I had forgotten about the nightly sleep interruptions and subsequent haze that passed over me the next morning. There are people who can function on little sleep, I’ve never been one of them. If I don’t get a full eight hours I have to make up for it the next night; its one of the main reasons I’ve never become a straight A student, a type A personality or a superhero. Parenthood necessitates functioning on little sleep, and my sister and her husband have become as accustomed to it as they’ll ever be. I, however, have not.
One night the drumming circles at Vermont Witch Camp, just across the lake, mixed with hoots and shouts and floated across Woodward Reservoir in the dark. Somehow I was the only one in the cabin that lay awake listening, although I heard reports the next day that others at family camp had been disturbed from their sleep too. They sounded like they were having fun, and I secretly wanted to slither out of my sleeping bag, tiptoe out of the cabin and follow the sounds of drumming until I found them. Hannah, the program director for family camp, said the witches go through three urns of coffee every morning, compared to just one at Family Camp. No wonder they were up so late.
There was a square dance last night, and the camp is sleeping in this morning. I’m at the waterfront watching mist rise from the top of the water and move across the surface towards route 100. Amika, one of the lifeguards, is sitting in a rowboat waiting for the early morning swimmers to arrive. The last time I saw her she was an infant. I babysat for her once or twice in high school, now she guards my life at the waterfront. She’s not the only one with that distinction this summer - Cody, the nurse, was a baby the last time I saw him. Now he dispenses ibuprofen to me in packets containing two pills each, and takes my temperature with a digital thermometer covered in a sanitary plastic sleeve before telling me its 98.6 and sending me on my way. I’ve felt slightly off the entire week, and its become a subject of conversation among the neighbors. Three people have approached me with “I hear you’re not feeling well.” Its not the kind of information that would generally make headlines, but among these hundred people, out here in the woods with no electronic distraction, it becomes news.
My sister and her family left the dance early to put the kids to bed last night, and I searched for a spot to hang out and read. I came up short - the main lodge was still being used for dancing, and the first floor of the “cozy lodge” was being used as a sleepover spot for kids, so I climbed the stairs of the cozy lodge thinking that I remembered a room or two upstairs where I could take refuge. There was a light on in what used to be the staff room, and I knocked lightly on the door before opening it, revealing a scene of teenaged idle; all that was missing was black light posters, Led Zeppelin and weed. Four teens were reclining on old, musty couches, looking up at me laconically.
“Is this the hangout room?” I sputtered, and immediately regretted my choice of words.
“No,” came the lazy, pointed reply from one of the girls.
“I’m looking for a place to hang out,” I said, digging myself a deeper hole and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am a certified geek - what thirty-eight-year-old comes to family camp and walks around alone in the dark with a backpack and a flashlight, asking kids if they can hang out? “And I can’t find one.”
“Sorry,” one of them says, I can’t remember which one, and I close the door. I stand in the dark hallway for a moment and am transported to a thousand terrible moments of rejection from my youth. Finally I walk ten paces to the room that used to be the camp library. I flip the light switch on and look around. The books are still here, some that I recognize - Our Bodies, Ourselves, to name one, and a closet full of motley dress up clothes that have been donated by campers and staff over the years.
“Well,” I say out loud, “this is as good as it gets,” and plop my nerdy, severely post-pubescent ass onto a hard wooden bench and dig for the book I’ve been toting around in my backpack all week - A.J. Jacobs’ “The Know-It-All,” a chronicle of one man’s attempt to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z. Reading about his quest makes me feel slightly less nerdy, and it comforts me as I sit alone, slumped over a bench in the dress-up room across the hall from a room full of self-satisfied teens.
I first came to this camp when I was nine years old. My parents had just split, and my sister, mother and I moved back to Brooklyn from a small unincorporated town on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, where our closest neighbors were dairy farmers. A few days after landing, my sister and I were loaded up on a charter bus at Port Authority, and four white-knuckled hours later ended up in this green valley. I spent a month with a bunch of other nine-year-olds in a cabin called Crickets, which stood until sometime last year. Its been replaced with a new structure, also called Crickets, that’s cleaner and no doubt safer, but has none of the dark wood graffiti-ed charm of the original. Last summer, just before leaving, I walked through the old Crickets looking for my name scrawled into it, but couldn’t find it. It had been too many years, and I wrote it too small. I did find my friend Annie’s name in several spots. “Annie C. was here,” she wrote in two inch high letters with permanent marker. I remember being angry with her for doing it, thinking it was undignified and obnoxious to write her name so many times, in such big letters, and to do it the year after she actually lived in the cabin. Annie was about eight months older than me, and we knew each other in Switzerland, where we were enrolled in the same class at the international school that all the ex-pat kids attended. Soon after I moved back to the states her family moved to Germany. We spent our first summer at camp together in Crickets, the next year I stayed in Crickets while she graduated to a cabin about twenty feet away called Heffalumps. It was that second summer that she came back to deface Crickets. All these years later it was the only recognizable graffiti I could find. We ended up going to the same college for about a year until we both transferred out, and the last I heard she was living in a halfway house in Colorado.
The perfect stillness of the misty waterfront scene is broken when Amika asks “are you getting in the water?” to the only other person down here, “because I’d like to go to breakfast.”
Many of the qualities that define me come from this place: a skeptical view of all things political, a tendency to break into spontaneous song, and a penchant for nudity. The camps have changed since I was a kid. The outhouses are newer, they have doors on them, and are separated into stalls. They used to have two or three seats in a row with an open air window and no doors, sometimes a four seater set up with two rows back to back. The hygiene practices surrounding them has evolved too. Now there’s an elaborate process involving sawdust, bleach, and disinfectant to spray on the spigot after washing your hands. It had never occurred to me that after you wash your hands you touch the same faucet that you touched when they were covered in outhouse microbes. The spigots used to be outfitted with a bar of Ivory soap hanging limply in plastic netting attached to a nail. They’d melt in the rain, leaving a gooey gray stain in the dirt. Now there are plastic liquid soap dispensers mounted to the sides of every spigot. Hand washing before meals has gone through a similar evolution. I don’t remember what the process was when I was a kid, maybe some of us washed our hands but I’m pretty sure I never did; now it involves washing hands and then squirting them with Purell, dispensed from gallon sized pump bottles set up on benches outside the dining hall.
I’m acutely aware that I am here without my husband. M’s idea of a wilderness getaway is to stay in a closed cabin no farther than ten minutes by car from a grocery store that has electricity, indoor plumbing, and if not an Internet connection then at least a TV that picks up local broadcast channels. I got him out here years ago, before we were married, and despite the challenges he had a good time. There was a genuine thrill in seeing him try so many things for the first time. One of the many family camp traditions is something called "climb up the mountain", which happens just before meals when everyone stands in a big circle. Someone will call out an item, like: “climb up the mountain if you milked a cow today,” and all the adults and kids who did barn chores will walk in to the middle of the circle, receive a smattering of applause, and then walk back to their places. Then someone else will say “climb up the mountain if you did the ropes course today,” or whatever item they want to call attention to. The first year that M attended family camp, before one of the last meals of the week, the camp director called out “climb up the mountain if you tried one new thing this week that you’ve never done before,” and just about everyone walked into the circle. Then he said “climb up the mountain if you did two new things this week,” and a bunch of people walked into the circle. He kept upping the number of new things until finally only M remained in the circle, and I counted off on my fingers and said out loud to the group all the new things he’d tried, which went something like this: first time sleeping in an open air cabin; first time using an outhouse; first time canoeing; first time away from the Internet for a whole week since its invention; first time away from television for a whole week; first time not spending money for a whole week; first time going a week without driving; first time milking a cow (his reaction to touching a cow’s teat was a genuinely surprised “It’s warm!”); among many others that I no longer remember. The director told us that M had made his dream of getting a true city boy to participate in the wilderness of family camp come true, and M and I both felt like we’d accomplished something.
As fun as that first time at family camp with M was, it couldn’t really be recreated. Perhaps because he knew what he was in for, his approach when he returned a few summers later was that of a man who knew his limits, and it just wasn’t as fun without the element of adventurous novelty. Now when I come to family camp its with my sister and her family, and I go home blissed out on the wilderness, my legs and armpits hairy, a bandanna on my head, and I slowly re-enter the civilized world on an as-needed basis.
There’s a few of us here without our husbands or significant others, but not many. Some of the regulars who I’ve come to know over the years approach the subject gingerly.
“And uh, M…. is he still, uh… in the picture?” they’ll say, wanting to ask, but not wanting to pry. There have been a number of divorces among the families that regularly attend over the years, so it’s a fair question.
“Yeah,” I’ll say, “he’s at home, working to support me in the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed,” my standard hilarious unemployment joke. There is at least one other woman here without her husband - Betty, who I met my first summer at family camp, and always enjoy spending time with. She comes to family camp with various iterations of her family from year to year - some years with her husband and three kids, sometimes with an extended clan of sisters and brothers and nieces and nephews, other times its just her and one or two of her kids - this week she’s here with her nine year old and her sixteen year old. Sometimes her sister Carol, who I also met the first year I came to family camp, joins the group. They’re roughly ten to fifteen years older than me, and I look to their sisterhood as a model for my own; like me and my sister, Betty and Carol are six years apart, and like me and my sister, Betty and Carol live very different lifestyles, but they manage to find common ground and have a good time together. I can always count on being completely goofy with Betty and Carol, and this summer is no different. My first summer at family camp I led the three of us through the pitch dark to the sauna, without even a flashlight, relying solely on my powers of recollection from walking through these camps as a youth. They were duly impressed, and we spent the evening alternately sweating in the heat of the sauna and diving into Woodward Reservoir to cool ourselves off.
Early this week Betty and I came up with the seed of what will become a very silly talent show piece, and when Carol joined family camp mid-week (during the first half she was cycling from Portland, Maine to Plymouth, Vermont), we got her into the act - a mock infomercial for a set of CDs of family camp songs. I write the text, and Betty and Carol go over it with me and offer suggestions. Betty is a writer and Carol is a voice coach, so between them I get all the advice I need. We rehearse rigorously, meeting before and after meals, and going over notes. I have no idea if anyone else will think our act is funny, but we have so much fun rehearsing that I don’t care. People overhear us as they walk past our open-air rehearsals with amused expressions on their faces. Friday night arrives, and Betty and I both get stage fright even though we’re so far down on the bill that half the campers have already gone to bed by the time we're up. Carol, being a performer, is in top form. When we’re called to the stage we take our places and I launch into my spiel.
“Are you like me?” I begin, as Betty and Carol stand on either side of me, miming deep thought, “do you cherish the week you spend at family camp and wish there were some way that you could capture the essence of family camp magic to take with you into your everyday life?” Betty and Carol nod vigorously. “Well wish no longer, call now for this limited edition, never before released recording of all your favorite family camp hits, such as…” and we launch into our medley of campfire favorites.
A few minutes later the piece is finished, and the audience applauds our efforts. After the talent show is over, Jonah, the precocious fourteen-year-old who MC’ed the event along with my brother-in-law, approaches me. Jonah is a strong presence at family camp, he and his diminutive eight-year-old sister spend several hours every day helping in the kitchen, and Jonah announces what we’re having at every single meal, stepping into the middle of our pre-meal circle wearing a white apron, sometimes a chef’s hat, and without a smidge of self-consciousness tells us what to expect at our tables. He’d spent the summer as a political intern in his home state of New Jersey, and follows the Daily Show and the Colbert Report with an insight as sharp as I’ve seen on any adult.
“I just had to tell you that when I think something is really funny I cough,” he begins, “and I coughed through your whole skit. Did you write that?”
“Thank you so much Jonah, yes, I did write that,” I say, and we begin what becomes a half hour conversation on writing, politics, and anything else that pops into our heads. Its raining steadily outside, and I have a poncho and an umbrella. Jonah has neither, and he disappears into the cozy lodge to look for rain gear. I consider how much effort it would take to walk him to his cabin under the shelter of my umbrella, and then come back to the lodge by myself. I go into the cozy lodge after him. I don’t see him on the first floor so I climb the stairs, the light is on in the staff room and someone shuts the door abruptly before I reach it. I go back down the stairs and find him on the first floor.
“I can walk you to your cabin,” I say, “I have an umbrella.”
“Did you see the teens up there?” He asks.
“Yeah, uh, I think Britney is up there, and uh, some others…”
“Thanks,” he says holding his hands up to his chest, palms out, a look of earnest gratitude in his face, “but I’m going to go hang out with the teens now.” There’s no trace of rejection in his voice, just the honest acknowledgment that he and I belong to different sociological strata at family camp.
“Okay, have a good night.” I say, and walk back to the adult world of the main lodge.
The rain gets harder, and by the time I walk into our cabin its so loud that I don’t have to be stealthily quiet as I change into my damp pajamas and climb into my squeaky bunk. Everyone slept well that night. I woke up once to find a small person squatting on the potty next to my bunk, but the sound of dispensing urine melted in with the rainfall, and I slept right through both the preamble of waking up and asking for help, and the postscript of being led back to bed and tucked in again.
We slept in a rustic open air cabin that had a doorway but no door, and a section along an entire wall starting at chest height that was open to the elements. Bunk beds lined the three remaining walls, ten in all. The twins each had their own bunk, and my sister and her husband slept with the six-month-old on two air mattresses pressed together in the middle of the floor. At night after everyone else was asleep I climbed into my bunk as stealthily as I could, my sleeping bag squeaking against the cheap thin mattress underneath it that was covered in plastic ticking. I was amazed that I didn’t wake anyone up in the process. At regular intervals during the night first one twin and then the other would wake up needing to pee. One of their parents would help them down from their bed, pull down their pajama bottoms, and sit their bare bottoms onto a plastic potty on the floor, inches from my head. From my perch I listened as a rain of piss exited their blameless bodies, and they settled back into their bunks. Sometimes one or the other of them would wake up inconsolably cranky, and with no closed-door space available, would keep the rest of us up for as long as it took to settle them back down.
It’s not like I didn’t know how this arrangement would work. I’d done the same thing last summer, in the same cabin in fact, but in the way that its easy to forget the pain of stubbing your toe, getting a paper cut, or giving birth (so I’ve been told), I had forgotten about the nightly sleep interruptions and subsequent haze that passed over me the next morning. There are people who can function on little sleep, I’ve never been one of them. If I don’t get a full eight hours I have to make up for it the next night; its one of the main reasons I’ve never become a straight A student, a type A personality or a superhero. Parenthood necessitates functioning on little sleep, and my sister and her husband have become as accustomed to it as they’ll ever be. I, however, have not.
One night the drumming circles at Vermont Witch Camp, just across the lake, mixed with hoots and shouts and floated across Woodward Reservoir in the dark. Somehow I was the only one in the cabin that lay awake listening, although I heard reports the next day that others at family camp had been disturbed from their sleep too. They sounded like they were having fun, and I secretly wanted to slither out of my sleeping bag, tiptoe out of the cabin and follow the sounds of drumming until I found them. Hannah, the program director for family camp, said the witches go through three urns of coffee every morning, compared to just one at Family Camp. No wonder they were up so late.
There was a square dance last night, and the camp is sleeping in this morning. I’m at the waterfront watching mist rise from the top of the water and move across the surface towards route 100. Amika, one of the lifeguards, is sitting in a rowboat waiting for the early morning swimmers to arrive. The last time I saw her she was an infant. I babysat for her once or twice in high school, now she guards my life at the waterfront. She’s not the only one with that distinction this summer - Cody, the nurse, was a baby the last time I saw him. Now he dispenses ibuprofen to me in packets containing two pills each, and takes my temperature with a digital thermometer covered in a sanitary plastic sleeve before telling me its 98.6 and sending me on my way. I’ve felt slightly off the entire week, and its become a subject of conversation among the neighbors. Three people have approached me with “I hear you’re not feeling well.” Its not the kind of information that would generally make headlines, but among these hundred people, out here in the woods with no electronic distraction, it becomes news.
My sister and her family left the dance early to put the kids to bed last night, and I searched for a spot to hang out and read. I came up short - the main lodge was still being used for dancing, and the first floor of the “cozy lodge” was being used as a sleepover spot for kids, so I climbed the stairs of the cozy lodge thinking that I remembered a room or two upstairs where I could take refuge. There was a light on in what used to be the staff room, and I knocked lightly on the door before opening it, revealing a scene of teenaged idle; all that was missing was black light posters, Led Zeppelin and weed. Four teens were reclining on old, musty couches, looking up at me laconically.
“Is this the hangout room?” I sputtered, and immediately regretted my choice of words.
“No,” came the lazy, pointed reply from one of the girls.
“I’m looking for a place to hang out,” I said, digging myself a deeper hole and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am a certified geek - what thirty-eight-year-old comes to family camp and walks around alone in the dark with a backpack and a flashlight, asking kids if they can hang out? “And I can’t find one.”
“Sorry,” one of them says, I can’t remember which one, and I close the door. I stand in the dark hallway for a moment and am transported to a thousand terrible moments of rejection from my youth. Finally I walk ten paces to the room that used to be the camp library. I flip the light switch on and look around. The books are still here, some that I recognize - Our Bodies, Ourselves, to name one, and a closet full of motley dress up clothes that have been donated by campers and staff over the years.
“Well,” I say out loud, “this is as good as it gets,” and plop my nerdy, severely post-pubescent ass onto a hard wooden bench and dig for the book I’ve been toting around in my backpack all week - A.J. Jacobs’ “The Know-It-All,” a chronicle of one man’s attempt to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z. Reading about his quest makes me feel slightly less nerdy, and it comforts me as I sit alone, slumped over a bench in the dress-up room across the hall from a room full of self-satisfied teens.
I first came to this camp when I was nine years old. My parents had just split, and my sister, mother and I moved back to Brooklyn from a small unincorporated town on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, where our closest neighbors were dairy farmers. A few days after landing, my sister and I were loaded up on a charter bus at Port Authority, and four white-knuckled hours later ended up in this green valley. I spent a month with a bunch of other nine-year-olds in a cabin called Crickets, which stood until sometime last year. Its been replaced with a new structure, also called Crickets, that’s cleaner and no doubt safer, but has none of the dark wood graffiti-ed charm of the original. Last summer, just before leaving, I walked through the old Crickets looking for my name scrawled into it, but couldn’t find it. It had been too many years, and I wrote it too small. I did find my friend Annie’s name in several spots. “Annie C. was here,” she wrote in two inch high letters with permanent marker. I remember being angry with her for doing it, thinking it was undignified and obnoxious to write her name so many times, in such big letters, and to do it the year after she actually lived in the cabin. Annie was about eight months older than me, and we knew each other in Switzerland, where we were enrolled in the same class at the international school that all the ex-pat kids attended. Soon after I moved back to the states her family moved to Germany. We spent our first summer at camp together in Crickets, the next year I stayed in Crickets while she graduated to a cabin about twenty feet away called Heffalumps. It was that second summer that she came back to deface Crickets. All these years later it was the only recognizable graffiti I could find. We ended up going to the same college for about a year until we both transferred out, and the last I heard she was living in a halfway house in Colorado.
The perfect stillness of the misty waterfront scene is broken when Amika asks “are you getting in the water?” to the only other person down here, “because I’d like to go to breakfast.”
Many of the qualities that define me come from this place: a skeptical view of all things political, a tendency to break into spontaneous song, and a penchant for nudity. The camps have changed since I was a kid. The outhouses are newer, they have doors on them, and are separated into stalls. They used to have two or three seats in a row with an open air window and no doors, sometimes a four seater set up with two rows back to back. The hygiene practices surrounding them has evolved too. Now there’s an elaborate process involving sawdust, bleach, and disinfectant to spray on the spigot after washing your hands. It had never occurred to me that after you wash your hands you touch the same faucet that you touched when they were covered in outhouse microbes. The spigots used to be outfitted with a bar of Ivory soap hanging limply in plastic netting attached to a nail. They’d melt in the rain, leaving a gooey gray stain in the dirt. Now there are plastic liquid soap dispensers mounted to the sides of every spigot. Hand washing before meals has gone through a similar evolution. I don’t remember what the process was when I was a kid, maybe some of us washed our hands but I’m pretty sure I never did; now it involves washing hands and then squirting them with Purell, dispensed from gallon sized pump bottles set up on benches outside the dining hall.
I’m acutely aware that I am here without my husband. M’s idea of a wilderness getaway is to stay in a closed cabin no farther than ten minutes by car from a grocery store that has electricity, indoor plumbing, and if not an Internet connection then at least a TV that picks up local broadcast channels. I got him out here years ago, before we were married, and despite the challenges he had a good time. There was a genuine thrill in seeing him try so many things for the first time. One of the many family camp traditions is something called "climb up the mountain", which happens just before meals when everyone stands in a big circle. Someone will call out an item, like: “climb up the mountain if you milked a cow today,” and all the adults and kids who did barn chores will walk in to the middle of the circle, receive a smattering of applause, and then walk back to their places. Then someone else will say “climb up the mountain if you did the ropes course today,” or whatever item they want to call attention to. The first year that M attended family camp, before one of the last meals of the week, the camp director called out “climb up the mountain if you tried one new thing this week that you’ve never done before,” and just about everyone walked into the circle. Then he said “climb up the mountain if you did two new things this week,” and a bunch of people walked into the circle. He kept upping the number of new things until finally only M remained in the circle, and I counted off on my fingers and said out loud to the group all the new things he’d tried, which went something like this: first time sleeping in an open air cabin; first time using an outhouse; first time canoeing; first time away from the Internet for a whole week since its invention; first time away from television for a whole week; first time not spending money for a whole week; first time going a week without driving; first time milking a cow (his reaction to touching a cow’s teat was a genuinely surprised “It’s warm!”); among many others that I no longer remember. The director told us that M had made his dream of getting a true city boy to participate in the wilderness of family camp come true, and M and I both felt like we’d accomplished something.
As fun as that first time at family camp with M was, it couldn’t really be recreated. Perhaps because he knew what he was in for, his approach when he returned a few summers later was that of a man who knew his limits, and it just wasn’t as fun without the element of adventurous novelty. Now when I come to family camp its with my sister and her family, and I go home blissed out on the wilderness, my legs and armpits hairy, a bandanna on my head, and I slowly re-enter the civilized world on an as-needed basis.
There’s a few of us here without our husbands or significant others, but not many. Some of the regulars who I’ve come to know over the years approach the subject gingerly.
“And uh, M…. is he still, uh… in the picture?” they’ll say, wanting to ask, but not wanting to pry. There have been a number of divorces among the families that regularly attend over the years, so it’s a fair question.
“Yeah,” I’ll say, “he’s at home, working to support me in the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed,” my standard hilarious unemployment joke. There is at least one other woman here without her husband - Betty, who I met my first summer at family camp, and always enjoy spending time with. She comes to family camp with various iterations of her family from year to year - some years with her husband and three kids, sometimes with an extended clan of sisters and brothers and nieces and nephews, other times its just her and one or two of her kids - this week she’s here with her nine year old and her sixteen year old. Sometimes her sister Carol, who I also met the first year I came to family camp, joins the group. They’re roughly ten to fifteen years older than me, and I look to their sisterhood as a model for my own; like me and my sister, Betty and Carol are six years apart, and like me and my sister, Betty and Carol live very different lifestyles, but they manage to find common ground and have a good time together. I can always count on being completely goofy with Betty and Carol, and this summer is no different. My first summer at family camp I led the three of us through the pitch dark to the sauna, without even a flashlight, relying solely on my powers of recollection from walking through these camps as a youth. They were duly impressed, and we spent the evening alternately sweating in the heat of the sauna and diving into Woodward Reservoir to cool ourselves off.
Early this week Betty and I came up with the seed of what will become a very silly talent show piece, and when Carol joined family camp mid-week (during the first half she was cycling from Portland, Maine to Plymouth, Vermont), we got her into the act - a mock infomercial for a set of CDs of family camp songs. I write the text, and Betty and Carol go over it with me and offer suggestions. Betty is a writer and Carol is a voice coach, so between them I get all the advice I need. We rehearse rigorously, meeting before and after meals, and going over notes. I have no idea if anyone else will think our act is funny, but we have so much fun rehearsing that I don’t care. People overhear us as they walk past our open-air rehearsals with amused expressions on their faces. Friday night arrives, and Betty and I both get stage fright even though we’re so far down on the bill that half the campers have already gone to bed by the time we're up. Carol, being a performer, is in top form. When we’re called to the stage we take our places and I launch into my spiel.
“Are you like me?” I begin, as Betty and Carol stand on either side of me, miming deep thought, “do you cherish the week you spend at family camp and wish there were some way that you could capture the essence of family camp magic to take with you into your everyday life?” Betty and Carol nod vigorously. “Well wish no longer, call now for this limited edition, never before released recording of all your favorite family camp hits, such as…” and we launch into our medley of campfire favorites.
A few minutes later the piece is finished, and the audience applauds our efforts. After the talent show is over, Jonah, the precocious fourteen-year-old who MC’ed the event along with my brother-in-law, approaches me. Jonah is a strong presence at family camp, he and his diminutive eight-year-old sister spend several hours every day helping in the kitchen, and Jonah announces what we’re having at every single meal, stepping into the middle of our pre-meal circle wearing a white apron, sometimes a chef’s hat, and without a smidge of self-consciousness tells us what to expect at our tables. He’d spent the summer as a political intern in his home state of New Jersey, and follows the Daily Show and the Colbert Report with an insight as sharp as I’ve seen on any adult.
“I just had to tell you that when I think something is really funny I cough,” he begins, “and I coughed through your whole skit. Did you write that?”
“Thank you so much Jonah, yes, I did write that,” I say, and we begin what becomes a half hour conversation on writing, politics, and anything else that pops into our heads. Its raining steadily outside, and I have a poncho and an umbrella. Jonah has neither, and he disappears into the cozy lodge to look for rain gear. I consider how much effort it would take to walk him to his cabin under the shelter of my umbrella, and then come back to the lodge by myself. I go into the cozy lodge after him. I don’t see him on the first floor so I climb the stairs, the light is on in the staff room and someone shuts the door abruptly before I reach it. I go back down the stairs and find him on the first floor.
“I can walk you to your cabin,” I say, “I have an umbrella.”
“Did you see the teens up there?” He asks.
“Yeah, uh, I think Britney is up there, and uh, some others…”
“Thanks,” he says holding his hands up to his chest, palms out, a look of earnest gratitude in his face, “but I’m going to go hang out with the teens now.” There’s no trace of rejection in his voice, just the honest acknowledgment that he and I belong to different sociological strata at family camp.
“Okay, have a good night.” I say, and walk back to the adult world of the main lodge.
The rain gets harder, and by the time I walk into our cabin its so loud that I don’t have to be stealthily quiet as I change into my damp pajamas and climb into my squeaky bunk. Everyone slept well that night. I woke up once to find a small person squatting on the potty next to my bunk, but the sound of dispensing urine melted in with the rainfall, and I slept right through both the preamble of waking up and asking for help, and the postscript of being led back to bed and tucked in again.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Wednesday, Second Interview
The thigh-high stocking on my left leg had lost its elasticity and began rolling south as I walked down the stairs of the Ravenswood Metra stop. I don't go in for pantyhose, I don't even like writing the word, but I followed the advice of my upstairs neighbor who worked at RI for several years and submitted myself to their compressing imprisonment for the interview. The ubiquitous "nude" hue that instantly imparts professionalism to the legs of working women everywhere erased all signs of life from mine: gone were the hard earned tan lines on my feet from wearing sandals all summer; gone was the small mysterious bruise on my calf; and gone was the scab on the middle of my left foot where the strap from a pair of clogs had rubbed against my skin on a humid day and cut right into my flesh.
I drew the line at full coverage, buying a pair of thigh-high hose from the display at Walgreens instead. The elastic at the top dug into my skin and left a red mark around the diameter of my thighs as a souvenir of the day's activities.
With each step the stocking fell a bit more until it hung loosely around my calf like a nude parenthesis. I walked through the underpass and stopped at the western staircase to hike it back into place, catching the attention of a fellow commuter who had been walking in lock step behind me. I headed south for half a block and it started falling again, and I wondered why I was bothering with it. I pulled the stocking off my leg, then grabbed hold of the elastic band on its twin and removed that too. Instantly the leather of my left shoe began cutting into my naked foot - why is dressing professionally such a pain in the ass? I continued on, walking past the open back door of a first floor apartment, its inhabitant bathed in the light of an open refrigerator, and past a man leaning perfectly still and silent against a tree like a camouflaged moth.
It seemed that I should keep the discarded stockings for future use, they'd gotten me through the first and second interviews and had become a kind of talisman - something that had transported me back to the working world for a couple of hours and protected me from it's harsh ways. I rolled them up inside a copy of the September 21st issue of the New Yorker that I'd found on the seat next to mine that belonged to a Bryan Smolinsky of Wolcott Avenue. Could Bryan really be finished with his New Yorker so soon? It was only Wednesday; it takes me all week to read that thing. I decided to drop it into a blue mailbox on a street corner in the hopes that it would be re-delivered to the subscriber, I'm not sure if the post office will deliver it but I figured it couldn't hurt to try. I'd written a note in it explaining where and when it had been found, in case it makes a successful journey home.
I'd just returned from my second interview at RI. I was a bit dazed during the first interview; after my week in the wilds of Vermont I felt like a cave woman unaccustomed to the social and cultural norms associated with the twenty-first century workplace, and was a little surprised to hear back from them. The second interview went well, until it became clear that I'd been studying the wrong job description. They have a complex online application system, and I'd gotten confused between two postings that I'd applied for. Either they'll think its funny, and a sign that I can roll with the punches and quickly change my talking points, or they'll think I'm an idiot.
Time will tell.
I drew the line at full coverage, buying a pair of thigh-high hose from the display at Walgreens instead. The elastic at the top dug into my skin and left a red mark around the diameter of my thighs as a souvenir of the day's activities.
With each step the stocking fell a bit more until it hung loosely around my calf like a nude parenthesis. I walked through the underpass and stopped at the western staircase to hike it back into place, catching the attention of a fellow commuter who had been walking in lock step behind me. I headed south for half a block and it started falling again, and I wondered why I was bothering with it. I pulled the stocking off my leg, then grabbed hold of the elastic band on its twin and removed that too. Instantly the leather of my left shoe began cutting into my naked foot - why is dressing professionally such a pain in the ass? I continued on, walking past the open back door of a first floor apartment, its inhabitant bathed in the light of an open refrigerator, and past a man leaning perfectly still and silent against a tree like a camouflaged moth.
It seemed that I should keep the discarded stockings for future use, they'd gotten me through the first and second interviews and had become a kind of talisman - something that had transported me back to the working world for a couple of hours and protected me from it's harsh ways. I rolled them up inside a copy of the September 21st issue of the New Yorker that I'd found on the seat next to mine that belonged to a Bryan Smolinsky of Wolcott Avenue. Could Bryan really be finished with his New Yorker so soon? It was only Wednesday; it takes me all week to read that thing. I decided to drop it into a blue mailbox on a street corner in the hopes that it would be re-delivered to the subscriber, I'm not sure if the post office will deliver it but I figured it couldn't hurt to try. I'd written a note in it explaining where and when it had been found, in case it makes a successful journey home.
I'd just returned from my second interview at RI. I was a bit dazed during the first interview; after my week in the wilds of Vermont I felt like a cave woman unaccustomed to the social and cultural norms associated with the twenty-first century workplace, and was a little surprised to hear back from them. The second interview went well, until it became clear that I'd been studying the wrong job description. They have a complex online application system, and I'd gotten confused between two postings that I'd applied for. Either they'll think its funny, and a sign that I can roll with the punches and quickly change my talking points, or they'll think I'm an idiot.
Time will tell.
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