Art

When I was 11, my best friend was Eddie Griffenbacher.* He lived with his grandma, for reasons he never detailed. (*No, it wasn’t. But even I don’t want to talk shit about someone. It’s not because I have class. Eddie would kick my ass.)

He was very, very, impressively naughty.

He came by this honestly: his grandmother was like a David Lynch character. She was short, round, and, I think, chronically intoxicated. She curmdugeoned around her house in a beige sweater-vest over a plaid shirt, khakis and fluffy white sneakers that resembled King’s Hawaiian rolls. Her hair was old-lady-did into fully-formed curl banks, but the back left corner of her head was all matted down and disarranged, like gray-hair crop circles amidst the otherwise puffy rows. She smoked endless Benson and Hedges cigarettes; they dangled eternally from her yellow fingers, the nails of which she kept painted the same bronzey-brown color for as long as I knew her. She was always drinking some ice-cubey alcohol cocktail from an amber-glass tumbler: between the yellow of her fingers, her nail polish, and the yellow tint of her glass, it seemed like everything around her was saturated completely with tar. Somehow, her entire microcosm had become the color of an old fly strip. (more…)

It started when I was twelve years old and my father consented to buy me a mini-bike. It was the real deal, a miniature motorcycle, not some boxy frame with a lawn mower engine. Sixty CCs, one hundred and twenty pounds, it would do fifty miles per hour. What a foolish gift.

There had been a couple of go-carts around the neighborhood before bikes took over. Two brothers had cobbled one together but had yet to master the complexities of throttle control or brakes. We put their sister on it, wound it up, and let it go. I don’t know how she eventually came to a stop, but she was last seen careening between the trees in our beloved public park. It was obvious from that experiment their machine had two too many wheels.

I probably knew a dozen kids with mini-bikes. My friend two blocks away had one identical to mine, and ours were among the coolest. Most common were the Honda 70s. Ugly, but they could keep up. The boy across the street had a Suzuki Trail Hopper. Pathetic. Honda 50s were tiny. The clown car of mini-bikes. One kid had an Indian which sounded like a chainsaw cutting sheet metal, yet law enforcement was strangely absent for a couple of summers when the world was young. (more…)

My wife and I had just completed the trifecta of stress-inducing life events. In the span of two weeks we had gotten married, moved to a new city, Chicago (where we would be living together for the first time), and I started a brand-new job at Northwestern University (where I knew exactly one person).

My commute from our apartment near Wrigley Field to Evanston was nearly 45 minutes. Which I got to spend on the packed red line train, sitting next to a revolving roster of the cast of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – Public Transportation Edition.

My “favorite” commute was the morning I sat next to a perfectly lovely older lady who smiled and moved her new handbag so I could have more room. We rode in silence for a moment before she asked me where I was heading. (more…)

Last March, like this one, was placid and mild; it was a true and distinct season instead of the usual Northland spring, which is often held hostage in an icy chokehold by winter. No, the days slowly and confidently transformed from ash and smoke into gently unfurling golds and greens.

This seems like an odd observation for someone who spent most of it in a dim, whispered wing of St. Mary’s Hospital. My second born, my new baby daughter, made an alarmingly early entrance into the world, interrupting a Friday afternoon’s planned errands: Target for hand towels, aspirin, and an indulgent Starbucks latte, and maybe the children’s boutique, Sproutlings, to fawn over tiny, unpractical pastel things — booties and bows and expectations of the chubby baby thighs to come.

For two days in that early March week, something was off about my pregnancy and I was torn between taking my intuition seriously by calling to move up a scheduled prenatal appointment or discrediting the feeling as merely nerves. The former won the battle. I hadn’t felt much movement out of my usually active, somersaulting babe. After a nurse on the phone recommended I head into Labor and Delivery at the hospital for a non-stress test, my husband left work early to accompany me and our 3 year old. We’d just pop in — it was probably nothing — and then head off to do some quick shopping before the weekend. (more…)