City Wendy

Alphabet: A History (F)

Alphabet, A History (F): Foster Beach

It's May, and I'm 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 and Foster Beach opens up to me like an outstretched palm holding all the secrets of the summer ahead.

It's June and Chad has just finished school for the year. He waits for me on his bike outside my apartment on Winnemac and I rush out, wearing a short black sundress over my bikini; I'm carrying a vintage boho bag Chad found for me at a tag sale in New England a couple summers ago, and I've got sunscreen in it, the latest In Touch, a couple bucks for some ice cream, and a hot pink batik tapestry I use as a beach blanket. Chad has remembered to bring a bottle of water and the transistor radio i gave him for his birthday the year before.

At Foster, we lie on our backs and stare at the blue expanse of sky and lake and inhale the summer deeply. It's 1 PM and we've got the whole rest of the day to do whatever we want.

"Remember the summer we became friends?" I ask still staring at the sky, "And we hung out on your deck every night and I kept trying to get your to kiss me and you just kept moving your furniture around and re-decorating instead?"

"Man," he replies, laughing "I blew it."

"If only I'd been a cute dancer boy or something..." I say,sitting up and grabbing the sunscreen to rub on my nose.

"DAMN!" Chad yells to the sky after a minute, "Wahoooooooooo!!!" He thrusts his arms in the air and throws back his head, bathing his face in sunlight.

I smile, flip on my stomach, bend my knees, bobbing my legs in the air, and pull a magazine from my bag.

Chad turns the dial on the radio and lands on "Spirit in the Sky."

"Goin' up to the spirit in the sky," I sing, "That's where I'm gonna go when I die/When I die and they lay me to rest/Gonna go to the place that's the best."

*********************

It's July. It's Nicki's birthday and Chad and I meet her and Sam on Foster Beach. They're finishing sandwiches from the Thai bakery on Broadway and Nicki holds hers out and asks if I want a bite. "Ew," I say, holding my hand up, "Those things stink! How can you eat them?"

It might just be the only thing we ever argue about — these smelly Thai sandwiches. The summer before, on Nicki's recommendation, I buy  two Thai sandwiches with Drew on one of his earlier visits to Chicago. We keep them in their bag until we park our bikes and find a spot on the beach. And then, eager to taste the delectable treat Nicki raves about, we tear into the bag, only to gag on the stench and rush the sandwiches to a far-off trash can.

"Oh, they're good!" Nicki replies, waving away my criticism and polishing off the last bite, "you don't know what you're missing."

I've brought champagne and plastic cups and we toast to Nicki's birthday. I suddenly wish I'd brought baklava from the Middle Eastern Bakery.

*******************

It's August and Terry is in town with the kids for less than 24-hours en route back to Springfield Mo.

"I drove the wrong way for 2 hours before I realized I was heading north and not south," he says of his detour from Ohio.

"Lucky for us," I reply.

In college, Terry is like an uncle to a bunch of us. Chad introduces me to him that summer he can't stop redecorating his porch, and Terry entertains me with stories of Woodstock and San Francisco in the late 60's and the Merry Pranksters. Sometimes the three of us go swimming in Fellows Lake. Sometimes Terry has us over to his little apartment on Walnut, which is unlike any apartment I've ever seen before. Stickers, album covers, newspaper and magazine clippings, tin foil stars, photos, and old postcards adorn nearly every inch of wall space. Even the ceiling is covered with stuff — with homemade mobiles, paper lanterns, and plants hanging from it lazily, gently swaying whenever a breeze blows through the open window.

A year after I meet them, Terry and his wife Mary move to a house, even closer to campus now. Mary is pregnant, and most of us can't believe Terry is going to be a father. They have a girl in June and name her Terra and a year after that, I move away to Chicago.

On Foster Beach during Terry's detour back to Missouri, we wade to our ankles in Lake Michigan. It's night time and dark and Terry doesn't want the kids going out too far. Terra has a brother now —Jules. He's 6 and has the same thick, wavy chestnut colored hair as his sister and mom, and a wide, mischievous grin and twinkling eyes. Terry and Mary still rent the little apartment on Walnut to escape during fights or when one of them needs space. I wonder if the kids even know about it, if Terra knows lived there once.

The next afternoon, I bike to the beach after work and meet Terry and the kids before they head home. They've been at the beach all afternoon waiting for me and now we have time for two songs and a quick dip in the lake. While Terry strums his guitar and sings, Terra and I bury Jules in the sand up to his neck and then run into the water as he kicks himself free, laughing.

Afterwards, as they pack up their rented 2007 white Maxima, I promise to keep in touch. "Maybe Chad and I will come visit one of these days," I say.
"Oh sure, oh sure," Terry replies, stuffing a bag into the back seat with the kids. They're in a change of clothes, but still sandy from the beach, and look exactly how I imagine their parents looking at their age. "We will" I say, "sooner or later...We can't stay away forever." And it's not until I say it, that I realize how much I mean it.

Four weeks later, when I leave Chicago for New York, I tell my friends I'll be back before they even have time to miss me. "I can't stay away from Foster Beach for too long," I say.

And everyone knows what I really mean is I can't stay away too long from them.

Read the whole Alphabet series here.

Alphabet: A History (D)

Drew

It's early spring, late afternoon, I'm having beers and burgers with girlfriends at The Edgewater. It's warm enough that we can sit on the patio outside, which is a good thing because some of us haven't remembered locks for our bikes. We lean them against the unpainted picket fence where we can keep an eye on them while we eat and drink and talk about boys.

I'm the youngest in the group — still a few months shy of my 30th birthday and conversation turns to the challenge of finding a good man before we become old maids.

"I don't understand why it's so hard," I say, "I just want someone who's funny and charming and kind and gracious and creative and ambitious and smart. Curly hair, glasses and dimples don't hurt either," I add.

"I know the perfect guy for you," Meg says, putting her beer down, resting her chin in the palm of her hand, and looking at me intently.

"You do?" I ask, "Who?"

"This guy, Drew," she says, leaning back in her seat. "He's everything on your list."

"Everything?" I ask, sceptically.

"Pretty much," she says.

"Well, why haven't you introduced me to him yet?" I ask.

"He lives in New York," she replies.

"Well, why would I want to meet a guy in New York?! I don't want to meet a guy in New York." I say.

"Weren't you just saying that you have to be open to finding love?" she asks.

"Yeah, but like, in your own city. New York's on the other side of the country!" I say.

"Aren't you going there in a few weeks?" she asks.

"For a weekend," I reply, "I'm not moving there."

"You should meet him while you're there." she says in a way that suggests it's a done deal.

"But —" I begin to protest as Meg pulls her phone out of her purse and starts dialing a number.

"Hi Drew, it's Meg!" she says into the phone a second later. She talks to him for a minute and then hands me the phone.

"Uhm...hi." I say. "Meg says we should meet?"

"Okay." Drew says easily.

"But...you live in New York and I live in Chicago..." I say.

"I can commute," Drew replies.

Five minutes later, I hang up the phone with plans to meet Drew for a sushi dinner later in the month when I'm visiting New York. For the next two weeks, Drew and I email back and forth every day, exchanging stories about our childhoods, friends, travels, hobbies. I'll save these emails and will print them out eventually for safe-keeping, but for now, I don't even know what he looks like. I just know that when I log onto my email account and see a message waiting from him, I get an excited little thrill that catches me off-guard. He makes me laugh and even though I can't see his face, can't hear his voice, wouldn't recognize his handwriting, I'm getting to know him. And everything I don't know about him — what he looks like, for example —I've filled in with guesses and assumptions and wishes of what I might like him to be. That he lives on the other side of the country is something I've pushed out of my mind. For now, I just want to enjoy the fantasy of it all.

The day comes for us to meet. It's May 5 — my mom's birthday. I dress carefully in a knee-length apple green corduroy skirt, a blue tank top, a brown leather belt with a green and blue belt buckle, and green wedges. I wear just a touch of eyeshadow and my glossiest lipgloss. My hair is still long — it's three months before the infamous mullet cut and subsuquent chop-off of all my layers. When I'm ready, I take the subway from Astoria to the Prince stop in Soho and as I walk up the steps to street-level, I see him right away. He has his back to me, but I know it's him. He has the curliest hair I've ever seen and is shorter than I imagined. He turns to me and I see him make the connection. We walk towards each other. I suddenly start panicking. What am I doing? Why am I about to have dinner with a stranger? In an unfamiliar city? How do I know he isn't some kind of kook?

"Are you crazy?" I ask him two minutes after we meet.
There's been an awkward silence between us since we exchanged 'hello's' and now he seems lost and completely unsure where he's going.
"What?" he asks, nervously.
"Are you crazy?" I repeat.
"Oh," he says, "Yeah, I am."
"I thought so," I reply.

We're silent for another couple of minutes while we keep crossing from one side of the street to the other, never really getting anywhere.

"Do you have any idea where we're going?" I ask finally.
"Not really," he says.
"Hmmm." I say, wondering if I should just go home. I'm not even that hungry.

Somehow, by some miracle, we finally cross the right street and end up at the sushi restaurant. They've messed up our reservation, though, and the table we were supposed to have out in the garden is occupied by another couple. I sigh. I don't mean to, but I'm suddenly under-whelmed by it all. Things aren't going at all as I imagined. I meet Drew's eyes and he looks equally unenthused. How could this happen? We had such good chemisty 1500 miles apart. We stand in silence for another five minutes while the waitstaff clears a table in the garden for us. We sit and order white wine and some gyoza. I tell Drew about growing up in Japan and how my parents would pick up McDonalds for my sister and me before we went out for sushi.

We finish out appetizer and wine, the sun sets, he seems a little less neurotic. By the time our entree comes and before we finish our second glass of wine, he's growing on me. I like the way he looks in the candle light, I like his smile, he has nice teeth.

"You have nice teeth," I say, sipping my wine.
"So do you," he replies.

The people at the table next to us are smoking a joint, they're passing it around in a circle, clinking glasses and laughing loudly between inhales. They speak Japanese and sometimes they lean in together and say something in hushed tones and look over at us and giggle.

When we finish dinner, I find myself nodding when Drew asks if I want to get a drink.

"Sure," I say.
"Yeah?" he asks, "Are you sure?"
"Yeah," I reply, "it's still early."

At the bar I tell Drew how I'm writing my masters thesis and it's the last thing I have to do before I get my degree.

"After that," I say, "I can pretty much do whatever. Go wherever. I mean, life's kind of an open path, you know?"

The next day, Drew calls and asks if he can see me again before I go back to Chicago.

We have brunch together the next morning and go for a walk in Washington Square Park. We sit next to an elderly couple and watch the man sing songs to his wife (girlfriend?) and the fly on his shoe. The fly keeps leaving and coming back, leaving and coming back.

"I've got a friend!" the old man says in a thick New York accent, "Look at that."

Drew and I laugh into our hands.

Later that night my friend has a performance at a club right across the street from Drew's apartment. I tell him I'll be there, but I don't invite him to come along. I'm not ready yet to introduce anyone. After my friend performs, I get a text from Drew. He tells me he's recording Grey's Anatomy if I want to come over and watch it later. I've told him it's one of my favorite shows. A half-hour later I go over. I like being at his place. I like sitting on his couch, I like being next to him.

"I have to go now," I say as soon as the show ends.
"Right now?" he says, disappointedly, "Right away?"
"Yeah..." I say. I'm afraid every minute longer I stay will just make it harder to leave.

I cry on the stairs on my way out. I cry the next morning in Astoria Park as I look across the river into Manhatten. And I cry on the plane later that day on my way back to Chicago.

I don't know yet how it's going to work out. I don't know that we'll spend the next year and half criss-crossing the country every two or three weeks to see each other, that we'll rush to one another's homes after tediously long delays in airports and become experts in national air travel. I don't know yet that I'll leave Chicago and move in with Drew into his apartment in New York and spend the first 4 months of my time there unemployed and frustrated. I don't know yet about planning a trip through China together, or how he'll feed my cats in the morning when he wakes up before me, and about the New Year's party we'll throw and the confetti we'll still find in the rugs three months later.

Meg was wrong. Drew doesn't have dimples. And he doesn't wear glasses. But he is "funny and charming and kind and gracious and creative and ambitious and smart." And I still love his smile (dimple or not).

Happy Birthday, Drew. Here's to lots more together.

Alphabet: A History (C)

Coffee

I'm 15 and on a school trip to Holland for a week. I've packed my entire wardrobe into two bursting-at-the-seams suitcases and wear my hair in little buns all over my head just like Bjork and Madonna do. In The Hague we stay in a 4-star hotel with a pool and complimentary breakfasts and one morning before we head out for the day, I sip my first cup of coffee. It's too bitter and I make a face and someone tells me to add cream and sugar. By the end of the week I'm drinking nearly a pot a day, and the next weekend when I have breakfast at home with my family, I casually mention to my father to make enough coffee for me.

Two and half years later, when I leave for college in Springfield, Missouri, I pack enough German coffee to get me through my first semester. My parents give me a coffee maker to keep in my dorm room and a mug that has a picture of a multi-colored cow on it and says "Dare to be Different," in bold, black letters. I wash the mug several times a day in the little sink in my room and wave it around to let it air dry. In the evenings and on weekends, I go to coffee shops with friends: The Magic Bean, Moon City Cafe, the Mud House.

I fall in love with a coffee shop boy and start going during the day, by myself, between classes. Sometimes I get a bottomless cup of coffee for $1.25 and sit there all day, reading, and watching. This is before wifi and cell phones and someone knowing where I am every second of the day, and I let myself get lost. I go through piles of books and pots of coffee and fill my little notebook with terrible poems. I go to the coffee shop nearly everyday all through college and then, in the last semester of my senior year, the coffee shop boy finally asks me out.

I go to his house--for coffee, of course--three days later and write a magnetic poem on his refrigerator called "My Sun." He asks me out again. We start going out all the time and by summer we practically live together.

I've graduated from college now, my friends have gotten jobs and moved away and I have no idea what to do with my life, but being with him makes things seem better. We spend the summer sitting on his back porch mostly, listening to Nina Simone and drinking coffee. I wonder if there's some way I can freeze time, to make fall never come, and definitely not winter. I wonder if I can just somehow stay right there in the warmth of his back porch in the summertime and never worry about finding a job or the rest of my life. Months later, I go see my parents for Christmas in Germany. I'm still just temping and feeling so lost and my dad rubs my back and says, "At least you have a nice boyfriend," and I start to cry. A week later the nice boyfriend dumps me.

It's 6 months before I feel normal again, before I wake up from the cloudy haze of heartbreak and pull myself together. I move on, I change, life gets better and then harder and then better again. I grow up, and somewhere along the way, I lose track of that silly cow mug.

Alphabet: A History (B)

B: Bike
My first big-girl bike is classic: hot pink with a banana seat and shiny steamers on the handle bars. In the parking lot outside our high-rise apartment on Yokota Air Base in Japan, my father holds the back of my seat as I pedal unsteadily. It's a test of patience and stamina for both of us, and not at all unlike our driving lessons years later on winding streets in Germany. When my dad lets go and I finally bike with confidence, I don't want to ever stop. In the evenings after school and work, my whole family bikes together along the tarmac, a seven mile stretch--my dad in the front, my mom in the middle with Allison in a baby seat, and me in the back, my streamers waving in the breeze.

We move so many times--from Japan to Korea to Germany and somewhere along the way, I stop riding. Worse yet, somewhere along the way, I decide bikes are scary. In Springfield, Missouri, my college friends talk about how bikable the town is. They pedal around to each other's houses and the bars downtown and in the summer, they even ride all the way to Fellow's Lake. I'm convinced I'm a klutz and have no balance and don't want to look stupid in front of anyone, so I stick with cars. Once, I try rollerblading on campus and I fall 3 times in five minutes, and declare wheels off-limits for good.

When I'm 24, I move from Missouri to Chicago with my boyfriend. He brings two bikes with him and quickly buys a third. He gets a job making sandwiches at Potbelly and rides the two miles there and back everyday. Soon, he loses 15 pounds and bleaches his hair. In the winter, his shoes and the legs of his pants are covered in salt. He gets promoted once, twice, three times in a year. We move to a bigger apartment. The lakefront is just 3 blocks away now and on an early summer evening, I walk over with my boyfriend and two of the bikes. He rides in front of me and I follow behind, pedalling unsteadily. It's so crowded on the lake path and I lose my balance and give up right away. "I'll just meet you back inside," I yell after him, but I don't think he even hears me. He's already off in the distance.

"I just saw the perfect bike for you," Chad says over the phone late one Spring afternoon. I'm 28 now and single. I've been thinking about getting back on the lake path. I go to Brownstone Antiques in Andersonville and see it: it's turqoise and probably from the early 70's, with a white wicker basket, a headlight and a rearview mirror. I buy it for $45. I spend the whole summer on my new bike, clunking along with my friends down Damen to Wicker Park and Ukrainian Village, I don't know what I was so afraid of before. I ride all the way through Fall and into early winter when I finally switch back to my car until March.

Two summers later I upgrade to a new bike with more than one gear. I ride through my last months in Chicago, memorizing tree-lined streets and Winnemac Park and routes to all my favorite places. When I think of what I'll miss most when I move to New York, this is top of the list. The day the movers come, I'm a nervous wreck. I drug the cats for the plane trip, finish packing my bags, sign a check for storage, and clean my apartment. Later, after the movers leave and I'm hailing a cab for the airport, I realize I've forgotten my bike. I can picture it now leaning against the wall in the foyer.

Alphabet: A History

I'm starting a new feature called "Alphabet: A History," totally ripped off from Amy Krouse Ronsenthal's Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life.

A: Allison
I'm six and we've just moved to Tokyo from Chinhae, Korea. We've left our dogs behind and the only thing that gets me over it is the anticipation of a new baby. Allison is born on a cold day in the middle of winter five months after the move. My first grade class is at a special concert on base for the Air Force band. They're in the middle of my favorite song, "Eye of the Tiger," when I hear the familiar jangle of keys coming down the aisle closer to my seat. My father is the assistant principal at my school and whenever I hear, outside my classroom, the jangle of those keys he wears on his belt, I sit up straight, put my brush away, and fold my hands over my lap. Today when I hear the jangle at the band concert, I swerve in my seat and see my father and even in the dark I can make out his smile.

I spend the night at my friend Kristy's house and her mother braids my hair and I feel like a whole new person. At the hospital the next morning, my mother doesn't mention my braids and I wonder what it will be like sharing her now. My father asks if I want to see my new baby sister and I take a deep breath and nod. He walks me to the nursery and I peer through the window. All the babies look the same to me. "Which one?" I ask. He points to Allison and says, "That's her." I stare and wait, I'm sure something's supposed to happen now. "She has red hair just like you," my father says after a few minutes. "She looks like a bulldog," I reply. A month later I teach her to touch her toes.