At seven years old, I have now become a Chicago girl. My family has moved into the third floor of an apartment building at 7746 S. Cornell.
One block to the west is Stony Island which is a major thoroughfare through the city. The Chicago Skyway is close by and we are never supposed to play in those places because of the heavy traffic and the stranger danger. But I look at them from our alley and from the back porch steps three stories high, where the boiling afternoon heat turns our apartment into an inferno in the summer. There are so many vehicles moving in steady streams in many directions. I am not in Sioux City any more.
This apartment only has two bedrooms. Mom and dad are in one. My two sisters and I are in the other. My brother is in some makeshift space on the back porch. There is aluminum foil put up to reflect the sun away from his bed. I am too young to be upset at the major downsizing from our Iowa house to this small space. In retrospect I realize that this move was much harder for my older brother and sister who were more established in their Sioux City lives. They have to adapt to a new social structure because we are now living in a much more sophisticated and wealthy area than in Iowa where class didn’t seem as obvious. Or maybe I was too little to notice class then. Our apartment building is on the fringe of that wealthier neighborhood and we go to school with kids who are used to a whole other economic existence.
As kid number three, I have the advantage of observing the problems of my siblings and figuring out strategies to survive. My parents,who were driven by desperation to make this move, didn’t have the psychology chops to understand the ramifications of this sea change. They were naive. This move created what my mom called “two separate families,” my parents with the older siblings and my parents with me and my younger sister. Whether true or not, I think my mom was wrong to tell us that. At least she told us two young ones. I really am not sure what she said to the big kids. Dorothy the boundary-less. But I digress. Mrs. Miller is our landlady.
She is broad, with greasy, straight salt and pepper hair which is straight, cut in one length to just below her chin. She is brusque and I want to be away from her. Sometimes her family comes to visit and by their accents, it seems they’re from the south. There is a pale-skinned, pale-haired, pale-eyed girl about my age. We play together in the gangway which separates our apartment building from the one next door. I make up most of the games. I did the same thing with Robin, the boy I loved in Iowa. With him we played, the butterfly, the spider and the fly. He had a dual role as the mean spider and the savior fly. I was the butterfly. With this pale girl, we are playing island natives. We trade off who is the girl and the boy. The heroine’s name is Fayaway. She is always in danger, being captured and then being rescued. Although nothing actually sexual happens between us, through the prism of time, I recognize that these were erotic forms of play. Apparently I am always in love, as soon as I recognized the beginnings of that feeling.
Our block is primarily apartment buildings, some three units and others six units. There are a few duplexes. There is only one empty lot on the block. I go down there to collect grasshoppers. In summer, my sister and I screw our roller skates to our shoes and go down the sidewalk making metallic, grinding sounds on the journey to collect the bugs. I bring them back to the ledge at the front entry of our building and conduct experiments. I dissect them and move their pieces around to see what happens. Sometimes their separated parts keep moving after my operations. I have no idea how that works but it interests me. We say that the grasshoppers are spitting tobacco juice at us. Our lawn consists of a small patch of dirt, maybe 4’ by 4’ with some wan blades of grass. I am now in the urban world of bricks and mortar. That’s what I adjust to, with the alleys, sidewalks, gangways and apartment basements as my play ground. Iowa becomes a memory. In summer and on weekends, kids pour out of the buildings and we all play together. Our hide and seek games have a two block radius because there are so many kids in the game. We need lots of space for hiding. I remember going into dark basements and have a hard time believing the freedom of those days. We play kick the can in the alley, concentration and those hand clapping games that have songs attached.
Concentration is a game where you say, thinking of, names of, cars, beginning with, A. We go from cars to colors to flowers and so on. This is semi-spoken and semi-sung. The hand games have songs too like, a sailor went to sea, sea, sea to see what he could see, see, see. Our hands move fast and we have special clapping styles. Sometimes if we go too fast, the game breaks down and we start over. We play jump rope and hopscotch.
There is always something to do outside. My mom opens the front window of the apartment, calls out or whistles and we run home for dinner. After we eat, a big gang of kids runs to the corner to wait for Harry, the ice cream man.
He wears a white coat and hat and rides a bike with small freezer on the front of it. For a dime you can buy a popsicle, a fudgsicle, an ice cream bar, a dreamsicle or a push-up. I love chocolate popsicles the best. I am bigger than a lot of the kids. While we wait for Harry, I lie on my back and flex my knees toward my chest. The smaller kids sit on my feet and I push them through the air. I push Johnny Lothrop so far that he flips over and breaks his collarbone. His parents are very angry and I’m afraid they want my parents to pay. Johnny has to wear a neck brace. For days I’m afraid to go out and I stand in the little front hallway, looking out longingly at everyone playing. Our block is filled with all kinds of people.
We have several Greek families living near us. Elaine and Anna Sonios live across the street. They’re older than me. Their parents own a grocery store on 79th Street. They celebrate different holidays than we do and on occasion we get invited in and are given treats. We get Greek halva which is nougat with pistachios. I can still taste it. Elaine and Anna’s parents are very strict. When they have lots of guests, the girls climb out the windows to run around with the rest of the kids. Constantine Athanasoulias lives on our block as does Johnny Latsoudis. Johnny is handsome. There’s another cute boy on the block named Kenny Jones. I have a crush on him. He has a line in the middle of his lower lip that makes him look special. He has an older brother named Edward James but everyone calls him Edgy. The first African-American student at my elementary school, Horace Mann, moves onto our block. Her name is Sandra Greene. She is tall and athletic. Her skin has reddish tones and her face has high cheekbones. I think she’s beautiful. I often wonder whether she is part Native American. Down the block there is a family from somewhere in the Middle East. A little girl whose name is Lu-el plays outside. She is odd. The big kids try to make her eat dirt with a stick. Sometimes when I look back I feel like the kids are just this side of Lord of the Flies. One day Lu-el drops to the ground and is having a seizure. We run and get my mother who comes and puts a tongue depressor in her mouth so she won’t swallow her tongue.
Our block is full of action. One day I am outside when a mean-faced teenager named Harry Hess comes up to me and calls me a fucking kike. I know this is bad so I go tell my mother. She comes storming outside and yells at Harry and explains to me that some people don’t like us because we’re Jewish. I’ve never heard the “f” word either. I’m getting my first lessons in prejudice. Cornell is an ethnic swirl and there’s a lot to learn.
My grandparents live right around the corner on 78th Street. I can still smell their hallway. It smells like chicken soup and pepper and schmaltz. Schmaltz which is flavorful chicken fat is saved and put in a jar in the fridge and is used for cooking and us smeared on everything. Why did everyone not die of heart attacks? My grandmother is a wonderful cook. But when we visit, we sit at her white porcelain table with blue embossed flowers and eat apricot jelly on rye bread and cantaloupe cut into chunks. The chicken and friccasees are for special occasions. One of my uncles and his wife live “north” on Kenmore but then they are suddenly south on Euclid. We get together with the extended family every weekend and have big meals. We sing a lot. Favorites are You Are My Sunshine, Tell Me Why and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. We shop locally on 79th Street.
There is Heller’s drugstore and Feldstein’s delicatessen. Feldstein’s has a big barrel full of penny candy. There are yellow jawbreakers wrapped in red rope candy. There are little wax bottles filled with juice. Wax is definitely a thing because there are big was lips you bite down on and wax mustaches. There are white candy cigarettes with pink tips and pastel gums that are shaped like cigars, with a gold label like the ones on real cigars. There are pink, yellow, white and blue hard sugar dots that are baked onto paper- you bite those off. You can get a package of pixy sticks or Lick-a-made which is nothing but flavored sugar. Tiny ice cream cones filled with colored marshmallows. Chum gum. Those were the treats we got on hot Saturday afternoons when we all piled into the laundromat with our bags of clothes, sheets and towels. How I hated the laundromat. The wringer washer in Iowa was long gone. My parents wouldn’t own a machine again until they moved near me in my adult life, almost 30 years later. But while we took turns there, swapping out the wet loads and folding the hot things from the dryer, there was shopping.
There was Dessauer’s butcher shop where my mom would order a piece of book roast. I don’t even know what that is. The butcher shop smelled of blood. I knew that even though I hadn’t smelled blood before. There was Wee Folks, the toy store where you could get Silly Putty. Eventually I got a Barbie doll at that store. Mine had red hair and a hole in her head. She could wear either a bubble hairstyle or if you wanted a change, you’d reach into the hole and pull out a ponytail. My favorite doll was one I’d gotten in Iowa from my grandmother. She was a Madame Alexander doll with a porcelain face and a stiff blue dress with white trim. She had one other outfit. Buying doll clothes was too expensive so I made more out of Kleenex and rubber bands. I still have her, though she is in pieces.
The Avalon theater was on 79th Street, within walking distance of our apartment. Sometimes we went with our friends. It was a fine old theater with stylish boxes and a balcony. If we shared a box of Milk Duds, they were real caramel with real chocolate covering that cracked when you bit them. I saw scary movies with Vincent Price and always liked the cartoons that played before the feature film. Movies were pretty cheap. Life felt good to me in those first years on Cornell.
We went to Rainbow Beach on the weekends. The adults all stayed on the grassy lawn of the abutting park but I went to the water where I learned to swim by copying other people’s actions. My brother worked at the concession stand there and it felt exciting to eat something away from home. They put mustard on the hamburgers which came wrapped in thin white tissuey paper. Mostly we ate at home. On weekends, we got food from the deli, like salami and bologna and bagels and lox. Those were welcome treats. For the most part, I was a happy kid. But there were troubles brewing. My dad worked for the Chicago Motor Club in the day and at Polk Brothers at night. My mom worked occasionally but she had bad bouts of ulcerative colitis and often wound up staying home. She worked at Time-Life Books and The University of Chicago hospital where she was in accounts and the beginnings of Medicare. My dad was the one who came to bring my little sister and I home for lunch as our school didn’t have a lunchroom. We ate a lot of eggs and salami. I knew there was economic stress. I always worried about my mother’s health. She would go in and out of hospitals, events which frightened me just like the first time it happened when I was four. My brother and sister were adapting but they each had struggles. My brother became a fringe person who only had a few friends. My sister was more socially entrenched but she was unhappy. The small space we shared rumbled with emotions, some spoken and others beneath the surface. I kept my younger sister close to me. She was physically little and I wanted whatever was coming in my direction from the big people to be kept away from her. I was pretty young to be thinking those thoughts but I was worried a lot about the obvious economic stressors and the impact they were having on our household. I was impacted too by those like everyone else. But I found ways to respond that prompted my dad to give me my new nickname – weasel. I liked that one. I thought it was apt. When I felt the anger, sadness and anxiety of the older people, I wanted to make things better, for them and for me. So I found my own ways to deal with the childhood issues that have big impacts on how we feel about ourselves. My go-to skill became lying. When it was picture day at school and so many girls pranced in dressed in fancy outfits with fancy shoes, I’d get asked, “where are your dress shoes? It’s picture day.” And I would clap myself on the forehead and say, “oh I forgot.” Worked like a charm. I started to figure out that there might be a way around, over, under or through any obstacle or problem that was in front of you. While I was playing and doing my little kid stuff, there was another part of me developing, the part that is the core of who I am as an adult. No depression, no acting out, no ulcerative colitis for me. I was going to be the person who found my way through everything, with as little personal damage to me as possible. I am still that person. The Chicago school days are next up in my memory journey which I’m going to leave for my family.
I think it’s been established that I love swimming in my slow turtle-ish way, up and back, up and back, five days a week. I used to be faster and better but I’m still pretty steady. I’ve actually convinced myself that I could pull a Gertrude Ederle and cross the English Channel, albeit at an impossibly slow pace. Being in the water allows for flights of fancy that I expect can be attributed to a lightness of being that doesn’t happen frequently on dry land. I have no scientific evidence for that idea – I just notice that my mind goes to drifty, fantastical places when I’m buoyant for awhile. Of course, you can always think about realistic things and emotional things or any combinations of those as well while immersed. I certainly have spent plenty of time when swimming along, thinking about who I am, what I’ve done, what’s important and what’s not, whether I’ll leave a legacy of some kind after I’m gone and on and on.
The other day I exchanged messages with a friend I’ve never seen. We met in an online Merkel Cell cancer support group. Her husband was a decade younger than Michael when he was diagnosed with Merkel, in his early fifties. The course of his disease was short, less than a year and a half from discovery to death. I got banned from that support group after being in it for a little over a week. I was bringing up questions about emotional issues rather than just talking about the nuts and bolts of the disease and its possible treatments. After I was kicked out, this friend begged the administrators for my email address and we’ve been corresponding ever since. The anniversary of her husband’s death was last week and I always check in with her on that day. I expressed my hope that she was getting along well and had found some space for small joys in her life. When she answered, I felt like she was troubled by her current emotional state. She wrote that we’d both had wonderful experiences in our marriages but that now we had to learn how to live again in real time. That caught me up short.
When my husband was teaching he grew close to a young colleague 26 years his junior. They shared a similar outlook on the world and on education. Several times a year they shared social time, going out for long lunches and beers to discuss their work and their lives. I loved that friendship which was unexpected-when our son was in 6th grade this newly minted math teacher was in the beginning of his career and our little guy was his student.
The garden is a meditative place. While the chores of pulling weeds and deadheading flowers lay splayed out in front of you, your mind takes on a certain cadence that blends in with the movements of your body. Bend, pull, clip, wonder what happened over there? Volunteer plants, trees and weeds are everywhere. Little redbuds and maples and oaks. Unidentified flowers or are they weeds that look attractive? I think, are you here because of the wind or are you here because a bird dropping was filled with ingested seeds? Hmm. How did things get to be this way after all my careful planning? Why do some of you plants come roaring back every year while others vanish without a whisper? Why are you green leaves here without every yielding one single blossom the entire season? Why is one-quarter of this shrub dead while the rest is vibrant?
Remember that time? Did I tell you what happened? You’ve got to hear this, you won’t believe it. How many times have we all either heard or said words like this? What follows them are the snippets of fabric that get woven into the tapestries of our lives. There is oral tradition, a verbal codification of ideas and knowledge, art and culture which is passed down through generations. Religions and epic poetry are examples of oral traditions along with Native American storytelling used in place of the written word.
The year 1990 was more than the beginning of a new decade for me. I had just survived three years of traumatic losses, hits to my primal weakness, abandonment. My cousin had committed suicide in 1987. My best friend committed suicide in 1988. In 1989, both my parents were diagnosed with cancers. My mom survived hers, but my dad died. My husband ran for public office and won after having lost an election 4 years earlier. All the walking door to door ultimately took out his back. After writhing in pain for weeks, with me sleeping on the floor because he couldn’t get comfortable in bed, he had surgery. Everyone was in a physical mess but me. I was working, helping my parents, helping Michael and taking care of my kids who were seven and two and a half. What a mad time that year was. I just ran from place to place, tending to people and trying to keep up with the daily demands of life. I knew I was changing inside but I couldn’t tell how those changes would manifest themselves. I was 38 years old.
Recently, I’ve been thinking that I am on a mission. Granted, it’s a mission of my own making. And an odd mission it appears to be, as it is mostly shapeless, disorganized and somewhat incoherent. Whatever I’m doing begs the title “mission” as it lacks a specific goal and is occurring in my inner self as opposed to the world “out there.” But I call it a mission anyway. While thinking about this I was remembering the film “Fantastic Voyage,” which was released when I was a teenager. That movie was about a Russian scientist who’d developed the power to miniaturize people and objects for short periods of time. After developing a blood clot in his brain a group of intrepid Americans with a submarine were miniaturized themselves to cruise through his body to repair the clot, in the hope that the miniaturization invention could be maintained and extended. A vivid and exciting technicolor adventure that reflected both the Cold War and the imagined science of the future, it wouldn’t make anyone’s top 100 film list, but was memorable enough to come to mind as I ponder my current curious journey. I have a powerful memory which I think is probably a genetic trait.
I’m wrestling with how to express myself in the midst of the socio-political climate in my country. I can’t say that I’ve ever been completely comfortable as a U.S. citizen. I’ve read too much history and lived through too many ugly times to just tune out the big picture and focus on me and my little world. I grew up in a household in which news and current events were always front and center, no matter what the personal issues may have been. I am a political creature as was my husband, so it’s no surprise that my children are always engaged as well. Even as Michael’s life was ebbing away, my kids and I were still anxiously watching our Orwellian government take shape before our eyes. That November, 2016 election and the subsequent government unraveling lay over our intimate family pain like an unavoidable dark cloud.
