365 Memories

What things plow through a woman's mind just days before her wedding, making her fertile perhaps but also furrowing her brow? If, like me, you are overseas, marrying someone from another culture (albeit one you are familiar with; it is European, Western, and you speak the language), the wedding ritual is made slightly more complicated, concerned as you are with the comfort of international guests and the possibility that any of your own faux pas will be magnified through the lens of difference: different customs, a different church, different any- and everything. A destination wedding is beautiful, but it is also an act of loyalty, courage, and maybe insanity (or at least masochism). All this to say that a lot was going on in my head space four days before taking vows, much of it logistic. An abundance of logistical detail of course means that you do not have to think too deeply about your emotional state. But here's what I remember about June 25, 2002, exactly seven years ago...

I graduated from high school in 1987, and although I had applied to college (one only, I knew what I wanted) and gotten my acceptance, I deferred matriculation for a year. It was for the best. Teen angst and anger were peaking, I was sick of school, and really it would've been a waste for me to go straight through when all I could think of was living on my own in the "real" world. Well, I got a dose of that. A good dose of what I could expect to do with a high school diploma and—let it be said—a bunch of shifty slackers for roommates, whose only ambition was to get wasted and stay that way all day. Except that I was not a slacker; that's something I never have been. And even if I had wanted to party—illegally, mind you, I was still underage for beer let alone the rest of what was out there to be had—well, there wasn't the time or energy for it. After a somewhat lost summer following graduation, I set about getting a job, a checking account, and an apartment, tryin...

I remember a single afternoon, sixteen years ago in St. Louis, when I met two dynamic women who changed my professional life for the best. One I never had another contact with and can't remember her name, but still she influences me; the other became my first mentor in public relations and is still a friend today. I was attending a one-day conference with a job fair component, sponsored by the St. Louis chapter of PRSA , the Public Relations Society of America. I had left law school and was not exactly sure what to do next, only knew that I had to do something. My mom is the one who steered me toward public relations work, giving me some of the best career advice I ever received. She worked in PR before I arrived in her life, and she could say from experience that the skills I'd learn in a PR position would be among the most valuable and most transferable —though perhaps I'd want to stay in the industry. She was absolutely right. Although I did eventually leave the world of...

Although St. Louis was not a particularly good fit for me—I needed to be where the streets downtown weren't deserted after 5:00 PM, where there were throngs of people who moved quickly and jaywalked against the light, where nobody asked where I'd gone to high school as if it made a difference once you were out of college—still, as I've said in earlier posts, I had the good fortune to meet and work with some fabulous people while I was there. People with great energy and creativity, supervisors who mentored me with kindness and generosity. And, craving the weird, it's not as if some oddball things didn't happen there, too. Let me ask: when was the last time you saw a group of skydiving Elvis impersonators, complete with Vegas-style jumpsuits (jeweled, wide-collared, bell-bottomed) and black pompadour wigs, parachute into a canyon of glass-walled, high-rise commercial buildings? Sixteen years ago this week, the marketing agency where I worked was a hive of activity, ...

  Seventeen years ago, the mortarboard cap and gown put away and the parties over, I closed the door on my undergraduate years, boxed up my affairs in the Hudson Valley (things and relationships), and prepared to move on. On this day in 1992 (a Sunday then, as now), the New York Times reported on weekend commencement ceremonies that had taken place the day before. My college was cited among them. " Bard College held its 132d commencement yesterday on the main campus lawn in Annandale -on-Hudson, N.Y. William Julius Wilson delivered the commencement address to the school's largest graduating class [. . . ]. Dr. Wilson, a sociologist and a professor of race relations and public policy at the University of Chicago, received an honorary doctorate of humane letters." It was not an uplifting ceremony; I was wilting throughout. First, it was hot—or anyway I was hot, sitting under the white tent, shoulder to shoulder with the two hundred plus seniors, doing my best to stay hydra...

1990: spring, summer, and fall. Closing in on my twenty-first birthday, I was studying French in college and, on weekends, working in a podunk diner at the intersection of Routes 9-G and 199 in Red Hook, New York. The diner is no longer there—I'm not sure what's taken its place—but I remember it well, and fondly. I was dating a "townie" at the time (since I lived off campus, I ended up knowing more locals than students by my senior year), and he's the one who introduced me to the diner's owners, N. and R. They were a hard-working couple, solidly blue collar, of Italian-American background. N., the cook (to say chef would stretch things a bit), had learned his trade in the navy mess (or the marines?), and was a reservist. He was a big brawny guy, but a sweetheart most of the time. R., his wife, was a woman with painted fingernails and frosted hair, who looked her age or older due to a smoking habit, a penchant for sun exposure, and what I guessed was a wearyin...

Sometimes you never know where things will lead, if anywhere. And yet . . . there is an inexplicable impulse, a vibe, a premonition perhaps, that drives you on. I was browsing in the then-new (now closed) Waterstone's book shop off Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Spring 1995, standing before the sleek black shelves and colorful book jackets. I had recently come to the end of a creative writing class that I'd been taking in the evenings through Northwestern's University College (their continuing education department). The class had me thinking for the first time about the possibility of writing fiction, attempting to get published in the genre. And of course my instructor encouraged me to get my hands on a bunch of literary magazines and start reading, researching the market, requesting submission guidelines. It's the same thing anyone will hear who takes even a half-step in the direction of fiction, at least where short stories are concerned. So, there I was, on the outsi...

Every year, we've got to pay The Man. The Tax Man, I mean. The government. April 15, time to pay for all that stuff they do that we don't even know about until it's too late. Not that there aren't good uses for tax dollars. But this is not a political blog. It's a memory. I am in Chicago at the age of twenty-five. I had just left a job with a PR agency to test my hand at something more editorial, and while waiting to land a salaried job I started doing a little freelance work. I had not done it before, so this was a first lesson in entrepreneurship. It was scary, but exhilarating. I did a couple of projects that were passed along to me by a writing teacher who developed a lot of texts for a healthcare -related organization. He landed the jobs, then subcontracted to have me help with certain chapters, usually to do with management tools or patient education in hospital settings. The work was interesting enough, and the pay was okay, though nothing to live on. I kept ...

OK, here's the story: first in Chicago, then in Los Angeles, my father worked for Playboy. In Chicago, it seemed like no big deal. Maybe my young age had something to do with it; certainly the Midwestern normalcy of Windy City operations also played a role. In Chicago, Playboy is business; in Los Angeles, it's THE Business (meaning Hollywood entertainment). We moved from Chicago to L.A. in 1979, so that my father could take on the position of Senior Vice President, Office of the Chairman. The Chairman at the time was Hugh M. Hefner; the "office" was his legendary mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood (though my dad actually did have an office in the boring-looking building on Sunset Strip, which I think no longer exists in that location). There are many stories-within-the-story, as you might imagine, but most of them are properly my dad's stories to tell and not my own. So, in this blog of firsthand memories, I will stick to my elementary-school view. And now,...

A small, private moment—almost missed and never intended to be witnessed. The top of a staircase; a glance right instead of left, and a single instant in time becomes the defining line of "before" and "after," a shift in the balance between protected innocence and mutual knowledge. I was eleven, maybe twelve. We were living in Los Angeles at the time, and the stairs were the ones leading from the open space near the family room, up to the landing where my parents and I went our separate ways: my room to the left, the master bedroom to the right. Framed in the doorway, shown in the afternoon light cut to ribbons by the vertical blinds in my parents' room: a desk, curved on its outer edge to form a softened L; the smooth, pale gray surface of a hard, poly-substance, veined with white to look like heavy marble. Behind the desk, a tall-backed chair, wide and thickly padded with light gray suede. A powerful executive chair—one I used to like to swivel in—not at all t...

When I was ready to leave the PR agency life and look for another job—something that would keep me in writing and out of client meetings (which seemed the inverse of what to expect if I looked for advancement in public relations)—the first thing I did, after updating my résumé and putting out word of a search, was to start scouring the Chicago Tribune classifieds. I was a home-delivery subscriber at the time, and the paper would thud at my door every morning, with particular oomph on Sundays. Except one Sunday. At the time, I was living in the Streeterville section of Chicago, near downtown. My one-bedroom apartment was on the eighth floor of a tall white building that was modern and unfussy; it was staffed by a 24-hour rotation of doormen. It was the first time that I lived in a doorman building on my own (younger and living with my parents, there were a few buildings with such attendants, but I had no sense that they were there to serve me personally). I mention this because the...

He was a pip-squeak in a suit—a weak-featured, whey-faced redneck type with the bleached look and moral substance of a slice of Wonder bread: soft, tasteless, mostly air. He was my peer in age (actually, I was a little older, by as much as two years perhaps), but he took himself for my superior. Sadly, in the very corporate, conservative pecking order of Chicago-based Ogilvy, Adams & Rinehart, he was. It was January 1994, and I had recently moved back to Chicago, alone, after what seemed like a lifetime away: after my family had made a couple of cross-country moves, after high school and college and a misfire stint at Washington University Law School, and after a first internship in public relations at a boutique marketing agency in St. Louis. I had interviewed for (and been subsequently "blessed" with) this next internship that could, if the fit were right, lead to a permanent position in OA&R. The person in question (let's call him J.) was a junior account execu...

White expanse of linen; bleached perfect square in front of me on a polished walnut bar. Folding, without too much thought required. Repetitive action draining away the minutes before the doors to the restaurant would open for business. Making my way through graduate school, I covered some measure of expenses by returning to the standby job of many artists: waiting tables. Growing up, it seemed you quickly fell into one camp or the other when it came to the (not necessarily) simple job for money—you were either "restaurant" or "retail." I dislike shopping, dislike salespeople trying to help me shop . . . I'm hardly right for retail. For me, it's always been restaurants, either front or back of house. I have worked at restaurants of varying degrees of size and finesse, from small hash-slinging diner to raw bar (shucking oysters is no mean task!), from bookstore café and espresso bar to the most recent, a more upscale American establishment. The shifts would ...

I cannot call it the MetLife Building, not to save my life. It was, and to me it still is and always will be, the Pan Am Building. Going up the escalators from the main hall of Grand Central Station, you'd reach the top, circulate through the revolving doors, pass a newsstand on your right, the bank of elevators, and eventually you'd reach Zum Zum, the breakfast (or lunch) counter run with efficiency by Edda, the middle-aged Polish waitress who always had a smile for her regulars. For a time, that included my father, and me. We'd perch on the stools and order eggs (him), or French toast (me), and we'd talk to each other and to Edda. I remember her as being short, a little stocky but not plump, and as having short blond hair. I could be wrong. I'm sure she had an accent, but I can no longer hear it in my mind. At Christmastime, she would purchase silk-thread ornaments (the basic globes you could buy in sets in a drug store and that came in bright solid colors of red,...