365 Memories

No, nothing to do with Mrs. O'Leary's cow. How old do you think I am? But I do have two memories of Chicago blazes, each seen from my car while driving city streets or highways. The first was late at night, in Cabrini-Green, notorious breeding ground for all of America's urban housing-project woes. This was in the mid-1990s. I had just moved back to Chicago, alone, and I still had a car, although I lived in the downtown Streeterville neighborhood and really did not need one. I will mention the make of the car, only because it really does make a difference to the story: imagine a single, young, white woman driving through the projects in the middle of the night . . . in a Saab. What the hell? you might well ask. Well, I was returning home from a late-night excursion in Bucktown or Wicker Park, probably the latter. I really wasn't thinking about where I was, only about where I wanted to go, which was back to my apartment to crash. I was tired. But not too tired to be ...

1987. Privileged Cheeverish town in Connecticut. An odd place to be down and out, but I promise, you can find the homeless, the hungry, or a band of penniless liquored-up losers anywhere. Even in Fairfield County, they don't all drink like bull-market Minotaurs in labyrinth mansions. Read the post just prior to this and you'll know my basic situation: fresh out of high school, college deferral, "friends" of the worst sort, rent to pay, and a dawn-past-dusk job that had me too dog tired to work toward fixing the mess I was in or really even to complain about it. I would just come home, step around the cases of Black Label, and try to get some sleep before having to get up and do it all again. The jerks who lived with me—nay, who mooched off me; who turned my first apartment into a flophouse and got me evicted—were a pathetic bunch. Of course, I was even more pathetic for playing hostess to them. I did it in part because I'd fallen in love with one of these freelo...

  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...

The worst kind of prejudice is the kind that slips under the radar. It's too subtle to cause a stir (and if you point it out, you'll usually get a sideways look: you're the one making too much of nothing), but its corrosive message nevertheless seeps in—subliminally, insidiously—beating down the spirit of the group it belittles or excludes. I am blessed to have been raised by two parents who were sensitive to prejudicial undercurrents; they fought against them in their own distinct ways through the tumultuous 1960s, and into the 70s and 80s as I was growing up. And it seems, thinking about it now, that they never missed a good learning moment with me: we often discussed issues of bias, prejudice, stereotype, and their harmful effects. This week, images in some of my kindergartener's reading books gave me pause. And in wrestling with how to handle these, I remembered something I hadn't thought of in many years: the library at the Brentwood Science Magnet School in ...

Whinnying, stomping, snorting, sweet-sweating horses. Horses short or many "hands" tall, sleek or barrel-bellied, good natured or mean tempered, nervous or lazy; horses that would jump or rear, balk or bolt. I loved them all. I first used to ride at Bailey's Stables in Chicago, when I was somewhere between the ages of five and nine. This was in the mid- to late 1970s—a time that may also bring to mind for native Chicagoans the highly publicized disappearance and (it was later ruled) murder of the candy heiress, Helen Brach ; Richard Bailey, stable owner and despicable con artist, was indicted in soliciting her murder and was ultimately sentenced in the mid-1990s to what amounted to a de facto life term in prison, given his age, for a complex scheme of fraud and a trail of sordid crimes that included murdering many horses as well. I shudder to think of what must have been going on behind the scenes of my weekly riding lessons. All I remember was the gentle giant of a hors...

I have just cut my hair—it's what I'll call a "clean up" job. I think it's been almost a year since the last cut (can it be?), and I finally couldn't take my "recession hair" any longer. I went to a new stylist, in a salon about two blocks away from my apartment. Judging only by external appearances (not a reliable indicator, I admit), this salon seemed like a good compromise between my usual high-end stylist and the local Super Cuts type of shop. I've tried the chop shops, and I have to say that unfortunately my very straight, fine hair is not suited to their bargain techniques. Today's experiment paid off; it was the compromise I was hoping for: a lower price and maybe a slightly less sophisticated style, yet nothing that looks in the least bit bad. This blog is about memories, however, and speaking of bad . . . today's brief salon stress (the initial anxiety, when you first trust your head to a complete stranger, not knowing whether th...

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...