365 Memories

Because we often lived at a significant distance from Detroit, I didn't visit my maternal grandparents often, but when I did, I could count on several things for certain: I would sleep in a small, cozy room under a heavy, hand-crocheted afghan. We would eat roast chicken and potatoes, all cooked together in the same dish with olive oil and lemon. Yiayia , my grandmother, would have baked some traditional Greek treats in advance (typically these were twisted ropes of sweet dough, the cookies known as koulouria ). We would sit in the living room on green (?) silk- or satin-upholstered, plastic-covered furniture to catch up on family stories. First, though, before too much talking, Papou would peer at me through his browline glasses, which had thick black rims across only the tops of the lenses; in them, he looked like a stylish man of the 1950s, despite this being the 1970s. His eyes looked dark, enormous, emotional behind their glass shields. And this was my favorite moment: He wo...

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...

Red or white? Meat or cheese? We'll always have Paris, 1991, and we'll always have Refuge des Fondus. We being me, my mother, and a fellow American, unknown to us at the time, who has since become a most amazing friend. (Actually, this is the same friend who hooked me up with the most amazing Keith Jarrett tickets; I'll call him B.) At this point, I just have to clarify that everything about this memory has to do with the Parisian restaurant in Montmartre, and  not with its poor relation, La Cave des Fondus, a NYC knockoff that opened not long ago in Nolita (and that I am not advocating). Refuge des Fondus is a tiny space in the 18th arrondissement, dwarfed further by the majesty of Sacré-Coeur, in whose shadow it has operated for at least thirty years. I had been there once with my study-abroad group, and had resolved to bring my mom along for some fun when she visited me later on in the term. B. was directed to the notorious eatery by a friend of his, who suggested that ...

Late spring or early summer, before I turned twelve or maybe thirteen. A beautiful day, with the kind of famous Southern California weather that people assume lasts year-round. (It doesn't.) Our house had a pool, and bricked out of one corner was a small jacuzzi—which was common enough for the time and place; it didn't particularly set us apart socially. Still, it was a luxury. I have only three memories in connection with the pool/jacuzzi: two specific and one a composite memory of the pool parties held there for my 10 th , 11 th , 12 th , and 13 th birthdays. Of the specific, one concerns a natural disaster (and will form the basis for a future post). The other—the memory for today, the last day of January 2009—has to do with life planning, decision making, making lists (something I now do very, very well). At the time, in the jacuzzi, I believe the decision facing me was regarding summer camp, where to go for it. I was having a hard time choosing. Blame it on the Libra in m...

It was only last night, but already it rates among my most powerful memories—one I know will reverberate down time's lonely corridors, enduring where the daily slush of logistical life (thankfully) does not. Yesterday contained plenty of logistical craziness, but by 8:00 PM I was seated in the last row of the dress circle at Carnegie Hall next to my father, looking down on a stage empty but for a single piano, a bench, and a collection of microphones wired for the live recording of Keith Jarrett's solo improvisational performance. I have always loved these charged moments of anticipation before a performance, and I expected this concert to be something special—that much more so because the tickets came through a friend of a very dear friend in California, a last-minute opportunity to be seized, and because a love of Keith Jarrett was transmitted to me by my father, and this was a great way to thank him for bringing awareness of this man's music into my life. But this is all...

It was January 1990 when I found out about the death of a family friend, Morgan R. He was an IT man we knew through a work connection, a "techie" before that designation meant much to the average person—before the dot-com Silicon Alley boom (or bust) became part of public discourse. Morgan was a tall, thin man, and somewhat frail. He had pale skin, brown hair, brown or hazel eyes; he wore glasses. He spoke with a Southern accent, though I don't recall where he was from. Perhaps the Carolinas . He was sweet, intelligent, and was dying from the day I met him. He was the first man I knew personally who was homosexual (until then I'd only known boys who were struggling with the issue), and he was HIV-positive when the AIDS epidemic was ripping mercilessly through that population in the 1980s. I remember Morgan walking the office in his gray suit pants, his white shirt—his employee badge and a tiny red-handled screwdriver in his breast pocket. He wanted to leave his job, I...

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...