What's Amazing

Aqua, the new Chicago skyscraper I got into yesterday when I met a friend in the city for an architectural tour. I can't believe how many new buildings exist since the last time I studied the skyline. The Trump Tower is complete and at least the foundation is down for the Chicago Spire. But Aqua (almost complete) is just amazing. It's a series of undulating balconies and multi-tinted windows that give the surface a rippled look and help it contextualize itself with Lake Michigan and the Chicago River. It reminds me somewhat of Marina City, the corncob structures from the 70s and another of my favorite Chicago buildings. What also intrigues me about Aqua is the architect, Jeanne, because 1) she is a woman in a man's world and 2) she is the founder of the hip firm Studio Gang. Our tour guide informed us that Jeanne recently said of her building, "it has a delicate strength."

What I'm Reading

Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure

I picked up this book in preparation for the August Poetry Postcard Fest, which my friend Jill invited me to join. Since I'm still contemplating the many different ways you can write nonfiction, I've decided to use nonfiction as a basis for my poems.


Some of my favorites from the book are:

Never really finished anything, except cake. - Carletta Perkins
Fifteen years since last professional haircut. - Dave Eggers
Came, saw, conquered, had second thoughts. - Harold Ramis
Affection. Erection. No protection. Injection. Infection. - Colleen Zachary
I grew up in a cemetary. - Rachael Hanel
Revenge is living well, without you. - Joyce Carol Oates
I re-met Lori after 27 years. - Alan Weinkrantz
Secret of life: marry an Italian. - Nora Ephron

Here are my first stabs at it:

A heart too soon made glad.

He betrayed me
with his wife.

Every month, I rearranged the furniture.

Getting a PhD
now seems crazy.

I'm intrigued by loners, at first.

One girl
among seven rowdy boys.

Early wilderness life discovered too late.

You give so little. I'm through.

What I Like

Writing in the backyard under my eighty-year-old grapevine that grows over a giant cedar arbor my husband and brother built.

What I'm Reading

Carla Lind, The Wright Style: Recreating the Spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright

I've spent an inordinate amount of time at the Wright Home and Studio this summer. I'm intrigued by how open Wright was to ideas from outside the world of architecture, everything from music (Beethoven), to religion (Unitarianism), the natural world (especially the Wisconsin landscape), literature (Emerson, Blake Thoreau), math (Geometry), and art (Japanese). Lind's book is gorgeously illustrated and presents Wright as a complex yet highly intuitive person.

What We're Celebrating

Our anniversary. We both forgot about it, but, hey, we're busy. We remembered by dinnertime and decided to mosey down to Hemingway's Bistro for dinner (the restaurant is right next to the writer's childhood home). Between the salad and the entree, we each made a list of the 10 most memorable moments of the last 27 years. The rules: we had to write as fast as possible and not second-guess ourselves as to dates or accuracy or cleverness. We wrote the first thing that occurred to us. During coffee, we read the lists to one another.

We both agreed that having our daughter was number one. After that, our lists were totally different. They included skinny-dipping in the Clearwater River when we first moved from Canada to the U.S. in 1986 (me), sleeping outside in our backyard one whole summer when it was super hot and we had no air conditioning (him), hiking trips in the Earl Grey (him) and East Moose Creek (me), eating a seatbelt ticket in front of an RCMP (him) and building play sets out of canvas and 2x4s in Richland, Washington where I was a high school theatre director (me).

After, we walked home in the skin-warm weather. He went to sleep on the couch and I did some more basement cleaning. At midnight I drug up my old wedding dress, rousted him from his sleep, and we called it a night. Simple moments. Unplanned occasions. That's what I love.

What I Dreamed

Isn't it amazing how, every night, the mind in sleep borrows freely from our fears, desires, memories, current activities, and the whole Carl Jung-Sir James Frazer-Joseph Campbell symbolic universe to create for us little stories in which we are the heroes?

In last night's dream I wandered around a huge warehouse when someone asked me to play the drums. I started to say, "but I don't know how..." when all of a sudden I realized I did know how to drum. Not only that, I was super talented at it. The problem was I didn't have any sticks. But, fortunately, I knew where to locate a pair: the basement of our house (which I'm in the midst of cleaning in real life). In the dream the sticks magically appeared in my hands as soon as I thought of them and I sat down to play a set. I understood my musical talent came from the special sticks: they were mismatched (a Zildjain and a Hard Rock) and deeply worn, the very sticks my daughter used when she was 15 (in real life). In the process of cleaning the basement (again, in real life), I had found the sticks in the back of her closet. As soon as I touched them, memories of all the music lessons and recitals and concerts and events of her life rushed in on me so furiously I had to break for a few hours before I could reach into the closet again.

What I've Noticed

How you can tell the story of your life through numbers. For example, last Thursday morning, my story went like this:

6:30. 1. 8:30. 129. 8-10. 150. 105/80. 60. 2-2-1-1-3-2-2-1-1-1-2. 8-24-09. 11:00. 2:00. 500-1000.

What I Love

When my parents come to Chicago. It feels like being five again, before all my brothers and all the grand kids and all the great grand kids came along and I got all their attention all to myself. It's great!

What Bugs Me

When I'm riding my bike in the pouring rain with a huge pack full of groceries on my back and a big woman in an enormous SUV lays on the horn as I peddle like hell down the street. When I took up biking, I swore I'd never become self-righteous about it, but after these SUV run-ins, I'm having second thoughts...

What I'm Eating

Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popping Corn. Last weekend, on a drive to a family reunion in Indiana, we sailed past Redenbacher's cornfields near Valpo. Beautiful.

What I'm Reading

Jane Austen, Emma

Third time in four months. I love the moral certainty of Emma's world, even when she's not entirely correct. Favorite quotation of the day: "Emma's very good opinion of Frank Churchill was a little shaken the following day, by hearing that he was gone off to London, merely to have his hair cut. A sudden freak seemed to have seized him at breakfast, and he had sent for a chaise and set off, intending to return to dinner, but with no more important view that appeared than having his hair cut. There was certainly no harm in his travelling sixteen miles twice over on such an errand; but there was an air of foppery and nonsense in it which she could not approve."


Painting: The Clifton Assembly Rooms (1817) by Rolinda Sharples in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, which I've seen several times in person and could look at as many times as I could read Emma.

What's Moving

Michael Jackson's childhood home in Gary, Indiana. The thousands of used stuffed animals people had taken from their own bedsides to lay on the front lawn and hand-written notes and Hallmark greeting cards, the quietness and smallness and poverty of his birthplace in contrast to what he became in death. When I visited the house yesterday, I was just barely able to choke back silent tears.

What I'm Reading

Neil Labute, Some Girl(s).

"When is hurting okay? When you say so, or is it just open season, all of us going at it in any way we see fit?" This line, spoken by one of the five girls dumped by "Guy," could be applied to most of LaBute's male characters. Still, I think "Guy" is LaBute's most hurtful. He's creepy and, down deep, sad.

What I Like

Italians and dinner on the Chicago River.

What I'm Avoiding

Caffeine. Just woke up one day and decided to kick the habit. So far, I like it. Yawn.

What I'm Reading

C.S. Giscombe, Prairie Style.

Argument. Lazy. Juxtaposition. Inland. Tendency. Ugly. Impulse. Equivocation. Racial. The Continent. Monstrous. Fielding the Question. Trains. Love. To me. These are some of the pegs on which this beautiful book hangs. It's a book whose landscape demands more than one reading, from beginning to end, then from end to beginning, then skipping from title to title, from paragraph to paragraph, from word to word, from page 5 to 26 and back to 17. Giscombe's stories are never simple narrative. They're like the gathering energy of a Chicago thunderstorm or a Kansas twister. "To me half a belief's better by far or one broken into halves." Love the idea behind that line...

What I'm Watching

The U.S. Open ("Tiger Woods, the player of this era who best knows how to control his own destiny, has often spoken of the importance of luck") and reruns of My So-Called Life ("sometimes someone says something really small and it just fits into this empty place in your heart"). So true.

What I'm Eating

Rainier cherries. My favorite food of the moment, and it's a bonus they were "created" at Washington State University in the 50s. Their namesake is Mt. Rainier, the dormant volcano that shimmered in the distance behind my north Seattle neighborhood when I was a girl. According to a Seattle PI article, "Growing these cherries is like playing poker with God." Nice.