Life in Bedford Falls

I've long said that I live in Bedford Falls.  It's the Christmas parade where you see someone you know every ten feet, the waitress at the diner who was your daughter's pre-school classroom aid fifteen years ago and remembers her name, the five-minute chats with the clerk at the gas station (and the way no one behind you gets annoyed--they may even join in), the way the children's librarian smiles when you come in with the grandkids and remembers when their mom graduated to young adult novels and a thousand other personal interactions.  It's the look of the place, too--the bright red wheel barrow in front of the hardware store downtown and the tiny post office and the storefronts run by people who live and work and shop and play in town.

But recently, when I started having some serious medical problems, I learned that my Bedford Falls was quite a bit wider than I'd realized.  (If you're thinking, "started?!  What do you mean started?", that's a fair question, but trust me on this--it's a lot more serious right now.)  Not being able to work for several weeks just at the time when I most need income has been rough. But it's also been a lesson in the beauty of humanity.

First, my high school best friend canceled a trip out of state so he could, basically, be close enough to drive me to the hospital if need be. So, instead of taking a vacation before he started a new job this week, he spent the week between Christmas and New Year's picking up my prescriptions and driving me to the grocery store and even bringing me toilet paper.

Then, some friends from the suburbs started talking behind my back, coordinating how they could help me out. And yes, that made me a little edgy, but also reminded me how fortunate I am to have such amazing people in my life.  One of them sent me a check that he insisted was a gift--when I objected, he said that if I insisted, I could send it back "when I got tired of it." And then these wonderful foods started appearing on my doorstep in decorative baskets, courtesy of a friend on the other end of the country.

I was already a little overwhelmed when an undauntable young friend on the other coast decided that it was time I "let the universe take care of me for a while" and started a fundraiser for me (and look at the nice things she said about me!)  And when she did, several of my past co-workers immediately chipped in to help.

My older daughter, already overwhelmed with three children, a full-time job and a husband going through medical issues himself, offered to come (225 miles) and pick up her sister if I had to go into the hospital.  I've received messages of support, prayers and offers of help from friends all over the country, some of whom I haven't seen in years. And today, a couple of college friends I've seen once in the past decade messaged to ask whether they could come and take me to lunch on Saturday.

I'm just saying "yes".  I've always been a big believer in mutual support and community only as long as I'm on the giving end; it's a bit uncomfortable when the tables are turned.  Perhaps everyone feels that way.  My wise teenager (who decorated the inside and outside of the house for Christmas by herself while I slept one day, after I mentioned that it made me kind of sad that I hadn't been able to do it) told me it doesn't work that way, that I'm on board with the idea or I'm not.  And I guess it's time to try out that view, since I really can't do a damned thing for myself at the moment regardless of my philosophy.  It's come as something of a surprise, though, how nice it is to have all this care and concern washing over me.

Not a Blast...

but more of a gentle twinkle from the past.  I wrote this for a friend's newsletter when Tori was in 1st grade, and recently he sent it back to me.  When I saw it for the first time in years I realized that I loved it--not my telling of it, but the memory of the experience--just as much as I did in the moment.

"I know a story about the Big Dipper," my daughter says, looking up. We're walking to the playground in the quiet spring night air.

 

"Tell me," I say.

 

"See that smallest star, at the end of the handle?" She points.  "That's the youngest brother. There was once a little girl who had no brothers. She made beautiful suits of clothes for seven brothers, and they made her their sister. But one day a calf came to the door and said that the buffalo herd wanted her. The brothers said they couldn't have her, so the the buffalo attacked. The girl and her brothers climbed up a tree to escape, and the tree kept growing higher and higher until they reached the sky. And they began to glow."

 

She points again.

 

"And that's them?"  

She nods.  "That's them. They turned into stars."  

"Is that true, do you think?" I ask as we reach the playground.  

"Its a legend Mom," she says, and climbs onto the swing. Her toes barely reach the ground as she pushes off.

 

"You pick if you believe it."

 

She stretches her feet toward the sky so hard that her long hair brushes the gravel in the dark, and I absolutely believe that a child can climb high enough to join the stars.

Too Discreet to Function

Last month, I spent a few days at the Ritz-Carlton Resort on Amelia Island.  It was a lovely place with excellent service, nice restaurants, onsite shops and a wide array of services I would never have thought to take advantage of.  And this was the view from my room:

The truth is, though, the whole atmosphere was a little more tactful than this carpenter's daughter is accustomed to.  For example, it took me quite a while to locate the ATM, which had its own spacious room behind a heavy wooden door with only the smallest and most discrete of signs identifying it.

I didn't get into real trouble, though, until I unexpectedly needed to make a purchase that apparently upper class women do not discuss in public.  There were several shops in the building, including one that advertised "sundries", so I didn't anticipate a problem.  But a quick turn through all of them turned up nothing.  After a review of the map of the resort confirmed that I hadn't missed any shops and that I was a good half hour from town, I went to the front desk and asked whether there was a drug store on the premises.

"No, I'm sorry," the young woman behind the counter said.  "But the sundry shop does carry items like..."

She trailed off.  She looked away.  

I was raised in a barn (well, a small industrial town in Illinois) and I was in a hurry.  I filled in "feminine hygiene products?"

"Yes," she confirmed with obvious relief.  "That's what I was going to say, but I was looking for something more...delicate."

Then, she continued, "But they keep them behind the counter."

I thanked her and hurried back to the sundry shop.  I've never bought drugs, but I think this might be what it's like...if your dealer is a nervous novice.  I approached the cashier and said, "The lady at the front desk said you had feminine hygiene products back there?"

She quickly looked around to make sure no one had heard.  Then she gestured me behind the cash register and opened a cabinet at floor level and completely concealed by the counter.  I made my selection and started back around the register to pay, but she whisked the package out of my hand and into a bag before I made it around the corner.  

This bag:

(The tissue paper is a nice touch, don't you think?)

Underneath the fancy wrappings, of course, these were the same products that I casually toss into my grocery cart every month.  Until last month, I thought everyone else did, too.

I'm not sure how the refined professionals at the Ritz-Carlton would feel about my telling this story in public, complete with the vulgar use of "feminine hygiene products" on at least two occasions.  I'm thinking of it as a public service, though.  Ladies, if you're wandering the hallways of a swanky resort in minor crisis, just ask at the sundry shop. But for God's sake, keep your voice down!

Katie Pukes on the Big Screen

I've talked before about reading the original script for Motivational Growth back in 2006 and how I first met The Mold long before Jeffrey Combs had signed on to play him.  In 2010, Director Don Thacker sent me a much-revised copy of the script.  The new script included between forty and fifty characters, but as I read it I knew exactly what he wanted.  I went to the bottom of the stairs and called up, "Tori?  How do you feel about vomiting on camera?"

Then I IMd Don to let him know I'd read the script and he said, "I have Tori in mind for Katie."

Yep.  Just as I thought.

Katie is mentioned exactly twice in the script.  Here's what it says about her:

Katie pukes.

And then later:

Katie pukes.

Turned out that it takes approximately eight hours to puke twice on film, and that fake vomit tastes a lot worse than the real thing, and that sitting with a maple-syrup-based concoction in your mouth for the better part of eight hours messes with your blood sugar in a very negative way.  But Tori was a trooper.

Then all of the stuff happens that typically happens with movies: you hear one is being shot or it's shot in your home town and you get all excited about it and then your children grow up and leave home and your dog dies and you've been through three cell phones and two automobiles before you hear that it's going to be released next summer.  Tori was 14 when she sat far into the night holding fake puke in her mouth and she's just shy of 17 today.

Last night, we attended the private screening of Motivational Growth. I'd seen three or four rough cuts by this point, so it was hard for me to really watch the movie like a typical theatergoer and get a sense of it.  So, I did two things.  I listened for the audience reaction (a very good rhythm of suspense, quiet attention, surprised laughter, repeat) and I watched for my kid.  She's only in the film for approximately 60 seconds, but it's broken up into pieces (she pukes more than once, after all, and then there's the altercation with the main character and the blue genie).  Turns out that when she's puking at 12 feet tall, she looks pretty much like she does when she's puking in my bathroom at home.  I guess that's a good sign, since she wasn't actually puking in the film: apparently she does a good job of ACTING like she's puking.  (Or wait...maybe that's not such a good sign. I don't think this is the niche she's going for.)

Anyway, it would be impossible to cover everything that was cool about the evening or to mention all of the amazing people involved in the production, but here are a few highlights:

1. The Patio Theater in Chicago is billed as an old "movie palace" and it lives up to its designation.  The architecture is on a par with some of the great live theater venues in Chicago, and the ceiling mimics a starry night sky with moving clouds (hence the name, I'm guessing).  
2. It was amazing to see my dear friend Don Thacker and his wonderful bride and producer (the former Alexis Nordling) reach this point with a film they've poured their hearts and souls and sometimes lunch money into for more than two years.
3. I mentioned that my kid was on the big screen in a beautiful old movie house, right? And her name.  Oh, and mine, too--I was very touched to receive a wholly undeserved "special thanks" in the credits.
4. My 16-year-old went and hung out in a bar with her co-workers.  Sure, I was there and the only thing she consumed was pizza bread, but it was still a kind of shift.  A kind of shift that already takes place in this crowd because they're the only group that Tori and I each independently relate to as peers.  She's always been comfortable with my friends and I with hers, but this is the only context in which they're the same people.  (Short version:  My kid grew up while I wasn't looking, but I'm not sure how it happened because I've never looked away.)

The only negative moment in the whole evening was when the bartender at Sabatino's on Irving Park Road in Chicago "misplaced" my change after I gave her a twenty for a $2 Coke and then accused one of our friends of having stolen it.  The piano player was excellent as was the floor server, but after the manager defended the bartender's actions and shouted at me that it wasn't the bartender's responsibility to get my change back to me, I'll never go there again.  I could have lived without the $18, but not with service staff who accuses my friends of stealing rather than admitting to a mistake.

You've probably noticed that I haven't said a whole lot about the movie itself.  In part, that's because it was a private screening and I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to say.  In part, it's because the less you know walking into this movie, the better the experience is going to be.  In part, to be honest, it's because it defies description.  I can't even assign it a genre.  There's more puke and blood and fungus than I typically favor, but there are also a lot of open questions (which I very much appreciate in film) and some really standout acting.  I think we would have left the theater revisiting certain scenes and asking questions if, you know, I hadn't read multiple versions of the script, talked at length with the writer and director and seen the movie multiple times and a couple of different endings.

Dancing in Elevators

The other night around midnight, just after an outrageously funny game of Lego Star Wars, Tori announced that she was ready for an adventure.  I'm usually game for most things, but opportunities for adventure are fairly limited in a small town on a rainy weeknight in December.

We kicked some options around and decided it might be fun to take some plastic animals out and leave them in odd places around the neighborhood.  If you can't see why that seemed like a good idea, you're clearly a healthy, well-balanced person but you should probably stop reading now.

Of course, Tori is my youngest child and she's sixteen, so we didn't have any plastic animals at the ready.  That wasn't a problem, though.  In a small, midwestern town the ONE thing that's open after midnight is Wal-Mart.  I try not to shop there, but I figured that a few bucks in plastic animals wasn't going to make or break the economy.

When we went into the store we were laughing about not "arousing suspicion" with our animal purchases and such, so we were both a bit taken aback when (possibly for the first time in all my years of shopping) the cashier commented on the oddity of our purchasing a bunch of plastic animals at 12:30 a.m.  As if that weren't enough, she went on to tell me that her kids still played with those animals, "And, for some reason, they think it's hilarious to go around and leave them in people's..."

I swear, she paused.  And during that pause I thought, "Wait, kids do this?  This is not a unique idea?  We're JUST LIKE THE CASHIER'S TEN-YEAR-OLD SON?"

Then she finished her sentence. "...beds and stuff."

She laughed.  I laughed, too.  "We're not going to do that," I said.

We walked quickly out of the store with our bag of plastic animals, trying not to laugh.

Though we were planning to distribute most of the animals in our neighborhood, we'd chosen a special one for a childhood friend of my daughter's.  She lives in a quiet neighborhood but on a main street, so as we drove toward her house I said to Tori, "Probably the police are going to come to find out why we're prowling around Megan's neighborhood at this time of night."

She said, "Probably" and laughed and then we turned onto Megan's street and...the police were there.

I'm not going to give away all of the species and locations, but I will tell you that one of the animals we delivered was a plastic dinosaur.  We left the dinosaur on the frame of a work truck, just over the driver's side door. We don't know the owner of the truck or anything about the residents of the house.

Or we didn't, anyway.

We finished the strategic placement of lions and giraffes and such in the late-night rain and headed home, amused with ourselves and not expecting ever to know what happened next.

The next evening, I took the dog for a walk as usual.  On my way down the block, I noticed that the truck had been moved from the driveway to the street and there were two men talking in the driveway.  I was absurdly self-conscious, walking by the house, as if they might look across the street and say, "That woman there, with the Yorkie!  The one we've never seen before!  Probably SHE put the dinosaur on the truck."

Or, of course, it was possible that the dinosaur had been stolen before he'd come out in the morning, or that he'd driven off without noticing it and it had fallen somewhere.  I forced myself to walk at a normal pace, right on past, without looking toward the house.  By the time we passed the house again on the way home, it was getting dark.  A young man was walking toward us on the street and the dog barked at him and the barking caught the attention of the men in the driveway, who looked up and saw the young man and greeted him.  I was delighted, because this directed their attention away from me and the imaginary, "Hey, me and my kid left a plastic dinosaur on your truck last night" sign over my head.

I kept walking west.  The young man kept walking east.  And just as he was about to pass out of range of the house, one of the men in the driveway called out to him, "Hey...you leave that dinosaur on my truck?"

It is, it turns out, possible to actually choke on laughter bitten back too hard.  While I was coughing, the man on the sidewalk said, "What? Nah.  It was probably Fred."

Giving Thanks for Being Thankful

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  No commercialism, no pressure, no hoops to jump through.  You choose the people you want to be with and sit down with them for a good meal and reflect on the blessings in your life.  It’s simple and relaxing and when it’s over you don’t have to rearrange your kids’ bedrooms to fit in all the new stuff they really didn’t need.

I make it a point each Thanksgiving to really think about the things I’m thankful for, and to share some of those things both here and with the people in my life.  As usual, there are many.  But this year, I’m feeling most thankful for my worldview.

See, in the past few weeks I’ve lost (for different reasons a few days apart) a major source of income and my medical insurance.  I also ended a very significant relationship.  Oh, and when I set out to cook Thanksgiving dinner, I had a problem with my stove that should have been an easy fix but ended up with Tori and I sitting on the porch in a very cold rain waiting for the gas company. 

But I’m feeling good.  If you only know me through this blog or you’ve only known me for a few years, it probably won’t be immediately obvious what a big deal that is.  Because you probably don’t know—you probably can’t even imagine—that between the ages of 13 and 27, I was suicidal at least as often as not.  I even made a half-hearted attempt in law school, washing down pills with a bottle of wine in front of the television. I was spacing them out to make sure I didn’t throw up, and my life was saved for the stupidest and tritest of all reasons (talk about things to be thankful for!): I got caught up in an episode of LA Law and stopped taking the pills because I didn’t want to pass out before I saw how it ended.

In one of those ironic but beautiful twists that life brings us, a stalker who came just a little too close to killing me saved my life.  Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder saved my life.  How those catastrophic events healed my life is another story for another day, but I often say (in complete sincerity) that having my life threatened, losing my business and having to flee the state to save my life is the best thing that ever happened to me.  Much to my surprise, it freed me to be happy.

So today, as always in recent years, I am thankful for many things.  I’m thankful for my children and grandchildren, for my amazing friends, for the way that writing transports me and for the flexibility of the past few years (even if it turns out that it’s time to venture back into the workday world).  But mostly, I’m thankful that the challenges that have arisen in the past few weeks don’t affect my ability to laugh with my daughter, to love my life, to take positive action where I can and to smile automatically when I walk out the door in the morning and see the sun.  Or, you know, a nice clean, cold rain.

That’s the greatest gift, I’m convinced.  No life is entirely smooth, but if you can be happy in the midst of challenges, you have everything.

A Trip Down the Memory Interstate

Earlier this week, I was talking to a friend about an upcoming cross-country drive.  The conversation started with him mocking my inclination to meander along the highways, browse the truck stops and enjoy a leisurely lunch in some small-town diner in Ohio, but it ended with a somewhat surprising trip down memory lane.  I've done a lot of long-distance driving in my life, beginning with a trip from Illinois to Washington, D.C. in my early twenties.  On those trips, I've seen civil war battle grounds, visited major theme parks, sat in on arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court, window-shopped on Fifth Avenue, dined at Ninja just after it opened, watched fireworks over the ocean, visited old friends and staked out haunted cemeteries--and that's only the beginning.  But when I started thinking back over the thousands of miles of road I covered, it wasn't the Statue of Liberty or the White House that stood out in my mind.  It was a series of low-profile, objectively insignificant moments that I wouldn't have missed for the world.

1.  I crossed the Kentucky border for the first time well after midnight on a week night, my toy poodle asleep on the passenger seat, and the first thing I noticed was that the neon was a softer green than I'd ever seen in the midwest--even the lighting on the chain gas station where I stopped.  Everything, it turned out, was softer: the lighting, the quiet night air when I stepped out of my 1979 Mustang and the cool grass under my feet as I walked with my tiny dog by my side.  I've driven through Kentucky several times since then, good parts and bad, but the mere mention of the state always brings to mind the feel of that grass and the velvet night air just across the state line. 

2.  The beauty of the upper Ohio valley during the third week of October came as a shock; I'd expected Ohio to be as flat as Illinois.  Instead, Interstate 70 rose into gentle hills, valleys (I guess the terminology should have been a clue) painted red and yellow and orange and brown spreading out below like a vast impressionist painting. Twenty-four years later, the changing of the leaves still brings back the memory of that drive and I hope that one day I'll pass along that same road at just the right time of year.

3.  En route from Georgia to Chicago in August of 1990, my friend, my teenage sister and I agreed that we simply had to pop off the interstate in Clarksville, Tennessee and have a look at the train station--maybe snap a few pictures. We may or may not have sung.  We were nonchalant when we asked a long-haired, middle-aged man walking down the street for directions to the train station.  He laughed softly and shook his head when he told us that Clarksville didn't have a train station; it seemed like maybe we weren't the first to have come looking for it.

4.  A California highway in the summer at the wheel of a new, champagne-colored rental car and "Runnin' Down a Dream" on the radio.  That is all.

5.  Driving across the country to take my 12-year-old daughter to the ocean for the first time during the summer of 2008 meant working the phones.  That is, sitting in fast-food restaurants and coffee shops with internet access looking up hotels and calling to ask the all-important question: "Do you have the Disney Channel?"  I usually like to drive far into the night, but on that trip we were tucked into our Disney-equipped hotel rooms early each night because some version of Camp Rock was on television every night that week. We've both outgrown the Jonas Brothers in the intervening years, but the Camp Rock soundtrack will forever be our go-to road trip music...and I will forever be the parent who planned her vacation stops around the third and fourth viewings of a Disney Channel movie.

6.  On most road trips, the greatest problems I've encountered have been traffic-related, but in the spring of this year my daughter and I headed to Florida.  I was going for a seminar on the application of the Uniform Commercial Code to residential mortgage notes; she was tagging along for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Our second day on the road, I woke up in Manchester, Tennessee to find the window on our rental car smashed and some minor theft.  Though we'd fared better than some of the other guests, it was a rough morning.  We had to wait hours for the rental car company to send someone out to replace the glass and the combination of stress and being limited to vending machine food had my head pounding by the time we got back on the road mid-afternoon.  We were nearly a full day behind schedule and it was clear that I'd be paying for a room at the Embassy Suites that night that we wouldn't see before daylight.  Naturally, there was nowhere to eat except gas stations and fast food places.  We bought sandwiches and chips at a Subway in a truck stop, and when we walked outside found ourselves at the foot of a breathtaking mountain. "Let's eat here," my very wise teenager suggested.  I squashed the impulse to rush, knowing that half an hour wouldn't make a significant difference at that point in the day, and we sat on a concrete wall at the edge of the lot, backs to the gas station, and looked out at a landscape soothing enough to carry me through to our 5 a.m. arrival in Orlando.

Is it a waste to pay $250 for two days at the Universal parks and hold close the memory of a $4 sub in a gas station parking lot? Perhaps.  But those other moments, the purposes of the trip, aren't forgotten. We were enchanted by the world of Dr. Seuss; I braved the Spiderman ride in Orlando.  In Savannah, we stood by the ocean at sunset with a very old friend of mine and watched dolphins play in the surf. Though I'd be at a loss to explain why, I've toured Juliette Lowe's house twice. We took the boat to Ellis Island with another old friend and ate hot dogs on Coney Island.  My daughter performed at Disney World; she held tight to my hand the first time an ocean wave washed over her.  I spent an afternoon talking to Vietnam veterans at The Wall. The more dramatic experiences, the more concrete items on the "what I did on my summer vacation" list, have their own value.  But they don't preclude the everday magic that can come from just being where you are in the moment.