On this date last year, I was sitting in this very room — but the room was full of boxes.
It was one year ago exactly that Claus and I drove from Washington to return me to my rightful place: Chicago. In this post from exactly one year ago today I’m trying to express my joy. I’m not a Buddhist, but it seemed to fit.
When I realized it was my one-year anniversary, I pulled out my journal from November 2015. I’m pretty joyful in there, too. In fact, below is an excerpt from the journal entry for this day last year. It’s not good writing. It’s just good to see a human be so sure of a decision and crow about being happy even when no one is looking.
Difficult to describe the feeling I have, being home. It’s an understatement to say that and ‘difficult to describe’ and ‘an understatement’ are both lame collections of words, too; poor, so poor. Never have I felt so wrapped in warmth. It’s a true homecoming.
The view from Wabash. My own park and my statue of General Logan just there, just east; the building’s white glazed brick entrance, oh, the fluttering, glittering joy I feel, as though I could fly, leave the ground, float up to see it all even more.
Buddha was enlightened: He saw everything exactly as it was, with no illusions, only presence. This is how I felt yesterday morning and this morning, gazing uptown from 8th and Wabash, holding my black coffee. The sun. The el. That’s my corner. The Hilton. Columbia. Michigan Avenue, I’m coming, baby. I’m coming back to touch sole to pavement and we will make like we never left.
Except that I did. And I learned one new thing. Just one. One. And that is that I love you more — so much more — than I ever even realized. And I knew I loved you a lot. But now it’s marriage.
So much has happened in the past year. Quilts made, decisions made, pain and love. And the moment I came home I knew I wanted to get new carpet.
Yippee! It finally happened! These things take time!
One year later, Chicago, we’re stronger than ever. Happy Anniversary!
Chicago’s unseasonably warm weather has decided it has indulged us long enough: today is a day cold enough to require a Serious Coat. (We’ve been in the high 60s for weeks, now, and temperatures in the high 60s allow for Somewhat Frivolous Coats, at least around here.)
I have a couple winter coats to choose from. There’s the black puffer coat with the furry trim, the sporty-looking Helly Hansen zipper-upper great for ice skating (it’s almost time!), and then there’s the camel-colored wool coat that makes me feel like Jessica Lange in any movie from the 1980s. Which do you suppose is my favorite?
Well, it really does depend on the weather, but if I had to go live on a desert island where winter coats were suddenly necessary, I’d have to pick the that boxy camel-colored coat. It makes me feel like an adult — but in a good way, like someone could come and ask me for advice and I would have something substantive to say. That coat makes me feel like paying the gas bill and picking up a gallon of milk is kinda sexy. Does anyone out there know what I’m talking about?
When I put on the coat, I felt in the pocket and found half a Ritter Sport chocolate bar!
I haven’t decided if I should eat it. Chocolate keeps pretty well, but it’s been at least six months since I wore this coat.
There’s something touching and sweet about the things we find in our winter coat pockets a season later, don’t you think? Who was the girl who ate the chocolate bar? What was she thinking about? Was it terribly cold or did she think:
“I think it’s time to switch over to a Frivolous Coat. Spring is here.”
Crochet detail. (Hey, you never know!) Photo: Wikipedia.
Registration for my second term of graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) was this week. I had forgotten how stressful it is to register for college classes because it’s been awhile since I did it. Here are the facts:
there are only so many seats in each class (i.e., you may get the classes you want)
there are requirements you must meet (i.e., you can’t fart around and only take classes about David Bowie)
students’ registration times are staggered (i.e., you might be dead-last for a registration time, which is bad)
you are paying a ton money (i.e., is it hot in here?)
I’m happy to report that my registration went great, but I know very well that this is lucky. Next fall, I might not feel so chipper — it’s really the flip of a coin. Therefore, I’m allowing myself to enjoy my good fortune while I’ve got it. This includes reading and re-reading the course descriptions for the classes I got and psyching myself up for January 26th, the first day of Spring 2017 term.
One of the jewels in the crown is “Micro/Macro Textiles” in the Fiber and Material Studies Department. Just look at this:
This seminar will use the Textile Resource Center of the Department of Fiber and Material Studies as the location for source material to explore artist research practices. Emphasis will be placed on research as hands-on knowing. Understanding textiles through possibilities of drawing, notation, photography, video, live action, and remaking will be considered. Close observation of textile structure, fiber spin, dyestuff color, fiber content, and formal resolution will be considered alongside larger frames of cultural context, meaning, and metaphor. Artist lectures and visiting scholars from areas including textile conservation, restoration, curation, and science will extend our learning alongside field trips to Chicago area museums and collections. Students will be expected to develop studio work, written research, presentations, and rigorous journals.
Darlin’, you had me at “rigorous journals.” Or maybe you had me at “close observation of textile structure” and “larger frames of cultural context.” Actually, no; I swooned in the first sentence with “Textile Resource Center.”
The professor? Internationally acclaimed fiber artist Anne Wilson, who is, as the graduate advisor for the Writing Department told me, “an absolute rockstar.” She warned me to have a solid backup, that I might not get into the class. But I did!
There are several weeks left of the fall term; I’ll have stories for you as I do my first “Critique Week,” where a panel of fancy people read my work and then peer over their glasses at me and talk to me about what they liked and did not like. And then there’s the ginormous project I have to finish for my Design For Writers class.
Dame Vera Lynn, “at home in Sussex.” Date unknown. Image Wikipedia.
I had a plan. A blog plan.
Writing a regular blog like this takes one, you know. I think about you all the time.
And so it was that I came home after such a packed day with my blog plan — but there was a surprise waiting for me. Oh, I knew the new carpet would be there. I began payments and scheduled the installation a month ago because man, that carpet was looking pretty sad, indeed, and had looked sad, indeed for a long time. So I come home and find there is new carpet here in my home, but I knew it would be there. And the new carpet, it’s great. I did my research, I shopped around.
But the installers, who seemed very nice when I met them this morning, apparently had a fire to go put out someplace across town very suddenly after the carpet was installed. They seem to have left in a hurry.
There are shoes (mine, thankfully) in the bathroom sink. Tables have been switched around in rooms. The rugs I have, they are all in interesting places, none of them so interesting that I can leave them where they lay. It’s fascinating how they re-arranged my furniture, I thought to myself, surveying total chaos in my house; I could just leave it like this. Couch way over at the “wrong” wall, quilts rolled up like burritos, lamps surviving, barely, pushed against the corner on my big sewing/dining/work table.
Tonight, therefore, rather than write what I was planning to write, I’m heaving my weight against dressers and drawers, making sense out of the chaos of my house.
The carpet is perfect. But at the moment, I don’t recognize the place. Is it weird that I kinda like it?
*P.S. The photo up there? That’s one of the images that came back when I entered “carpet” into Wikipedia Commons, the free image site I use for all my posts (unless I took a picture myself.) Do you not love this woman “at home in Sussex”?
A still from ‘To Catch a Thief’ with Grace Kelly and Cary Grant…because that’s what Wikipedia gave me when I searched images for “thief.” Also, it’s funny because I did not act gracefully. Image: Wikipedia.
As I was sewing this evening and thinking through the second chapter of the phony IRS phone call story, I realized that while some people commented on Facebook and in the comments below that they have also been targets for phone crimes and also sniffed out the predators, other folks — maybe a large number — were likely silent because they have actually been victimized by such a scam.
If that is you, I want to tell you that I am very, very sorry that happened to you. You are not alone and you are not a fool.
Well, maybe you are, and that’s your business. But if you got a call last year from the IRS — I keep typing “IRA” which is not the same — and you didn’t know that you were being lied to and therefore sent money, you were the victim of a crime and it doesn’t matter if you’re a fool or not: that stinks and I’m sorry. Folks will say oh, you should’ve double-checked the source, gotten a second opinion, etc., etc. and those people have never made any mistakes or been too innocent ever in life, ever, so you know, they can say that.
I’m kidding. I’m sorry you were robbed.
Having said that, just as it’s important for me to watch my purse on the train and not wear headphones when I’m walking in the city at night, it’s important for you/us to exercise caution when sending large sums of money to anyone: the real IRS, the fake IRS, televangelists (just no), politicians, ne’er-do-well cousins, etc. Got it?
Okay, back to the story.
I had the post-it with the scammer’s number on it. I decided to call and do it when Mom and Mark had left the house. Only Scrabble the dog would hear what I planned to say to the person on the other end of the line, which was smart; my intention was to say the foulest words ever uttered by a human being. And, like several people who shared their story, my strategy was to call and fake the person out for long enough to sucker him — it’s always a him — right back, even for a moment.
I used my computer/gmail phone line so they couldn’t trace the number.
“Hello, thank you for calling the IRS. What number are you calling from, please?”
As if the IRS would a) pick up and b) say thank you. And how could I tell that I was hearing not a busy phone center but a recording of a busy phone center playing in the background? Because it was obvious.
“Hi, oh, hi. Um…142,” I began, literally just saying random numbers while affecting a baffled, frightened, scared-lil-ol-me voice. “802-2152. I hope you can find me in the system, I’m really concerned about a call I got!”
Type, type on the other end. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t find you in the system. Can you repeat that number, please?”
“923, 823-9172?” <– psst: different numbers.
There was a pause. “I’m sorry, ma’am I —”
Now, I think it’s obvious that I enjoy words, my friends. Old ones, new ones, common ones, rare ones. You don’t know that I like blue ones because I choose not to use them here. But I like blue words juuuust fine when they’re called for. How much I like them is evidenced by what I said to the thief that day on the phone. The words I selected from my brain were so foul, so bitter and raw, I impressed myself. And I can’t even hint at how bad the words were because they were so bad, as they spewed from my mouth I wondered if “blue lightning” was blue because it struck down people who said the bluest of words. Like me. It was in the combinations that the magic really happened.
And that’s the coda to the story, actually:
My mom takes what she calls “Old Lady” yoga several times a week at the yoga studio in town. After class on Tuesdays (?) the gals go have coffee at the coffee shop nearby. Mom asked me to meet her there after class. As soon as I slammed the phone down on the counter — cordless phones don’t slam down with the same satisfaction as rotary ones do in the movies but it was still pretty good — I realized it was time to go to the coffee shop to meet the ladies.
I came in all steamed up from my call. When the ten or so women turned to me, smiling, happy to see me there in Winterset, they asked how I was and I was too flustered to say anything but, “Well, I just called back a phone scammer!”
They leaned in and cupped their hands around their mochas, pressing me to tell what happened.
“No, no, no,” I said, and I meant it. “I can’t say what I said. I mean, it’s bad. It’s so bad, I’m still ashamed of myself.”
They all — and I mean all ten or twelve of them — shook their heads and shrugged. One of these amazing, sweet, mild-mannered (?) ladies said, “Honey, I raised three boys. You can’t shock me.”
Another said, “Oh, I’ve heard it all. All of it. Come, on! What’dya say??”
They were all staring at me. I got another minute of confirmation and told them, in one breath, what I had told that person to do, where I told him to go, how, and when, and how happy I’d be when he got there. Basically.
The women all nodded. “Good for you,” one said. Another said, “Oh, I’ve heard worse.”
