Indiana Dunes

chicagohistorymuseum:

Girl Scout First Aid practice at Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois,1928.

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> Visit our Rights and Reproductions Department and give them this number: DN-0087090.

I remember having to lie down for bed at the Norma house when it was still daylight outside. We lived there until I was seven. We had an early bedtime, and when it was Daylight Saving Time, I could sometimes hang from the windowsill in my pajamas and watch the kids across the street still playing in their yard.

But mostly, it was just restful. I shared a room with my sister. I lay and watch the shadows against the top of the wall and the ceiling. The shadows would darken the corner where the wall met the ceiling as the sun went down, and then the streetlights made dramatic shapes out of the shaking tree branches.

On weekend mornings, it was in reverse. Our parents were still sleeping. Sometimes I would wake up to my sister already playing, or I would wake first and watch the wall brighten. Our room was painted pastel blue. Or maybe the house was blue and the walls were yellow.

I had nowhere I had to be. I had little concept of having things to do. I had to be in the bedroom, I wasn’t asleep, and I was completely relaxed. My mind was free to imagine and pretend. The forward horizon was completely clear.

**

When I sit to watch a baseball game with wings and a beer, I am unavailable for any obligation. I am on vacation.

**

The picture is from this weekend’s pub crawl. Forty of us on vacation together.

**

Baseball games and pub crawls are lovely, but I’m learning ways to create quieter pockets of time that I don’t fill with anything clever, social, or productive. Or maybe I’m learning to legitimize the pockets that I already tend to create.

I spent a semester in graduate school pursuing two degrees: Master of Design and MBA. It’s a three-and-a-half year program, full time, 80-100 hours a week. I left after one semester because that model wasn’t sustainable for me.

1. The financial and professional risk of not working for that long seemed too high for me.
2. For me, that’s too long to sustain that pace. It’s too long to be out of balance. If I’d more health cache, maybe it would be different. But I had just gotten to the point of knowing which things really keep me healthy. It really messed with me to have so little time for those things.
3. Related to that, I prefer to have time to integrate what I’m learning with what I already know. Time to write, and talk to people, and synthesize apart from what is prescribed in assignments.
4. Related to THAT, I would have preferred to have more choice is which courses I took. I thought I was ready to focus, but I had another semester (and $30K) of foundation courses before I could do that. Maybe I was ready, and maybe I wasn’t. The same could be said of some students who didn’t have to take foundation courses. My comparison could be off base, but $60K is a lot of money, and I would have preferred more choice and discussion about that requirement. I probably would have insisted on it, if not for the other factors I’ve listed.

My former classmates are getting something valuable, and it’s not clear yet how I’m going to get that for myself.

We all want to feel like we’re making the right choice.

Here is something that is also true:

What kind of a response am I wanting for this post?

You know what else would be fun here? Pictures.

Early in my Grad Intro to Photography course, John Grimes announced, “If you can’t lie, you can’t communicate. Photographs would be of absolutely no interest if they were totally factual.” I got an inkling of what he meant when I dropped out and made time to take more pictures.

When I’m sitting in the morning (meditating, which is kind of new), I tell myself, “all you have to do right now is sit.”

Sometimes I picture myself in a sunny backyard in a folding chair, with my sunglasses on and my toes painted. Nothing to do but look around, fall asleep, laugh, feel pretty.

Urgent ideas come to me: ideas to solve problems, and plans for the rest of the day, and plans for the rest of my life, and I am practicing just not even trying to remember them because ALL I AM SUPPOSED TO BE DOING RIGHT THEN is sitting. I trust that it’s very important that I do only that for five minutes every day.

The other day I was having a hard time disconnecting. I had sad and uneasy feelings churning around in my belly. Nothing acute, just vague feelings of doom leftover from bad dreams and pessimistic thoughts. OK, I said. Just sit in the sunny yard with bad thoughts.

Suddenly I wondered what it would have been like if we would have had five minute timeouts at The Restaurant.

I worked at The Restaurant off and on for six years. As is common in restaurants, we really didn’t get breaks. If you smoked, you could ask someone to keep an eye on your tables briefly or let you know if you got sat, but that was about it. Even sitting for a meal usually happened while you had tables, and with customers watching you. If you were standing still, managers or senior servers might tell you to clean something. And it wasn’t unusual to be at the restaurant for ten or twelve hours; sometimes longer.

I worked with a woman who I’ll call Elle. She was one of the best servers and bartenders there. After a while, after she stayed for a few years, she was THE best. She was the most personable, the most efficient, the most responsible, the most meticulous, and the hardest working. She made the most money. She was one of my best work friends.

When she wasn’t working full time at The Restaurant, Elle was going to school full time. She got married, got straight As, and got no sleep. She got kidney stones. Then her husband cheated on her, and she promptly divorced him. She had high standards, most of all for herself.

But what I pictured when I was sitting, not supposed to be picturing anything, was a five-minute time out. I thought, what if we could have sat in the back of The Restaurant—where the prep cooks chopped vegetables, the servers loitered, and the managers gossiped—on a bar stool, legs swinging, doing nothing for five minutes. It would be everyone else’s job to take care of the tables in your section, without coming back to bother you about it.

I can picture myself enjoying it. Dismissing my tables from my thoughts completely, trusting that it would all go on like clockwork when I returned. And I can picture my managers teasing me about it from the office, sneering at me on the barstool, the server who can disregard her tables so easily.

People who wait tables dream about waiting tables, just like most people who play Tetris dream of Tetris. Waiting tables in our sleep; some of us years after we leave hospitality for other industries.

This is mine: I dream that I work in a restaurant that is like a house, with many rooms and floors, and I have tables in every room, and I keep forgetting them and leaving them sitting, or obstacles come up that keep me from moving quickly from errand to errand. I go up and down stairs and forget who asked for what.

When I pictured Elle sitting on the barstool for her mandatory five minutes of disconnect, she looked uncomfortable. She laughed nervously and complained about how she couldn’t just not think about her tables. She couldn’t trust just anyone to take care of them the way she would.

But that’s a caricature in my mind of the brilliant woman I knew. A true-but-exaggerated part of her.

Eventually, the real Elle would have embraced the rule, and encouraged the new servers, most of whom she would be responsible for training, to have a soda while they sat, and explained all the reasons why it was good for them. When she walked past me sitting on her way to get something from the cooler, she would have teased me, sang me a silly song, and waved.

When you don’t know the names of things

Since I’ve been in Chicago, I have been bothered that I don’t know the trees and plants.

I lived in Florida when I was a small child, and then we moved to Missouri and lived there until I was through middle school. From high school until I was thirty-one, I lived back in Florida.

The first time I went to college, in Sarasota, Florida, I took a class called something like, “Natural History of Florida Literature.” We read Florida authors and visited the settings of their stories.

We studied the three dominant types of pine trees and their adjacent ecosystems: scrub pines, long-leaf pines, and slash pines. We camped in the Everglades, where I peeked at the creepy cypress silhouettes while hiding from divebombing mosquitos under my sheet. I learned about saw grass, saw palmetto, and how to tell species of oak apart from one another by the shape of their waxy leaves.

After that class, I kept reading and noticing, drawing and birdwatching, running in the woods, camping in the sand. I gave up looking for a plant that could substitute for toilet paper. Everything was pointy or poison oak. And I was fine with that; maybe secretly a little bit proud. My state’s nature was an acquired taste, as was its culture.

To me, Illinois greenery seems tender and naive. I feel cruel walking on the grass. (Florida grasses are engineered super-grasses, with fat, waxy blades to withstand the sun, and runners to overrun patches of sand). I keep meaning to get a book and look up Midwestern trees by their shapes, and bark, and leaves. But instead I just work and go to Andersonville restaurants and let my ignorance sully my enjoyment of the shady tree tunnel that is our street.

But this morning, I was thinking that it’s silly to put off enjoying green things here until I know all of their names.

When I was a kid, the only plant and animal names I knew were the ones my grandpa knew. Sometimes we lived with our grandparents, and sometimes they lived with us. When I was in second grade, we lived with them on a rural lot outside of St. Louis, and our neighbors had fields with tall grass, and a pond, and a horse that I was friends with.

In the field next to our back porch, they had a birdhouse where purple martins flew in and out on group missions. My grandpa taught me to whistle, “Bob White?” Bob…White?” so that the Bob Whites would whistle back. There were the small rabbits that our dog hopped after with her ears up, and once, a bigger, leggier, brown hare. There was a bobcat jumping on our hot barbecue grill under my grandparents’ window.

In summertime, there was goldenrod in the deep ditches by the road that gave the adults hay fever, clover that smelled sweet when my grandparents rode their mowers, dandelions, and poison ivy that my sister was allergic to and I wasn’t. When I squint my memory, I think I remember that the woods were made up of hardwood trees, because they stood naked of leaves on the sides of the hills in the wintertime. But I didn’t know their names. I don’t know if my grandpa didn’t know them, or if he just found the animals more interesting to talk about.

So what can I do now that I did then when I didn’t know?

I can walk again and again in the places I’m allowed to go, make up stories about what I see. Look at the shapes of things against the sky. Look at the bugs on the bark, wonder if I can eat the berries, notice the stains left by the crushed, varied fruits. Keep an eye out for helicopter trees so I can learn to make that annoying noise again. Make a friend who knows what things are called and wants to talk about them.

I’m helping someone set up a makeshift studio in her apartment to take portraits.

I’m pretty waggy-tailed about this. She lives in a high-rise, with a ton of unobstructed natural light coming in. She’s got a room divider for us to hang a sheet on, she’s getting a shop light with a clamp, and I’ve got a multi-kit with reflectors and a diffuser.

What’s your favorite home-studio tool? What do you recommend?

One thing we’re wondering about is wattage for the shop light. I’m thinking we should go for maximum and then soften it as needed. Sound about right?

A trip home to FL, a set on Flickr.