the clues [2/5]

Tags

Berghoff, Buckingham Fountain, Chicago, clues, downtown, engagement, friends, future, Grant Park, Lake Michigan, love, marriage, new york, proposal, relationship, scavenger hunt, surprise, the Loop, travel

the waiting [1/5]

Steve dropped me off at the zoo and handed me a letter from Brad. I recognized his penmanship on the envelope. And the way he spells my name, with two e’s. The zoo was one of our places in the years we shared in Chicago. Steve sent me to the bench, and though he didn’t know where that was, I did. The bench is on Fullerton, west of Cannon, next to a bike path. Unassuming, actually crumbling, splintering at each end. It’s where I waited for Brad to meet me the day we split up, well over two years ago. It’s where Brad sat long after I walked away, unwillingly, thinking it best. I sat on the bench this time, waiting, as my letter instructed me to do, for the next clue.

Would a jogger drop a package with a tag screaming my name? Would a bus pull up with signs affixed to all the windows? I started to feel like someone was watching me. Like there were henchmen in the bushes who knew I was at the bench. Walkie talkies all over Chicago were crackling, Subject is at the bench. Please proceed with clue. Just as my curiosity piqued, my phone started vibrating out of control, asking all sorts of incriminating questions.

Do you remember… when you used to send Brad messages during work from that one computer? —where you first met Brad? —where is the best place in Chicago to get schnitzel? All clues were pointing to the Berghoff, the restaurant where Brad and I met one another. Industry shifts amidst which we fell in love. A few more messages from my dear friends buzzed in, Go there now, pal! There was a twenty for cab fare in the envelope. Brad must have known I would try, frugally, to take a bus.

I stood outside the Berghoff for a while. I didn’t exactly leave this place of employment all candy and roses, a going away party with streamers and balloons falling from the rafters. A blind man climbed out of a cab right in front of the Berghoff marquee. Maybe he has my clue, I thought.

Finally, I ducked inside, slid comfortably into the corner where I learned a large percentage of what I now know about Bradley. Behind that lunch counter computer I cleverly, coyly, sent blinking, unordered tables in paragraphs to my bartender years ago when we shared everything in this city. There was a note slid under the monitor with my name on the front in familiar penmanship. I was out the door with the clue and a bit of Spanish dialogue.

I walked down Adams, turned at Michigan to head into Grant Park, where our stage was on the corner. We used to play a graffiti game in the city. Wrote couplets, little lyric lines that we penned on sticky labels and stuck to newspaper boxes, light posts, parking meters, following riddle-directions to one another’s words. We have fun. The last graffiti was on this stage. A simple summer outdoor amphitheatre. I found the graffiti in the winter, something like “Every song I sing ees for you.” Two e’s, like the way he writes my name. It was so perfect, my musician. But things weren’t working right then, so it felt so bittersweet. This empty stage, winter snow, standing alone, the words his heart meant, all the time we’d spent.

I wasn’t sure how many clues there would be. Brad was somewhere in this city. One of the clues would hold him in its palm. Maybe it would be this stage. It was supposed to be, I find, but this weekend there was Bluesfest in Grant Park. Brad sent a message, a picture of Buckingham Fountain, down the street. Change of plans, go here instead.

I walked up slowly to the fountain. I thought he was near, wasn’t sure whether to look for him or for another clue. When he slid in next to me on the rail, he startled me so that I gasped. The seconds moved in fast-forward, crawling over one another to happen next. They’d been waiting for this for years, too.

Linda, will you be my wife? from down on one knee.

All brides-to-be everywhere, don’t be ashamed on behalf of me. I don’t actually remember what I said. Yes, of course, only yours. I’ve wanted to be your wife for years. I’m confident that right now, today, this Fall, it’s right and healthy and perfect. I want to spend “the next forty years” with you. I could have said any of that. My heart was spilling over with all of it.

Whatever I said made people clap.  A man took a picture. In the end, it would only be a few short months until we would be the Dennisons.

the waiting [1/5]

Tags

breakfast, Chicago, clues, downtown, engagement, friends, future, love, marriage, new york, proposal, relationship, scavenger hunt, surprise, travel

We have a friend, Christina. We call her Migsy. And, in a sense, from my end, the plot begins with her. It begins back when I had not yet met her in February, when her name stuck in my head as Brad told stories from work. I contacted her, on blind faith, and commissioned her to help me when I surprised Brad with a visit. I liked her immediately. She’s charismatic and charming. Has a reality about her that I was sure would suffocate in a place like Manhattan. Migsy breathes genuine life into an overstimulated city. I can get down with that.

So when she said she was coming to visit me as soon as I moved back to Chicago, my excitement was overflowing. Sticky root beer float all over my knuckles when the ice cream drops in and the glass lip takes to napping. Brimming over.

The morning of Migsy’s arrival, I waited at The West Egg, a breakfast spot in River North near the lakefront. Downtown Chicago. It’s right around the corner from where a friend of mine used to live, where she once saw Kevin Costner eating a tomato. Or something. My eyebrows were raised, my head on a swivel, waiting for Migsy to saunter around the corner, her head high, cheekbones glistening, smiling.

I put our name in, sent her a text message. She was coming, she said. The sweet hostess sat me at a two top, awaiting Migsy. I sent her another message and sipped a cup of coffee with sugar in the raw. Waited just a bit. My heart was filled with excitement and although I had suspected this weekend as a plot of sorts before, while I waited at The West Egg on the eleventh of June, I really thought Migsy was going to walk through that door.

Across the restaurant, instead, was Steve, Brad’s roommate while he lived in Chicago, and dear friend, proofed by incriminating pictures which may or may not include Looney Tunes sweatshirts and suspenders meant for men over sixty. What are friends for? Momentarily, I thought it coincidence, us all having chosen the same restaurant for breakfast on this particular Saturday, as I waited, still, for Migsy’s arrival.

But then, after I stood to give Steve a hug, he sat down at my table with me. In Migsy’s seat, which was odd. Something wasn’t normal.

Steve said Migsy wasn’t coming. And that I should come with him. He didn’t know that, for once, I had already decided what to order. With Brad, it usually takes me dozens of minutes. With my friend Charissa, nothing short of an hour. Instead, I left with Steve. But not after an accusatory, if prideful declaration.

Brad’s here, isn’t he? From New York City. He must have flown when I thought he was at work. Steve’s eyes avoided contact with mine. He laughed. Never answered. My thoughts were in fast forward. This is it! I could hardly wait to see him.

Ocean Tides

Tags

Beloved, Caleb Carruth, faith, future, life, nature, questions, relatonship, religion, sand dunes, science, Scripture, tides

When the oceans and their waves bow at the feet of the King, it’s actually called a tide. The pull of the world on the waves is a tide. That’s a fact.

I never quite understood how the persistent draw of the moon, that magnificent, invisible string of force—gravity—between planets and celestial orbs pulled the water up out of the sea in swells like that. Neither of us did. So we sat on a sand dune at sunset, a storm sneaking around the corner, and looked up tides on 4G internet as any twenty-first century couple would naturally do.

Granules of sand, the dust of worn rocks from centuries of wind and storm and surf nestled between my toes and hid in the pockets of my jeans. His elbows around my knees pulled me snug to his chest. The phone searched academic websites and told us all about the tides. I couldn’t pronounce centrifugal, the force that makes the tides even on both sides of the earth. I said sentry-fyoogal, tripping over my young tongue, and he said centri-fi-gull, both talking about this beautiful balance that the Earth spins itself into while we sleep and eat and drive around.

Just the beginning, out here at dusk, tangled up, of asking questions for a lifetime. Of breathing life into metaphors from broken pieces of stone tablets with touch screens and wireless signals.

Moments that Make Marathons

Tags

coffee, conversation, distance, driving, future, life, love, marathon, marriage, moments, perspective, relationship, Starbucks, travel, waiting

Her coffee was too hot, she said. She usually tells them not to make it so hot. When they do, she can’t drink it right away and she hates that. I wondered, when she said hate, if she really hates it or if it’s just something she doesn’t like very much. I’m always wondering about things like that.

She stirred the whip cream, melted it into her coffee with a wooden stick from the coffee bar. Talked about how, today, differently than some of her yesterdays, she would shake nutmeg and cinnamon into her travel mug and see how her taste buds appreciated the gesture.

I hope it keeps me awake on my way to Flint, she said.

She invited me into her conversation, and I took a step I hadn’t planned on taking. The one on my map led me back to my table, to my isolation, brewing in mediocre circumstances, trying to grade papers. My map used terse words and fake smiles. But the step I took was off the map, it went beyond the hatred I feel for a commitment I must fulfill honorably, with excellence. It left papers ungraded. It spoke with patience for a relationship that must wait behind phone calls and weekend flights to spend forever. It worried not about me; it listened and found waiting unobtrusive.

Her husband, I learned, works across the state and she’s driving across to see him. They’ve been doing this for two years. And will do it still for one more.

I thought fleetingly, while she was sharing, of the eight-hundred miles that separate me and Brad, and how we struggle to appreciate this far-away time before being together, proximally, permanently. About how she was trying something fresh and new, something as simple as spices in her coffee, after two years of regular separation from her permanent lover. Her spices gave me perspective.

Good luck, honey, she said as she left. For what remained of our relationship between Michigan and New York, she meant. Even though she was the one driving to bridge the chasm in a marriage. Three-hundred miles, maybe. Between two that are supposed to be one.

Good luck to you two, she says, and climbs in the van on her way to Flint.

Engagement Announcement

Tags

change, engagement, friends, future, God, love, marriage, proposal, relationship

In the picture, they’re dressed nice,
both in black sweaters, she in tights.

Frosted with glass, there are cupboards behind,
Mom and Dad’s kitchen—Iowa—both families intertwined.

We all met in seminary, intermingled with one another
She fell so gently, his steps so slow, so measured toward her.

I, so impatient, watching them come together
But now, it’s too soon, knowing they’ll spend forever.

Heart is Greater Than

Tags

answer, equation, future, God, heart, journey, love, Love wins, math, money, relationship, result, school, science

My new wallet has graffiti on the front—a chunk logo of NYC, spray paint dripping to the edges on a brick wall in some hypothetical back alley. There are no back alleys in the brick and mortar NYC. Front is back and up is down.

And graffiti on the back, too—a math problem, to be true. It shows: misshapen heart is greater than money sign. That’s the equation. I suppose the heart is love. Or love and relationship, interaction between people. All of that represented by a heart. The expression of, feeling of, act of one engaging with another in the interest of love. I can level with that. I imagine that my wallet means not the aorta-pumping, artery-clogging, triple-bypass kind of heart, but the mine is broken, I give you my, you make mine go sort of heart is greater than the money sign. Than the stuff we buy, the things we have, the paper inside our wallets.

And I agree that it is.

Now the giver of this East Coast souvenir and I, we ascribe to this math problem, both agreeing that the arrow is pointing in the correct direction, that full credit should be awarded to the solver of this problem. In the intricacies, in the blank space where we show our work, we pull from different equation sheets. And I’m coming to understand, as the Teacher of this math class takes us through the lessons in the book, that those equation sheets just might be able to beautifully complement one another.

The way Chemistry informs Physics. The way Algebra informs Trigonometry and Calculus. Different cheat sheets on the test, x’s and y’s all tangled up in the show-your-work space, and the same answer in a box at the bottom of the page.

REPOST: A Thousand Times

Tags

communication, conversation, dating, denial, future, life, no, relationship

A reposted entry from nearly three months ago.

Said no over coffee, commercial or cozy, twice or more
Over cider at dark cedar bars, yes, another—
Sitting on a picnic blanket, planes above, the lake a walk away
In snowfall, my socks wet with slush soaking in
With words, over messaging, staying home, saying simple no’s—
In the car, long roads home, sitting on the bumper in the drive
Over sushi, it’s someone else—
Practicing for a play, pretending, playing, pulling out
Over email, unpreferred, knew these words en route weeks ago.

Said no a thousand times.

One of these, by the math, has to be the last.

If No Hope

Tags

Africa, Congo, faith, family, future, Grand Rapids, healing, hope, hopeless, life, love, memory, past, rape, redemption, repair, violence, woman

If the Congolese woman cooking rice, crouching down, her dress furling curls of dust into the humid sky loses hope—

If when her khanga splits in two and they thrust an assault rifle where only her husband had ever nestled in—

If the whines, the whimpers, the hiccups, spring blossoms of hatred brighter than the patterns hugging her thighs cry—

If the cries escaping from her pursed, parched lips will never sing notes of forgiveness—

If her baby boy, frozen in fear, his toes in the mud outside the hut, holding an army jacket, colonial of the third rank, the man with his rifle inside mama, can’t forget—

Then hope, too, once was lost in the grid of Commerce, Bartlett and Division where the prostitutes stand and the Catholic schools, fatefully or ironically, cluster on the corner—

Then the deck of cards, slick with alcohol corners, which slipped from my fingers before choosing the suit, before the staircase, after the sofa—

Then the scavenger hunt, clothes on the floor, every third stair, the carpet, callous, knees meeting each step, is missing a clue, missing a map, missing a girl—

Then the jeans that are torn, ride the bus with no pants, will always be frayed, never sewn, never patched, no hope of beginning again.

In My Imagined Mind

Tags

baby, child, fantasy, future, Goodnight Moon, imagination, marriage, parents, pregnancy

The statistic said that babies start to develop their sense of hearing at thirteen weeks. At thirteen weeks, that baby doesn’t look much like a baby. She’s smushed and too small in all the wrong places, still curled up like a seahorse in a space inside someone else. That someone else will be me, I thought, drifting from the statistic into an imaginistic fantasy of some time years from now.

She’ll recognize the mother’s heartbeat, the little seahorse girl; she’ll be comforted by the cadence. I imagine lying in bed, my husband snuggled near my stomach, reading books to my belly. How silly. Two adults, tangled up in sheets in daylight, reading Goodnight Moon by memory.

Our little girl, before she’s born, will hear with her little smashed ears inside her water world, Daddy’s voice say goodnight to all the things she’ll love. Her favorite toy, her big brother, holding the bars of his crib. Goodnight to Mommy. He loves her more every minute, she hears him say. His hand on my stretched skin, our feet intertwined. In my future fantasy, I’m a pretty pregnant woman. All in the confines on my imagined mind.

Another Bite

Tags

airplane, anticipation, cycle, cyclic, decision, destiny, dice, downtown, entertainment, fate, flying, future, gambling, LaGuardia, life, Manhattan, New York City, NYC, relationship, repetition, restaurant, roll, tourist, travel, vacation, winter, year

I’ve only ever been to New York City once. One winter weekend, a handful of dice, shaken and tossed, landing haphazardly on the street corners all over Manhattan, jaywalking, jaywaiting, boarding the ferry in the cold.

I left LaGuardia a little cynical. Loved the people, of course, my dear friends, no doubt. Could have taken the city minus a whole handful of unlikes, maybe in a smaller chunks; maybe without the something sour in my mouth.

This world is cyclic, as much as I try to dodge the around-again.  Took twelve months for another go-round, to gamble big-city style with confidence. 

Adrenaline courses through my veins, poisoning my somber moments, deafening my silences, pulling insistently at the corners of my mouth.  I’m on a plane back to the Big Apple, to take another bite.  For another roll of the dice, bouncing on the green felt of island and ocean.  To play my cards in piano bars, write my fate idiomically on  Manhattan marquees, close my eyes, snake eyes, and cross the streets at stoplights. 

Another bite.  Roll again.  Okay, New York, here I come.