What a Trip!

Dear Friends and Family,
What a trip this was! The journey began in 2004 when Barack Obama gave his speech at the Democratic Convention. I jumped on board after reading his book, “Dreams of My Father,” and the ride towards Election night took us through the suburbs of Milwaukee and Indianapolis.
Monday and Tuesday we were in suburban Republican-land outside of Indianapolis knocking on doors with two other people we brought with us from Chicago. Jing wasn’t even a citizen but said she just wanted to get involved. She’s from China, married to an American businessman and has a green card. Rogier, with dual U.S. and Dutch citizenship, was from Amsterdam and came to Chicago just to join in on the campaigning!
What an organization Obama had in Indiana! There were 63 staging areas in Marion country alone! It was run by cell phones, computers, young and old volunteers and people who donated their houses, food, time, energy and enthusiasm.
On our way back to Chicago on Election day we stopped at the campaign headquarters and got four tickets to the “party.” After leaving Jing and Rogier, we drove home, had a beer, relaxed a little by watching CNN then got on our bikes to go to Grant Park.
“Is this the line to get in?” I asked some people standing six abreast at Congress and Michigan Avenues. Someone waved a ticket, so we started walking back to the end of the line. We walked and walked and walked and by the time we got to Roosevelt Avenue three-quarters of a mile down the line we still couldn’t see the end. We crossed a grassy area heading towards Shedd Aquarium and saw a bunch of people heading the other way. “I think that group is heading to the entrance-let’s go!” So we joined the throng of line-cutters. Everyone was friendly and hopeful that we’d get in. After going through three lines of security we made it in and got to watch the festivities on the “Jumbo-tron” set up on the left side of the park.
It felt like there were a million people in the Loop that night. Everyone was smiling, everyone was cheering, everyone was hopeful. I’m writing this and trying not to use the clichés but it did feel historic. That’s why Jing was there. Rogier was there because he said the whole world was hopeful that Obama would win. He wanted to help.
We got home and stayed up until we saw that Indiana went for Obama. We clinked out glasses, told each other “Good Job!” and went to bed. It was a great day!

Michelle's Speech and Fox News

Last night I watched Michelle Obama offer a moving speech. Her delivery was so inclusive that I felt she was talking to me about our mutual American family experience. Hard work and doing a good job were the mantras I grew up with too, and, like her, parenting was my most important though most difficult job. It was like we were soul sisters.
In other words, though some might say we are very different from each other, I really connected with her. Neither of my parents went to college, and they dreamed of a better life for me. I've raised two daughters, was a professional teacher, and married my soul mate. But I'm 15 years older than Michelle, I'm white, and I'm not a native Chicagoan. I was born in a small town in Missouri and lived in Chicago suburbia much of my life. But these facts didn't deter me from "getting" what Michelle was saying about her and Barack's background. We've all been part of the American dream. And like her, I know that that dream is disappearing. I know that for my thirty-year old daughter who works hard at a full-time job, and shares some of the parenting chores with her Mr. Mom husband, the American dream of owning their own home is fading.
But it's more than middle class dreams and values that have deteriorated. Our country's focus and demeanor have changed also. We're a more unforgiving, selfish even punitive bunch of people. And we're greedy. We're afraid that others will get more than their share or will take our share.
But last night Michelle talked about a better world, a world that could be. She talked about not settling for this one. And she moved me, as a mom, a daughter, a wife and a citizen.
But as I listened to her words, the cameras panned the audience. The only faces showing emotion were faces of color. The white Democrats looked bored, complacent or unengaged. What was going on?
And today I found out the reason for this impression. The feed for these camera shots came from only one channel, Fox News, the biased, right-leaning station notorious for shading perception. I had to find this out from Tom Hartman on Air America Radio. I would have appreciated reading about this in the regular media, but we don't get that kind of news. In fact, NBC spent more time talking about the feud between the Obama and Clinton camps and the resentment of some of the Clinton delegates than the issues brought up by Michelle Obamas illuminating speech.
Barack and Michelle Obama are symbols connecting America's past with our future. As the First Family they will serve as role models for all Americans.

My Aunt Faye

You’ve got to love someone who loves dancing, hates clock watching and always says yes to new experiences. In her home on Sarah Lane, next to the “Schaff” collage made by her granddaughter Ashley and husband Ed are the words “Life, you gotta love it!” Her niece Debby designed the message, and it says a lot about Aunt Faye. She was a liver of life. For example, she learned Mah Jongg when she was almost 80! She loved travel, loved music, loved her family and was loved by many people.
She was Betty’s little sister and at times played the part perfectly. Exasperatingly late to appointments and bridge dates she usually just shrugged her shoulders and flashed that endearing smile. One of her boyfriends presented her with a clock with the twelve numerals piled at the bottom and “Who cares!?” at the Noon position. She proudly hung it in her kitchen. [It is now proudly hanging in our kitchen.]
But she wasn’t irresponsible. As a single mom before it became trendy, she worked and raised her two children with the help of her Missouri farmer parents. Mike and Sharon cherish those chicken coop/ outhouse memories even today.
The family moved back to St. Joe when she married Frank Schaff and was a wife again. Soon Laura was born and the family of five settled on Chatham Lane. But Aunt Faye wasn’t just wife and mother, she was also a business woman. We used to say that she could sell anything if she believed in it. She sold World Books, magazines, and knitting machines. She also worked at the grocery store her brother-in-law Jack managed, taking and filling orders. The store had a free delivery service in those days. In fact the whole family worked in that store to some capacity. I used to help fill orders every high school summer. “Anyone feel like some chocolate?” she’d ask before going down the office stairs to buy a big bag of Brach’s peanut clusters. We’d each have one or two then she’d finish off the bag herself and never gain a pound!
Maybe it was all that energy . It was even apparent over the phone while talking to her customers. “I felt like I knew them really well,” she explained. But one time she got a little too familiar her customer friends. “When a customer called and asked if the store carried 'peas in a can' I told them 'No, we let them just roll around on the floor!' The customer hung up on me and later called Jack to complain.”
Though some of us see St. Joe as a small-minded small town, Aunt Faye was its hospitality ambassador. She loved living there. When more and more of her friends complained about being homesick living in retirement places like California and Arizona she was adamant about never leaving St. Joe. She relished small town living with her network of friends. She often presented her Oklahoma and Seattle families with gifts of Missouri tomatoes and peaches whenever she came to visit. She even brought a “mess of” Missouri morel mushrooms to Seattle for a special dinner. I’ve always envied her cooking, especially her frying. Her secret to fried eggplant, fried morels, fried fish and frog legs is what Aly and Whitey would call “mindfulness.” When she cooks she pays attention to the process. She may neglect the hour but she never neglected the food turning golden brown in her electric skillet.
Every challenge was met with Aunt Faye energy and spunk. That divorce didn’t get her down even though the role of divorcee in those days was a social stigma. Lung cancer surgery didn’t get her down. She visited Laura and Blake not long afterward and with only 1 1 /3 lungs completed a strenuous hike at the most northwestern point of the continental U.S. and Myleodisplastic Syndorom couldn’t stop her. She continued her busy water aerobic, Mah Jongg, bridge and church activities schedule, occasionally boosted by blood transfusions. But after the gift of an Alaskan cruise to her kids the transfusions became too frequent. Once again she met that challenge by declaring she would do it her way. She wanted to be home, surrounded by her family. Though the end may have taken longer than she wished, she gave her friends and family the time to say good bye. We will miss her.

Another Blogger

I can't really call myself a blogger since I'm not a regular writer/contributor to this blogspot. I usually just write about trips, family, holidays, and other major events in my life. This isn't one of those. I'm writing about finding a blogger who connects with me. Her blog is called "Cancer Bitch," and I discovered it after hearing her on NPR.
"Oh, my god, that's my writing teacher!" I said out loud as I stared at the little portable radio on the table in kitchen of our new apartment. I recognized her voice before it sunk in that she WAS the Cancer Bitch. I knew she sometimes contributed to NPR with little essays about food, feminism, and life. The topic that day was much more personal and a little frightening, but still detailed with the same humor and insight found in her other essays.
She must have been diagnosed with the big "C" while we were living in Seattle. (I just realized that I have trouble saying and even typing that word. Is that why she's chosen the pseudonym Cancer Bitch to show it's not a death pronouncement and that you don't have to take situation lying down?) Her blog records her feisty acceptance of her situation.
I could never share such a truamatic experience so publicly. But how would she keep chemo a secret? Her hair loss, pictured on www.cancerbitch.blogspot.com, gives testament to her membership into a new club. And does belonging to this new club not only change her identity but her focus and perspective as a writer? She's not just the Jewish feminist writer/teacher I knew five years ago. And then I discover while reading past posts that she got married while I was away from Chicago. That makes me happy. I guess that puts her in the married Jewish Feminist writers with cancer club.

In My Next Life

I always said that in my next life I’d like to be a back up singer, the one in the slinky dress who stands off to the side swaying and singing harmony. So a few years ago when my twenty-three year old daughter asked if I wanted to accompany her on a weekend gig with her band I was ecstatic. If I couldn’t be a back up singer at least I could be a 52 year-old groupie.
You might be asking why I aspired to just be in the background instead of reincarnating as a Janis Joplin or an Aretha Franklin. Well, first of all, Janis over-dosed and Aretha gained about two hundred pounds. Who was I to think I could handle the success if these two icons couldn’t? Also by staying in the shadows I could still enjoy all the perks of fame without that pressure.
A few weeks later the two of us were following the band’s van towards Fort Walton Beach. Their dated and dented vehicle was stuffed with drums, guitars and seven other musicians. We pulled up in front of bar with the proverbial neon beer signs welcoming us. As I helped them unpack my daughter’s boy friend, the bass player, explained to me that their band, Pop Canon, wouldn’t even play until around 11 pm, after the first band had finished.
Around midnight I was sitting at the bar drinking a Schlitz and watching my baby girl belting out her song, “Fuck you, fuck you, you broke my heart.” I pondered the coincidences of life. Had my dreams influenced her to spend weekends this way?
An hour and a half later the last song exploded through the amplifiers. Ah, done at last. While I discreetly removed the wadded up pieces of napkin from my ears, the band began taking apart their sound equipment and instruments. Around 2:30 a.m. I asked her if we were ready to go. “No, Mom,” she said, holding a few CD’s and pairs of socks and underwear with their Punk Rock Idiot logo silk screened on them,
“I still have to sell the merchandise.”
It wasn’t until we got to her car around 3:30 that I discovered there were no motel reservations. So we drove down the dark Florida highway for about an hour counting “NO Vacancy” signs. Finally, about halfway to Pensacola we pulled into a Super 8. As the van sat idling, we walked into the office. “Do you have your AARP card?” my young daughter whispered as we approached the sleepy-eyed man behind the desk. “We’ll need two rooms … for six.” my daughter requested causally.
Our room had two double beds. At 5:30 am as my daughter and I got into one bed and the lead guitar and bass player got into the other, I wondered how the other seven people were doing in the room next door. But I didn’t feel guilty at all having an entire double bed almost all to myself. In fact it was at that moment that I decided that in my next life I’d rather return as a bird.

You call this cold?!?

At 6:00 am this wintery Friday morning I stood in front of my bathroom mirror lathering Vaseline on my face. It was an old trick I'd learned from my Norwegian mountaineer friend, Chuck Gustafson. He’s winter camped, cross-country skied and snow shoed in the Cascade and Olympic Mountains for over thirty years and the skin on his face is still as soft as a baby’s.
I had already put on my long johns and fleece vest and decided at the last minute to wear my Gore-Tex rain pants over my biking tights. Like a knight preparing for battle, I slipped my knit neck warmer over my head, trying not to touch the grease on my face. I was thankful that the Norwegian cure for wind burn was Vaseline and not whale blubber.
We met our friends, Mike and Jerry, at 6:45 on Lincoln Avenue and biked five miles to the Daley Plaza where we got free coffee and a piece of semi-frozen Eli’s cheesecake. This was the Chicago Winter Bike to Work day. January 18 was the anniversary of the coldest recorded date here in Chicago: 27 below. It was more than thirty degrees warmer this morning, and for the first mile I was nice and toasty. But although I was wearing Gore-Tex mittens, a wool hat under my helmet, smart wool socks and all the other accouterments I had gathered for winter biking my fingers and cheeks soon began to ache. By the time we pedaled into the Loop I was stiffening despite my lube job. But seeing about fifty other cyclists gathering around the Chicago Bike Federation's tent and downing some of their coffee, I began to warm up. Channel 2 TV was there and interviewed Jerry. We took our perfunctory group photo next to the Picasso then headed to the Wishbone restaurant for their early bird breakfast special. This is what I call “Wintering in Chicago!”

CHANGE

I’m changing my profile. I’m no longer the “Midwesterner living in Seattle”. In August, for various reasons, we moved back to Chicago. Mainly it’s our kids’ fault. They’re all married now and producing offspring. Seattle, two or three time zones away, seemed too removed from the action. And my mom, I needed to be closer to her too. Here’s how we’re managing this latest change of residence:

We’re snowed in. If we’d left yesterday we would have made it home, now it’s a waiting game. “Sue, I need to leave…now,” Leo is saying to me as I’m checking the weather on my Mom’s computer. The place he wants to immediately quit is St. Joseph, Missouri. We’re here for the holidays and to help Mom get back on her feet. She’s been sick over four weeks and at 88 needs time to get over things like the flu and bronchitis. She’s feeling feisty again, and it’s time to head back to Chicago.
But there’s reports of snow in Iowa, where we hit last week’s blizzard, and rain and sleet in St. Louis. The computer helps a little. We can get on MoDot and Idot, transportation sites, and find out the road conditions. Then you sort of have to guess-timate the best time and route. Unfortunately, these two world travelers are having trouble navigating through the Heartland. I’ve forgotten how fast these winter storms can arrive. It’s been four winters since I experienced a blizzard.
When we lived in Seattle I proudly called myself a Midwesterner. To me it suggested someone tough, hard-working and independent. I made sure my Seattle neighbors knew I was from Chicago, that nitty, gritty, blustering city. However I omitted that it had recently been conquered by Starbucks, suburban-like townhouse developments and flowering medians on major thoroughfares. I didn’t tell them that Chicago, once the hog capital of the world, had become sissified.
Maybe I like nitty gritty because I’m from farm stock. My granddad with his perpetual suntan line across his brow wore his leathered face as a badge signifying the unending chores demanding his attention. My grandmother “Memo” carried an extra eighty pounds as her badge. The only time I ever saw her out of the kitchen was when she went to her garden or the chicken house to gather eggs or grab the soon-to-be-wrung neck of an unsuspecting chicken. She cooked gigantic meals for breakfast and “dinner,” the noon time meal which fed not only her husband and other members of the family but also the occasional hired hand who helped out with seasonal duties.
Coming from a family of farmers perhaps is also the reason I like the outdoors. Leo and I used to volunteer once a week at the University of Washington Arboretum as “volunteer gardeners.” Actually, we were weeders. We pulled unwanted stuff like wild berry root out of the ground, if we could. One day while trying to lasso in some untamed morning glories, Karen,our supervisor, remarked to me, “You can sure tell you guys are from the Midwest; you’re such hard workers!” Later I learned, as a transplanted Milwaukee-an, she, like me, didn’t feel like she fit into to the west coast lifestyle.
But if you like the out-of-doors, you’d like Seattle. You can bike out your front door, get on the Burke-Gilman path and head for Seward park. After six miles you’d be rewarded with a view of Mount Ranier and Mount Baker while riding along the edge of Lake Washington. Or you can hop in your car, drive 40 minutes on I-90 and take a 4-mile round-trip hike on Tiger mountain with an elevation gain of 1600 feet. At the top, you’d get another view of Ranier then look back over your shoulder and see the skyline of Seattle. Or in the winter you could cross-country ski at Cabin Creek, less than an hour’s drive, and not only get a month’s worth of exercise but a soul-filling dose of nature. Then there’s Seattle’s weather. You may never see Ranier, Baker, or a skyline through the mist and the fog, but the temperature never varies too far from the 40 to 50 degree range.
But that kind of weather got on my nerves. I like change, in temperature, in weather conditions, in life style. Things were too predictable there. Although I knew I’d dearly miss our friends, I was ready for the more erratic atmosphere of a big, boisterous city.
So now I living in a city where the temperature can sink to -13 one day and a week later percolate around 60 degrees. I can wear my new down-filled parka on Monday and be in shirt sleeves by Friday. On Monday I might be biking to my part-time teaching job and by Wednesday burrowing through a snow drift to the El to get to school. We’ll dropeverything of course to go cross-country skiing here on the nearby park district golf course (elevation gain 5 feet)while there’s still snow on the ground. And we'll take a bike ride along Lake Michigan in a 25 mile headwind, and get blown home in half the time on the return trip. Ah, Sweet Home Chicago.