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.