The Lucy Conundrum

Normally, if I am asked to liken myself to a Peanuts character—which is no longer as much of a rarity as it should be, in the age of memes—I'd have to say I'm Charlie himself. I'm a bit hapless at times, prone also to repeating mistakes and finding myself crushed all over again even though I should know better. Also, I am not a good baseball player.

But thinking about this blog, I realize I have become Lucy, the obnoxious one who continually sets up Mr. Brown for one of his disappointments. And all she does is offer to hold a football.

Just in the way that I flit back in here from time to time with every intent of opening anew this blog of mine, which I think about far more often than would be apparent to anyone who clicks in to find I have once again not created a new post.

So, thinking about it, and myself as a writer, and how keeping this blog made me a better writer, I went and reread a bunch of it last weekend. It was sort of like reading an old diary, except that enough time had passed for most of the entries that it was a bit like reading the diary of someone else.

I wonder if Lucy fully intends to hold still each time. I try to imagine the scenarios that could pull a person away suddenly in the span between when Charlie starts his run and when he reaches that pivotal moment when foot fails to meet ball and he goes off hurtling through the sky. I wonder if Charles Schultz ever thought about the physics involved, and the impossibility of such a thing really being caused by the lack of a football.

I wonder if anyone still clicks in here. I wonder if I can rediscover that part of me that sought out little tales and small jokes to bring back to all those I affectionately called "Blogreader."

Can't hurt to try.

If nothing else, it's a good way to avoid work.

Hometown

The path from Chicago to Naperville is a simple one. Direct, too. One needs only to wade through the traffic on the Eisenhower Expressway until it merges with I-88, formerly called I-5, and recently redubbed the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway, for those of you thinking of making the trek and wishing to navigate by Presidents alone. From there you have your choice of several exits.

I took the first one.

I took the first Naperville exit, aptly named Naperville Road, and headed south. Before long, I unconsciously veered off onto a shortcut to where I was headed. As soon as my brain realized that I was taking a shortcut, its particulars dissolved, leaving my only with guesswork and memory to guide me.

My guesswork succeeded. My memories were sound.

I went to high school in Naperville, learned to drive on its streets. How is it that I can remember how to drive and not where this street goes?

For all my eagerness to escape, I find it is Naperville which leaps forward most easily if I am asked to name my hometown. I am not from here. I have few remaining ties. It is simply the circumstances of a rather nomadic childhood coupled with the importance one attaches to the years of puberty and those that immediately follow—becoming an adult and such—that give it this claim on me, or me on it.

I parked the car and began to walk.

The names of the streets were all familiar. They looked like the right names. I wondered to myself how many times I might have walked these streets. The names were familiar, and I felt like I knew where I was, but it seemed at least possible that I had never been here at all, had perhaps only read a particularly vivid novel set here. Down this road is the spot where the protagonist quarreled with a friend, only a few feet from where they had met in the first place. A mile in that direction and you'll be at the library where the protagonist watched "A Hard Day's Night" 30 times in a video carrel through headphones, trying to somehow memorize John Lennon, the better to emulate or become him.

Friends had warned me to look out for how different everything would be, how much had changed. I was struck instead at how much it looked the same. I was in an old part of the city, home to a college campus and some old houses. Each looked more or less as they always had. Those girls giggling themselves down the sidewalk on their way to or from class may as well have been the same girls for whom I used to detour when walking this area in the warm months, in my 8th grade hope that some of them might be out sunbathing.

As I walked, I now felt that I truly knew where I was, how these streets fit together to form the part of town I was in. I could not, however, recall exactly how this fitted into the town as a whole. I could picture in my mind what it looked like when this area gave way to to the more highly developed downtown area, which I knew was west of me, but not a sense of how far away that was.

A very tall brunette brushed past me on my left.

"Excuse me," I said. "How far am I from a restaurant?" Already, just the phrasing of the question made me feel weird, like I was claiming I had crashed in a meteor, or perhaps that my follow-up should be to to act manic and crazed and inquire as to the year or the name of the president. For her part, she took it in stride.

"A couple blocks that way." She pointed west. So now the distance was more or less fixed. It felt closer than I would have guessed.

We each walked on, her now a few steps ahead of me. She had a particularly unflattering walk, no doubt due partially to what appeared to be very uncomfortable shoes. Women confuse me.

After a few paces, she stopped and turned back to me.

"Actually, go a couple blocks this way first, then a couple that way. You go that way now and you'll just end up at the post office."

"Ah," I said. "And the post office, I take it, has substandard fare?"

She laughed a genuine laugh and was suddenly pretty.

"I don't know. Haven't seen the menu."

"Mustn't judge, then."

I walked on.

A beautiful morning

I ventured forth to obtain a sandwich from an enormous corporation to serve as my breakfast. The storms of the night were gone, and the remaining clouds were as rich, creamy and textured as a watercolor. This made the Hancock Building and the other spikes of steel which line the eastern sky seem much closer than normal, like they had been pulled inland because of the rain.

The birds were out in force, doing whatever they do in the mornings. One tiny black one with a yellow beak hopped across the hood of my car as I waited at a light, stopping only to chirp at me as it passed. A congregation of gulls had come in from the lake to murmur at one another on the signs and rooftop of the Burger King on Chicago Avenue.

There's a bakery I'd never seen before just before Damen Avenue. The Bleeding Heart, which appeals both to my fondness for ghastly things and my political orientation. I wish I'd seen it before I'd purchased a sack of food at McDonald's. Each letter of the name is laid out on its own wooden circle, painted an unfortunate pink. I plan to wander back there in the next couple of days, to see what it is like.

Last summer, the combination music store/cheap diner (boasting the "Best Sloppy Joes in town," served under a wall of used guitars) experimented with having a curbside coffee cart. I pulled over out of curiosity and they gave me a free cup in honor of being a new customer. The cart is no longer something they do. My guess is that they were handicapped from the start simply by being situated on the north side of the road. The cars who can pull over most easily are pointing at poorer neighborhoods. Had they crossed the street and picked up some of the traffic headed east, toward the financial and business hub of the city, they might still be there.

Or maybe they just gave out too many free introductory cups to folks like me, who are not generally up and about during the morning hours. At any rate, I never returned to buy a cup.

The rain seems to have cleaned the air, washing away the recent rash of heat in the process. I looked at the glow in the east, slightly to the left of the Hancock Building, so easily mistaken for the Sears Tower even by lifelong residents with a poor sense of geography. I looked at the layers of clouds and the birds and the buildings.

It was a beautiful morning in Chicago.

Geometry envy

I saw reports on overseas blogs of an eclipse which happened this evening, and was visible from Europe, Africa and parts of Australia.

I was burning with jealousy for no apparent reason. I'm sure these things happen from time to time, and yet the last time I can recall one specifically was when my class dutifully trooped outdoors with special viewing gear some time in elementary school. And that wasn't even the same sort of eclipse. The eclipse this evening was a lunar eclipse (in case the whole "evening" thing didn't give it away). You can look directly at a lunar eclipse.

It's a strange thing to witness: three celestial bodies going about their orbits and hurtling through space suddenly find themselves in a straight line. The shadow of us blocks the light of the sun from the moon, keeps it from bouncing back to us. It's a strange thing to witness, and our understanding of what takes place only helps to make it more strange and wondrous.

I wish I could have witnessed the eclipse, perhaps, because today I am feeling like I could use something poetic. I wish I could have captured images of this accident of geometry and saved them somewhere close by, for use as inspiration when I am feeling less inspired.

I could take out a picture and remember the beautiful thing that happened in space.

I think of Richard Feynman, the physicist and writer. He said:

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"