Pumpkin wicked this way comes

The stem is amazing and sculptural, a thick twist of green and grey vine that suggests the violence of the harvest, where a living plant is wrested from the field. The other is a huge, hideous bumpy orange gourd. Another, cream colored and unblemished, tranquil and deathly pale. They are fantastic, unlike the usual run of orange bowling balls that conform to type.

When we ask for a price, the girl isn’t sure and calls her dad over. He hesitates and the pause is significant. The pause is the pause of gauging how much the market will bear, of reassessing the market and determining two things. One is that the cultural value of pumpkins is higher this year. The other is that the farmers are getting the idea that our town has changed from being a simple, unsophisticated, regular place, to one with its share of foolish city folks who will pay absurd prices for pumpkins because they don’t know any better or because they are pressed for time, lack their own fields and/or have been afflicted by the viral creep of Samhain that fills our newsfeeds with a bumper crop of photographs of babies in the pumpkin field. With a little effort every holiday can be that little bit more special. Pumpkins are this year’s seasonal photo op.

The Selection of the Pumpkin is like the selection of the Christmas tree, where you venture into to nature and find the perfect object and then you take it home and bestow upon it all of your family’s whimsy and skill with Pinterest-perfect crafts, to etch your clever idea with a laser or a drill, pinpricking the thick pumpkin shell with a million points of light to create a pointillist effect that will impress the parents who regularly accompany the trick or treaters. Throw in some political commentary with your professionally carved Obama pumpkin. Really think about it. It’s an important part of your family’s brand.

seasonal hoax

The farmer would know that people are now buying multiple pumpkins to create displays, that pumpkin spice lattes have had a toxmoplasmosic effect and we are compelled to mark the end of the harvest with more elaboration as we become less connected to it. That fall kicks off an extended season of decorative expectations, starting with scarecrows and the gradual introduction of candles. One pumpkin will not do. One needs hay bales, 4-8 pumpkins, mums, a scarecrow.

How much for the sculptural stem pumpkin? He looks at us, not as the weekly customers who buy his peppers and squash, but as big city pumpkin seekers, the kind of people who don matching sweaters for a trip out to the farm. “Twenty,” he says. What about the bumpy one? “Twenty/Twenty-five?”

There is a food truck parked outside. They have broken ground on the Whole Foods.

“No way,” my husband says. Not because he had a fixed price in his head that he’d be willing to pay for a pumpkin mind you, but it just seems high. This is a reasonable, affordable place where you can buy a house for under $200,000. Don’t be selling us your big city pumpkins.

Pumpkin season in Indiana

“I was down in Birmingham,” the farmer says, “and that’s what they pay. A man tells me if I have any left next week, the day before Halloween, he’ll give me $40 a piece. I’ve got 200 pumpkins. He said he’d take them all.”

We buy something smaller and more regular for $5, but later my husband wishes we’d gone all out and bought the big one. They’re cool looking. A year from now, the $20 pumpkin will have gone the way of the egg cream. Remember when you used to just buy a pumpkin for $5 and stick a knife in it? Those were the days.

Images: Monks Market, screenshot of the Brooklyn and Bailey YouTube Channel, hoax condom from Snopes, one of a fleet of pumpkin-laden school buses in Indiana.

There are no words

The members meet weekly in a church hall. They practice giving speeches and speaking extemporaneously because at some point they realized this was a skill they lacked or a streak of potential that had gone unfulfilled for too long.

I imagine they go because they are tired of the palpitations, the queasy current of nervous electricity that shoots up the back of their legs when having to take the podium, or there hangs over them like a cartoon storm cloud the deeper fear of actually not having anything worth saying, their thoughts unformed or shapeshifting. They are failing to convey their points or they wish to exorcise their embolalia. Yes, of course, I am projecting.

I am sitting in a small row of chairs with a folder in my hands, an agenda written out to the minute, with all the members given formal titles for the roles they will assume, like the Introducer of the Welcoming Speaker. It is like a play about a play about a meeting and the ritual of the symbolism of the meeting. It is what makes city council meetings on television fascinating in their excruciating verbal obfuscation, the saying of that which is meant to convey politeness and procedural correctness when what you are feeling is rage or fear.

They are so welcoming. It’s even my title in the ritual symbolism of their meeting etiquette, where I am Welcomed Guest Wertis. I want to take that leap into the mosh pit of their hospitality, but at the same time something is holding me back, the fear perhaps that I would be under obligation to practice speeches I didn’t want to give or find myself stating, in week after week of Table Topics that, “I have no words.”

Good ideas are not at my beck and call in that way. Maybe it would be good training for the words, to roust them out and make them march in straight lines, not meander aimlessly, but this could be achieved by journaling exercises rather than by devoting the time to come to meetings and having this precise verbal choreography with people.

In spite of the time limitations, the Key Speaker runs over. The warning card is flashed more and more emphatically by the Keeper of Time in the front row.

Some of the Toastmasters have been in this together for a decade. I find this both touching and disconcerting. I had thought it was more like a course you took, where you solved your public speaking issues and moved on, but it is more a club where they take comfort in the rituals, a sort of fan group for an ideal state of a very certain kind of polite eloquence. They draw closer together through succinct personal revelations but maintaining a correct distance. Feedback is given not by name but by role. I thought the Master of Table Topics did a commendable job keeping time.  There are leadership tracks you can join, a progression of speaking accomplishments to achieve, wider audiences to be addressed regionally, internationally. Is this my show? Are these my people?

What if, during the meeting, an emergency happened and we were forced to stay in the church hall until the all-clear sounded, how long would it take for the formality to erode? Would the topic be correctly adjourned in lieu of determining the severity of the situation? What if someone is an unreformed circuitous talker? Would the group turn on him or her? I imagine pairs being elected to venture into the church basement in search of nuclear era snacks. If the situation were worse than we had at first imagined, how long would it be until the longest-serving members of the club revealed their true feelings about each other? Perhaps one person would throw down her knitting and cry out, “I’m tired of being so darned nice all of the time!” and made a run for it into a thick cloud of waiting poison.

The folder sits on my desk at work all summer, an unanswered invitation, offering the promise to be a different person, one who speaks with a firm but measured conviction on a variety of topics, who can turn a phrase like an unexpected flash of silver in the otherwise muddy creek of human communication where the cliches and the long winded preambles sway like aquatic weeds, the point falling like a lost lure into the silt. Weeks pass and I know that I should say something, thank you for having me to the meeting, anything, but the words just won’t come.

Dressing for disaster

What do you wear from your capsule wardrobe as you prepare to maybe get stuck on the highway in a snowstorm?

The older daughter has a doctor’s appointment an hour and a half away.

I wear jeans, a black cardigan and grey sneakers. Easy. Just as well not to be distracted. I pack boots in case. The boots are not on the list of the 33 items I have pulled for the month’s fashion challenge, see previous post, but I am not getting frostbitten feet for the sake of “rules.”

Shopping is partly about the illusion of control. The week starts out with a survivalist determination, keeping the cars filled, the phones charged. I go buy most of the things that you should carry in your car. On the rare days when my windshield freezes over, I scrape it with whatever I can find, the unreturned hotel keycard, a squeegee, a hot tea towel. It’s time for an ice scraper and a brush. I buy a small bag of cat litter and a tow rope (that’s insane) and I pack sleeping bags.

I have driven this way many times but never alone or just with a child, never with instructions for clearing snow out of the tailpipe. There are a lot of trucks. We go by the sign for thegolfchurch.com and the most ancient Stuckey’s billboard with it’s sunfaded, blistered illustration of ice cream sundaes. Heavy raindrops splatter down at one point, but then stop. At Gardendale, the most truly enormous tallest cement cross hoves into sight and slips away.

We arrive. The weather is in abeyance. The hospital is designed to not feel like a hospital. The lobby has a cathedral ceiling with a sweep of glass and a curving reception desk.

Shopping for clothes is also about the illusion of control. The interview suit, the lucky boots, the perfect lipstick. Like shopping for milk and bread, or beer and dog food, however you imagine your disaster scenario. When I go to the supermarket the next day there has been a run on organic, free range eggs.

We shop to be prepared, to undertake an activity of preparation, scurrying about on the darkening roads, as if there were something we could do to stave off whatever is gathering in the clouds and signified by the rainbow filled shapes that pulse over the map with every weather report.

When the weather advisory lifts, will we be overwhelmed by choices?

Sitting in the consultation room we are without windows to watch the rain begin or hear the quickening rattle of sleet. We have made it this far. We’ll just have to see.

When we come out, the sky is grainy but dry. I drive and drive until at last the bridge over the Tennessee River rises up before us and we are on the final road home. And so there is no need for the sleeping bags, the boots, the tow rope, which have offered the illusion of protection, like the other half of my closet, packed with clothes for other seasons, other occasions. Each day is it’s own journey, what you wear, what you carry, what you leave behind. No one can ever accurately predict exactly what you will need, not even you.

Photo of the GFBC cross by Ben Tate via Panoramio, with permission.

Cat outta Leytonstone

He was a cat out of Leytonstone. We found him through the classifieds in the London Loot and I brought him home in an apple box on the tube.

Until recently, we would joke that he was the honey badger of cats. He don’t care. He could fix you with a belligerent stare that said Feed me or That’s my spot, Dog. He was black and white and comical. He had a big head and in his prime he weighed over a stone, about 16 pounds, but when we took him to the vet yesterday he was just under 7 and there was a mass on his spleen and so we did what we had to do.

It is the first day of spring, after unseasonable biting cold, the air is soft and you can feel the warmth of the sun. This seems unfair that he has made it through the winter and missed out on the first evening he could have sat out on the deck.

He was really old. We were in our 20s when we got him. He sniffed the Moses basket with the baby. The girls staggered under his weight as they carried him around and posed for photographs. The older daughter fell asleep holding him in her arms the night before he died, after we had told them we thought his end was near. I came back from tennis and found them both asleep on the living room floor. She was still on the beanbag and he had gone back to his spot on the rug, lying in this facedown posture he had adopted as part of his decline. The thing about pets is that you sign up for this. That kitten or puppy you bring home will get old and die. They teach us about death, I tell the younger daughter after school, before we go home.

The ground around our house is stony and filled with roots. It is an effort just to plant a bulb, the tip of the trowel immediately hitting a dense network of fibers. A box with a cat would be impossible. You would have to dig a deep hole, because of the wildlife, and you might make a good start and hit a rock and have to start all over again. It would take all weekend and be grotesque, like a scene from a National Lampoon movie.

We chose the group cremation and scattering of ashes in the woods or farm of a man who was in the vet’s office that day, who we glimpsed through the door, who wore a fawn colored corduroy coat.

I will not bore you with the charming details of his life, his fear of a certain 70s pop song or his love of chèvre, his last meal, and asparagus; the way he liked to lie on my chest; how kind he was to the second cat or the time he got his head stuck in a can and I thought we were being burgled. It was good of you to read this far, even if you were only skipping ahead to the punch line, the realization that animals are brave because they have no choice.

Cabbages and kings

If you remember the game SimCity that used to come preloaded with Apple computers in the 1900s, you will be able to picture the random piece of terrain you were assigned upon which to would build your dream city. You will think of it when you visit places like Washington, DC’s National Harbor, which I have written about previously, where I just spent several days at a conference.

You got your land and you built a coal or nuclear power plant. You built the electric grid and laid down roads, which would eventually swarm with ant-like traffic. You put down units of housing which might become trash-strewn lots with high crime rates or grow into dark glass towers. You could check the stats and the growth rate, add industrial units if jobs were needed. Periodically you would receive feedback: “Residents demand a stadium” or there might be an explosion at the nuclear plant, with little particles of radioactivity smudging out bits of the roads or buildings.

A quarter of a century later, I remember it fondly. It preceded the Sims, whose tacky condos and pets and relationships would corrupt what may have been a perfect game. A current iteration exists, which we gave the Older Daughter for Christmas, called Roller Coaster Tycoon.

National Harbor has no public transportation, but they seem to have gotten away with it, like the Walrus and the Carpenter in the poem, who lure the baby oysters out to nowhere and eat them.

On arrival there are girls in leotards or with exposed midriffs and starched glittery bows and gold lipstick and tubercular blooms of red upon the cheek. No, not conference entertainment, well, sort of, but cheerleaders there for some kind of convention. Teams of parents are wearing baggy sponsorship T-shirts or odd shades of green. In we filter, with our tote bags and a different shade of enthusiasm.

The hotel is set, as the name suggests, at the edge of a harbor. It is hard to say where the magical world of the hotel ends, with its townhouses within an atrium, and the fake town beyond the fields of landscaped cabbages begins. There is an ice rink and a miniature Stonehenge set by the side of a road, themed restaurants, and ragged metal statuary. You leave the hotel and enter one of the eight-lane highways that connect Maryland, Virginia and “the District.” The sign for Maryland says, “Enjoy your visit.” Why not something about the state’s assets or its beauty. Why not, “Welcome home”?

I am not staying at the hotel, but with friends from London who now live in Maryland, in an apartment building. It is filled with people, young people, young people in duffel coats. An older guy, maybe in his 30s, stops by the concierge desk: losing his hair, dark clothes and dark sneakers with a day-glo green sole. He’s asking the concierge about his son. “He’s in North Carolina?”

“No,” the concierge says, “he’s in Florida.”

“That’s right,” says the man, “That’s correct,” as if he were administering some kind of test. Later he will tell people about the conversation, in passing. Let it be noted that he is good with people, he makes an effort.

A woman is in the process of leaving her apartment, already bundled into a belted black down coat, talking on the phone as she gets her keys. The door is ajar and I see her showroom-style kitchen, all burled granite and wood and halogen. I had to make a note of my friends’ apartment number so that I could find my way back, like a parking bay for people. I did not want to find myself pushing random buttons in the elevator wondering, Where might they live?

I had forgotten what it is like to live in an apartment building. The elevator door slides open like a curtain, each passenger a new act. You can hear their conversations under the doors, their phones ringing through the walls. In the elevator are minutes from the latest tenants meeting. The last item on the agenda is Disposal of Household Grease: Best Practices.

There are more cabbages in my friends’ neighborhood, arranged in planters like profiteroles. Here we have music playing on the street and people eating Saturday lunch in restaurants and the educational children’s toy shop and the posh wine shop and a place that sells pernickety sweaters and Nordic fashion. They are having a closing down sale and before I enter the shop I know that these are going to be the kind of clothes I hate and they will be, even on final sale, too expensive.

“Oh,” remarks one of the sales people/owners as I enter, “you brought wine.”

Maryland no longer hands out plastic bags in shops.

The clothes were, as I expected, awful.

Everything is bright and pretty (except the cabbages. The cabbages are silly.)

In the morning, my friend who is attending the same conference, drives us through the fog back to the fake town.

If you were the development tycoon and you could build anything, my friend asks, is this really the best you could come up with? The house in the atrium, he says, is based on the template of the hotel chain, a replica of a replica of a replica. We’re just lost in the fog with the cheerleaders and the teddy bears and the statuary that commemorates and represents the need to have a statue in this location because it’s the kind of thing a real place might have. A large stone, or more likely fiberglass cast to resemble stone, arm with a grasping hand reaches out of the bay.

Imagine the empty terrain. The cursor blinks, waiting for you to select your tool, to build the roads and create the zones (commercial, industrial, residential). Visitors demand an  experience.

What do we bring home with us, then? My friends’ daughter is four. She likes princess dresses, Swan Lake and reversals. It was a bear. No, it was a monkey. It’s on your head. It is a froggy day, we tell her.

I have displaced her from her room. At night I dream that I am on a London bus with my daughters. It is rainy and winter. As we alight, I realize that we have a son. He is hiding under one of the seats and I scoop him up wondering how it is possible that I have been, for years, telling people that we have two children when we have three, girls when we also have a boy. What does it mean that I have forgotten my son? And that I almost left him hiding on a bus?

Away from your family you are displaced. As a single entity attending a conference I appear to be a whole when I am a part. The younger daughter sends the occasional text as do friends and former colleagues from London as we search for each other at break, each of us now making our way in the new world, still finding strange this new, more affluent and referential version of America.

The cabbages, weather-resistant, practical, nutritious, inexpensive and with their blooms of color, could sustain us should the hotel run out of food or the beltway close, should something occur that is just beyond the imagination, like a fiberglass monster rising from the water. Oh, wait, that was their idea.

In SimCity, you were the king with your cursor, planting fields of cabbages to increase the commercial value of your property. I had never imagined myself as a resident.

A night of luminaries

“Oh,” says the man in the fedora when we are introduced, “You were on the radio yesterday.”

What a great way to enter a party, especially when you have come alone and you are not sure who else will be there.

He has just recorded a couple of spots for the same program and writes a column for the paper and a blog about restoring a 1954 Chevy truck. He doesn’t mention it, but he has a day job with an international engineering and geospatial software firm. Now, if we hadn’t started off talking about writing we might have chatted about our jobs and left it at that. When meeting people at parties I am not extending my urbane, tabby paw and declaring myself to be The Wertis.

The great thing about social media, my husband jokes, is that nobody knows you’re a dog.

Yeah, says the dog, before there was Twitter, no one would talk to me about anything of substance.

Social media blurs all the lines between your professional, family and private life. And while it is important in, say, marketing to connect your brand across platforms, I am not wanting, personally, to become this seamless online entity. I don’t want to log in to news media through my Facebook account or Tweet my Amazon purchases or be the same six people everywhere I turn up. I don’t want people to read this blog because I am the mother of the older or younger daughter. I want there to be a little opacity even if it is an illusion.

The cat’s mother: she has followers.

The world being flattened by social media is good for education, health, the arts, technology, maybe democracy, but all the facets of your life and all your social groups merged into one avatar is a bit horrible and tedious. You don’t need to know me as the charming professional that I might be. This blog is where I get to be grumpy or go off topic or be uncertain. If I felt that I were writing for people I see every day it might be a bit weird. I like to think of my readership as mostly far-flung. And not everyone at work wants to know about my obsession with keeping the scissors in the kitchen or what I think about when I drive.

On the second Saturday in December, 5,000 glowing paper bags line the roads of the historic districts of our small city.

But I didn’t know about this and so, when driving to my friend’s open house, my first thought was that, as I turned off an arterial road into the dark residential one, these were little stone plinths to help drivers avoid running onto lawns. Or to warn them off. The neighborhood association had gone a bit bonkers I thought, baring their teeth at me. These white markers extended all the way down the street, in an endless maw.

As my eyes adjusted, I realized that the brutal white teeth were paper not concrete. This transformation and their impermanence made them beautiful. I had the idea that they were there to guide the runners of whatever race had taken place during day, for the stragglers, to light their way to the finish line.

When the network of light expanded at the first cross-street, I saw that it was too complex to be part of the race. As a marathon route, this would have been like one of those puzzles where you have to trace a design without lifting your pencil or retracing any segment, which, town of engineers that we are, would go down a treat. They could call it The Mental Mile.

I tell the man in the hat about a post I have been trying to write about a friend, how I think that both of us consider each others’ lives to be a form of writer’s colony. Is that fair? It is so hard it is to write about people you know. Other people will read what you have written, if you’re lucky. You will have made your friend both larger and smaller than real life. You have reduced them to fit the form of your writing, but at the same time you have made them a larger character with whom more people might identify. You expose them to interpretation.

Dotted around the room, I see people I know. I run the course between them, without lifting my pen. The night, the bags of light, the people walking on the street are all part of an evening called Luminaries, which involves house tours and people being expected to decorate.

On my way home, I see a set of blue upholstered French Regency chairs arranged in a front parlor. The room behind them is alight and the light falls on the cushions so that they take on an air of mystery and importance, like a cat disappearing into the shadows.

Strange bedfellows

The other night my husband shared something very personal. It is something that has been present for the past two and half years and he has just now given it words. After a lifetime of considering himself to be a cat person, my husband has discovered that he is a dog person.

Midlife Animal Preference Conversion (MAPC) is not as uncommon as I had thought. The next day my friend reported that she, too, has MAPC. A staunch dog person, she was actually so pro-dog, she was anti-cat, and you know what they say about protesting too much. “I mean, I have even sent cat joke emails,” she confessed. Only in spite or, some might say, because, of her cat aversion, one has arrived at her house and twined its tail ’round her heart. “This cat is making me think that I might actually be a cat person. All of a sudden dogs seem so needy.”

I tell her about my husband. Everyone’s switching teams. I get the appeal of dogs, but I can’t imagine living without cats. I’m playing on both sides.

My husband and I both had cats growing up. We adopted as soon as we were out of school, and even in college there was D-U-G Dug (I named him), an orange tabby with a mean streak, who wandered around the Town Houses looking for food and more interesting or more violent people to hang out with; he was always itching for a fight. We were never sure about Dug, who owned him or what he was all about.

In London, we didn’t qualify for a pet through the RSPCA because we didn’t have direct access to the outdoors. Animals grow old and die in the Battersea Dogs Home, because, as the name suggests, they already have a home, thank you, and a more suitable one than yours, so sod off. We got our first London cat from a classified in The Loot. I took the tube out to a grim, grey street in East London and brought him home in an apple carton. We got him a kitten the following year. He has always been very devoted to her. We’re not sure if the feeling has ever been mutual.

Dogs, like cars, are impractical in a city. Oh, people said, when we were making plans to move to the US, are you going to get the girls a dog? What are we, we replied, the Obamas? They had just moved to the White House.

But the girls have always liked dogs. They have, I can see this in retrospect, been repressed dog people, living in a cat household. The older daughter went through a major dog phase. We learned how to ask “May I pet your dog?” in French as part of our small arsenal of  vocabulary, like straw and vacuum cleaner, which they never teach you in school, not anticipating that you will travel with children or rent a house.

“Are you sure the verb is caress?” my husband asked nervously as the older daughter strode over to strangers in cafes, parks and markets.

The younger daughter really wanted a dog when we moved to America. In the same way that  parents respond to requests for a guinea pig with, “But we have a fish,” so too, did “But we have cats” begin to sound a little hollow.

We got a dog.

We spotted the mother lolling by the side of a road as we were going to a friend’s house on the outskirts of this little town in the more agrarian part of Alabama. That looks like a nice dog, we all remarked, seeing dogs the way that women trying to get pregnant notice babies: everywhere.

“She just had puppies,” our friend said, “and I bet they’d let you have one. They’ve been giving them away.” And so we drove out of town an hour later, with a puppy, making an emergency stop at the dollar store for food. It was a bit like coming home from the hospital with the older daughter. I can’t believe they are letting us do this. We have no idea what we’re doing.

I found dog mentality a little frustrating at first, their need for hierarchy. We’d watched our share of The Dog Whisperer, which in retrospect should have tipped me off to my husband’s latent MAPC, and I knew that the root of all dog problems was the owners’ inability to establish dominance. Housebreaking was tedious, but the mental energy was in letting him know you were top dog. Cats just don’t care about all of that and throughout this business of puppy training they were like our elegant, childless friends, stretched out on the couch enjoying an elaborate cocktail while we carried dessicated meaty dog treats in our pockets.

You start thinking like a hackneyed sexist. Cats are aloof, capricious women, with psychic powers, slinking around in designer gowns. Dogs are boisterous, 9-year-old boys who will do anything to make the team and expect that you will be their firm coach who knows all the rules.

“Dogs are on your side,” my husband says. It is a revelation after he sees that the dog charging the cat when she reaches up the shred the sofa some more. The dog knows this is not allowed. She couldn’t care less. It feels good. She was bored. The dog is a great smelly beast and not graceful. Eats my food. And worse. I could go under the couch and get your tennis ball but then you would just run around some more.

“We’re never getting another cat,” he says.

We are leaving the farmers market when we see people in the parking lot of the Liquor Express with a box of tiny, brindled puppies, the mom on a leash. “Oh,” we all cry, “puppies!”

“Should we get one?” my husband asks.

“Yes!” we all shout. Even me.

“Ha!” he exclaims. “You would, wouldn’t you? You said yes.” I mean, it’s like the worst idea ever, obviously. Two elderly cats and a stable, happy dog. Let’s see, let’s push one or all of them over the brink of one thing or the other.

Later, when we are all bundled together on the bed—humans, cats, dog—it occurs to me that pets, cats and dogs, most animals, with their shorter life spans offer up a science fiction kind of tragedy, going from small, skittery kittens and soft, warm, wiggling puppies to old souls, with ginger tread and deep sighs, within the scope of a human childhood. More themselves than ever and moving past you and away to the end of their own days.

You probably think this post is about you

This is the dog’s first visit to Chicago, to any city. We wonder what he will make of the buildings, the elevator, so many people. This is a dog whose ears prick at the rumble of the UPS truck at the foot of our road, but if, in the city, a man across the street gets into a parked car and starts the engine, whose yard is it anyway? Do you bark?

Where are you supposed to pee? Why are all the flowers behind fences?

Normally, on arrival, we would throw our bags down and stay inside for the night, but the dog needs to be walked. We find ourselves out on the street, amid the elegantly tattooed, the sleeveless and coiffed, the ice cream eaters, the cafe table occupiers.

We are looking for a spot that looks like a place where a dog might be allowed to poop. This would not be in the arranged pebble garden in front of a doorman building, nor in the precise display of birds of paradise and begonias in a pristine lawn stuck with placards stating that the ground is treated with chemicals and dogs are not allowed.

Chicago has alleys and this is where we find a perfect patch of unlandscaping, the potential of which the dog grasps immediately.

In the middle of the night a man and a woman are hosting a radio guest, local boy made good, comedian Jimmy Pardo. They start talking about back hair and it emerges that between the two men, they partake in brow grooming and back waxing and that one of them trims his underarm air. This is an odd conversation to wake up to. It is all very The Capital in The Hunger Games. And then, more disturbing, one of the men reports a conversation his wife has had with their waxer—he goes to his wife’s salon—who had told her she was lucky to get an appointment, this is our busy season with prom, with all of the girls coming in for, no, not leg or underarm or brow waxing, nope: Brazilians.

People here pull their dogs back a little when they see another dog, or is it just our motley hound? “He’s not good with other dogs,” they say, or “She can be aggressive.”

We take the dog to the lake and let him off leash. Other dogs are here, only one is muzzled. They run in and out of the water. The beach, framed by skyscrapers, and the skyscrapers topped with swimming pools, has always seemed something of a miracle, add to that the jubilation of the dogs.

Two people are wrapped up and sleeping by the lifeguard stand. The limbless panhandlers and the homeless shock us anew. This is still going on, this problem still unsolved, against the backdrop of the shoppers’ paradise, where everyone, the beggars and the shop people, are telling you, Have a good one!

If it is not enough that underage girls are getting Brazilian waxes to please themselves and/or their prom dates, the final portent of civilization’s downfall is spotted by my husband in Brooks Brothers, where the men’s department now sells Spanx. Spanx for men. In Brooks Brothers. In Chicago.

To rephrase my father’s joke of yore, which was, If it’s 5:30 PM in New York, what time is it in Chicago? (Answer, 1950), if civilization is T minus six tufts of unwanted male body hair and one pound of belly fat in Chicago, how much farther behind the dystopian curve are we in Alabama? Do we measure cultural velocity by incident, density or force of impact? For all I know, men are waxing in Alabama, have been for years, and I’m just not tuned to the right radio station to hear about it.

What is it about the city that you have these intense, young, put-together women walking swiftly with their aspirations set out like tiny prep bowls of rose-colored salt and olive zest? Does it create them or are they drawn to it? And, finding others like them, it feels necessary and unquestionably right.

For me, the city is a natural habitat. I revert to form so much that the overly chatty biker dude who rings me up at H & M tells me I ought to smile more. But why is he pretending to have an Australian accent? And is it wrong to think that the hairy shoulders with the leather vest and the untrimmed underarm hair are a bit… unprofessional?

Our last night in Chicago, the dog and I make our way out into the evening. Outside the Puma fashion store, we meet an older woman and her smaller dog, who stands on his back legs and waves his paws until his owner lets the leash out slowly and allows him to approach. Our dog, however, is not engaged. He looks back and forth, not making eye contact, unsure of what to do next. The lady compliments his markings. I thank her. Then she laughs abruptly.  I look down to find that he has started to wee, too close to me, spraying the tops of my sandaled feet. Without another word, she retracts her dog and moves on.

But who can blame him, the dog, coming to such a place as this? He has made a good job of it. Feet and sandals can be washed. Unfazed, undefeated, liberated, we walk through the cafe tables, past the pancake restaurant, and into the alley.

Photo by The Younger Daughter, who took the dog out for several walks and found these signs hilarious.

Five stages of house

1) This is my room. It has purple carpet and these are my favorite books and this is my collection of china animals. My mother wishes we had a bigger kitchen. I like to look out the window. I never ever want to move.

2) When I get my real house, it is going to be so nice. It will reflect my real personality, not my mother’s, not my housemates’. This place is temporary. I don’t even think we own a vacuum cleaner.

3) Sunny, brite, 3BR, EIK, garden, tons of potential, must see!

What have they done to these walls?

It’s kind of small.

Did somebody die here?

I’m worried about the master bedroom.

Just say you hate it. Either you like it or you don’t. People worry about leaks or subsidence not something fixed or something changeable (like tile.)

The bathroom needed to be completely redone so we figured we might as well replace the hideous tile the previous owner put in.

Do you have any idea how much it costs to redo a bathroom?

We need to do something about the yard.

If we ever sell this place, we’re going to need to do something about the yard.

4) If you don’t see what you’re looking for, please ask. Don’t forget to look in the garage and the backyard. There’s some nice patio furniture. They always said they were going to landscape, but they were always too busy. You know how it is. There are price lists in all of the bedrooms. Towels/sheets $5, bras $3, underwear $1. All VCR/DVDs $2.

5) Which bedroom is mine? I like this one. You can see the birds. It makes me happy.

The final frontier

When my younger daughter was in first grade they did a unit on space. She wanted a duvet cover with planets and stars on it. For her birthday, I decorated the cupcakes with a space theme. I iced them in navy blue with gold sprinkles and Smarties for the planets. We trekked out to the Greenwich Observatory for a family outing.

“Mommy,” she informed me one morning. “You know how some kids say they like space?”
(No. Is that something kids say? And they’re being insincere?)
“Yes.”
“Well, I really love space.”
Not like those other posers.
“Really?”
“Yes. I love space.”
“That is great. I love that you love space.”

She wasn’t willing to elaborate. I concluded that she loved space in the same way that you and I are in awe of it, in that cliched feeling of amazement that causes you to pause in the driveway and remark, “Look at the stars!” while knowing how lame and inadequate that sounds.

This is why I love this painting she made at a friend’s birthday party. They had just outgrown invite-the-entire-class parties held in vinyl padded play spaces and moved on to invite-all-the-girls (or boys) parties, and what stood out for my daughter was the silliness that orbited the one boy who was there.

I like the way we are out in space looking at the moon and the Earth, seeing, possibly, comets and UFOs, which I don’t think were part of the curriculum. The sun is dwarfed by the moon, rising out of the corner, which shines most brightly, eclipsed only by the part of itself that isn’t there, the three-quarters that exists off of the canvass.

She likes space well enough these days but, like the essential elements of our planet, her love has settled and cooled. I found the painting this weekend when I went on the hunt for picnic things. It was sitting in the back of the cupboard waiting to be rediscovered.

The children from the party have scattered. The garden where they painted, where I can still see them scampering around, belongs to someone else. The party girl lives in NYC. Some stayed in London, some have returned to the States, all following the trajectory of their parents’ careers, or unseen forces that would require the family to embark upon a sparkly new adventure.

“When I am a grown up and I have a house,” the younger daughter prefaces something at dinner last night. Annoyingly, as parents, we qualify for her that she can be an adult and rent.

“When I have a job,” she says.

You’ll have a job to pay rent, we say.

“No, when I have a permanent job,” she says.

“There is no such thing,” I tell her, “as a permanent job.”

But we relent and let her finish the thought and continue in the belief that there is a planet of fully formed adulthood where you will settle at the magic age of 30 with an understanding of yourself as a solid mass and all the rest of it fitted into place.

My husband is outside looking fixedly, not at the stars, but at the roof. “I am staring at the roof with a mixture of awe and fear,” he says.

We have arrived on that planet of adulthood, a little later than we thought. But who says this will be the last and only planet? That is the fallacy in the notion of a final frontier. It implies both that we have explored and conquered all that there is on Earth, which the bioluminescent, multisexual, superintelligent squid at the bottom of the sea would contradict, and that somewhere amid all of this infinity there will be an endpoint. It is exactly this, the lack of a terminus, that makes me look past the roof, not yet in need of repairs, but with a tree growing out of a gutter that needs to be seen to, and marvel at the darkening sky with the wordless love of a seven-year-old.