Roger Wright – Chicago

We had just gotten the kids settled, sitting cross-legged with us on the carpeted floor in a semi-circle, when the two secret service guys, laser eyed tree trunks in suits, led Rosalyn Carter through the locked doors of the Ward to the single chair at the front of the room.

The building where this happened, lifetimes ago, The Northwestern Institute of Psychiatry on Huron Street in Chicago, is being demolished as I write these words. But the memory of Mrs. Carter’s small chat with those children is as sparkling golden fresh as this morning’s sunlight streaming through my window right now.

Later on this morning, Mrs. Carter will be standing next to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius in Atlanta, for the announcement that we, as a country, have taken some steps in treating illnesses of the brain on parity with the ways we treat illnesses of the rest of the body.

What follows will be the usual piercing shrillness of commentary on the Affordable Care Act. The attacks grounded in an ethic that says, “If I don’t like something, it’s OK to just make stuff up when I say why I don’t like it.” Celebrating a world where words have no meaning. Or a history that only goes back a day. A fight destined for the dustbins of history.

But as the torrent of venom spews out on Ms. Sibelius and The President, and all those struggling to change the ragged, sickly broken way we all try and take care of each other; to make a system change at it’s core where all the poison has been buried in the very way we think, while all that is happening, Roslyn Carter will be at the front of the room. Just as she was when she spoke with us on that sixth floor locked ward all those years ago.

She said to the kids, “If you’d like, you can ask me questions. Anything you want.” And what happened next was something we counselors didn’t see too often from our kids. We saw their wide eyed, bone deep silence of what it means to be in the presence of someone who is important for all the right reasons.

None of the kids and none of us know it all counselors could have named any of the reasons why the woman was able to elicit an immediate and heartfelt respect simply by completing our circle and speaking 11 words.

Perhaps because kids have a built in bullshit detector. One set at a much higher frequency, And perhaps kids with an illness of the mind, perhaps their bullshit detectors are tuned up the highest of all.

Spending eight hours of the day on the ward taught us counselors to feel the rise and fall, the trouble and the terrors of the group, We might have had words for that at the time. If we did, I don’t remember them. But I can remember vividly how those waves and swings of group feelings would move us through our days and nights. So, I can remember so clearly, even now, how when Mrs. Carter started talking with us, she instantly owned the room and every living shred of respect in that room.

A kid asked her what it was like living in the White House. And her eyes got all wide and she said, “Oh my goodness, we still get lost! See, my office is on one side and Jimmy’s is on the other, and the other day I thought it would be nice to have lunch? So I tried to take a shortcut? And I had NO idea where I was! I ended up having to ask,” and here she burst into laughter, “how to get to Jimmy’s office!”

And as she begin to laugh harder, she opened up the floodgates of 20 children who none of us counselors had ever seen laugh all that much at all. Seeing what laughter could do to heal, something I never, ever forgot. And that’s where I saw it first. That’s where I learned it.

Then, because this was a real conversation, she started asking questions. Her voice was soft and soothing like a southern pine tree alive in the wind. Not lost on the young buck counselors was the thought, this is an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Later, the whispered line in the nurses station was, “Now we know why Jimmy always smiles.”

She asked one young girl. “Why are you here?” Perhaps the most important question of all. But one that most visitors would avoid. And the young girl, electrically charged, just lit up to be noticed, answered her back with the simple elegance and honesty Mrs Carter had brought onto the ward and populated every inch of that room. The girl answered, “I’m here because my Daddy died last month, I got so sad, that I didn’t know what to do. So I tried to hurt myself. Then someone brought me here.”

“What’s your name, child?” Mrs. Carter asked.

“Sarah.”

“How old are you Sarah?”

“Thirteen.”

“You know, I was just about your age when my Daddy died. I didn’t know what to do either. But Sarah?”

“Yes?” The girl barely breathing. Riveted to this one moment in her life.

“Sarah, I really hope you don’t ever try and hurt yourself again.”

Sarah les out a breath, you could see a tension in her core relax. She looks down at the floor, and all of us counselors see something we have never seen before. A tiny flowering bud of a smile.

This morning when they sign the papers saying that taking care of the mentally ill is just as important as taking care of the physically ill, maybe Sarah wherever she is, will hear the news, cut through the noise and remember that moment. Her smile. I don’t know.

But I do know that Rosalyn Carter will be standing there when we all take a step towards taking better care of each other.

Just like the time when she said to the little girl, “Sarah, I really hope you don’t try and hurt yourself again.”

The empty red plastic shopping cart from the Target store padlocked to the street sign outside the boarded up Blockbuster Video?

Yeah. That’s mine.

Most people don’t even see it. Almost nobody wonders what that cart carried last. And I’m guessing that no one wonders where the last load of that shopping cart is right now.
Which is fine. Because it’s nobody’s business.
The cart holds everything I own. Where I keep it at night is my business.

I keep nothing in a shelter. I can tell you that. I’ve seen rusty can opener knife cuts, screwdriver slashing to the face fights just to get into a shelter. Then inside the shelters? Once you’re in? Even in the ones where they keep the lights on all night, I’ve seen real fights. The kind you don’t talk about.

So I got a place for me and my stuff at night. It will last as long as it lasts. I don’t really think about it that much. The nights come early, with October in the winds. So I unload my stuff and lock the cart up tight by the time the sun goes down.

Now your picture? That old snapshot? That always stays with me. It got a little messed up when I stuck an old bar of soap next to it in the pocket of my jeans. But never mind about that. I couldn’t see it all that well anyways. My eyes ain’t the same since that day a crazy pick up driver almost hit me, my glasses came whipping off and shattered on the street. But I remember the picture so well that I guess it doesn’t matter.

It started like this. You were bending over some tomato seedlings, surrounding them with basil. Back when the whole north side of Chicago seemed to have community gardens everywhere. Ours was in Old Town, across from a Standard Gas Station and Lincoln Park where the hippies had tried to set up camp. It was spring of course. But there was something in the wind off the lake that said autumn. Something that said this was more about continual beginnings and endings than it was about a solitary season.

Coming up behind you, quite a view I might add, you were wearing short cut off jeans and a yellow top. You stood up, turned, put your hands on your hips and said, “Hey, why don’t you take a picture. It lasts longer!”

So I did.

We talked gardening, summer, the other people who had the plots, the conversation was like some sort of river that just never stopped. As the sun came up higher, we traipsed across Wells Street to Nookie’s and had pancakes, bacon, eggs, orange juice and a lot of coffee. A breakfast like we had known each other forever.

Over the years, buildings went up where the garden used to be. No more scraggly carrots yanked out of the urban soil. But I held on to that picture of you.
Years of dwindling chance meetings. A White Sox game where I obnoxiously lectured you on the evils of smoking. That Jill Clayburgh movie where you did the play by play and rooted for the weaselly investment banker to kick the bearded artists’ ass. I remember a postcard from Japan where you just wrote, “Watching lesbian sumo wrestling. Wish you were here.”

But I never let go of that picture of your face.
Finally there was that last time. Again seeing you first bending over from the rear. This time in the recycling bin. Outside a 7-11 store.

That time, I was busy not understanding that being broken in a billion pieces could be the springboard for hope. You tried to show me that. I didn’t get it.

How it would end up this time is that I would decide, with virtually no thought at all, that another marriage destined to end was the right answer.

For a very short while, I saw both you and her.
Then one day when you called to ask if you should take a pound of chuck out of the freezer for dinner, I said no. And I never made it over for dinner.

Again.

Left just with that picture of your face.
Which is why when I saw that face again this morning, just as I was going to unlock my red shopping cart, when I saw that face it all came flooding back. The garden, the breakfast the stolen moments through a lifetime. I saw your face.

It was early. Sunday morning. She was walking her dog along Lincoln Avenue. Both of them curious, young, and calm. She had that look in her eyes—like you—that the world was a very amusing place. Jeans and a baseball cap. And your face.
Now most people, when they pass the old man pushing the shopping cart through the streets and alleys, most people don’t see me. Some pretend not to see me. Some just do not see me.

But as she passed, she and her dog, she looked up. She looked up and saw me.

Then she smiled.

And I saw your face.
**************

I am Rich Christian. I drive the runaway train.

Down the tracks, sliced through time. Every year in October, when you hear some story of a ghost train rumbling with no one at the helm? When someone mentions an unexplainable journey? One that makes no sense at all? Then you can know I am up and traveling again.  

Once again trying to make my way back to Laura. Grabbing ahold and firing up any old unexplainable journey. Always to get back to Laura.

It always starts just before an autumn sunrise. The train lurches to life. A gravel voiced songwriter of the centuries, man named John Stewart, tosses out a line that sparks the train engine silver orange and rolling. He sings that the ‘curves around midnight, aren’t easy to see.’ And the train starts to roll.

This year, 2013, east down the middle of a highway in the god forsaken town of Chicago Illinois. They call this road of dizzying speed the Eisenhower Expressway. My ghost train on a track between 8 lanes of zooming cars. A driver sitting at the wheel of every car. But no one sees a driver of my runaway train.

The speeds of these cars make my head spin. My last time walking the earth was long ago. Laura was my wife. I was a soldier. A Private. In the army of the Confederate States of America.

And that bleached white bone scraped by the workman’s shovel in six inches of soil at a construction site this autumn of 2013? That was my left leg.

To get to where I am now, time follows no order and respects no boundaries. So, I can only say listen hard. Hear shovel scraping bone and a ghost train rumbling, picking up speed that generates a rhythm for John Stewart singing

I’m worried about you

I’m worried about me.

Then watch the workman who just scraped my leg. Watch his eyes go wide as he scoops a rib from the soil. And if that sets off a choral hum rising from the earth first faintly and then growing stronger; you will be in the presence of the 10,000 souls left here in shallow graves like mine. Resting fitfully under what they now call The Gold Coast and South Lincoln Park areas of this city, Chicago, Illinois.

There were 4,000 of us Confederate  prisoners of war held at Camp Douglas, in the southern part of this city.But the main grave site for this muscular mushroom of a town was here. About two miles north of the mouth of the Chicago River.  Why are so many of us prisoners buried here? Why not at Camp Douglas?

Well, I will tell you. But first, remember. This is a town where men actually decided to make their river flow backward! So it was no surprise to any of us spirits, when our remains were moved up north of the river to join the Catholics, the Jews, and the Protestants. Yankees all. Money changed hands. Property was valuable. So the graves were moved from south to north. Then when the mushroom of people started bloating up again, that giant gravesite of the north was emptied. The remains taken even further from the heart of the town. Land cleared for living.

And that would have been the end of it. There used to be a cemetery here, but now there are homes for the living. That would be the story. But not in Chicago. In Chicago, there were winks, nods, contracts and unspoken deals made. Money changed hands. And not all the bodies got moved. They built the homes on our graves. And they remain that way today.

 So ten thousand of us remained. Houses of rich men were built right on top of our earthly remains. Ten thousand of us trapped underneath the mansions of power.

 Which of course made most or us wander. Made most of us go searching for something. Searching for home.

 And in the red, brown and golden crinkled leaves that shivered across my body’s resting place, when I once again know autumn, I can begin again my unfinished work of finding her.

As the train lurches forward, I am again amazed at just how anyone could live here in Chicago. Even as the centuries pass, I never understood. My only clue was autumn. Especially October, when there would be a rustle of a breeze that brought the smell of tomorrow. An evergreen instant taking me back. To our home in the mountains. Back to our quiet diamond of a town.  Asheville, North Carolina. I’d catch the smell of Asheville and home  just as the leaves, even here in cruel Chicago lit up in colors so achingly alive that even we wandering dead just had to smile for a moment.

Just how did I get so far from Laura Christian? What led me to the shore of this terrifying inland sea?  It was the Great War between the states. The blue coats had money. They had arms and horses and beans and sizzling grilled meat on their campfires at dusk. My regiment fought hard. Most of us fighting like mountain lions. But we were captured and tamed.

Surrounded we were till our white flag waved. Then put in chains, given the first meat we’d had for weeks. And shipped by rail to Chicago. To Camp Douglas. Prisoners of war. We simply lost the battle for our way of life.

 I would often think, before the pounding guns of fire would go quiet for the day, that if we had Laura fighting alongside us men, that the battles would have taken such different turns. A snarling Mama Bear gone wild if you crossed her. Worse yet, if you ever dared hurt someone or even something she loved? Then you could only count on your next breath being your last.

Why was it then that this towering fury of a fighting woman could cry as if the floods of ancient times had just unleashed raging waters of sorrow? What was it that made that river of pain flow into her unfathomable curiosity and musical laughter? Ignorant questions all. Like asking ‘why did I love her?’ If you could answer that question, there would be no answer.

 Stubborn? Like a tree stump stubborn. Still, when she would laugh? The world would applaud.

I saw her last on the front porch of our cabin in the green forest just outside of Asheville. She was smiling. No one knew how long before we’d win this war. But it had to be soon. Laura crying out “Write me!”

And for a year, as our battalion fended off Yankee horror, I did. But then the war took some turns and something buried deep in me seemed to fade. I no longer could believe in our cause.

 And when belief fades and distance grows, love is tested.

Laura knew the cause. She was sure. But my faith was built on doubt. Forgiveness came so much easier to me than it did to her. So I got quiet. My only writing was scribbles in the dirt.  Laura stopped listening. My quiet like a knife gone slashing her heart. And in that pain of her pain, deep in the winter wind off that icy terror of the inland sea, I passed from this world to the next. To the runaway train. There being no worse pain than causing Laura pain.

Then as the years passed, I saw Laura moving on. Loving deep and alive someone else. I even saw her forgetting our tiny home looking out, as the writer once said, at the ‘soft stone smile of an angel’ in the green hills that circled Ashville. Fading from the thought of the two rocking chairs on the front porch we once shared. Simply not caring anymore, she went on and rocked happily with the love of her life.

I remember all this as my runaway train builds up speed. It happens like this every year. Faster and harder and miles and miles of gleaming rail track rumbling, tumbling to what could have been or should have been. This love like a runaway train. Then just when the speed hits a peak, when the wind is whipping along side, just when you think the train can go no faster, harder or deeper . . .

The crunching shamble of sheet metal. The train stops cold by another train. The journey ended. Autumn into winter.

November’s bare trees. I will rest now. But only till next October.

Next October. When you will see another runaway train. Trying again to find Laura. Just so I can say that I remember every golden moment.

Every autumn breeze.

On Sept 9^th, 2013, Reuters published “The Child Exchange,” a devastatingly powerful piece of reporting on how Americans are using the internet to abandon children adopted from overseas. The practice is called “re-homing.” It was once confined to pets, but is now conducted in chat rooms and done to children in what Reuters called “a largely lawless marketplace.” Soon after the piece was published, at one case within hours, the internet providers acted to close down the chat rooms.

********************************* 

Re-homing. I see the word and feel a knife blade tingle at my throat. Then a cousin or an uncle or a father says, “ Be still now little darlin’ cause you gonna like the way this feels.”

But where I am now, there is no re-homing. Where I am now, I have something new to do. And every October I come back and do it. And it never gets old.

You’ll never see me. Not on this visit. Not on any. When you are re-homed, you practice being invisible. I guess that’s so you can be invisible when you get to where I am now.

Re-homing like being yanked, tossed and locked into pitch black and musty root cellar darkness, cold dirt floor and scurrying sounds just inches from my ear.

Re-homing was a word I never heard when I walked this world. But I guess that’s what they call it when the people you’re supposed to call “Mommy” or “Daddy” decide to drop you off with some other people, turn to give you one last look, saying something like, “If you hadn’t been so difficult, maybe minded your manners just a little bit better” then shuffle off to the car, with doors slamming shut goodbye, and the engine starts up while your heart slows to dust.

In my eighteen years, I was re-homed three times. But I remember only one of them. Even now. I remember one of them.

I remember Daddy said, “C’mon now little darlin, we are going for a ride.” Our farm was just outside of DeKalb Illinois. The corn fields rolling straight to the horizon. As if there were no more people. Just the quivering corn fields and the wind. It was late afternoon and the sun would be setting early because winter was coming. We headed west. Towards Galena and the Big River. It was just me and my Daddy. Not Mama. But I didn’t think too much of that. I was the big girl. I was eight years old now. And Daddy always showed me that he loved me. Sometimes he showed me so much that Mama’s face would get all red and I’d see her neck start throbbing. Then she’d get really, really quiet. But Daddy always showed me that he loved me.

That day in the car, I asked where we were going, and my Daddy answered “Chrissie, I got something to tell you. Your Mama and I, we adopted you. Now, you know what that means?”

“No Daddy.”

“It means I ain’t your real Daddy.”

“You ain’t my real Daddy?”

“Well, you see, it’s complicated Chrissie. You are such a beautiful big girl and now it won’t be too long to you’re all grown It’s just complicated. And your Mama just feels like. . .”

“Daddy, I don’t understand why Mama gets so quiet sometimes. . .”

“You see, I. . . .”

“Is Mama my real Mama?”

“We don’t know who your real Mama is. You were five years old when you came to stay with us.” It was getting darker now. The rhythm of the car going gliding through the corn fields. Like a feather soft pillow had come to fill the car and make me want to close my eyes and sleep.

“Well Chrissie, I don’t understand it all either. But like the man says, ‘It is what it is.”

“Daddy, what does that mean?”

“I gotta do what’s best for Mama and me and you too Chrissie. This way is better. I know it will be better,”

I looked out the window of the car and we had turned into some sort of trailer park. We pulled down this little trainer park street to the last one on the left. There was a tire on a rope hung from a tree branch. Two lawn chairs to the side of the trailer’s screen door. A beer cooler being used for a table, empties and ash trays smudging up the cooler top in a hopeless kind of gray.

Two big old fat people came rumbling out of the screen door just as we drove up. My Daddy got out of the car, slammed the door. I stayed put.

“C’mon now Chrissie,” Daddy never sounded like he meant it when he wanted me to something I didn’t want to do. But the three of them were staring back at me so hard.

“Chrissie, this is Rupert and Michelle. You’ll be staying with them now.”

I heard him say the words. And you know what was funny? I wasn’t surprised. I just got quiet. Like my Mama.”

“We can get your things sent over to you tomorrow. We all figured it was best to do this quick. So you’ll be staying here tonight.”

Daddy handed the fat people some papers. They wrote their names. Gave him back some of the papers. The fat people still hadn’t said a word. Daddy started to come towards me, his shoulders kind of shaking like they did when he showed me that he loved me. But then I saw his shoulders slump down. He stopped, put his hand to his waist and he gave me this little side to side wave. Like he was polishing a tiny window clean.

Then the fat lady lifted up her hand and told me with her finger that she wanted me to follow her. So I turned away from my Daddy, put my head down, and followed the fat lady into the trailer.

The screen door slammed behind me. Then I was re-homed.

But every year, in October, I come back.

So, if you can’t see me, how do you know I’ve returned?  Here’s how: If you can breathe in that one sugar maple moment when October’s weary smile turns the crinkled red and golden leaves up to face the sun, I’ll be here.

When October arrives, there is no more re-home. In October I am always home.

I come back for the folks who tell the stories like my story of re-homing, I come back to make sure that those story tellers write. That they keep speaking.

I’m the autumn breeze at the back of the writer, recorder, story teller, journalist. I’m what starts the healing just before that groaning last paragraph, image, smell, sound rhythm tap on the keyboard that makes the fingers start to bleed. I’m what prompts that one last question. The one that barreled straight out of the blue. I’m the shivering delight when the writer lifts hands and says, “Done.”

I come back to make sure the that the story gets told.

I come back in October for the story tellers. I bring along the message from the Book of Amos, “ Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

In the loving, clean breezes of autumn, where there is no more re-homing . . .

I come back to make sure that the stories get told.

**************************************************************

This story is for all those who try with their stories to make a better world. And specifically for the Reuters Team who did “The Child Exchange.” In memory of the late Allan Dowd, my cousin and Reuters reporter.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSXYu-3r1S8]

Graceland Cemetery in Chicago is the final resting place of a collection of both known and unknown souls from the worlds of commerce, the arts, sports and government. And whether it’s the autumn breezes, or the inspiration of Edgar Lee Master’s classic book “Spoon River Anthology,” it’s under the “Ghost Moons of October” that the spirits of Graceland Cemetery can be heard if one is very, very still.

***********************************
So it’s under the starbright moons of October I return. Because there is so much more to my story.

You know my brother. Charles. He wrote books. You do not know me.

I was 39 years old and said to be penniless when they put me in the October soil. The year was 1866. My brother Charles with uncounted millions. But I had plans…no one knows that I had plans.

When the autumn leaves come blowing, swirling in a misty woodsmoke haze and dancing in muted golden crinkly brown, orange, and blazing red; my brother Charles rises up from an untold distance to come meet me. And lit by the moon we walk these grounds of Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. We walk and I remember my plans.

You’ll forgive my manners. An introduction is in order. My name is Augustus Dickens. My brother was Charles Dickens. He was 15 years my senior. He wrote books; told stories that were heard by the world. Heard by the whole world. Read forever. That was my brother. That was not I.

In our lifetimes my brother never came here to Chicago. Certainly not to this quiet island; Graceland Cemetery with its tall red brick walls keeping out the rush and roar of the city. Here where I rest, with the distant rumble of a passing train like a heartbeat. The marble-sculpted markers of my neighbors like elegant morning greetings. The green quiet of the lawns and the swaying rhythm of the trees now decked out in their finest for October. I am always so proud to welcome my brother here to my final resting place.

I was not always so proud.

I left our native Portsmouth, by the crashing sea, with my love, Bertha. Left to come to America. And yes, there was the matter of my wife Harriett; when she became blind, I left her. I was not proud of that, and I offer no excuses. But you see, I had plans. There are stories you don’t know. Stories even my brother Charles doesn’t know or hasn’t told.

No one can really know the stories of another, can they? Especially when, like me, one has plans.

Bertha and I went first to Amboy, Illinois. Draw a straight line from where the muddy lanes of commerce called Chicago rested on a giant lake directly west, and there you’ll find tiny Amboy. From the blinding white prairie snowstorms of February to the muggy long evenings of August, I was the Editor of The Amboy Times. I had plans for that newspaper. I saw the promise in what Amboy could become.

But then there were the plans for my store. I called it the “People’s Cheap Store.” Ah, the store. Perhaps it was something in the Green River that bubbled up thoughts of new kinds of stores. Samuel Carson, he was also from Amboy. Carson and Pirie and Scott. They also had visions of a new type of store. But they didn’t have my plans.

So I sold the store, and bought the small farm. But those winters on the prairie were hard. In June of 1860, when the job with The Illinois Central Land Department opened up, why Bertha and I, we had to go live in Chicago. These were the times when the Illinois Central Railroad was fueling the prairie like blood keeping a dying man alive. And to be in the middle of all that? It was the place for a man with plans.

In Chicago, we lived at 538 North Clark Street. Our home was filled with music. That was the time of the music. Bertha at the piano; in the evenings her voice echoed through our rooms like sweet wild fruit that could feed my plans forever and a day.

Yes, I knew the pleasures of the drink. But a man who has plans, a man so far from his home, a man whose path was not an easy one, that man would of course know the pleasures of the drink. Because the drink would help me with my plans.

It wasn’t the drink that finally took me. It was the tuberculosis. And then I came here. To the outskirts of muddy Chicago. A full pulsating city now, grown around this quiet Island of Graceland. No longer on the outskirts of anything. An October garden right in the middle of it all. An October garden where once a year my brother Charles comes to visit.

After I was gone, Charles supported both blind Harriet and my love, Bertha. Charles did that up until that first Christmas Eve after my departure when Bertha, now alone, took the morphine, closed her eyes and joined me.

Sometimes, on a summer evening here in Graceland, you can hear the faint echo of Bertha’s piano as she sings and I still make my plans.

But now it’s October. Grand and glorious October. When my brother Charles joins me and we walk the quiet paths of my final resting place in Chicago. As the autumn leaves swirl down crunching beneath our spirit feet, I tell my brother my plans. Share the rest of my stories.

He hears me. He nods. And my brother, my brother Charles Dickens, the writer, offers me up an October smile.

Photo Credit: geekgrrl++
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vr0Q6fz2gw

December 2050. As he punched in the security code that snowy night at the armed entrance of the gated community, Ricketts Glen, at the corner of Clark and Addison in Chicago, the wind was so cold that his hands felt as if he had plunged them in fire.

The vacant, snow flake stares of the street people cowering in front of the Hyatt and Best Buy across the street were making her nervous, so he hurried to punch in the code. And he kept chattering to keep her attention. “You know there used to be a baseball stadium here. They called it Wrigley Field.”

 “No way!” she said, shaking her long blonde hair back from her face and shivering all in one move. Her blue eyes wide. “I had heard there was like a church or something here?”

 He loved how most everything she said sounded like a question. Questions he pretty much knew the answers to. Maybe tonight would turn out better than he thought.

 “Actually. . .” be began. He was being extra careful to try and sound smart. She had told him in the bar that she liked guys with big ah. . .brains; was the way she put it. That’s when she tossed off that killer smile. And he pretty much forgot everything after that. Except to try and sound smart. So he was trying to get the, wise college professor persona thing going. Starting sentences with words like “actually” seemed to fit.

 What he did not see was how her eyes zeroed in on his black and silver embossed Ricketts Glen ID card when he pulled it out and signaled for another round of drinks. “Actually,” he said, “There was a church here. That was a really long time ago. A seminary. They trained ministers here. But the Clark Street bars got a little wild. That’s when they built the baseball park. Wrigley Field they called it. It was here until they tore it down to build Ricketts Glen.”

 Inside Ricketts Glen

The security code finally clicked all clear, he heard the buzzer, the green iron door whooshed open and he saw the man in the glass booth holding the Chinese manufactured automatic weapon nod.  He nodded back and then watched as she immediately unbuttoned her coat in the climate-controlled air. “Oh my God. It is like what, 69 in here or something?”

 “To be precise, it’s kept at a constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit.” He said authoritatively. “So you like our little corner of the world?”

 “I had like seen stories about places like this, but I’d never actually like been in one? So like, who is Ricketts?”

 “Oh they were the family that owned the stadium and the baseball team.”

 “So what happened? I mean look at this place,” she said, taking in the sweeping green grass lawns lit by artificial light designed to lower blood pressure, each of the homes with their own green space, gardens, streams sprinkling through the community all encased inside a translucent bubble thin as a microchip yet capable of deflecting a nuclear attack. “I mean this place is like heaven! These Ricketts people, they must have been like geniuses or something, right?”

 “Well, depends on how you read history I guess,” he said like someone who should be smoking a pipe and wearing a faded corduroy blazer with patches on the elbow.

 “The Ricketts kids bought the baseball team and the stadium for the same reason any of us would have. It was a toy. And their Daddy had the money, so why not?”

 “Mmm,” she said, as we walked through the artificial summer air to his house.

 “They wanted to fix up the stadium. So they did what any of the wealthy folks of that era would do. They went looking for other people’s money to pay for it.”

 “So they like really did that back then?”

 “Oh but of course my dear,” he said punching in the security code for his front door. As they walked in, the size of the rooms, the décor, maybe the music, he wasn’t sure, made her eyes go wide again. “This place is something!” she whispered as she tossed her coat on a chair and begin to take it all in.

 What People Used to Believe

“C’mon” he said, the elevator is this way. I’ll show you my Tower Room.” Or, as some people called it, he thought, my bedroom.

“OK,’ she said, for some reason now a bit meekly. She then got a quizzical look on her face, “But wait, she said, these Ricketts people? Did they get other people’s money? Or did they use their own?”

 “Oh, that’s the interesting part. I mean they really tried. The first place they went was of course to the government. That was back when the way the government worked was that if the politicians and the business people who owned them said something the right way, they could make anybody believe anything.”

 “Huh?”

 “Well the Ricketts tried to get tax money, bonds, to pay to fix up their stadium. And in those days people actually believed that the more money flowed to the rich people, the better life would be for poor people.”

 “What? People like believed that? No way!”

 “Oh yeah,” I said. Back in those days, people voted against their own self interest all the time. Why I remember reading about when all this in the history books. The Ricketts kids said they wanted tax money that would have gone to schools or firemen to pay for their baseball team. It didn’t work. They ended up paying for their “stadium improvements” themselves. Giant scoreboards, walkways, hotels, retailers. And then over the years, the baseball part just kind of faded away and Ricketts Glen was built. A new standard in luxury. For the right people of course.

“But . . . I mean I know maybe I don’t like understand this stuff, but that makes no sense at all! How did they like pull that off?” she said as the elevator door swooshed open unto the tower room. A 360 degree view of the twinkling Chicago night, the stars blending in with the city lights.

 Kicking off her heels, she ran past the bed to the window, “Oh. My. God! This is like beautiful! No wonder they wanted to like tear down the baseball stadium! So explain to me again how they got from the crummy old baseball stadium to all this wonderful luxury? Because, like, I am really having trouble getting this.”

 “They were rich people. There was a club. They were in it.”  

“Well I’ll tell you one thing,” she said, dancing over to the bed and leaping into the middle then motioning him over with her finger.

 “What’s that?” he said as she grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him down beside her.”

 “I’m sure glad that I didn’t live back when there was a yucky old baseball stadium here.”

 “Me too. he said. Me too.”

 Then no words. Only the snow.

Falling on the bubble where there used to be a baseball park.

*****

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

James Joyce.

     The Dead

“I think once you love somebody, you love somebody; that’s just how it is.”

Richard Ford

It’s our house being sold for a dollar. Of course I’d come back.

The house? Busted out windows, charred black walls, and rusted hinged hanging front door. There used to be a neighborhood here. Those pencil scratches in the door frame to the kitchen marking how fast our kids got tall. Open sky above where our kitchen table used to be. We were a family that ate dinner together. In the orange and grey haze of the steel toned skies of the mills here at the tip of Lake Michigan. Of course there was a smell that spun off the mills. Bothered some people. But I never paid a smell any mind. I mean it ain’t like you are losing someone you love. Or even taking care of one sick kid. It’s just a smell.

The mills let our kids be like all the other kids. Oh, she and I, we thought they were geniuses. Loved them both, Annie Beth and Eric, with the very strength of steel. What our kids wanted most was to be like all the other kids. And on our quiet little street in Gary Indiana. In the shadows of the mill flame, they were like other kids.
The mill let us do that for them. There was home. The neighborhood. And then there was the mill.

Then the mill, really all the mills, shut down. People started moving out of the neighborhood. Even that crazy Jackson family. Went to Hollywood or something, I don’t know.

Then the autumn winds went cold. Every sunset went to black alone. The streets of our neighborhood, echoing the crumbling concrete dust of memories, our family scattered. She was gone.

Without my days in the mill, I went silent. Don’t really even know just where I spent my time. Only knew that when October came she was gone. The kids were just phone calls. She was gone.

And my heart just stopped. Like the fire in the mills gone cold. My heart just stopped.

Till the news that houses in Gary were now being sold for a dollar, drifted out here, where I now drift too, and slapped me cold.

As if some sort of circle, other peoples chances, other people’s times, were starting up again. Like some tiny steel blue flame. The rhythm of oh, I don’t know, those Jackson kids singing. That bass guitar anchoring. Some new sunrise.

As if there were another chance.