Christmas Tree Video

I've written about our Christmas tree before, but each year it does fill me with total pride and unearned nostalgia. The tree came from Steve's grandfather's hardware store in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, brand spankin' new in 1965. That is also the year that A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired, vilifying exactly this kind of Christmas tree. And, of course, introducing that iconic jazzy Christmas music by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.

In my house in Park Forest, where my parents moved with me from Pennsylvania in 1965 when I was a year old, we were listening to The Sound of Christmas, the Ramsey Lewis Christmas album that came out in 1960 and was re-released in 1962 with added tracks. My parents, who married in 1963, may have bought it for their first Christmas together, along with the Kingston Trio and Bing Crosby Christmas albums.

These would become mainstays of our Christmas listening, with few additions-- the Muppets' Christmas album and the Carpenters' Christmas album are the only two I remember as vividly in the mix. On a Saturday between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day (our official Christmas season), My mother would prop up the 4-6 albums in the morning, and one by one they'd drop and play. When they had finished, she would turn the whole stack over and play the B-sides. While they played, we'd make Christmas cookies and crafts for presents for teachers (my favorite, the Christmas diorama in a baby-food jar with cotton snow, white glitter, and tiny wooden figures).

Each album had a distinct character, and listening to them in halves like this, instead of individual songs on a mix tape or ipod shuffle, had a strong effect on me. I never tired of them. By the time one was over, I was so ready for the next. The rolicking fun of "Children, Go Where I Send Thee" by the Kingston Trio was always welcome, and the groove of Ramsey Lewis was a welcome counterpoint. Bing Crosby's "Mele Kalikamaka" could certainly try one's patience, but it was worth listening to for the delight of those background singers on his version of "Jingle Bells."

This year when we put up the Christmas tree, I got out my camera and made a little video. I was initially motivated by showing the individual steel branches in their original paper sleeves. However, it is also quite a production to put up the thing, so I just kept picking up the camera. In a way, this tree is the embodiment of Steve's aesthetic-- midcentury modern and somewhat minimalist. No lights go on the tree, or ornaments (so I've been instructed). Just these small colored balls, glass, of which a surprising number remain intact (I broke one this year). Since presumably Charlie Brown wouldn't approve, I went with the Ramsey Lewis soundtrack instead.

The video turned out much better than I expected. The muted original sound and the light sort of makes it feel like an old-fashioned 8mm family film. There's one clip where I forgot to mute the sound, and you can hear the football game in the background.

Enjoy the video, and Merry Christmas!

Ice

We've got our first long blast of cold weather. It's been discouraging to see open water still on the small lakes around here. When it's cold, I want ice! Time to skate!

On Friday night, we went to some friends' house for a festive dinner party. When we were leaving, our headlights shone on what looked like a major construction site in the backyard next door. "Wonder what's going on there," I said. Steve responded, "They're making an ice rink!"

This is a great Minnesota tradition, though I hadn't seen it up close before. Steve has made them before; all it takes is plastic sheeting, 2x8s and some concrete blocks to hold the plastic in place. Then you flood the ice with a hose.

There are, of course, some very nice amateur videos on YouTube that show you how to make yoru own rink in your backyard. Some are quite elaborate. Most are made by teenage hockey players, and as such, the music over the videos is very loud and there's much profanity used in describing the ice rink construction and final product. I did find this lovely family rink video.



There's also an excellent documentary about amateur ice rinks in Minnesota, Canada and other cold places, called Pond Hockey: http://pondhockeymovie.com/. There are advantages to frozen ground!

I grew up ice skating three blocks from our house on Farragut Street in Park Forest, Illinois. The grade school (Illinois School, on Illinois Street, not to be confused with Indiana School on Indiana Street about 12 blocks away) had an outdoor rink every winter. You never knew when it would be flooded (it seemed done by elves, but I do believe some firemen came out and opened a fire hydrant onto it once the weather was going to stay below freezing). The rink was actually carved into the ground, with sloped sides and a mound down the middle that separated the figure skating side from the hockey side. This was, in my day and my neighborhood, a gender line: boys on the hockey side and girls on the figure skating side.

I also took figure skating lessons at a large indoor rink in Park Forest South. I took a bus to get there, and I always was a little nervous when I came out into the dark (it was probably 4:30 or 5 p.m.) and had to find my bus. I had no idea where I was but it felt like a long way from home. I truly valued this kind of independent experience even then. I became a good skater: figure eights and backward and some spins, but nothing elaborate. As good a skater as I was, I was always impressed by boys and how they could skate. Hockey demanded a kind of athleticism I would never have, a confidence and ease on skates. It was like they were on solid ground and I was doing the same thing on a balance beam, precarious.

The last time I was at that grade school rink, the older brother of one of my childhood friends was there with his toddler daughter. He was clearly a hockey player. She was on little double-bladed skates and completely enveloped in a snowsuit. This man, who was in his 20s, skated around and around the rink, holding onto her all the way. She must have felt like she was flying. All you could hear was her laughter, pealing out of that snowsuit. When they came my way, I could see her face-- one gigantic smile. It was one of the purest portraits of joy I've ever seen.

So every day I watch our pond, waiting for the day it will ice over, then freeze completely. It's nice if it happens before there is snow, but if there is snow, Tim will get out there and blow it clear. In the old days, Paul used to string up lights around the pond, but now we skate in dark or moonlight.

It's one reason we live in Minnesota.

Halloween is for Kids

I enjoyed Halloween until I was 12, although it was never my favorite holiday. I loved fall, with its pumpkins and colored leaves and early dark. I liked the candy and especially the time spent after trick-or-treating trading candy with my siblings. We gave 2/3 of our haul to the charity bin at the elementary school, so quantity was our aim. Luckily, there were enough peanut butter taffies, Mary Janes and Tootsie Rolls to put in the charity pile that we didn't have to go into our candy bar collection. Also luckily, my sister was a fan of 3 Musketeers and not a fan of nuts, so I could build up my Snickers collection.

Park Forest, Illinois, had a haunted house when I was growing up. It was in a small, brick two-story house that was built to provide training to the fire department. A few times a year they'd set it on fire and practice navigating the narrow hallways, tricky stairways and small rooms. For the haunted house, they replaced the limited bare lightbulbs with colored or strobe bulbs. I vividly remember going through that place one year, being pushed into a hay bale that housed a monster of some sort and fleeing through the back door-- terrifying. I think I was expecting fake haunted house carnival ride monsters, not real people dressed up and hiding, reaching out and grabbing us.

Mostly I associate Halloween with discomfort. The costumes, of course, but also plunging my head into a bucket of water and apples. My sticky face and hair after struggling to bite through a layer of caramel and into an apple. Although I loved being in plays, I never liked wearing costumes for parties or Halloween. It felt like too much pressure to come up with something good, and I was never satisfied.

My favorite Halloween as an adult was the year I lived in Brooklyn. I had successfully avoided all costume parties, and came home from work to a gorgeous fall evening, stopping at Happy Pizza for a slice. I went up to my apartment over the video store, only to be roused by the sound of a parade a half hour later. In 1989-91, when I lived in Park Slope, 7th Avenue was a major parade route. Beginning the first Saturday morning after I moved in with bagpipes and a parade of all the park district baseball teams, the were almost always led by bagpipes, and they were almost always a complete surprise to me.

I came down to watch the parade, what seemed like hundreds of kids in costumes marching down the street. Adults gathered on the sidewalk and called out and applauded the kids: "Hey, superman! Hey, hi there, ninja turtle!" Some kids worked the crowd, while others seemed surprised by the attention. All the store owners (except the new Korean noodle place that was also taken off guard) had candy at the ready to hand out to the children. It was almost like a mirror version of a 4th of July parade, with the crowd throwing candy to the marchers.

I have friends in Cold Spring who go to an annual adult costume party for Halloween. They look forward to it and go to great lengths to put together costumes. Last year they won the best costume prize for Thing 1 and Thing 2, and this year the plan was to go as the sexy cable repair guy and a "Real Housewife" of Cold Spring. Their three children-- yeah, they have costumes for Halloween too.

My Facebook feed is also full of photos of adult friends at various Halloween parties. I love the gnome and vampires and superheroes and all of it. But I thank the Lord I don't have to dress up. The last costume party I attended was in 1987, if I remember correctly. I came home from work to find the law students I lived with had spent the entire day preparing costumes. I dissolved in tears, until my friend Bob took me in hand and said, "Susan, there's always the hobo!" A flannel shirt, ripped jeans, bandana bundle on a stick and some charcoal and I was good to go. But I do remember how much that charcoal itched all night and made my face break out.

Tamarack

tamarack and pine trees I pass on my way to work

Throughout my adult life, there have been times I have been criticized for not being more engaged with nature. The harshest came from Denise Levertov, who thought it was the ultimate reason that I should not be a poet. I remember a conference with her when she said, "Susan, your interest is in human relationships. Poets care about nature. Why don't you write fiction?" I said to her, almost plaintively, "I'm going on a backpacking trip for four days starting tomorrow." She came very close to patting my knee, as if to say, "That's nice, dear, but it's not going to make you a poet."

Such a pronouncement is silly, of course, but Denise Levertov loomed very large and we students gave her a lot of power. In fact, she did have the power to make or break us, recommending her favorite students' manuscripts to publishers. When my poetry manuscript was a finalist for the National Poetry Series a couple of years later, she was one of the judges.

I grew up in Park Forest, a suburb of Chicago, a place defined, if by anything, but culture, by sociology, by human relationships. It is the subject of the book The Organizational Man. There was a forest preserve, and we walked in it, but in its deep recesses there was danger-- smoking and drinking and sex and violence. We stayed on the path and didn't go there at night. On a camping trip with the Campfire Girls we got deluged and ended up twelve whimpering, sodden girls in the back of station wagons driving home in the middle of the night.

I knew the names of a few trees: locust, maple, oak. Firs and pines were all "evergreens." The truth is, I didn't know anyone who knew the names of any plants beyond the most common. I loved summer storms and October weather, especially the early darkness and wind in the piles of leaves. I loved lilacs in June. I loved snow on the giant pine outside our kitchen window, framed by the carport.

During my two stints in California and my year in Reno, I worked very hard to absorb the natural world. Backpacking was just the start. The fact is, it was foreign terrain. In Reno, attached to the Literature and Environment program at the University, there was so much talk about the various ecosystems. Basin and range. Watersheds. Elevation and its effects. Lake Tahoe and its clarity and fragility. Walking in the public lands, which seemed barren to me, I have to admit I loved the rusted out shells of old cars people had pushed over ridges and the sound of people shooting tin cans. But I worked hard to pay attention to the plants as well.

Which brings me to the tamarack tree. This fall it has made an impression on me. Two weekends ago we were out at the Kluesner log cabin, which was built on our property and moved to a lake near Wadena, Minnesota. It was a gorgeous, unseasonably warm October weekend, so we went kayaking both days on the lake. On one shore was a large tamarack grove, right along the swampy edge of the lake, backed by black-green pines.

Tamarack is a pine tree whose foliage turns yellow in the fall before it loses its needles. They're feathery and I'm sure I thought they were just drought-stricken, sickly trees in the past (not noticing they grow in or near water). But this year I saw them along that lakeshore in all their glory, and now I see them on my way to work, small stands sometimes glowing in the morning sun or stark against green pines. They only grow in northern climes, mostly in Alaska and Canada, also in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Connecticut and Maine, dipping down as far south as the "extreme northern end of Illinois." 

I remember standing with my sister on a corner in Atlanta when she helped me move there after college. She wanted to know what kind of tree we were looking at, a large tree with smooth bark, gnarly branches and large, waxy green leaves. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder. It turned out to be a magnolia, and then I started seeing them everywhere. I wish she could have been there to see them in bloom. Later I learned about dogwoods, from a poster for the annual dogwood festival, and started looking for them. I learned what azaleas were.

I read about jacaranda trees in a poem, and then looking for them in Southern California after living there two years. They bloom in April, and if you look for them they are everywhere. But you have to look-- amid the shopping centers and concrete. You have to go into the neighborhoods and slow down. In fact, you can see them best from an airplane at that time, making a light-purple canopy over the area. They are native to South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. They are exotic, like the bamboo, birds of paradise and lemon trees in my Long Beach neighborhood.

Nature is a tricky business, and mostly, it is local. In Park Forest, I loved the rattling seed pods of the locust trees, the helicopter seeds of the maple. More than anything I loved the weeping willows that grew along a creek behind the public library. I loved Queen Anne's lace with its black dot at the center. When I was very young and living by that forest preserve,  I thought the black dot was a baby ant, the queen. I loved black-eyed Susans, with whom I shared a name. To share a name with a flower seemed quite magical.

Now I live with and love the purple aster, droopy cone flowers and bergamot. I look for the sumac and, now, the tamarack groves.   

Ponderosa Steakhouse

I'm definitely loving kale. I think part of the appeal is my past history with it. I worked at Ponderosa Steakhouse  in Chicago Heights, Ill., when I was in high school. I could walk there-- cutting through the hedge at the end of my street-- and Ponderosa had been part of many minor childhood adventures (sneaking in and getting paper cups of water from the fancy water fountain) and suburban legends (the bullet holes in the side of the building and stories of armed robberies). For about the first six months, I was on salad bar and bussing tables, the first step before becoming an order taker and eventually, a cashier.

It is amazing that the hedge was the only thing separating us in Park Forest from Chicago Heights, which was all around a much more "dangerous" place. Meaning it was more urban and more poor. Crossing through that hedge put us within a block of the corner of Lincoln Highway and Western Avenue. That corner was a gateway to a number of places. Of chief interest to us as teenagers were White Castle, Dunkin Donuts and Brunswick Bowl.

You really weren't supposed to walk across any of the intersections at this junction, or so it seemed to me at the time. It was a pure car environment, meaning a mass of strip-mall type entrances with people driving in and out, parking, multiple lanes of traffic, etc. Given the fact that most of my childhood was spent on my bike traveling safely and without any harrassment from cars, in Park Forest and then into the leafy neighborhoods of Olympia Fields and Flossmoor, Chicago Heights represented a certain very concrete (in both senses of the word) form of inaccessibility. And since I was making sub-minimum wage, $2.90/hour, at Ponderosa, it wasn't like I could afford more than the occasional donut or slider anyway. Looking back, I think there was also a movie theater over there. I think my sister and I saw Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure there when we were stuck at home without a car later on in life. Once, stir-crazy in a snowstorm, we walked to Brunswick Bowl. Otherwise, it truly felt like my world ended at the hedge at the end of Farragut Street, with an exception made for slipping through to go to work at Ponderosa.

I do find it sad and kind of a symptom of what's wrong with our food culture that I did not learn a single thing about cooking while working for two years at a restaurant. The only food-related things I learned was 1) the tomato shark is an essential piece of kitchen equipment, and 2) Fruit Fresh would make my hands itch and swell up to twice their size. I also developed a lifelong dislike of French dressing, which seemed to ooze from my pores after a night of working the salad bar.

Fruit Fresh was pure MSG, and we'd soak kale in a clean tub of cool water and the stuff before putting it out as decorative garnish on the salad bar. I liked the look of kale, and the texture, but it seemed clear to me that no one ate the stuff. It was soaked in chemicals to keep it from wilting and then placed over ice. At the end of the night we'd wash the spilled French and blue cheese dressing off of it and put it away, in the tub of fruit fresh, in the cooler for the next day. It seemed some part rubber, like a fake plant, and I wondered how someone came up with the idea of putting kale as decorative garnish on a salad bar. I remember wondering once, also, where it came from. Iceberg lettuce, I knew, came from California. Hard-boiled eggs came frozen in a carton and were very popular, so you had to make sure to get them thawed before you ran out or customers got crabby.
I look back on my Ponderosa experience fondly, entirely as a social experience, because of the people I worked with. I did also learn there how to smash a foil-wrapped baked potato with the heel of my hand and push on the ends to make it flower open. I burned my hand on roll pans, like the boys who worked the grill burned their arms on racks of baked potatoes. But cooking? Hmmm. If you run out of coctail sauce, you can substitute ketchup with lemon juice. And, uh, I did make quite a few gigantic trays of jello. When it wouldn't work out (something about the temperature, it would sometimes get hard on the bottom), we'd slurp it down and once has a jello fight in the kitchen with the dishwashers.

My friend Michael Parks talked me into applying for the job, with tales that turned out to be not so far-fetched about the antics of the employees. I liked the uniforms, which for girls consisted of a brown polyester jumper over a not-itchy flowered knit blouse and a matching flowered hairband. I would wear my hair in looped braids with the hairband and Michael called it my "Princess Leia Hair."

An essential part of our training for the job was learning what to do in case of an armed robbery (I thought this had been a myth, but I was wrong). We were very well-coached to give the thief the money, not do anything stupid, and tell the thief, for example, that someone might come through the swinging door to the kitchen, so don't get alarmed and shoot him, please. I remember the training vividly. It included a video.
 
Michael was working the day there actually was a robbery, and I was not. The cashier was ordered into the manager's office, behind the cash register, where they were made to strip to their underwear and open the safe. Michael walked in to find out how many Ribeyes he should take out of the freezer and realized something was wrong. He also had to strip down, and the thieves left with the money from the safe, into which they locked the employees' clothing. I thought this made them very professional.
 
I never faced a robber, but one afternoon an old man who I waited on in the empty restaurant from order through cashier, died of a heart attack while I was at his table delivering his food. He sort of communicated without speaking that I should stay with him, and I did, and then he had the heart attack, and I went through his pockets for medication, which said "Take with orange juice," and then he was slumped over in the booth. I went for the manager, and it turned out the only other customer in the place was a nurse. She did CPR until the ambulance came -- which was fast, this being Chicago Heights -- I'd just turned 18 and it had a very large impact on me.
 
The next day when I came in, the manager said, "Hey Susan, I was just telling Mr. Henry here how you killed that guy yesterday." That's the kind of people are managers at Ponderosa. Another one of them delighted in telling us stories of "sucking up villagers' huts" with his plane in Vietnam. I don't know if he was bombing them or what, but he said he was close enough to see them running around trying to get away as their homes went up in flames. Another one loaned me stacks of record albums, all of which, in the end, with the exception of The Kids are All Right by The Who, which I asked him for, were terrible. (They included such prizes as Manfred Mann, 10cc, LSD (Lake Shore Drive) and a couple by this cocky young telephone line worker from Indiana, John Cougar.) 
 
My experience at Ponderosa Steakhouse, in the end, had nothing to do with food. It had very little to do, even, with my everyday life. When a customer, a tough-looking Hispanic kid, asked for my phone number, Michael pointed out that he had a gang tattoo and told me to never give my phone number to a customer (as if I would!). I remember when a family who used to come in quite regularly asked me, near the end of my final summer, if I'd be going to college soon. I told them yes, and they said, "We thought so. You are clearly a bright girl with a lot going for you. You really shouldn't stay here." (As if I would!) By then I was up to $3.35/hour, after being bumped up a quarter when I threatened to quit earlier in the summer.
 
I also remember this: one of the cooks, my good friend J.T. Berkley, who is now an engineer for Ford Motor Company working on hydrogen fuel cell technology, was fond of pointing out that the steaks came all the way from Australia.
 
Oh, and if you don't have a tomato shark, you REALLY should get yourself one. They make great stocking stuffers!

Church Banners

Yesterday, March 19, was the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker. Joseph the carpenter is the patron saint of our parish here in St. Joseph. Steve was really excited about the feast, and got up and went to early Mass. He was disappointed that it wasn't a bigger deal in the parish. Afterward he saw the liturgist and said that he would be happy to make a banner of St. Joseph, in the woodblock style of our parish logo, which he also designed, for use on the feast. The liturgist, David, said: "Will it have words on it?" He doesn't like words on visual displays.

When Steve told me about this, it reminded me of my sister, and of our transition from the Catholic Church to an Assembly of God church when I was 12 and she was 10. When we switched churches, I think it was the visual change that was the most overwhelming for us. Instead of priests, we had a pastor in a business suit. Instead of pews, we had chairs that stacked for removal from the school classroom where we met once the service was over. The classroom was really two, with an accordion room divider opened up to make room for us on Sunday mornings. No more stained glass, incense, wood, candles, altar-- not even a crucifix. The tools of our pastor's trade were an overhead projector for the song texts and writing notes with a Sharpie during the sermon and a podium from which he preached.

There was no question for us that God was there. God was present in our prayer and in our singing, in the prophecy and tongues that were now a regular part of the service, in the love of the people for one another. But it was sort of like the Whos of Whoville after the grinch came. My sister and I, at least, missed the tree.

I was surprised when my sister went to our pastor and asked if it would be OK for her to make some felt banners. I knew this was "a Catholic thing." In our 1970s Catholic parish church we'd pitched in to make many banners: wheat and grapes, giant suns and sunbeams, Holy Spirit doves plunging into flames. And I was even more glad that our pastor said yes.

My sister made banners for the major liturgical occasions: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and for everyday. They were strung over the podium, making it look much more like a lectern, or hung from the track where the accordion door ran. I loved seeing them, and also recognized it was a profound gesture of love toward us. Pastor Stroud and that congregation cared a lot for my sister and me, the only teenagers in our small congregation. He wanted us to feel at home.

The Assemblies of God, I would learn over time, are particularly spare when it comes to religious imagery. They don't have overtly religious ornamentation in their churches. I don't think ours was unusual, even though we didn't have a permanent building. 

Felt banners were very much a cultural phenomenon in the 1970s Catholic Church. As I've learned more about Vatican II, I realize what a dramatic shift occurred very quickly in terms of church architecture and design. For the parishioners of St. Irenaeus in Park Forest who had attended in the 1950s, our church must have looked spare indeed. And into that space the folky Catholics of the Vatican II era brought large felt banners, a whole new age of liturgical design and art. And we, who only knew that, took it with us in our hearts. 

images: top left is Steve's logo for St. Joseph Church, St. Joseph, Minn. Would make a nice banner, wouldn't it?  At right is a recent example of a First Communion banner, which seems to be a common project for 2nd graders. If you'd like to see some really professional felt banners by liturgical artist James Mellick, click here.

Tolstoy Lite

I fell under the spell of Tolstoy when I was a senior in high school. It started when Mayama's bookstore in the Park Forest Plaza closed. All the books were deeply discounted, and I took my babysitting money and did my first serious bookbuying.

My family was strictly a library family. We had a large bookshelf full of children's books, which was added to over the years because my mother became a nursery school teacher. Those were books to be read and reread, the logic went. As for adults, what was the point in owning books? You only read them once and you were done. Aside from a shelf of my father's old college books in the basement, an untouched collection of Reader's Digest Condensed Books we'd acquired through gift subscriptions and some coffee-table books on display in the living room, our house was bereft of books.

I remember what I bought very clearly. I bought a large Bible that was filled with illustrations by Rembrandt, including a loose print of his portrait of Jesus which was the only thing I really wanted (and which I hung in my dorm room all four years), and a Modern Library hardcover edition of Anna Karenina.

I sitll have that copy of Anna Karenina (and my grandmother loved the "large print" Bible in her final years). It's pages were like porcelain. I loved it like a physical object, for the beauty of the type, for the simplicity of the cover, and I also loved the story, particularly the story of Kitty and Levin. I devoured it, and when I was done I moved on to War and Peace, which I read the summer before I went to college. That Grinnell had a whole course in Tolstoy was really too much good fortune to be believed, and so when I took it I got to read them both again. That the amazing John Mohan taught the course was icing on the cake of my lifelong love of Tolstoy and what Isaiah Berlin called his "big, baggy monsters." To this date, I'd have to say that was the best class I took in college.

So I was probably too excited about The Last Station. It is possible my hopes were too high. And I was disappointed. However, I was also aware of just how much the director and writer had to work with, and really, I would have been happy if they'd done any of it. This film, with excellent acting by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, was not big, and in the end felt like a real missed opportunity.

The story is simple: the great author, essayist and idealist Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, with paparazzi recording his every move, in 1910, has become an icon (first time that word actually fit the context, as they are making an illuminated saint of him!). He lives at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, where his wife, the Countess Sofia Andreevna, struggles to keep his attention and to protect his legacy, namely the copyright to his books, which he is being convinced to sign over "to the Russian people" (i.e., public domain). Tolstoy is not just a writer, he is the (reluctant) leader of a movement; the Tolstoyans are a nature-loving, peasant-imitating group of bourgeois kids, who have shed the trappings of religion and other institutions and are after simplicity, equality and a good life on the land. They're ensconced on a plot of land that they run like a commune. The other major character, his secretary, played by James McEvoy, is our guide through the situation.

What I wanted was to see Tolstoy's relationship with the peasants and the land. OR, let us see the fiery anarchists and how their extremism is destructive and/or hypocritical and/or valiant. Let me see Tolstoy's wisdom and thought, his commitment and ideology. Or let me see his wife's decadence and how he figures out a way to distance himself from it. Or let it be a foreshadowing to what was coming in 1917, a critique of class envy turning to class warfare.

In the end, the filmmakers showed us a complex, unhappy marriage between two people who were nonetheless devoted to each other. Manipulation on a small and petty scale. Intrigue that was really not very intriguing. And don't ask me anything about peasants or Tolstoyan thought. These Tolstoyans were a grumpy bunch who didn't seem to have much of a program and seemed happy to abandon it at the first sight of a pretty girl. There is NO celibacy or even struggle with celibacy in this film, though much is made of it in the promotional materials and early discussion of Tolstoyanism. All in all, a surprisingly passionless bunch all around.

I recognized some of the great details of the notoriously conflicted marriage-- mostly having to do with diaries and a game of initials they played when they first met.  But there was no grand arc, no symbols, no complex intertwined stories, and despite the beauty, not a whole lot of life, in the film. It was so un-Tolstoyan!

Still, you have to see it-- the costumes are gorgeous and the acting is first rate. And it's unlikely we'll get another film set at Yasnaya Polyana for a long, long time.

The Badge Pool

I've been thinking a lot about the Park Forest Aqua Center these days, particularly the Badge Pool. For those just getting ot know Park Forest through the blog, the Aqua Center was this amazing city pool complex, all outdoors, run by the city until the late-70s or early 80s when it became a YMCA and started its decline. It has had many incarnations and seems to be doing well now, run by the Park Forest Parks and Recreation Department. It was built in 1954 "by the citizens of Park Forest," a gigantic single pool with an octagonal deep end and diving boards that turned a corner and became a shallow kiddie pool.

When we were kids it was a complex of five pools. There was the adult pool for parents, completely gated and fenced; the teen pool, a long narrow rectangle with a high dive and deep end and a shallow end; the baby pool-- just a series of concrete puddles; a kiddie pool that was basically a two-three foot wading pool; and the badge pool. The badge pool was squat and full of kids who could swim, although mostly they were playing. You had to have a badge to get in, and to get the badge you had to swim two lengths of the pool.


Every day at 3:00 was the test, and kids would start lining up about 2:30 for the chance to attempt to get a badge. At 3:00, the kids were sent into the pool in spaced intervals. Those who already had badges would line the edge of the pool to cheer kids on or just to watch the drama. Lifeguards spaced along the way decided if you were still swimming or just struggling for your life. It was the first big test in life, like a driving test for nine-year-olds. Were they going to let you in the deep water? Did you have the skills? Were you a good swimmer, or at least good enough?

I remember the lead-up to getting my badge, going up to the fence and trying to get a sense of the challenge, seeing the bigger kids in the pool having much more fun than we could ever have in the kiddie pool. I took swimming lessons, so probably qualified for my badge earlier than some other kids. We'd try practicing in the 3-foot waters of the kiddie pool.

I don't really remember, but I doubt I made it on my first attempt. I sort of remember standing in that line several times. THe only way to really practice was just to do it. And I remember my utter lack of confidence, feeling that I certainly would not pass the test. I'm sure a large part of it was psychological. There was also the pressure of all those kids with badges watching you, yelling at the pool, knowing you were being watched AND tested. In not wanting to be embarrassed, how could you help but try too hard, gulp a big mouthful of water, and so fail. We'd psych each other up: "Just relax. You're a good swimmer. You can do it." But standing in that line in nothing but a bathing suit, it was hard to believe.

I know my sister didn't make it on her first try, because I remember standing by the side of the pool to cheer her on, watching as she started out strong, lost speed, more or less stopped kicking, and eventually was lifted out of the lane. Some kids would just keep flailing and turning their heads to breathe even as the lifeguard was removing them from the pool. It was in some ways a terrible spectacle. It was very clear when someone earned a badge, and when someone didn't. The bobbing and flipping sideways to gasp for air, the sinking, said quite distinctly that this particular child could not be allowed in deep water, lifeguard or no (of course all the pools had lifeguards-- four of them at the badge pool alone).

There was no triumph like the day you got your badge. It was a white plastic circle printed in red. As the possessor of a badge, you then had another decision to make. What bathing suit should you sew it onto? You likely had more than one for a whole summer of swimming, but only one badge, and it had to be sewn on to count (no sharing of badges by pinning them on the suit). So would it be the Speedo with the bad racerback tan lines, or the scoop-neck with the low back? I'm sure I went with my red Speedo the first year-- it showed off the badge's colors so well.

And when you were tired of swimming, there was no place like the gigantic sandbox alongside the locker rooms. The sand was clean and deep and the sandbox was shaded-- the only place in the Aqua Center that offered relief from the burning hot concrete. You could dig your toes into the deep, cool sand, watch the kids with all their trucks and buckets making elaborate construction sites, and live the dream of your town, where a couple men after World War II claimed acres and acres of farmland in the name of Families and Progress. The American Dream.

Please leave your memories of the Aqua Center!

Photo: Octogonal Pool at the Park Forest Aqua Center in the 1950s.

Park Forest Public Library

The Park Forest entries have gotten such a good response, I've been meaning to sit down and write about Illinois Theatre Center. I just have so much to say about it, it's not really blog-length in my head. So let me just give the preface here. It is no small thing to say that of all the special things about Park Forest, and there are many, my favorite things all had to do with the Park Forest Public Library.

In the early days, there was the children's reading room. It had little kids' tables with slanted tops covered in extremely pleasing formica. The tops came together like little tents, and you could rest a picture book on the ledge and turn the pages at your leisure, reading without craning your neck. The reading room also had window seats, along the length of a big picture window, with pillows, where you could curl up on a rainy day. Those window seats made me feel like I was in a castle, not a library.

It wasn't long before I graduated to reading "chapter books." The "Y" section, real bookshelves that went up at least six feet, were our first experience with the card catalogue. The fiction was alphabetized by author name, and I began, of course, with "Alcott."  My mother had read Little Women to us already, so I went for the sequel, Little Men, and then Jo's Boys. In a recent PBS special on Louisa May Alcott, they interviewed a few well-known women writers who said that Louisa May Alcott was their first inspiration. I'd have to agree that Jo was my first model as well, and without her, I might not have been able to imagine myself becoming a "real" writer. The fact that she wrote when she was young, for her sisters and for the sheer pleasure of it, was exhiliarating. It gave me permission to take myself seriously, and to give myself over to books.

When I hit junior high, there seemed to be a greater emphasis on being physically active, probably as I became more bookish. My mother wanted me to go outside, but when I'd take a book and set up on a lawn chair, she'd prefer I "did something" like housework. Going to the Aqua Center was an approved alternative, however, a 2-mile bike ride from our home on Farragut Street.

The Aqua Center was next door to the library. So it was that I'd go off in my suit and shorts, park my bike at the Aqua Center, and walk instead over to the library-- sneak over to the library-- on a summer afternoon. I was through with the youth section by then, but had no real guidance for where to go next. It was easy to find the adult fiction, but it was also daunting. I really wish I'd met a nice librarian at that point, to recommend some books for me. As it was, I went to the place on the bookshelf where there would be books by me. Sink. It was empty, but just in front of "my" space was the good company I would have: Isaac Bashevis Singer.

This is probably where my love of Eastern European and Russian literature began. I started with Shosha. Then I read some yiddish fables he edited, and Enemies, A Love Story. I'm sure I read more, but those are the ones that stuck with me. I wish I had discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald then, or John Steinbeck.

I read randomly, and don't remember most of it. I remember mostly being confused and intimidated by the shiny novels that looked very adult. I avoided the ones with the skull and crossbones stickers (mystery), or the little magnifying glass stickers (detective), which were mostly the books my father read. He was an avid library patron, too. It felt odd to be looking for books in the same section as him.

I didn't find poetry until high school, doing research papers on the other side of the library. The reference section, along with the "800s," drama at 821 and poetry at 822, got my attention in high school. At that time we'd all go to the library to work on research papers, filling out slips to request magazine articles that had to be retrieved from the basement. When you got them, more often than not they didn't fit your topic, and you'd have to keep digging through the Reader's Guide to Periodicals. At some point, I also found 821 and 822, and started reading poetry and plays.

I'd hide out in the carrels along the outer side wall. In addition to anonymity, those carrels had another benefit. Sitting there, you could often hear the rehearsals at Illinois Theatre Center coming up through the floor. The Illinois Theatre Center, an Actor's Equity theater right there in Park Forest, Illinois, run by Steven and Etel Billig, opened in the basement of the Park Forest Public Library in 1976. I was twelve, and must have taken a class there as soon as it opened. My parents, and my friends' parents, were early subscribers (and my parents have subscribed to all 34 seasons).

How I remember the windowless basement accessible only by a steep staircase nearly hidden along the side of the building. It smelled of cigarette butts and paint and wood shavings and costumes with make-up and sweat deep in their period lace and ruffles. It was at the complete opposite end of the library as the children's reading room, and it was equally as magical. For me, for awhile, it was a door to a much larger world beyond that of my family. It was a fulfillment of the promise I'd always seen in the Park Forest Public Library, it's last and best offering.

Park Forest Girls' Softball

In 1973, when I was nine, the youngest you could be and still play, girls' softball came to Park Forest, Illinois. We'd had boys' baseball, well, forever, and my father was an umpire. When I was five or six, my father was an umpire at the state championship, and my mother woke us up at 6 a.m. (my sister was four) and sat us in front of the little black-and-white television and said, "Your father's on t.v.!" I didn't see my father. I did see a baseball game. "That's him, the umpire, in the mask and chest protector." It didn't look anything like my father. And when he called out the balls and strikes and dramatically, "You're OUT!" he really didn't sound or look anything like my father.

When girls' softball arrived, it arrived as an entire league, with three tiers and at least 24 teams. My father took me downtown and signed us up: I would play and he would be the manager. His friend from work who also lived in Park Forest and had a daughter named Suzy, Jack Sizemore, would coach. So we were Suzy Sizemore and Suzy Sink (I had not been Suzy before, but softball meant extraordinary efforts for me to fit in) and our dads were in charge of our team, the Kittens. (At age 11 we would become Cougars, and then at 14, Lions). Our color was navy. We played teams like the Ponies (Yellow), Papooses (Green) and Cubbies (light blue). We were issued hats and jerseys and randomly assigned to teams. We showed up for the opening day parade dressed in our uniforms, some girls with jerseys down below their knees, more than 300 girls in colorful ranks.

The Kittens' first practice was rained out. But my father still held a team meeting in our basement, and an intimidating group of girls showed up. He set up a blackboard and instructed us in the basics: names of positions, rules of the game, etc. I was more interested in the social aspects of the situation. I remember Cindy Cissell chewing a wad of gum and blowing very large bubbles. Maggie Egofske paid attention. Suzy Sizemore played with her hair. Neither of them looked interested in being my friend.

Eventually, the team meeting ended. Girls had to wait for their parents to pick them up, and the sky had cleared. They all seemed to have gloves already. Someone had a softball, and Cindy and Maggie started playing catch. Others joined in. My father stepped back and said, "Wow." He was already assigning positions. Cindy Cissell had an amazing arm-- 3rd base. Maggie knew how to pitch already, and Jill could field-- 1st base. One by one, parents came, and players left.

The promise of that first day was more than fulfilled in the first season. We soundly won every game, by as much as 33-3. After batting around, the inning was over, so there were checks on our rallies. It turned out there were other girls in Park Forest who didn't know how to play as well as the girls that landed on our team.

I played center and right field. I was told right field was important for backing up the first baseman, but at that level, nothing ever really left the infield. Girls couldn't hit that far, nor could they "overthrow" that far. I sat in the field with my glove on my head and watched butterflies. One miserable day I poured lemonade over my head between innings, thinking it was water.

I continued to play until I was 13, when I moved on to summer theater at Governor's State College, a much better fit for me. But I did like many things about girls' softball in Park Forest. I liked practices, especially those breezy evenings in midsummer and evenings when rain blew through. I liked the girls on our team, and the hats. I liked especially the scoreboard my father made out of wood, with painted number blocks my brother would hang from pegs to track the innings, outs and score. I liked the annual parade. I liked playing on different fields all over town, driving into neighborhoods I hadn't known before, where there were named fields with dugouts and backstops and bleachers.

The entry on Norman Rockwell has brought some other Kittens out to the blog. More and more people I grew up with are finding these happy memories, and asking that I write more about that special place and the privilege we had of growing up there.

Norman Rockwell

I think like most people my age, I have mixed feelings about Norman Rockwell. Growing up, we had four framed Norman Rockwell prints over our living room couch. They were the four seasons, and a quick Google search shows they were the "Young Love" series-- still available on collectible plates. I saw them every day, and engraved on my brain is the one of the boy testing the buttercup under the girl's chin, and the one of him carrying her books to school. There is a dog in every picture. The kids are freckle-faced and belong to an idyllic "small-town" America.

I like Norman Rockwell's work, and like many was surprised to see his more socially conscious pieces later in life. I appreciate that he always saw himself as an illustrator-- he had a genuine lack of pretension in that way. I don't embrace his vision, though for the most part that may have to do with seeing too many of his images on collector plates. Still, I was surprised this morning to hear in a story on the photographers who took the photos he painted from, that one painting, "New Kids in the Neighborhood," was based on a story on integration in Park Forest, Illinois.

Of course, the models are in Vermont, where Rockwell lived. I don't know where the houses are from, but that is not Park Forest. In Park Forest, the houses in the neighborhoods are much closer together, the lawns end much closer to the street, and I'm assuming the houses are smaller. They're certainly not made of brick and stone. They're 1950s split-levels.

It's funny that I assumed I'd see my Park Forest in the painting. Rockwell painted it in 1967. Well, I was in Park Forest in 1967! I was three years old and living in the Co-ops. What I do like about this painting is that all the children are from the same class. They are all middle class children. In fact, the African American children are quite dressed up. They're making a first impression. One can write a back story to this. And the white kids are interested as anyone would be to have new children in the neighborhood. I still vividly remember the arrival of new children in both the Co-ops and on Farragut Street. The day Katie moved out was one of great sadness, and the day Michael moved in was one of great anticipation, some anxiety, and much joy. The first storybook I wrote was in sixth grade, and it opened with a moving truck bringing a mysterious and magical girl to the neighborhood, and ended with the moving truck that took her away.

I don't see my Park Forest in the painting, of course. This is the crux of Rockwell, I think, the blend of "realism" with his very specific vision of how people looked and what they were up to. Steve says the lasting value of his work is that it was narrative-- that back story I was talking about. And I agree. As long as we also realize that the narrative is fiction, not history.

Park Forest

We squeezed in a trip to see my family in Chicago and Frankfort, IL over New Year's, and it was a good trip. Steve had not been out to my parents' house, which is warm and inviting and in an old town that prides itself on "1890s charm." My mother is a great cook and a wonderful hostess, and we had a very good visit. They've lived there since 1993, when they left Park Forest, IL, the town I grew up in. Over the years as I've visited I've seen the town of Frankfort transform. The small, quaint downtown is still there, with a bike trail running through it and the old tavern that has been in existence since the 1870s (in my time a popular biker bar called "Rosie's" now renamed "The Plank Trail Tavern" with an outside patio to attract a different kind of biker). The town is surrounded, however, by all sorts of new construction, mansions and mini-mansions, upscale shops and lofts. It is becoming, in a word, Naperville. It's been interesting enough to watch this developement take over the countryside. The construction started on Hwy 45 between I-80 and Frankfort. First the gas stations were built all along both sides of the road. Then came the banks. Then all the other spaces were filled in with housing developments and strip malls, and a large number of chain restaurants.

It was with this picture in my head that I prepared to show Steve the town I grew up in, Park Forest. We drove out on Friday, headed down Rte 30, and in no time at all were at the Lincoln Mall in Matteson, and then under the Illinois Central tracks, and bam-- Orchard Street in Park Forest. It was exactly the same. There is the eccentric split-level house that looks like a Buddhist temple on the corner. And Orchard is still only two lanes wide. Driving up our old street, Farragut, I stopped in awe at the home of my childhood friend Anne Lloyd, whose parents still live in the ranch home. It is still painted white with green trim. And the wood shutters on the front are exactly the same. Even our own house looked basically the same. The hedges out front were the same. And the beautiful large locust tree in the front yard was still there.

The next stop was the Park Forest co-ops, where I lived from age 1-6. This was truly a magical place to be a kid. It was one of the first planned postwar communities in the country. It is a series of row houses arranged in "courts," that have parking areas to the side. This means children don't ever have to worry about cars in the neighborhood. We lived on Dogwood, in court D-4. And our row of houses faced the forest preserve-- dense forest right out your door. When we walked up this visit, there were two very tame deer eating grass beside the parking lot. They watched us until we moved on, but clearly had no intention of making a break for it.

The co-ops themselves look, well, the same. The porches have been replaced, and air conditioning units have been added, but otherwise they're the same tidy postwar spaces I remember. Our unit was snug between its neighbors. But it is all about that forest. And you just really don't see places like this in the United States anymore. It was kind of thrilling.

The Park Forest Plaza shopping center downtown has been completely reconfigured, and this is where we saw the only new construction of the visit. They're trying to integrate housing with the shopping center, which in the 1980s and '90s became a dangerous empty space at night. That said, we stopped by the Illinois Theater Center, a theater that used to be run from the basement of the Park Forest Library, and that whole end of the center is now occupied by galleries and art organizations.

Park Forest still feels like the progressive place it has always been. I have so much to say about this town, I'll have to wait for future blogs. For now, in the midst of a very busy week, I wanted to check in and leave an essay about "what I did on my Christmas vacation." Thanks for reading.

The black and white photo above is of the co-ops taken by Dan Weiner, called "Party in the 'tot yard,'" Park Forest, Illinois, 1953. It was taken as part of a photo shoot for a three-part article that ran in Fortune magazine that year. I first saw the photo and bought the post card (and several others like it) at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC in 1990. Later I found the photos again in a book called America Worked. Here's a link to another amazing photo, of commuters in Park Forest (most likely the Matteson train station). When I was in fifth grade, and someone asked what my father did for a living, I said, "He's a commuter." Told "That's not a job," I replied, "Yes it is! My father's a commuter for CNA insurance!" I bought all available copies of America Worked at a book kiosk in Central Park back in 1991. It's great stuff.

My Black and White America: Michael Parks and Barack Obama

For about a year I’ve been wanting to write about Michael Parks. I've written about him before, but it hasn't been very cohesive. This time I was prompted when my mother said she was thinking about voting for Barack Obama, because he reminded her so much of Michael Parks. My mother has never voted for a democrat in her life.

Moreover, my mother was raised in the 1940s and 1950s in a fairly racist environment. It was her mother, my grandmother, who took me aside while visiting us in the south suburbs of Chicago to talk to me about her views on the mixing of the races. She didn’t approve. Blacks should marry blacks and whites should stick to their own kind, too. She didn’t even fully approve that my aunt was raising her children as “Italians.” My mother was at that point raising us as Protestants, having left the Catholic Church when I was twelve, and so we were in trouble already as far as my grandmother was concerned. During that visit I also heard her say, “I’ve never been anywhere that Catholics weren’t in the majority.” My mother’s evangelical environment struck her as quite strange. Later I would see what my parents had done in a new light—in their early twenties they’d left their families in South Jersey and moved when my father’s job transferred him to Chicago. They’d moved to Park Forest because of the availability of cheap housing, and I think also for the promise it always offered of a solid community and the ability to move up, neighborhood by neighborhood.

My parents moved into the middle class, and despite their conservative politics, they were living in a place that was known for radicals. Park Forest, Illinois, built in the 1940s as a planned postwar community, was unusual from its founding for its commitment to integration, first of Jews and then of Blacks. It’s history with race was complicated, but in 1976 Park Forest won its second of two “All-America City” awards “for its efforts in housing rehabilitation, fair housing, and racial integration” (America’s Original GI Town, 134). Our block of Farragut Street, our home in Park Forest after we moved up from the townhouses, was a perfect example. Across the street were Cathy and Michael Zilverberg, whose mother was black and father was white (and Jewish). They lived next door to Keith Smith, whose mother was British. In the house behind ours lived my brother’s best friends for a time, Freddy and Frankie Wang, before they moved back to Taiwan. Two doors down from us was Michael Parks, who was black. Cathy Zilverberg, Keith Smith, Michael Parks and I were inseparable for years. Cathy taught me to double-dutch, and we spent hours beneath Keith’s window waiting for him to finish practicing his horn. We played Kick the Can, 500, every imaginable kind of tag, and even chicken fights, with the girls on the boys’ shoulders. We had a science lab, a clubhouse, and we all learned the electric slide in Cathy’s living room.

No doubt my grandmother had noticed that my best friend, Michael Parks, was a black boy. In fact, with only two exceptions I can think of, all the boys who came to my house to visit me were black. From Phillip in the fourth grade up through J.T. Berkley who worked with me at Ponderosa Steakhouse during high school, unsolicited they came. When J.T. showed up at the door, in a steel WWI helmet, army jacket, and carrying a cane, dark-skinned, with a voice several octaves below any other high schoolers I knew and a full beard, my father sounded downright exasperated when he called me: “Susan, someone’s at the door for you,” before turning and retiring back to his spot watching sports on t.v. from the living room couch.

I was lucky growing up to have many best friends, but none of them held a candle to Michael Parks. He moved in when we were in third grade. Before him, my friend Kelly had lived in that house, and it was my first experience of a friend moving away. I hoped with all my heart that another child my age would move in, and I could not have gotten luckier that it was Michael who did. Michael and his brother Anderson (Andy) were being raised by their single mother, Lois Parks, who was a school teacher in Chicago. She is a heroic woman in my eyes, having somehow bought that house and brought her sons up in a good school district, with the opportunity to go to college. I have no idea what her commute was, but it was surely long.

Michael was a huge fan of after-school television, an interest it was important to him that we shared. And I was game—very happy to discuss which of the superheroes was the best in the Super Friends (?) half hour, and lament the fact that there were so few Captain America episodes in the rotation. It was because of Michael I had the terrifying experience of so many After School Specials, none scarier than the two-part edition of Sybil with Sally Field, the flying nun, and that I learned my Gilligan’s Island and I Dream of Jeanie references.

And given all the television we watched, it’s amazing how much activity we accomplished. Michael decided my house was the best for Kick the Can, and he was right. Michael was almost assuredly behind the scheme to build the clubhouse in my backyard when we got our hands on two boards from a broken ping pong table. We used the fence for the other two walls, and for weeks we trolled the neighborhood on Thursday afternoons, “garbage picking” for our clubhouse.

Michael always wanted us to enter contests—especially if there were cash prizes. He talked me into a Halloween contest in 1976, when we were 12. My costume, as always, was highly conceptual. I was the “Spirit of ’76,” a plain white ghost with a sign saying Spirit of ’76. (I did not win in the Most Creative category, as I’d hoped.) Michael was a robot, a costume he’d made out of an astonishing number of boxes cut to fit every part of his body. It was hard to move around in it, and even harder to see out of it. At the end of the contest we sat and watched as a perky woman announced: “First Place goes to—Michael Parks!” The robot moved his head around until he got her in his sight and then headed off. But she was already moving to the other side of the stage. “Michael Parks?” He stopped, adjusted his box until he found her, and began walking again. Still she didn’t notice him, and moved: “Michael Parks?” waving his prize check in the air. The audience laughed, as again the robot froze and tried to find the woman with his money. This got her attention, and they managed to meet center stage.

A few days later, on Halloween proper, I went to pick Michael up for trick-or-treating after school, and he was alone at the house. As I was coming to the door a group of small children came running up and pushed in front of me. “Trick or Treat!” they yelled. Michael took out a giant bowl of candy and held it out to them. Then he stood there, his mouth a wide “o” of surprise, while the kids scooped handfuls of candy into their bags. When they’d left, and I was telling him, “Michael! You don’t hold out the bowl! You give them the candy!” He replied, “I think they were here already.”

That was Michael. No one was more generous, more open-hearted. Michael was kind and funny, and he was also my biggest and earliest fan. In fourth grade our elementary school got a new principal and with him, a student council. Michael ran for Treasurer and I ran for Secretary. Only 4-6 graders could run for office. We were young and my race was, as it were, contentious. Michael, though, tirelessly worked on my campaign: “Think Pink! Vote Sink!” “You’ll turn pink if you don’t vote for Sink!” were two of his favorite slogans. He made posters for me on his own time, at home, and brought them to school to hang up.

Michael got me to join 4-H with him, because instead of badges you could earn cash money: $1.50 for each unit completed. Write a speech: get $1.50. Learn to cook five dishes: $1.50. He figured we could easily earn $10 a year doing things we’d like to do anyway. I learned that I did not at all like to do embroidery.

It was also Michael who, somehow, found out we could audition to be in the summer play at the local community college. I hadn’t thought he was interested in plays—I was already involved in the theater run out of the basement of the Park Forest Public Library, and he’d never shown an interest. I think he just thought it would be a fun thing to do. And we’d make friends. I never would have tried out for something so far from home—too far to get to on my bike. I didn’t like to ask my mom to drive me places, and I knew it was hard for his mother to drive us too. That first summer we auditioned, at the end of eighth grade, Michael was cast in a small role, but I was not. Then I got a phone call a week before the play began. I was next on the list, and someone dropped out, so could I do a part—3 lines and some stage action. I said yes! Michael already had friends there, but he welcomed me and introduced me as quite the special addition to the cast. Those plays would become a very significant part of my teen years.

We did two more summer plays, landing bigger parts each time. In the last year the play was a kabuki-style production of “The Little Peach Boy” and Michael was Momotoro, the peach boy. I was the Ferocious Dog. It was easy to see this play was a version of the Wizard of Oz, and I had landed my dream role, a version of the Cowardly Lion. Michael was scrawny, with a big afro and knobby knees, and a sight in his tights and kimono, sword outstretched. He led us—dog, pheasant, and monkey—to the village to kill the ogre.

One of the unusual things about that summer theater at Governor’s State College in 1977-1981 was that it was decidedly interracial. Cross-racial casting was the norm, like when Sleeping Beauty was played by a black girl and had two white parents, and I was cast as a fairy princess twin—with my black twin sister. We remarked on that twin situation between ourselves, but it wasn’t a big deal. In fact, it was my black twin who pointed out: “Look at Sleeping Beauty’s parents—white!” I hadn’t noticed. Sleeping Beauty was played by Celene Evans, obviously the most beautiful and talented girl there, and that’s why she’d gotten the part. Who else could have played the princess?

I think in retrospect that the interracial nature of the casting is how Michael found out about the plays. There were no black kids in the theater program I attended in town. (I’m cringing now, wondering if I ever invited Michael to join me.) Very few, if any, black kids auditioned for plays at our junior high or high school. The few black kids who were in choir, or on speech team, were smart and pretty much outcasts from black society in our school. Because I was in the majority, I didn’t have to be aware of things like this. And I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t really think about what it meant to my best friend, Michael.

In junior high, of course, I knew what was happening. Our happily integrated block was breaking up. We were going our separate—race-determined—ways. But the forces seemed outside my control. It seemed like the way things had to be, the way things are. My job—both our jobs—was to negotiate the social system, not to change it.

In the eighth grade, Michael was getting ready for high school by going to parties in other neighborhoods. His brother Andy, who now wanted to be called Anderson, was initiating him into “black culture” in our area. Michael invited me sometimes. He wanted to teach me “the steps,” would demonstrate them on the sidewalk, and he wanted me to come over and listen to Bootsie Collins and the Funkadelics albums. For the first time, though, I declined. I knew he was talking about parties with all black kids, although there’s no way he ever said that. I couldn’t go there with him. Those summer plays were the last place our world was integrated. When we went to high school, I’d see Michael in a few of the honor’s classes he was in, but not in the cafeteria. Not at parties, hang-outs, school plays, speech team, student council. My friends didn’t know him. I hung out with a group of seven girls, and we moved on the periphery of a popular crowd in our quintessentially John Hughes-esque world, dominated by class issues, not race. Michael went to parties in Beacon Hill, in Chicago Heights, in black neighborhoods. He was in the Afro Club. I’d finally see “the steps” in action when he invited me to one of their shows—a “step show,” where I was the only white person in the audience. Not an experience I had very often in high school, where African Americans were 25% of the population.

When he turned fifteen Michael came to our house to use my typewriter to change the date on his birth certificate. He heard Ponderosa, at the end of our block, would hire you for $2.90 an hour but you had to be sixteen. He went off to work and regaled me with the stories of how fun it was, how outrageous it was, how much I was missing. When I turned sixteen I made a half-hearted attempt to get a job at the mall, then joined Michael at Ponderosa. And he was right. It was a blast. It was more money than babysitting (still fifty cents/hour, sometimes seventy-five). I didn’t mind the polyester jumper and flowered headband. I wore my hair in looped braids on either side of my head which I thought of as Dutch, but Michael called me Princess Leia and said I should always wear my Princess Leia hair.

Again I was in a world unfamiliar to most of my classmates. Illegal immigrants and struggling, pregnant girls with their greasy boyfriends or deadbeat husbands were working there. The managers were (with one exception) not good human beings. And there were Mexicans and black boys from Beacon Hill working in the kitchen. One, Dale, from my own high school, rode a motorcycle and was a portrait in despair. He had a broken front tooth and a scar on his face. I was a little frightened of him, but my friend Laura (who I convinced to work there) befriended him. He had one of the worst stories I’d ever heard: his family car broke down on the side of the road and some white rednecks shot and killed his brother and left him for dead in the back seat. Laura did such a good job befriending him that he began to smile when we greeted him, and even talk to us in the kitchen, where we’d go to sneak pieces of cheesecake from the freezer.

Dale was always warning us there was going to be a race riot at school, but he said he’d protect us—if anything went down we should come to his locker. He dubbed us honorary Disciple Queens with the dishwasher nozzle and taught us a gang sign. I understood it was all in fun. When we did see him occasionally in the hall, again he’d break into a broad smile and give us the sign. Race riots were a thing of the past, but they had been severe not too long before we arrived at the school, when there were major controversies over bussing and the composition of a new high school in the district. We heard stories of locked down classrooms and overturned school buses. There was still a full-time policeman on duty. But he was not at all threatening, despite his gun, and I would not say it was a tough school. The fights that broke out were as segregated as everything else.

When we were in grade school, Keith, Michael, Cathy and I used to sometimes go into Ponderosa to get a drink of water from the drinking fountain. It was just the thrill of being in a place we weren’t supposed to go, and the managers would chase us off when they saw us. But Michael also showed us the gunshot holes in the wall outside, and two he said were gunshot holes in the paneled wall inside. And it’s true, Ponderosa was regularly robbed. Part of our training was detailed instructions on what to do in case of a robbery: give them the money, point out anything that might be unusual that could happen—someone coming from the kitchen, for example, through double doors—so no one got hurt. I never experienced a robbery, but Michael did. He walked into the office when a robbery was underway, asked what was going on to the cashier and the manager unloading the safe. The robber had them all take off their clothes and locked the clothes in the safe. It was the suburbs. Then again, bad shit does go down in those suburbs.

It actually never occurred to me to ask if the robber was black or white. I don’t know to this day, but I assumed he was white—or maybe I was told that. Somehow the white people who came in there seemed much more desperate characters than the black folks.

Michael was ambitious. He was set on going to Northwestern University, and that’s where he went. My best friend Kim went there, too. When I went to visit her sophomore year, she got me in touch with Michael. He invited me to an event he was in that night, a show for some occasion, probably Martin Luther King’s birthday. So I found myself in another auditorium, in a sea of black folks with here and there another white person. The show was joyous and, in places, intense. It was political, as the Afro Club show had been. Michael’s mother was there and I sat next to her. At the end we all stood up and joined hands and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Then Michael came and innocently wanted to know if I’d liked the show, as if it had just been a Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland revue. And we went over to his fraternity house, which was of course a black fraternity.

I’ve been in these situations a few times, but more often as the only woman at a primarily gay male event. And the treatment is the same—people falling over themselves to talk to you, to make you welcome, to get you something to drink. I always end up feeling uncomfortable because I so obviously stand out and get special attention. Much the way it is for minorities at white, straight parties I’d imagine. After the party, Michael and I walked out to his car, so he could take me back to Kim’s dorm. I said, “Michael, you have been such a good friend to me. And you have never, ever acted like there was any diff—“

He cut me off. “Stop it,” he said, across the top of the car. “Don’t. Don’t every say that.”

“OK.”

We got into the car and after a brief silence, talked about his classes, my classes, the weather, something else—I don’t remember. I remember it was really cold outside. It was January.

Michael Parks was my best friend. And for much of our childhood, we really did live in a world free of race prejudice. We were aware we were different races. We were proud of it, even. Because of Michael I knew about nappy hair and ashy knees, and I was happy to know those things. It is true that when it was time to play at romance, during fifth grade, Michael paired up briefly with Cathy and I paired up with Keith. But Michael, well, Michael was like my brother—I’d like to think it was more about eros. And I noted that Michael only dated black girls, ones he met at those parties or the Ponderosa.

That also made sense to me. In the world of our high school, interracial dating relegated you into one group or another—invariably it meant a white girl who hung out with the black kids, regardless of her status at school. But I can’t think of any white girls with status who dated black boys. After junior high, there weren’t many black boys around. The ones who “mixed” with us, didn’t date. However, I think both Laura and I secretly had crushes on Gavin Sutton, who was moody and loved early Peter Gabriel era Genesis music and was lead singer in a band that did a few Cars covers and played some (white) parties. But Gavin took off right after high school for college in Mississippi and we never heard from or saw him again. Like Dale, I think in some ways he was humoring us. But I also think he was from the South, and saw the racial barriers in our part of the world more clearly than we could. He saw that there was a limit on our friendships, and dating was out of the question. He saw our quiet, unexpressed racism—though we thought ourselves the opposite.

The truth is, my grade school and high school experience represent what is great about race relations in America and what is awful. But it was a step on America’s journey toward having a black president. I’m 44, and so just a little ahead of me, Barack Obama was growing up in Kansas, and in Hawaii, with a white single mom and white grandparents. I don’t know what his high school was like or who his friends were.

But Barack Obama is the black son of a single mother, and got himself to Harvard Law School. Michael got an MBA and a law degree, and last I heard works for the Chicago Tribune as a lawyer, because it allows him to be home with his young daughters. His wife is a lawyer, too, beautiful, and her name is June. I learned this from my mother, who saw him at a funeral for Marty Zilverberg, Cathy’s brother, who was black, her mother’s child from a first marriage. Marty was among the nicest guys I’ve ever known. My parents read about his death in the paper and showed up at the wake, although they left Park Forest in 1993 and moved to a more rural, much whiter place further west. She said she and my father were the only white people there from the old neighborhood, and how happy Myrtle, Marty’s mother, had been to see them. I was living in California at the time. I tried tracking down Michael after that, left a message, but he didn’t call back.

It had been a long time. And we had parted ways long before. I tell my husband that I miss black people, and that’s why I want to have season tickets to Penumbra theater—just to hear black people, albeit on stage, talk. When I go to Chicago I like to take the train and hear people talk, and go to the Wishbone on Washington Street, which is the most integrated restaurant I know, just to see black people and eat near them. I go to Hyde Park when I get a chance, for soul food if I can get someone to go with me. My friend Kevin Young, a poet who grew up in Kansas too, son of a black father and white mother, who went to Harvard and Stanford and Brown and is an acclaimed poet, he sometimes came to Chicago and would go eat with me in the joints there. Kevin was born in 1968, four years behind me, and has his own story to tell.

I sometimes feel stupid for missing black people. For regretting that the world I grew up in during fourth-eighth grade came to an end, that paths diverged, that I made choices not to go to the step dances—but I know it was impossible. It didn’t happen because of who I was, and because of my perception of what was possible. I was not brave, and that was not my path. Only Michael Parks helped my life stay as integrated as it was for as long as it did.

I feel grateful, though, that there continued to be Affirmative Action efforts at Grinnell College where I went to school, and for Young, Gifted and Black Gospel Choir at Grinnell that fostered black culture, that gave black students who landed in Iowa from Hyde Park in Chicago and elsewhere a place to feel safe, experience their culture, apart from me and my middle-class white John Hughes suburban ways. When people were up in arms about the choir keeping whites out, I said: “Please. Do we have to be everywhere?”

And so it doesn’t surprise me that now, with my generation growing into our middle age, is the time for Barack Obama to be president. That it begins with my generation. Because we grew up with Michael Parks in our neighborhoods. We grew up where Michael Parks lived. And though we were just children, and only did our part innocently, as children will, it is because of the people before us who made sure that anyone who excluded a black person from anything would be ashamed of it, and made sure the schools got integrated, albeit tenuously and not in the lunchrooms so much, or even sometimes in the classrooms just then. It is because of Temmie Gilbert, the director at Governor’s State, who somehow got the word out about her plays and her casting policies to black kids and white kids, even though she herself lived in tony Flossmoor! It is because of the people of Park Forest who were committed to interracial neighborhoods, and the people of my block, where everyone welcomed any of the kids into their home, including my parents who were not raised that way but managed to learn it—even the children who showed up in combat hats and army jackets, even pesky little Ricky Payne who got in fights and had mean dogs—but was no worse than the troubled white kid next door who smoked pot and set my brother’s Halloween decorations on fire and peeped at my sister through our bedroom window. Less worse in many ways.

It’s because of my experience, that it feels exactly right that now is the time for a black president in the United States. And that the man who is running reminds me, and reminds my mother, of Michael Parks. And it is because of my experience that I’m not counting on a victory until all the votes are cast and counted on election day. Let us see how far we’ve come. Let us see if we can celebrate that progress now, and move even further as a nation in the years ahead.