The reader…will hear the accursed cat, which is a symbol of unredeemed guilt, mewing behind the wall.
The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard

I don’t have much patience for animal stories: heroic dogs, cute kittens, playful puppies, disdainful cats. I’ve been known to defriend facebook friends just for posting one of those cute cat videos: cats playing pattycake, talking cats, the surprised kitten… The last thing I want to look at in my private web space is a cute cat! There are babies being born, people dying, cancer, books to read, litter to clean up—for Chrissake!

I am, however, a devoted pet owner, and I find no contradiction in loving animals and being intolerant of animal stories.

It wasn’t always the case that I mocked animal stories. As a kid, I read the requisite animal books; the horse books that every girl read— about the horses mistreated in Black Beauty, the wild horses in Misty of Chincoteague and Misty’s offspring—Stormy, Misty’s Foal, and the race horse heroes: Black Gold and Man O’ War and National Velvet. I read the dog books too, with their forgone dead dog conclusions: Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, White Fang. I don’t remember the cat books. Were there cat books? Maybe T.S. Elliot’s compendium of cats, Old Possums’s Book of Practical Cats that inspired the Broadway musical Cats. The Cheshire Cat and his slow fading grin. More than any book, however, I recall a movie about a cat most readily: The Three Lives of Thomasina, about a cat who is the pet of a Scottish widowed vet’s daughter. Thomasina is injured in a fall and the vet euthanizes the cat, breaking his daughter’s heart. There’s a funeral with bagpipes and mourners, and a resurrection. Because this is Thomasina’s first death, she loses her memory but comes back to life. Thomasina narrates, sounding a bit like Maggie Smith in the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. “They say that to die is a journey from light to darkness but here is light again.”

When we moved to Chicago, we moved with two dogs and two cats. The dogs adjusted to the move as well as we did, which means they were disappointed in the size of the yard, by the unavailability of a sandy shore river bank, dismayed by the traffic, skittish about the frequency of car alarms and emergency vehicle sirens, and incredulous about the variety and quantity of garbage and litter in the streets and alleys. Their incredulity included a certain amount of wild joy and gratitude (Dead squirrel! Flamin Hot Fritos! Really old pizza!) that ours did not.

The brothers, cats

The cats, brothers, never moved to Chicago. We brought them along with us—seven hours in the car in their individual carriers crying piteously—in spite of frequent spritzes with a spray that was supposed to mimic a calming feline scent pheromone. We were very calm—a little drowsy driving, even—but the cats were unrelenting in vocalizing their unhappiness. They were older, accustomed to having access to the yard in Minneapolis, to living in proximity to a compost bin that attracted a steady supply of small rodents, to open windows, and the cool cat hideout under the neighbor’s front porch they accessed through a missing slat in the porch skirting.

Ida, the big-headed floppy rag doll, had a busted lawn chair on the deck that was his. And yes, his name was Ida, and he was a male. Sometimes my girlfriend told me she had named him for African-American activist Ida B. Wells, sometimes she said film director and actor Ida Lupino. Except when the temps dipped below zero during Minnesota’s frigid winter, Ida never missed a day in his chair, stretched out on his back, front and back feet hanging over the chair’s edges. He loved to be brushed. He loved a bath, but he had no social skills. His feet were enormous. He scratched the back of the couch, the antique area rug, the wall—everything in fact, except his multiple option scratching posts, trees, and condos—like a vandal. He shredded pillows and cedar deck boards, pin-pricked 400-thread count sheets and liked to clear surfaces like the dining room table and my bedroom dresser. He’d jump up on the table and leisurely sideswipe candleholders, salt and pepper shakers, pens, books, papers to the floor. There was no collar that ever stayed around his neck for more than a day or two. I suspect he bribed the dogs to pull them off. We finally gave up on collars and tags and had him micro-chipped.

His brother, Bone, was a brown tabby with a pointed chin and a white vest. Bone liked to travel—sans carrier. He once left home for nine days. It was April. I stapled a poster with his photo and the headline “MISSING” on utility poles and trees all over the neighborhood. I visited animal control and the animal humane society and submitted a missing pet report. I went back more than once to comb through the logs describing the dead animals collected without identification: “black and white, domestic short hair, male, found on the 27^th block of East Lake Street,” and the logs of animals killed at the shelter. We were sure he was road kill, or had been trapped in a garage, or was dead by some unknown but no less fatal means. Every evening during the time he was gone we walked around the block and down the alley, calling his name. Then one night, nine days after he had first gone missing, I was awakened by a cat meowing outside the front door. I woke up Polly and we ran downstairs and threw open the door. It was Bone, our wanderer and world traveler. He strolled in the house like he had just gone out for quart of milk and what’s the big deal. He was clean, seemed to have been eating well, and was much more casual about our reunion than we were. The next day I called all the animal agencies to update his status: was lost, now found. The woman on the phone told me that in the past two days three other cat owners had called to report that their missing cats had also returned home. Where did the lost cats go to be lost? Were they all hanging out together at a cat jamboree?

In Chicago the cats didn’t go outside. We coaxed them to join us on the deck, we left the back door gaping open. Ida stepped out a few times and turned around and came right back inside. As a poor substitute we made up window seat beds and look out posts. Every car driving down the street, every person walking by the open window, was a potential big scary loud threat that propelled the cats from their carefully constructed outside world views. In the big city, the cats’ space became smaller and smaller.

Bone’s lament

Almost immediately after we moved into our orange brick bungalow, we launched into a few house projects, and then, as happens with house projects, a few more: the new back door, the new window, the front door, the front steps. Our first year we lived with sanding dust on every service in the house, the sound of sawing and pounding, and a shifting crew of carpenters, masons, painters, and electricians. The cats had gone through two house remodels in Minnesota but they weren’t having any of it in Chicago. Ida camped out in the basement, Bone retired to our upstairs closet. We saw Ida when he came out to eat. Bone came out at night to remind us of his vast discontent. He sat on the rug at the foot of our bed and cried through the night. He ripped out great clumps of his hair. Food did not soothe him, or treats, or petting or thrown pillows. If we had houseguests he made a point to visit them at night and speak his grief around the hair hanging from his mouth. The nine-year-old granddaughter of a friend made him a sympathy card. It said, “We don’t know each other. I’m sorry you’re sad.” The young son of Minnesota friends who visited, sent Bone a package of grass and dirt from the yard at our old house in Minneapolis. He thought a relic of the old country might lift Bone’s spirits. It lifted ours but did nothing for the cat. Night after night, Bone was inconsolable. He would not be deterred or distracted. He would not shut up.

Ida shrinking

As Bone got loud, Ida got smaller. He was always a big cat, sixteen pounds plus and longhaired, so he looked bigger and bushier than his actual size. One day I was brushing him and felt bumps and edges that I’d never noticed before. His bones were poking out and his coat was dry and thin. There were other signs: excessive drinking, profuse peeing.

We started at one vet, a reasonable neighborhood clinic, although with no chairs in the waiting room, no computerized recordkeeping, which rubbed our finicky middle-class sensibilities the wrong way. When they diagnosed Bone with diabetes, and the treatment protocol of daily insulin injections and prescription food didn’t ease his nightly lamentations, we started over with another vet—with waiting room chairs and computers and higher rates—who diagnosed Ida with diabetes as well.

Skipping ahead

In Minneapolis we’d had the same vet for a dozen years. She’d known the history of our pet-keeping, she had fostered our yellow lab’s mother and attended his birth; I once saw her kiss our old orange cat, matter of factly, as a point of conversation. She referred us to the Veterinary Center at the University of Minnesota when tests revealed the unlikely scenario that both our dogs shared a genetic enzyme deficiency although they were not related except by household. When the old cat went through a bout of uncharacteristic aggressiveness, she demonstrated soothing touch to help clear the cat’s heart chakra. She’d been with us, witness to our terrible grief both times, when we said good-bye to Polly’s gray lhasa-poodle and the old orange cat.

In Chicago, after months of insulin dosage adjustments, glucose monitoring, pureeing chicken thighs and livers in a blender, nights chronically disrupted by Bone’s lamentations, Ida swinging his shaggy head from side to side, dragging his back legs behind him, blindness and muscle weakness brought on by hypoglycemic reaction, we had the option of walking through the nicely furnished waiting room at the new vet’s office past all the healthy, happy pets and pet owners into an exam room with a cold metal exam table. The vet suggested a twenty-minute appointment, so we wouldn’t be tempted to linger. Feeling foolish, feeling like we were indulging the worst of Americans’ misplaced obsession with our pets, I found a Lincoln Park euthanasia specialist—a Dr. Death for pets. The boys could have a whole death experience with a personalized soundtrack and scented candles and an everlasting forty-minute appointment. So could we.

The Rainbow Bridge

Alice Sebold’s version of an individualized heaven in her novel The Lovely Bones includes reunions with our dead pets. The Lovely Bones, published a year after the September 11 attacks, is in the pile of formulaic and enragingly simplistic post-911 artworks that attempts to address how to make sense of something that doesn’t make any sense. What happens after the worst thing—the fictional rape and murder of a child—happens? Not to worry—the dead girl goes to heaven and hangs out with her old dog.

I waited for him to sniff me out, anxious to know if here, on the other side, I would still be the little girl he had slept beside. I did not have to wait long: he was so happy to see me, he knocked me down.—The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

When the worst thing happens, or just a bad thing, or a part-of-life sad thing, I am all for taking comfort where you can, even if comfort comes in the form of mawkish depictions of the Rainbow Bridge that we will cross with our dead animals before we enter heaven together.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down

We moved to Chicago carrying the ashes of dead animals—cremains in plastic bags in a shoebox. We didn’t want any more dead animal ashes. I didn’t want to have to find a final resting place for the cats who never rested in Chicago, who never felt at home here. so we eschewed the individual cremation, the paw print impression, the hair clipping. We felt heartless and cheap, guilty, and, finally, irredeemably sad.

There’s an Edgar Allen Poe story about a cat called, “The Black Cat.” It’s a gruesome fable: the narrator adopts a black cat that he loves at first and then, inexplicably, grows to hate. He maims the cat by cutting out one of its eyes; the cat recovers and is hanged by the narrator. The narrator’s cruelty seems to be provoked by the cat’s devotion:

[I] hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart;—hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence…

Following the murder of the cat, the narrator’s house burns down:

On the night of the day on which this cruel deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole house was blazing…. The destruction was complete. … I resigned myself thenceforward to despair.

His despair doesn’t preclude another cat and another attempted cat killing though. He swings an ax at the cat that lands in his wife’s head instead. To hide her body, he walls it up in the cellar. In the process he accidently walls up the second cat with his dead wife, sealing his fate. His crimes are discovered when the cat’s howling behind the built wall attracts the attention of the authorities.

Poe’s narrator kills his cat from depravity, from an unbearable burden of love. We despair of our own mortality, accumulating an anger that anticipates the inevitability of the loss of all we love: pets, places, people. Our choices are to knock down our reason with cute and sentimental—we are the surprised kitten being tickled by death’s hand; or we can blind our love, choke devotion by the neck until dead, build brick walls to hold back our terrible love, our terrible grief, lie down shaking in our beds at night listening to the cat that calls to us, our hearts engulfed in flames, still waiting for the light again.

Plenty. The opportunities for people-watching in Las Vegas are unparalleled. And the amount of flash and glitter and distraction and spectacle is enough to keep any photographer happy for days.

On my first real trip to Sin City I wandered the strip with all sorts of cameras — everything except my big professional gear. I shot rolls of expired film with plastic point-and-shoots, and I made plenty of saturated snaps with little digital cameras.

These photos sets were created with my iPhone.

The process of waiting has inherent conflicts in it.

A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander

Two scenarios about waiting:

At the Department of Motor Vehicles on Elston in Chicago people are lined up on the steps outside before the door opens. A greeter, who is more like a guard at a checkpoint than a maitre ‘d, asks your purpose, reviews your materials, and sends you to one door for a driver’s license or another door for plates. Once through the door, you wait in line to take a number. Of the dozen service windows, there are just a few open. It’s 8:30 in the morning, and the civil servants already look like they’ve put in a hard day or a hard ten or thirty years. The numbers are not sequential and seem to be called like random bingo numbers—B205, C784, A113. You sit on the edge of a hard plastic chair, Social Security card, expired driver’s license, passport, birth certificate, a postcard of the Black Madonna addressed to you at your new address, past due utility bills, a note from your mother clutched in your hand. These are the paper products that constitute your identity—so ephemeral and arbitrary. Since you can’t predict how long the wait is or where you are in the queue, it’s easy to become anxious, to anticipate that the next number, the next number, the number after, will be yours. Where is your number? Still in your hand. You are waiting and that is all you can do.

I was driving home from work along a familiar interstate when my car suddenly lost all power. I jerked the steering wheel to the right and managed to pull over to the shoulder out of the stream of traffic, and put on my flashers. The car was dead as dead. The engine wouldn’t turn over and I couldn’t shift out of Park. I pulled out my AAA card, called for roadside assistance. and made a second call to leave a message for my girlfriend to say I was waiting for a tow and she should not linger at the office because the dogs would be waiting at home. AAA was on the way but considering the traffic, the time of day, and the fact that my car wasn’t spewing black smoke or blocking an intersection, I knew my rescue would be farther down the priority list. So I waited. I watched the traffic rush past me, I moved my seat back; I adjusted the side view mirror so I get see when the tow truck pulled up. I entered the “waiting room”:

…a floating time, completely free of usefulness, suspended between wakefulness and sleep. This is the time zone of wonder, when we fall out of the habitual, the taken-for-granted, and are startled by what is.

The New Yorker, “Fall from Grace,” Noelle Oxenhandler, June 16, 1997.

Such moments are increasingly rare in this day and age of instant gratification, of expectations of round the clock productivity, of the immediate, insistent now. Personally, I have a hard time putting a sentence on paper without interrupting my keyboarding to check email, to have a conversation with one of the dogs, or to think about something to eat and then a rationale for either eating or not eating. We are in a hurry to get to the next thing, the new thing, to check it off our list, and move on.

In my current life I rarely experience the world in this state of present tense, or perhaps more accurately: present perfect tense, an action that happened at an indefinite time in the past or that began in the past and continues in the present. Present perfect.

If we were lucky we visited the waiting room as children–not as children ten years ago—but as children twenty or more years ago, in a time of fabled childhoods when the expanse of summer vacation stretched out endlessly, a luxuriant meandering stream we drifted until the fall and the return to school; on the long distance road trip riding in the back seat being taken somewhere while the world of power lines, a field of sunflowers, gray snow in a ditch outside the car window flashed past; the religious devotion of lying in the sun, the book face down in the sand, eyes closed…

I love traffic, sitting at the doctor’s office waiting to be called to the examining room, waiting at the service center for the car to be returned to me whole and sound. While I’m in the present perfect, there is a full roundedness of the present that offers a pleasure of attention without the necessity of intense focus, an alert awareness of at this time, in this place.

The other side of waiting, of course, is when the edge of alertness tips into anxiety such as at the DMV: waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting in the wings, an accident waiting to happen. From the benign stasis that every writer who has submitted a story or manuscript for publication knows to the high-pitched whine of suspended animation anxiety that hospital emergency rooms provoke. Is it broken? Infected? Do symptoms point to a more serious condition? Is somebody going to die? Am I going to die?

In 2008 architect Jeffrey Inaba designed a waiting room for Policlinico Umberto hospital in Rome whose aim Inaba said is “to create an environment to cope with our restlessness, if not through easing the irritation of having to wait, then at least through distraction from it.” Inaba’s Waiting Room looks like a surreal cartoon, which Inaba describes as an “Alice in Wonderland mushroom meets solar-ray chomping Pac-Man.” The description alone makes me twitch and sounds perhaps too distracting?

I once spent a week waiting for a friend’s mother to die. She was dying at home. My friend’s sisters had the day shift. We waited at night, eating licorice and Necco wafers, waiting for the next interval to deliver morphine drops, listening to Jerry Vale and Joni James on vinyl, Ave Maria on an iPod dock; listening to her mother’s shallow breathing. Waiting. Like the cars that passed me on the highway while I waited for a tow, like the world going by outside the car window, people came and went: family members, nurses, children, a taxi delivering more medication from Walgreen’s. Time happened on another plane where a woman lay dying. The waiting was happening in present perfect progressive tense:an action that began in the past, continues in the present, and may continue into the future. Until it becomes the past.

The doctors in the hospital were worried about circulation in my father’s legs.  We needed to move pillows around, adjust things, even rub them at times. I never went so far as rubbing his legs, but I touched them.  My job—when he was awake and not on a ventilator—was to remove, clean, and re-insert his dentures.  We were never an affectionate family, so when I felt my father’s cold legs in my hands, I was uncomfortable.

*

I never thought much about genetics before I started getting older.  More specifically, I never thought about genetics until I started having children of my own. When I was growing up, the big joke in my family was that I was adopted. I was the last of four children, coming after my brother, Ira, who was my parent’s first biological child, and my sister, Michelle, who died at three months from SIDS. My oldest brother, Darrell, is technically my half-brother. I’ve never seen it that way.   Darrell is six years older than me and has struggled all of his life with issues of abandonment. His mother left when he was five years old, and she has never resurfaced since. Darrell was always attached to my father. He was Darrell’s comfort blanket, his favorite stuffed animal, his friend.

By the time I was born, life was busy for our family. My father worked at the airport from the early morning until mid-afternoon.  He woke up at 3am every day and was wiped out by the time he returned.  My mother stayed at home with her three boys, aged six and younger, getting us up, planning our days, cooking our meals, cleaning the house.  This was the early 70s, so this wasn’t uncommon.  Although, by the time I was in first grade, my mother took a job at a currency exchange and never stopped working.

The recording of my first several years was minimal.  When I was born, my mother started a baby book of me, which included my very first picture taken at the hospital, blurbs about my first few months about how I slept or when I first lifted my head, and a lock of my hair.  Chronicling my life lost its frequency and went unfinished.  There are a few pictures of me in various family photo albums and even a few 8mm silent videos.  One odd thing people notice is that I didn’t look much like the rest of the family.

Darrell had blond hair and bluish green eyes, and he wore a thick pair of black plastic-rimmed glasses.  Years later, whenever we would look through old pictures and come across a photo of Darrell, we knew exactly who he resembled: Ralphie, from the classic movie, A Christmas Story.  Darrell never objected to the reference.

Ira was always a chunky kid.  He was mistaken for a girl once at a restaurant, probably because of his long hair and boy-boobs.  As a toddler, Ira had very thick, very curly brown hair.  People always said he looked like the kid from the Oscar Mayer commercial.  You know the one; the cute kid whose bologna had a first and last name.  I always thought that Ira looked like Weird the Bellhop, one of the characters from The Gigglesnort Hotel.  Ira had to wear braces on both of his legs to help correct a hip problem.  He was the child version of Forrest Gump.  Ira’s leg braces came off with much less fanfare than how it happened in the movie.  No one was chasing him or yelling, “Run, Ira, run!”

I was shorter and thinner than my brothers, and no one thought my facial features resembled anyone else in the family.  That was until one Halloween, my parents suggested I dress up like a girl, complete with makeup and a dress.  After the costume was complete, everyone said I looked like my Aunt Denise, which was fine if I was a girl.  Boys don’t want to hear that they resemble their aunts—or any woman—no matter how flattering that might seem.

*

My father was a hairy man. He had a mustache at 13. And it wasn’t one of those cheesy, peach fuzz/pencil-thin/barely see it kind of ‘staches.  It was the real deal.  Think Burt Reynolds or Tom Selleck.  He was one of those men who could grow a thick beard in a week.  I’m not like that.  I’ve tried to grow a beard, but it just comes out all wrong. Patchy, thin, unappealing.

*

Whenever my brothers wanted to get me mad or make me cry, they would simply remind me that I was different. “You’re nothing but a nark,” they would say if I confessed to my parents when we misbehaved.  I had a guilty conscience—something my brother’s did not seem to possess—so it was difficult for me to lie.  “Why do you have to be such a jerk?  Why can’t you be more like us?”  I was different, my brothers would say, for only one reason: I was adopted. My parents were in on it too. They thought it was funny.

As I got older, I began to wonder if I was actually adopted. I wondered if I had to embark on a quest to find my birth family, to see if I could fit in there, to see if I had “real” brothers and sisters.  I might have even fantasized that it was true.  That someday I would find myself on a daytime talk show, hearing Oprah Winfrey or Maury Povich announce and bring out my entire grief-stricken family.  The family that thought about my whereabouts regularly, the family that continued living no matter how hard it was for them.  The family that liked to read like me, the family that liked to lift weights and eat healthy like me, the family that had brown eyes and thick brown hair, was slim, and cared about the food they ate.  The family I resembled.

*

Being hairy isn’t something I think I missed out on. I mean, my father had hair on his chest which is, again, sometimes seen as manly. But he also had hair on his back, and on his stomach, and on his butt. My father used to sleep naked when we were kids.  He never thought twice about walking naked in the house, as long as visitors were not around.  I’ll give him that.

*

I’ve always been the negative print of a black sheep. I was the only one of the children to like school, and the only one to go to college for both my Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees. I am the only one who converted from Judaism to Catholicism. I am the only one who hasn’t been arrested, who likes his job, the only one who has coached his children in sports, the only one whose wife homeschools their children. I’ve never thought it makes me better than anyone else. It just makes me me.

As I’ve gotten older, I have started to see things differently. Physically, as well as behaviorally. When my father was sick in the hospital—dying from pneumonia, a side effect of the chemotherapy treatments for gastric cancer—I noticed that we have the same legs. More specifically, we have the same calves. It’s a strange thing to notice, but when you spend hours staring at a person in a hospital bed, you tend to look at them, I mean really look at them.  I never noticed how round my father’s face was, or how many wrinkles he had on his forehead and around his eyes.  I never noticed how long and wide his ears were.  I never noticed the way his eyes, even closed the way they were, protruded so far out.  I never noticed how peaceful a dying man could look.

*

With all of the hair on my father’s body, his legs were probably the spot that had the least amount. It was light colored, almost transparent, and thin; barely noticeable. My legs are the same way. The hair is darker, but the amount is negligible. When I was a competitive bodybuilder, my calves were thick and strong; they measured 17″ around. Now, even though I still workout on a regular basis, I’m lucky if my calves are 13″. My thighs have always been thick. Still are. But today, like right this moment, when I reach down and put my hand on my left calf, I feel more skin and bone than muscle. And they feel cold when I touch them. Just like when I touched my dad’s legs as he lay in bed, dying.

Thanks to this tactile memory, I think about my dad more often than I expected. If I am laying in bed reading, and my legs cross, I think about my dad. If I have an itch on my leg and I scratch it, I think about my dad. When I wear shorts, I think about my dad.

*

As I get older, I believe I am beginning to look more like him, too. I see him in my expressions, in my short stature; in the way my body is shifting. I’ve even started walking like him, hunched over a bit, quick; like E.T.: the Extra Terrestrial. My dad had this thing he used to do—my grandfather, his father, used to do it too.  Whenever it was cold outside, and he had to perform an activity like pumping gas, he always puffed his cheeks up and blew out steady burst of air, repeatedly the entire time. I do the same thing, occasionally.  But my puffs come with more frequency.

In 1996, Darrell was the best man at my wedding. He had to give the Best Man speech. It was short and to the point, welcoming my wife, Cyndi and her family into ours. I’m not sure there was much preparation behind the speech.  Darrell didn’t read from a sheet of notebook paper or from index cards.  He didn’t have any embarrassing jokes or gestures to share.  He did, however, end with a simple proclamation: “You were not really adopted.”

I’m beginning to believe him.

- From A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

Either you like cemeteries and graveyards, or you don’t. Like a penchant for musicals or casinos or rooftop gardens, it’s usually one way or the other. I’d been visiting the dead all of my life. Some of them I knew in life, others I was meeting for the first time.

A visit to Lake Forest Cemetery was facilitated by bricks and an idea to build a backyard barbeque pit. I drove out to Lake Forest to pick up a load of Chicago common brick that had been advertised on Craigslist. It was a lovely soft spring day and since I’d never been to Lake Forest before I wanted to look around. I asked the brick merchant where I could park my car and go for a walk. She suggested I should keep going down the road to the cemetery. It was a great place for a walk, and—she looked pointedly at my brick-burdened 2001 Volkswagen—I wouldn’t attract attention.

Lake Forest is the North Shore’s swankiest community, where the average home value in 2009 was $850,000 and a used car cruising through the village is cause for suspicion. A short drive through winding roads lined with the houses of the richy rich and I was entering the imposing wrought iron gate of Lake Forest Cemetery. This was the Barrell Memorial Gate, built by Grace and Finley Barrell in memory of their son John who drowned in the Illinois River. Why a gate, I wondered. Why not a screaming angel or a bloody Jesus?

I looked around at the winding paths and the boxwood hedges, the lake vistas and tasteful gray granite monuments, the one-syllable names: HOLT, SWIFT, WOOD, REID—a.k.a. WASP. Not a bloody Jesus or a plastic geranium in sight. Designed by landscape architect O. C. Simonds in 1900, Lake Forest Cemetery is the epitome of the expression “resting place.” I felt my pulse slowing just walking around.

Among the many prominent names at Lake Forest Cemetery, three stood out for me: ARMOUR, SWIFT, and WILSON, representatives of Chicago’s meat mongerers. In case you’re taking notes, Andrew Watson Armour, III, (1908-1991) the great-great grandson of Philip Armour, is buried at Lake Forest. Philip Armour, an American captain of industry, the founder of Armour and Company, the slaughterhouse and meatpacking company, brought hot dogs to the world. Louis Franklin Swift (1861-1937) is also at Lake Forest. His business, Swift & Co., developed the first refrigerated railroad car so dead meat could travel in cool comfort. Thomas Edward Wilson (1868-1958), the founder of Wilson Sporting Goods and the Wilson and Company meatpacking company, was the cleanup guy. He took all the leftover animal bits from the meatpacking plant, like bladders and sinews, and made them into sporting goods.

They were so excessively alive, these pigs. And then, they were 
so excessively dead…

–Rudyard Kipling, American Notes

Rudyard Kipling visited the Chicago stockyards in 1889. He described it at as a tour through a swamp of blood, assaulted by the screams of dying animals and the noxious stench of dead meat, sweat, dung, and urine. By 1900 a million cows, sheep, and hogs were slaughtered every year at the Chicago stockyards.

Walking above the Lake Michigan shoreline on a glorious spring day, along paths beautifully landscaped with native plantings, among the sculpture park variety of mausoleums and monuments, nothing felt “excessively dead” in this place. One of the differences between a graveyard and a killing field may be the difference in their respective ghosts.

Years ago an ex and I were looking to buy some small acreage with a house within thirty miles from the Twin Cities. When we found an affordable six acres in St. Paul Park near the Mississippi River with a three-bedroom ranch house and several outbuildings we were hopeful and excited. We met the seller’s realtor at the property for a viewing. The house was empty, the garage half filled with taped boxes and building supplies. We checked out the barn last. The realtor opened the door and in the dim light we saw rows of small wire mesh cages stacked and lined up on both sides of the space. There was an acrid, oily, wild animal smell in the dusty air. It was a smell of broken hearts and crime scenes. What was this place, we asked, the empty cages yawning open accusingly. A mink farm. In the time it took to walk back to the car we had made our decision: no sale.

I was getting hungry. It was almost time for lunch.

I read an article that was published in the New Yorker in 1939 about “beefsteaks” in New York City. Beefsteak was the term used for a private steak dinner party that consisted of steak, lamb chops, lamb kidneys, and pitchers of beer—all you could eat and drink for $5. An average beefsteak might serve 350 men and women with 35 sides of beef, 450 double-rib lamb chops, and 450 lamb kidneys—no napkins or silverware. Eating with your fingers was protocol.

On my way out of town I stopped at a neighborhood joint for a burger. Framed, autographed pictures of beefy boys crowded the walls. The headquarters of the Chicago Bears is in Lake Forest. I ate the burger with my hands.

Slaughtered meat and dead bodies are most effectively connected in the short film Meat Love by Czech filmmaker . Jan Svankmajer
. Two red and juicy slabs of steak depict the lifecycle of a relationship from meeting through courtship and passionate love to death. From red meat to dead meat—in one minute. It just usually takes a little longer for the rest of us.

Schulz drew his iconic and lucrative cartoons from a dark, well-worn office built in a grove of redwoods near a dirty creek. I’m sure when he moved here, the creek wasn’t the dirty, homeless haven that it has become, but times change. During his lifetime he and his wife bought the a rundown ice arena near his studio, paying to have it completely refurbished, and renaming it the Redwood Ice Arena. He also had a hockey court with blue cement floors and white walls put in, as well as an outdoor tennis court. After Schulz died in 2000, the grounds around his playground became the site of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center.

This modern, glassy building is right down the street from my house, and I’ve been walking my dog in the fields near the hockey rink for the past four years, almost every day, and while I have enjoyed seeing the happy tourists congregating for photographs next to a ceramic Snoopy’s doghouse statue, I’ve never actually ventured into the museum proper. The reality being that I couldn’t bear to part with a single dollar to see old Peanuts comics on view and modern art tributes by people like Christo to the “Peanuts gang.” I mean, I loved my Snoopy lunchbox, snow cone machine, and t-shirts when I was eight, but like I said, times change.

But when my husband suggested we go check out the museum on a free night—the occasion for the free entry being the museum’s eighth anniversary, I said yes without hesitation. I was finally going to enter the building that I’d peered into, mused about, and walked past for so many years. Plus, they were serving free ice cream cake. It took us two minutes to walk over, and once we stepped into the actual building, the exhibits were pretty much what I expected, but still entertaining. I especially liked the random collection of pop culture artifacts that supposedly served as Schulz’s inspiration—a macramé owl, a silver lame vest, a Davy Crockett hat, and a pristine long board pushed up against a wall. Hmmm, okay.

But the most interesting moment of the night came when we were approached by a museum volunteer as we stood before the “Wrapped Snoopy.” A gift from Christo to Schulz, a thank you for the cartoonist’s support of the artist’s “Running Fence” project, erected in Sonoma County in the mid-1970’s. The artistic integrity of a Snoopy doghouse sloppily wrapped in what looks like bedsheets was lost on me. The woman asked us how we liked the museum and we got into conversation. It turns how that she had just moved from Brooklyn, New York and had only lived in our little city for ten months. She was rhapsodic about living here, talking about how much friendlier people were than in New York, and how much she loved the weather. She told us about her walks through the Fountain Grove area where she had moved with her husband.

So this is where I actually get to the book I want to talk about this month. In 2006, Chronicle Books published this amazing collection of photos and essays titled The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. Written by the trippy California-phile Erik Davis, the essays offer fascinating information about the “restless, heretical edge of the Anglo American experience as it probes the inside and outside of religious institutions.” In the essay “Divine Winery,” Davis tells the story of Thomas Lake Harris, a mystic who moved his Brotherhood of the New Life Colony—a theo-socialist commune—to California (specifically the town where I live) in 1875. He called it the “Eden of the West.” Harris and his friends lived in a richly-decorated, two-story manor where Harris taught his acolytes about Divine Respiration, and the hermaphrodite God that he called the “Twain-One.” At the same time, the group established a winery on the grounds that would one day be Fountain Grove, where they built a thriving wine export business. Eventually, Harris was “shamed” (the man did think that fairies lived in the bosoms of women) into stepping down as leader, and after years of being successfully run by Kanaye Nagasawa, the winery fell into disrepair. But you can still walk the creepy grounds of the ruins, where ancient wine barrels covered in graffiti loom under a progressively deteriorating roof.

We excitedly shared all of this information with the woman from Brooklyn, as she peered at us through her hip New York glasses. She seemed interested, but a little put off by our obsession with the Divine Winery. It seemed so far away from the sparkling, proper museum filled with the important but so commercialized-that-it-has-almost-lost-all-meaning Peanuts images that surrounded us. Two versions of the California dream, one that ended in riches, and one that ended in ghosts and decay. I’m thinking ceramic Snoopy statue in front of the divine winery, holding strange fairies and 19^thcentury wine goblet in paw, but alas, never the twain shall meet.

Until now. Until I met standup comedy.

I started taking standup comedy classes at the San Francisco Comedy College ostensibly to research my latest novel-in-progress, the protagonist of which is a standup. I’ve been a comedy nerd-lite for awhile now. Greg Giraldo, David Cross, and Dave Attell are like sports heroes to me. I admire their work, wish I could do what they do, and can’t begin to fathom how. Two drafts into the novel, I realized that I only superficially understood a comedian’s life. Obviously, most successful comedians spend most of their careers on the road, going from one shitty club to another. Yes, many of them find that they need drugs or alcohol to prop their spirits while they’re stranded in cheap hotels in small towns waiting for the sun to set, the bars to open, and the audience to buy their two-drink minimums. But I was looking for the experiential details beyond the standard storylines of the lonely, but ultimately redemptive and gratifying life of a comedian that one can find easily in movies like Comedian starring Jerry Seinfeld, memoirs like Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, and podcasts like The Nerdist or WTF with Marc Maron. I figured that the best way to get into the head of a standup was to try to become one.

Even the teachers at the Comedy College admit that the concept of teaching comedy is a dubious one at best. “You are the material,” and “There are no rules,” are the closest things to tenets you’ll learn. Most importantly, the college gives amateur comics almost unlimited access to stage time, the best and fastest way to find out if you can be funny under the bright lights, alone, on a stage, in front of an audience who more or less expects to sit politely while you bomb.

Like many writers, I’m an introverted fellow, an invisible man at parties. I wake every morning and silently trudge to my laptop and translate images, scenes and anecdotes to a blank and unresponsive page. Sometimes the process is exciting, and sometimes, it’s a wonky tedium of shuffling words, deleting them, and Googling the arcane and slowly dying rules of grammar involving em dashes and serial commas. Writing is not an extemporaneous art form. Books are meant to be consumed in silence, in bed, on planes, and at beaches. The microphone and the stage are not a writer’s natural ally. I most certainly do not consider the spotlight a close friend.

Consequently, I planned to leave the gift of stage-time wrapped for as long as possible. After a couple of classes, though, more than half the class had begun to perform open-mics at least once a week and being an Asian-American (Type A all the way!), I wasn’t about to be left behind. So I took the leap. Two hours before my open-mic, I crafted (liberally speaking) three minutes about breaking my toenail while standup paddling as a result of my reluctance to trim my toenails and the resulting hijinx and neuroses that ensued. Larry David’s job is safe. As I walked up on stage, I kept telling myself I didn’t give a fuck whether these strangers laughed or not.

It wasn’t art, but to my surprise, I got laughs. In those instances, I felt a rush, not unlike the lighting of the bulb between me and fiction writing. And in those instances, I wanted to chase that feeling again—the rush you get from an audience’s laugh—as soon as possible.

Since that first open mic, I’ve performed a few more times. Each time, I’ve sat in the audience, worrying over my material so intensely that I often forget to enjoy and laugh at the previous comics like I should. Comic karma is a bitch! You have to support your own! Each time, before I get on stage, I lie to myself that I don’t give a fuck whether these strangers laugh or not. Of course, you care whether they laugh or not! Laughter’s your sole measure of success.

Yes, I’ve bombed, but one good bit seems to make you forget ten bad ones. Besides, when I bomb, I try to blame the audience as quickly as possible, and then move on to the next bit (just kidding, I save the bit for the next unlucky audience; I’m supposedly “working on material” but really, I’m just being prideful and misanthropic). When I write a failed novel, I throw half-decades of my life in the paper shredder. When a bit bombs, it’s just a few bad minutes I can quickly redeem.

Almost every aspect about being a standup is the polar opposite to that of a writer. Most writers require a quiet environment. A standup works on material with audiences. Most writers need a stable home to do their best work. A successful standup spends most of their time on the road. Fiction writing is a game where a select few win big, but smaller wins, like publishing a short story in a journal, are few and far between. Standup comedy is a game where a select few win big, but there are hundreds of potential micro-wins every night. Every joke wins or loses. For a writer, not only does every sentence not win or lose, every sentence can be an eternal pain in the ass.

If fiction writing is the long-married wife, standup is the farm fresh mistress, never questioning my failures and always feeding the ego with an effortless grace. But what will I do when I wake in the morning? Won’t I need to silently trudge to my laptop? Won’t I miss the wonky process of working and re-working sentences? Won’t I miss the inherent joys of working on my office-ass at home? Well, let’s just say that before I started doing standup, I never had to ask.

What do the hair depilation scene in The 40-Year Old Virgin, Todd Haynes’ Superstar, and Sarah Manguso’s stunning, lyrical memoir The Two Kinds of Decayhave in common? According to David Shields, author of the book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, these seemingly disparate art objects all share a commonality in that, while they are works of the imagination, they also toe the line between “reality”(a word that Nabokov claimed should always be in quotation marks) and fiction in a wholly new way. “Art is theft,” begins the book, with a quote from Picasso—one of the only quotes out of hundreds actually attributed, in the text, to the original speaker, and Shields spends the next 205 pages making just that argument.

Taking a clue from hip hop–particularly sampling–Shields “borrows” from other sources as a way to build a new kind of collage.  Each chapter of Reality Hunger contains short numbered vignettes, entire passages taken from other sources, without citing (on the page) the original source. Curious readers can flip back and forth between the body of the book and the appendix–which publisher Random House insisted be included to avoid legal ramifications—but Shields suggests that the reader instead grab a sharp pair of scissors and remove the pages by “cutting along the dotted line.”

While I didn’t heed Shield’s advice to cut out the appendix (it was a damn library book for god’s sake!), I did control my urge to flip back and forth between the appendix and the vignettes, an act that took a shocking amount of self-control on my part. In this action, I felt like I was actually interacting with the book in an intriguing way, one that got me thinking the assumed lines between attribution and originality, between myth, memory, and truth. Soon, the reading felt liberating. I have been struggling to finish a series of short stories for the past three years, trying to finesse them into something that resembles what I think they should look like, something so wholly fiction that the seams are hidden, like a fine couture dress. Shields book helped me to think about the “reality” that often times, I am more drawn to writing in which the seams are ragged and transparent, than those stories that are polished to perfection; while I do enjoy sinking into a nice work of fiction, the older I get, the more I enjoy books that challenge genre without adhering slavishly to the guidelines monitoring fiction.  Examples include the Meat and Spirit Plan by Selah Saterstrom, and Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

“This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text. I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost. Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature,” writes  Shields (see, I can’t help but give the guy credit) just before he suggests cutting out the appendix with a box cutter.

Why all this trouble to “steal” from other sources, to muddle the reader’s expectations of truth and fiction? Well, Shields is writing a manifesto, one that forefronts the argument that an artistic movement is forming, one that shares certain key components.

1. A deliberate unartiness; “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, unensored, and unprofessional. Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity,; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity; self-ethnography; anthropological autobiography; a blurring ( to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction; the lure and blur of the real.

In short, Shields declares that the novel is dead, or in the process of dying a slow and painful death. The time of the seamless Tolstoyan dream has ended, to be replaced by a mixed, hybrid form. In fact, he argues that this is not so much a replacement, as a return to original form. And while I find these ideas intriguing and freeing, as a so-called “fiction” writer, I am even more intrigued by the interaction between art and “reality.”

I started thinking about this while listening to the new Charlotte Gainsbourg album. I find Gainsbourg to be endlessly fascinating, ever since seeing her in a 1996 movie production of Jane Eyre—a book that I have read five times, thank you very much. The actress plays the patron saint of homely and disenfranchised girls with a confused, bemused energy, her lopsided mouth a perfect representation of the Jane Eyre’s homeliness. Gainsbourg is also a singer and her latest album is titled  IRM, the French acronym for an MRI scanner. In interviews, she has talked becoming intimately familiar with the IRM machine after a water-skiing accident led to a brain hemorrhage in 2007. The title track captures the experience of being in a hospital, undergoing tests, wondering if you are going to die. As I listen, I’m not sure if it is the actual song that I am drawn to, or if I am so fascinated with the history behind the song that I’m filling in the meaning, making it into an experience outside of the art object itself. Many albums are autobiographical, but this one in particular has got me thinking about the increasingly blurred lines (reality television has something to do with this) between what is made up and what is “reality,” and the importance of what both the artist and the reader (or listener) bring to the table. “Urgency attaches itself now more to the tale taken directly from life than one fashioned by the imagination out of life,” writes Shields –or not Shields. This not only explains the popularity of the Real Housewives franchise, it also gives liberty to writers and artists to pull unabashedly from their own experience, to break genre, to wallow in the freedom of being able to be both the “I” and not the “I” all at the same time.

​Of course, years later, I learned that many boys and a good handful of girls during the Great Depression sought shelter and refuge on Chicago rooftops. While on wandering walks in the city, or on an occasional skate, I keep my head up and I often try to imagine them – stealthy orphans stealing up stairs, fire escapes, and ladders to find solace and to get a better view of their catastrophic and shimmering city. (It’s no wonder that the rooftops of Gotham City were originally based on Chicago’s.) Today, our city’s rooftop bombers, taggers, and artists chase the ghosts of these orphans and seek the same thing that they once did – refuge from the formulaic and often brutish world below. We could learn a thing or two from them.

For all of its efficiency and necessity, a rooftop is a place to go when you feel the need to escape or when you need a different perspective of the city – inexhaustible towers, a cerise sunrise, the unfading blue of our great lake – but it’s also a place to consider and reflect on high. A place to go alone and wander the labyrinth of your thoughts. A place to bellow an Odyssean verse. A place to cavort with modern history. A place to abandon memory. A place to slow dance to Sam Cooke (or, R. Kelly, depending on your skool!) with someone you love, or at least, someone you love at the moment. Of course, the best rooftops are the ones where you can get epically drunk, commune with the ridiculous universe, and party with your friends like rooftop deities. So, yes, for all their efficiency and necessity, rooftops end up attracting orphans and artists and lovers and partygoers and would-be-gods. Essentially, in the city of Chicago, a rooftop is a Dionysian institution of refuge.

One particular night, some years back, a few good friends of mine and I needed a little refuge. We had just spent the previous two days and two nights on a non-stop hyper writing drive in order to submit to Bravo’s Project Greenlight, a tour de force competition in which thousands of young men and women across our Hollywood blitzed nation produce and/or write a television show over the course of two days and two nights, which is to say that thousands of young men and women quietly suffer those two days and two nights away under the illusion of a generous and grandiose Hollywood. Ah! But this is America. We have deities wearing crowns of sitcom scripts and wielding swords sharpened by Tom Cruise’s very own chin! To only be them. So very worth it! Our sitcom was entitled Settling Up. Basically, it was about on-going divorce proceedings between an awesomely hilarious, weight lifting, Camaro driving slacker and his equally awesomely hilarious once-bra-burning, fight-the-power wife turned corporate leviathan. The pilot episode starts when their runaway son returns to Chicago from Taiwan with a beautiful, fish-out-of-water Taiwanese pop star only to discover that his parents are getting divorced! It was, uh, a commentary, or something, on Baby Boomers and love. Ok! I know. I know. Absurd. BUT. We had spent 48 hours writing the damn thing and we loved the damn thing. Trancelike Hollywood was clearly awaiting us…That is until one of us, in a sitcom-y inspired moment, accidentally erased our only copy. So, with the click of a mouse button and a resounding if not entirely despondent and un-ironic booooooooo, our great masterpiece disappeared into the digital netherworld. Devastated and exhausted, we did what fallen Chicago writers do best – we absconded to a rooftop party. And ended up ruining it. While a moderately pleasant and mostly hip crowd attempted to quietly watch a very hip foreign film on a gorgeous rooftop off of Division, we drank a good portion of their alcohol and yelled at wonderfully drunk and attractive people on the street, who were not on their way to a rooftop party, who were, in fact, concrete dwellers. We felt sorry for them. We invited them up, much to the chagrin and angst of our hosts. We danced with them. We told bad jokes. Really bad jokes. From the sitcom we had just written and lost. We mourned our loss. We yelled and high-fived and made impossible promises of stardom. We threw bottles at the flaxen half-moon and listened as they crashed somewhere off in the distance. Dionysus of the Rooftop had clearly seduced us with hallucinations of Hollywood and ruckus.

​We got kicked out. And the moderately pleasant and mostly hip crowd stopped inviting us to parties.

A few years later, I found myself with a friend of the host of that rooftop party. We were celebrating and, in part, grieving, the last evening of the infamous and jazzy, deep red music club the HotHouse. Sometime during the coral stained sunrise in a few hours, the doors off Balbo Drive would close, and like so many other things neglected by the constant metamorphosis of our city, the club would disappear into a maze of memory. To further our disremembering, we danced and drank up the last of the club’s offerings. And sometime during the night, a small crowd of us retired to the rooftop to enjoy the silvery breeze coming off the Lake and to talk. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I’m sure it was mostly about myth and family and politics, Chicago’s triumvirate, and the friend of the host of the Division rooftop party wondered aloud if I would ruin the good conversation by throwing bottles at skyscrapers. I smiled and told her that I would not. I told her that I had abandoned sitcom writing and was now focusing on bigger and better things – a stage sketch show featuring PBS’s Star Gazer Jack Horkheimer and a rabbi that pitched bad sitcom ideas to Hollywood executives. I also told her that with age I had found reservation and maybe even a little maturity. Something like that. She smiled sweetly; though, I don’t think she believed me. We quietly sipped our drinks and watched the city lights and from the street below we heard laughter, debonair laughter or the midnight laughter of the soon-to-be damned. Before long, someone pulled out a camera and was taking photos of Balbo Drive, and I thought offhandedly, or I am thinking offhandedly now (rooftops have an ethereal affect on me) about how Balbo Drive was named after Italo Balbo, the fascist Italian aviator who flew from Rome to Chicago for the 1933 World’s Fair, proving once again, as the Swedish born, Chicago sculptor Claes Oldenburg once stated, that Chicago has a metaphysical elegance of death about it. We watched the photographer and I promised for a third time that I would behave. I wanted to behave. The night was elegant and self-possessed and I couldn’t think of a better place to be in the world. I turned my attention to the sky and the lights of the stars were somehow fused with the lights of the skyscrapers, a primrose fusion like that from a Van Gogh painting, and the skyscrapers themselves, ones I had known my entire life, seemed poised to puncture the night in what could only be considered defiance of a mortal life.

Photo by interpunct on Flickr.

Photo by Joe Lencioni at shiftingpixel.com

I was never much for dolls when I was a kid—not baby dolls or Barbie dolls. I was more likely to dress up my cat than a doll. My indifference to dolls followed me throughout life. I used to go to a hair salon that was decorated in dolls. The owner collected dolls and had them displayed on shelf molding throughout the salon. There were dolls with ornate hairstyles—braids and curled bangs and beehives—and even more ornate costumes of silk and satin and velvet. The dolls were positioned so when I was trapped under a purple cape processing, they seemed to be looking down at me, judging me with their unblinking eyes and perfect baby doll mouths. I turned my chair away but I could still see the dolls behind me in the mirror. All their perfect blank faces looking at me at my most vulnerable, my most secret self, without my coiffed day to day shield—righteous bitches.

“The trick is to intensify and to overlay; to compress the patterns; to reduce them to simple expressions; to make every inch count double.”

–from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

Not long ago a visit to the Glessner House on Prairie Avenue made me think of dolls in another way. In the context of the ornate and decorative mansions on Prairie Avenue during the late 19^th century, the Glessner House, although grand in its own right, was somewhat of a palate cleanser. Unpopular with its luxury row neighbors when it was built in 1886, after visiting the new house during construction, Frances Glessner noted in her journal on October 24, 1886: “We walked across the street to take a distant look and two ladies passed by us—one said to the other ‘there isn’t a single pretty thing about it.’” The house built by architect Henry Hobson Richardson came to be recognized as innovative in design and is considered a landmark in residential architecture.

The Glessners lived in the house for fifty years and many of the furnishings and objects in the house are original and representative of the Glessner’s preferences and taste, which focused predominately on Arts and Crafts. The house reflects the dreams and desires of its inhabitants. That the Glessners commissioned such a radical departure in design for their primary residence and the thoughtfulness and intelligence exhibited in their selection of home furnishings, led me to expect that the residents of the Glessner House were at least as thoughtful and intelligent as their taste in home decor, at least as innovative in their thinking as their home design would suggest. In this context, I was interested to hear from the tour docent that years after she left the family home, the Glessner daughter, Fanny, constructed a series of dollhouse dioramas depicting violent crime scenes.

In her middle age, during the 1940s, after marriage and raising three kids, Frances Glessner Lee created eighteen miniature scenes based on actual homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths—The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. The Nutshells were used to train law enforcement officers in the instruction of forensic techniques of observation.

Contemporary photographer Corinne May Botz produced a series of images of the dioramas that were displayed in an exhibition and appear in a book, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Monacelli Press, 2004). The Nutshells reveal not only crime scenes but also a degree of detail and precision that is perhaps as revealing about the nature of their creator as it is about the methods of murder. An unlatched door, blood splatters on pink wallpaper above a baby’s crib, pink slippers knit with straight pins neatly lying on a pink-fringed throw rug, an overflowing ashtray, a framed painting of a buck that is no bigger than a postage stamp. The scale is exact and looking at the photographs of the dioramas is disorienting. The dollhouse dioramas impose a narrative. What happened in these domestic scenes in kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms? What is the story that must be imagined? Is there more than one story? Reduction suggests diminishment, less than, but in the case of The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, miniaturization intensifies and enlarges the effect. A drowning in a bathtub is reduced to a series of “simple expression[s]”: soap in a soap dish, a drain plug on a chain, a woman’s fully clothed body hanging over the tub, the water splashing in her face. Was she forced under the running water and drowned? Did she slip while filling the tub, knocking herself unconscious? Was she killed someplace else and her body placed in the tub?

“Children take up the suggestive qualities of space…”

–from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

From miniaturization to multitudes. I am the childless friend of women with daughters and granddaughters. Sometimes I am invited into this particular world, sometimes I spy. Recently I was a guest at the mother lode of the mother and girl child reunion—the American Girl Place on Michigan Avenue. A friend had traveled from St. Louis to Chicago with her seven-year-old granddaughter, Natalie, to visit the American Girl Place.

American Girl® encourages girls “to enjoy girlhood through fun and enchanting play.” That’s play with one or all of the American Girl characters, Just Like You® dolls, or Itty Baby® dolls. The American Girl store is a theme park devoted to dolls and their stuff—lots of stuff. Clothes and furniture and pets and gear for the pets like raincoats and grooming tubs, and a campfire with fake marshmallows on sticks, and a wooden ice cream churn, and two versions of tap dance outfits. The store is red and pink and black. The trademark shopping bags that girls are carrying in a six-block radius around the store are red. Like one of George Saunder’s short stories about the guy in the caveman real-action diorama or the CivilWarLand theme park, the American Girl Place is an exaggerated form of American consumerism. It’s fiction larger than life and gutted of imagination. In this space, the story is readymade, available for purchase.

Frances Glessner Lee’s dollhouse dioramas and American Girl doll nation: something big—murder, suicide, accidental death–made small and open to interpretation versus something small—a doll’s story, doll-sized black patent leather tap shoes—made larger than life and deathly static. Reverse gestures, yet both perverse, both violent acts of imagination.

First stop at the American Girl Place was the doll beauty salon. Josephina, one of the historical American Girl characters, had been promised a redo. Poor Josephina looked like she had been rode hard and put away wet. Natalie picked out a hairstyle for her doll—the tucked two braids with the turquoise ribbons—and the uniformed stylist tied a purple cape around Josephina’s neck. So there we were: Josephina trapped in a doll chair, hair on the loose, the three of us looking on, awaiting her transformation back into the only self that was possible for her.

Photo by Joe Lencioni at Shifting Pixel

That was eight years ago, and I’ve gotten a bit more realistic. College textbooks are expensive; there’s no way we’d rip them up, and my students don’t listen to opera, they listen to emo or trip-hop and I can’t save anybody. I teach creative writing—voice, structure, point of view, imagery… none of that’s going to help Rachel who’s pregnant or Kyle with the anti-depressants or Dennis who’s waaay more interested in pot than he is in class and I have these days sometimes where it’s like, what the hell am I doing here? This past semester was especially rough and on the last day, as I was packing my things for winter break, I thought: I could walk away.

What if I walked away?

On the way out, I grabbed my mail—memos, a stack of student work, and a book. I checked the cover—some lit journal from a community college—and was all set to toss it when I noticed a page was marked with a Post-it note. I opened it to a short story, saw the name of author and stopped. Okay, in order to explain what happened to next, I need you all to imagine that I’m a character on Grey’s Anatomy. I’m thinking specifically of the episode where Izzie gives up being a doctor—she’s got eight million dollars from her dead fiancé and she goes to say goodbye to Doctor Burke who first taught her how to do a running whip stitch and she tells him, “I’m sorry,” ’cause it’s her fault he got shot and has a tremor in his hand and maybe can’t be surgeon anymore and he says, “Don’t you be sorry because of me. You have two good hands and you’renot using them, be sorry for that!” At this point, some pop song by a new up-and-coming band will start playing—Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol, perhaps, or a Regina Spektor tune—and Izzie’s face jerks as though she’s been slapped. She stands there, confused and frozen in Burke’s office until slowly, slowly, she looks down at her hands, holding them in front of her like she’s about to play the piano. She studies every finger, every wrinkle, and turns them so the palms face upwards. We stare at those hands, all of us, imaging the thousands of lives they might save and the camera pans back to Izzie’s face, her lovely blue eyes wide and determined. My God, what am I doing? she thinks. How can I give up becoming a surgeon? And then, the song crescendos or maybe changes chord in some significant way and—she smiles. It all becomes clear then: she’s not going to quit. She’s going to stay and be a great doctor and here, here is the important part: It might never have happened if it hadn’t been for Burke.

Just like that lit journal in my mailbox means nothing unless I tell you about Andrew.

It was my second year of teaching. I was twenty-three and still naive enough to think we could all recite Whitman standing on our desks—except we don’t have desks in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College, we sit in semi-circles so you can look everyone in the eye. It was the first day of class and I was calling out attendance.

“Elizabeth?”

“Here!”

“Spencer?”

“Here!

“Andrew?—”

“Andrew?—”

I looked up. “Andrew?—” And I will never forget this, he said, “I’m fuckin’ here already.” This guy was nineteen, South Side Irish Catholic complete with the accent, very baggy jeans belted just below his crotch and these giant headphones that he would not turn off unless you told him to, like “Andrew, we’re starting class, can you lose the Eminem please?”

“Whatever,” he’d say, which was pretty much all he ever said—not because he was shy, but because he just didn’t give a fuck. I’m sure if you ask some educational psychologist, they’d tell you his defiance was a façade meant to mask his insecurities, but I wasn’t asking a psychologist. I was asking Andrew.

“I don’t give a fuck,” he said, when I told him he was failing. It was the fifth week of classes and he’d missed three already. When he did show it was an hour late, headphones blaring, sitting in the back of the room a good ten feet away from the rest of us in our semi-circle and it’s very, very difficult to continue reading Faulkner under those circumstances, for one: Faulkner and Eminem do not go well together and two: everyone is more interested in seeing how the teacher will handle such an interruption than they are in The Sound and the Fury so all the concentration that you’ve just spent an hour building is shot to hell. Had I been the teacher I am now, I would’ve told Andrew he could join us after the break, but then? I wanted to save everybody, remember?

“So if you don’t give a fuck,” I asked—Michelle Pfeiffer said the word fuck in the movie Dangerous Minds and after that all her students totally respected her—”Why are you still coming to class?”

Andrew’s hair hung past his nose—I wanted to tell him to move it so I could look him in the eye. “My mom’ll freak out if I don’t,” he said.

“This is college,” I said. “Your mother doesn’t—”

“Look, I fucking paid for the class,” he said. “I’m fucking gonna come to it.” In that moment I was afraid of Andrew—not that I thought he’d hurt me physically, but that maybe he could tell I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

“Fine,” I said. “But you have to write. We’re a third of the way through the semester and you haven’t given me any writing and it’s a writing class, Andrew, you have to—”

While I was talking, he stood up and opened his backpack, taking out a couple typed pages and dropping them in my lap. Then he turned and walked out, leaving me mid-sentence and trying to remember if this had ever happened to Michelle Pfeiffer.

His writing was really, really good, except it was about a guy who wanted to kill himself. Now, lots of my students have written about suicide, but this felt different. It didn’t feel like fiction. Usually, in such situations, you’ve got three options:

1. Ignore it, which really isn’t an option so far as I’m concerned so—
2. Contact somebody who knows what they’re doing. I called the college’s counseling hotline—and, for the record, I felt like a total asshole, like I was ratting out this guy’s creative work but me being an asshole seemed better than him being dead. Turns out, there are all sorts of legal implications to this stuff. This is college. Andrew is an adult—he has to choose to seek out counseling. I could suggest it but not enforce it, which brings me to—
3. Talk to Andrew directly.

Halfway through the semester, we do one-on-one conferences with every student—an hour-long sit-down to go over the strongest elements in their work. These are held in closet-sized cubicles in a hallway off the Fiction office, which is good because of the privacy but also a little unnerving, like picture you and a semi-stranger locked up in a bathroom for an hour. Now picture Andrew and me during his conference, the two of us in this tiny, cramped space and I’m making suggestions for his writing, like, “Could you maybe slow down the scene? Right here, when the character is taking all those pills and drinking all the vodka…” because that’s my job, right? To focus on his work? And then say something very subtle that’ll inspire him to seek help on his own but it is not, not, not that simple because sometimes those perfect words get all stuck in your throat and you end up saying the absolute worst thing possible, like: “Sooo. How’re you doing?”

“Fine,” he said.

“Fine?” I said. “Like, really fine?”

I couldn’t see his eyes through the hair, but I knew he was looking at me like I was nuts. “Okay,” I said. “Look. Do you need to… talk to somebody? I mean, there’s people here who—” Just like last time, he was on his feet and packing up. “Andrew!” I said. I wanted to reach out and grab his arm but figured that touching him would be as far from appropriate as I could get. “I’m just trying to help!”

He turned and faced me then. “It’s fiction,” he said. “Isn’t that what this class is? A fiction class?” And then he was gone.

I sat there in the cubicle for a really long time. I don’t remember my exact train of thought, but it went something like: Why can’t I get through to him, how do I reach him, how do I save him. I didn’t know then what I do now: it is so much fucking bigger than my little one class a week. Everybody think back for a second to when you were a freshman in college. What were you the most focused on? Me: my folks were splitting up, my boyfriend back in Michigan was seeing somebody else and I shared a twelve-by-twelve foot dorm room with a girl looped on ecstasy four nights out of the week. I will tell you what, teachers were the laaaast thing on my mind.

My job is to help their writing, not save their lives.

Right?

I gave Andrew an F, and on the last day of class I asked him to stay after. “You failed to fulfill the standards and policies of this class,” I told him. “It doesn’t mean that you’re not a good writer.”

“What the fuck ever,” he said. “I’m done with this school bullshit anyhow—” And then, like always, he was gone, out the door with zero fanfare.

At the end of every semester, teachers turn in grades and all copies of students’ work to the fiction office, at which time we’re given our student evaluations. I flipped through the stack and found one that hadn’t been filled out except for a single line in Andrew’s handwriting. It said: I can’t smoke pot before this class. This teacher talks too damn fast.

I thumbtacked that evaluation to my wall and looked at it for a while. Then, I put it in a box under my bed. Shake it off, I told myself. New students, new chapter. The first day of the spring semester I walked into class, called out attendance.

“Kelly?”

“Here!”

“LaTasha?”

“Here!”

“Brian?—”

“Brian?—”

“Brian?—” I looked up and it was total déjà vu. The same baggy pants, same headphones, same fucking accent even! Except this wasn’t Andrew. It wasn’t Andrew. It was Brian, slouching in his seat and looking at me like All right sweetheart. What are you gonna do for me?

He didn’t show up the second week of class.

He didn’t show up the third week

On the fourth week he rolled in an hour late and sat down in the back of the room. That’s when I sort of lost my mind. “All right, out in hall,” I told him. “Everybody else—read something… or something.” As I left the classroom, I tried to calm down. This is not Andrew, I told myself.Don’t put Andrew on this guy.

“I’m sorry,” he said, moving the hair out of his face. He had blue eyes. “The past couple of weeks have been pretty fucked up.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “But that doesn’t excuse—”

“My friend killed himself,” he said. “That’s not your problem, I know, I just told you so you don’t think I’m slacking off.”

I exhaled, wondered briefly what the world was coming to and said I’d help him catch up after class.

“Cool,” he said. “But actually, my friend? He was a student here. And I know they’ve got some of his work in the office and I was wondering if you could get it for me. ‘Cause I know he wouldn’t want his parents to see it.”

I’m telling this story now and it’s so easy to see what’s coming next, but in that moment I just didn’t get it. I said something about the legality of the situation, how I’d have to ask the chair of my department and did he know the name of his friend’s teacher so I could speak to them directly?

And he said— “It was you. You were Andrew’s teacher.”

In class I tell my students there are words for every emotion and it’s our challenge as writers to find them. I have tried over and over to explain how I felt in that moment and every time I fail. I can tell about the guilt, about how part of me, the idealistic part, died right then and there; I can tell you how horrible it was but I won’t even come close. “Excuse me,” I said to Brian. Then I went into the office and down the hall, locked myself into a conference cubicle and cried. It was the first time I’d ever done that, and it certainly hasn’t been the last.

The full-time faculty in my department were really wonderful, and I might not have gotten through it without their support and advice. “Do the best you can,” they told me. “Turn your attention to the students you have now.”

For me, that meant Brian.

He came to class sporadically, but when he did he was really involved and even, I think, had a good time. He told stories about growing up on the South Side, specifically a series of instances about the Catholic school he and Andrew attended when they were kids. I don’t know if it was therapeutic for him to write about Andrew, but it sure was for me to read it.

In the end, I gave him a C, and on the last day of class I asked him to stay after. “You got a C ’cause you weren’t here half the time,” I told him. “It doesn’t mean you’re not a good writer.”

He smiled, sliding those giant headphones over his ears. “School’s never been my thing,” he said. “And this place costs too fucking much anyway.” He made it halfway through the door before he turned back around. “You know, Andrew told me to take your class,” he said.

I waited. What I wanted to hear was: He said you really helped him, or He said you were inspiring, or He said you almost saved him. What I heard instead was:

“He said you were… interesting.”

That was eight years ago. Sixteen semesters ago—twenty-seven if you count summer school—multiply that times three classes at two schools equals eighty-one classes times approximately twelve students per class at a grand total of nine hundred and seventy-two students and through all of it, all the names and faces and page upon page of writing I have never once forgotten Brian.

So picture it: I’m standing in front of my faculty mailbox, getting ready to walk out the door for winter break or maybe a hell of a lot longer, and I find this book, some lit magazine from a community college, and when I open it, there’s Brian’s name on the top of the page. I stare at it for a while, remembering him and Andrew and how I once thought I could Save the World, and some John Mayer song kicks in—maybe Imogen Heap. The story is about Brian getting kicked out of Catholic school for calling his teacher a whore. “What are you going to do with your life?” his mother asks as they walk to the car. “What are you going to do?” I remember when Brian first told the story, eight years ago in my class the week after his best friend’s funeral—and then, right after the chord change, I get it: my job is not just story structure and point of view and imagery. It’s about Brian putting that book in my mailbox. It’s Chris calling me the night before he shipped out to Iraq. It’s Rudy writing from prison and Kate getting a Fulbright to write overseas and Byron’s thank you card when he started his own business and all those people who’ve sat in my semi-circle over the years and let me learn from them. I imagine a camera closing in on my face then; my eyes are wide and determined. My God, what am I doing? I think. How can I give up being a teacher? It all becomes clear then: I’m not going to quit.

I can’t say whether or not I’ll be a great teacher, but it’s worth my time to try. At the very least, I’ll always be interesting.

This piece originally appeared in the Toasted Cheese Literary Journal.