Open Letter To the Person Who Stole My Wallet Yesterday

Dear Sir or Madam,

Most of all, I really hope you enjoyed reading all those fortune cookie fortunes I collected over the years, perhaps while you were waiting in line at Target with my credit card in hand and maybe two dozen sheet sets and a bunch of DVDs on the conveyor belt. You seem like the type to hunt without a license, but just in case, I stuck a blank jackalope hunting license in there just for you! It's been signed by the mayor of Douglas, Wyoming, so just fill in your name and you should be good to go! I also hope that you take the opportunity to drive down to Urbana and eat four more meals at Basil Thai. Your fifth will be free.

Then, while you're lying in front of the fire on your jackalope skin rug, eating fried rice and watching the complete Friends, consider taking a moment to look at the wallet itself. It might not be your style--pink with red poppies on it--and at first I wasn't even sure it was my style, but I bought it in one of my favorite cities in the world and it held everything. It became my style, because it was my wallet and I liked it better than all the other wallets people gave me over the years, the ones that languished in my top drawer (well, aside from the replacement I whipped out yesterday) untouched.

You're mostly welcome to the cash in there, even though I was planning on spending the forty bucks at the grocery store today. Perhaps your need is greater than mine and you have children or nieces and nephews who could use a good meal. That part is fine. What isn't okay is the rest of the money in there, which my mother handed me when I left Kansas on Thursday. She told me to buy myself a nice outfit I could feel good wearing on my first day of work, which is tomorrow.

Now, I don't have the world's largest bank account, but I have enough that, if I wanted, I could go out and buy an outfit today anyway. After all, I left my debit card in my apartment for the first time this year out of some strange, premonitory luck and I have it with me now (in my new, perfectly nice, substandard wallet). It's not the money. Money is money. I have a job and my mom has a job and my dad gets retirement checks. What really bothers me to the point that it makes my skin crawl and my tear ducts fire up is that my mother, who loves me and wanted me to have a good first day at work because I've had a not-bad-but-not-easy year, handed it to me and I took it out of her hands and put it in my wallet and the next hands to take it out were...not mine. I wasn't standing in Express, and my mother's idea was temporarily hijacked by someone she would probably call "sad," "unfortunate," "an interesting adult."

So think of me in line at the DMV tomorrow morning, while I hope against hope that they can get me a new driver's license as quickly as possible so I don't have to call in late on my first day. And think of me the next time you access any of the services available to you as someone who has gotten to the point that you feel you must steal for a living, because somewhere someone is writing grants to keep those services available to you, and they might be doing it with a new (substandard) wallet in their purse.

Enjoy those CVS and Dominick's discounts!
Sincerely,
Nom de Plume

In Which I Am Claire Fisher

When I left work on June 29th and drove to my hometown (now finally revealed as Champaign, Illinois), I left work for the last time. On my last day, the kids threw a party. They wrote cards and hung streamers and made little protest signs out of Popsicle sticks urging me not to go. They girls created a stepping routine and performed a poem they had written to go with it. M, my coworker, ordered pizza and cake.

It's been a tough year, and one I would not care to repeat, but it has changed me in ways I wouldn't trade for anything and on my last day I felt very loved. To repay some of the kindness that was done to me by welcoming me to the Center, I gave each of the kids one of my books, carefully selected to match their personalities and needs from among the stack of books deaccessioned from my childhood library. FP, who is a quiet, deep-thinking writer, got a hardcover book of poetry. FJ, who I wouldn't be surprised to find myself working for one day, got Julie of the Wolves. Two of the boys, best friends and artists, got Dinotopia and The World Beneath. AP got Harriet the Spy. Her brother got Captain Underpants. And on and on and on. Since my precocity had limits, I went ahead and bought two Anna Deavere Smith books for the girls in the evening program who worked with me to write the play.

I think I may do more for literacy at the Center by my absence than by my presence, as I'm given to understand that letters may already be on their way to me in the mail.

I'm not going far. After taking July to help my parents move, I will be returning to the Center (different site, same organization) as a grant-writer. I'm happy because I'm not leaving entirely; I'll still have to opportunity to see the kids and coworkers I'll miss the most. It'll be very different, though. I'll have a desk, a computer, a filing cabinet, a phone extension, and a boss who checks in with me regularly. I'll have working adult hours. It'll be stressful, but not in the way this year has been. It'll be challenging, but on a professional and not a basic, personal level. I will miss those deep-digging revelations about the world and myself that I had on an almost weekly basis, but I won't miss the time I snatched scissors out of a girl's hand, or the time I had to break up a rapidly escalating fight, or the time there were shots fired outside the school where we did pickup, or those times I kept it together at work only to burst into tears on Lake Shore Drive on the way home.

But, wait, how am I Claire Fisher, youngest Fisher child and red-haired heroine of HBO's Six Feet Under? I have blogged before about my passing resemblance to Roland Pryzbylewski. Now, and not for the first time, I feel myself identifying with Claire, who is semi-catapulted into adulthood as she drives away from the place that has been her house for years while "Breathe Me" by Sia plays in the background.

Claire and I have very little in common in the grand scheme of things, but while I was driving away from Chicago to Champaign where I would spend one night with my best friend's family before embarking on my parents' big move the next day, "Breathe Me" shuffled its way onto my iPod. I found myself thinking of Claire, whose creative struggles I took to heart at the beginning of my time at the Center. "Maybe you're not an artist," her aunt says to her, and she gets really offended, because she knows fundamentally that she is but with every passing day she has less proof. She tries a job that isn't her before finding one that is, but going for it requires a big leap of faith. She leaves her home, and she's uncertain but she's hopeful.

I've found that dealing with uncertainty in one area of your life narrows your focus in others. You start to think of what's really important to you. You may not act on it immediately, but at least you know. Working with the kids at the Center changed my setting just as saying goodbye to "home" changed my setting, but these things also made me more myself. More experiences. More growth. More challenges. More people to identify with.

"You have to complete your body of work" (Writing to Solve Problems)

Readers of this blog may or may not be aware (and if this is obvious or if I have worn out your patience on this topic, forgive me) that I have been trying to get my writing groove back for almost exactly two years now. ("I'm sorry, but you've thrown off the emperor's groove." Anyone?) In recent months, I've begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel. For the first time in a long time, I've started to have new ideas. I have a tentative outline for a project that is both timely and fulfills a requisite I wasn't even aware I had until I thought it over: when I write, I like to solve problems.

In September 2009, I attended a Women in Theater conference at Princeton where I heard one playwright panelist offer this advice: "You have to complete your body of work." She was responding to another panelist's fear that her latest play would be too real and too inflammatory and would bar her from returning to her home country.

"You have to complete your body of work," really moved me. I wrote a lot through middle school and high school, and I churned out some pretty good things in the first two years of college, but if I had to throw it all away and delete it I would, if it meant I got to keep two pieces. These pieces--my play about the Vatican investigations of U.S. seminaries and my novella about my French godfathers--both arose from a need to work something out. I was upset in 2005 when I read this article, and I wanted to use a play to express my point of view. At that time, fiction was my primary means of engaging with the world. I had only recently become interested in politics, thanks to The West Wing, and I had been granted a glimpse of what theater was capable of in Angels in America. I set out to create a nuanced but also hopefully persuasive play. As I wrote it, as I traveled to Nebraska to stage it, as I talked about it later, and, finally, as I wrote a college admissions essay about the experience, I became more outspoken. Prior to writing the play, I had never taken a strong position on anything. Writing it helped me see things clearly and find my voice.

The novella about my godfathers was not sparked by controversy, a water-cooler discussion, or a piece in a national newspaper. I became curious about people who had once been a part of my life, but whom (for different, equally upsetting, reasons) I would likely never see again. I felt somehow cheated of a wealth of stories when I lost my connection to these storytellers, and so I decided to take the stories I knew and make up new ones to fill in the gaps. When you are fictionalizing the lives of people you knew well but incompletely, it almost helps to know that they will never read what you write. I was at liberty to extrapolate on what I knew, and in doing so, I later found out, I came painfully close to the truth. Later, I would talk more about what truths can be found in fiction in my senior thesis, but this was my first experience of it first hand.

Now I am working on something and I'm not quite sure how to proceed. As in the novella, it is about people I know well but incompletely. In this case, however, I don't have the permission granted by distance or death. I will be filling in the gaps, and I will be doing so to work out my own feelings about what I actually know to be true. Like the play, what I am writing about is complicated, and timely, and could make a certain segment uncomfortable. It's making me a little uncomfortable, to be honest, but not because of its content. I wonder, do I have to right to write about this? It isn't my story, not really. If I appear at all it will be as a character even more peripheral than "Lizzie" in the novella. But then I remind myself, this is how you felt when you started the play. You thought you couldn't talk about it because you weren't a priest, you weren't gay, you'd never been in a seminary. You were Catholic, at least, and you were angry, and that had to become enough to buoy you on.

I work in a place with a lot of confidentiality. If I want to write about what I'm thinking of writing about, I'll have to fictionalize like never before. Even then, I may not feel entirely comfortable about it, but I guess if I felt comfortable I wouldn't be much of a problem-solver. To write to solve problems, you have to have access to feelings you try to repress the rest of the time. You have to be willing to let your characters look bad. You have to be open to the possibility that there may be no answers. You have to be open to the possibility of failure, and you have to be ready to stand up for what you've written.

I've been having a lot of trouble "leaving it at work" recently. I'm only three weeks away from my end date, and that helps, but I strongly suspect that at least some of what I'm feeling stems from the idea that in three weeks I can walk away and the situations that bother me will continue in my absence. I've done a lot of good at the Center. It hasn't always been my favorite place, and I haven't always felt that I was doing the job I was hired to do, or even that I was doing anything remotely resembling my qualifications or interests, and, yes, it has been the toughest year of my life, but I think without the chance to step outside myself and my experiences I would still be floundering. Now I have something to write about, and if it works out, writing about this in particular might be the greatest accomplishment of the job. If I want to help kids and help myself, this has to be the way I do it. Otherwise, I'm not doing anyone any good.

So I won't be doing a writing MFA. At least not yet. I need to be challenged, but I need to be challenged on a personal level, on a gut level. I need to be challenged as a person, not as a writer. In the age-old question of writing what you know or writing what you don't know, I've decided not to choose. They're pretty much a hairsbreadth apart, anyway. It doesn't bother me. It's how I change.

The Sister and the Heterolifemate (April, Part III)

On the People Who Are Important to Me list, these two are way up there.

One of them is my best friend, Subcontinent, the person I've known almost as long as I've known my parents. We've never gone to the same school and we went to college on opposite coasts. We've also never had a fight (I've never fought anyone, actually, which is something my coworkers find improbable) or a disagreement, if you don't count the Sippee Cup Incident when we were two, and I don't, because I bottled it up passive-aggressively as is my wont. She knows me, I know her. We're like Montaigne and that dude; "Because it was him: because it was me." Or, in her words freshman year:

I have decided you are far more entertaining than econ quant analysis
but I already knew that 

The other is my college roommate, one of five, the illustrious Roommate J. If we get to sixty-five (allows room for an eleventh hour husband) and neither of us is married, we'll marry each other. (I'm pushing for Iowa. She likes Vermont. Hopefully by then there will be several options.) I already know we can live together. She makes unexpected noises and I like my space, but for some reason it never became a problem. We bonded over Whose Line Is It Anyway and nail polish and it accelerated from there. It got to the point where it became difficult to say goodbye. That's when you know a person is important to you.

Subcontinent and Roommate J are very different from me, and they are very different from each other, but they were the ones I used my hard-won vacation days to visit. This was the weekend after Easter, and my East Coast visit had been on the books long before any of April's other delights began to pick up steam. For a while I was worried I wouldn't get to go after all, but I could and I did and I have never been more relaxed over a hectic five day period in my life.

New York was food, walking, and feeling vaguely like an adult. Baltimore was food, walking, and revisiting old sources of entertainment. Both felt so incredibly right.

And Here Was I (April, Part II)

When I was in middle school, my grandparents came to visit and my parents went out to dinner. After picking me up at school and navigating the unpaved parking lot, my grandparents and I went to the world's best video rental store (losing intermittent access to this may actually be what I dislike most about my parents' impending move) and picked up The Four Feathers (this was before the Heath Ledger version) and The Man in the White Suit. We watched The Four Feathers first and whenever I saw my grandfather after that, I took to reciting what my imperfect memory could dredge up of the above clip.

Here were the Russians: Guns, guns, guns!
And here were the British: The thin, red line.
And here was the commander in chief.
And here. Was I.

It started sounding like poetry.

Movies were our thing. Movies and stories and Paris, France. It was kind of the perfect grandparent-grandchild relationship, because those were the things I loved most anyway. Then I moved to Princeton, New Jersey and all of a sudden I was inundated with recommendations of restaurants that had been closed forty years or more. We had even more to talk about, which I guess was partially adulthood on my part.

Whether we were in California or Illinois or France, Grandpa was always trying to foist alcohol on me. It's kind of a thing in our family; it's an Irish family, so it's not weird. (I was the weird one, since I didn't drink at all until I turned 21; freakishly well-behaved, that's been me all along.) I turned down wine in California, I turned down wine in Illinois, and, most shockingly, I turned down wine in France at age 18. I was also offered beer, champagne, and bourbon, and all my family members looked on in amusement as I declined every single time. I did dip my finger in my mom's wine and act out the Four Feathers scene, though. That's just what we did.

My grandfather passed away on April 6th and on April 7th I was sitting in my parents favorite bar with my father (Mom was in California), drinking bourbon. It seemed appropriate, which didn't prevent me from making every novice mistake in the book. In my attempt to water it down, I released the flavor. All the ice I added melted and it lasted forever. We arrived back home, tipsy, and cried all over the pizza dough. We wetly discussed Kansas, adulthood, and my closeness with my parents. Dad revealed that he had no regrets. We blew our noses, made the pizza, and watched the first two episodes of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The next day was Easter. We hosted some friends, did our (last) traditional Easter Egg Hunt in the backyard, and I took over Mom's role and cranked out some really amazing (if I say so myself) profiteroles.

The friends left and I packed my stuff to drive back to Chicago. I couldn't carry everything myself, so Dad helped me out to the car. I shut the trunk and he glanced through the window. "If you wanted," he said, "I could ride up with you and help you carry everything up to your apartment, and then you could put me on a Greyhound back." At the time I thought he was only 70% kidding. Now, looking back at the emotional roller coaster that weekend was, I'm sure it was only 30%. (If you called him and asked him, he might admit to 20%.)

I don't have many regrets, either. I certainly don't have any big ones and even if I did, my closeness with my parents would never be one of them. We've always been a very close family, and I don't think distance is going to change that. It didn't when I was in college and I don't think Kansas, even if I don't get those nice long breaks every six weeks, will do much to hurt it either.

So it's been an interesting spring, but I'm still quoting The Four Feathers, and I'm still trying to plan out my life with as many trips to France as possible, and I kind of like wine now, and I'm turning into a professional storyteller, so if that's my contribution to my grandfather's legacy I'm happy.

And if I'm tempted to turn around and stare at April like a charging buffalo and yell, "AND HERE WAS I!" then I think I would be entirely justified.

Some Simon & Garfunkel Song (April, Part I)

April happened. April really happened. So much happened in April that it's difficult to know where to begin, but let me begin, as ever, with this simple fact:

My mother is a BAMF. My mother rocks. She rocks so much that to say she rocks has become some sort of hellish understatement. She rocked herself all the way to Kansas, got a rockin' job with a rockin' salary, and rocked on back home. Or, "home." For those of you who didn't pick up on this before, my post on home in late February stemmed from my dawning awareness that the place I'd called home for twenty three years (roughly; there was a time I couldn't talk) might not even be my parent's home for much longer. It's interesting. I am proud of my mom, obviously, and excited for my dad, who is all set for his "third stage in life" (his words), which could be anything from starting a consulting business to doing more of what he does now, from straight up retirement to guiding inner city youth through the woods on birdwatching expeditions.

I am also (after almost four months of thinking about it) at peace with the idea of my home belonging to another family. As I explained first to my high school friends and then again, tearfully (bourbon was involved, but more on that later), to my dad and then finally to my mom, while that house belongs to us, nowhere else will ever be home to me. Chicago feels temporary. This apartment feels temporary. This gig (thank God) feels temporary. Only one of those things needs to be true. While that house belongs to us, I probably won't try to put roots down anywhere else, and it's rough, because I don't see myself moving back home. If I did that, I would be disappointing myself, my friends, and probably my parents. So I know it's not going to happen, but it's difficult to resist the siren call of my bed and my bookshelves and my back porch and my kitchen.

My parent's back porch. My parent's kitchen.

 So it's good they're selling the house because I need to cut the cord. I don't want to live in Kansas. (For one thing, it's a red state.) I probably will never live in Kansas. I may visit Kansas, but I can't see myself there.

As I was working through all this, I had a conversation with a good friend of mine from high school. She's a grad student in the Chicago area and we meet biweekly for brunch at Café My Spirit Animal (not its real name). Over the course of our discussion, we came to the simultaneous (and possibly belated, but whatever) realization that no one was making decisions for us any more. Another friend, this one from middle school, chipped in with the corollary over cupcakes: we don't always factor in our parents' decisions any more. None of this is earth crushing, none of this is unique to us, and all of this is as it should be, but they were two very interesting conversations.

So it's time to take charge, time to start thinking of my next steps in terms of where they may lead. As one of my favorite former coworkers would say, "Imma need for you to get it together." I'm trying, dude, I'm trying.

"And all the books you’ve read have been read by other people."

Beginning in April 2007, I started keeping a list of all the books I'd read the previous year. I got the idea from the girlfriend of the son of some of my parents long-lost Baltimore friends. We were in London at the time. (It's one of those undiagrammable connections.)

Previous installments of the reading list can be found over in the Hall of the Revels, here, here, here, and here.

And so, without further ado, here is the comparatively short list of things I've read in the past year. I blame not being an English major any more. Also all the back issues of New Yorker I've been reading over lunch. Also, if I'm honest, Netflix.

Of the thirty-four books (and one play) I read this year, there were only two that I hated. In general, I try to steer clear of books like that, because I have a compulsive need to finish every book I start. Additionally, only two of these books were re-reads, although in the case of The Westing Game, which I read twelve times at age ten, re-read seems a bit of an understatement.

Books

1) The Spire by William Golding
2) In Search of Respect by Phillippe Bourgois
3) The Secret History by Donna Tartt
4) Life Class by Pat Barker
5) Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault
6) Queen Margot by Alexandre Dumas
7) A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
8) An Unequal Music by Vikram Seth
9) Dorian: An Imitation by Will Self
10) The Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
11) The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
12) The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies
13) What's Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies
14) Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
15) The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
16) The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John Le Carré
17) The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
18) Savage Inequalities by Lawrence Kozol
19) Friendship, Cliques, and Gangs by Greg Dimitriadis
20) The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
21) Our Kind of Traitor by John Le Carré
22) The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
23) Answered Prayers by Truman Capote
24) War Horse by Michael Morpugo
25) The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King
26) A Neil Jordan Reader
27) The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
28) Listening is an Act of Love ed. Dave Isay
29) The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
30) Breaking the Code by Hugh Whitemore
31) Blackout by Connie Willis
32) As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann
33) The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
34) Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
35) Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins


Top Five of the Year, in descending order

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John Le Carré
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins


And an Explanation

I went back and forth over including Catching Fire in the Top Five. I wondered whether I should put The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in instead. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was a re-read, true, but I barely remember the first time I read it, it's a classic, and is far better written than Catching Fire. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was the subject of not one but two plays I saw at the Steppenwolf this year (an adaptation and an inspiration), and both moved me beyond words.

With all that being true, why Catching Fire? Ultimately, it had one thing in common with the other books in the Top Five: I couldn't put it down. Indeed, I read it on Cousin R's kindle with Cousin R in the room (she was watching Skins, so it wasn't like I made her go sit in the corner...although she was sitting in the corner). The thing about Catching Fire, and the third book in the Hunger Games Trilogy, Mockingjay, is that it made me feel like a teenage reader again. I was so invested in the story and the characters that I didn't spend too much time picking apart the gaps in logic or the wobbly writing. True, I was a college-educated teen reader, so I reveled in the references to mythology, to climate change, to reality TV, and I gloried in the ambiguous emotions and relationships the main character, Katniss, has. Sure, I see its imperfections and the love triangle made me roll my eyes, but those were things teenage me did too. Not everything has to change.

The Hunger Games series is also significant because of the impact it has had on the kids I work with. Kids who don't usually read are reading it. Boys are reading it, and not despite but because of the female protagonist and how much she kicks butt. I love talking about books at work, because it reminds me of college, and it reminds me of high school, and it reminds me of every part of my life I've enjoyed. And, frankly, it's the reason I was hired.