The Big Cowboy Hat in the Sky

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When Saturn finds itself in the same place it was when we were born, Astrologers call it Saturn's Return. It starts about the time we turn 28 and concludes by 30, or so I've been assured. If we survive this despondent phase, we reach Adulthood. However before we can cross over to the promised land of clarity and confidence, we must trudge through something resembling a poorly planned party where we are all required to play brain teasers while intoxicated on the destructive drugs of personal development and recurring regrets. Our challenge at the party, if we shall call it a party, is to cast off what isn't working in our lives to focus on what is and what will. 

Last month, I turned 29. I've been treading for about a year in a deep kiddy pool of what smells to be piss, pus and puke. For my birthday, I bought myself a used tweed bathing suit with a pleated skirt and found a couple arm bubbles for occasional rest, but mostly I just hang on the wall gagging and hollering questions at the lifeguard like he has any idea whether I should become a certified career woman or not. Three months ago, Scott turned 28. A week after his birthday, my dear husband belly flopped beside me, sinking to the plastic bottom. I watched while the yellowish green water hid his naked body like a G.I Joe guy in the grass. I thought he might be dead, drowned, but I didn't give up and eventually I drew him to the surface with silly songs and false promises of cake. Once he was breathing again, I stole him a kick board, a beer and a wet suit and we laid in the living room talking. An hour later, we were pulled to our feet, our eyes covered with blindfolds and our shoulders set to spinning. After several dizzying turns, we were stilled into wobbling nausea, given sharp pins with dangling tails and told to wander through the darkness in search of our destined donkey butts. Zealously, I accidentally poked my pin through Scott's pants and into his flesh. He cried out, removed the used handkerchief from his eyes, wiped away the dried crumblings of snot from the ridge of his cheekbones and looked at me, then looked to the pin pressing the loose denim to his hip. He didn't pull it out. Instead he just looked at it. That's when I said, We've been procrastinating about one of the most important things, our purpose in life! We thought it was theater. But maybe it isn't. Perhaps leaving the theater has been obvious for awhile. We just didn't want to believe it before. 

"I don't want to be poor anymore." He said then, a cloud in each of his deep set eyes. 

"Me either." I agreed, pulling the pin out. Strangely, he didn't bleed. Instead, he deflated a little. 

After 730 days of such demoralizing activities as these, the fishing nets of fog and fear will be dragged away.  We will be handed goody bags of the graphite sketches and the lists of declarations and newly acquired aspirations we drew while at the stubby craft table in the corner of the kitchen. We will find our dusty car keys in the basket above the fridge and our boots behind the boxes of empty bottles in the yard. 

However until that glorious day comes, I'll be at the sticky ping pong table, swinging at soft lemons. Why are we home nearly every night too tired and cold to socialize with this city? I wonder. We were so busy planning our move here that we didn't really figure out what we'd be doing once we got here. Sure we had some ideas, but mostly we moved to Chicago because we wanted to. I'm afraid that means we're doomed. Perpetually following our guts and hearts instead of our brains and heads. We never knew it'd be so much like life here. As strange and stupid as that sounds to say. We move and move and move with these hopes that everything will just work it's way out like a loose knot tugged from one end. But it doesn't ever. There are always snarls twisting into doubt and depression, which tightens and becomes even more impossible to separate. Particularly now with Saturn staring down at us, it's rings pointing in every direction. With all the politeness I can muster, I shout to the hidden stars above the city lights, Please Saturn, team up with the North Star and give us a little guidance down here. But that big orange stone in the sky remains silent. That's when I throw my shiny paddle at the sandbox, my cuticles burning, and declare to myself that we must stay still for a moment. Take a class. Make some friends. Enjoy this marvelous city.

I return to the craft table where I sit on a doll sized chair drawing pictures of a fictional farmhouse. I draw a dirt parking lot, a bike rack and a row of rocking chairs. I write about piles of mismatching mugs, plates and pots. I draw pellet stoves glowing in cozy corners, sending smoke to the sky. I write recipes. We'll live here, I draw an arrow pointing to the second floor windows. We'll work here, I write beside the cafe on the ground level. Behind the house is a great big field with a vegetable patch and a row of little apple trees reaching from their roots. There'll be live music. String instruments vibrating, raspy spit drenched harmonicas wailing and old folk tales telling. Patrons will sit together on tattered oriental rugs, reupholstered ottomans and blanketed love seats, sipping beer, dipping cookies into coffee and singing along. 

I show my paper plans to Scott. He smiles and tells me to stop searching the Internet for foreclosed farmhouses, but to preserve my pencil sketches and recipes because they might just come in handy one day.

Sneaking into Jewelry Boxes

The sun is out. It's the 10th of November, but it's something like 55 degrees in Chicago. Scott drives us from the airport. My mother and I sit in the backseat and my father sits in the front. 

"We have a couple options." I tell them. "We can go out to breakfast right now; we can go to the grocery store and I can make breakfast or..."

"Let's go out to breakfast." My mother resolves. 

"Do you still want to go to the movie? It's at noon? We could walk there, it's only a mile away, did you bring sneakers?" The independent cinema I work for is showing Buster Keaton's Cameraman with live organ accompaniment. I thought it would be fun to see the old silent comedy on the big screen together. I also cannot help but spit rapid sentences at my parents whenever I am with them. They don't mind, they tell me after they've been quiet for awhile. They like listening. And yes, that all sounds great to them.  

While my mother and I snuggle in the backseat, she points to Sunny's gold diamond ring on her finger. She takes it off and slides it onto my right ring finger where it settles above my knuckle quite perfectly. I look down at the old gorgeous gleam, flattening my hand to admire it properly. 

"Do you want it?" She asks. An offer which is far too spontaneous sounding for me to accept. I love the ring, but I can't take it from her. It used to be my great-grandmother Sunny's, then my grandmother Nancy's and now it belongs to my mother, Sandy. Though I do suppose my mother calls me Rachey. So maybe it is meant to be. But she needs to think about it more, I decide, giving it back. 

For the rest of the ride to the restaurant, we discuss our plans for the weekend. I have them from Saturday morning until Sunday night. 

"I want to see your water." Mom says. 

"We can take Penny to the dog beach. Maybe tomorrow morning after we check out of the hotel." 

After dinner at a raw vegan restaurant where my father's noodle dish is surprisingly cold and my mother's pizza is on some kind of bark bread, the three of us sit together, sipping water and wine and giggling about how many times I've dragged them to such alternative food establishments. Then my father glances over to my mother and asks, "Don't we have a special little gift for Rachel?" 

"You're here, that's my gift!" I say, thinking Dad's assuming something he shouldn't. But then my mother surprises me. 

"I tried, but she didn't want it." She says touching the antique gold and diamond stones. 

"You were serious?" I exclaim.  

"Would you wear it?" She asks sliding it back onto my right ring finger.

"Yes." I say looking at my hand adorned with a new delicate sparkle. 

"Somehow I always knew that you used to sneak into my jewelry box and try it on like I used to sneak into my mother's room and try it on."

"I would." I say. 

"I think I would pretend it was my engagement ring." 

"Me too." 

"I've always known it would belong to you one day. Do you really like it?" 

"Yes Mum!" I do, of course. 

"Don't sell it." 

"I won't!" I would never. 

Maybe one day I'll have a daughter who sneaks into my jewelry box to try it on.

The Romantic

According to Enneagrams, I am a "Type 4, The Romantic." I long for what I feel is missing. I have severe emotional intensity. I crave to be unique, but have an ever present fear that I am deficient and lacking in everything I do. I am, to a wretched fault, persistently envious. If only I were thinner, prettier or married to some successful businessman. In addition to all this seeming baggage, I am a Scorpio. I am passionate, devoted, motivated, sympathetic and stubborn. I am so interested in others that it causes me to stare at strangers in restaurants and swerve as I drive past pedestrians on slanted cement sidewalks. I crave to know what everyone around me is talking about, struggling with, wearing, feeling, like an untreated OCD addict might kiss every door handle fifty-seven times before turning it. If I had shown any promise in science, I may have become a nurse or psychologist, but I didn't. Still I like helping people. Perhaps that is why I am so desperate to start a family. Mothering, I know, will be something I succeed at. Or at the very least, something I won't be rejected from. In college, my intuitive traits drew me to expression and led me to art's open ending. My emotional instincts were what attracted me to acting and experiencing theater and film. My husband says I am the perfect audience member. I weep when they want me to, cringe when they show something gruesome, and laugh when they surprise me. When acting work proved sporadic, I learned to write my emotions (of which I have more than I care to keep) away into safely kept sentences.  

When we are labeled into types, signs, stereotypes and palm lines it would seem that destiny is predetermined by some godly chemist in the clouds, but what about when we add in every factor? Can one truly sum herself up into a single list of ingredients? I wouldn't know the first thing about the mathematics, in calculating life long calorie percentages, but we can forget about all that for the time being. I am the third child of four. One of three daughters. My mother used to call me her peacemaker. I am twenty-eight years old, nearly twenty-nine. I am caucasian. My husband says we're middle class though we're broke as tramps. I am 5'8 and 147 pounds on a good day. I have an extremely delicate soul and seriously sensitive skin. I am Irish, Italian, English, and French Canadian. I am an American. I have dark brown hair and when I'm worried, strands of it stick between my wet fingertips as I rinse it of shampoo in the shower. I have bluish brown eyes. I have a freckle on the center of my throat and visible veins beneath my brows. I was raised a Catholic and I married a Jew. I want to find a church or a temple to attend, but fear I'll be too embarrassed because God doesn't seem to be very popular anymore. I miss the days when "God bless you" was nice and not offensive. I sweat and blush whenever I'm embarrassed. I wake up early every morning to walk to the beach where my dog herds birds who sit on the water like buoys of beaks, wet feathers and wide wing spans. It injects joy into every pore of my body and pumps bliss in and out of my lungs like menthol. I want to pay a psychic to read my ora and predict my future because I am gullible, hopeful and supremely interested in what's to come. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a product of my mother, my father, my ancestors, and my generation of so many others equally lost in this current American era here upon this benevolent Earth. We are all scrambling for guidance and acceptance, no matter our birthday or birth order. But labels, it seems, can help our minds name complex matters by aligning our differences into categories and explanations. I separate myself into pieces, roots and stems because I hope in better understanding myself, I will understand how to better myself. 

words

We live in an apartment building with a courtyard, mailbox key and a maintenance man named Tom. Sometimes the beagle across the yard howls an horrendously shrill cry. One time, I stuck my head out the window and said, "it's OK pup!" in my gentlest way, but it only made him bellow longer. We live in Chicago now. I play my guitar and sing covers of songs with simple chord progressions. We ride busses to live shows. We walk the dog to a fenced-in beach with fresh water waves and damp sand marked by overlapping paw prints. I live in Chicago now. I miss my mother and my sisters, my brother and my father. I miss my state. My friends in Massachusetts. My life in Massachusetts. I miss knowing where everything is though I like discovering this new pace, tree leaf lace and storefront face. I ache for my mother's arms and my father's coarse kisses, but I love how scary this all is. There's a time difference between my home state and here. One hour. That means I have more time every day, or rather that's how it seems when I call and it's a just little too late to chat. But there aren't any mountains here. Just a hill at the park where I like to take pictures of people standing beside their bicycles, perspiring running partners or holding spools of strings that connect to kites on windy days. I don't know that I can be home for Christmas and I'm afraid my father will be melancholy to not have his mother or daughter there beside the tree, at the dinner table or in the church at midnight. I want there to be a better word for love. A stronger, sturdier word for miss. Because I love and miss more than these small familiar lines of letters can express. Sorry is so pathetic when I want it to be valiant and bleeding. I don't regret moving here, paying for a truck to lug our life nine hundred miles to the left, for quitting our jobs, or for straining relationships with the complexity of physical withdrawal, but I am still sad for it, which is another word lacking in true depth. 

The film, Away we Go, written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and directed by Sam Mendes comes to mind a lot lately. It is one of my favorite films. Verona, played by Maya Rudolph and her husband, Burt, played by John Krasinski have this conversation, while they huddle by candles for warmth. 

VERONA

Burt, are we fuckups?

BURT 

No!...what d'you mean?

VERONA

I mean, we're thirty-four-

BURT

-thirty-three 

VERONA

and we don't even have this basic stuff figured out.

BURT

Basic like how?

VERONA

Basic like how to live.

BURT

We're not fuckups.

VERONA

We have a cardboard window.

BURT (whispering)

We're not fuckups.

VERONA (whispering) 

I think we might be fuckups. 

BURT (whispering)

We're not fuckups.

On our wedding anniversary, we sit in a restaurant where we both feel a little under dressed and we talk about three years of marriage and nine years since our first kiss. Numbers. Astounding numbers followed by the self-calculating word, years. 

"What do we want to happen before our four-year-anniversary?" Scott asks. 

"We could prepare ourselves to have a baby." I say. "Figure out what we need to do to be ready."

"That would be awesome." 

"I think we're emotionally ready. We just need to be financially."

After dinner, we sit on the train as it rattles on its elevated tracks toward the North Side and I tell him, "My mom used to say we should run our own bed and breakfast." After three weeks of employment searching stress pressing on my shoulders, I suddenly need something real to be striving for. If it's a bed and breakfast then it's a bed and breakfast and I can start taking classes and buying used books on hospitality. 

"We should try and win the lottery. Then we could buy a big house and not have to pay a mortgage and we could open a bed and breakfast." He says.

A few days later I bring it up again and he asks, "How would this be easier than working for a company?" 

"Because we can be our own bosses." I say with multiplying impatience. Then I realize my bed and breakfast dream is just like when I thought we should buy a house because we couldn't afford rent any more. It isn't logical. Only money can truly beget money and we have no money. My hopes pull like the kites I've seen on windy days. Pretty in their diamond silhouettes, but far away. Maybe when the weather calms... I could make warm breakfast every morning for our guests and wash the linens and sweep the uneven wooden floors. Scott could set up a projector and show films at night. Our kids could run around the back yard where a vegetable garden would grow, a rectangle swing would float from ropes and benches would stand waiting for the morning sun. We could have beer and wine and live music on the weekends. We'd meet so many new people and invite old friends and family to come and stay with us.... My plans always hide the practical, but never do my detailed daydreams fully suppress my fear that we'll never be grown ups, that we'll always be just a couple of fuckups.

RUN!

I wonder what a jogger from 2012 would look like to folks on trolleys, in shops and on sidewalks during 1930s Chicago. Hot pink sneakers, spandex shorts, tank top, sweat bands and white wires connecting ears to pockets. They'd run away screaming. Or they'd just start running too, for World War was just around the corner and maybe bomb threats had already reached the papers. Now, runners are commonplace. Runners passing joggers. Joggers passing walkers. Walkers are another story entirely. Ever pass two women walking really fast side by side, their elbows jutting out like the wooden oars of an Olympian rowboat? Listen close. Are they trying to solve one another's problems or just talking trash? It will be one or the other. But forget that, I want to discuss the act of running for exercise. I had tried a few weeks back with Penny-the-dog, but my herding, tracking, protective pup started to panic, naturally, pulling me to every smell she could reach and to where she hoped to find safety. The fur on the sides of her face stuck out, her tail was stiff and her ears were back. To prevent this panic, I walked the rest of the way and eventually she became preoccupied with pissing on every tree and calmed down. Today, sans dog, I go out on my first real run since moving to Chicago. In old peeling sneakers, a baggy lavender t-shirt with a dinosaur on it and my dark running shorts I go. I pass runners wearing all kinds of spandex. So much spandex they could swim in the Arctic and go to a penguin prom if they so desired. I also pass runners wearing things on their feet that resemble folded skies or like giant mouse traps. They kind of bounce as they run. Science Fiction books from the seventies and even eighties could never had predicted the weird shit people do for fitness nowadays. My head is tilted down with my royal blue baseball cape covering my eyes and flushed cheeks. It's strange that we do this, this running. We once traveled only by foot. Food was scarce. Now it's everywhere we look, convenience stores of candy bars, fast food french fries, sidewalk carts of tacos. And the poorest are often the fattest. We all once had to cultivate land and/or forage food and water. Now most of us sit all day sipping from the faucet and cardboard coffee cups. Then like third graders released for recess, some of us bust outdoors to run down sidewalks, dodging old folks, children in school uniforms and shrieking loonies at crowded bus stops. I'm not wearing headphones today. It's safer, I decide. I can rely on my eyes and my ears. Scott almost got hit by a truck this morning in a crosswalk. We had the signal, but the truck had the green and apparently the driver didn't feel like waiting for us so he drove between our moving feet and the curb. Scott's head was down though and hadn't seen the truck so I yelled, "Scott! SCOTT!" He stopped just in time and looked up. We both glared at the butt of the truck as it drove off. A girl with an inhaler in her hand just passed me. I feel mildly chubby. The chewed up baby carrots in my stomach are bouncing. Whenever Scott and I are with anyone who mentions running marathons, my husband will say "Rachel and her sisters ran the Boston Marathon." I always correct him. "Jogged. We jogged the Boston Marathon very slowly. Took us five and a half hours." Then, if I'm feeling silly or tipsy, I tell them the story of the porter potties before the race. While my sisters and I stood in the long line for the toilets, I begged my little sister to let me go in before her (the enormous pasta dinner we had the night before was executing an unexpected exit strategy). She refused, smiling as she entered the tall light blue rectangle of shit, sanitizer and Evergreen stink. Two minutes later, she emerged ridden with despair. No toilet paper! She told us. OH NO! What did you dooooo? We asked. She grimaced and mimed pulling up her pants without wiping. My other sister and I were in hysterics. For a good poop story always kills in my family. What did I do as the next person in line, you wonder? I grabbed one of those free hand towels they were handing out all over the place. I held my breath, walked into the little blue house of horribleness, pooped, wiped the most luxurious wipe of all time, tossed the towel into the bucket and walked out of there ready to tackle that marathon one fourteen-minute-mile at a time. I would be much faster at running long distance if there was some kind of fear involved. For instance, if I lived in a post apocalyptic world with dragons, angry aliens and/or mythic monkeys that could fly helicopters and jump through volcanoes, then staying fit wouldn't be a top concern because I'd be in incredible shape. I'd be skinny for lack of rations. I'd have tons of muscles from running, crouching in brush and fighting battles with my ax. And I'd be so fast because I'd have death-by-fire-breath chasing me wherever I went. I mean, that'd sure as hell beat saying that the fastest I've ever run was up the basement stairs of my parents' house. A sprint, which was never even recorded or witnessed by anyone besides the fictitious ghost that gave me the chill that inspired me to run up the stairs in the first place. 

Maniacs

Beams of lime green light move in synchronized swiveling sweeps from the stage. Vinyl records bellow from electric speakers. I have a yellow bubbly beer with an orange slice. I am not drunk. I'd like that to be noted. My cup stands surrounded by other cups, strangers of ice with red skinny straws stuck into most of them. On the floor, my purse and sweatshirt huddle together in a hidden heap. They wouldn't take purses at coat check. This is fine since they would have charged me $3. And because I haven't had a paycheck in over a month $3 feels more like $10. I call it the deflation of an unemployed person's pockets. We six dance like maniacs to the disc jockey's selection of 70s soul. It's awkward when we first get onto the painted black dance floor, but soon it's clear we all embrace some kind of individual love for dance. We twirl, squat, jolt our hips, point our fingers, shake our butts, clap, snap, run in place, mime holding a baby whenever the lyrics call a lover "baby", and mimic the opening to The Cosby Show as best we can. Some of us look insane. You know that saying that's usually carved and painted onto little wooden boards and hung on dorm room walls, the "dance like no body's watching" quote? Well, we literally dance like no one is watching. We feel the beat and jerk our bodies accordingly. Sometimes we look like modern dance aficionados, improvising choreography like salaried artists, but a lot of the time, we just look like we're poking fun at this old silly human tradition of moving to music. There must be a name for what we're doing, something like Freestyle Dance, but I prefer to just call it Fun. 

"The times, they are a changin.."

The ten foot moving truck is parked out front. The dog doesn't understand and keeps running to bark at the suspicious vehicle through the screen door, causing me to yell and my heart to punch at my chest cavity. For two weeks, we say goodbye to the familiar. Goodbye bathroom where our toothbrushes lean, bye Main Street where we ramble, bye bedroom with the orange curtains and streetlight beams, bye to the mountain trails we travel and to the kitchen sink where we stand to wash. This is the last time I'll see this, do this, drink this, I think, staring at bricks, porcelain, dirt, smudged car windows and a stemmed beer glass of stout. Amy and Mark are moving away too. When they leave for Canada, I cry a little, but it feels like tap water stuck in a damp clump of hair, rust, and toothpaste spit. My body must be rejecting this impending sorrow. Well this is happening, body. I say, playing sad music on the car stereo. Eventually, a breach busts through and two salty streams surge for my dear friends and for all the friendships, which will warp by the weight of distance. Goodbye old pals, I'm sorry if you fade into archived photographs, storied memories and precious artifacts of love. 

I watch Martin Scorsese's documentary about Bob Dylan called No Direction Home. Afterwards, I buy two of Dylan's old folk albums and sit at the computer listening to his rhythmic voice and guitar picking poetry. As a young man, he found himself in New York City's Greenwich Village where Allen Ginsberg was howling and small folk bands were collecting change in baskets and playing three song sets between poets. Alcohol, cigarette smoke and dancing coins passed through the candle lit darkness of crowded folk cafes in Greenwich during the 1960s. Strangers sat together while they witnessed art. There were rustic record players, but mostly entertainment was found when alive and in cafes, theatres, street parades and traveling circus tents. One big reason we're moving to Chicago is so that we can sit as strangers in theatres, old movie houses, comedy clubs and music venues, witnessing art. 

Once he got famous, Bob Dylan was asked a lot of stupid questions by the press, questions he'd question back or blow cigarette smoke at. When he started playing with a band and an electric guitar, he was booed and heckled, called fake, a sell out and even Judas. All for moving away from his acoustic folk sound. Imagine if every change we underwent faced a mob of angry audience members, of fans who are no longer. I don't have anything like that. But if I was faced with a similar sort of harassment, I hope I too would have the courage to play on. 

Tomorrow I drive my dog to Toledo, then on to Chicago.