Remembering Names

“Vanessa’s having her usual,” the Starbucks’ baristo shouted.

I’m not much of a Starbucks patron. For one thing, I don’t drink coffee. But this morning, before heading downtown for the day, I didn’t have time to make breakfast, and I had a Starbucks gift card in my purse. I had a vision that there was a cinnamon scone with my name on it tilted coyly on display in their glass pastry case. It was drizzled with overly-sweet white icing.

“Vanessa’s having her usual.”

The baristo, a tall thin man in his early twenties, wearing a black logo decorated baseball cap, repeated the order. He called down the counter to two other crew members, two women, who were even younger. They were similarly decked out in black slacks and long-sleeved button down shirts, black baseball caps and green cotton aprons.

The girl closest to the coffee machine, with a fresh from the farm complexion and four piercings in one ear lobe, giggled then pulled out the appropriately sized cardboard cup.

“This is the second day in a row that you remembered her name now, isn’t it?” she teased her co-worker.

“Yes,” he replied as she started the process of filling, frothing and flavoring Vanessa’s standing order.

“I have a buffer of about 720 names,” he went on. “I am sure the names of most of the people we see all the time are in there. Somewhere.”

I confess I was pretty impressed with his recall. When the other girl rang up my order and deducted today’s purchase from the balance on my gift card, I didn’t even think about the more impressive demonstration of information retention. How did the other girl remember what Vanessa’s usual was? Did she like her coffee strong or weak? Creamy? Black? Sweet?

Vanessa, a short thirty-something with black and blond streaked, spiked hair, started fumbling through her handbag looking for her wallet. The big, black leather number would barely have qualified as acceptable overhead storage according to any airline’s policy. She seemed happy. She looked up at the three servers and smiled. She must have been happy that the baristo remembered her name.

Calling people by their name is an incredibly welcoming gesture, a small way to say, “Yes, you matter.” I know that when I do appointment-setting or other types of professional phone work, I always make a point of repeating the contact’s name. Even when I am just leaving a message, after I leave my phone number, I add “John,” or “Lorraine,” or “Billy Bob,” ... "I'm looking forward to talking with you.”

Seeing this short scene at the mother of all corporate controlled experience providers was really heartening. And it wasn’t even about me. It wasn’t even my “usual” that everyone seemed to know. But it got me thinking that if I did drink coffee, if I did visit a specific café practically every day, like Vanessa, I imagined how happy I would be to be remembered.

Hearing someone remember your name is no small thing.

Ask and It is Given

I had made an executive decision. I would go to the bathroom before I took my seat. Why squirm, even for an hour? The crowds would only get worse, I figured, and the next act was not going to go on for fifteen minutes.

This was my first trip to the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. It had become a south side tradition for the last four years. Before the neighborhood became a tourist destination for people seeking anything Obama, this part of the city was known as an intellectual and cultural Mecca, a very United Colors of Benetton progressive sort of neighborhood and home of The University of Chicago. I was at the assembly hall at the International House, one of many venues the U of C offered for the occasion. The musical menu for the festival featured an abundance of local talent; 150 musicians at 15 venues over twelve hours. I knew the pianist who was playing at 3:00 and trusted I would find my way to two or three other sets before heading back home to the other side of town.

It was an old-fashioned, institutional sort of women’s lounge. You had to walk down a short flight of marble stairs and turn in to a room with about five stalls, including one extra wide one for handicapped access. None of the latches on the stall doors seemed to work very well. The hot air hand dryer only worked intermittently and there was more pink, goopy soap pooled up on the ancient sink counter than in the dispenser. There was a sign near the mirror, announcing something akin to a pledge to keep the premises clean.

Hallelujah, none of the stalls were occupied. I slipped into the middle one, seemingly the cleanest, and started the hanging ritual, first draping my purse strap then my cotton hoodie over the hook on the inside of the door, hoping that it would hold up for the duration of my visit. I heard a few other women enter nearby stalls by the time I was pulling down my jeans.

“Excuse, me,” I heard a meek voice pipe out to the person in the stall next to hers. “There doesn’t seem to be any toilet paper here.”

For a second, I went into a panic. I had my pants bunched up around my knees and was half sitting and half squatting over an ancient University of Chicago toilet (and I didn’t care what their posted pledge about cleanliness said, I was not about to sit squarely on the throne). Then I found myself moving into an almost Socratic mode of self-inquiry. Did I forget to check for TP? Relief spilled over me quickly as I looked to my left. There was TP aplenty behind door number three.

Ah, I thought to myself, as I like to do, time to be grateful. Still in my sitting squat pose, I considered my good fortune. I had plenty of toilet paper waiting in readiness by my side. Even better, I was not at an outdoor venue where I would have had to use a port-a-potty. I may even have had some Kleenex balled up in my purse….Then I heard a different voice.

“Yes, I have some here,” the woman from two stalls down called back. “I’ll pass it to you under the wall.”

Wow. Is this a miracle or something? After the hand-off must have happened, I heard a quiet and grateful thank you. I was still contemplating the simple joy of toilet paper when I walked to the sink to wash my hands. I was struck by another observation. It was great that there was someone on the other side of the stall wall who was able to provide exactly what was needed. Nine times out of ten, when you ask for something, you can get it.

Remembering to ask is no small thing.

The Girl Who Loves Hats and Sweaters

My fourteen year-old niece recently moved to my neighborhood. She had been living in a suburb of Chicago since she was born. I had helped her celebrate birthdays and attended many of her violin recitals, but I wasn’t very involved in her daily life. I have been looking forward to developing a new kind of relationship now.

I invited her to take a walking tour of her new ‘hood with me. I wanted to show her where you could pick up a good pad thai for carryout and where the hippie candle store is. I wanted to take her to the mom ‘n pop frozen custard shop where, on a nice summer night, lines can stretch out and curl around the corner practically to the library.

For a fourteen year-old kid, she has a lot going on in her life. Within the last few weeks, she moved from the only home she had ever known to a town house in the Lincoln Park area. Confronted with the prospects of settling in to form a new household with her father, his new wife and her daughter represented more than a simple move. (Emma’s mom, my sister, died nine years ago.) Only two weeks earlier, she had major oral surgery and got fitted for braces. And she was about to start a new school within the week. Whitney Young High School. A most urban kind of institution where she would have to take the #9 Ashland Avenue bus most days.

Her new place is a little under a mile away. I planned to walk with her to my place and drive her back home. More than pointing out my favorite pizza parlor, I wanted to show her that I lived nearby, that she could come over to my place any time to watch a movie with me or just to hang out.

When I picked her up, I think she was still figuring out the security system. When I rang her buzzer at the gate, our conversation went something like this: “Do you want to buzz me in?” “No, I’ll just come out.”

As she walked down the stairs, then through the courtyard, I saw that she was wearing a stretchy kind of black sweater with a teal colored knit cap and the biggest smile you could imagine. After a very hot summer in Chicago, it seemed that the weather had changed very quickly. Oh man, I thought, it’s really fall.

We started walking down Lincoln Avenue, past St. Alphonsus Church, where only a few minutes earlier, I had seen a troupe of bagpipers playing to welcome wedding guests. I took a deep breath.

“I love fall,” I said.

“Me too,” she echoed.

While I was thinking crunching through leaves as I walked, less humidity, and football, Emma, I learned, had completely different reasons in mind.

“I love hats and sweaters,” she declared.

I knew by the way her face practically glowed that she loved everything about hats and sweaters; how they looked, how they felt. Shopping for them.

Shopping to me means running to Trader Joe’s to buy party snacks before watching a football game. Emma and I share a special fondness for Johnny Cash, but I know I will probably never be her best partner for an excursion to an outlet mall. And yet, in making her enthusiasm for fall fashion so visible to me, she passed along a little spark of the fire she felt. Being around people who have a passion for something feeds my sense of aliveness, and being around a fourteen year old girl who’s not afraid to flash a glimpse of her braces when she really is taken with something – well, that’s the best.

Loving a girl who loves hats and sweaters in no small thing.

I've Been Practicing

I love to shake people up some times by making a joke or by voicing an ironic observation. When I go to the bank, for instance, to make a deposit with a request to get a small amount of cash back, let’s say $50, the clerk will invariably ask me how, in what denominations, I would like this amount. With a very deadpan expression, I’ll say, “In hundreds, please.”

Step one for making a joke, according to my own invention for invention: Be willing to disrupt the flow.

My secondary purpose in life is not to pray upon service workers of every stripe, although brief, everyday encounters seem to lend themselves to in the flow observations and snappy remarks. It’s just that – for me anyway, engaging in this kind of playful repartee is a lot of fun.

Countless times, when I have worked my way towards the front of the check-out line at the store, I will go through the FRWTCC, the Fumbling Ritual With The Credit Card. No matter how many times I have walked this path and performed the routine of swiping my card, I rarely get it right on the first time. (There are four different ways you can guide the card through the reader and only one of them gets you to the next screen.) Often, after flipping my plastic over a few times until I get the swipe right, I’ll stand confidently at the processing station with the voo doo like magic, specially wired credit card processing pen in hand and announce to the clerk that the fumbling she just witnessed is over. I am very good at signing my name. I cockily announce, “I’ve been practicing.”

This usually leads to a few smiles, or at least a blink of recognition that someone is funning with them. There’s an ample amount of ambiguity here, which makes it fun for me as I look for reactions of the surrounding innocents. Have I been practicing signing this name? Am I the person whose name is on the credit card? Or, have I been out practicing shopping, enthusiastically charging my purchases?

I actually don’t think it’s audience reaction that drives me. It’s something else that sparks the inner giggle.

Last week, I was at a local bar waiting for a friend to join me. I was watching the customers and waitresses interact. I got a glimpse of a balding, middle-aged man – okay, he was probably my age. He folded several bills into his hand, which he then stuffed into his waitress’s hand and then, in a oddly intimate way, enfolded her hand with both of his. The waitress was in her mid-twenties. She wore tight jeans and a colorful, loose-fitting top. Her hair was pulled back in a pony tail, hanging in a most casual sort of way, perfectly unadorned, simultaneously styled and wild.

I remember thinking he’s way too old for her. What can he be thinking? Then I shook my head and found the inner giggle creep over me. A younger woman, I contemplated, might give you better mileage, but us older models can be so much fun to drive.

Hey, I made up a joke. For no one but myself. Rest assured, I won’t be competing with Seinfeld or Tina Fey any time soon, but I love making up jokes. It’s so easy to get ensnared in critical self-talk, or to ruminate on something that happened a week ago on Tuesday, something that can’t be changed or fixed. Our minds can also dream up incredible scenarios for testing out possibilities, or we can revel in an in the moment awareness in order to make up a joke.

Delighting in your own mind is no small thing.

Going with MY flow

Sunday morning, at around 9:00, traffic on the Kennedy was pretty light. I was driving to my meditation center where I had been going most Sunday mornings to chant, meditate, and – basically to get grounded for the week. I was listening to Breakfast with the Beatles, a favorite segment on my favorite radio pre-set. Having only a short distance to travel by expressway, I was hanging out in the right lane, singing along with Paul. “Two of us riding nowhere, spending someone’s hard earned pay. You and me Sunday driving, not arriving on our way back home. We’re on our way home….”

I was sort of rocking out in my little Honda when, to my right, I caught sight of a similarly sized, old, blue car, cruising slowly, getting on at the North Avenue ramp. Unlike many of the downtown entrances, the North Avenue ramp goes on for a while, affording a pretty good chance to size up the speed of highway traffic and plot your move. As I watched the car to my right, it was clear that the driver had a choice. He could either speed up or slow down. No great speed change was required, just enough so that when his forward progress intersected with mine, he would comfortably be either in front of me or behind me.

But no --- I ranted to myself as he pulled just in front of me in my lane. The whole damn highway is practically empty and this guy has to get on in such a way that I have to put on my brakes. Does he have his head up his ass? Can’t he see me? Doesn’t he look where he’s going... The Two of Us was almost at the chorus, “You and I have memories…” when all I could think was, I hate people who can’t merge.

Strong words, I realized. I noticed feeling differently in my body. I was gripping the steering wheel more tightly. My head sat on my neck with greater tension, like a bobblehead doll assembled with an over-coiled spring. My throat and mouth seemed to have suddenly gone dry. I stopped breathing. I stopped singing. What happened to ME? I was in no danger of a collision. I just had to apply my brakes. While indulging in a heated inner rant on how other drivers should respect the flow of traffic, I lost MY FLOW, the only thing I can control.

Breathe. Breathe, I told myself. Look at the traffic going northbound. It’s heavier than usual. Wonder where they’re going on a Sunday morning. Stay in the right lane, I told myself. The Ogden ramp is only two more exits from here. I instructed myself to observe the world with openness and see what better things, if anything at all, my mind would choose to latch on to. Hmm, I noticed a large car dealership just off the highway. When did this open? And then, I heard the music again.

“Two of us wearing raincoats, standing solo, in the sun. You and me chasing paper, getting nowhere, on our way back home. We’re on our way home…”

Remembering not to let anything take you out of your own flow is no small thing.

Market Days

I love Green City Market. From May 12th through October 30th, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, farmers from Indiana, Michigan and Illinois set up tents and stands at the south side of Lincoln Park, appropriately, perhaps, not far from the miniature farm in the zoo. It’s quite a festive, family friendly atmosphere. Often, there are folding chairs set up so shoppers can listen to musicians. Dogs on leashes and toddlers in their buggies visit the different kiosks under the watchful eyes of their owners and parents, organic foodies, high on the air of sustainability and pesticide-free produce.

The green beans are so fresh, they even taste good raw. Flaming Furies®, a name I’ve always thought more suitable for a ladies’ softball team, and about a dozen other varieties of peaches are chin dripping treats. I used to think “purple peppers” were simply part of a tongue twister (Remember Peter picked a peck?) until I found some at the market. There’s a tent I visit regularly where they sell micro-greens. They look like fine, colorful grasses, but are dense loaded with flavors you would normally find in a milder form as some other vegetable like beets or radish. There’s a rainbow of apples, from red to pink to yellow to green. They’re perfectly imperfect, of all different sizes, completely unselfconscious about a brown spot here or there. They know they are wonderfully crisp and not too sweet or too tart. A red cabbage at Green City Market opens up like a corsage on homecoming. And the blueberry-raspberry-melon smoothies blended on site (where they plug in the blender, I don’t know), you can’t believe how good they are.

In June, the market has several vendors that sell wild prairie flowers. Asparagus is also plentiful. In July, you’re more likely to see molded cardboard buckets of berries; red, blue and black. And you’ll start to see corn come in. My fellow urbanites will pull back the husk from one or two ears before buying a bunch. I’m not sure that most of us really know the signs of a high quality ear, but this seems to be everyone’s routine. There’s more corn in August and enough tomatoes to make Mama Ragu cry with joy. Now that it’s September, I’m starting to see beets and a wider variety of peppers.

Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate that I can go to a nearby grocery store and find avocados year-round and can pretty much whip up a batch of guacamole anytime I want. Still, the fact that what I see any Wednesday or Saturday morning at Green City Market might not be there the following week makes me feel a special kind of appreciation. Golden sunflowers or purple asparagus, bunches of basil or strawberries ready to be encrusted in dark chocolate: these things might only be available a couple of weeks.

Enjoying things in their season is no small thing.

Eat Your Heart Out, Jimmy Buffet

Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I am a die-hard Cubs fan. If I slit my wrist (which this peculiar fan relationship renders almost reasonable), I would probably bleed Cubbie Blue. But Friday night, something stronger than fan loyalty came over me. I realized summer’s almost over.

This past weekend I wanted to load up on all things SUMMER. I had a heartfelt longing to go to a ballgame, to watch grown men run around the infield grass, buy a scorecard which I would not make a mark in, and test my judgment on close calls against the umpire’s, courtesy of the Jumbotron. Enjoying baseball this fine Friday night meant a trip to the Cell, a.k.a. US Cellular Field, home of the White Sox. Foreign territory for me

Cliché though it may be, some of my best friends are Sox fans. If not big backers of the Men in Black, many other friends have touted the virtues of the Cell for a long time. Almost everyone agrees, the food is better than at Wrigley. But, while only 10 miles away from Cub's Park by the Red Line, getting off at the 35th Street stop, I felt like I was stepping off into a brave new world.

Fortunately, I coaxed a girlfriend into making the trip with me. Her post-game advice turned out to be practically life-saving. Herded like pigs at one of those slaughterhouses whistleblower documentaries on big bad agri-biz like to show, everyone from the north side, whose only reasonable means of transport was the el, shuffled along to the edge of the platform, with no air space in between. There, they waited to shove their way into a train car. The trains seemed to be running on a reduced frequency schedule. Not over-served like 90% of the other baseball revelers returning cross town, she directed me to board a practically empty train going further south so we could jump off at 47th, walk to the other side of the platform and get a seat on a northbound train before it reached 35th. While this maneuver was a little bit of a trick, I can’t complain that there was any lack of hospitality at the city’s other park.

As soon as we got close to the Cell, there were promos galore. Street vendors handed out sweepstakes forms for exotic trips. McDonald’s gave away sippie-cup sized raspberry slushies. The first 10,000 through the turnstiles received replica Stanley Cups, as Friday night’s game was dedicated to the Sox honoring the Blackhawks as recently crowned hockey champions.

The view of the Chicago skyline, from the bus parking lot and from a 500 level rooftop lounge, was breathtaking, an angle of the city I could never see from the loop or from Belmont Harbor. The brats (locally manufactured Bobak brand), as reported, were definitely above the fare served at The Friendly Confines. The site lines, although we were sitting in the nosebleed section, were quite adequate….Oh yes, and the game was great! We clobbered the Yankees (always good sport) 9 to 3. Going to a baseball game where your team wins is a great way to observe the end of summer.

After the game, the firework display was incredible. Amped up with a little extra fire power, courtesy of the Chicago Blackhawks, the post-game pyrotechnics probably went on for twenty minutes. And we had a perfect view, sitting on the right field side, about twenty rows down from the roof. Dizzying sprays of lights, along side of a nearly full moon, against a backdrop of velvet, navy blue sky.

All in all, it was a great evening. My favorite recollection was when the margarita man visited our seats, something I have never seen at another stadium. Vendors, suited up with rounded tanks of freshly blended margaritas, like men from NASA suited up with jet packs, roamed the Cell, dispensing their delectable, cold, frothy and highly Sauza-ed libations. Is this not the best?! Eat your heart out, Jimmy Buffet. Margarita-ville came to me.

Having the margarita man come to Section 516, Row 9, and serve me a freshly made, frozen strawberry cocktail from a space age chiller tank is no small thing.