Everyday Wine

When I was fifteen or so, my father used to open one of those squat, funny looking bottles of Portuguese wine, Mateus, when we would have a roast on Sunday. Sunday dinner was probably one of the few meals we ate together as a family. He’d joke about contributing to the delinquency of minors, referring to my sister Ronna, who was twelve months older, and me. All the while, he’d be smiling at the thought of us sharing a meal together or thinking about his daughters being safely at home instead of out with friends where we would be more likely to make mischief. Of course, my sister and I were delighted at the chance to imbibe a grown-up beverage.

On Fridays or Saturdays, if we ordered a pizza, my father would uncork a bottle of Lambrusco. Too sweet for my current tastes, at the time, this Italian red seemed like the perfect thing to drink with a spicy sausage or pepperoni pizza.

I guess you could have called them everyday wines.

These days, I might reach for a Cabernet or Syrah to drink with a roast and a Zinfandel or Chianti to sip with a pizza, but I have stuck with the idea that an everyday wine makes a meal special.

I have been having fun with this idea as it makes me go ‘treasure hunting,” looking for deals on wines.

What constitutes an everyday wine? It’s not that I drink wine every day. It’s mostly about economy. It’s about an affordable luxury. A good friend talks about an everyday wine as something that’s “drinkable” and costs $9-$13. My threshold for spending comfort is a little lower, closer to $7-$9 and, while I wouldn’t drink vinegar regardless of alcohol content or relative cost, my palate probably accepts a wider range of what’s drinkable.

So, I love to wander down the aisles of Binny’s or Foremost looking for deals like a $13.99 Cotes du Rhone for $8.99, or a good Temecula Valley Sauvignon Blanc for under $10. Sometimes, I’ll look for vineyards or wineries that produced other wines I’ve liked, or sometimes, I’ll go by label. If the graphics and bottle art appeals to me, I will often give something a try. Sometimes, I’ll laugh at my own biases. I have some silly notion that wines from odd years will be better tasting than wines bottled in even years. I’ll tell myself that good doesn’t mean expensive and that perfectly fine wines can come in screw-top bottles, but I will still often look for the original sticker price to benchmark quality and hesitate before ringing up a Meritage in a screw-top.

I like to turn on other people to my finds. I love seeing a friend’s face when I open a bottle of Frontier Red, a small batch California wine, and tell its story as I pour. Each everyday wine seems to have a story, which I like too, either about the product or about my first taste. Fess Parker, after he retired the coonskin cap he wore as a TV Davy Crockett, started a winery with his family in Santa Ynez, just outside of Santa Barbara. The winery supposedly was one of the ones featured in the movie, Sideways. As I recount the tale of Frontier Red, I don’t always include the fact that it was first suggested by a Trader Joe’s team member.

I don’t drink wine from a box I have permanently installed and tapped in my refrigerator. I choose what I keep around the house, and I will choose what I want to drink depending on my mood, my menu, or my company. Having a few bottles of inexpensive wines in my household inventory makes me feel like I always like have choices, like I could always welcome a friend for a visit.

Maybe, too, enjoying an everyday wine makes me think about my father. It makes me recall the delight I had as a young teen when I was feeling a little naughty without causing anyone harm.

Reveling in the spirit of naughty but nice is no small thing.

Crunch

Crunch, crunch. I love fall. I love walking through layers of leaves, leaves that have been blown into temporary hills on the sidewalk or rake-able piles that cover the grass. I love the sound they make when I tread over them or walk through them. Think about it. You can never really hear your own footsteps directly, but you can hear the brittle yielding sound a pile of drying ochre leaves make under your weight. The sound serves as an unmistakable reminder that you are moving through the earth plane. Your body has weight, significance. You are capable of traversing distance. You’re passing through...something.

While walking down my block today, I saw a small gaggle of four year-old girls with blond hair and lavender jackets. Their mothers, watchfully standing nearby, bounced younger siblings in comfortable cloth slings wrapped around their chests. “I love leaves,” I roared as I took several high but very tiny steps through the pile of leaves on their front lawn. My gait was unconsciously calculated to achieve maximum decibels. Maximum crunch.

The girls giggled at me. Their young mothers smiled knowingly. A person is never too old to enjoy hearing crunch, crunch, crunch as they walked.

As I left the girls’ giggles and their mothers’ expressions of understanding behind me, I kept thinking about the gift of sound. There is so much wonder and joy, so much beyond the crunch of leaves to think about.

I get a kick hearing the plunkkk-swoosh of a kid doing a cannonball off the high dive at the community pool, or the erratic, circular swizzz-swizzz buzzing sounds of a fireworks show. Even without seeing an explosion, I can imagine a small object being catapulted towards the heavens. I will grimace, then sigh when I hear the sound of squealing brakes, thinking that an accident has just been averted. I’ll shift my eyes quickly, to see if anyone is looking, when I hear my own stomach growl. It’s nice to remember that it’s my stomach, not my head, that actually gets hungry.

I’ll smile at night when I’m stretched out in bed, my mind dancing on the in-between, between the fascination of my thoughts and the allure of having no thoughts, and I’ll zero in on the rhythmically shifting sound of the bed frame in the apartment above me. I’ll think “Someone’s making love. Good for them.”

Why do sounds affect me so?

I love language because it’s intentional. Language is all about our need as people to feel understood by others. Sometimes words fail, but I want to believe I can put my experiences into language and share them with others. I like to travel with a loved one, a journalist or a poet, through their words, too. But I love pure, unadulterated sound; the unfiltered, uncensored, direct awareness that an event has occurred. When I focus on the sound a drawer makes when it’s being opened, or the sound a spoon makes when it is mixing cream and sugar into a cup of coffee, or the sound the book I take to bed makes, the last waking thought that registers, when I knock it out of bed and nod off – all these are little delights. Through sounds, I become very conscious that daily life events are worth noticing.

The sound a key makes when it is finally aligned with the channel of a lock is no small thing.

My Secret River

I have been living at my apartment on School Street for around eighteen years. It has provided a sense of security, a feeling of familiarity and neighborhood that I really liked. I developed the habit of walking to my health club when I wanted to sweat, Whole Foods when I wanted to eat something fresh, or Hamlin Park when I longed for the satisfying summer entertainment of watching little leaguers and grown-up boys don their local pizza parlor sponsored uniforms to play baseball. I had eased into paying a fairly manageable monthly rent, which I never discounted as a blessing, and, while not best buddies, I always felt I could count on my upstairs neighbors in an emergency.

But over the past six months to a year, I was getting the feeling that my karma here was over. My landlady became vocal in objecting to certain visitors I had over; work to repair my upstairs neighbor’s pipes, requiring tearing apart my ceiling in a few places, was scheduled without advanced notice; and when I tried to rent half of the unused garage behind my building to store my new car, I was turned down with no explanation.

I had been planning on moving for a while, ideally to a building I could purchase and make a permanent home, but I was hoping this move would be on my timetable. Yet, here I was heading into winter with a very concrete goal of finding a new place to live within a couple weeks; one that was in a safe neighborhood and close to public transportation, a place that was roomy enough to set up a desk for what had become a predominantly work-at-home lifestyle, and a place where I could pay about the same rent as I had been paying for my deal on School Street. Oh yes, and it had to have a garage, a covered, off-street parking place for Freyla, the name I had given my new VW Jetta.

I poured over craigslist posts and contacted numerous property management companies, not to mention Apartment Hunters, Apartment People and just about every apartment locating outfit I could find.

The short timetable made the search discouraging. There are simply not as many rental properties in Chicago with December 1st leases as there are with May 1st or October 1st leases. I was anticipating having to settle in some fundamental way after setting an intention where settling was no longer an option. Too often, though, apartments with garage spaces were in elevator buildings and were tiny and without character.

Just over a week ago, after visiting a variety of elevator buildings with shoebox-sized apartments with $150 a month garage rent, I found a craigslist post for a large, sunny apartment in a 2-flat with hardwood floors and a two-car garage behind the building. They wanted to rent it for November 1st and had obviously gone past the date. It was in a neighborhood I was not very familiar with; a few blocks of two-flats and Chicago style brick bungalows flanked by 100 year-old elms, only steps away from the exclusive Ravenswood Manor area.

After pacing the length of the unit several times, looking for flaws and finding few things I could complain about, I started imagining filling the second bedroom with my office essentials and the pantry with my beloved red Rival crock pot and Jack LaLanne power juicer. I asked for a lease application and took a walk around what I hoped would become my new neighborhood.

I had forgotten that the north branch of the Chicago River runs just a few blocks east of Mozart Street. There’s a narrow strip of houses in Chicago that are situated with their yards right up against the river. Many of these houses have small boats tied up to little wooden piers only steps from their back doors. Others have incredible gardens, nestled away undisturbed by virtue of their location.

I walked to Wilson Avenue, which connects Ravenswood Manor to the more active area of Lincoln Square. I stood on the bridge there for a while meditating on the tree branches, recently freed of their golden leaves by early November winds, and I looked in both directions, at the boats in the water, at the changing width of the river, at the trees and yards and houses that ran along its banks, at other bridges I could see in the distance. I relished the scene’s sort of moodiness – and my own sense of surprise. I found a new place to live at a very challenging time of year, in a location that feels like being out in the country but is only one block from the Montrose bus. Only a few blocks from the river.

I felt lucky, but I also wanted to acknowledge myself for taking up a challenge life presented me. If I didn’t feel I had to move now, I wouldn’t have gone looking for a new home and neighborhood. If I wasn’t willing to risk the security I knew, I would not have discovered this hidden corner of nature in the city, this place where change and constancy seemed to get along so well.

Discovering your secret river is no small thing.

Backstage

In August, John asked me if we should subscribe to one of the local theaters for the 2011/2012 season. Wow, I thought, this must be a serious relationship. A subscription series usually starts in September and runs through May. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

All the theatre and arts marketing organizations must have had John’s address. (Maybe he gave a small donation to WFMT once and his name was added to the ranks of arts patrons in perpetuity.) In anticipation of the fall season, I think brochures from The Goodman, Steppenwolf, Raven, Lifeline, and Writers Theatre all turned up in his mailbox. Steppenwolf had a specially priced mid-week series that seemed like a good investment in our cultural development. We liked the ongoing involvement of Steppenwolf alumni, some of the country’s most accomplished actors and directors. Prior to the opening of the first scheduled play, the theatre invited new subscribers to an open house. It was a chance to get a backstage tour and sample dishes from local restaurants that wanted to woo theatre patrons into booking standing reservations for performance nights.

The Steppenwolf seemed to be pros when it came to hospitality marketing. They planned their welcome open house to make new subscribers feel good about the charge that would show up on their next credit card statement. We were greeted at the door, introduced to a pair of bright-eyed interns stationed at the subscriber services office. There, we were handed an arty coffee table book, a thank-you gift that catalogued some impressive Steppenwolf history, and drink vouchers, redeemable for generously poured glasses of generic wine served at several bars in the main building. We were advised where different restaurants had set up their sampling lines. We were told when and where backstage tours would begin and when the director and cast members of the season’s first production would hold a talk at the main stage.

The tour was interesting and fun. We saw the small footprint but extremely high-tech and high altitude backstage area and learned how they stored and coordinated their wealth of scenery. (They proudly boasted having an eighty foot tall fly, the backstage area where flats and scrims were suspended, to be lowered onstage and neatly whisked away.) We saw the green room, where actors waited for their cues or where they just hung out. We saw the microwave and vending machines where they got their snacks – just like us regular people would. The costume mistress explained how character costumes were designed, sewn, fitted, and washed. (Somehow, I had never thought that there would be a washer and dryer in the basement of the Steppenwolf.) She showed us a “pregnant” tummy that she actually sourced from a costumer in Baltimore, a padded belly harness that made an actress appear to be in a realistic mother-to-be state. After the tour, we sat in on the discussion with the director and actors of Clybourne Park, the first production of the series.

John and I were excited when our first Theatre Tuesday came up. Intrigued by director Amy Morton’s comments on new subscriber night, we read the Playbill notes as soon as we took our seats. The play was based on an interesting conceit. It told the story of the family that sold their house in a white Chicago neighborhood during the fifties to the black Younger family in Hansberry’s classic A Raisin in the Sun. The focus then shifted from this troubled white family to the property itself. In a way, the play led the audience to look at themselves and the process of neighborhood gentrification that the theatre itself was right in the middle of.

We watched as the characters occupied the same space we had looked at only weeks before as tourists. When we went on our backstage tour, we could see how the actors entered the stage from stairs and doorways that basically led to nowhere, to a world outside of the reality we committed to as an audience. When we saw the young pregnant woman in the play, we actually knew she was not pregnant. She wore a padded tummy made in Baltimore. We could have considered that a cast member extracted a Snickers bar from the vending machine a half hour before curtain…but we didn’t.

Being able to go backstage and see the mechanics of a work of art without losing any of the magic the experience itself embodies is no small thing.

What's the Plan?

Several weeks ago, John and I discovered we had practically the same idea forming in our respective heads. Like a secret pregnancy, who would have thought that the conception and gestation of such a thought could have gone unsuspected by the other until it had arms and legs and its own heart beat? I think he told me first, although I quickly reacted with my own admission. “That’s funny,” I said. “I’ve been thinking that it would be great for us to take a vacation together Christmastime, too.”

The idea seemed very logical and all -- neither of us have work at the time, no standing family obligations, and we both have a little reserve cash just for such a purpose. But the bottom line is that taking a vacation with someone is a big step. Besides the fact that we'd be in each other’s face pretty much 24/7, trekking through airport security, getting lost together, or otherwise hanging out in a veritable state of sleep deprivation, even before we'd leave, we needed to make plans together.

I recall the words of Daniel Burnham, Chicago’s pioneering city planner. “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.” Yet, often these little plans, like developing travel itineraries, are wired to deeply rooted preferences or dreams we carry inside and sorting them out with your significant other can create unexpected stresses or expose cracks in what appears to be a pretty idyllic partnership.

Where should we go? After not having money to go on a trip outside of North America for decades, I had no shortage of bucket list destinations. I wanted to see Machu Picchu. I wanted to shop in a Turkish bazaar and visit the caves in Cappadocia. John wanted to re-visit Italy and sample red wine and the finest rustic cuisine. The notion of leaning over the perfect bowl of pasta and sauce, I think, transported him emotionally to somewhere just this side of heaven. We decided on Spain as our primary destination, mostly because neither of us had been there before and it seemed right to have a new experience together, and we agreed to end the trip with a few days in Paris because, hey, it’s Paris.

The idea of taking this vacation together operated pretty much on this plane, as an idea, for weeks. I borrowed a Fodor’s book on Spain from the library and both of us stuck post-its between pages or made mental notes about destinations that captured our interest. But no reservations had been made, no agreements had to be reached; not until this past weekend. Sunday night, we took out our calendars, skimmed through our Fodor’s notes and sat with John’s laptop to actually check on hotels and train schedules.

As we probably should have expected, after two adventurous souls had not taken a two-week, just for fun vacation in almost thirty years, we both wanted to do more than what could be done in fifteen days. I wanted to get a feeling for different regions and visit destinations that friends took in over three-week adventures. John wanted to make sure we got to stop in Provence on the way to Paris and have the experience of staying with a family friend who actually lived in one of the most beautiful areas of the world. We had to face the reality of time and distance.

Spain has a wonderful network of trains that connects almost any city or village, but you can’t get to anywhere from everywhere, or at least not quickly, not with high speed trains. For us to go from Spain to France, we pretty much had to leave from Barcelona or Madrid. For us to get a fast train from southern Spain, we had to go from Malaga. Prior to this exercise, I really didn’t have an idea how long it would take to travel by train from one city to another. Like the relationship itself, we had to discover ways to work with reality and get our needs and wants met.

Okay, so we would be eating our twelve grapes on New Year’s Eve in Malaga instead of Barcelona as I imagined. We talked about lodging in Barcelona and taking a side trip to Montserrat. Hunched over his laptop, his fingers whirred as he bookmarked some package deals on hotels in the Ciutat Vella, the old city. As he opened screen pages on his PC, alternating between travel sites and train schedules, I sat beside him with a yellow legal pad writing down, and then scratching out and re-writing, dates and destinations. Okay, from Madrid we’ll go to Seville. From Seville, we’ll go to Granada….

It was working. We hashed things out. I was feeling very lucky that he was so web savvy. I climbed behind him on the couch and started rubbing his neck and shoulders; a small reward for hours spent stooped over his laptop. We talked about luggage and the winter weather in Aix-en-Provence. I announced my intention to buy a new pair of boot-like walking shoes. We shared a glass of Garnacha, a good Spanish red.

Making small plans with your favorite companion is no small thing.