Good Days

John and I got tickets to see the Cubs play the Brewers practically when we first started seeing each other. I had never been to Miller Park before and an easy road trip ninety miles up Lake Michigan seemed like a great idea. By happenstance, or maybe by divine plan, our day-trip kept growing. Our tickets were for Sunday’s game, but we planned to get to Beer Town on Saturday, to visit the art museum in the shadows of Calatrava’s Quadracci Pavilion and stay overnight. I somehow felt bold enough to ask him to take off a day from work so we could leave Friday and visit my friend Chris who has been in a nursing home in Sturgeon Bay, at the base of beautiful but tourist teeming Door County, since last winter.

Chris was my boss at a data comm company I worked for lifetimes ago, or so it seemed (in reality, around 20 years). I was a not-so-perky young woman in a navy suit determined to make something happen in a mostly male industry. We immediately struck a bond and, while we have actually spent so few of the intervening months, or days even, living anywhere close to each other geographically, the connection has not faded. It seemed that he beat a cancer diagnosis several years ago, but it had already started spreading to his bones. Last August, when he was struggling with the idea of abandoning chemo treatments and other “healing” regimens that made him feel worse, I drove to Green Bay to see him at his sister’s where he was staying. We had a short visit. He was too sick to do much more than sleep.

Many times, this past year, I wondered how long I would get to have him in my life. Last winter, he moved from his sister’s to the nursing home in Sturgeon Bay. He decided to go on hospice. He went through periods of despondency and numerous health complications. Then he decided he wanted to write a memoir recounting some of his life experiences so that he could give his children and grandchildren an understanding of him that they couldn’t get anywhere else. I volunteered to transcribe his recordings and edit his notes. The memoir has continued to grow since last March. Then he got an IPad and, by his own admission, it changed his life. He uses it to read articles of every theme and stripe, from tech news to political rants. He has picture phone conversations with his two young grandsons in Indiana and with a best bud in Toronto. And, after a modest credit card spree at the ITunes Store, he has equipped himself with an array of applications that allow him to do photography to the full extent of his creativity.

When John and I got to his room at the Dorchester, I handed him a cup of Vanilla Latte from Mickie D’s, an easy to get and well-appreciated gift. We asked after each other’s plans and talked a little baseball. As Chris’s beloved Brewers are the hot team these days, I had to listen to a few “I told you so’s” about Ryan Braun who is having a banner year. Then Chris started showing off his latest IPad/IPhone photography projects.

I think he got into photography in his teens. I know he did photography while in the Air Force, including some professional work. But his curiosity and sense of play when it comes to trying different things, his patience for researching then learning what the different apps will do, and, ultimately, his artistic sensibilities – he knows how to frame an image and how to highlight objects or colors within that image – it’s obvious how much pleasure he gets from his new toys. Using the Internet, his IPad, his IPhone camera and special apps, he can scan the world for scenes or ideas and then make art out of them.

We were having a nice visit; all the more precious to us because it is so hard to predict when they will occur. There is no way to know a week in advance or even a day in advance when Chris might have a good day, a good health and energy day. Realizing it was close to five, he asked if John and I had plans for dinner.

“Well,” I confessed. “I was hoping to get to a real Wisconsin fish fry.”

“If you want to get on your way, I understand,” he said, “But if you would like, we could go to The Nightingale or The Mill. The Mill is supposed to have great pan-fried wall-eye. My treat.”

I couldn’t believe Chris was so spry this late in the day. We packed up his wheel chair in John’s Toyota. (This necessitated bringing his golf clubs into Chris’s room to make space in the trunk, which sparked many quizzical faces among the Dorchester staff. Chris golfing? No, couldn’t be.)

The Mill is a quintessential Wisconsin supper club with fishing lodge style wood paneling, strings of white Christmas lights over the bay windows, and a big vat of soft cheese and bowl of crackers near the hostess station. Self-serve. As soon as we were directed to our table, Chris wheeled his chair to the cheese and crackers table. I followed close behind in case he needed any help, surprised to hear his next remark.

“Deb, if you want any cheese and crackers, you’re going to have to get your own plate.”

We all ordered cocktails. Chris ordered a Brandy Manhattan, perhaps a popular libation in Central Wisconsin, not so common on Lincoln and Irving, in my ‘hood. We continued to talk about our families, our accomplishments, life changes – cole slaw. The fish was great; sweet and tender with a perfectly crisp, not over-salted coating. When the waitress came by to check on possible dessert requests, we ordered a second round of cocktails. I couldn’t believe it, Chris having a second brandy. He must really be feeling good, I thought.

And then I started to reflect on what it means to have a good day.

When your car gets dinged in a parking lot, or when you get an unexpected bill you can’t pay, or when you find yourself in a pissing contest with someone you love over something inconsequential or silly – those things can define a bad day. What constitutes a good day seems more complex, although you know it when you’re having one.

While some might say that any day you’re breathing is a good day, I think there’s more to it, although I am not sure how to sum it up. For Chris, good days are partially determined by energy and pain levels, but also by creative juice and how much he feels like himself, how stoked he might be to express who he is creatively. I have never talked to John about this specifically, but I know he lights up on days when he strokes the golf ball well. For me, good days have a lot to do with feeling understood, being in good company, being with my tribe, about feeling known and cherished.

Recognizing and relishing when you are having a good day is no small thing.

He Makes House Calls

The day was getting away from me. I woke up late, for a change, and attended to shopping, cleaning, and bill-paying tasks. Usual Saturday stuff. I wanted to get all my chores out of the way so I could be free to join John and his out of town friends for dinner. As I was dusting and vacuuming, I turned the ballgame on. I got a special kick out of watching the game knowing that John’s friends were there, at Wrigley Field, soaking up the sunshine and waxing nostalgic over memorable moments at the old ballpark.

Ahead of the Cards 3-0 in the eighth inning, I was actually feeling pretty confident that the Cubbies would prevail and reminded myself that I had better take a shower now because I would be getting the call soon with instructions on where the first drink of the evening would take place. It was probably no more than two minutes after I got the right mixture of hot and cold (staying out of the tub/shower while my upstairs neighbor flushed his toilet) and started a preliminary rinse when the phone rang.

I had been in this position before. Too many experiences told me that there was rarely a call worth jumping out of the shower for. Why rush out of a nice steam-filled bathroom, prematurely draping a towel around your damp body, leaving a trail of water on the wood floors (necessitating a small mop-up job later) just to find out you’ve been auto-dialed by a credit card consolidating company? Or even if it’s a call from someone you want to hear from, do you really want to write down a return phone number on a pad of post-it notes as water drips down from your head, rendering your notes a blurry mess?

But the sound of a phone ringing is so insistent, so hard to ignore. My years as a customer service rep make a ringing phone almost impossible to shut out.

I grabbed a towel and, taking tiny steps, careful not to slip, padded my way towards my office. As I crossed the threshold between the bathroom and hallway, I felt a sharp pain in my left heel. Did I step on something? I finished my trek to my desk, by now convinced my heel had discovered some foreign object that had not been adequately swept up during cleaning time. Breathlessly, I picked up the phone. And I watched a growing pool of blood gather on the plastic floor mat where my caster-enabled office chair rested. It was John.

“Are you watching the game?’ he asked.

In a sort of altered state, I tried to form intelligible words but my mind seemed to have been entranced with the image of a bloody footprint (of my left foot) on my clear plastic floor mat.

“Yes, I was watching the game.” I mumbled. “But I can’t talk now. I stepped on something. My foot is bleeding.” Hoping I did not sound like a baby, I repeated myself, “I mean, my foot is really bleeding. There’s a lot of blood here on the floor.”

Without thinking much, I let the received slip back into place as I sat down and tried to look at the bottom of my foot. Was something still stuck in it? Getting a good look was difficult. I hated feeling that I was making a big deal out of a small mishap, but I was a little panicked. There was a lot of blood and I couldn’t see the bottom of my foot. Not thirty seconds later, I called John back.

“My foot is really bleeding,” I announced. “Do you want me to come over?” he asked. “Can you? I mean, just to look at it?” I added hesitantly and hung up.

He called back.

“Do you need band-aids? Gauze? Disinfectant?” he asked, a regular boy scout, obviously much better in emergencies than I was.

He was over in ten minutes. I was sort of embarrassed about my appearance. After all, I hadn’t actually showered yet. I was wearing an old shift, something I just threw over my head, i.e., a garment that didn’t require me to step my bloody foot through any waistband.

He found a big bowl in my kitchen cabinets for soaking my foot, concerned that I shouldn’t use a plastic bucket that had probably leached chemical cleaners when used for floor cleaning duty.

He washed my foot, doused it with peroxide, and got a band-aid in place. He tried to retrace my fateful steps and hypothesized about how the injury must have happened, then he cleaned up my bloody office mat.

I felt very taken care of.

Finding a guy who’ll make house calls is no small thing.

Compensating Flatches

God, how I hate getting tickets! Don’t the police have better things to do than scrounge up revenue by seeking out petty infractions? People are getting killed in our city’s streets and Officer Doughnut Eater is busy seeing if city stickers have been affixed in the proper corner of parked cars.

Get the idea? I really do hate parking tickets.

For me, they seem to come in waves. I will go for years between spying that most heart-sinking of all orange colored envelopes between my wiper blade and windshield. Then I will seem to get 2 or 3 in a couple weeks. Sometimes, I will just pay them right away, chalking up receiving a violation notice to a bad gamble I took knowingly trying to skirt some silly, but clearly posted, restriction. And sometimes, I will huff for weeks, refusing to pay the fine because I feel like a victim of inadequate notice or an unfairly enforced rule. In Chicago, getting parking tickets seems like an unavoidable curse. I experienced one of those waves recently, getting two tickets within one week.

I got the first ticket, a night parking violation, while trying to avoid a ticket for street cleaning. In my neighborhood, once a month, they make it illegal to park in half the available parking spots from 9:00 AM until 3:00 PM while a strange, single-seat white vehicle with rotating brushes travels down the east and south sides of the streets one day and down the north and west sides the next day. On a "street cleaning" day, with a shortage of available spaces, I grabbed what I thought was simply nightime restricted parking (illegal from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM) only to find when I retrieved my car at 5:29, that it was illegal to park there after five when the Cubs were playing a night game. The second ticket was for not having a new state license plate sticker purchased and in place in time. On this one, I simply forgot. All told, damages came to $110, not counting the $20 late fee for renewing my plates after July 31st.

I was fuming about this double whammy when I got an unexpected phone call from Peter B, a travel excursion organizer from Toronto.

“So,” the voice on the other line began with a sort of fake enthusiasm. “Have you missed me?”

I was hoping I could get him to talk longer so I could figure out who was calling and hitting me with such a corny old line. Eventually, I figured it out.

As a part-time city highlights guide, I had escorted some of Peter’s senior groups around town. He wanted to see if I was available to guide a group of his in a week, on a Saturday morning when I had nothing else to do. Let’s see, I thought, I would be able to bill him $120 for a few hours work. There could be tips too, although with seniors that was hard to count on. According to my best estimation, this unexpected assignment would pretty much exactly cover my equally unexpected contribution to Chicago’s Revenue Department.

And then I remembered the theory of “Compensating Flatches.”

My friend Nancy, who is an engineer, first introduced this natural law to me. She used to have a boss, an old-school, pocket protector wearing engineer, who explained the law of compensating flatches to his staff. The law works something like this… If something goes wrong on a project or plan, which it inevitably will, you should never worry about it because at least one or two other things will go wrong, or change directions again after that point, which will render the first problem or detour of no consequence.

While I know this is not the same as making three right turns at an intersection where it is impossible to make a left turn, and I recognize Peter’s out of the blue call was not exactly another problem that eradicated the painful rash of orange windshields I was experiencing. Still, it is an incredibly empowering thought. Lots of unexpected things can feel like major setbacks, but in the bigger scheme of things, more often than not, something else will come up to mitigate or offset those things that make you feel cursed.

Remembering the Law of Compensating Flatches is no small thing.

In Praise of God AND Man

Two weeks ago, I went to Millennium Park, to the Pritzker Pavilion to be exact, to enjoy a concert of a seldom performed Rachmaninoff piece and an even less frequently performed piece by Sibelius. The humidity, which infused the summer air with heaviness earlier in the week, had broken a bit and my sister had secured her usual spot on the lawn, just four steps above the 4000 or so orange amphitheater seats. We had an unobstructed view of the orchestra and chorus, set against a wood paneled hall, nearly 100 feet wide, encased in a Frank Gehry designed shell. The structure captured the feeling of steel ribbons unfurling buoyantly. It has become more than a state of the art music venue in town. The Amoco Building, a majestic white rectangular, less is more style, skyscraper, for many years the second tallest in Chicago, and the Deco style Prudential Tower, shot up directly behind it.

Having fine-tuned our preparation ritual for this most cherished of summer evening activities, an outdoor concert at Millennium Park, we were in our places by 5:30, a full hour before the baton was raised. We had plenty of time to enjoy wine and cold delicacies and conversation. Our lawn chairs were slipped out of their pouches and anchored around a low to the ground, collapsible picnic table covered with a colorful cloth, a family relic from which a tale could be recounted from every stain. Each of us was eager to uncork the wine we brought. Tupperware containers of treats were withdrawn from cold-pac lined coolers. During the day, I whipped up a new winning recipe of chicken salad (poaching the chicken breasts with the skin on was the secret). Barbara brought artisan cheeses from her farmer’s market and a wonderful apricot cake. John and his mother brought stuffed olives, for which I have a special fondness.

The Sibelius piece was a sort of mythic Finnish story featuring a Finnish soprano and baritone, who traveled to Chicago especially for the event, along with a men’s chorus, forty voices strong. The sound of the powerful and tender voices belied the strange tragedy of the story. That I had never seen or heard the piece performed before somehow had my attention dialed up.

As the evening sky began to take on darker tones, as we passed ginger and bacon cookies and opened the Italian white, I marveled at the amazing sight in front of me.

The beautiful Douglas fir paneled orchestra hall was sheathed in interlocking strips of aluminum, hundreds of uniquely sized pieces held together like hand-stitched patches in a quilt. The pavilion could only be seen as the product of genius. And the music -- beautiful orchestrations with talented soloists and a committed chorus, providing a fresh experience of musical storytelling -- I was entranced. The backdrop of the city skyline only punctuated this point; that man, at his best was capable of incredible things.

Then I remember feeling the sensation of a breeze on my neck, and I thought about what made this scene perfect for me was the temporal beauty of a summer’s night. I felt grateful.

Some people, mindful of man’s potential, often students of mankind’s greatest creative achievements, reject God. For them, human genius is the standard for perfection and inspiration, bestowed through acts of daring invention, is the pinnacle of gifts we can give each other. There are other people who, in their appreciation of nature, reject man’s highest expressions or belittle them as negligible in comparison.

I felt very grateful to be able to experience the best of God and man at the same time; a summer night of easy breezes and intoxicating music performed in a structure of rare brilliance, delivered to me via the most high tech of sound systems as I picnicked with 7000 neighbors I didn’t know.

Holding both the gifts of God and gifts of man as sacred and complementary is no small thing.