traveling

I saw a concert on the second night of my solo trip to Paris.
I wandered through the 11e arrondissement to find the Café de la Danse, a small venue behind a tiny door off what seemed like an alley, off another, just wider cobblestone alley-street blocks from the Bastille. I fumbled my words buying my ticket and, plunged suddenly into the glowing red music hall darkroom, fumbled everything else looking for a beer then a seat.

William Fitzsimmons made his way, alone, to the stage with only a guitar. There was a black metal folding chair for him to sit on, and he wore a plaid shirt and a black stocking cap. His beard was enormous. I’d heard maybe two of his songs, and it was easy for me to believe we were the only two Americans in that huge room.
If not easy, then comforting. Being alone in Paris, that unfamiliar place wasn’t scary, per se, but it was exhausting. A short lifetime of dreams built up that trip in my mind, and the comedown was quicker than I imagined.

All I remember of the concert is what I wrote afterward. I remember taking my first look at Fitzsimmons, hearing the first notes he sang, and not understanding how a man who looked like that — talked like that, even — could sing so sweetly and with such sadness. I remember that between songs, he seemed like an asshole, but looking back, that was part of the fun.

He’d opened for another band, and I left midway through their set. When I walked out the door, it was well past 10 but barely dusk. The air probably didn’t smell like funnel cake, but it’s what I’m remembering. A group of street dancers stopped me in my tracks before I found my train and headed back to the 8 e and my hotel room, which opened with a big gold key kept at the front desk. Everything was strange. I made it back to Place Vendôme, a few blocks from my hotel, before the Eiffel Tower started to glimmer. I watched it twice that night.

I felt so…
I don’t even know how I felt.

That night was so magical, and I don’t have a clue why.

Tonight is more of my full circle, this ring I’m living out, though I wonder if I’m making too much of all that.
Tonight, I walked in to the Old Town School of Folk music alone, with two tickets. John bought them but didn’t want to go with me in the end. And I decided I’d rather sit by myself.

That building is so full of memories, and it makes me so profoundly sad to go inside, despite the beautiful, wonderful music that happens there. Where Paris’ strangeness had an exhausting je ne sais quoi, Lincoln Square’s sameness mostly isn’t even vaguely soothing; the familiarity of the haunts I’ve loved for so long is breeding a stale contempt that I hope will fade as I struggle out of this emotional black hole.

Tonight, Fitzsimmons headlined; a band called Slow Runner opened for him. The sound was sublime — the Freelance Whales’ hipster lilt, Ben Folds Five’s bass, drums, piano and vocals, and an 8-bit Nintendo aesthetic — and the songs made me laugh and broke my heart, with only measures separating the two. Only the best music can do that.
I bought an album after their set, and a friend from Twitter recognized me from my photo and came to say hello while I waited in line.

But where they inspired tears, the rest of the show fell flat. The same bearded man I saw in Paris took the stage in Chicago, surrounded by a full band and looking out at an English-speaking audience full of kids whose faces I saw, some I even recognized, who had heard and comprehended every joke in his charming-asshole book before, and knew his song lyrics by heart.
He stood at the microphone with the guitar strapped to him, and it all felt false. This wasn’t real. I didn’t go to the Old Town School expecting Café de la Danse, but…
I don’t even know what I expected.

I left after his third song and came home to my laptop, my familiar bed, my sweet tuxedo kitten.

Every night in Paris, I stayed up until 3 or 4 a.m. writing, writing, writing. Everything seemed significant, its strangeness worth documenting completely.
Tonight, I’ll fall asleep before midnight with Emaline mewing outside the door, pawing at the old wood. And this doesn’t disappoint me, but I do want that magic back. Whether I find it down another cobblestone alley-street in a music-hall darkroom, or somewhere else entirely.

2 comments

When I come home to Kansas City — “home” — it’s back to a house my mother bought, post-divorce, long after I went off to college; I sleep in a king-size bed that my back has to adjust to on every visit, in a room painted the color of an oxidized penny. It’s beautiful and familiarly foreign but still manages, somehow, to offer a sense of belonging.

It’s mine. More mine than anyone else’s, anyway. The same silk flowers and unplugged clock/radio welcome me upon arrival. I picked the scent of the reed diffuser on the bureau. My beat-up blue Samsonite sits on the luggage rack with needlepoint straps to match the heavy taupe curtains, a halo of dirty clothes and cast-off shoes strewn around it. No one else sleeps in this room; no one even comes in when I’m home.

On Friday night, Congress passed a stopgap measure to keep the government running — whatever that means — followed by torrential downpours and Cocoa Puffs–size hail drumming on the roof. There’s something about the rain on this roof, like music. Like a steel drum on the gutters.

When I woke up Saturday morning, sun fought its way around the blinds and into the room. A beautiful spring day, perfect for a jog…only the sunshine belied the above-normal temperatures and abnormal humidity for early April.

But I was already laced up and ready to run, so I set off. Pressed play on my iPod, queued up to the anthem to the life of a suburban drone, Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender.” The sidewalks were slick with fallen petals from magnolia trees battered by the storm the night before; the street in front of one house was lined with cars and SUVs driven by garage salers clamoring for one man’s trash and a nice glass of 50-cent limeade.

Where the ads take aim and lay their claim to the heart and the soul of the spender.

Every home was buzzing with activity: lawnmowers humming, men cleaning gutters, crews at work on the stone façade of a new construction. Children finding their footing on skateboards and bicycles after a long winter, aging women watering fragile spring blooms in newly dug planters, dogs languishing and panting on stoops in the suddenly-sticky air.

In this neighborhood I call home, the streets between Roe Avenue and Mission Road are in alphabetical order. Granada. Fontana. El Monte. Delmar. Catalina. Buena Vista. I had to Google the “A” street: Alhambra. It’s the only one I consistently can’t remember.

I passed houses in various states of completion and disarray, looked at the cars parked outside and flowers planted around the foundation, and saw homeowners doing their chores outside or enjoying the first heady preview of summer, so many of them my age or just a bit older. Everyone smiled; everyone waved.
I can’t imagine owning a home, or a dog, or being married, or navigating a double-wide stroller along the streets I so nimbly jogged through — okay, panted and stumbled through — on Saturday. I’d sometimes like to think, in my urbane, urban existence, that I’m above the lives these people have made for themselves.

That my train commute and restaurant meals and diverse group of friends — who happen to eschew the suburban lifestyle themselves — and fingertip access to my beautiful city make me somehow better.

Who am I?

I could say that I’m just different, but I’m really not even that different.
That I don’t struggle to make my next car or mortgage payment, that I’m not part of a book club, that I’ve abandoned my timeline for those adult milestones like marriage and having children… I am this place, even if I’ve chosen not to live it. I grew up here, and something as small as one simple choice turned me away from it.

And really? That I live in a big city doesn’t make me any different.

I’m gonna be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender.

In a tiny apartment, far from the shade of the freeway…but when the morning light comes streaming in, I get up and do it again.

Amen.

I wound my way through the neighborhood, which is less cookie-cutter the more I look at it, listening to my iPod, not sure whether to feel heartbroken or hopeful. There’s this cynicism and veiled dejection in this song’s lyrics and tone — and my personal association with it — but the music is so gorgeous. This simple piano melody, Jackson Browne’s bell-clear voice, a frantic heartbeat of drums behind it all. You want to hope that if the person in the song just believes a little harder, he’ll actually get to the point where he really is just happy. Content. Getting up and doing it again because he wants it, not because it’s all he has left.

Are you there?
Say a prayer for the pretender.
Who started out so young and strong…
Only to surrender.

You hope it because he’s you.

I leave here with a sense of agitated peace, that I’m not so different from all of this, that I belong — or, you know, don’t — just as much as anyone.

I’ve been aware of the time passing by.
They say in the end, it’s the blink of an eye.
And when the morning light comes streaming in, you’ll get up and do it again.

I never realized I took time to think when I was out running.

9 comments

The fog in Chicago this morning was so thick that I couldn’t see the lake through the buildings from my seat on the El.
So thick, in fact, that I couldn’t see the buildings on Michigan Avenue or even a few blocks to my east. The powers that be actually closed Midway Airport — where I’m waiting now for my flight back to Kansas City — for a few hours this morning, which means we’re delayed. Big. Surprise.

I don’t fly out of Midway very often, mostly because I’m not a fan of Southwest Airlines, but also because leaving from Midway means riding the Orange Line all the way to the end. It is not a pretty ride. And people look at me like I’m wealthy and white and don’t belong on their train. Then, I imagine, they look at my suitcase and think, “Oh, just another traveler passing through.” I smile at them.

Today, anticipating a long journey with a lot of walking through city streets, CTA stations and airline terminals, I wore my most practical shoes: three-inch nude patent-leather pumps. The whole ensemble today smacked of total idiocy where practicality is concerned.
There are two sides to the dressing-for-the-airport argument: On one hand, it’s pretty safe to look disgusting, because many travelers might as well own stock in Crocs. But on the other hand — just like every time I walk out the door — I could meet the man of my dreams on this very plane ride. And while I’d love to think my charm will overcome any unfortunate comfort-over-style incidents…
Right.

I’ve had a bad week. A really bad week. A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.
The stress I’m feeling lately has inched up from my lower back all the way through my shoulders and neck, into my already hyperactive tear ducts. Beyond that, every muscle in my body aches from the fitness classes I’ve been taking three days a week. (For nothing, apparently: Even with all this effort, some minion of Satan still found it in her black, empty heart to ask me if I was expecting on Tuesday. Did I mention I’m having a bad week?)

But I wanted to look pretty at the stupid airport. I want my mother to think I have my shit together at least a little bit, even if I collapse into hysterical sobs the second I load my suitcase in the Murano and close the hatchback.
So, weather be damned, I put on a black tee with my new crocheted cardigan, my favorite spring scarf and a brown linen skirt I haven’t worn since last summer, and I finished with the pumps. I’ve nearly fallen five or six times, at least once with a cup full of Ben & Jerry’s Mint Chocolate Chunk. On the moving walkway. Not that I’m counting.
But sitting here, computer safely on my lap and feet unmoving, I look like I have my shit together. No tears in sight.

The fog persists, but we’re boarding now. Soon, I’ll be home. I think sunshine is expected. There must be some kind of metaphor there.

10 comments