"There are so many different ways to be connected to people"

Tonight makes twice in one week that I've put on the B-52's "Good Stuff" album. I wonder if it's the weather? I'm sick of the snow and slush, and that album brings up memories of the summer of 1992, when we spent nearly every day at the "beach," and every evening cruising Main, blaring it.

Or maybe it's because I'm watching My So-Called Life again, and I am transfixed by it. My past few free evenings have created a bubble of 1994. I had wondered how well it had aged, and it still hit me the way it did the first time, hard across the chest so it was hard to breathe for a while. I'm a different person now, though, so, while I still love Jordan Catalano, I finally realized why all my friends were pro-Brian Krakow.

I don't know where the show was headed before cancellation. The final episode has so many unfinished stories.

You remember--it was the one with the letter:

Dear Angela, I know in the past I've caused you pain, and I'm sorry. And I'll always be sorry till the day I die. And I hate this pen I'm holding, because I should be holding you. I hate this paper under my hand because it isn't you. I even hate this letter because it's not the whole truth. Because the whole truth is so much more than a letter can even say. If you wanna hate me, go ahead. If you wanna burn this letter, do it. You could burn the whole world down. You could tell me to go to hell. I'd go. If you wanted me to. And I'd send you a letter from there. Sincerely, Jordan Catalano

But it also ended exactly right, with Angela riding off with Jordan, watching Brian out of the window, knowing he actually wrote it.

It was a perfect, perfect encapsulation of what is terrible, tragic, horrific, wonderful, amazing, and inspiring about being a teenager.

Thinking back

The day after I graduated from college, my belongings were packed in the back of a truck, and my parents and I drove to Chicago.

Growing up, every time we'd visit, we'd arrive the same way, from the south, up the Dan Ryan to LSD, and then the home stretch to my grandparents' home just north of the city, in Evanston. Coming up Sheridan Road in Rogers Park, I'd get a thrill of excitement, because to me, Rogers Park was the city. It was the embodiment of everything I believed Chicago to be.

So I was finally there! The city was mine! (Well, sort of. The fact that I lived in what could technically be called a suburb didn't phase me.) Evanston wasn't a typical suburb, anyway. It was a cross between being its own city and a small town.

That summer, I ran the baked streets, getting to know the cafes, vintage bookstores, and thrifts. I worked at a cafe near Northwestern, and I flirted with the intellectual professors who'd spend their Sunday mornings over my coffee and a newspaper. Sometimes nights I'd walk through the neighborhood on the lake, the one with unbelievably fancy mansions and daydream about what it would be like to live in one.

I was lonely still, missing my Kansas boyfriend and worried about job prospects, but it was also a glorious time, filled with newness. The world unrolled itself at my feet, and I could have done anything.

Memories like that rush back at the touch of hot summer wind, or the smell of coffee beans freshly ground. Certain music can resurrect the exact feelings I had at any given moment during that period. The experience is so deeply imprinted upon my psyche.

It goes without saying that there is an entire chamber of my heart devoted to Evanston. I still work here, 9.5 years after that beautiful summer. So I was excited to also do my internship here.
And it's different.

I'm older.

I'm seeing a different side of the city, the one where 25% of the citizens live at or below the poverty line. Where the streets I formerly skipped down, if I turn left instead of right, I discover low-income areas I never knew existed.

Knowing about the urban problems that Evanston's pretty, tree-lined streets cover up sour my memories of the perfect college "town" I used to know. It's hard to enjoy its beauty when I know about the uneasy alliance between the priviledged and unpriviledged.

But sometimes, sometimes sometimes, I'm able to walk into the organic cafe that's near my internship, sit down with some tea, and be transported back, unfettered, in the glorious spell that this place once cast upon me.

Camp

I listened to This American Life today; it was a rerun from 1998 about camp stories. It reminded me so much about my own camp experiences, and my heart ached a little at missing it so much. Things ended really badly for me--no perfect final summer to round out my memories--so for the longest time, I pushed thoughts to the back of my mind and when I thought about it at all, it was while sleeping, in nightmares.

But the truth is, mostly camp was a little crystalline bubble of perfection, an escape from the normal angst of teenage years, a wooded oasis of peace for six summers. I'd give anything to be able to return in some capacity. Like maybe there's a summer camp out there in the wilds of Wisconsin or Michigan who needs a social worker on staff?

I felt like I was a completely different person there. Still me, I suppose, but electrified. (The things I would do to make a kid laugh . . .) Maybe I remembered being a camper--of course I did--and as a counselor I wanted to make sure the kids took away wonderful memories like I had.

Two things stick out in my mind as important and special. The second year I counseled, during a junior high week, we had Invitational during vespers. The invitational was the one night during the week where we took communion and invited everyone in camp to accept Jesus into their heart. For campers who had been coming back summer after summer, this was a meaningful tradition, and the cabin chosen lead vespers tried its hardest to make the service a tearjerker. The counselors stayed behind to talk to any kid who needed it. Technically, this was for discussing spiritual issues, but inevitably kids who had gone through rough patches, like losing a friend or having parents get divorced, would stay to cry on someone's shoulder. I don't remember what happened at the service, or after, I just remember going back to the cabin and putting the girls to bed and laying down myself. A few minutes after I turned out the lights, one of my girls got me, and said another camper was crying. I crawled up to the girl's top bunk, and said, "sweetie, what's wrong?"

I wasn't the type who called people "sweetie" or "honey," but the girl was crying so hard that it slipped out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying.

"Sweetie, what's wrong?" and I gathered her in my arms.

She said, with difficulty through her sobs, that she didn't know whether or not she had Jesus in her heart. How do you know if you do?

That was a conundrum for me as well. I was supposed to be some sort of spiritual advisor for these girls, yet I wasn't even sure how I felt about things myself. At that very moment, I didn't know if I had Jesus in my heart. Was he supposed to wave and say hi once he got there or what? And since he hadn't, did that mean he hadn't shown up? I was only 18 or 19, fairly new to Christianity myself, and not 100% sold on it. Honestly, I think I was a camp counselor more for the kids and less because I was an avid Christian.

But you don't say that to an 11-year-old kid in spiritual crisis. You don't admit that you have no answers when she's sobbing and looking to you to ease her pain somehow.

So I asked her things about her belief, and I talked about how you never know anything for sure--you just have to believe. And believing makes things real. She stopped crying, and thanked me, and we both went back to sleep.

I don't know why this ranks up at the top of my experiences, but it seems so special to me.

The second thing happened my final year of counseling, for the most part, a pretty miserable time because of my co-counselors, not because of the kids. Senior high week towards the end, we had a closing ceremony for the graduating seniors--yet another opportunity to wring the most possible tears out of an evening. This particular class was special to me. They had been freshman when I was a senior, so I had been both camper with and counselor to them. After the ceremony, one boy said he had something important to talk to me about, and could we go for a walk. We ended up sitting by the lake under the stars. I was slightly nervous, because I knew I had to be careful about anything with the slightest hint of inappropriateness, and a counselor and camper of opposite sexes off somewhere alone could fall into that category. But he and I had been friends since we'd met, at a youth rally four years before.

He talked about meeting me then. As a senior, Kurt Cobain and grunge had finally hit Marion, and I embraced the combat boots, flannel shirts, and what Hannah called my "elephant" pants. I ran around the youth rally, according to him, this really cool person, unlike any Christian he had ever met. Like him, he thought, and he decided he maybe could find a place for himself in religion. (It didn't hurt that he was a hot little skater punk. I have a weak spot for them.) He said he considered me his spiritual mentor. I didn't know how to respond, how to let him know that no one had ever said anything more wonderful or meaningful to me in my life. How to thank him in a way that conveyed how honored I was. I don't remember what I said.

I'm not the person I was back then. But I suppose I don't have access to the same environment, and the world seems like a harder place now--no place for the same blissful summers where you're closed off from the real world, existing in a special dream place like camp.

The first summer counseling, I felt alive and hypersensitive every single moment, drinking in the experience. I made friendships with my co-counselors that I thought would be rock solid for the rest of our lives, but the intensity that camp fosters rarely translates successfully to the mundane world. I thought I'd fallen in love, too, and remember like it was yesterday a walk we took, on the way to the chapel, revealing our feelings and the tragedy that we could not be together (for myriad reasons).

Oh, everything was so dramatic and important back then. (Maybe it came from being 18, too.)

My last summer counseling was night and day different than the first. I felt I was on one side of a canyon, my co-workers on the other, and I couldn't figure out how to build a bridge across to them. It didn't seem like they were trying to connect with me, either. I felt so isolated, and threw myself into the work, ignoring the importance of connecting with them. The tone was different, too. I always looked forward to immersing myself in a deeply spiritual summer and making new friendships, but suddenly the space was no longer safe. I was no model Christian during my college years, but the woods were sacred to me. The other counselors were profane, disrespectful, pretty much assholes, really.

The hardest week was senior high. I was 20, so not much older than some of them, but a few of the counselors were where I was two years previous--just a summer out of their own camping experience, and good friends with some of the very people they'd have to take charge of. S, the boys' counselor I shared a cabin and responsibilities with, he was my age, with a year or two of counseling experience, thus theoretically more capable than some of the younger counselors. Yet he was one of the worst. It was more important to him to be liked, and he took inappropriateness to an extreme.

In the middle of the week, he supervised the kids who wanted to drag their mattresses out to the communal porch to sleep. I stayed in my bunk on the girls' side with a few of the campers who didn't want to brave the mosquitos. The porch crowd didn't get much sleep, and I didn't close my eyes all night. I don't know what reality S was experiencing that made him think that sex, sexist, and race jokes were somehow appropriate in that setting, but nonetheless, that's what he was telling. Then he started talking shit about the other counselors. I could hear everything clearly through my open window in the quiet woods that night, and I felt like I was being kicked in the stomach over and over and over. Today, though, I don't remember if he said anything bad about me. Everything about the night was so horrible, him talking cruelly about me would not have made things noticeably worse. I don't know if it was an idea that has only come to me over the years, or if I thought it but couldn't execute it: I should have gotten up, gone out to the porch, and asked S if we could take a walk. The kids, of course, would have known as soon as we were out of earshot, that he would be in deep trouble--or so he would have told them later. I was so meek and passive that I probably couldn't have said how I really felt. Or maybe I would have just started crying.

I am slightly proud to believe if this happened today, I have grown enough that I would have addressed it. Back in 1995, though, I stayed in my bunk, crying and praying all night.

And then I think of the "Footsteps" poem, and I felt God with me that night, but what I would have given not to be there, listening to hatefulness where there should have been love.

I wanted to leave the next day. I was leaving early anyway, to study in Ireland, skipping the last week of the summer. I only had a week left before then, and I didn't think I could make it after that night. The only person I felt close to was the camp director, and she asked me not to go.

So I stayed, and got through the end of senior high week, and the next week. I don't know how, or what happened. That night was burned so deeply on my consciousness that, more than ten years later, it's really the only thing I remember from that hellish summer.

I relived it in dreams for years after. My photos are stuffed far out of sight; last time I checked, it even hurt to look at them. My whole love affair with camp was obscured by that last summer. It seemed so unfair that I couldn't even locate my good memories of it; my sleep self only recalled the bad.

But ten years have passed. I'm a different person now, which is good. Maybe someday, back in Kansas, visiting for the summer, I could go back and make peace with the woods again.

"My senses exist to witness your beauty"

I have a box of letters under the bed. One of my secret desires of old was to be someone who inspired love letters, and it's very satisfying to have fulfilled that. The oldest is from 1994, and the latest are ones from Tim, our anniversary letters to each other.

I went in it last night to see what it contained for the purpose of writing this post. Otherwise I hadn't looked at it in a while. Usually the box existed for post-breakup self-confidence boosting. If ever I was down about someone rejecting me, or wondering if anyone would ever be interested again, reading through the old letters was good for that.

At home over Christmas, organizing my old things, I came across two enormous boxes filled with all the letters I'd ever received from childhood up through college. I was a prolific writer back then, and so were my correspondents. (I think the box filled with three summers of letters to me at camp was the same amount as the rest of my childhood combined.) Since college was included in that collection, I found a few from a guy I had wanted to date but never did.

Reminiscing is only good if you have no regrets. Though I'd like to have none, David was one.

I met him early in the first semester of my senior year of college. LeAnn and I lived across the street from a laundromat, and we went together to wash our clothes. It was manned by a short, muscular guy in hippie attire with long hair and thick sideburns. Too bad David was so short, for he was exactly my type. Nonetheless, I found ways to flirt with him as LeAnn hissed at me to ignore him. The next time I did laundry, it was early afternoon and the place was dead but for him. We sat in front of the TV, watching a soccer game on the Spanish station, and he wove me a hemp necklace with a melted copper squiggle of a pendant. In the midst of it all, I started dating someone else. We hadn't had The Talk yet, so when David asked if I wanted to go to a poetry reading with him, I accepted. I wasn't sure how to handle things (hadn't yet developed skill enough to date multiple people), so I had a talk with the other guy, and we determined that we were exclusive. So the date ended up being a nondate, and I told him about my boyfriend when we went for drinks after the poetry.

But still. There was something there. A few months later, he went to Egypt to study field mice for a year (he was a bio grad student), and he wrote to me frequently. Once he even called me to hear my sexy, throaty, cold-induced voice. I took over his place at the laundromat, and eventually started working with his best friend Doug.

Doug and I become good friends, and eventually he strong-armed me into dating him. (I say that because I had utterly no intention of dating him. I was still hung up on his best friend.) David visited one week, and I found out later that Doug had given him strict (if paranoid) instructions to stay away from me. That was the nail in the coffin--for both me and Doug, and for anything with David.

As the years passed, I'd occasionally Google him, and once I discovered him living in an apartment not three blocks away from where I had just moved! Or so I thought. After leaving a message on his machine, I wondered if that was really his voice, and then a few weeks later, a guy returned my call and it wasn't him.

Oh how I wished things had gone differently. Being with him instead of Doug (who turned out to be controlling and insecure, a real bother), or having a second chance. I daydreamed about randomly running into him at a bar in Chicago, for I knew he visited often. Finally, after way too long, he faded from my thoughts, and I only Googled him if the subject came up of old flames.

So I didn't like reading the ancient letters I found from him. They reminded me of things I didn't want to think about, because there was nothing to be done about them. I think regrets are stupid, and I don't want to think about having any.

But Googling is a good thing. I finally tracked down a photo of him online, and it completely erased any lingering thoughts I'd had of him. Whew. Aging is sometimes unkind.

Photos

Last night I put on some good music and dug through my photo pile. As much as I love having a digital camera, I am so grateful for the old cameras that spawned loads of pictures of my past. I learned a lot, too--mostly that most of my hairstyles were serious missteps, and I need someone to sit me down and firmly tell me exactly what haircut I am best suited for.

I also used to be a lot more photogenic. I have millions of pictures of me leaning into a friend, us beaming widely and authentically--and beautifully. I don't remember having more self-confidence when I was younger (in college and after). But I do see so much happiness in the pictures, which is a universal beautifier. And friends. I see lots of friends. That's got to be what's missing now.

Another reason for looking through pictures: A friend asked about summer camps, and I thought of mine, Googled it, and found a web page for it. There were enough pictures that I could tell how much it had changed--and hardly recognized it. I made my way to the staff list for the upcoming summer, and saw a name I knew under Art Director. It took the wind out of me. If my memory does not fail me, she was my favorite camper 4th- and 5th-grade week my second year of counseling. That would have made her, what, nine or ten? And now she's the art director at the camp that, when I was there, could barely sustain crafts hour once a week for the littler kids.

I feel so old.

So I looked through my camp photos, and found a few pictures of her and me. I think I'm going to get copies made then send her a note with the pictures this summer at camp. I feel a bit tentative about it, as I always do contacting people with whom I'm long out of touch, but I remember what it was like at camp. I hope they still do post-lunch mail call, make a big fuss out of people who receive a lot of letters, and sign them up for an act in the weekly talent show. I would have loved to get a letter from an old counselor sharing memories with me, remembering me. I don't know, though, if I had been a camper at ten, if I would have remembered my counselor ten years later. I do know how influential counselors are, and I do still remember the ones I had the years I attended in high school. It could be like always remembering your first-grade teacher.

God I feel old.