Gus

The man and his wife sat at a wooden table in their kitchen, looking out toward the road, past the white face cows and lean brown horses.  Their 1000 acre farm was just off highway 4, near Salem Heights and Laporte. 

Ocassionally, tractor trailers thundered by, rattling the mailbox at the end of the gravel driveway.  Under the mailbox was a white plastic newspaper holder, printed with the words, "Herald Argus."

The white farm house was streaked with Indiana soil, eroded by Indiana wind.  A white oak tree planted near the house generations ago sheltered it from the sun, spreading its limbs across the yard and up over the roof, fanning lobed leaves and creating dappled shadows on the small patch of grass just outside the window. 

"Gus," the farmer's wife asked, "you expecting someone?"  She pointed down the drive as a station wagon slowly pulled in.

"Nope.  Probably just turning around."

They didn't.  Their Plymouth kept coming up the driveway and stopped near the house, under the tree.  As the two inside watched, the visitors began unloading from the car.  They excitedly hurried toward the cows, who gazed at them curiously from behind the barbed wire.

Gus pushed his chair back and made his way out the metal screen door of the kitchen, which squeaked and slammed shut behind him.  He squinted out into the sunshine, his face taunt and bronzed, lined from country sun and winter winds.  He saw a young man headed toward the door, wearing a white short sleeve shirt and knit pants.  His hair was cropped short and he had a pipe in his hand.  It was my father.

"Hi there," Gus said.  "Can I help you?"

"Yes," said the man, introducing himself.  "You see, we're out here for the weekend at our cottage.  But my wife wanted the kids to see a real farm.  Well, we were driving by yours and thought maybe we'd ask if we could see it."  My father must have been confident Gus couldn't say no.

"I'm Gus," said the farmer, looking at the gathering of children near the heifers.  "I guess it would be okay if they looked around some, but they need to be careful near them cows." 

When we met Gus, he was as pure and undistilled as any farmer ever was.  His dusty jeans were the real thing, unlike the dark blue ones my mother bought for us at Sears.  His shirt was denim.  And his cap was John Deere, back when John Deere wasn't cool. 

That was the first of many trips to Gus's farm. 

Back then, Gus was larger than life.  His world, up close, was much bigger than what we had imagined.   Frightening at first but, when we got used to it, exciting.  And everywhere on his farm, the air smelled of manure, made in the pens and moved out to the fields. 

It was work on Gus's farm that was often threatened as the fate to be earned for various misdeeds.  "You'll spend the summer working on Gus's farm, is that what you want?"  If it was that bad, we'd wonder, why did we always stop there on vacation?
 
We must have outgrown the farm experience, because ours visits stopped at some point.  For years, on any country road, we would look for the familiar farm and argue over real versus imagined sightings.  All it took was a white frame house and an oak tree, and it was Gus's place.

Perhaps fate steered our station wagon into that driveway on highway 4.   But my parents pulled into it, drawn by the future.  It's as if they knew Gus would be there - and that he would become part of our family's story, whether he was ready or not. 

Those trips gave us the chance to get right up to the fence, close enough to the horses and cows to smell their breath and look into their eyes.  To be unafraid and amazed. 

****

Uncommon Goodness

I was unpacking a Christmas gift this afternoon from a internet retailer and paused to think how closely connected we have all become in the on-line world. 

And yet, we are remarkably distant from each other.  From politics to families to human rights.

In the U.S., only about 7 of every 1000 children do not survive their first year.  In Afghanistan, the number is 157.  For every million children born there, 157,000 are lost to disease, lack of medical treatment, nutrition, hypothermia and other causes during their first year. 

The same high mortality numbers are found in Chad, Somalia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Iraq - throughout the developing world.

Nearly 20 million low birth weight babies are born each year, mostly in the developing world, and these babies are especially prone to hypothermia due to insufficient fat beneath the skin.  Many mothers won't even name their babies for several months, until they have lived past their most perilous period.

In 2008, a group of students from Stanford's Design Institute developed a warming device to address the problem of infant hypothermia.  For their work, they won the Stanford Social Entrepreneurship Challenge, an award given to companies with the power to create social change.  Distribution has started in India, and it is projected that by 2013, they will save more than 100,000 babies in that country and prevent illness in 800,000. 

But there are other crises yet unaddressed. 

Africa has over 14 million AIDS orphans.  In developing and transitional countries, 9.5 million people are in immediate need of life-saving AIDS drugs; of these, only 4 million (42%) are receiving the drugs. 

Inadequate sanitation is one of humanity's most urgent yet solvable crises, according to many scientists.  Haiti, like many third world countries, has no sewage treatment plants anywhere.  In many developing countries, raw sewage is taken to garbage dumps.  Ground water becomes contaminated. 

Malnutrition is spreading across the globe, primarily in children.  It affects one of every three children in developing countries and accounts for as many as five million deaths annually.  It magnifies the effect of every disease, including measles and malaria. 

Undernutrition is an underlying cause of death in diseases such as diarrhea (61%), malaria (57%), pneumonia (52%), and measles (45%) (Black 2003, Bryce 2005).

Malaria is the 5th leading cause of death from infectious diseases worldwide (after respiratory infections, HIV/AIDS, diarrheal diseases, and tuberculosis) and the 2nd leading cause of death from infectious disease in Africa, after HIV/AIDS.

If we are all becoming so closely connected, such a global community, why is innovation and action to affect social change not more valued, more rewarded, and more expected?  Where are the other students - and sponsors - like the ones at Stanford - who will step forward to affect change?

If we can provide low-cost sewage treatment facilities the size of semi trailers - ones that also generate potable water - why aren't they found in Port Au Prince and Chad? 

If the world can buy 345 million smart phones this year, why can't we find ways to make HIV medicines available for those who are dying for them in Africa?

This Christmas, I wish we would all begin to have a closer connection to each other.  A greater awareness of why we need innovation and commitment.  If we place a social value on that, we'll begin to see change.  Safer drinking water, healthier babies, fewer orphans. 

Then, perhaps, we'll see an uncommon good become as common as it should be.

Please

Please come to Indy and live forever

Back to college life
and campus towns
And they’ve got lots of room

The snowfall lays out on the cornfields
And there’s miles and miles of prairies
As far as the eye can see

Please come to Indy
But she just said no, John, you come home to me

Camo Reflection

I really need to pull myself together. 

There I was, a few nights ago, at the Sarasota WalMart looking for light bulbs.  I had slipped into my cynical me, condesceding toward all things redneck. 

That particular version of me features a lot of head shaking and eye rolling.  At trucks, sub-woofing their way through the parking lot and nearly running down people in their pajamas and self-propelled shopping carts. At missing teeth. Muffin tops. At gaudy tattoos on backs and legs and necks.  Camo.

That me also specializes in mumbling things like "oh yeah, that's a nice outfit."  Or seeing an especially odd couple and saying "mm hmm," as I walk past them, which only I can traslate into "you two are perfect for each other."  I once said, "hot dogs are that way, lady."

The great thing about this attitude is that it reinforces that I am so above everyone else.  Never mind that I might be buying Toasted Almond bars and windshield wipers.   That's just a coincidence. 

That night, I eventually found my way into the sporting goods department, where I was condescendingly thinking about how much rednecks love guns.  Man, those hillbillies and their shotguns.  

As I was looking into the case, I noticed a typical Walmart shopper - a man with a goatee in a white t-shirt, grey cotton sweat pants, and a camo baseball cap.   A little overweight; shabby.

I turned, sensing he was too close.  No one. 

And then I realized the painful and surprising truth - it was me.  

Man, I need to pull myself together. 

Until then, I'm going out to my truck and eating one of these Toasted Almonds.

*****

Two Headlights and a Radio

In Turquoise Pencil country, there's a road unlike any other.  It's more than 80 miles of linnear oasis through the most dangerous and impenetrable terrain in the world - the Florida Everglades.

Like a flaming Seminole arrow, it points from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean, its near-melting tar and gravel supported by centuries of seas shells and silt. 

Mile after mile, along every foot of tangled green palmetto, a chain link fence keeps the quiescent swamp creatures at bay, like the tall barriers of an endless prison yard. 

Beyond the fence, a canal parallels the road; a moat patrolled by leathery alligators and other indigineous reptiles.  Above, hawks and falcons circle the skies like carnivorous search parties.

It's know as "Alligator Alley."   It's a sanctuary of oddities, a steambath and furnace. 

It's not hard to imagine the difficulty engineers and laborers had forging through the cypress swamps.   The Everglades could only be breached using amphibious vehicles, helicopters, swamp-buggies, and airboats.  And even then, it was a Panama-canal like effort.  

On a sun-bleached wall, one worker wrote,  "Please Lord, I've been a good man.  So if I get cotton-mouth bit, or attacked by some of Oscar the Alligator's brothers, and if I get to that Big Job in the Sky, oh, please, Lord, let it be on dry land. Amen!"

The journey South on interstate 75 is one that everyone should make at least once in a lifetime.  South, because that destination holds bikinis and blue waves and beautiful people.   South, lured by the tropicana beat of Cuban music in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood.  

Pigments of pink, coral, ochre, are everywhere - colors indigenous to Brazil or Havana, the Spanish Main and the Carribean.   The sidewalks and strands filled with latin women strolling as if on fashion runways, captivating and beguiling; native.  Beaches covered in sugary sand.  

But the adventure is in the journey.  Open vistas like African savannahs reach as far across the horizon as the eye can see, with only the curvature of the earth limiting the view.  Each afternoon, anvil-like thunderheads gather in the distance, sometimes streaked with electric webs of lightning.  The clouds menacing.  Threatening - and promising - rain. 

The air smells of hot organic incense.  A Florida scent.

Alligator Alley is a menagerie of wildlife and a panorama of calm.  Great bald eagles soar in circles over the dried husks of towering pines.  Blue Herons and Cranes wander on stick-like legs through the shallows.  Cormorands sun themselves on rocks with outstretched wings.  And, on rare occasions, roseate spoonbills appear as if they had just stepped off a postcard.

On my return home, the sun set in ways described by untold writers, glorious and surreal.  But after the sunset, when darkness settled over I-75, my feelings changed.   I felt as if I was in Ohio or Kentucky - or anywhere.  The magic disappeared, blotted by night. 

I was back in a normal, mundane, non-Florida world.  It was just two headlights and a radio, even as the Everglades passed by me in the darkness.

*****

Second Chances and High School Dances

My sister and I were recalling the funny and politically incorrect movies we saw in high school – of headgear and pimples and double entendres and gawky teen actresses.

Of one actress, she teased, “You always had a big crush on her.”

“Me?  No I didn’t,” I denied. “But I bet she's even more beautiful now,” I offered, thinking that I might have a chance with the more mature and possibly washed-up version.

“Well, not really, she’s like, over fifty. I just saw her in a movie where she played the mother. I don’t think you’d be all that interested.”

In high school, I probably would have been interested.  Looking back, they were days spent in a sort of fog - one of self interest and experimentation.  What I remember seeps back in sensory waves – musty locker rooms and dance floors; classrooms and cafeterias, China Grove and the Doobie Brothers.  Pintos, Mavericks and Plymouths.

We didn’t think about the economy and Watergate and what was happening overseas. We were sealed in a blissful cocoon.  But we did think about girls.  A lot.  We were a thirsty bunch of Y-chromosomes, and girls were fountains of cold water in our testosterone desert. They stirred the fog and dizzied our senses.

Looking back, we didn’t choose them for their interests or intelligence – we liked them for their hair, their friends, our convenience.  Because of that, our relationships were destined to be fleeting.  Most of us can remember few moments today from those dates and dances and back seats.

I'm grateful now that we were able to experiment. We made simple choices because we were not complex individuals - after all, we liked Ford Pintos.   But we fantasized that those relationships were more profound than they really were; that all the drama and melodrama were the real thing.  They weren't, but it was a good dry run.

What mattered to us then were our friends, our image of ourselves, and our need for validation. Our role-playing dramas helped us grow. When they ended, we were stronger, like newly pruned trees waiting to grow stronger and taller next season.

We weren't looking very deeply, even though we convinced ourselves with certainty that we were.  If we knew someone who wanted to go Yale or Stanford, it didn't impress us much.  If they weren’t beautiful, accessible, or part of our group, they were probably bookworms.  And they were invisible.

We couldn’t see that someone’s values were perhaps richer, their visions perhaps deeper. Our brains weren’t growing in the right ways. We thought about Friday night.

But, had we not experimented, had our relationships not been simple and shallow and doomed, we might have chosen a life partner who didn’t have the vision or depth or connection important to us now - now that our brains have made the connections they lacked decades ago.

Yet not everyone has benefited from lessons learned in the fog of youth. Sometimes, the metamorphosis occurs later in life, beyond marriage, beyond children. Couples find themselves wondering about the depth of their love; the fulfillment of their life's promise.  And perhaps the person wearing the gold band sitting in the kitchen may not be the soulmate they need. 

That person may be the one who went to Stanford.

So, after my sister and I reminisced about Sixteen Candles and The Breakfeast Club, I dreamt - of Molly Ringwold.  Embarrassing but true.

In my dream, she told me she was available - but I told her I wasn’t interested.

Anymore.

******

Maverick, the immortal

Tennis balls.  They were always on his mind.  Tennis balls, soaring over a concourse of green fescue, stretching into infinity; arching across the sky like lemon suns.  He wanted to be chasing them, in great loping strides, as if he really was the thoroughbred he imagined himself to be, instead of a mere black lab.

Maverick was obsidian and tiffany, reckless and reliable, lovable and laughable.  Captured on thousands of megabytes - cd's, flash drives, hard drives, hearts.   A backdrop to the chronicles of our lives - of boyhood and brotherhood, happiness and hope, joy and grief. 

In recent years, Maverick spent long hours sleeping, whimpering and twitching as if he were trying to escape from his seat in the dream audience and move back on to the stage.   Majestic head supported on his front paws, he watched his adventures as they flickered on the screen behind his velvet eyes.

And they must have been glorious. Cascades of water filling the screen as he thrashed into a freezing trout stream or a summer lake.  Squirrels and birds flinging themselves into trees and sky, just out of reach of the great hunter, scurrying up giant oaks or shedding feathers in panic as they fled off camera for their lives. 

Proud and lean, muscled like an olympic athlete.  Loving and unafraid.

He’d lay there in the kitchen or near the piano, sometimes curled up with the cat.  Bathed in summer sun or long winter shadows, thinking of twisting airborne catches, gazelle-like turns, turf-tearing stops on all fours.  Quick snaps and over the shoulder catches.  Spittle flying, head shaking, eyes dancing.  All powered by an adonyus soul of limitless energy.

And oh, the food in those memories.  Apple pies and take-out packages mistakenly left on countertops. Christmas cookies, beautifully handcrafted with jellied centers and sprinkles and bright frosting, waiting for the cookie exchange.  Gourmet dinners left by friends during a nap.  And a cornucopic menu from the pantry - peanut butter, pasta, cereal, potato chips. And, occasionally, kitty litter.

Although Maverick was "rescued" from the shelter, he was really just waiting for Kirk to pick him up, for he was a soul born to be with us. 

One summer afternoon not so long ago, the boys and I took Maverick to the park where we grew up.  He dragged us down the hill with uncontrollable excitement; careening and flying as if we were a horse-drawn fire truck headed toward a blaze.  He tore through the carpet of dandelions and cactus-like weeds and across to the dusty baseball diamond.  We unleashed him and flung tennis balls across the summer sky until our arms hurt.  We laughed and high fived and hugged each other as we watched the magnificent Maverick in all his glory.  It was an unforgettable day.

The last time I saw Maverick, he was looking through the lower half of the screen door as I walked up to the house.  He was shifting from side to side, and I knew what he meant.  I always did.

On the next step of his journey, he had no leash, no collar.  He was taking great deep breaths and the muscles rippled under his shiny ebony coat as he strode toward the gates of heaven.  When the gates were flung open, welcoming him home, thousands of bright yellow tennis balls poured out, showering him with love and expectancy.

We'll miss you, Maverick.

*****

Thanksgiving redux

In the Turquoise Pencil world, a strange summer has morphed into an impossible autumn.  Here, soap opera scripts are played out daily. 

The most recent plot developments have our cast of characters scattered across distant locations, and the family lens is ready to flip back and forth between venues like a Discovery Channel Storm Chaser reality series. 

Our characters are emerging from their home grown storm-chasing mobiles, breathlessly marveling at their narrow escape. 

Here, the Thanksgiving winds have blown the sky into a wispy and transparent cerulean blue.  If there are clouds, they can only be seen by squinting into the distance.  

Ahead, there are new adventures and different challenges, no less exhilirating and rich.

I think perhaps our Edwardian and Victorian holidays may be receding into the past.  We've started to blend old traditions with new ones.   The emerging traditions, for now, seem to be more diverse - an ecclectic cocktail of palm trees and Manhattan taxis, Minnesota lakes and Indian Reservations.   The Batman Park and the Gulf of Mexico intercoastal waterways.

It feels good.  I think I'm ready.


*****

Pain

Across the street from the Loyola quadrangle, the familiar sounds from an endless procession of L trains could be heard even inside the classrooms.

The linked-up aluminum cars would brake and screech along the tracks and through the final turn before crawling and hissing into the Loyola station.  Echoes from almost inaudible announcements would bounce across the frozen pavement and against the campus buildings.

Even with a powdery new snowfall, it was a grey world – the platform, the trains, the lives.

At times, the trains seem suspended in the air just above the crumbling overpass. Ambulances would rush underneath, blaring and screaming, ricocheting north or south, destination heaven or hell. Against the broken curbs were a collection of trash and street sludge snow cones.

Beyond the stone buildings that bounded the campus like the walls of a keep, the city streets lurked. Faded billboards stalked Sheridan Road like zombies, with faceless ads about malt liquors or lawyers or paternity. And just a short walk from the holy cathedral of the Madonna, it was too dangerous to be alone, especially at night.

Inside the protected quadrangle, we didn't feel the threats or the taunts of the city.   Instead, we learned of neuroses.

The revelation was in theology (an appropriate place), which was required coursework when studying for the Jesuits.  The revelation was that a normal person is really not normal at all.  If they seem normal - and happy - then they are undoubtedly and successfully neurotic.  They have created a perception of reality that helps them to cope.  They hear sirens but can't feel the trauma. See the billboards but block the messages.

This mental faculty keeps us sane.  It’s like a vestigial sort of mental miracle.  On a daily basis, it softens the sharper edges of reality.  But when life’s pain becomes intense, it can carry us all by itself.  Without it, we might be unable to continue the lives we thought we had.  Without it, we might find ourselves atop a bridge and leaning out - with pain too great to bear.

Perhaps the Jesuits, at times, disguised this miraculous faculty as a Trojan Horse. 

But they know it's faith.  It's God, helping our souls carry burdens too heavy for us to lift by ourselves.

Maybe one day, you'll be riding the L train, feeling a pain you believe has changed you forever.  Hold on tightly as the train screeches and swerves, and nearly throws you from your seat. When the wheels grind to a halt, hurry off the train, down the stairs and across the street.

Step into the quadrangle.

Breathe deeply and feel the gentle snowflakes fall around you.  Listen to the muted sounds of the train as it fades into the distance.  Follow the warm pools of light that fall beneath the familiar buildings.  Feel the comfort of walking with other students toward your dorm and your friends and the life you have known.

Then, look across campus, toward the eaves of the church of the Madonna. 

Feel the pain fade.


*****

A Life Story

In our house on Esmond Street, my mother could be heard calling up the stairs, “Your father’s not going; he’s working on his book today.”

His book. My mother proudly told us that it was going to be a great work of literature, that it would make him rightfully famous. But knowing its ostensible title, the book drew little interest or awe from the group of us, preparing to go to church or the beach or the S&H greenstamps store.

We would leave my father standing in the doorway, his pipe clenched in his teeth and a box of papers under his arm.  A sacrifice for the book.

In the 1960’s, my father could have used the Olivetti from his office for the project, but he wasn’t a typist - he was an artist.  He used fountain pens and bics, legal pads and plain white paper.  

There on Esmond, work on the book had just begun, so we often saw him carrying his box of papers, busy and intent and energetic. Young, tall, and thin.  Unburdened and eagerly anticipating his future as an author and historian.

The box with the loose pages could be found in his studio, among other flotsam and jetsam carried along on his creative river of talent; oil pallettes and canvases, brilliant pools of watercolors drying in plastic pans, and delicately drawn outlines of Chicago homes waiting for the watery touch of his brush. 

His studio resonated with music and smell of Bond Street pipe tobacco.  Visiting his studio, we watched from playpens and highchairs, stools and swing-o-matics. 

We moved from Esmond Street to a tiny brick house on Longwood Drive in Blue Island, where work progressed.  Pipe smoke and inappropriately loud operatic music drifted up from the basement; certain clues that Chicago’s sepia history of barons and brothels and business tycoons was being transcribed.

As he penned those pages in the cramped basement, he was sifting through the rubble of a house on Prairie Avenue, or walking up a grand mahogany staircase with his friend and mentor, whom he told us was part of Lord Carnarvon’s excavation of King Tut’s tomb. John McCormack and Arthur Rubenstein deafened the sound of the babies crying upstairs. It must have seemed like heaven.

We lived in the Blue Island house during the Viet Nam war.  My mother would occasionally have “Viet Nam Dinner” nights for the children.  They featured only rice, odd vegetables, and water. 

We hated it then, but see if differently today.  Now with admiration.  Because now we know of the days my father would come home after selling just a few art supplies or hand-sketched note cards in his gallery.   We’d eat the budget-saving Viet Nam dinners and then my father would head downstairs to work on his book.

The book that would make him famous.

Then, during those tumultuous Blue Island years, history happened.  Men landed on the moon. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were shot.  Riots erupted across the city, and Daley’s canary blue police served up justice as the fires burned.  And the basement flooded.

Amid the floating boxes and submerged furniture, the pages of the book were saved. I remember seeing a box of rippled and streaked paper and wondering if the book project would survive.  Evidently it did.

Shortly after the flood, we moved into a new house and a new period in our lives. The house was not unlike those featured in the unfinished book. It was a peeling and dilapidated old Victorian, with broken pipes and windows. The high-ceiling rooms had piles of leaves from the oak trees that towered over its three stories. And it seemed like a perfect place to work on the book.  In this new space, our lives felt changed.  Our minds seemed to expand.

And we grew.  Teenagers started appearing.  Braces and new cars were needed.  Our friends gathered in the large kitchen in the house on Prospect Avenue, filling the place with noise and laughter and chaos. We were all swept into our own lives and personal dramas.

We had temporarily forgotten the image of my father standing by the door in our Esmond house, youthful and hopeful, clutching his box of paper.  For the moment, we'd forgotten those hand-written pages, water stained from the flood.

I lost track of the book.

But my father must have kept writing it.

He must have, because today his book, “Chicago's Old Homes - Legends and Lore,” is in its third edition from McGraw Hill.  It’s been sold on Amazon.com and E-Bay.  And I once saw it in a Barnes and Noble bookstore in Florida.

Maybe it didn’t make him a famous author. 

But in my eyes, he acheived fame from another work, yet unpublished but even longer in the making.

Upon endless pages, he has drawn the indelible characters of our family.  He penned each of us imperfectly and yet grandly.  Our minds as big and open and irrational as moving into a house filled with leaves and racoons.  Our souls bathed in the artistic and creative process. 

Thus we became philosophers and scientists, thinkers and writers, musicians and artists.

For this, my father shares the byline.

And now, we are busy writing our own books.

Thanks dad.


********

Corkie, Yorkie, and Cicadas

In Chicago, it was just early August but the dog days of summer had arrived many weeks too soon, along with weather from a Louisiana swamp. Windless and hot, time dragged as slowly as the few molecules of air that blew across the city.

Among the rows of bungalows in Beverly, sprinklers were working hard; spraying comb-teeth waves of water across the browning grass.  And, as afternoon inched forward, the shrill sounds of the cicadas would begin - a deafening backdrop of insect chatter from a million tiny voices that would mercifully drown out the sounds of the city - the sirens and traffic and planes.

This particular afternoon, it was hot.  And boring.

So we sat inside Meg's bungalow on Bell Street, where it was quieter and cooler.  My neice Eliza and my daughter Katie sat cross-legged in front of the sofa next to the coffee table.  Eliza's Barbies were scattered out across the floor.  Sponge Bob was talking to Gary in the background.  The fan pointed up at the ceiling where someone had probably kicked it.  So I curled up in front of it, near Eliza and Katie and the dolls.

Eliza knew about Elizabeth Freckly Dawn Ron, a Barbie from Katie's childhood that was legendary in the Simmerling family.  Dawn Ron was a creation of our imagination, a pretend teenager that overcame her challenges to become an overconfident olympic skater who won the gold medal (under dubious circumstances).  

"Why don't you guys play Barbies?" Meg asked, as Eliza stared in a zombie trance at the television.

"Me?" I asked, yawning.

"Yeah, you two can do a show or something," she said.  Meg probably remembered the dance contests and skating events Katie and I held with Dawn Ron and her friends on our own living room carpeting.  I was a grown man (I think), so it should have been kind of embarrassing.  But Eliza was now snapped out of her trance and latched onto the Barbie idea.

"I don't know, I'm kind of tired from working for the Bobs all day and everything," I said, stretching out and closing my eyes.

"Please, uncle John?"

"Yeah dad, come on, it will be fun," Katie conspired.

So we gathered all the dolls together to get them ready for an organized event, which involved a lot of pulling pants up and dresses down, and un-matting wild hair.  As we sat them in rows, stadium like, I wondered what we could come up with.   I needed some coffee. 

"How about a magic show?" I offered.  That seemed interesting, in a David Blaine kind of way. 

"Cool," Eliza agreed. 

So, as the seating arrangements continued, I asked for the names of the dolls.  While Katie had names for all of her Barbies growing up, Eliza's Barbies were virtually anonymous.  So we had to come up with some stage names.

"Ladies and gentlemen," I announced,  "I'd like to introduce Corkie and Yorkie!"  Picking two dolls (a Ken and Barbie) from the crowd, I dramtically held them up, "And they are starring in the Corkie and Yorkie Magic Show!" 

The names were pulled from nowhere, but oddly they had a certain gypsy-caravan kind of feeling.   And with the wild hair and outfits in the crowd, it seemed appropriate.

And with that, the Corkie and Yorkie magic show was born. 

The early acts of the show featured a flashy trick called "The Magic Kimono", where an assistant would be made to disappear from under a large silk robe, but only after the audience was told to close their eyes because of the danger from powerful magical rays.  The assistant would reappear after much backstage talking and arguing - but again only after the audience would obediently close their eyes. 

There was also the popular fortune-telling act (also gypsy-like), where an assistant named "Miss Magic" would answer audience questions about their future.  Unfortunately, the questions were too simple and the answers too vague. 

"What kind of car will I get when I am older?" 

"A fast car - thank you very much," Miss Magic would curtly answer.      

That first afternoon, after the acts had developed, we went into the backyard and cut pieces from a cardboard box, which we used to make props for the show.  As we cut and taped and painted, we laughed about the funny characters and the silly questions.  We made a booth for Miss Magic, which included a sign that read, "Magic Tricks and Good Advice."  Katie made a sign for the Barbie Minivan that said, "Going to the Corkie and Yorkie Magic Show." 

The Magic Show was a hit.  Eliza would do her best to re-create it for other family members, but Katie or I would need to add the bungling and innocent complexity (and humor) that made it so fun.  More props were added, and daily showtimes were posted on the side of the kiosks.

Late one night, I received a text message from Meg, telling me that the audience was now camping out in her living room, waiting to get tickets for the next day's show.  "All these teenagers are sleeping out in my living room," she wrote.  "And I think I smell someone smoking," she added in a later text. 

In daily conversations and texts, we would refer to the different Barbie characters, such as Brian, Chad, Miss Magic, Corkie, Yorkie, etc.  They would be late for work, headed to Great America, in the backyard sitting on the picnic table and smoking, looking for jobs, off at Starbucks, and all the other things teenagers do. 

We laughed about it late at night as we texted each other.  In the mornings, we would discuss the previous night's misbehaviors - how the carnies and the groupies were a bad influence on each other.  I'd drive over to the Gallery and Vicki would be laughing as I walked in - she'd ask for the latest on Corkie and the gang.  If you were in on it, you'd have to help build the story.  So the Magic Show misadventures were as creative as the show itself - and almost as funny.

Like the heat and humidty that hung over the city this summer, our emotions were pressed and twisted and tested in unpredictable ways every day.  But we were lucky, we had each other.  We relied upon each other, learned about each other, and I know we became closer than ever. 

But during those summer days, Corkie and Yorkie also gave us something that we didn't know we needed - an escape.

An escape, like the deafening but welcome sound of the summer cicadas.

**