she moves she

It is beautiful here today. A calm 56 degrees with winds that punch you in the gut and send you face forward into brick buildings. Oh these classic Chicago days, when your hair stands on end and strolling down Wabash is like standing in the wake of a jet engine. Spring is a tick away….

I associate Spring with a Black Labrador named Ted. I was seven and barely four feet tall and Ted was seven feet standing on his hind legs. A hell of a dog who demonstrated his affection with slobbery kisses and pawing paws. Valerie Rowell and I would take the bus home from Mount Olive Elementary. It dropped us off at the head of our subdivision (Country Manor) and we’d walk the half miles to our cul-de-sac houses. That Spring Ted showed up–a vagrant dog, starving–on our front porch. Dad fed him hot dogs while I looked on half-fascinated, half-terrified by this beast. Ted immediately singled me out as his favorite kid in the neighborhood. He’d put his front paws on my skinny shoulders and attack my face with doggy kisses, while his never-trimmed nails were digging bloody holes into my shoulders and his kisses gave way to tiny bites on my face with his over eagerness.

It got so bad that I was scared to go outside. And when the bus dropped Valerie and me off, we’d stand on top of the brick wall to our little gated community and sing songs to each other to pass the time until some good hearted neighbor would drive by, see the huge black dog waiting for us to descend our sanctuaries and extend the pity of a ride home. Everyone learned to hate Ted. Neighbors threatened to call the pound if they ever saw him stalking a kid again. (Confused by this, my mother informed me that “Calling the Pound” meant “Putting to Sleep” and that “Putting to Sleep” meant “Never Waking Up.”) Even my father, the one that adopted him, abandoned him. Leaving the starving, lovesick soul to wander around the neighborhood looking for food and affection.

Because my father stopped caring and the neighborhood wanted him put down, it was up to someone new to take care of him and I took that duty upon myself. I’d make it home from school after getting a ride home and hop up atop the patio table in our backyard. By then Ted, would be somewhere causing a ruckus with some other canine vagrants. But whenever I yelled his name in my seven-year old bellow “Teeeeeeddddddddddd!!!!” he’d come running, bolting, sprinting out of no where, straight towards me with his gleeful, ferocious gait. He’d get to the food bowl I’d put in front of the table and bury his face in his dinner, distracting him long enough for me to make it back into the house unscathed.

One day in April, he wasn’t at the bus stop. I walked home bravely, scared he was going to jump out at any moment and plough me over. I got all the way home without seeing him. I knew something was wrong. I got his food from the garage, I stood up on the patio table and “Teeeeeeddddddddd!!!” Nothing. “Teeeeeedddddddddddddddddddd!!!!” Still Nothing. Three more agonizing Ted’s, and a couple cheeks full of tears before I realized and accepted that he was never going to come running out of nowhere towards me again.

It took about fifteen years before I was comfortable with any type of dog jumping on me. Big or Small. But those two minutes when I stood yelling his name, waiting for him to come around the corner….nearly twenty years later and I’m still replaying it.

Kristen Schaal (Mel from Flight of the Conchords) is Trixie Tangway, Miss Hobo USA.

Sometimes I’m so overwhelmed by the explosions of life–those unexpected things, those crinkles in our plans, those truths in our guts–that I can do nothing but stay still and listen. I wrote once that you can only know the true beauty of a moment after it has passed. There is much to be said for being present but my god…the layers of complexity unearthed while staying still, listening and remembering is too great a monument to breathe out in a single sigh of applause.

I wanted this year to not be boring. And so far # of complaints: zero. Metaphorical howling at the moon that Bacchus would be proud of. Freedom and that great L word, finding anger and fire inside myself. It’s fun to take leaps of faith. In fact, leaps are what make the world glitter and make an expanse of possibilities possible.

I’m not one for clarity these days. I’m enjoying speaking in mysteries.  You’ll have to forgive me.

Sorry for the interruption of services. We’re now back and much taller.

It is now officially spring break. That term does not have the same meaning as it used to. Now it means absent student workers and a lull on the job. I was never a Take Your Shirt Off and Swing It Girl.

Chicago is finally warming up slightly. There were clouds between buildings this morning and even on the street. Everything is misty and hazy and smells like Almost Spring. It’s an interesting time of year. The sun shines longer, sweaters a bit too warm to wear, boots are on their way out, swim suits are in store windows and the memories of eighty degree weather surface in the well of your mind. This time of year is like those few seconds before you take your first sip of wine or gin or whiskey at the end of a long, cold day. The few seconds as you raise your glass to your lips and nearly feel the liquid already in your mouth. Or the feel of walking into a theatre or an orchestra hall right before a show. It’s the violins warming up, the bass getting in tune, the trumpets practicing those few fast notes, the flutes fluttering cautiously. It’s the “Almost” of the year.

I am feeling. I am feeling more. I am feeling more like a human. I am feeling more like a human with a soul. No longer content with staying put. No longer content with making do.

Om Namah Shivaya and Shanti Shanti Shanti.

Honolulu.  How exactly did I end up on Waikiki Beach?  Let’s just say…the stars aligned and all of my dormant impulsiveness and spontaneity woke up with a jazzy jolt.  The next thing I know, I’m on a plane…then I’m  dodging coral reef, swimming with eels and sea turtles, eating the best Ahi Tuna of my life, shooting pistols and magnums, drinking Mai Tais on tropical balconies, chasing roosters, drinking copious amounts of wine, hanging out with a Japanese family, speeding down a highway in a bus with drunk New Yorkers and eating pounds of pineapples and grapefruit and scrambled eggs.

Then.  Back to the “mainland.”  Oahu to Atlanta.  Atlanta to Chicago.  And home to a letter from Berkeley Fiction Review.  My immediate thought: Lovely. Another rejection letter.  But not this time!

“Dear Lauren,  Congratulations! Our editorial staff has reviewed your submission and is happy to tell you, your short story “Contents of a Dead Man’s Pockets” has been accepted for publication in the 28th volume of the Berkeley Fiction Review.”

Are those angels singing?

Thanks to a very fortunate set of events I am currently in Los Angeles awaiting a plane that will whisk me away on the final leg of my fifteen-hour long journey to Honolulu. All of my thoughts about tropical locals to ease the sting of Winter Winds must have been heard by the Whatever Out There.

I’ve never been West of the Mississippi River…well wait…do Minneapolis and St. Louis count? No.

I stopped briefly in Phoenix and was astounded by the Mountains. Mountains! Real ones. I’ve never seen any (excluding those Applachian phonies that cannot rightly be called Mountains. Real Mountains have snow topped peaks). Flying from Phoenix to LA made me giddy. Looking down at the weird collection of Desert, Plain and Mountain Range I kept thinking about people in wagons, ridin horses, shootin up cowboys, indians (pronounced ingins) runnin wild and hollerin for Buffalo. (yeah I might be drunk right now). And then I thought…”Where’s Billy the Kid? I can’t believe they have cars in Phoenix.” I suppose the Wild Wild West was so impressed upon my Childhood Mind with movies and tv shows that I subconsciously expected to see saloons and spit buckets. I was a little disappointed. Where’s Emilo Esteves and Keifer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips?

I won’t lie. I got a little “Proud to be an American” on myself. Ammmmerica!!!!

Though it wasn’t funny. It was the best I’ve ever felt.

The world is full of lifetimes. And whatever we go through there is always something else, something new, something about ourselves that we haven’t yet discovered.

Aloha.