It was a very good year

When I was 27, it was a very good year. It was a very good year for Southern girls to cast caution to the wind, move to Chicago with a Midwestern boy, live in a basement apartment in Rogers Park, walk to the Howard Street EL, get Squeak the cat, teach and study yoga on Bryn Mawr Ave., get befriended by Durga, clean houses for a living, make salads and friends at the Heartland Cafe, run at the Loyola track, run the Chicago Marathon, get married.

It was a very good year for Midwestern boys to ride the EL up to Pioneer Press and paste up ads for suburban weeklies, ride the Evanston Express down to the Loop to type and make copies for Ma Bell, walk to the lakefront for lunch, wander the Art Institute on Free Thursday, go to the public library on Michigan Avenue, watch movies with Edward Mellish, run into Corky Siegel at the beach, eat Mexican at La Choza, get accepted at Oberlin, get married.

It was a very good year to go to t'ai chi classes on Dempster Street every Saturday, learn Basic Movement, study the Ch'en form, drink Professor Huo's jasmine tea, hang out after class, get befriended by DJ and Dick, read their books, listen to their nutritional advice, pester them with questions, witness Professor's painting demonstration, decide to go back to school in physical education, receive a painting as a wedding gift.

As of this month it's been 27 years since those life-altering days enduring a Chicago winter and enjoying a Chicago summer. I still do Basic Movement but stopped practicing and forgot the Ch'en form after four years. I learned a Yang form, then another one, then another one, and I still practice it (the second one). I took up ch'i-kung and do that every day now. I still repeat the starting instructions from January 1978 on occasion, and it still makes a difference:

Assume the head to be suspended from above, face the front, mouth closed, tongue touching the roof, breathe naturally through the nose, let the shoulders and elbows sink down with arms, hands, and fingers naturally extended at your sides, relax the body, clear the mind, breathe deeply, inhale, exhale.

A few things have changed since those days. Now there are two young adults, out in the world on their own adventures, whose DNA derives directly from mine and Gven Golly's. If I were a total Romantic, I would say that the story of the second 27 was written in that one Chicago year when Gven and Sven crystallized as a couple in the heat and cold of the Windy City. But it's more complicated than that, so I'll just spill my pent-up nostalgia and appreciation in this space and get back to work on the next cycle of nine times three.

Stopping by condos on a snowy evening

Saturday was beautiful, and the fresh snow that fell overnight gave me a good excuse to drag out my old, beat-up cross-country skis and get my butt outside. After a cup of coffee and some leftover pizza, I scrawled new wax on my scratched-up wooden skis and trudged across the field to the bike trail. There was enough snow so that the paved surface was fine, and I found that if I stayed to one side I could pole with one arm on the unpaved shoulder. Light wind, temperature in the 20s, nice dry snow, nearly ideal conditions. But where could I go in Methodisttown?

Rather than drive out to Alumni Creek Reservoir, where there are groomed trails, or a golf course where there are hills, I took the path of least resistance - and it has made all the difference - the bike trail that used to be the Conrail tracks. It's nothing special. It's flat, and it crosses a few streets going north to Maxtown Road or south to State Street. There are a few trees along one side and fences, warehouses, back yards, and a couple of open fields on the other. Past County Line there is a wooded stretch beside a new upscale housing development with street names like Nature Trail, where it felt quite peaceful. A big V-shaped flock of Canada geese honked by overhead, and I acknowledged them with outstretched arms. I ignored the people and their snow-blowers.

It felt good to stride and glide, stride and glide, hardly poling at all, and I found a rhythm I could maintain without getting tired. I got back an hour and a half later satisfied, did the usual Saturday chores, shoveled the walk, and sat down to watch the snow falling heavier. It's hypnotic. The pea soup is ready, and bread is in the oven. I have firewood to bring in, compost to take out, and miles to go before I sleep. Ha ha.

We shall overcome

So I sat in church and listened to an audio tape of Martin Luther King speaking to a large gathering in Washington, August 28, 1963 - I remember the date because it was my sister Jo's sixteenth birthday - and listened to the choir sing about freedom, listened to Rev. Susan talk about the years of work, meetings, and training that led up to Rosa Parks refusing to go to the back of the bus, and how the moderate civil rights groups wouldn't support the Montgomery bus boycott. When the congregation stood to sing "We Shall Overcome," I got one line into it and my mouth stopped working. It's happened before. I tried again, and my hands started shaking holding the hymnal, and my voice wouldn't sing a complete line or verse: We shall overcome...We'll walk hand in hand...We will live in peace. The rest of the congregation did just fine without me.

What gets stuck in my fifth chakra? It's partly just my pessimism about large groups of people getting along with mutual respect; I don't see it happening, even among small groups of like-minded people, let alone subcultures who see each other as the evil, subhuman, or inferior 'other'. And part of that 'otherness' is the belief that we're all in a zero-sum game, where my success depends on your defeat. Dominate or be dominated. Not that I act that way - no, this is other people I'm talking about.

Another problem is that my fourth and sixth chakras agree that it matters, and overcoming, living in peace, etc., deserves to be taken seriously. Always a dangerous step. Once committed to doing something about it, I could turn out to be wrong; life could be one big social darwinian game of domination. Or I could fail miserably, and personal humiliation is never fun. And it is personal, because I'm talking about overcoming not just Ashcroft and Bull Connor and George Wallace and Joe McCarthy (the bad guys) but the fear and pettiness and hubris in myself, my family, and my friends (the good guys). It's a lot of work. I'm tired already. And this poor attempt at writing it out is another fifth-chakra breakdown.

January 20

I think I ought to do something, but I'm not sure what.

Show up on Pennsylvania Avenue, naked, holding a sign, mooning the procession while wearing jester's cap and bells, turning my back along with other dissenters, wearing black, wearing a flight suit, declaring "Mission Accomplished," election stolen, thanking Kenneth Blackwell, thanking Kenneth Lay, burning the Patriot Act, burning the flag, packing for Guantanamo, I dunno.

Write my lock-step congressman, Pat Tiberi, that would make a big difference, or my "moderate" senators, Voinovich and DeWine, write a letter to the Dispatch, write an outraged blog, write a manifesto, write a semiautobiographical coming-of-age bildungsromantic novel, write a taiji manual, revise a world history book, build a better paragraph, make the world safe for The New American Century?

Pray for peace, pray for divine intervention, bless our troops, bless their troops, meditate in silence, withdraw from public life, run for local office, run for cover, just run?

Send money to the DNC, send money to Impeach.org, send money to MoveOn, send money to Sumatra, send money to my kids, start a private social security account, invest in Halliburton/ExxonMobil/Shell, go to hell, buy a Hummer, kill my television, spend nothing?

Open to suggestion.

Water

So I'm out in the back yard blackening my fingers with the sap from pine branches that snapped and fell during the recent ice storm. It's 50 degrees and sunny outside - in January, in Ohio - and I'm digging the chance to be outside, breathe fresh air, clean up the yard, strip the branches, and use the needles (in Georgia it's "pine straw") to mulch flower beds. It's a win-win situation. Brought about by a Christmas Eve snowstorm, followed by an ice storm that left half a million people without power for days. Followed by a week of rain that flooded several river-valley communities that are still trying to dry out. And we in middle Amerika got off easy. If weather is a global phenomenon, our storms were connected to more severe seismic events on the opposite side of the planet that produced truly awesome, terrible waves.

I'm just imagining, without meteorological facts to back it up, a sudden crunching crack in the crust at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, releasing energy that had been building up for a long time, that pushed real hard against a huge mass of water in direct contact with said crust. Like a chiropractic adjustment that alters the position of all the tissues around it, this local jolt sends a wave radiating outward that doesn't stop until it hits something solid, like half of South and Southeast Asia and part of Africa. But it doesn't stop there either, because the shock waves, like the butterfly effect, radiate through the ground and into the atmosphere, as well as through the ocean, and pretty soon I'm mulching my garden with volunteer pinestraw. There but for fortune.

So I ask you, dear reader, am I hallucinating from the effects of this really great pine tar?