Good Cop, Awesome Cop

I’ve always wondered if serial essayists/memoirists — like my favorites David Sedaris and Sloane Crosley — ever had an experience that they knew immediately would wind up in a book; something hilariously awful happens but they comfort themselves with the knowledge that it could become fodder for The New Yorker or This American Life. Or at the very least, they’d have a hell of a good story to tell on first dates and at cocktail parties. Because two years ago (holy crap!) something like that happened to me, but I didn’t realize how long I’d cling to it after it happened. Or how often I would cite it as proof that the kindness of strangers still has the potential to surprise me.

In my case, I ended up reading a very abridged version of my story on Chicago Public Radio. Editing the story down to 1.5-double-spaced pages was difficult since it usually takes me a good ten minutes to tell. I’ve always intended to write it down in detail, so here goes.

Two years ago on the Tuesday morning right before Thanksgiving I was driving to work and trying to psych myself up or a hectic Tuesday morning. At the time there were rampant rumors that our company was planning a big layoff before the holidays (instead, they waited a couple weeks after). Not unrelated, there was also considerable office drama since everyone was edgy and protective of their jobs. I’d only been there a year and a half and had been lucky to avoid being laid off after the company shut down the magazine to which I’d been originally hired. I knew I didn’t have enough seniority to be “safe.” Needless to say, I was preoccupied and distracted while I navigated the main road through the ritzy North Shore suburbs. A road, I should add, that local police monitored vigilantly for speeders.

My sole strategy for calming down on my commute consisted of listening to exclusively upbeat songs at a volume level my dad would sure have chastised me for. Which is to say too loud for me to hear anything going on outside of my own car.

I was about two-thirds of the way to my destination, listening to “Sister Kate” by the Ditty Bops, when I finally noticed a police car with its lights flashing one car behind me. I thought the lights’ target was the white Volkswagen directly behind me, so I pulled over to give them some room. To my complete shock, however, the police car pulled behind me and the officer walked up next to my car, made me roll the windows down, and asked me to pull into the straight away 100 yards ahead. Confused as to what a straight away was (the median), I drove a little further up the road to where I knew there was a roadside picnic area. Mistake #2.

With my hands and knees shaking badly I waited and pulled out my license and registration. Right away the officer, also named Mary, asked me why it took so long for me to pull over. Apparently I’d stopped at a stoplight and paused for a school bus without realizing her lights and sirens had been flashing for me. I was so oblivious that I’m sure the surprise registered on my face. I promised her that I had not seen her and I could tell she believed me. Then it dawned on me she thought I was trying to evade the police as I saw her pick up her radio and tell the person on the other end that everything was “OK.”

Then she asked every traffic officer’s favorite question, “Where were you going and why were you driving so fast, ma’am?”

“I’m so sorry – I’m going to work – I take this route every day and I think I’m just stressed out and distracted.”

She became suddenly very sympathetic as I had started crying.

“Are you having work stress, trouble with your family or with a boyfriend?”

Her sincere concern was so touching and unexpected that I started crying more.

“Oh, it’s just work stress,” I said as I reached for the Kleenex I had stashed in my car for my frequent crying jags on my commutes home.

“What’s been going on?” she inquired, sounding more like a therapist than law enforcement.

I figured I had nothing to lose if I responded honestly; besides, it helped my chances of avoiding a speeding ticket.

“Well, my boss recently called me into her office to tell me she was afraid I wouldn’t be able to mingle and make small talk at an industry cocktail party,” (which was true), “there’s rumors about layoffs, and Tuesday mornings are stressful because we have to put out the weekly newsletter.” I think I rattled off more stuff as the crying escalated.

Then Mary started in with the advice.

“Have you tried taking your boss out for coffee and tried getting to know her outside of work? Or request meetings with her. Or maybe you should look for jobs outside of publishing? You know, my husband is a writer and I was a journalism major. The economy is hard in this business. Maybe you need a career change?”

If she had been mean and all business, I probably wouldn’t have dissolved the way I did, but the fact that she was going above and beyond the call of writing a simple speeding ticket compelled me to unload more troubles.

“This has got to be tough on you,” she continued, “It’s gotta be taking a toll on your health!”

Still intent on avoiding a ticket, I upped the honesty ante.

“It has,” I sobbed. “I get the dry heaves in the shower every morning, have more headaches. It’s even gotten to the point that I’m too tense to even pee at work!” True statement? Yes. Probably too much information? Certainly.

“Mary!” she said, “You’ve got to get this under control. I know a man who’s incontinent for the same reason. You can’t let this stuff bother you!”

I was starting to run out of tissues, so she handed me more through the window.

She doled out some more career advice and tips for coping with work stress and the economy. Most importantly, she let me get away without a ticket and set me on my way so I wouldn’t be too late for work.

“When you get there, don’t tell your boss you got pulled over. Just tell her you overslept or something. Brush yourself off and STOP CRYING. You can’t drive safely while you’re crying. It’s going to be OK.”

I was still so flabbergasted by her kindness and the mercy she showed sparing me the ticket that it was about a mile before I could get the tears to stop.

After work that day, as I recounted the incident to a friend, she said, “Please tell me she was a sassy black police officer. It just fits the story so well.”

“No, she wasn’t,” I laughed. “She was more like Frances McDormand in ‘Fargo’ than Queen Latifah.”

When Christmas rolled around I decided to send an email to the suburb’s chief of police to inquire about how to send Mary a Christmas card and to let the department know that she deserved either a raise or job security for life for being such an awesome employee. When he wrote me back, he assured me that he knew how valuable she is, and told me to send a card to the department for her.

When I wrote the radio piece, I told the producers that they should interview her also, since I was curious to know what she thought of me in that moment. Did she often counsel speeders? Why didn’t she just write me a ticket and send me on my way? Though, in hindsight, it occurred to me that it was probably unsafe to ticket someone who would continue crying on their way to work. She likely considered me a threat to public safety if she couldn’t calm me down.

So that’s the whole story. It’s worth noting, though, that the next time I got pulled over for speeding, this time on Lake Shore Drive, I didn’t fare so well. I got a ticket and four hours of online traffic safety class. No amount of crying would’ve impressed THAT officer.

Books, Bikes and My Brain

In case anyone was concerned by my complete lack of posts recently, no I haven’t had any bike-related injuries rendering me unable to type. Which is kind of a miracle in itself, really. I was completely expecting to have at least a couple “Mary Bites the Dust” stories by now, but so far, smooth sailing. I can scarcely believe it myself.

On my way home from a ride last night, I ran (not literally!) into a friend who was out for a walk. After I introduced her to Hildy, she told me she’d been holed up all day working on a spiritual memoir. More specifically, she said the memoir is about her search to figure out where God is during a trauma — in her case, a life-threatening childhood illness. The ensuing conversation reminded me that I hadn’t yet properly reviewed the migraine memoir “A Brain As Wide as the Sky” yet like I promised I would a few weeks ago. I realized the reason I hadn’t written the post yet is the same reason I haven’t written openly about my own migraines since immediately after my stimulator surgery: I had long given up on trying to derive any meaning from them.

I’m not sure how it happened, but somewhere along the way I had internalized the belief that constantly writing or thinking about how migraines impact me means I’m “dwelling” on it too much — and everyone knows that dwelling automatically leads to self pity. And people who indulge in self pity start to use their illness to get out of things and avoid responsibility. This is nonsense, of course, but it took me a long time to understand that.

I knew I would love this book when I saw an excerpt on Amazon where the author, Andrew Levy, compares having a migraine to “being punched in the face by God.” Shockingly, he doesn’t resent God for this — quite the opposite actually. He writes: “Look at what most appalls God: stiff-necked people, people with hardened hearts. As Elaine Scarry writes in an absolutely perfect phrase, God’s ‘forceful shattering of the reluctant human surface and repossession of the interior’ is where the Old Testament action really lies. God doesn’t have an agenda: He just wants us to be pliant, humble, cracks us open like eggshells because that, really, is all we are. And pain is the agent that makes this happen.”

As I mentioned, this book is the reason I decided to call my bike Hildegard, after the eleventh century migraine sufferer and saint, Hildegard Von Bingen. Levy opens one chapter with a passage from her writings: “But I, though I saw and heard these things, refused to write for a long time through doubt and bad opinion and the diversity of human words…until, laid low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a bed of sickness; then, compelled at last by many illnesses, I set my hand to the writing.”

Thankfully, Levy doesn’t spend the whole book talking about migraines through a Christian-only lens. He offers an equally fascinating take on chronic pain and its reasons for existing from Buddhist, Darwinian, Freudian and historical perspectives. For example, he says Buddha is the man for pain: “It seems to me that the migraines accomplish much of what Buddhist teachers hope to accomplish for their pupils with meditation. They clear the mind wonderfully. During a migraine (the worse the better, of course), you will not be thinking about food cravings, or sexual desire, or work anxiety, or all of those worldly matters that calm breathing practices are supposed to sweep from the mind. You will be thinking about the migraine, but even this, somehow, seems right: the Buddhist teachers often recommend focus on some single mantra, some process, some conundrum, some object.”

The historical perspective Levy uncovered was new to me also. I used to consider myself a bit of an expert on famous migraineurs, such as Elvis, but this book was eye opening in that I learned so many of my favorite artists and writers suffered too — no wonder their work has spoken to me for so long. Their ranks include Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keefe, Van Gogh, Picasso, Dalí, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Nietzche, Susan Sontag, Monica Seles, Oliver Sacks, Ulysses S. Grant, Chopin, Rudyard Kipling and lots of others. That these people, despite their level of disability, were still able to make such significant artistic and cultural contributions in their less painful moments is hugely encouraging. His discussion about how pain affects creativity is something I’ve missed in my attempts not to “dwell” on my own suffering.

Writes Levy: “They were all rebellious thinkers — although, sometimes, surprisingly reserved ones, often disabled by what liberated them…it is not enough to tough it out. When migraine doesn’t want you catatonic, it wants you making something new and won’t rest until you do.”

What I appreciated the most about this book though, is how Levy doesn’t sugarcoat the reality of chronic migraines. He doesn’t try to minimize it or spin it into lemonade. He talks about the resentment, the fear, the depression, the anger and the frustration it also inspires. He writes about the dark sides in a way I’ve never been able to fully recognize or articulate. He writes about it without fearing that others will see him as lazy or faking it. He acknowledges that migraine is often seen as a woman’s disease and thus, stigmatizing.

When I saw Andrew Levy speak at the Printer’s Row Book Fair earlier this summer, he and the discussion moderator, Paula Kamen, brought up a point I had never considered before: When you go through life constantly trying to cure your headaches, you’re really missing out on life. By waiting for so many years for my head to get better before making a go of it by myself, I had put my life on hold. Immediately, I was sad it took me 29 years to recognize this, but then I realized some people never figure it out.

In closing, I offer this paragraph from the book (which you should totally read, by the way):

“In the end, you cannot divide the headaches from the art they help produce (or suffocate in infancy). And the wild treatment, the headlong dive across Europe, one’s own skull as the canvas or the clay? In the end, you cannot divide the desperation to find a cure from the need to create, or from the intellectual desire that compels you to try and answer these damn questions, and not live with the question marks.”

Feet, Meet Pedals

What’s the fastest way to combine all of my biggest fears at once: seriously losing my balance in public; flying ass-over-teakettle over the top of a hastily opened car door; running over a small child; making ill-fated impulse transportation purchases; going through a well-intended, going through half-hearted but mostly inexpensive phase?
Turns out buying a 30-year-old bike on Craigslist accomplishes all of the above. After the Jetta-buying Fiasco of 2007, I vowed to wait longer than 24 hours before buying anything with wheels ever again, but a deal is a deal. Which is why I named said bike, a pretty sky-blue1973 Schwinn Suburban, after St. Hildegard, an11th century nun and severe migraine sufferer. A bike can’t go wrong if you give it a saint’s name immediately, right?

 

(I first read about Hildegard von Bingen in the excellent new migraine memoir “A Brain As Wide As the Sky,” by Andrew Levy. Incidentally, Levy signed my copy of the book at the Printer’s Row Book Fair last weekend, and I plan to post a much lengthier review of it in the very near future.)

The thing nobody realizes when they say something like “Don’t worry, you won’t forget, it’s just like riding a bike,” is that getting back on a bike after many, many years is really hard! If I lived in Princeton I’d haul the bike to a cemetery and re-teach myself the basics — you know — important things such as starting and stopping, making 90 degree turns, playing chicken with cars on narrow roads, and avoiding other potentially deadly hazards.

 

Instead, on my first jaunt today, I reminded myself of one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen. One day Katie, Ryan and I saw a father teaching his little girl how to ride her bike on a busy street in downtown Evanston. While we waited for a stoplight we overheard the dad ask the girl “Are you OK? Are you scared?” To which she said “Yeah, I’m scared!” Then her dad asked, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how scared are you? Really scared?” “Really scared, a 10,” she said.

Using the same scale, I was probably at a 6 on the relatively quiet residential streets I practiced on today. But I’m within riding distance of a couple big cemeteries, so stay tuned.

 

But, and this is key, the most important thing is having a patient teacher.

It’s Come To This

The train wreck that was my first real car purchase is a long story — and certainly much more expensive than the pigeon fiasco. I’ve only refrained from telling it on here because I’m still hoping for clearer hindsight. The title of that post, when I inevitably write it, will be “10 Stupid Things I Did In My 20s.” (Look for it in six more months when my 20s will be behind me.)

But since I’ve heard almost entirely bad news from everyone I know this week, I know I could use a little laugh. Even if it’s at my own expense. So what the hell.

With money tighter than usual, whenever the tiniest symptom of potential disaster presents itself, I react with maybe just a tad more urgency than usual. For instance, I emailed building management the second I saw a pigeon land on my windowsill (see post below). When Firefox or Chrome loaded too slowly one day, I rushed my computer to the Geek Squad and made several contingency plans in the event they had to send it out (they didn’t).

So when I got lost on my way to a nannying case last week, I froze when I heard my car make some ominous noises. My radio is almost always on, usually loudly, so I’m somewhat unaware of my car’s usual sounds. If my muffler someday started sounding a little loud, I would be the last one to know. But when I turned the radio down so I could call the family, I noticed a weird rumbly sound I’d never heard before. It seemed to happen whenever I braked, but not the usual squeaky-brakes squeal. Just rumbly. Sickeningly so. I had to be back with the same family the next day and determined I couldn’t take action for a couple days. So I cranked the radio back up so that I could put the scary noise out of my mind — or at least earshot.

Two days later I decided to get it looked at. But after consulting my usual panel of automotive advisors learned that I first needed to take my car for a spin with the radio off and the windows down to get a better sense of where the sounds was coming from.

The minute I got in the car I knew what the problem was: an errant partially full Nalgene-like water bottle. More specifically, my last bit of swag from Kettle Foods. It’d been rolling around on the floor of my backseat — in the company of a couple cans of tennis balls — for a while.

Sure enough, I moved the bottle to a secure location and heard nothing suspicious. I laughed like an idiot for a good three blocks and thanked God that I hadn’t gotten as far as my reliable Firestone. Moral of the story: listen to your dad when he tells you to occasionally turn the music down. And, for the love of God, don’t call “Car Talk.”

Say No To Bugs

A few minutes ago I heard the very, very worst sound in the world: the sound of pigeons cooing. It seems that two of them found a fun little hangout on my bedroom window ledge, just to the left of where their other feathered friends set up their quaint little home last year, on the other side of the window unit. The instant I heard their innocent-seeming noises, I took the pad of paper I was writing on and swatted the bejeezus out of my window until they stubbornly flew away. They were plotting against me, I just know it. Trying to figure out my daily schedule so that they can come back and build a new nest as soon as I’m gone. But I am thwarting their plan. I called the building manager and requested more pigeon spikes. When I get home from my nannying gig, I won’t hesitate to get out the anti-pigeon goo and smear it on the ledge. This is war! That is, as soon as I stop itching.

Rumble at the Altar

One of the reasons I signed on to be an on-call nanny while I job hunt is that I have found that being around some kids — usually in direct proportion to their cuteness quotient and degree of crankiness — can give your mood an unexpected and always welcome boost. There were days when I was sick a lot and living at home — days that make unemployment seem like a cake walk — that visits from the kids next door were a godsend. They typically bopped on over, either one-by-one, all at once, or in pairs, unapologetically in search of candy and/or chocolate milk.

When I got better and moved to Evanston I missed their daily knocks on the door. Which is not to say they always knocked. Sometimes I didn’t even know there was anyone else in the house until they knocked on the bathroom door while I was getting out of the shower. But I always made sure I saw them on visits home. There were even some tearful  (theirs, not mine) partings when I inevitably had to leave Princeton.

Now, all of that kind of pales in comparison to the relationship my sister’s fiancé, Ryan, has with them. Their reaction to him can only be likened to Beatlemania. All of them, from the 10 year old to the toddler, can’t get enough of Ryan. And vice-versa. Ryan somehow has the stamina to give countless piggy-back rides and the ability to spark fights over who gets to sit on his lap and who gets to sit on his shoulders. When the kids are worn out from using Ryan as their own personal jungle gym, they curl up next to him and unwind for a while.

Watching Katie and Ryan and the kids interact is a sight to behold. So it was only fitting that they decided to include the girls in their wedding in October. And I, for one, can’t wait. If the ceremony is any reflection of my sister at all, it will be a most low-maintenance and relaxed affair. She is the bridal equivalent of Barack Obama — inviting of others’ opinions and open to suggestions. It’s telling that she was able to find The Dress off-the-rack without any need for alterations. (And sidenote, speaking of weddings, what’s wrong with you, California?)

I’m 99.9 percent sure that the whole show will go on without incident. But it would be shortsighted of me not to consider the following scenario: that Garity and Hensley somehow decide that they can’t share Ryan with my sister and make their feelings known when the minister asks if anyone objects to this union. I believe there’s a very small chance that a scene straight out of The Graduate could ensue. Or, in the very least, Ryan may have to compromise and give them piggy-back rides on his and Katie’s way down the aisle. So what makes me concerned? I present some photographs as evidence.

Clearly, Katie and Ryan love each other. Their engagement pictures could warm the cockles of even the most cynical singleton’s’ heart. 

See, Ryan obviously loves Katie:

And Katie definitely loves Ryan:

Looking at these pictures, it’s easy to see that Ryan’s adoration of these kids is reciprocated:

Look how Jacob, 10, lights up while he wishes Ryan a happy birthday over the phone:

And if you so much as say Ryan’s name to Garity, 5, you get this sweet little face in return:

Also, when Hensley, 7, turns on the charm, you’re kind of powerless against it.

In the end, though, romantic love will win out.

I mean, look at them.

(If you think this is schmaltzy, just wait till I write my toast for the reception).

Next Stop: The Killing Fields

Perhaps it’s telling that my idea of a pleasant afternoon these days involves making the short trek to Skokie to visit the new Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, but that’s exactly what I did today. Back in April, when it opened, I had found out too late that Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel were speaking at the grand opening, and missed my ticket-buying window. But due largely to a lull in nannying gigs and a Sarah Vowell reading binge, I decided today was the day I’d finally get over there.

Feeling a little cocky about my own Holocaust knowledgebase and past visit to the mother of all Holocaust museums in Washington, I wasn’t expecting to come out feeling significantly more informed. However, I think that because of this museum’s much smaller footprint, I got a better sense of the enormity of the Holocaust itself. Also, the it’s the fact that it’s in Skokie, and not in a city packed to the gills with overwhelming museums, that brought the experience home. Knowing that plenty of Holocaust survivors and their families live in the area makes it more tangible than looking around and seeing hordes of tourists exiting tour buses.

The most jarring part, initially, was actually entering the museum. The reviews I read correctly reported that the main entrance is difficult to find. Though to be fair, one docent did apologize for the signage throughout not being so great yet. However, there was one museum employee that looked as if he walked the perimeter of the building expressly to find wayward patrons like me and direct them in.

The fact that today may have been the sunniest day of the year so far added to the shock of finally gaining entrance. The box office area is almost completely dark — so much so that it took at least 10 seconds for my eyes to adjust and recognize the faces of the people in the ticket booth and security checkpoints.

When you see the museum from the Edens expressway, you can see that half of the building’s exterior is black and the other half is white, so that you enter in darkness and leave in a much brighter and sunnier part of the building. It’s symbolic for many reasons, which I’ll let the architecture critics and journalists explain more succinctly. But the desired effect works.

It’s been so many years ago that I visited the D.C. museum, so it may very well be that it has a sizable collection of genocide-inspired works of art, but for me, I appreciated that element of the Skokie museum the most. The works of art on display paid homage to other genocides before and since the Holocaust in places such as Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, Darfur, Armenia, Ukraine, Russia and others. And since I’m as inept at describing art as I am describing fragrances, I’ll just say that you should see it in person to get the full effect.

So, in conclusion: definitely visit the museum yourself. And spend the time watching all of the great film snippets throughout the exhibits — since the museum is small you can watch them all and still see everything in a few hours or so. And be sure to plan a less somber activity after you leave. You may need to decompress even after leaving from the white wing.