Response to the Five Questions

If you refrain from asking me these questions...we will have a happy and loving holiday season.

Some of us will, and some of us won't. I think the most important thing is that you are 17. That is important because it is an age that many people reach, though some of course do not. Many people remember 17, and I am just one of those people.

During Christmas break, when I was 17, we drove to Minnesota. My brother went to college there and I had been offered a scholarship at a small liberal arts college in the same state. I don't think most of my relatives knew this. No one asked me about college, except the teachers who had written letters of recommendation for me and my friends who were probably going to miss me, though I couldn't imagine why. I really didn't think I would get to go, that I would get out. We drove to Minnesota and the story should be that we were going there so I could visit the school that was giving me a scholarship and where I would eventually spend four years, though I couldn't imagine how.

We drove to Minnesota quickly because my grandmother had died and we needed to get home for the funeral. My parents hadn't lived together for years but they weren't yet divorced. My mother had known my grandmother since she was younger than you are now. We dropped off my brother's things and drove through the college campus that I would eventually call home. We drove through it--we did not even stop the car. On the way home, there was a terrible blizzard. One of our headlights went out, and we could not see the road right in front of the car. We found a motel and stayed there, all in one room, and I laughed and laughed at this absurd little lamp in the room because it was easier to laugh at that absurdity than all the rest. After the funeral, we found out that two of my mother's favorite nuns (she is an atheist, and went to a Catholic college, but not until she was in her 30s, did you know sometimes that is the way of things with people?) had died in a car accident on the road not far from where we pulled over to get to the motel with the lamp.

When I was 17, I did have boyfriends. One boy lived in an apartment and his mother smoked and he always told her he hated it. We had been friends before we dated, and in the best times we sat in the apartment and he played "Lenny" on his guitar while talking to me, as if we were not in love but just friends still, as if he didn't remember he was playing at all. When my mother turned 42, that boy bought her a cookie jar in the shape of farm animals: a pig, a cow, and a rooster. My kids eat candy from that cookie jar. My daughter's name is Lenny. Another boy was 20, so maybe not a boy really, but he had a car that was hopelessly old and he worked in a cafe and knew my favorite coffee and sandwich. He whittled a box to hold my playing cards. He whittled for me. Another boy lived far away and his grandmother didn't want him to date a white girl but he wrote me letters and I kissed him at a track meet. Then, there was a boy who was 19, who became a part of my family for years and years. When we first started dating, he crawled over all the other kids in the car to walk the girls to their doors and no one ever thanked him and he never said a word. Once we sat watching a fountain shoot an arc of water across the Chicago river, and it only did that once an hour, and we saw the arc 7 times. Twenty years later I discovered that fountain had a name, and I still haven't gotten over the disappointment.



I looked the same at 17 as I did at 15 as I did at 23 because I was a girl and girls age earlier, we start to look like ourselves and then we always look like ourselves, and at 17 you are already at the point where no one will tell you that you look older or taller unless they haven't seen you since a child, and then what they are really thinking is, you aren't a child anymore and you never will be again. And the thing is, you don't know this, you won't know this until you are 35 and learning to ride a bike for the first time and your daughter takes the video of you after your husband lets go, but she is afraid you will ride too far away and she doesn't want to lose you, so you come right back, and it's like being a kid again but not at all.

When I was 17, the only relatives who came to my high school graduation were my mom and my brother. My husband attended his graduation, but didn't walk to get his diploma, because he didn't care, and he was there by himself. Our graduation was formal and you had to wear a white dress, but I got permission from my dean to wear an offwhite wedding dress I had bought at a thrift store with $35 of the money I made at the job she had hand-picked for me in one of her many inexplicable actions of saving me when I didn't know how to save myself. She wore beautiful, bright clothes, and she wrote a note for me, allowing the dress, and one day she was exasperated at me for how I was ditching class all the time, and she who never swore slammed her fist down on the table and said "Damnit Katy! Just graduate from high school!" and I was actually speechless, I was without the ability to speak, for what seemed like forever until I said "Yes ma'am" and then eventually there I was, in a lace dress carrying a dozen roses and shaking her hand on a stage for longer than I needed to, I'm sure.



A few months before that, I was at a friend of a friend's house and we were going to go drive somewhere, anywhere really, because we had nothing and everything to do, and as we sat there giggling and plotting, the girl's dad came outside and glared and I thought, in that way that I used to fantasize about how corny and normal fathers behaved, that he would say have fun girls! but instead he threw his daughter the car keys, said "don't get pregnant" and slammed the house door.

Some people's parents drank too much. Some people never talked to their parents. Some didn't have parents, or lived with other people's parents. Some wanted to flee their parents.

We didn't have family parties.

And somehow, I knew the stories. I knew that my best friend's parents had met when he was a dance instructor and she was learning to dance. Years later, at her wedding, I would dance with her father and understand what the phrase "my feet didn't touch the ground" actually meant. I knew that adoption was different in the old days, because I had asked, and thought it was so curious that you could tell the kind of baby you wanted (A German baby, please), and babies were free, and no one would ever know if the teen mother had wanted to give the baby away or not, and back then, no one cared.

I knew that my grandmother loved trains and had a lot of boyfriends as a girl. I knew how much whiskey at Chicago hotel bars cost at various points in history because my grandfather was a young man during the Depression and he knew how much everything cost, everything, forever, and he used to tell me. I knew which of my uncles had been wild, I knew about people's jobs and experiences in war and everyone's favorite sports teams. My mother's brother had once had a job at a farm and he cut the heads of chickens and then they ran after him and he never ate chicken again for the rest of his life, not even today, and I knew that then, when I was 17, and I was known to ask questions.

It's hard to picture, isn't it? Someday, you will be almost 40, and there will be this idea that your life will be boring, but that is the last thing it will ever be. People say you stop talking, that life becomes mundane. It's hard to know that you will go to a bowling alley with your husband, and it is the same bowling alley you went to at 17. The people are the same but different. You are still not very good at bowling. Your husband still likes to watch you from behind. You had gone out to dinner first, and you had seen a couple so cute and obvious, he so much older and trying again, she enamored with the attention he paid her and his stories of his children who she didn't even know. After bowling, you would talk to your husband about how strange it was to see couples like that, so deeply in love as if the other loves weren't real, except that's the thing, isn't it? You told your husband that at the moment of your biggest breakup, which sounds like nothing but is so much something, you told your lover that the hardest part was not that you would never fall in love again, never feel like that again, but that you would. And your husband just said "oh." And you told him you meant it, that if you died, he should and would find someone else, and he said no, not someone like you, there isn't anyone like you. And you said, there isn't anyone like anyone. Because the things that are hardest never start out sad.



It might take more than 20 years, but you will come home from the gym one night, even though you usually go in the morning, and you will still be in your bike shorts and hoodie and headwrap, still sweaty, and you will barge into the kitchen as your husband makes pasta. You won't even sit down before you begin to tell your children about this article about the Five Questions, and how you hope they will always talk to the people who try to talk to them and show an interest in their lives, and your daughter will say "of course they will ask. Because they don't know. How can they know if they don't ask?" And you will say, ask them a question. Listen to their stories. And your husband is the quiet one, but he chimes in when you remind them that someday they might be inclined to think your casual love for them is misplaced. He will say, yeah, what do I do every day when I come home from work? I always ask "so everyone, what was your favorite part of the day?" and for now, you tell me. But you already roll your eyes when I say the same thing: "My favorite part of the day was walking in the door and seeing your smiling faces!" And your daughter will say, but DAD! You say the same thing EVERY SINGLE DAY.



And that's the story. The story you will tell someone else decades from now, in another house, maybe in another country, maybe after half the people in the story are dead, is a story about your mother in her bizarre workout clothes and inability to keep the words in, and your brother constantly getting up from the table, and your dad laughing at himself, and maybe you will remember what they were trying to teach you about being respectful and empathetic, but really, probably not. You will remember, perhaps, your mother's face burning with endorphins and intellectual agitation, when just a year before she had been like a ghost of herself, all paleness and thin hair and dizziness and lists of other people's names, and you will remember your father telling a story about himself telling the same story. Someday, you will tell someone. Every day when your father came home from work, he asked the same thing. Every day your father had the same answer. Every day, your father came home.

On Why I Don't Smoke Weed

Ferguson. There was so much I wanted to say. So much has been said already, and I'm not naive enough to think I could say things any better. I thought of so many scenarios that were fitting to discuss. I kept thinking of all that I wanted to write, but everything came down to two major concepts. So, I decided to write about my lack of shock about how the world works, and...why I don't smoke weed. Stay with me here.

The Interwebs are alive with statements about all kinds of things that have happened in my city, in the country, and in the world, that basically begin like this: I didn't realize these things still happened. I didn't think things like this happened in communities like mine. I am in shock. I thought justice would be served.

I'm not here to argue about what justice looks like. I'm here to argue that if you have lived as long as I have, and I'm not quite 40, and you believe that justice usually prevails, that is your privilege talking right there. Yes I understand that people are white, or male, or straight, or living in an actual house or apartment in a developed country, or employed, or physically abled, or what have you. And yet, as people, we live in a society. If we say that we were unaware of the injustices experienced by others--or even by people who look much like ourselves--because it hasn't happened to us SPECIFICALLY, then I will say that our lack of knowledge is, in fact, willful. If you don't see injustice, it isn't because it isn't there. It's because you never had to bother to see it. It is because you chose to look the other way in the face of it. It is because the people affected by the injustice were unimportant to you. It is because you thought that you would never be impacted by injustice, and you also believed that the only thing that mattered is what impacted you directly. If you believe that injustice requires your acceptance to be real, you have proved the point of everyone who sees justice as a goal and a dream, not a birthright or a present-day reality. If you don't see or recognize your own privilege, that is because it isn't necessary for you to see it to benefit from it.

Again, there are so many ways to explain what I mean, but I am going to choose just one--and it is one that will make me exceedingly unpopular, including, or maybe even especially, among my liberal white friends.

Here goes nothing--a decades-long explanation of why I don't smoke weed, condensed into a few paragraphs.

When I was six years old, I was diagnosed with epilepsy. I had more than 100 seizures a day and was forced to take poisonous medication that permanently enlarged my liver. As everyone here knows, I've been diagnosed with cancer twice and have done 10 months of chemotherapy. Both epilepsy and breast cancer kill 50,000 or more people in this country every year. I've dodged these bullets so far, but I don't believe there is any reason (such as my "deserving" nature) that one of these scourges would not do me in eventually. But to the point, I have taken medication all of my life because I had to, and I saw what it did to my body. It never appealed to me to do drugs. I figured it would kill me before I could ever enjoy it. So--reason #1. I get that you can argue with me about the logic of my reasoning here, or about how weed would help me rather than hurt me, but when you do that, you are ignoring what I just said to you. You are ignoring my reason, my reality, my personal and probably illogical and arbitrary association with the harshness of drugs and the price I've paid for (knock on wood) good health. You may be right, but I am not wrong. You just never had to live as me.

So, it never appealed to me. Another reason for that is this (and yes, I know this is changing, because I live in society too, and I pay attention): weed is illegal. OK, enter all the arguments about why it shouldn't be--that's what always happens when I say what I'm about to say. I get it. I don't disagree. Prohibition was a bad idea--yes, I know. But WHY was it a bad idea? Because the government helped poison booze to teach people a lesson? Because it encouraged prostitution? Because everything went underground and Al Capone got in on the gig? Arguably yes, all of the above. But while the country waited for the law to change, people went blind, people were prostituted, people died, families and communities were torn apart. You can blame the law, but the fact is, people did terrible things to each other because of the law, and the people most likely to suffer were those on the bottom rungs of the social ladder.

The fact that weed is "harmless" is not of interest to me. Because I did not grow up in a "white" neighborhood. Because I am amazed every time I ask a white person if they know anyone who has gone to prison for marijuana possession or intent to sell and they say "no." Because I do, and I have, and there are so many people.

How could I enjoy doing something with no fear of consequences that has destroyed so many other people's lives as they sit in prison for doing the same thing? Should the law change? Should sentencing change? AGAIN. NOT RELEVANT. I did not grow up believing that I could do illegal things and get away with it, because I saw so many people punished for minor nonviolent offenses. I've seen so many people punished for doing nothing at all. I once told friends who were visiting that no, they could not smoke up on my back porch, because I lived within sight of the police station. They thought I was ridiculous. Hey Katy, man, you won't get in trouble. It's cool. Nope, not cool. I own this place, and I would be responsible for the long arm of the law coming down on folks here if it were to happen, and I am not even benefiting from what's going on here, and I am not under the impression that laws were made for me to break with impunity because of my station in life. I remember dating a guy who had once OD'd on heroin, and he told me about the people in the hospital, the cops who were there, the pumping of his stomach. He was telling me how lucky he was to be alive and I kept thinking: and you didn't go to jail? They didn't arrest you, or cite you, or anything? I couldn't believe it. Now, do I think people with drug addictions should go to prison? No, of course not. I just think that many of them do. But not that guy. He was white, and from Indiana. So that's reason #2.

Reason #3 is this: Mexico.

Mexico's war on drugs is the blood diamond of our age. Before you pester me with the war on drugs not working! and see the law needs to change! and legalize! and it's not weed in Mexico anymore, now it's heroin and cocaine! I will say this: Of course, yes, sure, and I know that. But also: NOT RELEVANT.

This is the world we live in, this is the society that exists. As long as this is true, we should be willing to focus on those whose lives are being destroyed and ended rather than on our own desires. Dozens of students were kidnapped and presumably killed by a drug cartel in Mexico recently. And this is what I want you to know, to understand, to refuse to shy away from, to agree to see with your own eyes:

All indications are that the drugs that flow through those who massacred those students were headed for Chicago.

I live in Chicago. I'm sure there are people who are neighbors of mine who buy weed from Mexico; there are definitely suburban kids nearby buying heroin or coke that is funneled through Mexico. You can smoke weed, you can remain free because of it, you can benefit from it. If you are nodding your head to those statements, realize this: You are not dead. Your body is not buried in a mass grave so that someone somewhere living a life that is so safe and secure you can't even fathom it can get high. I used to be able to think of weed as a harmless thing. I know that there is less marijuana coming from Mexico, and other drugs are the hot ones now. But it doesn't really matter to me.

I think about people's faces being cut off their heads and sewn onto soccer balls. I think about 50 people being bludgeoned to death with a single hammer, each one waiting their turn, unable to flee because men with Uzis make them stay. I think of girls getting gang raped and killed and left in the desert and their families never knowing what really happened because they just disappear and no one in authority cares. I think of towns where girls who are still alive have stopped going to school, because drug cartels own their towns now, and it's not safe to go outside. I think about kids in Chicago who are caught up in the drug trade, who are used as pawns so others can make big bucks and live on Lake Shore Drive, I think about kids who can't cross this street or that one because if they do they'll get shot because these drug runners own that corner and those do not. And then I think that all of these people have lived these realities, and the justice that is coming is that maybe this drug will be legalized, and white people who have never faced negative consequences of possession or selling will be able to cash in on their homegrown.

I have never been to Mexico. I don't live in a neighborhood plagued by gang violence fueled by the drug trade. None of my family sits in prison on a possession charge. I have no "disappeared" loved ones. I might be plagued by the threat of sexual violence but I have not had to give up other civil rights because of it. My children are too young to know about drugs.

And yet.

I think about these things, about how my decisions and my reality and my privilege intersects with the reality of the world right now, as it is. I think about how people can't wait for the laws to change, because it's too late for them. I think about people who have seen their lives utterly destroyed over something that is just fun for those who receive it.

I live in this society, in this world.

I cannot un-see those faces on soccer balls. I cannot. I will not. If I were to say "harmless," I would be denying the truth or the importance of those people's lives and gruesome deaths.

I know I might have lost a lot of friends here. I know this might seem a long way off of Ferguson. But to me, it's not. If you are white, or live in the suburbs, or in general live a life of privilege, think about how many things you have done that are wrong, immoral, or illegal, or maybe even all three, that didn't land you in prison. That didn't lead you to be raped or tortured or killed in a hail of bullets. Think about the times that justice served you, and your expectation that it would.

And don't tell me you didn't realize. You just didn't have to, and therein lies the difference.

Consent Part Five: Grab Bag

We've all been there at some point.

Or, at least all women have been there.

You are walking down the street, and you hear someone approaching behind you. You have learned to listen. Is the person running, walking, biking? If you are the one approaching someone else, you know to either speed up or slow down to avoid that awkward moment when you are right next to each other. You wait to hear the "excuse me" or the "on your left" or you say those things yourself. Yesterday, at 3:30 in the afternoon, I was taking a walk in my neighborhood. I was about 4 blocks from home, across the street from a park. I heard footsteps behind me. They got faster and faster and nearer and nearer. I made an assumption. I assumed there was a woman (specifically) walking behind me, and that she was speeding up so she could pass me. But she got really close and I heard no "excuse me."

And then I felt a hand grabbing my ass.

I spun around, shocked and yet not really because that shit has happened so many times before, you know?

And I was looking right at a boy who could not have been older than 13.

He looked mortified when he saw my face. He said excuse me, uh I'm sorry, and then he literally ran across the street into the park. I didn't have time to do anything more than glare at him.

And then I started questioning my own interpretation of what just happened. He looked so embarrassed, it must have been an accident. Maybe he just bumped into me because he wasn't watching where he was going. Hmm. But no, that's not possible. Does your hand ever accidentally form itself into a cupping shape and then oh my god how did that happen there's a woman's ass inside it? I have lived on this earth almost 39 years and that has never happened to my hand. So I knew he did it on purpose, but I couldn't figure out his reaction. I shrugged my shoulders and muttered something to myself about punk kids and then continued on my walk and kind of forgot about it. When Gabe got home hours later he asked me how my walk was and I remembered and said I had something to tell him later after dinner. When I told him this story, rolling my eyes in the process, he had an interpretation that hadn't occurred to me.

"He thought you were a kid, like him."

"Huh?"

"From behind, you looked like a kid, like a young teenager or something. When you turned around he realized you were a grown woman and he got scared."

"OK, that's plausible. But what the hell? So it's ok to go around grabbing random young girls' asses?"

"Well, he thought if you were a kid, he would get away with it. He thought you wouldn't say or do anything."

And therein lies a lesson that boys have learned by middle school, apparently. Young girls are embarrassed and scared and confused when weird and offensive things happen to them, so go ahead and do those things! They're not talking! But these moms, you never know, after more than a quarter century of this shit they might just call the cops! Stay away from them.

And then I started wondering about the thought process in this boy's brain. Was it just a matter of thinking, huh, that's a nice ass, I need to speed up and grab it? Was he trying to intimidate me? Did he think I would giggle and flirt or maybe grab his ass in return?

Now look. This incident was not that big of a deal--at least to me. I have a very thick skin, and even when I know things are offensive or wrong, I shrug them off pretty easily. Some women might have been very upset, others might have been flattered; there are a million possible reactions. I felt annoyed and then indifferent.

But my reaction is irrelevant.

It is not my reaction that dictates that the thing was wrong. He knew it was wrong. He would never have looked so terrified if he hadn't.

And I know that there's a question percolating in the minds of at least some who are reading this. Don't lie. You are wondering:

What were you wearing?

I won't even bother to answer that question.

I think this incident is pretty minor in the scheme of things. But the overall message is less so.

Let me start by saying that my ass has been grabbed by people more times than I could possibly remember. And by "people," I do not mean boyfriends, lovers, or husbands. In those cases, hands might have been on my ass multiple hours of the day. I regularly get annoyed at Gabe for excessive ass-grabbing. But, I also love him. And I chose him. And I know that he will back off when I glare at him. And I grab his ass in turn. He in fact has his share of ass. A lot of guys, white guys especially, cannot claim any junk in the trunk. Not so Gabe. And yet, a stranger has never grabbed his ass, not one time. Similarly, no stranger has ever touched his stomach, his chest, his face, his hair, the small of his back, his hips, or his legs. All of these things have happened to me numerous times. We are exactly the same age.

When I had long curly hair, it was normal--well, not normal, but common--for people I didn't know to touch my hair. Men did this all the time. Sometimes old ladies did it too. A few times, people (men) stopped their cars in the middle of the street, got out, grabbed my hair, told me it was beautiful, and then went back to their cars. I have had men grab my face in a bar and tell me how pretty I am. On the very first blind date I ever went on, I got into a conversation with the guy about car accidents, because we had both survived bad ones. He had broken a few ribs in his, and I told him about my broken hips and needing to learn to walk again. After dinner, he held the door open for me and we started walking down the street. He positioned himself in front of me, grabbed my hips with his hands, and said "wow! you've got great hips! that accident couldn't change that!" This guy really liked me and we went out on a few more dates and I never, ever let him touch me after that.

You can tell me that this is just small stuff, that none of this matters, that I am overreacting. But I am not writing this to say that I was traumatized by some idiot boy's hand on my ass.

What I am thinking about is how this kind of relentless and unwanted touching and the assumption that it happens all the time and is just a yawning bore affects our nature and potentially changes it.

My mother will tell you that I was never a particularly affectionate kid. My brother loved to be held and cuddled and sung to and to have his back rubbed. I cried in my mother's arms as a baby until she put me down in my crib and left me alone to chatter happily to myself. This overall pattern has never changed. I can be affectionate, but never overly so. Every boy and man I have ever been with has been more affectionate than me. So, that is my nature. But I do wonder if my nature was exacerbated by the constant and unwanted attention and touching. This was at its worst from ages 12-19. It was so bad in high school I learned to walk with my books close to my chest so that one boy with the locker near mine wouldn't grab my breasts in between classes.

That is overtly sexual touching. But the space invasion starts much earlier and is more subtle. Let me use my children as an example. I would say that of the two, Augie is absolutely the more naturally affectionate child. He grabs your face to kiss you. He likes to snuggle and wrestle. Lenny likes to read by herself and give you a little kiss goodnight. Now, maybe they are just like that. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that people have been touching Lenny and getting in her face all her life. Telling her she is beautiful. Stopping her in her path at 2, 3 years old, crouching down, getting right up in her grill and saying what a pretty girl she is and touching her hair. Adults have told her she is tiny, she is gorgeous, she's a beauty. The child is eight.



Then there's Augie. The one with the beautiful curly hair, just like mine was. People comment on his hair all the time. But there is a huge difference.

They never--NEVER--comment on his hair to him.

They say it to me, or his dad.

Men and women notice his hair. They stand aside and let him run around and do whatever he is going to do, and then they remark about it, to some trusted adult. They must think it would seem weird to get in a little kid's face, tell him he's a handsome son of a gun and oh my god that hair while they grabbed his curls. They must think he has the right to move his body and not be stopped in his tracks.

They must realize he's a boy.



We do this in so many subtle ways. We lament how boys are being asked to give up their nature; we wring our hands over it if boys are told to do things we have decided are contrary to their nature like sit down, read, or pay attention. Never mind the assumption that any of those things are true, what interests me is how we think it is such a shame for boys to ever have to do anything that is contrary to who they are.

Because we ask girls to do this all the time. Maybe girls are just as horny as boys, but we teach them not to be. Or, like me, they are too suspicious of people and they don't trust boys or men enough to act out on the promiscuity that probably comes naturally to them. Maybe girls are just as goofy or restless or crazy in their natural state but at some point they learn to tone it down so as not to be so noticeable. Maybe girls look at people's asses, and manage to keep their hands to themselves anyway.

Would it be so wrong to find some sense of balance, where we tell boys to deny their urges and desires more often and girls to pay attention to them? I mean look. We are all human beings with hormones and instincts. But we also live in a society where it matters how we behave and how we treat other people.

I would love for my daughter to be as free and trusting as my son. But she isn't. I see her get smaller in herself when she gets attention for how she looks. And I see him puffing up his chest and reveling in it.

One day, Lenny was lamenting her straight hair. This was mostly because she hates brushing it, and you don't need to brush curly hair. "I wish I had hair like Augie's," she said.

"No you don't, honey," Gabe replied. She said she did, and why not?
"Because people would touch you all the time if you did. You would hate that."
"But they don't do that to Augie."
"No, they don't."

And ain't that the truth.

This is a small story. It isn't really an important one. But it is one that I can tell easily, and that every woman I know could tell just as easily as me. Above all else, there is one thing I regret about the way this story ends.

I wish I had had more time. I would have grabbed that kid's phone out of his pocket and threatened to call his mother.

The World Cup: Not My Kind of Football

I was in the office yesterday, having a particularly absurd professional moment of chaos that eventually turned out just fine, when I walked past a conference room and glanced inside, wondering why all the lights were off but there was sound emanating from the room.

A bunch of dudes (yes, all men, at least at that point) were watching the World Cup. In the office. You know, utilizing company resources and stuff. With no fear of repercussion.

I love the World Cup for that reason alone.

I'm no fan of the sport. I don't know why. I still call it "soccer." I think it's like baseball. You have to grow up with it to love it, and I didn't grow up with soccer--I grew up with baseball. I grew up with the other kind of football, the one that is admittedly badly named. Anyhow, I do not love the sport itself. I have nothing against it--it just doesn't capture my interest. In that way, to me, it's kind of like...golf.

But I love everything else about the World Cup. I love anything that can take people outside of one cultural moment, like meeting/office culture, and bring them into another cultural moment, like sport. I love that people all over the world are watching the same events at the same time. I love that people lose sleep. I love the way I get information about the games through social media.

But most of all, I love the World Cup for the memories.

Exactly 20 years ago, Chicago hosted the World Cup. I was 18 years old and had just finished my freshman year of college. I came home for the summer and began working at Kroch's and Brentano's, a famous old Chicago landmark right in the heart of the loop, back when bookstores were a THING. That flagship store was huge. I have some extremely vivid memories of working there, all while collecting my $5 an hour and standing on my feet for 9 hours straight, realizing that I don't actually like people, or that at least I don't actually like CUSTOMERS. I remember:

the guy named Mike who was my closest "friend" at the store. He was a little older than me, maybe 22, and was already a vet, having served in the first Gulf War (remember that one?) when he was just a teenager. I remember how I could tell, even at my age, how hard it was for him to re-integrate into society after being in the army straight out of high school. He brought the same boring lunch with him every day: flavorless beans and rice. While the rest of us downed our lunches in 5 minutes and spent the rest of our 25 minute break outside smoking or blowing an hour's worth of wages on coffee or just walking around the park, he spent the whole time doing pushups. He woke up at 4:30 every morning, or so he told me. And, every single day, he "coincidentally" met me at my train stop to walk me to work, even though he took a different line. He walked me to the train after work every single day as well. If my boyfriend was meeting me, he would casually walk away as if that had been his plan all along. I was too clueless to realize why he did those things, though it should have been obvious, especially that one time when he

had my back as I got my revenge against the customers who harassed me while buying their porn. Kroch's was a major distributor of newspapers and magazines, and had more periodicals than any other single store in the country (or something like that) at the time. Twenty years ago, before Internet porn, men bought magazines. They bought Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler and Playgirl. They bought the French, Brazilian, and German versions of those magazines, all of which were hidden behind the register so they could not stand in the store itself jerking off to porn. Some of those men would be extremely embarrassed as they stood in my line and asked me for the porn they wanted. Those men got even more uncomfortable as Mike glared at them and muttered things about how they should have had the sense to get in a different line. Others lived for those moments. You see, the international porn magazines had naked women right on the cover! You didn't even need to look inside. So some dude would say, hi honey, can you show me that French Penthouse? And I would have to stand there holding it while he looked at that and at my 18 year old self. UGh. The worst. But then, a wonderful cultural icon named Tonya Harding decided to make the world's first truly infamous "sex tape" by filming herself having sex with a really crappy video camera...and then selling STILL PHOTOS FROM THE CRAPPY VIDEO TO PENTHOUSE. And then people pre-ordered this crap, and awaited its release with bated breath. And then the dudes came into the store in droves, asking for their special orders, and I spent an entire day selling porn to suits who were going to go jack off to blurry pictures of felons in company restrooms. By about 2 pm I had had enough. So when the really cocky, flirty suit WINKED AT ME, I looked him up and down and realized he had no briefcase and no jacket, so therefore nowhere to hide his magazine. And Mike nudged me, giving me a signal, and smoothly hid all of our paper bags from view. And I told the dude we were fresh out of paper bags. Here's your see-through flimsy plastic bag, sir. Now your boss will know what's up.

Ah, Mike.

But not everyone was like those guys. When I say we had more periodicals than anyone, I mean it. We had newspapers from all over the world, in dozens of languages. We had regular customers who would come in once a week to buy seven days worth of four different Arabic-language papers. Those customers had special shelves dedicated to them. We knew when they were on vacation. We knew their names and their families' names and we knew many of their stories. There were other regulars (regulars, people. regulars in a bookstore) who came in every morning for LeMonde. My little brain was always full of stories about all of these people, walking around with bundles of newsprint, trying to find a way to connect back home in a time just before those connections you could touch with your hands would become irrelevant.

And then, there were the people who came to Chicago for the World Cup.

The jerseys! The colors! The swearing in 27 languages! The women who wore white blazers! The men who wore short shorts! The young men who had no interest in porn because they were buying every single newspaper from Spain just for their country's version of the sports! The children who would have to console their parents over the outcome! The fathers who just assumed I loved football and would earnestly try to overcome the language barrier to talk to me about it, reminding me that the world was filled with people like them and like Mike and like the penthouse guys!

My God.

It was beautiful.

I've had a lot of jobs. I've even kind of made a career for myself. But I will always remember working in a bookstore for $40 a day when I was 18, discussing the news of the world with people from every corner of it, watching them fall to their knees screaming GOOOAAAALLLL, clutching crumpled papers to their chests as they grieved and rejoiced for places I had never seen. When you mention the World Cup to me, that's what I see in my mind. And I am 18 again, and the world is a very, very colorful place.

26 Things My Husband Thought Were a Good Idea at the Time

Next weekend is Gabe's 39th birthday. For the third year in a row, I will be on a business trip at that time. Well, actually, weather and flights permitting, I will be home the night before his birthday, but he will be left with all of the end of school year drama and planning while I miss the last day of school, and the reality is that I will probably arrive home from Dallas with little more than some cheap souvenir for him, and then the next day is Father's day, and MY GOD. There's no time. So. I'm writing this now. When Gabe and I met, we were 27. Lots of birthdays have passed since then. He spent his 35th birthday at the oncologist's office with me, helping me make my chemo game plan the first time around. I've written him birthday letters and even lists about what I like about him via my blogs before, and I could get serious like that again.

Or not.

Everyone knows we have this weird little household going on over here. It's not like I have to search hard for material if I want to talk about something absurd. Most of the time Gabe doesn't mind being fodder for that material. And the reality is that while I could talk about the absurdity, I could also talk about the stupid or hurtful things he's done or the really meaningful things or the really useful things like teaching our son to pee sitting down, and of those choices, this seems the most appropriate. So here goes. Off the top of my head, here are

26 Things My Husband Thought Were a Good Idea at the Time

1. Trying to save a tree branch by propping it up with some twine and scotch tape.



2. Forgoing the oh so unnecessary trips to the body shop and overly investing in duct tape and post it notes to keep his car held together.



3. Speaking of that car, taking a really long time to pick up the babysitter before one of our dates, because on the way over there he somehow managed to pick up a hitchhiker and tried to sell that dude said crappy car. And no, thankfully, the hitchhiker and the babysitter weren't in the car at the same time.

4. Taking Leona's up on their challenge to see if anyone could eat an entire slab of ribs along with an entire order of lasagna. The prize for achieving this? An enormous free ice cream sundae. We don't speak of that night.

5. Answering the door wearing nothing but boxer briefs, or, worse, boxer briefs and a bathrobe, leaving him looking like one of those porn stars from the 70s with the chest hair on display and all.

6. Telling our daughter that beauty is not really important, because after all, what would happen if you fell in a vat of acid and your face got totally messed up? You'd still be the same person.

7. Practicing circus tricks:



8. Deciding to ride his bike to the dentist's office. At night. In February. During a blizzard. It didn't end well.

9. This seems to be a theme, but hanging laundry on the clothes line in the backyard. Without any pants on.

10. Buying me a year's supply of cheap winter gloves, in May, for Mother's Day, because "you can never have too many."

11. This:



12. And this:




13. Again with the boxer briefs (maybe that should be the title of this post?): running outside in his skivvies and robe at 5:30 in the morning, shaking his fist and screaming at the newspaper delivery guy "STOP DRIVING OVER MY LAWN!" like he was 107 years old.

14. Not calling his new girlfriend after they had sex for the first time. So she called him instead and said "this isn't a movie. stop being an asshole." Of course, he later had to remind her that the first few times they slept together, she didn't let him spend the night and just kicked him to the curb afterwards, though she claims no memory of that ever happening.

15. Telling his new girlfriend he would have babies with her...after they had known each other for two weeks.

16. Planning an excellent third date, complete with stops at Dunkin Donuts, an ice cream shop, and a drag show.

17. Hiding the engagement ring in a hot dog, except it was too much pressure, so he balked and had to hide it in his pajama pocket and ask me if I would "marry him anyway."

18. Asking a fisherman for help after we had locked ourselves out because we were having sex outside at midnight, and it was pitch black and again with the boxer briefs, but this time he was also wearing water shoes that he found sitting in the lawn, so he walked right up to the lake, flagged down the lone boat, and said, "You look like a big, strong guy. Maybe you could help me." After which he got back in the house by climbing on this guy's back, then scampering up a 2x4 the guy had braced on the outside wall, until he could bust the screen in with his elbow and do a backflip through the window into the house. And then he had to bribe the guy with a whole case of beer to get him to leave and stop looking through the house for his wife, who at that point was hiding in the closet. OK so that's a longer story than I have room for here.

19. Telling the guy who was in line behind him at Planned Parenthood waiting for his vasectomy that he looked "pretty good for a guy who was about to have an abortion."

20. Shoveling our driveway while wearing the Superman footie pajamas with the cape.

21. Falling asleep playing Candyland.



22. Placing his deodorant on the kitchen counter and a box of triscuits in the shoe tree.

23. Hiding condoms all over the house "just in case," including in houseplants and a crayon box.

24. Giving me this card for my birthday. On the inside it says "don't let the bastard win."



25. Hoarding dark chocolate from Trader Joe's at the neighbors' house so I wouldn't find out how bad his addiction was.

26. Allowing me to publish this.

Happy 39, baby.

Consent Part Four: The Things They Said

I have been wanting to write this for a while, but couldn't figure out how to do it. Actually, there is a much larger piece I would like to write, but I don't have the bandwidth in my mind right now. That piece would be about what we consider to be the "right" kind of victim of sexual abuse, including the "right" kind of response that such a person should exhibit. But I get tired just thinking about that. Also, I have thought about writing about what the perpetrators of various acts have said to me, but I don't think their voices really deserve to be heard. So instead, I'm going to do this: I'm going to give examples of things that were said to me by OTHER PEOPLE, many of them female, some of them adults, some of them police officers and other figures of authority, when I tried to tell about something that happened to me. It is because of these types of responses that I decided I wasn't talking. It's bad enough to experience something you know is wrong; it's worse being told you are lying or crazy or just to SHUT UP about it already. It's bad enough having something happen once, but the reality is that most girls and women and yes some boys and men too have so many of these things happen to them over and over again that it begins to seem like something that is just par for the course, an inevitability, and THAT, my friends is how silence is perpetrated and the rape culture continues.

People said these things to me after I tried to tell about a variety of incidents: molestation as a young girl; what I understand to be sexual assault now (when I was growing up, there was rape or no rape--nothing else short of penetration "counted"), threatened gang rape, stalking, propositions from a teacher, various kinds of sexual harassment (at school, at work, online, on the street) etc. While none of these things happened to me at the hands of any of my chosen partners, some of these things were done by people I considered to be friends or trusted figures of authority. And then, I eventually tried to tell someone. And they said these types of things to me.:

I guess it's a good thing you weren't drunk.

What were you wearing?

Why were you in that room with them?

Oh, you are so conceited!

(eyes rolling): Stop looking for attention! (I also heard, "you always get all the attention!")

If he didn't physically assault you, there's nothing we can do about it.

You're overreacting.

He was just being friendly.

That's impossible. I've known him since I was little.

It's normal for him to think that way, even if he's an adult.

What did you expect?

Big surprise! I mean, look at you!

Someday you'll wish you got those kind of remarks from men.

You should be grateful.

But isn't that how you see yourself?

You must be used to that kind of thing.

Why don't you cut your hair?

Well, you DO look older.

Well, you DO look younger.

What does Gabe (or insert name of current boyfriend) think about that?

Why didn't you call the police?

You were lucky.

This happened such a long time ago. Aren't you over it yet?

GET OVER IT.

I could go on, but do I really need to do that?

There are two things that are coming to my mind right now. One involves the things that were not said, the things that were not done. When I got called into the Dean's office in high school because I had ditched so many English classes, she was furious and confused. I told her this: Every single time that Mr. X substitutes, I will turn around and walk out the door. I will ditch every single time. And I was practically begging her with my youthful defiance to ask me why, but she didn't. She didn't say a word. She gestured for me to leave her office. And she never again called me back in or threatened to punish me if I ditched.

And then I am thinking of that moment right after the little voice in my head told me I was trapped, that it was hopeless. I was being held by two boys, both so much stronger than me, one behind me and one in front of me, both of them holding one of my arms so I couldn't fight and both of them taking my clothes off and undoing my bra and abusing me with their other hand while other boys did nothing or stood there laughing or started walking over to me while I screamed. When the boy in front moved one of his hands so he could unzip his pants the little voice in my head said "now's your chance" and somehow willed my little fist in my suddenly free hand into a ball for the first time in my life and I punched that boy square in the mouth. And I can hear his words all these years later, and I can see the hate-tinged surprise on his face as I successfully ran away:

"What a fucking bitch."

The Lost Boy

She spent 35 years looking for him.

35 years of growing up, growing older, having children of her own, making the decision and the sacrifice to raise her son’s child when he turned out to be too young, immature, and, yes, maybe even dysfunctional, to do it himself. Thirty five years spent wondering about a baby boy she knew only briefly and then never saw again.

It was 1976. Winter. She was 20 years old, idealistic, anti-establishment, a card-carrying member of the communist party living in a co-op in the Midwest on a beautiful plot of land overlooking a large lake in the midst of a university campus. There were a handful of children living in the co-op, and they all considered the children to be their own, to some extent. That was part of it—the collective mothering, the responsibility and desire to look out for one another. There was only one infant, an adorable boy who at 8 months old had lived among them for maybe 6 months.

One day, she heard crying. She heard it, and expected to hear it stop. The crying only intensified. She went to investigate, running through cavernous hallways with no central heating, to the room the infant boy shared with his 25 year old mother. She wasn’t there. The windows were wide open, letting the cold and even the snow in, and still, she heard crying.

He was there, in the crib, wearing nothing but a wet diaper. Shocked, she grabbed him, changed him, closed the windows, rocked him and covered him in blankets. She fed him a bottle. There was no sign of his mother, not for hours. When she finally returned, she turned on her in a fury and demanded to know how she could leave him like that. He could have gotten sick! He could have died!

And the baby’s mother said: “He needs to learn how to be alone.”

She sat there, stunned, knowing what she must do. Someone came to get him a few weeks later. She didn’t see him again, not for 35 years.

How could she know what she had done that day? How could she know that she had, perhaps, instilled in that boy a sixth sense, an ability to ask for help and to find someone who would be willing and able to care for him? How could she know that he would be raised with unconditional love by other family members until he was taken away, by his mother, at six years old? How could she know that the little boy would find others like her: his mother’s boyfriends, his friends’ parents, legions of people, who would help to raise him over the years?

She could not know that. She knew nothing of him. She had no idea if he had survived. And then, someone came up with the idea of a reunion for the still-running co-op. That was it--her chance, her excuse, to finally find the lost boy. He was hard to find, off the grid almost, but eventually she had success. An email was sent. Days later, he responded.

He was alive.

He lived less than 200 miles away. He agreed to attend the reunion with his wife and children.

He had a wife and children.

She was, of course, thrilled at the idea of seeing him again, having thought of him so often over the years. But in some sense, seeing him mattered less now that she knew he was out there in the world living out the promise of his life.

He arrived with his family, looking out of place in sensible clothes, with no piercings or tattoos, pushing a stroller and holding his daughter’s hand. She brimmed with illogical pride. She gave a tour, talked to them at dinner, asked a handful of polite questions. And then, as he wandered the grounds with his children, she pulled his wife aside and said this to her:

“I can’t tell you how happy I am to see that he grew up.”

And she couldn’t help but tell his wife the story of that cold room in February, a story that boy had never heard. And his wife smiled knowingly at her, suddenly understanding the chronology of his placement in his grandparents’ home at 9 months old, realizing she was talking to a woman who had saved her husband’s life, in more ways than she might ever know.

She looked for him for 35 years.

Once she found him, she could let him go, as she did that other time, though it broke her heart.

And how could she know, really? How can any of us know the impact of our best and most selfless actions, the ones that make us afraid, make us sad, make us question whether or not we have done the right thing?

She could only know if someone could tell her. She could know if she could see him now, refusing an invitation to go out with the guys because he would rather be home with his family. She could know if she could see him get up from the couch, kiss his wife, and go upstairs to help his son settle down, his son whom many fathers might think was too old to be called sweetie. She could know if she could hear him sing softly to the boy until he fell back to sleep.

She could only know if someone could tell her.

So, I will tell her: Thank you. And me too. I am awfully happy to see that he grew up.





(He's under that pile of kids, somewhere...)