Notes on spring
April 4, 2008 at 4:05 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment–That sunshine feels different; wait it’s warm — is that how warm feels? I remember the heat lamps, on the el platform, when you turn your face up toward them, you feel like a daisy basking in the sun except it’s a heat lamp and it’s actually unspeakably cold, but this… this feels like sun and it is sun.
–Change rumbles, low change, small change. The sign for Augie’s diner came down yesterday; the owners packed up and retired; the welders took it down and a group of pre-schoolers with their teacher stopped to watch. The sign was one of those hefty metal ones with all the lightbulbs bordering it like a dressing-room mirror. We once sat in their wide, red leather booths and had hamburgers and milkshakes. I felt important; red leather does that. So does a good milkshake. I don’t think I ate the hamburger.
–I love bare tree branches. I saw a truck full of bare tree branches and wanted to jump in and build a sculpture or take a picture. But leaves, well, leaves mean spring and I will take that.
–At the Field Museum I learned how dinosaurs came from fish and are now birds, and so are we. I’m glad I know that; I pay more attention to the birds who migrate back here, more each day.
The Underdog
April 2, 2008 at 11:28 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 1 CommentI’ve spent most of my adult life fighting for the underdog: Nonprofit organizations, small theaters, public schools — it’s always the same battle, the big guy needs a good ass-kicking. And recently I realized where my love of the underdog first manifested itself: The Buffalo Bills.
For entire weeks of my life in third, fourth, fifth and sixth grade, my family and I religiously watched Bills games, yelling at the television, wearing the cheap screen-printed sweatshirts with the Bills logo that we bought at the supermarket, listening to the pro-Bills jingles created by our local Oldies station, watching the team miraculously advance through one playoff after another, just barely winning, always beating the teams with more money, more fame, more style.
We were the town with nothing to show for itself, the town that most people had already abandoned, and here was a football team that never quit. Even when they lost one Super Bowl after another — lost their nerve, sent a kick wide right, or just got outplayed — we loved them.
Screaming my guts out, wearing pigtails with the red, white and blue ribbons, watching Thurman Thomas run fifty yards for a touchdown, the no-huddle offense, the K gun, Bruce Smith sacking the quarterback, I became a deep believer in the power of enough people with enough heart becoming capable of anything.
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