I really should be working on my novel, but instead I am sitting here listening to an old Sister Hazel song (and no, I don't know either - I think it's the infectious beat), bobbing my head enough to rattle the notion in my skull of writing about the trip to Chicago I went on once upon a time.
By "once upon a time" I mean a good three years ago.
I figure I should get it down in one place (rather than the twenty piles the bits and pieces are scattered now) before I completely forget about it. Not that that would be a horrible thing...
(The following has been complied from the nigh unintelligible scribbles in a notebook, a letter to a kid I once thought handsome and whatever flecks of memory I could scrape from the mementos I was able to shove into an overstuffed handbag.)
"I've been awake since 4.27 in the morning, not so much excited for this not-so-much a senior trip but, I suppose, dreading it. This outing to Chicago was all my idea, and what I wouldn't give to simply shove my foot in my mouth and go crawl under a rock."
So began my deplorably written letter to Anarchy (in the USA) on the morning of 6 June, 2006. I sat on the concrete steps in front of my house, half of my brain still asleep and the other half wondering what in the world I was doing up so early in the morning. Yes, the Chicago trip had been my idea - but I was the only student actually coming along with the teacher and her son. Why hadn't the outing been given up as a bad job? Why weren't we instead heading over to a wild night of fun and greasy pizza at Chuck. E. Cheese?
Sitting there, fretting not only about me (an East Coast native who's spent more than half of her life in small-town Wisconsin) going to a big city, but also about the ants wending their way ever closer to my backside. I don't like ants. Fact is, I might be slightly terrified of ants and the thought of even one of these tiny bug crawling on me -
I turned back to my letter, "... in efforts of forgetting the fact that the only big cities I've been to I can't remember, I was too young". This worked quite well - until my teacher pulled her car up to the curb.
(It might behoove me to stop here and clarify. For reasons I shall not get into (for it's a very long story but essentially: I left public high school after my freshman year because if I didn't I would have done some very drastic things, then tried a homeschooling program which was fulfilling college level stuff but also horrendously expensive, so - ) I spent a year in what I lovingly call The Graduation for Dummies Class. Through this course I received my high school diploma. I also was gifted with a wonderful teacher who completely made up for all the inept and indifferent schoolteachers I'd ever had. Said teacher was like the cool older sister who actually wanted to do things with you.)
Packing my letter into the handbag I had converted to a seam-splitting harbinger of all the useless things I would soon find out I didn't need, I got into the car and settled in for the long ride to the Metra station. In Kenosha. An hour and a half away. In a car with a rattling object in the dashboard and a silent radio. The latter was easily dealt with, for my teacher was the complete antithesis to me - she liked to talk. So, as I sat shotgun and listened to her speak over the soft snoring of her sleeping little boy, I looked out of the window at the rising morning along the highway.
There is nothing to look at on the highway, at least not on the one we were traveling down. Just cars and concrete and maybe the backs of vanilla buildings; it was a very long car ride. I counted one Wendy's restaurant - three counties south of where we started and five short blocks from the Metra station.
The station was sterile in the absolute purest sense of the word; there was not even a peanut packet to be found for sustenance. We should have stopped at the Wendy's we'd passed, but then again I wasn't hungry. I was tired, having woken up at 3.00AM and having woken up at 3.00AM my stomach was doing that thing it does when I'm forced to wake up anytime before 6.00 - it cramped.
With a cramping stomach and a mind screaming out ravenously for sleep, Apt Teacher, her son and I walked to the train platform. This platform was not, as you might be imagining, like something out of the Harry Potter series. There were no brick walls or magical creatures, nor even handsome trains. No, this train platform was on the roof of the sterile station we had come through. I wondered briefly how much time would have to pass before the roof gave way in a wondrously grisly display of steel, wood, and asphalt.
I wondered why there were no guardrails around the roof-top platform.
I wondered which one of the small children in the growing crowd would be the first to play "Touch the Face of the Speeding Train".
Once on the speeding train (settling into the second level), "I almost feel like Jonathan in Bram Stoker's Dracula, on his way to certain madness and severancy to the undead". I was sitting right above a man who insisted on picking at his teeth in a very nasty way, and to the left of another who had stared quite intensely at me while getting into this particular train compartment (a man who looked a little too old to be staring at Russian moon-faced (then) 19-year-olds). The same man who out on the platform had been keen on breaking the things packed so tightly in his bag.
That man had a complex, I think. He was all jazzed out in London Punk: Doc Martens (and has anyone else ever found that a tad bit ironic/amusing/[insert adjective here]?), cargo shorts, black beret and a t-shirt three sizes too small. London Calling, as I named him, was studying a book I've been reading for the past two years.
"I'd try to look at that tiny shirt of his, see what band is so important his beer gut needs to be unmasked, but that might draw too much attention".
If it hadn't been for fear of London Calling thinking I was attempting to hit on him, I would have chanced leaning over those two seats between us. I would have dealt with the almost absolute fact that when the train stopped I'd fall to the floor and break something; I was far too tall for the tight quarters of the second story. With my feet hanging down through the railing, I'd nearly clonked the conductor in the head when he came by to check tickets.
I made a remark in my letter to Anarchy (in the USA) about our third stop (Lake Forest, Highland Park - all during which Half-Suit, a man nestled across from us and wearing half a suit conversed with Apt Teacher about things which I did not pay attention to, though at one point I did care enough to learn that Half-Suit was actually Cooky).
Our third stop was Glencoe, Illinois.
I looked over what I had just written. Drunk on lack of sleep, I thought it was the wittiest thing I'd ever read in my life. How wrong I was.
(I inserted that dismal display because the shame might remind me to never think too highly of anything I do again)
Shortly after this, a man in a checkered shirt sat down in the seat immediately to my right. He scratched his head quite frequently. I pondered whether or not I should be worried.
Apt Teacher's son then had to pee. Badly.
And some guy began talking rather loudly about expanding bowels and other things one should never speak of outside of the doctor's office or morgue.
By "once upon a time" I mean a good three years ago.
I figure I should get it down in one place (rather than the twenty piles the bits and pieces are scattered now) before I completely forget about it. Not that that would be a horrible thing...
(The following has been complied from the nigh unintelligible scribbles in a notebook, a letter to a kid I once thought handsome and whatever flecks of memory I could scrape from the mementos I was able to shove into an overstuffed handbag.)
"I've been awake since 4.27 in the morning, not so much excited for this not-so-much a senior trip but, I suppose, dreading it. This outing to Chicago was all my idea, and what I wouldn't give to simply shove my foot in my mouth and go crawl under a rock."
So began my deplorably written letter to Anarchy (in the USA) on the morning of 6 June, 2006. I sat on the concrete steps in front of my house, half of my brain still asleep and the other half wondering what in the world I was doing up so early in the morning. Yes, the Chicago trip had been my idea - but I was the only student actually coming along with the teacher and her son. Why hadn't the outing been given up as a bad job? Why weren't we instead heading over to a wild night of fun and greasy pizza at Chuck. E. Cheese?
Sitting there, fretting not only about me (an East Coast native who's spent more than half of her life in small-town Wisconsin) going to a big city, but also about the ants wending their way ever closer to my backside. I don't like ants. Fact is, I might be slightly terrified of ants and the thought of even one of these tiny bug crawling on me -
I turned back to my letter, "... in efforts of forgetting the fact that the only big cities I've been to I can't remember, I was too young". This worked quite well - until my teacher pulled her car up to the curb.
(It might behoove me to stop here and clarify. For reasons I shall not get into (for it's a very long story but essentially: I left public high school after my freshman year because if I didn't I would have done some very drastic things, then tried a homeschooling program which was fulfilling college level stuff but also horrendously expensive, so - ) I spent a year in what I lovingly call The Graduation for Dummies Class. Through this course I received my high school diploma. I also was gifted with a wonderful teacher who completely made up for all the inept and indifferent schoolteachers I'd ever had. Said teacher was like the cool older sister who actually wanted to do things with you.)
Packing my letter into the handbag I had converted to a seam-splitting harbinger of all the useless things I would soon find out I didn't need, I got into the car and settled in for the long ride to the Metra station. In Kenosha. An hour and a half away. In a car with a rattling object in the dashboard and a silent radio. The latter was easily dealt with, for my teacher was the complete antithesis to me - she liked to talk. So, as I sat shotgun and listened to her speak over the soft snoring of her sleeping little boy, I looked out of the window at the rising morning along the highway.
There is nothing to look at on the highway, at least not on the one we were traveling down. Just cars and concrete and maybe the backs of vanilla buildings; it was a very long car ride. I counted one Wendy's restaurant - three counties south of where we started and five short blocks from the Metra station.
The station was sterile in the absolute purest sense of the word; there was not even a peanut packet to be found for sustenance. We should have stopped at the Wendy's we'd passed, but then again I wasn't hungry. I was tired, having woken up at 3.00AM and having woken up at 3.00AM my stomach was doing that thing it does when I'm forced to wake up anytime before 6.00 - it cramped.
With a cramping stomach and a mind screaming out ravenously for sleep, Apt Teacher, her son and I walked to the train platform. This platform was not, as you might be imagining, like something out of the Harry Potter series. There were no brick walls or magical creatures, nor even handsome trains. No, this train platform was on the roof of the sterile station we had come through. I wondered briefly how much time would have to pass before the roof gave way in a wondrously grisly display of steel, wood, and asphalt.
I wondered why there were no guardrails around the roof-top platform.
I wondered which one of the small children in the growing crowd would be the first to play "Touch the Face of the Speeding Train".
Once on the speeding train (settling into the second level), "I almost feel like Jonathan in Bram Stoker's Dracula, on his way to certain madness and severancy to the undead". I was sitting right above a man who insisted on picking at his teeth in a very nasty way, and to the left of another who had stared quite intensely at me while getting into this particular train compartment (a man who looked a little too old to be staring at Russian moon-faced (then) 19-year-olds). The same man who out on the platform had been keen on breaking the things packed so tightly in his bag.
That man had a complex, I think. He was all jazzed out in London Punk: Doc Martens (and has anyone else ever found that a tad bit ironic/amusing/[insert adjective here]?), cargo shorts, black beret and a t-shirt three sizes too small. London Calling, as I named him, was studying a book I've been reading for the past two years.
"I'd try to look at that tiny shirt of his, see what band is so important his beer gut needs to be unmasked, but that might draw too much attention".
If it hadn't been for fear of London Calling thinking I was attempting to hit on him, I would have chanced leaning over those two seats between us. I would have dealt with the almost absolute fact that when the train stopped I'd fall to the floor and break something; I was far too tall for the tight quarters of the second story. With my feet hanging down through the railing, I'd nearly clonked the conductor in the head when he came by to check tickets.
I made a remark in my letter to Anarchy (in the USA) about our third stop (Lake Forest, Highland Park - all during which Half-Suit, a man nestled across from us and wearing half a suit conversed with Apt Teacher about things which I did not pay attention to, though at one point I did care enough to learn that Half-Suit was actually Cooky).
Our third stop was Glencoe, Illinois.
"Glencoe. What the hell kind of name is Glencoe? Sounds like some sort of
(Cooky is married and a big cell phone talker. He commutes to Chi-town from Kenosha, works at Palms)
steroid company or something. It even has a stone marker.
(Cooky grew up in West Bend. London Calling looked at me again when I noticed "Glencoe, Ill., home of the best 'roids this side of Barry Bonds's ass!")
Now leaving
(picture: ripped and overly tanned dude, head the size of the Universal Studios globe. Big Smile)
"Glencoe!"
(tink tink of light against bleached and veneered teeth)
for Winnetka. Sweet ol' Winnetka."
I looked over what I had just written. Drunk on lack of sleep, I thought it was the wittiest thing I'd ever read in my life. How wrong I was.
(I inserted that dismal display because the shame might remind me to never think too highly of anything I do again)
Shortly after this, a man in a checkered shirt sat down in the seat immediately to my right. He scratched his head quite frequently. I pondered whether or not I should be worried.
Apt Teacher's son then had to pee. Badly.
And some guy began talking rather loudly about expanding bowels and other things one should never speak of outside of the doctor's office or morgue.
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