Steel Grey and Woodsmoke

God, the fall weather of the past couple of days has been perfect; the air has been cool and sweet-smelling, the streets just a little damp from the sporadic rains, and at night there's a little bite to everything, just enough to make me feel solid again, just enough to grant a little redemption. From what? I'm not sure, but I think everyone could use a little. Weather like this leaves me nostalgic. It's the smells, the charcoal scent of leaves burning that just seems to churn up in weather like this, even though there haven't really been any leaves to burn just yet. But the atmosphere keeps a few particles of the smell in reserve, just for people like me. Just for the good memories it brings.

I walked four and a half miles from my office up to Wrigley Field in this weather. Ignored the clouds that kept threatening to make it rain, even when they briefly made good on that threat. Bring it on, I figured. A little fall rain in the late summer never hurt anyone, least of all me. And when my gimp foot told me that it was time for it to stop pounding the pavement, I took a train up north to Roger's Park and sat down for a cup of coffee in Cafe Ennui (a more affected name, I've never heard). I sat there, reading, and flirting at great distance with a pretty girl in a long coat, and revising a short story, but mostly it was memories. Roger's Park is the first neighborhood I lived in when I moved to Chicago. I had lived a summer in Evanston, subletting from my friend Dan, and when the summer was over and he needed to move back in, I answered an ad for a roommate needed. The woman I moved in with was an eccentric named Jenny Marx (not Karl's daughter, but she would joke that she was) with two cats, named Rama and Seta, both Siamese.

The months I spent in that apartment were some of the most interesting and productive I think I've ever experienced. Because I was essentially still a traveler in Chicago, so everywhere I went there was a new experience waiting for me, a new alley to explore, and new people to meet. Any stranger I met on a bus, or in a coffee shop, I would talk to them and for a time, I would have a new friend. And as I sat in Ennui, and the coffee warmed my bones the way soup does on chilly rainy nights, I just remembered all of the great experiences I had when I first got here. I remembered spending hours sitting with my friend, John Deng, one of the Lost Boys of the Sudan, listening to him talk about his childhood as a refugee among other child refugees; I remembered learning some of his language, Dinka, from him. I thought of the way Rama took to me like I was his personal mirror; how whenever he was around me, he expected that I look at him, and if I weren’t, the way he would meow until I did. It wasn't enough for me to idly pet Rama—I had to look at him while I did it. Mostly, I remembered the countless hours of exploring the streets of my new city and the feeling that anything was possible, that life was still undetermined and that anything I could conceive, I could do. It was perfect freedom, and tonight I needed a dose of that.

By way of reward for what I found, I ran into my friend Steve, who I met running a show this summer. Steve is another writer, and he is also one of the greatest people I know right now. I say this, partially because I know Steve will eventually read this post, but also because Steve reminds me a lot of that freedom and the feeling that life, in whatever form it may presently exist, is always still open and still open to play.

So the universe has left me with some happy synchronicity tonight, which makes me smile. I think I'll go out on the back porch and take in some of that smoke-air. Then to bed and to dreams.