Vic Chesnutt

Does sad music demand any ethical responsibilities of its listeners? Can we use sad music any way we see fit? Or does the disclosure of pain oblige us to think carefully about the way we listen?

This is why I ask. In June, I went to a Vic Chesnutt concert.  In the bustling bar, the 45-year-old singer-songwriter looked small. He sat in his wheelchair while two crew members hoisted him on stage.  His face looked sallow, and red where it should not have been red. He said incoherent things. The audience – mostly there for the next act – grew impatient and rude, having loud conversations in the middle of Chesnutt’s set. They whooped when he sang that Florida was “the redneck riviera” but talked over the ominous line, “I respect a man who goes to where he wants to be, even if he wants to be dead.”  While struggling to grip his guitar comfortably in the chair, Chesnutt poured out dark, plaintive songs. They were full of painful thoughts so few people can articulate with his precision, humor, and imagery. And most of the audience didn’t care.

The Empty Bottle, where he played, is a small venue, and I was able to meet Chesnutt afterward.  I only had to wait for one other person before I could say hello. I told him I really liked his song “Wallace Stevens.” He smiled and said “I’m really proud of that song.” I didn’t know what to say after that. I moved away. Chesnutt was left like a lonely guest at his own party.

The moment made me feel like the way I’d been listening to music up till then had been cheap. I’d spent college listening to the saddest music I could find. I hadn’t found really good sad music, though, so this mostly amounted to Counting Crows and a few emo bands I’m too embarrassed to name. I wept along with verses like “I need a phone call/I need a raincoat/I need a big love/I need a phone call” and carried them around with me all day. I thought about the music, not the musicians, as if their art was a Frisbee flung far and whose owner was unknown.

In the gray light of the Empty Bottle, the songwriter was there and was so very human. His pain was not this thing created to make a good song.

This was Chesnutt’s last tour. Christmas week, he overdosed on muscle relaxers and died. There is controversy over whether the overdose was intentional; Chesnutt had attempted suicide in the past.

Many artists who make sad music have been doled a more than average serving of tragedy. Take Eels (Mark Oliver Everett) for example. Within a few years, his father died suddenly, sister committed suicide, and mother died of lung cancer. Or consider outsider musician Daniel Johnston. His quirky music has been created out of severe bipolar disorder. Even Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz was diagnosed with a dissociative disorder. Vic Chesnutt was paralyzed in a car accident at 18 years old.  The list goes on.

Though an avid consumer of melancholy tunes, nothing too terrible happened to me in college. I was just moody. Is that okay? Is it okay to turn on the music of Elliot Smith, who suffered a drug addiction and died young, just because my day is in the tank? I mean, a break-up sucks, but it’s not the same as losing your whole family, being addicted to heroin, or losing use of your legs.

Clearly, one of art’s functions is to make people feel. Sometimes, it makes people feel miserable.  Like Bleeding Gums Murphy told Lisa Simpson, “The blues isn’t about feeling better, it’s about making other people feel worse.”

But does the fact that so many of these experiences are beyond what most of us have to deal with increase the average listener’s responsibility?

I think yes. Being confronted with other people’s pain requires a thoughtful response, and art should require the same. A melancholy album confronts the consumer with several options:

1) Listen in a way that keeps looping you back to your own mood. This is probably the least ethically sound way to listen to music. It’s not good for listener or artist. Here, music is valued based on how wretched it makes a person feel, not based on its own merit.

2) Don’t listen to depressing music at all. There’s a section in Augustine’s Confessions where Augustine regrets the time he wasted weeping over the death of Dido. “I was forced to learn the wanderings of one Aeneas,” wrote Augustine, “forgetful of my own, and to weep for dead Dido, because she killed herself for love; the while, with dry eyes, I endured my miserable self dying among these things, far from Thee, O God my life.” Time spent commiserating with artists could be used more profitable things.

There is a time to wallow, but there’s also a time to put away the Chunky Monkey ice cream and emo songs. Like the Microphones sing, “Get off the internet, we are the ones who are alive right now, so let’s start living.” Augustine says there is no place for using art as a way to avoid God. However, this view would also mean that people would be missing out on several positive ways to listen -

3) Look to music to reveal something that will resonate, and that, like an empathetic friend, will reveal something comforting and true about oneself and the world.

4) Appreciate the common humanity music expresses. Tolstoy says, “The activity of art is based on the fact that a man . . . is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it.” If I feel moved when Elliot Smith sings “Needle in the Hay,” this doesn’t have to lead me back to myself. It can lead me to wonder. To wonder that through a well-crafted lyric, I feel something that could be similar to what Elliot Smith experienced when he wrote it.

5) Experience the music as being invited into something totally outside one’s own experience. I will never know what it is like to be Daniel Johnston, Nico, or Joni Mitchell, but their music invites me to experience not just commonality but difference. Even with our shared humanity, I can’t say I understand completely, but their music gives me a way to begin getting outside myself and trying.

Too often, listeners talk over the music; they superimpose the current clutter of their lives onto art. I’d like sad music to be more than that. I wonder if I’ll be able to take it.

My grandfather’s death absorbed a December ten years ago and cast a long shadow on Decembers to come. Because of this, “getting into the Christmas spirit” now requires me to reflect on death, and I suspect this is the case for many. It’s a fitting meditation for Advent because the birth and death of Christ, and our own death and sense of being made new, all twine together in Christians’ musings.

The long weeks my grandfather was dying let him communicate meaningfully with each of his children, grandchildren, and many of his friends. I say communicate, but he could no longer speak. He’d had surgery on a tumor in his throat. Watery coughs echoed through his trach tube. My mother bought him a clip board and he wrote messages in wobbly block letters. I still have many of them. When it was my turn, he wrote that I should find his spiritual journal. It would be in the bottom drawer of his office filing cabinet.

He died December 17, 1999. That week, midway through my senior year of high school, I hid in a rough polyester armchair in his office. My grandmother pulled papers out of his office closet and threw them away in grief-fueled frenzy. In the armchair, I paged through his journal. It was detailed and meticulous, like most things my grandfather did. Like masking tape labels he stuck on fans and tape-players to tell when they had been purchased and had batteries changed. Like financial records he kept or the way he arranged every detail of his funeral years earlier.

The journal – a “spiritual travelogue,” he dubbed it – began with a timeline of spiritual highlights, mingled with dates of his retirement, his brother’s cancer diagnosis, and other life markers. From there, it was more memoir than diary, complete with a title (JOURNAL OF MY JOURNEY IN FAITH), byline (George Hodges Soule), epigraph (a prayer of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s), and chapters.

It showed marks of many revisions: dates crossed-out and corrected, words circled with question marks, margin notes to explain connections between people or events. While he recovered from a knee replacement in 1996, he meant to type up a good copy and “use the inactivity… as a gift of uncommitted time to make some real headway,” but that’s where his journal ends.

Unpolished and unfinished, it is still one of the most influential things I’ve read.

To tell you why it’s so influential, I have to tell you something about my own spiritual travels that isn’t easy for me to confess. I come from a boisterous evangelical tradition where my friends and immediate family were always clamoring about “what God had done in our lives” lately. Not only were my grandparents from austere New England upbringing, but their generation had an expansive definition of what should be kept private. Faith was, for many, the most private. Not considering these powerful psychosocial pressures, I took my grandparents at face value when I was growing up. Christians talked about being Christians. All the time.

After college, when I spent a month at Southborough L’Abri, it dawned on me what sort of a Christian my grandfather had been. I had conversations at L’Abri about the value of a small but effective Christian life – one that lived out the command to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.” In Southborough, I attended a small Episcopal church, the same sort my grandparents attended. My last day there, the liturgy had us pray “that we may have grace to glorify Christ in our own day.”

Those two insights sketched my grandfather in front of me. He was a Christian in the public sphere, chugging away at the same Du Pont job for years, serving on a community college board, helping more people than he ever let on. The only time I ever remember him putting this faith into words was a time when I was homesick and he drew on rich reserves of personal, spiritual comfort in order to comfort me.

I’m not meaning to absolve my grandparents, or myself, from the need to lovingly communicate the beliefs that were defining them. Indeed, keeping mum about this reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s story “Greenleaf,” where Mrs. May muses that “the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom.” Mrs. May believes the word “Jesus” should be kept private because she is “a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she does not, of course, believe that any of it was true.” My grandfather was quite far removed from this, but I had no paradigm for his quietness of faith. I value having such a paradigm and now I value the journal he left behind even more.

Sentences like, “God is present in the beauties and wonders of his creation where it is beautiful and wonderful, and in the challenge where it isn’t” come back to me even when the green binder is closed. Events he relates guide my decisions. They are matter-of-fact, yet vulnerable. He describes nourishing, clarifying weeks spent at a Jesuit retreat, and this eventually led me to pick up St. Ignatius’ spiritual exercises. When he records how his psychologist challenged his depressive mid-life crisis, those words shake me: “If you’re so damned religious, what about the sacrament of your marriage?”

His journal is influential as a means of understanding him, but it’s also a way for one generation to understand the spiritual concerns of another. There is much to learn from another generation, even if that lesson is just to listen more closely.

My grandfather’s spiritual journal makes me wish for more conversations about this part of life we share. I know that I have his blood, because there are things I can put in writing that I could never say aloud. I’m certain this is why his journey of finding “the immanence and presence of God, day in and day out” is something he wanted me to discover while the rest of the family was eating cold cuts and wearing black, and to keep reading as his wife channeled her despair into wastebaskets full of shredded paper. He put it in writing and waited for his descendants to grow into it.

Photo Credit: Henry Bloomfield

The music of singer/songwriter/guitarist Jonathan Richman has been acclaimed not just for its influence on early punk, but also for its childlike and positive lyrics. Songs like “That Summer Feeling,” “Twilight in Boston,” and “Hey There Little Insect” take a close and cheery look at oft-missed parts of life.

Nonetheless, this was an artist I had to learn to love. There. Sounds grouchy, doesn’t it? Did I also have to learn to love pizza and sunny days? Whenever I heard his upbeat melodies, his nasal voice and slurred dictionannoyed me. His songs struck me as repetitive, some of them comprised of just one repeated lyric, like “Gail Loves Me.” And what kind of fluff was he singing about? In college, I judged music’s worth by the anguish it made me feel. Since then, I’ve tried to balance my tastes, but until this past June Jonathan Richman’s happy-go-lucky tunes still didn’t have a place on my spectrum.

In June, he played at one of my favorite Chicago venues, The Empty Bottle, with Vic Chesnutt, one of my favorite musicians. Richman and his drummer, Tommy Larkin, have just produced Chesnutt’s recent Skitter on Take Off - which, for me, has become another reason to love Jonathan Richman.

Anticipating the concert, I started spinning some Jonathan Richman albums. And, as often happens with good music when you give it a chance, I began to like what I heard.

On the small stage at the Empty Bottle, he held the guitar and danced twirling jigs. He smiled the entire time. With just Richman and Larkin on stage, the concert felt intimate. He sang about the same simple things I’d heard on earlier ventures into his music, but hearing it while seeing the smiling face made it all cohere. This guy really liked life.

He sang, “The lilies of the field just sway all day, oh, but no one is ever dressed quite their way,” assuring his listeners that “you and I don’t need to worry.” He captured a quandary I’ve felt myself: “I want the city but I want the country, too,” because, sang Richman, “I want to be with my friends by the fire and the starlight, but I want music, music in my life. I want a bar hoppin’ music scene, I want to pick from ten or fifteen.”

What ultimately won me over was the way Richman sang about women. I have to confess, going to a concert generally makes me feel about as self-conscious as a beach trip. Every type of music has an associated way to dress, which I can’t get right no matter how I try. But Richman sang about loving a woman who “don’t act cool, don’t act like a femme fatale… she laughs when she wants…she laughs when she laughs, she’s the breeze, she’s the natural…. Her mystery not of high heels and eyeshadow.”

I came back from the concert realizing how rare Jonathan Richman is. In a culture where it’s cool to half-close your lids and say, “that was so 2008,” his music revives wonder. The same year Woody Allen was belittling Annie Hall for using the word “neat,” Jonathan Richman was promoting Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers by writing: “Hi There! I’m Jonathan Richman and I’d just like to tell you that after all these months of waiting you can buy a record of me singing one of my favorite songs, ‘Roadrunner’… Neat, huh?”

A part of the nascent 70’s proto-punk movement, he slept on the Velvet Underground manager’s couch when he first moved to New York. He plunged into an era of exuberant ugliness and maintained his innocence, posing wide-eyed and smiling, singing about how he didn’t use drugs, and still looking carefully at life’s rarely-lauded beauties.

It’s Richman’s lack of snide irony that lets him indulge in wonder. In the liner notes to the Rhino release of Modern Lovers, his first album, the reviewer noted Richman’s “non-ironic affection for the trappings of modern American civilization and culture.”

When I moved to a city, I learned that wedging one’s way into artistic, cultured society can mean acquiring knowledge not for its own sake but for the sake of being able to reference it. And once one could make the cultural references, one could make ironic remarks about them.

This is enervating. If you really love something, you’re bound to look naive, even nerdy. This is the risk that Jonathan Richman takes with his ebullient, “Neat, huh?” and his songs about how much he likes “When Harpo Played His Harp” or how he loves moments of confrontation because he “get[s] this thrill out of saying what’s true.”

David Foster Wallace wrote that “irony, irreverence, and rebellion [have] come to be not liberating but enfeebling” in our culture. This is why artists like Richman are a breeze of relief. Loving the simple things in life may cause us to lose our ironic, critical prowess, but can it be worth it to live without loving everyday things and looking at them with rapt appreciation?

Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish in Bright Star

(This essay contains a few spoilers, but they’re not so bad if you already know Keats’s biography.)

A film about a Romantic poet’s romance could so easily be cringe-worthy. I surveyed the movie poster as I bought tickets. It flaunted Victorian script that glowed like a star, a couple about to kiss, and the tag line, “First Love Burns Brightest.” Was I about to experience media I would have to ‘fess up to liking, likeGilmore Girls, rather than a film I could proclaim as great cinema?

The emotional tale of a three-year courtship cut short by Keats’s death at 25 could have become sentimental goop. But I needn’t have feared. Jane Campion – whose films Sweetie and Angel at My Table are personal favorites, though it was The Piano that won three Oscars – made several deft moves in her writing and direction of Bright Star and created a solid film.

Her first smart move is that she grounds the chaste but impassioned love of Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) and John Keats (Ben Whishaw) in the midst of reality. That’s not to say that she portrayed the Keats-Brawne romance as mundane, measured, and reasonable. Romantic poetry is characterized by its delight in powerful, overflowing feelings rather than Enlightenment rationalism, and Campion captures the sentimental heights Brawne and Keats soared. For instance, in one snippet of Keats’s Romantic words to Brawne, he tells her, “I had such a dream last night. I was floating above the trees, with my lips connected to that of a beautiful figure.”

Keats may have floated above the trees, but Campion binds him to the earth. As Dan Persons writes in Huffington Post, “The film, in short, is sweet, sad, and moving but with Campion’s astringent edge keeping the proceedings from lapsing into sentimentality. And that makes all the difference.”

But how exactly does one do this?

Campion maneuvers away from sentimentality by showing Keats’s interactions with the Brawne family, and Fanny’s relationship with her family. Indeed, the first expressions of love in this film are not between Keats and Fanny Brawne at all. Instead, we see Fanny’s love for her very young sister, Toots, and Toots’s love for Fanny.

Toots demonstrates her love and trust when she and her brother Samuel walk into the bookstore to buy Endymion for Fanny. “My sister has met the author,” Toots tells the bookseller, “and she wants to read it for herself to know if he’s an idiot or not.” The fact that Fanny has entrusted them with this mission and that Toots feels like she can repeat anything Fanny says shows their close relationship.

The family’s interactions with each other are believable, with small bickerings, affectionate nicknames, “I love yous,” and resigned sighs. Keats becomes part of this family. Right after he declares his love for Fanny and they join the picnicking family, the couple play a game of “freezing” every time Toots turns around to look at them.

These touches make the film feel like you are watching the workings of the most fun and dynamic family you know, and this makes the film so human it’s impossible to cringe. (Okay, maybe it’s possible when characters read poetry aloud to each other. If you can’t suspend disbelief to watch a musical and pretend that people do burst into song mid-sentence, you’ll have a hard time imagining that people do quote poetry to each other from memory.)

The second smart move is that Bright Star seems aware of how silly Romanticism could appear to 2009’s viewers. The trailer describes Brawne as a realist, but once she and Keats are an item and he teaches her poetry, Brawne lazes about in ecstasy, cries, threatens to kill herself when she doesn’t hear from Keats, and in short, acts like a high school kid in love. As the three years progress, she demonstrates bravery, gravitas, and spunk along with her absorbing love for Keats, but at many points, she’s obsessed, and this creates humor and lets the audience observe Romanticism.

For example, after Keats wishes that the two of them were butterflies and could fill three days with pure delight, Fanny, Toots, and Samuel take the Romantic idea to the next level and start a butterfly farm in Fanny’s bedroom. Mrs. Brawne (Kerry Fox) walks into the “farm” bewildered, wanting to open windows, brushing the clinging butterflies off her dress, and sighing in disgust.

Campion crafts the juxtaposition well. On one hand, it’s ridiculous: keeping dozens of butterflies in a bedroom, shutting all the windows to create the warm environment the insects love, and not caring a hoot if they fly in your face. On the other hand, it’s cause for awe. The camera rests on jars of multi-colored butterflies, watches a blue-winged one flutter on a sliced orange, and looks at Toots caught up in the sight of them. Campion’s lens gazes wryly at the aspects of Romanticism that seem over-the-top to us today, but nevertheless appreciates the same beauty these poets held dear.

In Campion’s hands, Keats and Brawne’s relationship is a way to examine what makes all types of love meaningful, even love for the world itself. In Campion’s hands, it’s a film to proclaim as great cinema.

John Keats and Fanny Brawne dance in Bright Star

Half of a one week share from Home Grown Wisconsin

A few months ago, my husband Sean and I sat in our living room rummaging through crumbs and unwanted nuts at the bottom of a bowl of Chex mix. Sean pulled out a Brazil nut and stared at it. “Who ever even thought to eat that?” He asked. “It looks like a freakin’ piece of wood.”

This summer, Sean and I joined a Community Supported Agriculture program (or CSA) with our friends Catherine and Jarrett Knox. CSAs, increasingly popular among city-dwellers, are partnerships where local farmers sell food “shares” to support themselves before the harvest and then those who buy the shares pick up boxes of organic produce straight from the farm. Ours is coming to a close, having lasted about 20 weeks.

Since Sean and I tend to be fairly traditional in our food selections, I had never seen – or even heard of – some of the vegetables that appeared in our weekly share. So, this summer’s recurring question was this: How did anyone ever decide you could eat some of these vegetables, anyhow? I mean, kohlrabi? It looks like it wandered out of Monsters, Inc.!

Participating in a CSA this summer not only broadened my culinary horizons, it also taught me a thing or two about trust.

Joining a CSA immediately provided surprises. Catherine Knox received an email that gave the host’s address, phone number, and garage door code. The hosts were a family who opened their garage and let CSA subscribers grab their shares. Yes, we just traipsed into someone’s garage and helped ourselves to the farm-fresh wonders within: veggies, cheese, and eggs (depending on which we paid for). People don’t quiver about this kind of thing in Amish country, where I grew up, but in Chicago this is rare. “It’s a very good thing I have the Holy Spirit,” says Catherine. “Because taking all of those cheese shares was totally tempting.”

Soon I realized that the hosts weren’t the only ones for whom this was an act of faith. The Knoxes and Talbots spent $300 per couple, and we had little idea what sort of food we were getting. The amount and tastiness of the food would depend on the quality of growing conditions. And, Catherine pointed out, we would have to trust the farmers to be generous, since it would be easy to pretend the harvest had been weak and pull one over on the Chicagoans. It was like manna: we had to trust that good and nourishing food was waiting for us.

The day before each pickup, Home Grown Wisconsin, who ran our CSA, sent out a newsletter listing which veggies we would find under the drop cloth in the host’s garage. I’m used to planning the dishes I want to make, hopping online to sort recipes by rating, then rolling through the aisles to buy what I need. This was more like being a kid and not knowing what was for dinner till I smelled it cooking. I was handed food and hunted around on blogs to plan my meals around a few key vegetables. We ate less of our favorite meals this summer, but found some delectable zucchini and beet recipes that we would not have eaten otherwise. Melissa Garrett, who has subscribed to Chicago-area CSAs for the past four years, agrees, “We have discovered our love of leeks, parsnips, turnips, and kohlrabi from getting those veggies and having to figure out what the heck to do with them!”

Kohlrabi

It is kind of ironic that right after a summer in which I was given box after box of mystery vegetables, I was also handed a series of life events I wouldn’t have predicted, starting with my husband becoming very ill for a month-long stretch. So, that picture of walking home with a mixed bag of Swiss chard, rhubarb, raspberries, and cucumbers is one that stays with me. I like to make use of things; it hurts me that cauliflower is moldering in the crisper as I write. In some way, the events of this autumn will be nourishing, and if I learned what to do with kohlrabi, perhaps I can learn what to do with these changes. (Kohlrabi makes a lovely apple-slaw, incidentally, and it’s also good roasted.)

Aside from the lessons learned, now that CSA season in the Midwest is nearly through, I find myself wondering if I’ll partner with the local farmers in this way again next year. This makes me wonder – what circumstances would make a CSA worthwhile for someone? What factors would make it less desirable? Here’s what I’ve decided, with input from fellow CSA veterans Catherine Knox and Melissa Garrett.

CSAs are excellent if:

- You place great importance on receiving food from local sources. CSAs let you stay connected with local farms, and the money you pay up front helps them toward a solid harvest. Many CSAs send newsletters with articles about what each farm is like. One farm that supplied our food uses horses to avoid fossil fuels.

- You want to eat fruits and vegetables that are in season and learn to live off what the land provides.

- You love to try new foods and new recipes.

- You know trustworthy blogs with good seasonal recipes and you have time to experiment with recipes or already have good ones in your repertoire.

- You live in an area where it is hard to get local produce, but easy to find a CSA pick-up location.

- You have a family that feels adventurous about even the kookiest vegetables.

- You want to can and/or freeze so that nothing goes to waste, or you have people you can share any extra vegetables with.

- You are interested in seeing the farm that grows your food.

CSAs are not ideal if:

- You will only make use of a few kinds of vegetables. If this is the case, I suggest taking the $30/week you might spend on the CSA and heading to the farmer’s market, farm stand, or orchard. You are still supporting local farmers, though not giving them the cash before harvest.

- Your schedule is hectic and sawdust-crust frozen pizza usually sounds better than veggies.

- You live by yourself and don’t have folks in mind who would like your extra veggies, or who could share a meal with you.

- You live far away from the pickup location, or have to move.

- You’re going to waste food. (If there are, like, four pieces of penne left from our dinner, I’ll save them. So some weeks it depressed me that I never had time to look up a recipe, and thus kale become a pasty mush in the fridge.)

As farmers harvest the last CSA vegetables of the season right now, I am thankful to have purchased a share in local farms this summer. I’m unsure whether I’ll do it next year, though the bleak season to come may leave me craving freshness. Whatever happens, I am glad to have participated in a CSA this summer because I found new levels of trust in the city and in myself. I also learned that there are vegetables the color of newts I used to catch in the summer, back when I was far more in touch with the land.

Interested in CSAs? Check out Local Harvest to get started.

Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot; Graphic design: Chris Ware

In Chicago, a glimmer of the world that ought to be, in our midst: Elementary-age kids chatter, laugh, and hunch over their latest writing projects, jotting down what they know about superheroes. Tutors admire their writing or ask prodding questions. My Morning Jacket plays in the background. Then, the kids circle on a carpet and do some very painless literary analysis. They deconstruct a genre with giggles and exclamations, eager to contribute, since the genre happens to be superhero tales. Once they’ve grasped the basic elements of the genre – sidekicks, villains, fatal flaws – they’re ready to create their own characters. Some are gleefully gross (these are elementary school kids, after all), like a boy named Antonio’s “Armpit Hair Man,” who swings to the rescue from (yup. cringe.you guessed it) his armpit hair.

“We’re academic, but we’re also fun and academic,” says 826 CHI’s Executive Director, Mara O’Brien, whose enthusiasm and welcoming presence shape this chapter of the 826 National writing and tutoring centers. O’Brien greets each Elementary Writing Camp participant, calling out, “Hello, Sweet Jocelyn!” or “Welcome, my friend!” She believes that 826 CHI’s mission is not just to improve students’ language skills, but also to introduce them to a community of adults who care about them.

At this tutoring center, caring means encouraging creativity, and that usually means thinking like a kid. “We try to trick them into writing,” O’Brien admits. O’Brien once had elementary students write narratives about imaginary vacations – reminiscent of Magic School Bus adventures – through space, inside the human body, or through Harry Potter’s world. O’Brien says that this subject matter inspired elementary kids to write one and a half pages and to tell their parents they didn’t want to leave yet – they were still writing.

The world 826 CHI creates might not otherwiseexist for Chicago students.Presently, says a June 2009 report from the Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, researched by the University of Illinois at Chicago, about half of the students who attend Chicago public schools drop out or fail to graduate on time. Just yesterday, I listened as a mother interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered described Chicago’s selective enrollment schools as a “lifeboat” for students, implying how rough the ordinary school experience is. CPS has long been a troubled system, but it looks as if the state’s budget crisis will worsen its problems: the state board of education cut its budget by $180 million and slashed foreign language, arts, and agricultural programs.

Knowing the arts could be cut, three Americorps volunteers have been bringing West Garfield Park middle school boys to 826 CHI’s summer comics writing workshop. Yara Shadid, Gretchen Oorthuys, and Rachel Bernkopf marvel that the West Garfield Park kids are so creative, drawing on every flat surface and singing their own rap songs. Yet “their in-school time is very strict and regimented,” says Bernkopf. When the arts are cut in public schools, character development, originality, and the feeling of membership in the school all suffer, say the Americorps volunteers. Students will believe creativity has nothing to do with their future success.

Near where the kids circled to deconstruct superhero tales, a Chicago map shows the 157 schools that 826 CHI serves. This doesn’t just mean that kids from 157 schools are tutored at 826 CHI. It also means that teachers plan field trips to the center and that 826 CHI sends volunteers to Chicago public schools to provide extra one-on-one help. “We want to help area teachers get their students excited about writing,” says their website.

Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
Store design: Chris Ware and Patrick Shaffner

Tutors’ help is especially valuable because if any place can remove the perception that creativity is unimportant, it’s this place. After all, 826 National was begun by Dave Eggers, author of six books including What is the What and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and founder of McSweeney’s independent publishing house, which publishes McSweeney’s literary magazine, The Believer magazine, and Wholphin short-film DVDs.

At Chicago’s chapter, the advisory board reads like a who’s who of the local literary scene: Roger Ebert, Alex Kotlowitz, Audrey Niffeneger, Joe Meno, and many other well-known authors. These are people who’ve made their living being creative, and this is what their participation is about. For older kids, having contact with published authors who care about them must seem almost imaginary – as unreal as a superhero world. But this is the world that 826 CHI is able to create for students, and it is a reinforcing experience for would-be authors.

These connections to published authors also pave the way for young writers to see their own work in print.

Right in Front of Us is one recent example. Published in 2008, it was written entirely by CPS ninth-graders and edited by Alex Kotlowitz, author of There are No Children Here, Never a City So Real, and others. Reading the introduction, it’s easy to see Kotlowitz’s respect for these kids. “I picked up these stories one night,” wrote Kotlowitz, “sat down on my living room couch and didn’t rise until I was finished. I don’t know that I’ve read anything quite like this before.”

826 CHI keeps publishing student work. Most recently, 826 CHI published the first volume of their compendium, featuring work from students ranging from age 6 to 18. In 2007, 200 second through sixth graders wrote a hilarious guide to Chicago called A Sunday Afternoon Hotdog Meal. Publishing student work is an essential aspect of 826 National – which has also published the 826 Quarterly and sought student input for the Best American Non-required Reading anthologies.

At 826 CHI, kids join a circle where the arts have been crucial to success. Mara O’Brien says this shows the reality of what it is like to survive as a writer. Young writers see that even professional writers work many jobs to support themselves. Though earning success by your wits is hard work, 826 CHI is incredibly hip, and above all, the staff create an environment where it is cool to be academic.

Consider, for instance, that from the street, this doesn’t look like a tutoring center at all. Instead, the front of 826 CHI is The Boring Store, Chicago’s finest purveyor of secret agent supplies. When students come for tutoring, they pass through a portal that looks more like an art gallery than a store and sells such tongue-in-cheek items as a dropper-and-bottle called “Eve’s Dropper.”

The store has proved a good idea for many reasons. Not only does it sell quirky items and 826 National’s books, it takes away any stigma kids might feel about going to a “tutoring center.” It also brings in foot traffic. People wouldn’t walk off the street into “the place with all the tables,” says O’Brien, but they do come to The Boring Store, and this increases people’s familiarity with 826 CHI.

Though it’s been a benefit, Eggers didn’t plan it this way when he started 826 National. He simply wanted to start a tutoring center, but when he found the perfect place in the San Francisco Bay Area, the city told him, “That’s not zoned for tutoring; it’s zoned for retail.” As O’Brien tells it, Eggers replied, “Fine! I’m opening a pirate store.” And thus, Eggers began selling a whole lot of lard and tutoring centers came to be tucked into the backs of stores that sold anything you’d ever need for Space Travel, Bigfoot Research, Time Travel, or – of course – your secret job moonlighting as a superhero.

Places where creativity is free, rolicking, and communal may always be rare. But one such place exists at the corner of Milwaukee and Paulina here in Chicago, and it stands as a reminder of what ought to be – and a testimony to what can be.

“Iam a link in a chain,” John Henry Cardinal Newman famously mused, “a bond of connection between persons.” His meditation explores the idea that even in the midst of obscurity, insecurity, or even desolation, God is doing “some definite service” through His people. Even the smallest actions can mean that people are gaining strength from each other.Ruth Ann North, founder of jewelry company Refugee Beads, which sells jewelry handcrafted by refugees, exemplifies how exciting it is to be a link in a chain, a bond of connection.

Individually, the actions of jewelry-making are tiny and meticulous.Threading beads onto strings,gripping and twisting wires, sorting and selecting materials. If you’ve made jewelry, you might have suddenly felt like your fingers were gigantic.When the jewelry-making classes in Atlanta, Georgia lead to what North calls “Village Gatherings” in homes and churches in the city and beyond, these minuscule actions open out into the largeness of shared meals and stories, laughter, singing, prayer – as Newman would put it, “connection between persons.”

Refugee Beads began in March 2009. Two months before, Ruth Ann and her husband, Ian, left a particularly biting Chicago winter and moved to the three-mile circle of Atlanta known as the International Village, home to 145 different people groups and tens of thousands of refugees.There, through the North American Mission Board, they hope to demonstrate their belief that God’s redemption of humanity is powerful and complete by nurturing many facets of refugees’ lives – anything from helping adults with English and children with homework to driving kids to drama camps.

Refugee Beads’ goals fit the Norths’ conviction that the arts are a way to understand and heal the whole person. The women not only meet twice a week to learn the art of jewelry-making, but they also eat lunch together and often hike nearby Stone Mountain to continue spending time together.”Refugee Beads is a really encouraging community,” says North.

While jewelry-making sessions sound like a nurturing time – and, honestly, a whole lot of fun – North has pragmatic goals. She hopes to train women in the nuts and bolts of small business management. Selling jewelry allows them to supplement the income they earn working nights at a chicken factory nearly an hour from their homes. Soon, North hopes they will be able to give up this grueling labor.

Photo: Ruth Ann North

While there are many refugees North cares for and cares about in Atlanta, she pours her energy into these six women – refugees from Bhutan, Burma, Egypt, and Sudan – because they are all leaders among their people groups, and will be able to start their own businesses, support themselves, and train their communities in the art of jewelry-making. North hopes that in training and mentoring these women, she is starting a chain reaction.She wants to help them to be self-sufficient, since at this point, it is still daunting for them to walk into a store and communicate what they will need to buy.She hopes to remain a mentor even after they begin their own businesses.

When the women sell their handiwork, the Village Gatherings become a rich, communal experience.About once a month, North has been facilitating Village Gatherings wherever the women are invited. It might be someone’s church group, neighborhood, or work group (whatever the Americans consider their village, says North).These gatherings are one of the main opportunities for the refugees to sell their jewelry, but more than that, they are a chance for people to spend time together.

Realizing that “these women are such a gift to the American church,” North sees these gatherings as a way to connect cultures. Americans have so much to give the refugees – financial assistance, English practice, driving lessons, computer literacy – and she watches as giving flows in both directions. It is presumptuous, North insists, to think that if we are comfortable Americans, we have so much more to give. If anyone comes to a Village Gathering expecting to feel like the generous one, she’s in for a paradigm shift. The refugees bring meals they may have spent five hours cooking, sing in their native languages, pray for the Americans and ask the Americans to pray for them, and tell their stories. The value of these connections has been evident in both emotional and practical ways.Once, when a member of Refugee Beads asked a Village Gathering to pray for her sick child, the American women connected her with a clinic where her child was cared for.

Sharing stories is one way that the connection is particularly symbiotic.The refugees are relieved to tell their stories and be understood, and North listens as they add details and complexity to stories as their English improves. She realizes that there are so many facets of these women’s stories that she doesn’t know, and it may take a decade before the women can articulate the story completely. But for right now, “they need someone to hear this story,” says North. On the other end, listening to these stories allows Americans to learn what people around the world are facing, to step out of their own world and experience someone else’s story.

The first Village Gathering.
Photo: Charlene Hines

“We See Many Healing Power”

What are the stories these women share? The story of Purna, a Bhutanese member of Refugee Beads, is one example. Purna spent 17 years in a Nepali refugee camp.When she was quite young, the Southern Bhutanese, who were subsistence farmers, were forced to migrate, but not before some 2,000 were tortured, says the site Bhutaneserefugees.com. They found relative safety, though not a warm welcome, in Nepal, as the refugee population climbed to 105,000 by 2007. The Nepali government did not allow the Bhutanese to work outside the camps. Most days, says North, they ate less than what most Americans would feed their house cats.

Though Purna’s family faced hardship there, she also experienced something that many refugees have seen in their camps.Fellow Refugee Beads member Juli, of Burma, put it this way: “We see many healing power.” “Healing power” may fall beyond the limits of what many American Christians believe God will do, and yet Christian refugees insist on what they have seen.Purna experienced the healing of her sister, who suffered violent seizures.

It happened like this. Purna’s family required her to stay at home to watch her sister. This meant that her brother was the one to leave his Hindu family each day and walk miles away to visit a Christian pastor. Speaking with the pastor, Purna’s brother became convinced that God could heal their sister. “Let me ask the pastor to pray,” he said, and urged the pastor to visit their home. Though the family was skeptical, after the pastor’s visit and prayers, her sister gradually healed, and her whole family began to believe.

When Purna was 25, she said goodbye to her parents, doubting she would ever see them again, because when refugees are placed in other countries, there is more emphasis on getting them out than on keeping families intact.

Photo: Ruth Ann North

Symbolically Small

Contemplating the stories of refugees, it is easy to view any actions an ordinary person might take as tiny, a drop in the bucket. Perhaps it can be seen as symbolic, then, that the refugees sell something as intricate as daisy-patterned barrettes, made with beads nearly as small as flower seeds. The actions required to make this would be delicate and small, yet in a wooden bowl on a table at a Village Gathering, joined with other beadwork and jewelry, this small flower means that hope continues to bloom.

Refugee Beads jewelry is available online at refugeebeads.com, in Chicago at Novum Shop, and in Atlanta at the Atlantic Station Market. Want to get even more involved? Become a fan of Refugee Beads on Facebook, or contact Ruth Ann North (refugeebeads@gmail.com) to host a Village Gathering or send beads and other supplies.

Growing up, my family and I vacationed in an Upstate New York cabin. A lake spread out, cold and tranquil, just across a gravel road. Hiking trails looped through the woods, a nature center offered pamphlets and kayaks, and our neighbors let us borrow their canoe. Did I visit the nature center to learn about the flora and fauna? No. Did I water ski? Not unless wheedled into it. Did I hike trails? Borrow the canoe? Maybe once or twice. How did I amuse myself on our wonderfully nature-y vacations? I brought a stack of books, sat in the damp, dark cabin and read.

Having forfeited pleasures of nature for worlds of fiction and creative nonfiction, I am here to recommend three books that are perfect to pack if you’re planning a mountain- or lake-side vacation this summer. They are not cutting-edge; rather, they are books I am recommending because the forest setting will amplify their worth.

3. Richard Russo’s Empire Falls.

Why it’s good: One of the intriguing things about small-town life is that places have layers and layers of stories. If a visitor asks why a mom-and-pop store is sitting vacant, she may find it used to be the hub of the town, but the family suffered a tragedy, mom-and-pop split up, and another family tried to start a new store there but no one came. Richard Russo captures this layered aspect of small town life perfectly, setting much of Empire Falls in the Empire Grill, a diner that Miles Roby, a divorced man in his forties, wants to sell but keeps managing at the demand of Francine Whiting, who owns most of the town. The stories of those who frequent the diner spin out from the setting, leading to compelling character studies and page-turning action.

Why it’s even better in a cabin in the woods: No doubt the cabin is near some small town or other, and Russo will get you thinking about the stories that fill the diners, gas stations, schools, and taverns.

2. Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman.

Why it’s good: Munro creates characters who live and breathe. In them, you may recognize parts of yourself or true, deep aspects of people you know. Munro lets characters develop slowly and richly and lets plots resolve in a measured and satisfying way, the way a simmering sauce will suddenly reach its best flavor. In this collection, the resolutions are still measured and satisfying, yet more jolting and revealing than usual, especially in “Rich as Stink,” “Save the Reaper,” and the title story.

Why it’s even better in a cabin in the woods: Munro sets many of these characters in small towns, forests, and vacation spots in Canada, and many developments happen specifically because characters are away from home. Also, since they are short stories, they are easy to read in one afternoon, and there are good stopping points in case someone cajoles you into water skiing.

1. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

Why it’s good: Not only is this a page turner, but Truman Capote invented a genre while he was writing. Amazing.

Why it’s even better in a cabin in the woods: No doubt many folks dusted this off when the film Capote came out. It’s intensely disturbing that these crimes were random, springing from misinformation about the profit the murderers would reap. But the most terrifying thing about this nonfiction novel is its reminder that the safest, most unlikely place can become a setting for gruesome killings. If you haven’t read this in an isolated setting, this book hasn’t had its full effect.

So, here’s to a summer of great books, a dash of nature, and safety and serenity the woods.

Two hundred people fill a sparsely furnished sanctuary, singing at the top of their lungs. They are untrained singers with plenty of vocal eccentricities. No instruments give the right key or take the edge off the voices’ peculiarities. Stumbling upon a scenario like this would make many people flee for the exits. And, knowing that the lead singer of Chicago-based indie band Cains & Abels had grown up in this tradition, I thought of the torturous a capella as an experience he would have had to overcome to get on with his musical life. Far from it, he told me. David Sampson, Cains & Abels’ front man, considers the unaccompanied hymn-singing foundational to his music making. In fact, these experiences have woven the ethos and sound of Call Me Up, Cains & Abels’ first full-length album.

Sampson grew up Plymouth Brethren. For this denomination, a capella singing was a symbol of the way members craved direct, simple communion with God. “You could sing your head off,” Sampson recalls. You were purely accepted and simply free to participate. “Obviously, sometimes it could get weird, with nobody in a church who officially knew anything about music. We could end up singing really really slow, or sometimes we could lose pitch at every verse and end up singing in a different key. Overall, though, I think the way we sang was very honest and direct,” he reflects.

“I actually like to think about it as kind of punk rock. Like Beat Happening. You should have heard how some of these people sang. This one old guy would start all of the singing. Someone would suggest a hymn to sing, and then he would start it off. Sometimes nobody knew the tunes, so he would just make something up on the spot. It was amazing. He had a loud voice. You could hear it out in the parking lot. If a note was too high for him to hit, he would go for it anyway.”

The authenticity of those voices is still in David Sampson’s head when he makes music. “I remember being young and figuring out from those people how to use my voice in that way,” he says, adding that the Brethren style influences the harmonies he seeks. Authenticity is important to the whole band – they proudly use words like “pained” and “raw” when they describe the music, and their MySpace page proclaims, “We are trying to make the most real and honest music we can.”

Josh Ippel
Photo: David Sampson
 

Call Me Up doesn’t sound much like church music – it is layered, folk-infused rock music with lots of reverb and instrumental solos (think Neil Young & Crazy Horse).Nevertheless, the honesty and simplicity of the Brethren style are evident lyrically and musically throughout Call Me Up.

The album builds to moments where sound practically swallows you. Jonathan Dawe and Michelle Vondiziano’s background vocals are soothing and pretty, like a lullaby from another room, and Josh Ippel’s guitar is eerie, ringing thick with distortion.These blend with Vondiziano’s cello and keys, the primal sound of Dawe’s drums, and Sampson’s bass to form lush, engulfing instrumentation.It feels oddly similar to how Sampson describes church conferences as a kid, where a thousand people filled a rented high school auditorium and sang hymns a capella.”The silence in the moment right after the last note was an amazing moment. It was like the trough of a wave. You could hear a creaking chair in the corner in a place where a second earlier, you couldn’t even talk to your neighbor.”

Sampson’s voice rides on these waves of backing vocals and instrumentation, a voice that hits the emotions of the song perfectly, without requiring itself to hit a perfect pitch.(Of course, isn’t this what the folk tradition is all about? It reminds me of when Bob Dylan goes all out on The Rolling Thunder Revue, or when Will Oldham sings “Madeleine-Mary.”) “I’m not trying to sing in a traditionally beautiful way,” says Sampson. “I hope that the way I’m singing now has the most in common with the voice I used when I was five to sing the alphabet.”The result is a “super-acquired taste,” Sampson admits, but it has power to grab its listeners.Jonathan Dawe confesses to singing the tunes in his head before realizing they’re Cains & Abels songs. “It’s got it’s own charm,” he says.

Jonathan Dawe
Photo: David Sampson
 

Seeking to make honest music, Cains & Abels embrace both harshness and beauty.Visceral, image-driven lyrics, reminiscent of Neutral Milk Hotel’s physicality, combine with memorable melodies. Michelle Vondiziano says she often forgets she’s harmonizing to disturbing lyrics, because she is so focused on creating beautiful harmonies.

Take these lyrics from “Metal in my Mouth”:

I shoved my hand into a crack in the road

And let cars and trucks roll over my body

I tore a piece of skin off of my finger tip

And gave it to a squirrel to take to her.

Or this imagery from “Killed By Birds”:

For the stone to be thrown

For the bone to be lodged in my soft neck

Each time I pull back the skin

I find the feathers within…

Killed, killed by birds

Killed killed by lady birds

If the lyrics seem violent, it is because the band is trying to communicate something about intimacy. Intimacy is the Rosetta Stone for this album, making lyrics like “lay a hand on my hand” and “I’d dive into a fire if it lit up the phone in my pocket” come together into what Sampson describes as “a big fat universal plea.”

Reaching out, to anyone at all, is a theme throughout Call Me Up. The startling lyric about tearing off skin is actually about prayer, about just wanting to be able to give a piece of yourself to God and know that it got there.The album’s title is also a reference to intimacy.”Call Me Up” refers to what Sampson wanted most in 2006, when a relationship was ending. “I wanted to send that to the universe.”

There are times in the album when pain is quenched, when an answer comes:

And you can never be alone

You are loved by me

And I cling to your heart

I cling to your heart.

Michelle Vondiziano
Photo: David Sampson
 

Interestingly, Vondiziano singles out this song, “Never Be Alone,” as one of the album’s most musically pained and raw. This makes sense, because harshness and beauty become a push and pull within Call Me Up, and the album reverberates between extremes.The dichotomies are not by accident, because even the band’s name describes a dichotomy.It describes the band’s belief that each person is literally a Cain and an Abel simultaneously: both a cruel, rebellious person and a kind, generous person.

All along the spectrum, beauty slips in. It’s a haunting, engulfing beauty that, because it grows from painful authenticity, avoids anything saccharine. Interestingly, that’s just what happened in Brethren church services, too. “They weren’t bringing beauty to the services in an intentional way,” says Sampson, “but beauty was able to slip in through the cracks.”

Because they have pursued authenticity and achieved a rare kind of beauty, Cains & Abels’ Call Me Up is well worth checking out.Call Me Up is available May 19 through iTunes, States Rights Records, and Southern Records.

Photo: Wally Gobetz.

“Shoot,” I mutter, looking at the clock on my computer. It’s 4:30 p.m. in Oak Park, Illinois where I’ve just finished teaching, and that slates me for a 5:15 transfer to the Brown Line train in the Chicago Loop. Which means I won’t get a seat. Which means I’ll be shoved into a space more precariously crammed than my closet. Which means that I will be practically hugging about five other commuters for 20 minutes, saying “sorry” at least a half-dozen times as I lurch into them on our journey. I often wonder why people willingly submit to conditions that might otherwise be a human rights violation.

I guess you’d have to be a sicko to say you liked being so close to other people, but I do have to wonder why I find it quite so obnoxious and awkward. I mean, on other occasions, wouldn’t I claim that I love my fellow humans? Don’t I celebrate the faith that claims God became a human not too different than the guy chewing gum in my ear? Public transportation has a way of making the abstract concrete.

According to the Chicago Tribune, the CTA is the United States’ second largest web of public transit. Each day, says the Tribune, the CTA gives 1.6 million rides – 500,000 on the trains alone. A crowded train car in this system is kind of like a laboratory. Throw something interesting into the mix – say, a pigeon flapping around inside a train car – and you can marvel at the individuality of each person’s response.

In three years of regularly riding Chicago Transit Authority trains, I’ve learned that the CTA can illuminate a lot about human nature. I’ve learned that people will give a fifty dollar bill to a stranger if he has a slab of wood, three cups, and one pea.I’ve learned that different colored plastic prayer cloths are purportedly good for different kinds of illness.But sometimes this clunking laboratory of human experience teaches bigger lessons.

Contentment is Transferable

It was an early morning, and I opened the station door for a man with crutches and one leg, walked beside him on the stairs, lost track of where he was, and then ended up boarding the same car. I sat diagonally across from him while he stacked his crutches on the seat beside him. He placed a plastic cooler on the floor by his one foot. I smiled at this man in his paint-splattered sweatshirt, a smile both wistful and bumbling.

He smiled back at me.”It’s hard having three legs,” he told me. I laughed, and smiled some more. The message was clear: he didn’t have less than me, he had more.For the rest of the day, I kept remembering the short, black-haired man with his lunchbox by his foot and his crutches on the seat, and it was like somehow his words had multiplied the things I had: I felt like I had more of the things I loved, more appreciation for my home, more love to give my friends.

During the months surrounding that encounter, my morning rush-hour commute would frequently land me on “The Blessed Train” – a Red Line run operated by a cheery driver many Chicagoans appreciate. “Good morning,” he would say. “All aboard the Blessed Train. The Blessed Train is the best train.”He had a hearty voice that boomed over the speakers, and his appreciation of his work let me recalibrate.It became the omen of a good day ahead.

Photo: Lee Bey

“Bad” Trains Offer Impromptu Community

I’ve moved since then, and instead of the Blessed Train, I ride the Green Line, a line of track with a bad reputation. The second time I rode the Green Line, a friend told me a girl had been stabbed right on the train.Also, the Green Line is not the site of the only CTA disaster, but its operator had one of the most outrageous responses. When a Green Line derailed last year, the operator ordered everyone to stand on one side of the cars so the train wouldn’t plunge off the elevated track. Despite the dangers and past catastrophes, the Green Line is one of my favorite to ride (in the daytime).

The thing is, people talk to each other on the “bad” trains, and ignore each other on the “good” trains (like the Brown Line, which runs northwest from the loop through wealthier neighborhoods). For instance, a few months ago I was reading Gregory Wolfe’s The New Religious Humanists just as the Green Line rolled away from the station, and someone asked me, “Hey, is that a good book?” Then it was, “Where’d you get that?” which eventually led to another scrutiny of the title and the sigh, “Man, I should get myself to church.”

This brief exchange did not pressure me to keep talking; it was merely a pleasant way for both of us to begin the trek home. When people talk to me on the Green Line, the feeling is not that someone is flirting, or getting ready to follow me home, or scam me (okay, well, except for the guy hawking prayer-cloths). Instead, the feeling is that, by boarding this train, I am now part of an impromptu community.

We Aren’t Easily Threatened

It’s the mantra of CTA riding: “If you see someone acting suspiciously, please inform CTA personnel immediately.” The thing is, if we took that mantra seriously, we’d be on the intercom every five minutes or so. There’s always someone talking to himself in the corner, or looking protective of some oddly-shaped package, or glaring at us unnervingly. But I was amazed the other day at just how much suspicious or even aggressive behavior people will witness unperturbed.

I was riding the Brown Line (that’s right – the “safe” one), and from my vantage point it looked as though someone was lying down in the aisle. I could only see the tips of battered white sneakers sticking out from behind the metal dividers by the doors. I whispered to the guy next to me, “Is that person okay?”

“I think so,” he responded, no doubt pegging me as a tourist, “though you never know with people these days.”

When I leaned over to look more closely, I knew why he wasn’t as concerned as I was.The man wasn’t lying in the aisle. He was just sitting on the floor with his back against one of the dividers. Odd enough, though. He stayed like this for a few minutes, mumbling to himself, then hiked himself up and paced the aisles, glaring at everyone and still muttering.His eyes were sinister and his hair was wild.He paced right out one of the emergency doors and stood between the cars, wild hair blowing, like he was on the boardwalk enjoying the ocean breeze. After a few minutes, he came back to my car and continued pacing. As we neared the Loop, I heard what sounded like a muffled explosion. The guy had taken out an Aquafina bottle and was slamming it against the divider, muttering louder and looking at us like we had all been his tormentors since childhood.

To me, what was even stranger than this guy’s behavior was that every passenger but me seemed oblivious. They kept reading. They kept their earbuds in. They hardly glanced at this guy or each other. As for me, I decided I wasn’t going to wait for the guy’s next move, so I followed another CTA mantra: “Move to the next car if your immediate safety is threatened.”

Reflecting on it, I suppose the passengers’ response wasn’t abnormal. It’s already taken a whole lot of trust just to live in a city, because, as Jane Jacobs has pointed out in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a city is a place where strangers live very close together, most of them bargaining not to hurt each other. Urban existence means that we have given each other a generous dose of trust. It’s not the sort of trust where we’re making eye-contact and talking to each other all the time, but it’s the kind of trust that it takes to have the same entryway key as five other strangers, or where we’re hopping into a vehicle a stranger (be it a cab driver, bus driver, or train operator) is driving. In some cases, though, maybe this daily trust means our danger sensors are corroded.

CTA Stories

Another thing I’ve noticed in my three years here is that Chicagoans love CTA stories. When the RedEye version of the Tribune has a column about the CTA, emails to the editor pour in.The Decider section of The Onion ran a series on what it’s like to ride certain lines of the CTA round trip. There are whole blogs dedicated to sightings on the CTA and rants about it.

Whether ranting or celebrating, chances are that part of the draw of public transit stories is that there are unusual things to be learned about human nature when we’re all crammed together. The quirks, threats, or homilies in motion that we notice on the train are merely the quick emergence of a million stories of the people riding packed together above Chicago.