Tales from the ledge

A love Tori

2010-01-23T07:42:00.000-08:00

There aren’t very many good things about being out of work, but for me one of them has been a better relationship with my cat, Tori.

A diminutive black feline, Tori inhabits our house alongside our Australian Shepherd, Callie, three kids and my wife.

The two animals –Tori and Callie, that is-- get along as well as two members of opposite species can be expected to get along.

They more or less ignore each other, except when Callie occasionally snaps at her or snarfs up Tori’s food when she thinks no one’s watching.

Otherwise than that, their relationship is like an inter species dètente. They have agreed to leave each other alone for the sake of domestic tranquility.

But Tori and I…well, that’s different. Ours is a relationship that is evolving by the day.

We picked up Tori—named for a character Vittoria Vetra in Dan Brown’s novel, “Angels and Demons”—at a local big box pet store about three years ago.

For the two of us, it was not love at first sight.

In fact, I fought the relationship from the start, on the grounds that my allergies to cats would make my life miserable.

But being the sacrificial father that I am, and being unable to counter the argument that I had two cats in my single days, I gave in, thinking the kids would love her.

And they did.

Daughter Sarah would nuzzle Tori on the couch and stepson Mackenzie would carry her around on his shoulders, in the hood of his sweatshirt. Eldest son Jacob was somewhere in between, thinking Tori was a midget compared to the two football sized cats he had back at his mom’s house.

Me, well, I petty much ignored the animal, opting only to keep her protected from the evil Callie, who would occasional snap at her in a moment of jealousy.

Then, in the dark aftermath of March 29, 2009, the day I got laid off, everything changed.

Suddenly, I was spending more time around the house, Tori’s domain.

So when Tori was hungry, I fed her.

When she wanted to go outside, I opened the slider.

When she was thirsty, I made sure her bowl was filled with water.

At first I didn’t notice any change, until the day Tori walked quietly into my basement studio and began to meow.

I was sitting in my artist’s chair, a spot she obviously coveted.

So I slid my butt forward and Tori jumped up between the chair back and me.

And she stayed there for quite some time, perfectly content in the tight space between human flesh and plastic chair. Her purrs floated over the afternoon air as we sat back to back, nearly entwined in,well, you get the picture.

Subsequent days saw Tori expanding her exploits in my office to include trips on to my desk, sitting time between my computer and the wall and afternoon naps on the bed that doubles as my extra workspace. In the summer, we even sat on the deck together early in the morning, watching the sunrise.

Then came the real breakthrough. Late one evening, after Maureen and I had turned off the bedroom light to retire for the night, Suddenly I felt something land on the bed followed by little feet padding up my right leg followed by something warm and slightly heavy sitting below the space we don’t talk about in public.

Yep, Tori had made her way, covertly and quietly, from her usual perch on the couch pillow to our bed for her evening respite. And it’s been that way almost every night since.
So Tori and I are buds.
And I must confess that I kind of like her. She’s pretty good company when I’m home alone applying for jobs on the internet, although she seems to be hungry whenever I am doing something really important.

But sometimes she’s a bother when she wants to share my chair, so I’m thinking buying Tori one for her.

Imagine that, a cat with her own desk chair.

Next, she’ll want her own queen-sized bed.

Out of work, but not dead yet

2010-01-18T16:37:00.000-08:00

The conversation at the high school fund raiser had just gotten to the point where we were asking each other what we did for a living.
The diminutive woman I was selling sub sandwiches with said she was a grad student.
Nice.
I told her I was unemployed; I had been laid off back in April.
I'm soooo sorry," she said.
Although she had the best of intentions, it suddenly seemed like someone near to me had died.
"Oh, I'm fine," I told her, explaining that I viewed the end of my 32-year newspaper job as an opportunity to pursue my passion in photography.
"We're fine," I assured her.
But I couldn't help but thinking how some people view unemployment as a disease.
But it really isn't.
True, unemployment can drain your emotions, strain your relationships and suck the life out of your savings account. Just like cancer.

But in my own case, I try to maintain that "this is a great opportunity" outlook. Sometimes its tough; I wouldn't be human if I didn't have those thoughts on some days.
Like when I worked the concession stand at the high school fund-raiser. As I took a steady stream of $10s and $20s in exchange for hot dogs and sub sandwiches, I couldn't help but think...
"How is it that my wallet's pretty much empty and these kids are walking around with all that green."? Stupid, huh?
Or when we had to limit our holiday gift for the holidays to a tiny fraction of last year's
Or when I have to plead--for the 10th time that month--for more time to pay a bill because my wife and I are both out of work.
It's all part of the unemployment gig. You're bound to have some negative thoughts, but don't buy into them.

I've been pretty lucky; I've managed to keep self-defeating, self-pitying karma to a minimum.
Its like I tell me wife.
"Hey, this isn't a life sentence."
Even if some people treat you like someone's just died.

Why is today different than all other days?

2009-12-24T13:53:00.000-08:00

Call in a right of passage.
Call it a bald faced bid to save some cash.
But today--on Christmas Eve--I joined AARP.
Argh!
I did it on line and as I pressed the keys, my life as a Child of the 60s did, in fact, flash before my eyes.
Protests in Lincoln Park.
The year we closed Southern Ilinois Univeristy.
Jimmi Hendrix, the Byrds, Dylan, SDS.
Blue jean jackets with the Peace Sign fashioned out of masking tape on the back.
Those funny cigarettes.
The whole 9 yards.
Gone in the stroke of a computer keyboard.
In my youth, I had always thought of the AARP an organization of old people. Now that I'm in it, I guesss I'm officially an old people.
Why did I join?
Cash.
Or a lack there of.
With the recession still hanging on and unemployment still a daily occupant of our house, we're trying to save money where ever we can.
Grocery shopping at Target.
Off brands at Dominick's
Cutting back magazine subscriptions.
You get the picture.
So when the bills came for car and home insurance, I figured, why not shop around.
Around the same time, some junk mail arrived at the house promoting lower insurance rates if we joined AARP.
So good bye Allstate. Hello Hartford. If we joined AARP.
So today I did.
We're talking big time savings, here (sorry about the commercial!).
But there was a cost.
I had to cross that line into senior citizenship.
It was painful, but hey, I can be bought, I admit it, even if it meant relegating my jean jacket and days of protest to a distant memory.
Actually, now that I'm into my second hour as a senior citizen, I can honestly say its not that bad.
I don't feel any different. My back still aches. I still snore.
But now I get discounts at Walgreens, Borders and a string of mid-range hotels.
Maybe this senior citizen thing IS all in my head.
Maybe I can still be a proud Child of the 60s AND be a senior.
There are lots of benefits.
Its like the lady at Hartford said when she explained why they could insure seniors like me so cheaply.
"They don't have accidents," she deadpanned. "They usually just back into eachother at Wal Mart."

Dealing with c*** in life

2009-10-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

Before it actually happened, being unemployed at the age of 59 was nothing more than an unpleasant nightmare.

Fifty-nine, I thought, would be an age where most people wouldn’t want to hire me and I would be too young to retire.

It would be, I thought, like living in a workplace Never Neverland.

Add to that a real live recession and the fact that my chosen field of work, newspaper journalism, has undergone a gut wrenching change that has left it at death’s door, and the nightmare takes on…well, nightmarish proportions.

So here I sit: 59 and unemployed.

It leaves me with a lot of time on my hands, once I’ve handled the daily task of looking for work.

I find myself doing a lot of thinking, a lot of, well, introspection, about my life and situation and the lives and situation of those around me.

The thoughts aren’t always connected, sometimes they stand alone, by themselves.

Like this one:

At 59 and unemployed, its easy to accumulate a lot of mental c***, er, junk that might not be mental c*** , ahem, junk, if I was working. In other words, little stuff becomes big stuff.

Like when someone leaves a half eaten breakfast in the car after I drive him to school instead of dumping it in his way into the building like I asked him.

Or the dishwasher being left full with clean dishes and opened so the house slave, that would be me, has to empty or close it before attending to the more important things on my “to do list.”

So on bad days, this mental c*** builds up quickly and, on real bad days, it can give me a headache.

So at 59 and unemployed, I’ve created this approach to deal with the mental c***: Put it in a pile, move it to the corner of my brain, and ignore it. Instead, find something positive, fun or interesting to live on til the pile of c*** degrades.

Now some psychologists might call that denial or avoidance. And it very well might be. But I don’t care.

For me, its an effective technique on the road to happiness.

At some point, I’ll deal pile of c*** in the corner—maybe after my headache goes away. But in the short term, I’m quite content to leave it sit in the corner while I Iook for peace and happiness elsewhere.

A Long and Winding Road

2009-09-10T20:57:00.001-07:00

The lady standing in line behind me at the bookstore could easily have been 60. Maybe 65. Her hair was a reddish grey and she dressed slightly, well...grandmotherly.
Yet as the Beatles tune, "Nowhere Man," played on the store intercom, she moved slightly from side to side, hummed a bit, smiled. She said something about feeling like she was back in the 60s.
Yes, I told, her, all we needed was a set of love beads and earth shoes and we'd be all set.
It was Beatles Day, the day all 14 of their albums were being re-released in newly remastered versions. And the world seemed to be humming "I Want to Hold Your Hand."
I'll leave it to the pundits to decide if the music sounded any better. For me, and apparently that woman in line at the bookstore, the day plunged us down memory lane.
The specific recollections evoked by "Paperback Writer" ET., AL aren't important. What is important is the feeling of hope, optimism and joy that washed over me as I listened. Just as it did the first time I heard it.
And it wasn't playing just at that book store either. I must have visited a half dozen shops that day and heard John, Paul, George and Ringo singing one of their hits.
It was a good thing, actually, because the music somehow made me feel like I would really find a job some day soon, like the recession would finally end and that I'd figure out a way to pay for my bills.
It made me feel hopeful back int the '60s, too. Hopeful that the awful war in Vietnam would end, hopeful that college wouldn't be too hard and hopeful that I'd figure a way out of my lingering adolescence.
The remastered music also made me realize how old I was getting. (is 59 still considered old?) That music was popular 40 years ago. I was what, 16, 17, 18 at the time. My grandmother was still alive back then, knitting blankets and potholders. And lots of kids were wearing tie-died shirts and love beads.
As I got in the car, I couldn't help but flip on my iPhone to check if I had any Beatles music loaded.
I did.
"No Reply:
"The Long and Winding Road"
"Let it Be"
"Till There Was You"
"Roll Over Beethoven"
"She's a Woman"
"She Loves You"
"I Want to Hold Your Hand"
"Ticket to Ride"
"Paper Back Rider"
"Hey Jude"
So I plugged it in, started the Black Scion, rolled up the windows and blasted the radio as loud as I could.
Man, it sounded good.
The car shook.
My eardrums rattled.
My brain froze.
And I drove home.
How I got there, I'll never know.
But I do remember driving around the block until the end of "Let It Be"
the second time through the play list.
I pulled into the driveway just as Paul was singing the last notes. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah......"
I bounded out of the car, raced in the house and pulled my wife away from her computer, where she was dutifully filing job applications on line.
"You gotta come with me," I blathered.
"What's going' on?"
"Its Beatles Day," I babbled "and we gotta go for a ride and listen to the music. This stuff is the soundtrack of our youth."
So I raced back outside to wait.
Finally, she came out, carrying, not a tie-died shirt, or a string of love beads, but a set of knitting needles!
Perfect, I thought, just perfect.

A certain place

2009-06-02T20:50:00.000-07:00

We drove slowly down the street, the same street I had walked so many summer days as a child on the way to the lake.
The air was cold, though, not at all like those scalding days when we had left the beach house, heading up the dune trail and down to the cool waters of Lake Michigan.
But this day, as we came to the corner of Colfax and Louisiana, something was different. The tattered old white clapboard house that had been our summer home as a child, then as an adult with my own kids, was gone.
Just like that.
Sitting at that corner now is a blue and white monster house that looked like it belonged in Martha's Vineyard, not 100 yards from a sand dune in Michigan City, Ind.
"Wow, what's that," Jake yelled, his voice shattering the spring morning.
"What happened," was all I could muster. "Where's the old house."
What happened, the builder of McMansion by Lake Michigan told us, was that the owner had knocked down the old place, sold the land, and....well, the rest was obvious.
We got out of the car and walked around the front of the three story house, probably looking like a couple of earthlings examining a flying saucer that had just landed in our backyard.
On the spot where we would cook dinner on an old grill now stood the start of a paver brick driveway that led to not one, but two garage doors.
About where we would walk the cement staircase to the upper living units of our old house now stood one of two stair cases leading to the new living quarters, with a front door and a backdoor at either end of a long porch that stretched the entire length of the house.
And in the old backyard yard, where a hammock beckoned and a small putting green occupied the kids, instead stood a screened in porch on the first floor of the mansion.
We could only shake our heads. Jake took refuge walking up an old winding trail that led through a sand dune and down to the lake.
I caught up with him at the top of the dune that overlooks miles of beach to the west, almost as far as the eye could see.
"Boy it pisses me off hat the house is gone," he said, eyes sad with anger. "Let's never come back here again."
I fought back my tears.
* * *Jake's time in that house and on that beach goes back years, to the age of four. Later, his sister, Sarah and step brother Mack visited the tattered white house, not far from another home my folks rented when I was Jake's age.
The family spent an August week in the three bedroom unit on the top floor. The place felt like a Salvation Army store inside But it was home. Our beach house.
The inside was done up in knotty pine paneling straight out of the 50s , old furniture in a living room, three bedrooms, a bath, a long not working fireplace, a kitchen with creaky old plywood cabinets, and a table big enough for a dozen people.
And there were days when that table was filled. Family and friends would come down for the day. We'd take long walks in the hot summer sand or take a dip in the cool lake.
Jake and I would sometimes walk the couple miles to the lighthouse. Or I'd take Sarah out for a ride in her stroller, stopping at the trendy coffee shop at the strip center a coulee streets away. One year, we arrived before the house was ready, so the kids, still dressed in street clothes, jumped over waves from the pounding surf.
Sometimes visitors would rent out a living unit in the basement, or they'd stay at a nearby hotel. But stay they would. And they'd all eat at that table.
It was the same table where Aunt Roberta would lay out the craft she'd brought down from Chicago to keep the kids busy on the rare non-beach rainy day. On the really hot days, you'd find Roberta floating in a huge inner tube out beyond the sandbars in the lake.

* * *

The lake looked inviting as Jake and I made our way down the other side of the dune. The wind whipped in our faces and the waves pounded the shore.
We walked along the beach, talking about skipping stones, rip tides, sandbars, kite flying and illegal fires.
"The Michigan City of my youth," Jake kept calling it.
We found of set of beach chairs left conveniently at the top of the dune. We sat there for a while. Jake seemed happy and content as he looked over the beach.
We both gazed down the shore at a tall building interrupting the beachfront: The Blue Chip Casino and a multi-storied hotel tower had gone up there a few years back.
We could always stay there," Jake said. "It's close, the beach is only ten minutes away."
We could, I suppose.
"There are other beaches, ya know, he said.
"Myrtle beach is really nice."
Maybe, but its not Michigan City. And there's no beach house.
The truth is, there will never be another beach house. Never be another "Michigan City of My Youth.
Jake knows it. And I know it.
It like he said.
"There are places you hold in a certain esteem. And this is one of them."

Loving the rain

2009-05-27T10:09:00.000-07:00

Jacob stands close to six feet, weighs around 275 pounds and has a neck so big that his father can't get his hands around it, just in case I feel like strangling the kid when he does outrageous.
He's also not one to get overly emotional. He rarely says "I love you" to his father or sister. And the only time he gets really excited is when his beloved Red Wings win a hockey game,his Chicago White Sox actually beat up on somebody on the baseball diamond or we find a great Mexican restaurant.
That's probably why I was taken aback the other night when, during a car ride through a torrential downpour, the following words passed through his lips.
"I really love the rain."
Its not so much that he put the "L word" in the middle of a sentence. It was how he said it: with a wistful, almost poetic cast to his voice.
"I really love the rain."
Huh?
When Jake was a kid and a rainstorm came up, I'd take him outside. We'd sit in the back end of our old two-tone blue Ford Aerostar mini-van, pop the hood and use bungee cords as pretend fishing lines. We'd sit there as the rain poured down and pretend to catch blue gill, trout, whatever fish we could imagine. We had a great time. Little did I know it would turn my son into a rain officiando.
On our trip back to the house, the rain was coming down in sheets; I could barely see the road ahead as I drove. Jake was saying how he wished he were home sitting on the front porch of our raised ranch watching the rain.
"We'll be home soon," I said. "The porch is probably dry enough so we can sit out and watch the storm."
Just then the storm let up; the rain continued, but not with the force it had shown a few minutes earlier.
But for Jake, everything had changed.
"It just won't be the same," he said.
Maybe not, but for his father, the rain had served as a reminder that a big neck and a big body sometimes can hide a huge heart.

2009-05-24T07:20:00.000-07:00

The unemployment curve
There's a definite learning curve to this unemployment thing.
Out of work since April, I'm experiencing days that are a mix of good and bad, productive and non-productive and just plain awful.
You'd think that after a month or so, I would be getting better at having no job.
But I'm not.
The first thing I noticed about unemployment is the total lack of structure it bings to my day.
As a newspaper editor for more than 30 years, my day tended to be shaped by deadlines. I did what I had to do with the total focus of making my deadlines. My days flowed around the clock.
At home and out of work, there are no job-imposed deadlines. Only those I manage to impose upon myself And I'm finding that what I impose, I can unimpose.
There are days that I make my deadlines and the work --what ever it is that day--gets done. And there are days that it doesn't.
Why?
Life has a way of intruding.
There's no food in the house for the dog.
We need a gallon of milk.
There's a flat tire on the van.
Someone needs a ride somewhere.
These little roadblocks are unavoidable and totally out of one's control.
Maddening it can be.
Where is it written, I ask, that the unemployed one is suddenly the one who covers for every scheduling snafu, meets every home repair man and does all the shopping, eh? Have those around me forgotten that even though I'm out of work, finding work is a full time job.
I thought I had the deadline issue whippped when I came up with the idea of keeping the same schedule unemployed as I kept when employed: Up at 6, to the gym by 6:45 to work by 9.
Seemed like a good idea, low-hanging fruit that I could easily harvest.
Not so much.
The first few days my idea worked fine.
Then son number 2 needed a ride to school because my wife was student teaching and needed the time to get ready.
So I inherited the job of early morning chauffeur, which I didn't mind, but it set my day back 45 minutes.
So I started working out at 9 a.m., but the new start time meant I finished about 10:30, which is late to start the day.
So I moved my work outs til noon, which worked fine until Son No. 2 came home from college.
That meant my basement office had to morph into his bedroom and the adjoining basement had to morph into my office.
Now, a week or so later, everyone is nearly settled. Son No. 1 is camped out in the room that once served as my basement studio.
Son. No. 2 has his morning ride. Wife gets her time in the morning to do whatever it is wife's do in the morning before going to work.
And me...we'll, I'm making my way through the learning curve called unemployment.

2009-05-19T21:50:00.001-07:00

The last day
Originally posted April 1, 2009

It didn't take long to empty out more than 30 years of memories at the office the other day.
Forty-five minutes, tops, for two file cabinets under my desk and one big one in the corner of the newsroom.
Three convenient garbage cans, two boxes and one plastic tube and viola!, my job was done.
Oh, I saved a few things. But by and large 90 per cent of it went into the garbage.
I must admit, though, going through the junk was like a 45-minute trip down memory lane, where both the good and the bad waited to leap out of the darkness of faded memory.
There was a clipping of a story I did about my son, seven at the time, visiting a new computer center at a kiddie playground I took him to one night. The picture showed him transfixed at the screen of a 1997 era computer, his eyes staring into the light while his hand maneuvered on a primitive touch pad. It was one one of my Friday night visitations not long after a divorce, as I recall, a time I was still getting accustomed to seeing the kids every other weekend and twice a month on Weds night.
There was another clipping, this one of a review I wrote of Jewish comedian Jackie Mason. The venue remains clouded in lost memory, but Mason was fabulous, quick witted, acid tongued yet kind in a strange way. I fancied myself an arts writer at that point, far from the business editor I ended up at the end of things.
There were lots of other clippings, stories about the latest in gadgets at the International Housewares Show, a review of an Alman Brothers concert, a story about Frank Lloyd Wright, and a string of columns about the outdoor concert season of 1997.
I piled the clippings, along with a few files, into a plastic tub that I had brought from home. Inside it already were trinkets from my desk, pictures, postcards, tape players that didn't work, old business cards and a five year old photo of my daughter that had gotten stuck way back in the desk drawer.
The ride to work that last day looked and felt as it had for most of my years at the paper. The Marathon station was selling gas for $2.16, oodles more than the first day I passed back in 1976. The sky was a typical Chicago winter grey, not unlike that cold February day I started at the paper, a raw 26-year- old rookie out of weekly newspaper land, more than a bit scared of working at a daily.
Off in the distance I thick black clouds rose over the horizon.
"No doubt a fire," I thought.
There was a time I would have called it in.
Not today.
The calendar at my desk was marked for me to be in Washington, D.C., today, where daughter Sarah lives with her mom. "See Sarah sing National Anthem at school," the calendar said.
Not today.
As the day meandered along, I had a conversation with a photographer about fixing a photo I needed for one of my pages.
"Nice to know you still care," he said.
Always have, always will.
Later in the day, an email popped into my account.
'"Is this the same Ernie Schweit who once lived at Carbondale Mobile Homes in 1972."
Yes it is, I thought,. Then I realized, OMG, it was from my college roommate, who I had not seen or heard from since that day I left campus.
Talk about timing. Of all the days to pop back into my life.
Near the end of the day, as I was putting the finishing touches on packing, a steady stream of people happened by my desk. We laughed as we talked about the old days. And we cried as we talked about the current ones. We all promised to stay in touch.
"Lets have lunch one day," was a familiar--and much appreciated--refrain. But to tell you the truth, it was starting to feel like a wake, except the body was still standing. And there was no coffin in sight.
I put on the top of the last box, put them all in empty office chairs and wheeled them towards the newsroom door.
I had held myself together pretty well throughout the day. Until now
Barbra and Renee, two of my dearest friends, offered to help. So the three of us pushed the office chairs topped with boxes through the newsroom door to the elevators, down to the first floor and out a side door.
I ran to get my car and pulled it around near the door where my two friends stood waiting, chairs and boxes in tow.
I took one look at Barbara and lost it.
Totally.
"You gave me my start. You never hung over me. You let me do it my way," the words came tumbling out through the tears.
Then Renee lost it.
"I've never worked a day at the Daily Herald when you weren't here."
The three of us hugged. And cried.
We must have been quite a sight.
We managed to load the car. We hugged again and then off I drove.
These are good people, I thought, great friends that I leave behind.
I'll stay in touch. And I know they'll stay in touch with me.
For more than 30 years they were a huge part of my life. Bigger than anything that could fit in a cardboard box.