Mrs. Fitz's Story Emporium

Autumn doesn’t patter in on little cat feet in Chicago. it doesn’t arrive on anybody’s schedule. One day, it just is.

People generally grumble like overtaxed serfs on this day because it means that weather soon will reclaim its supremacy over us. Color compensates elsewhere in the Midwest for this indignity. Not here. Not much.

Some fight back by pretending. Cyclists wear windbreakers, which do nothing to break wind. Walkers bend forward like ship’s prows to slice the gusts. Some fools continue wearing flip flops, thus providing their feet the unhappy task of walking while morphing into numb.

We do not like Autumn one little bit. In Chicago, it really is a fall.

Today I met the me I often am. What a concept.

She, who isn’t always present, is annoyingly cheerful, in the sense that she is happy without cause, whereas my usual me guages it acceptable to remain miserable until, and only AFTER, some external beneficence has been bestowed.

To be with someone genial on their own accord sets the uum-pah! bar high.

In short, she makes me feel inferior, which is in fact, the fact.

I like this cheery ole me but distrust her. Taking things seriously is what we women who grew up hoping to change the status of our sex, strive for.

I’m not sure why we are inclined so, but it seems the only way to be taken seriously is to wear the coat of seriousness…and this is will get us to what we want and need, right?

I don’t know if you can be good without the chance to be bad.

Since we were about as diverse as comb teeth, I think I can speak for the entire neighborhood of under-10s during the 1950s in Elmhurst when I state:

We were good due to the simple fact that there was little bad to do.

Fiery emotions that spur irrational acts must have been inside us somewhere. It’s just that they were not called forth by circumstance. No flagrant injustices were visited upon us children of parents who knew World War II, which was enough drama for one lifetime, thank you very much.

We suffered no deprivation of human rights, unless you count wearing school uniforms. No parent beat us during a drunken rage, at least not with regularity. No hunger gnawed. No passion to rise above our station pestered. No desperation to be recognized as a unique individual threatened to drive us cuckoo amidst stifling conformity.

Such bedevilments waited until we arrived at college to rear their tempting little heads.

In 1968, Mom took me to Marshall Fields in Chicago, and, defying family tradition to shop at Sears Roebuck and only Sears Roebuck, she did the extraordinary. She spied and bought me the most outlandish coat the store possessed.

This coat was so remarkable, it was recorded in literary history when a warm-hearted journalist wrote about my upcoming attendance to Mundelein College with the phrase, “She arrived in a coat any girl would love to wear to college.”

Likely, the sheer size of this garment caught her attention. It could double as a mattress as well as withstand holocaust of any kind. It was an enormous concoction of something very curly and very puffy, and of a material bearing no connection to the natural world.

It had the consistency of petrified cotton candy and a color egg-yolkish.

I loved it with affection previously reserved for stuffed animals. It was, come to think about it, the largest stuffed animal known to man. I loved it so much, I wore the thing well beyond dirty and well beyond the season when I needed the warmth of a wooly mammoth.

I cleaned it prior to my first college date, with a fellow who wanted to take me to dinner AND a movie. In the face of such largess, I wanted to look my best.

I used a powder designed to be sprinkled onto dirty hair, in case you were miles from water and shampoo. I used 2 cans. The idea was to let the powder latch onto dirt particles, then brush it out. I did so. My coat and I then smelled like a newborn bath.

My date, hoping to discern if a body lived within, cradled my shoulder as we walked to the theater. POOF! A cloud of powder engulfed us both. We sat in seats in the darkened theater. POOF! my coat exploded when I sat. By the time we arrived at a restaurant afterwards, he daren’t risk checking the coat. I wore it to the table. Leaning forward to find out his sun sign. POOF! Raising a glass to toast our meeting each other. POOF! Had a stegasaurus needed to powder its nose, I could have helped out.

For once, being called a powder puff had basis in fact.

Two pairs of words that don’t belong together are Motivational Speaker and Embracing Change.

1. Motivational Speakers are generally cheery people who really like being themselves, thus they are nice to be around. However, motivation doesn’t come on cue and expecting a motivational speech to motivate you puts terrible stress on yourself and on the speaker. For instance, speaker says, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” hoping to release you from barrier to greatness. BUT, clearly this statement indicates that what you are doing at the moment isn’t all that impressive.

You might be popping bubble wrap, watching a brick wall out the window, or trying without success not to think about somebody because thinking about that somebody jump starts your loneliness engine. Admittedly, this is small stuff, but it is your stuff and that makes it motivational. I say sweat the small stuff. Do what you are doing, not what you might be doing. This is particularly relevant if you are driving a car.

1. Embracing Change. We might embrace the end result of change but only an idiot likes the process itself. This phrase likely has historic origins in those who want OTHER people to change something so that they can enjoy the results.

Here is where I think God has the right idea. He didn’t set out to create a race of fools so He wouldn’t expect human to LIKE change, let alone embrace it. So, He just dumps it in your lap from time to time, giving you little to no time to fret about it. You can deal with it, run from it, argue, whatever you like but you don’t have to initiate it. Leave that up to God, since He has had more experience with the big stuff.

On this autumn day, construction workers are building something on the roof of the 5-story Vic Theater at Belmost and Sheffield avenues. Maybe a dozen men are on site, illustrating three reasons Chicagoans have a fondness for being labeled a city that works.

1. Brevity of motion.
If their arms aren’t enroute to actually doing something, like hoist or hammer, they hook thumbs into pockets so their arms are nicely stowed until they need them.

2. Brevity of speech.
When it can’t be avoided, speech is limited to the work. If there were a need for preliminary bows, introductions, getting-to-know-you chat, rumination of any sort, this would be some other city where those things matter, like Los Angeles.

3. Brevity of fashion sense.
The T-shirt is the great cultural leveler, putting into practice what communism fails to achieve, a classless group working toward a common goal. It’s pretty classy. The only variation T-shirt-wear allows is tucked in or not. Workers tuck in.

There are many reasons folks don’t write. Lack of talent isn’t one of them.

Deadlines are. Deadlines can make nonwriters, famous writers, and everybody in general, feel all tensed up. A main reason is a deadline makes you promise something you aren’t sure you can deliver. Tense.

Here is a good plan:
1. Calculate the time between now and the deadline.

2. Tell YOU how much time you KNOW it will take you to do this job. EVEN IF you think you don’t know how much time it will take, you DO know. That information is inside you. So, tell yourself “I can come up with something in about 18 hours.”

3. Are there 18 good hours in your life to work on this? If your answer is honestly “no” then you won’t meet this deadline and you have to change it or abandon the effort. It happens to everyone.

4. If you know there are 18 hours, you WILL come up with something. You WILL.

And here is the bonus:
Deadlines do something nothing else can do. They make happen the time when a writer is 100% in one place.
Really, that is all you NEED to do.
Really, it is all that you CAN do.

After 21 years at the helm of Chicago, Richard Daley decided not to seek re-election.

Others know better his legacy, his contributions, near-misses and so forth. Tediously, such chats will ensue. Many will scramble to predict tomorrow. Others will lean on their experience of him to analyze his place in Chicago’s brawny history.

Before this inevitability, two things warrant a smile:

1. It’s possible others will brand him a brigand, a braggart, a bane. He may be branded a booster, a brave man, a benefactor. What he can never be accused of, however, is trying to brand himself. He is no fiction authored by marketing. He is who he is. He is himself.

2. He decided what to do and then he did it.

Let’s say angels were doing a flyover above my brother Eric’s back yard in Wheaton the August Saturday he hosted a birthday party for his mother-in-law Barbara.

They would have gone into hover mode. It was that nifty of a moment in the mini arboreteum he nurtures back there, where Roses of Sharon, Lilies and Peonies gather like women waiting outside church.

Daughter in Law Bev was pressed into service to say a little something to God. She is tall and light, lovely wearing white. This may account for the fact she quiets any crowd by doing nothing more than standing in their midst. She said a little something.

Then Barbara let some of her emotions out and said Bev “is a good pray-er.”

This was accompanied by a distinct flutter of wings.

I am learning to play golf for reasons best left unexamined, since those reasons are boring.

What is exciting is the confrontation this activity has unleashed. A battle has ensued on my inner field of play – between doing the enjoyable (smacking little balls around) and denying the enjoyable (the loftier goal).

My problem with golf is much akin to my problem with other enjoyable behaviors. There is no spiritual payoff, no return on the investment in the form of holy gains.

Not a soul forced me to place more import on suffering than on pleasure, although my affiliation with saints, reformed sinners and generally holy people is somewhat higher than the norm. I chose to place denial higher on the evolutionary scale.
Golf forces me to rethink that choice.