You Are Here

I woke up feeling sick.

I didn’t sleep well last night, kept up by a series of imagined What-Ifs and Worst Cases too horrific to get into here, but all of which involved time and deadlines and deepening self-doubt; thoughts that led to my waking every couple of hours, terrified, clutching sheets damp with sweat, mind confused and speeding before veering under again for the sixth, seventh, eighth time.

I brushed a thick, flu-like bitterness from my mouth and caught the 75 outbound for Oakland. I tried (as a courtesy) to sit alone, rebalancing my temporal checkbook and gauging in feverish, panicked fragments the academic consequences of a day lost to illness.

If I’m too sick to write, I’ll finish my multi-genre piece tomorrow, and get to my lit paper on Friday,

                        But I have to pack Friday, plus we have class, and really I should sleep in some that day so I’m rested

            for AWP, especially,

                                                and what I’m feeling is either the flu or sleep

deprivation,

Was that a sick cough or a smoker’s cough?

Don’t touch anything

                                                on this bus,

Shit! I still have three books to read—

Am I hot or cold? This can’t be good,

Maybe I can just read

in bed

all day,

Worry about writing        later

             

STOP REQUESTED

You Are Here.

That last thought wasn’t so much my own as borrowed from the map I found myself in front of. I stood at the western entrance of Schenley Plaza, having come here in my delirium almost automatically, fever steaming up the inside of my nylon jacket. My phone buzzed.

Reminder: Wednesday, 9:30 am—Schenley Plaza for Nature Writing (posts due @ 12a Sundays)

When I’m overwhelmed, I stop thinking and do whatever I can to keep up with my calendar. I go where it says I should be, I stop when it says to stop.

I stared into the reminder that I Am Here, into this sign confirming my place in the world. I saw myself in its dim reflectiveness and let myself breathe.

Suddenly I felt ridiculous.

I’d left the house without putting socks on beneath my boots.

I’d come without my notebook.

In the plaza’s wide-openness I stopped, for the first time that morning, the gush of anxieties that’d been plaguing me all week. There was nothing beautiful or unusual about the plaza, but standing at its entrance on a drenched sidewalk, all of a sudden I understood the phrase ‘coming to your senses.’ The day was cloudy and cool but warmer that what I’d been used to. The soft humidity smelled like rain—an incredible, elating smell after the punitive sharpness of settling snow. I unzipped my coat, applying the breeze directly to my overheated skin. Patches of green grass rose from gaps in the lawn’s snowcover. Water dripped from the edges of everything: from the circular white pavilion tent, from the circular food stands, from the circular abdomen of our still-unfinished snowman. The drips came down in staggered rhythms, like a roomful of ticking clocks, making a backdrop for the noticeable uptick in bird noise.

I wonder about birds and their calendars. According to Kate St. John’s Bird Blog over at WQED, the tiny gray swirls around the tops of buildings that surround Schenley Plaza may have been peregrine falcons, which visit Pittsburgh in the winter and perch on her high roofs before heading north for the summer.

It’s hard to imagine Pittsburgh as a place to escape the cold.

But as I came out of Pitt’s library after taking some recycled paper to write on, feeling less feverish in the warming breeze, it seemed, for a minute, that maybe I’d escape it too. And I felt better.

***

(As a side note, I usually listen to music for a few minutes while I'm outside. I figured I might as well start sharing that as well, as it's part of my experience of the place. Enjoy!)

Welcome Back

There’s something strange about trying to get familiar with Schenley Plaza. Sure, it’s a park. A park with less trees than (the other) Schenley or the Frick, but a park nonetheless. It meets Ryan’s Personal Criteria for nature: grass, trees, sky, birds. Seems simple enough.

But it isn’t. It might be easier to feel a place is “mine” if I were truly alone. A stump in the middle of a forest, an island flecking a lake. Getting to know Schenley Plaza—a place passed through by so many people every day—is like getting to know a sidewalk or a manhole cover. Granted, the plaza is more interesting and natural and changing, but it’s just as…public.

Maybe that's irony. There is nothing more public than a forest. But there’s also nothing as private as being deep within one.

It’s impossible to get deep within Schenley Plaza.

Schenley Plaza is the size of a city block.

It is a city block.

It’s a perfect square of open white, like winter farmland seen from planes.

A forest is a destination. A stopping point. Something to stare at and sleep in and wish for. Schenley Plaza is none of those things. Schenley Plaza is a well-decorated hallway leading to grander rooms. Even I won’t stay there. I’m taking a packed suitcase with me (to drag through two inches of snow), and I’m headed south by way of the 28X and Southwest #4745 nonstop to Nashville.

*

This was all on my mind as I headed to Schenley Plaza on Wednesday afternoon. Here we go again: the snowman the gray skies the library the people etc. etc.

But really, it’s amazing what a sunny day can do. The snow at the plaza looked disinfected. Restored. Even the snowman seemed in better spirits (though he remained unfinished). The ice atop the circus tent moaned as it broke apart in the clear light, making the pavilion look like a translucent tortoise shell.

I heard the ambient street noise of impermanence, the sound of moods upturned across the region, of shovels against warming sidewalks, of my pen scratching a black Moleskine I’ve had for six years, only now coming to its end and pondering future notebooks…

Even the bare trees brought good news as my head drifted off. Called London plane trees, they were planted here as an experiment in urban horticulture right about the time I bought this notebook. Their bark is a speckled gray-green, almost like camouflage, rough and smooth at the same time like a driveway. The oldest of them, the ones that didn’t die after the original planting, were discovered to be resistant to insects and disease on a genetic level. Their DNA is now used to breed hardier London planes planted throughout the city. Pittsburgh is tough down to its trees.

*

So Schenley Park isn’t private. It’s not a forest. It’s not “mine.” It’s ours, and sitting here with my suitcase under the tortoise shell on a sunny afternoon, thinking about (of all things) plant DNA and feeling as if the fact that our trees are improving is the last remaining piece in the puzzle of my day, I realize how much I’m looking forward to coming back.

Notes from the Neighborhood

1.

Here I am, Saturday again, 1pm again, at my green metal table under the white funnel tent again. Surrounded by hunks of ice like polar rocks again. Watching the unfinished snowman guard his frozen lawn beneath a gray sky again.

But there’s more to see today. There’s always more.

2.

The snowman has company: amorphous blobs of snow and ice rising from the blank landscape. Like stalagmites or the trees in Dr. Seuss books, leaning and bulbous. Existing now, like us, for an uncertain and limited amount of time.

3.

The snowman himself is damaged, chunks blasted from his cold abdomen like lunar craters. For a moment I wonder why I keep thinking of him as a snowman. It’s just a soiled ball of snow after all, honeycombed by flexing temperatures and severe exposure. But his humanness is too obvious to ignore: a snowman flawed, isolated, abandoned by his creator, unfinished and facing the end.

Maybe that’s too much to project onto a ball of crystallized water.

4.

The lawn is roped off, which strikes me as oddly futile even though I know it’s a good-faith effort to protect the grass. Imagine having to break into a forest. Imagine a razorwire fence around Mount Everest. A tarp over the Pacific. The Everglades, closed for renovation. It wouldn't work. It’s impossible for us to Keep Off The Grass. Even here at Schenley Plaza, footprints beneath the rope suggest rebellion.

5.

I don’t know why I revert to lists when I write about this place. Maybe it’s because nature doesn’t inspire linear thinking. When I sit here long enough, my senses are more outspoken than my consciousness. Thoughts are punctuated by long intervals of clean silence. Maybe that’s why I don’t mind writing outside even as the ink in my pen begins to freeze.

6.

A trolley glides by, reminding me that this really is Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood. His show was filmed a short walk from here. 

I don’t know how I feel about this. 

On one hand, Fred Rogers was a saint and I’m proud that the kindest television show ever produced came out of Pittsburgh. On the other hand it’s disappointing that that perfect neighborhood of his, with its leafy streets and friendly mailmen, was actually Oakland—the same place I had a gun held to my head for three dollars and a flip phone.

7.

Two men pass, holding coffees and discussing a scrap of paper. The plaza is many things to many people. A shortcut. A place to eat. A place to write or to start a snowman. A place to drink coffee and tell your friend about the amazing doodle you’d stuffed in your pocket and forgotten. About how you’d rescued it from your jeans right before you drowned them in the wash. About how you’d been stunned by the drawing’s quality, unconvinced you were even capable of drawing so well. About how you'd stood in the Laundromat and felt a warm rush of pride on a cold day, grasping your work and wishing your mother were around to see it.

A Series of Long and Short Sentences

Saturday, 1pm, the first of February, fighting a hangover, foggy and disconnected at Schenley Plaza, surrounded by snowmelt and the sound of dripping water.

People are out, laughing, eating North Korean takeout from Conflict Kitchen (a place I’ve been meaning to try), slugging books from building to building, holding hands, crossing streets more slowly, it seems, than yesterday, when winter was more brutal and self-evident.

Thin snow covers the plaza lawn, save for a winding patch of green along its south end, a path that culminates in an unfinished snowman’s abdomen, caked with dirt and gloveprints and blades of yellow grass.

The sky is classic Pittsburgh, a gray plane that just barely clears the Carnegie Library, that building I love, that gift to the city from a man who came here with nothing and left with everything; a man who, despite his flaws, gave back nearly as much as he took.

I read somewhere that Pittsburgh is the smartest city in the country, and on days like this I’m inclined to agree, to feel a maybe undeserved pride just for being here, remembering bearded bartenders with PhDs and an old neighbor of mine, DePaulo was his name, an angry Italian who lived on his porch and smoked cigarettes in his white t-shirt, reading Foucault and calling 911 when Pitt kids spiked the noise level.

I’m trying to concentrate on the plaza, to see the chunks of ice blasted across the sidewalk, the green table I’m sitting at, the names etched into bricks beneath me “In Memory Of…,” and the single tree across the lawn that kept its brown leaves, but others file into the pavilion beneath the white funnel tent, making this the first time I haven’t had it to myself this year, and while that’s probably a sign of things improving toward spring, I feel a definite disruption in focus and remember the deep anxiety I woke up with this morning, an uneasy knowing that I have more work to do than I can finish today, that I’ll spend my afternoon in that library, drinking coffee ‘til I shake and trying to summon a thesis statement for a paper that’s mocked me all week.

And now the plaza isn’t so interesting or peaceful.

Does anybody else get self-conscious writing in public?

It seems like a normal-enough thing to do, and if I were one of these others in the pavilion, if were to see myself sitting alone with this notebook, I wouldn’t give me a second thought, but for some reason it still feels strange to put pen to paper with so many people around, probably because of this girl I met at a bar once: a friend of a friend brought her, and she seemed nice but also like she was trying too hard with her ironic schoolgirl outfit and grandma glasses, and partway through the table’s conversation she pulled a journal from her bag and started writing and didn’t look up for the rest of the night.

At the time I thought it was the most pretentious thing I’d ever seen (even after going to Williamsburg), but now, surrounded by strangers, I have to say that looking back I at least admire her poise, if not her tact, and here at Schenley Plaza, bordered by libraries to the east and west, thinking about this city and its tough and brilliant and (usually) unassuming people, I wonder if I should have ever been surprised at all, to see a writer doing what writers do, getting the words out even as the world carried on around her.