2001-05-21 - 7:13 a.m.

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The Project

Episode 2

(in which our young hero meets a girl)

The city is waking up. It is a Saturday morning, and the snow is a distant memory, and the trees are blooming, and the weather is 70 degrees! We all have been waiting for this to happen, as the weather has held out through March, but now everyone seems to be sharing a smile. I want to smile with them and say hello and wish them well. I want to look everyone in the eye, let them know I am glad to see them and we will rejoice in the fact that yes, life can be worth living.

I walk to the park on Lake Michigan, just a few blocks away, to witness this glorious revolution of bikers, soccer-players, barbecuers. I will thrill in this humanity and let them teach me what lessons they will. I bring my little notebook to scribble in because this will be my new role, to take in the wisdom of the world, inscribe it in my book, translate it into wisdom for all the world to share.

There must be a hundred kids playing in the playground. I want to sit and watch them play, learn from them. But I look at the parents sitting on the benches. They will know that I am not a parent, they will think it strange that I am watching their children and writing in my notebook. This is what perverts do.

I settle on a bench facing away from the playground. Up ahead and to my left is a water fountain.

A young boy, about five, fills his water gun in the fountain. Standing beside him is his brother, who looks to be about one. He�s learning to walk. The world is new and his eyes are wide. He watches his brother, not knowing quite what he is doing. He depends on his brother, who is grabbing onto his shirt collar, to guide him.

The older boy starts to gently lead his brother away from the fountain. He knows it will be a long walk for such little legs. Because he is still a child, he squirts the water in front of his brother, who waves his hands into the water and smirks. He is being led slowly, step by step.

They climb over some broken gravel and up an incline, and then they are close to the car, where the father sits out the back, watching and waiting. The older boy runs ahead to the car, turns around and squirts the water back at his brother. The younger boy stops walking, gazes off, turns around, taking in the world. There is much to be learned.

Back at the water fountain, two older boys, about ten, are getting a drink. The wind has picked up and is blowing the water into the air. They laugh.

One boy sticks his finger into the fountain. The water goes streaming out, shooting onto the path. The boy laughs again, but nobody has noticed. His friend has wandered ahead without him. But he does it again, sending the water shooting farther, performing his small act of rebellion, rebellion and childishness all in one. He does not mind being childish, because he is a child. Of course the adults wouldn�t understand. They never do.

I walk on, out to the water. I am enjoying my people-watching. Up here, staring out onto the water, are an old man and woman tending a fishing line. The man is staring off into the lake intently, drawing in his line further and further. The woman is sitting behind him in an old lawn chair, here to keep him company but not particularly concerned about the fishing. She will just sit there and keep him company, just like they have kept one another company through life, because they have been together so long and it is the thing to do.

I smile at these people. I want to tell them something, thank them for being here, let them know that I appreciate them, that I am with them in their struggles. I want to be one of these people, stop wandering invisibly through life and make my life happen, together with people, not all alone like a ghost.

I get up and walk along the park pathway, taking in everything I can. To my right is a girl putting down her blanket to sit on. Another man on a bike is motioning to her, pointing past me, toward the lake.

I look over to where he is pointing. I see a dollar bill blowing by me, fluttering quickly toward the lake. I stop for a moment, consider, then go running after it like a fool and stomp on it. I pick up the dollar bill and bring it to the girl, all the while half-thinking, I should say something to this girl! She is pretty and sitting down to read in the park! This is the hand of fate calling out to me!

�Thank you so much,� she says to me.

�You�re very welcome. Have a nice day.�

Then I walk away, half-dazed because I know, I know that this was one of my best chances, and that dollar bills don�t go flying by every day for you to save. And I haven�t been able to say anything, do anything, except say something moronic like, �Have a nice day.� This is the old me, not the reinvented me who has razed his old self and will build a new self from the rubble.

I can�t let this old self take over. I must do something new, unexpected. I wander around a bit, buy an ice cream bar from the vendor, sit down not far from where the girl is sitting. I think what I should have said to her � �I have something you want; I must get something in return.� No. �It is a pleasure to be of assistance to such a lovely woman.� No, no. �Could I buy you an ice cream bar?� Something funny, something winning. I�m just not winning.

I think that maybe it is not too late, that maybe I can make this into an experiment, see what the new self can do, cause you�ve got to start somewhere. Even dismal failure is preferable to doing nothing. But I am so nervous about it, so I take out my notebook as a stalling technique, to run off some of this nervous energy and maybe to build up the nerve to go and talk to her. I have never done this before. I have not had a girlfriend in years, am far too timid for this sort of thing. But now, I think, I am working on a project, a project of reinvention, and sometimes I must make the difficult moves, for my audience, if I ever have an audience, so I am scribbling in my notebook, trying to work myself up:

This should be the girl I go out of my way to meet. This should be my experiment. In the name of the project! You must go out and meet this girl, so you can write about it later. Can you change yourself by telling yourself that it�s part of a creative project?

My Life: A Creative Project

Step 1. Catch dollar bill for girl.

Step 2. Go get an ice cream, sit down on the grass.

Step 3. Think about how you should go up and talk to this girl; if there was ever a time you were going to actually go up to anybody and meet them it would be now, having stared at the beauty of children and the beauty of old age together. Now is your chance to be a participant, not just an observer. Try to get one of those �couple� things going.

Step 4. Duh! Go talk to the girl!!!

In all this, I have decided that I will make this an official occasion for the project, that I will tell her that I must know who she is and what her name is, for the sake of my writing, my project, because otherwise I�ll never know what to say. I scribble out a little form that I must fill with information, for the sake of the project:

Name:

Occupation:

Neighborhood of residence:

Other comments:

And then I stall some more, and walk away from her, but then, no, I must not walk away, and my feet start walking toward her somehow, somehow they keep going, and the girl is starting to stand up and fold her blanket and maybe she�ll walk away, but as I get closer she sees me and recognizes me and smiles and says,

�You caught me coming and going, huh?�

I tell her that I was just writing down my anecdotes for the day, because that is what I have been doing, and I decided that I had to at least know your name. And she tells me her name, and I learn that she lives in Uptown, and we talk for a moment about how wonderful it is to see the city coming to life. And she looks at me, intrigued, because I have been so bold as to come up and talk to her, and I have insinuated that I am a writer, so she is seeing somebody that nobody has ever seen before, the new me, who goes after that experience, who doesn�t just sit over on the grass and watch the girl walk away forever.

We stand there for a moment, and I smile, having exchanged pleasantries about the weather, and names but not numbers, and I say �Well��

And we part ways because my mission has been completed, I have written down her name in my notebook, and her neighborhood of residence, but not her occupation because I didn�t get that far, still couldn�t come up with something to say. I leave wondering if I have really accomplished anything at all, how I could have got talking to this pretty girl but not tried more and harder, at least get her number or something, but no. It is okay. I don�t have to solve all my problems at once. I have gone up to the girl and talked to her at that is at least a first step, something I haven�t really done before, and I can content myself on that.

***

The next day I am off again, walking around again in this beautiful town. Uptown. This poor patch in this rich town, its abandoned storefronts, its cheap one-dollar stores and Chinese-food joints, with people loitering out front, making trouble, making me feel a little nervous but alive. When I first moved here I was nervous, didn�t know quite where to go, was still too nervous to walk down the darkened streets, to walk into the McDonald�s on Wilson Avenue or under the elevated trains at night, but I have become more bold. This neighborhood is a wilderness � where all the surrounding neighborhoods are neat and clean, every spot filled with a nice bright apartment house or chain store, where you have to pay to be anywhere, Uptown is a place that has been ignored by the machine, where people just plop down wherever.

People hang out in front of convenience stores and yell and joke, they hang out along the long wall in front of the Salvation Army all day long, until the shelter opens and lets them in. They set up a little chair, at the corner of the thrift-store parking lot, a little triangle of space bounded on all sides by a railing that couldn�t fit more than one chair, and they sit and watch the night go by, the police cars prowling, the train rolling by, the people shouting. Chain stores are discouraged � once there was a Burger King on the corner, but by the time I got there it was all boarded up, its parking lot covered with glass, weeds growing up all around it. It was more than a year before they tore it down. Now I see that Good Year, where I got a spare tire just a few months ago, has moved out, too, leaving another storefront open.

There are lots of those empty storefronts � most notably the long, triangular Goldblatt�s Building on Broadway, which was once a department store but has been empty for years. I feel a chill when I walk by it, walk along that big, empty, cavernous street that was once so lively, but now features struggling hair salons on one side and this former department store, with a looming water tank overhead that reads �Goldblatt�s,� looking over the empty street and the empty building with its blackened windows.

Then there�s my favorite overhead symbol, the sign over the church on Wilson Avenue, high above most of the surrounding buildings, that can be read from the train two blocks away: �Christ Died For Our Sins.� And if you stand just so, it looks beautifully juxtaposed with the McDonald�s sign across the street, which is nearly as high.

But today it�s a sunny day, and I can feel renewal in the air, every day is a renewal, a new chance at life, a reinvigoration of the spirit, a chance to knock the old buildings down, the old habits down, and start again.

I walk around town, smiling and grinning like a fool, feeling like I�ve been blessed with some sort of wisdom but being unable to communicate it, like if only people could get inside my head right now, they would see that the world is a beautiful thing, that everything�s going to be all right.

Anything can set me off grinning and laughing. As I walk, I see a few pedestrians step out in front of a truck. It�s a big, scary truck with a huge Egg McMuffin on the side, but the pedestrians pass in front of it without a glance, ignoring his green light. I see this and stop for him. He stops, waits to see what I will do, and waves to thank me before moving along to deliver his Egg McMuffins. I smile and think that in even the most unlikeliest places, in the big McDonald�s truck in the big city, there can be kindness and consideration if only you look for it, and that is making everything all right.

I am wandering I am not sure where, listening and watching for my mission as I go. The signals seem to be coming in clearer now, a mission is coalescing in my mind. Perhaps it has been there for years, since I stood out on a mountaintop two years ago and told myself, �I want my life to be a work of art.� And now, I feel, that is just what I will do. I have decided to do everything that I ever wanted to do but never could before, and to make that my work of art. And I have been writing in my little black notebook as I go, writing for what audience I don�t know, but suddenly that act of writing makes me aware, I am looking for things, noticing things, reveling in the life that is happening all around me. And since I am living a work of art then I am a creator, and I can do whatever I want for the sake of my art. I can go up and walk to the park and talk to the girl for the sake of my art. And I can create games, parameters, and see where they lead me. So, inspired by the interaction with the girl in the park, I decide I can do this again, and I decide that I will be suddenly conducting a survey, the �Excuse-to-meet-you Survey,� and I draw up, in the next page of my notebook, three survey forms that look like this:

Official Survey Form

Name of Participant:

Occupation:

Neighborhood of Residence:

Current Outlook on Life:

Other Comments:

And I think that I will go up to random people (I don�t let myself think this right now but I know instantly that they will be pretty girls of my age) and meet them, and they will think me strange and quirky, a vagabond misfit storming through life all crazy-like. But then I think that maybe they will want some reward for their trouble, so I write up three more survey sheets that I will give to them, which read:

Official Survey Form

Name of Participant: David.

Occupation: Writer, observer of humanity.

Neighborhood of Residence: Uptown.

Outlook on Life: I am currently rediscovering life, remembering what it means to be alive. Life is good!

Other Comments: Thank you for participating in the Excuse-To-Meet-You Survey.

And then I think that, wait, what if it�s a pretty girl and she seems so interesting, based on her survey responses, that I want to give her my number? So I draw a little box in the upper right-hand corner and write in it, �For Official Use Only.� This will be where I write down my number, if the participant is deemed worthy.

So my life is like a game, but it�s also becoming like a book, a book that I write as I go, and I�m starting to see the symbolism. Like that dollar bill I caught as it was blowing by yesterday, that wouldn�t happen in real life, that�s just a device used in movies and books, only in really bad, predictable movies and books, only it happened to me, for real, yesterday. The difference is, in the book or in the movie, the two people fall instantly in love and after a struggle of some sort live happily ever after, whereas for me, I will never see this girl again, I have seen my opportunity knock and let it slide shut.

I find myself back out at the park, and I am wandering over to the spot where I was yesterday, only half-realizing what I am doing. Because in the book, they would both wander back to the same spot and reconnect and then they would know it was meant to be. But I�m left standing here and feeling so stupid, looking off at the grass patch where she was sitting yesterday, as if she would have come back to the exact same spot today, and then staring off into the lake and feeling foolish.

I start to walk away and then � and you, whoever you are, are not going to believe this, unless you are one of the dozen or so people I told almost immediately after it happened � there she is, walking up to me!

I can�t believe this, but there�s no time to think, conversation seems to come so fast, so we just start walking, and I start talking. I am so nervous that I plow ahead with my feet, not knowing where I�m going, not able to slow down for a second and catch more than a glimpse of this girl. And I�m just blurting things out, about how I�m rediscovering the world, doing what I want and am so happy! But I�m not sure if I�m making any sense, because this type of happiness is just so damned hard to communicate.

Carrie�s her name, and she tells me about herself and it turns out that she works in a homeless shelter, just lives there and works there and just lives, like I�ve been wishing I could do. She�s helping people, too, not only at this homeless shelter but also teaching English to refugees and I can�t believe it. This is exactly, exactly what should be happening, I have been thrown a gift from the blue, a life preserver to take me to the promised land, all I needed to do was to look and see that dollar bill blowing by and decide to do something about it and now I have won the girl and we will get married and live happily ever after.

But no, I haven�t won the girl, I am hardly even able to go for a proper walk with her. I am so excited and nervous and not paying attention to where we�re going that I�m leading us away from the lake and toward the parking lot, which is full of glass and she has bare feet. So I apologize, say �sorry� or something, I�m not sure, and then we�re back on the grass. And then she sees her friends, and she tells me that she should get going, but I tell her I want to sign up, sign up for the whole program, be her friend or lover or join her homeless shelter or teach English to refugees, whatever, or actually I just ask her for her number and she gives it to me, and I give her mine and we say goodbye. And I tell her I am actually going away for a week, to Boston and then to New York, but I will give her a call when I get back.

Question for further reflection: Was it very dumb of me to post this story on the web?

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