{"id":127,"date":"2019-01-12T22:16:49","date_gmt":"2019-01-12T22:16:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/juliejusticz.all-d.com\/?p=127"},"modified":"2019-05-27T23:00:16","modified_gmt":"2019-05-27T23:00:16","slug":"the-poetry-garage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juliejusticz.com\/?p=127","title":{"rendered":"The Poetry Garage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Traffic snarled at Dearborn and Madison. Ten minutes before Margie could squeeze her scrappy 2002 Honda into the backlogged buses, bullying cabs, and ubiquitous Ubers. Driving into the city was never worth the hassle, even when she needed a car. Tonight, she had a maybe date with Larry. Maybe, because he often cancelled at the last minute. Maybe, because it might not be a date. They\u2019d been friends and work colleagues for over 25 years at Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago (recently rebranded, expensively, stupidly, LAF). Still, she was hopeful about what the evening might bring: she\u2019d dust busted the car seats this morning to get rid of dog hair and she was wearing her flowy blue outfit from Second Time Around.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

She\u2019d booked her parking spot with one of those new apps: Spacegrabber? Spotmonster? Sixteen dollars all day. A real deal because Loop retail was closer to forty bucks. Yasmina, a new attorney, fresh out of UChicago (which hadn\u2019t yet been rebranded that when Margie attended), had downloaded the app on Margie\u2019s phone, then insisted on adding another one named Venmo\u2014\"for, you know, like charging a friend after you buy them a latte.\u201d Didn\u2019t that defeat the whole point? Would Larry \u201cVenmo\u201d her for dinner tonight? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cyclists pedaled furiously past her car window. Divvy was the latest plague to hit the city. As with iPhones and sleeve tattoos, the blue bikes appeared overnight, infecting everyone under thirty, then slowly spreading to the older generation. Margie was tatt-free, planned to die that way, but she\u2019d surrendered to Apple, bought a used iPhone 6S, last month. \u201cI miss the flip-phone,\u201d Larry had said, when he entered his info into her contacts. Unnecessarily, because Margie knew all his numbers by heart: home, office, cell. Address and email, too. Larry was the first person she\u2019d met at LAF. She\u2019d just finished a clerkship in Detroit; he\u2019d arrived fresh from a Kibbutz where he\u2019d picked dates 2 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

for a year post law school. When they were baby attorneys together in different neighborhood offices, they talked on the phone for hours every day, had dinner at least once a week. She hadn\u2019t found him attractive; he was tall and tan and tended to bump into things. But now, with his thinning hair and unkempt beard, his ever-stained ties, well, she could imagine growing old with him, maybe moving to Cape Cod? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A pedestrian banged hard on the hood of her car. Cheap suit, briefcase, comb-over, no doubt headed for the 9:30 call at the Daley Center. He flashed his thick middle finger at her, disappeared behind a bus. Self-righteous jerk. He was the one jay-walking. Margie laid on her horn, loud and long, like a driver in a New Yorker <\/em>traffic cartoon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hadn\u2019t Larry first won the caption contest on a cartoon like that? He submitted an entry every week, spending hours finding the perfect line, even when he was overwhelmed with cases. He\u2019d email her his ideas, but she was terrible at picking winners. Terrible at telling jokes, too, apparently. Larry once said, \u201cNo one can flub a punchline like you.\u201d But he also said that she was the best damn brief writer in the agency. \u201cPrecise and compelling.\u201d That from his first evaluation of her work, when he became Housing Project Director, her direct supervisor, and she was bumped up to Senior Attorney, a title without a pay raise. He\u2019d won the caption contest eight times in the last few years; twice the number of trials Margie had won in the past quarter century. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The red light at Wells changed two more times before she got through, turned into the garage, and spiraled up to level five. W.H. Auden\u2019s floor, because yes, this was The Poetry Garage and yes, she\u2019d picked it for that reason, and yes, she wrote poetry in her spare time. She imagined retiring to a beach house with Larry. With her dogs, too. She\u2019d sit with a mug of coffee, watch the waves, write nature poems, while he sat on the can, coming up with winning captions. 3 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Waiting for the elevator, she looked at Auden\u2019s photo\u2014young, horse-faced, slicked hair, big-ears. The words printed under his image: If equal affection cannot be\/Let the more loving one be me. <\/em>Why not Stop all the clocks, <\/em>the poem made famous by Four Weddings and a Funeral? <\/em>She\u2019d seen that rom-com twice, foppish Hugh Grant and the admittedly awful Andie MacDowell. She saw it the first time with Larry at Webster Place. His nostrils had flared throughout the movie. \u201cSentimental crap,\u201d he said afterwards, so she\u2019d had watch it again on her own a week later to cry freely. Larry and she did better with books than movies. Better with restaurants than books. Though she was a little dubious about the Vietnamese place he\u2019d suggested for tonight. She suspected Larry had been turned on to it by one of the pretty young lawyers he supervised. They got to you, the twenty-somethings, putting new tastes in your mouth, new apps on your phone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The elevator down: Frost, Whitman, Eliot. Emily Dickinson on street level. Was she the only female poet the floor-namer could come up with? If that were a full-time gig, paying decent money, Margie would love to name garages and then label their floors. She\u2019d start with The Book Garage, each level titled for a favorite novel. Maybe one for movies . . . Chicago movies . . . Would there be enough? Blues Brothers. Adventures in Babysitting. Home Alone. At 53, Margie felt she was approaching irrelevance. She\u2019d never be a floor in The Law Garage. She\u2019d never won so much as a newsletter mention for her (admittedly minor) victories at LAF. And now she worked alongside iPhone X\u2019ers, tech-savvy, Divvy-riders. They knew how to do things with computers that seemed liked sorcery. She\u2019d fought the office manager for two years before giving up WordPerfect; she still missed the old key codes, hated the wireless mouse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yasmina stood outside Margie\u2019s office, misery drowning her fine features. Overwhelmed by their caseloads, new attorneys often lined up outside Margie\u2019s door to ask questions: Is medicinal 4 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

marijuana use cause for eviction? What about a therapy dog? Oral research was how legal aid lawyers managed to assist sixty clients a month. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Margie held up her and like a stop sign. \u201cGive me a minute, please.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She got five seconds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRemember the family in that crappy building in Pilsen? Well, the landlord changed the locks on their apartment last night, so the dad, Jorge, broke a window to get in. Now the cops are there and the landlord\u2019s threatening to call ICE and Jorge\u2019s terrified he\u2019ll be arrested . . .\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Margie\u2019s computer whirred to life. \u201cI\u2019m sending you my file on illegal lockouts. Fill out a petition--start adding names, summarize the events up to now. Attach the judge\u2019s order from last week. Be sure to include the kids\u2019 ages\u2014the baby. I\u2019ll head over there.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNow? Are you driving? I can download the Waze app for you . . .\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo need. My car\u2019s happy where it is. I can catch a cab, then Venmo Larry later for the fare.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Traffic snarled at Dearborn and Madison. Ten minutes before Margie could squeeze her scrappy 2002 Honda into the backlogged buses, bullying cabs, and ubiquitous Uber drivers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":97,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-shortstories","category-writings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juliejusticz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juliejusticz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juliejusticz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juliejusticz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juliejusticz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.juliejusticz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134,"href":"https:\/\/www.juliejusticz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions\/134"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juliejusticz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/97"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juliejusticz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juliejusticz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juliejusticz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}