Great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly.

Chicago

The woman downstairs is old, maybe eighty-five, eighty, no younger. At times she seems ready to crack in pieces from the weight of her own body, her arms stretched akimbo, raising the tension in her posture as she stands surveying the alley from her back entrance. When I see her in this stance, it sends a cold tremble down my own back. Although it doesn’t last long, this sensation, the seeming fragility is passing.

We’ve only been neighbors a short while but I have seen her ride her blue bike, her working, sturdy bike all day and all over the neighborhood, slow and steady like a machine clockwork, wound up and letting the energy out in a smooth, constant stream. She goes just fast enough to stay upright. Her first floor apartment smells like cabbage in the winter, dog in the summer. And the smells come nearly the whole way up our three-floor walkup where I live on the third above her. She is tiny, maybe four-eleven, no taller (well, perhaps an inch or two could be gained if she straightened her back, her spine curved into a slight bow). Now this impression is false, the one you may be gathering. It throws her in a doubtful light, of bad smells, frail, strained and hunched over. Nothing could be further from the truth, from the feeling you get when you see her, when you come in contact with her periodically on the front steps chaining her bike to the railing or in the alley behind walking her dog at a surprisingly late hour. When you do encounter her like that, or the residue of her presence—the lone bike chained, the dog barking from the window at face level, the broom she leaves outside the front door that is used to lightly, gently brush away the snow, and, of course, the quick closings of her door to only a crack just wide enough for her eyes to peek through and see to whom those footsteps belong—the impression from these lingering postmarks is never bad. No, the image of her is not unpleasant at all. It is sweet and elegant in its strength and at times you would even venture mysterious (at its height, most surely, it’s even girlish). Never is there an instance of true fragility. She holds her ground like a river. She is not worn down, collapsed inward, not aged ragged. On the gaining ground, to be sure, she gives the distinct impression that she is the one who has whittled down the edges around her, chaffed them into small piles of dust and slough that blow away all the so much easier, just like the funneled winter wind that strips the trees bare as it shoots through the narrow passages between our neighboring Chicago two-flats.

At our local diner, the Le Sabre Restaurant, two blocks from our building, you can find her on the occasional evening sitting in a booth dressed as if she were going to a jazz nightclub. She leaves her coat on as she talks over her coffee to a friend, one of many met singly, her blue, work sturdy bike wrapped up out front under a shower curtain used to keep off the rain and snow. It’s clipped down with clothespins. I’ve seen the same pins when not in use aligned around the bike basket like soldiers in formation. Inside, as she navigates the conversation with her solo friends, she doesn’t look outside the booth, to the rest of the people eating, loud as they are, or to the comings and goings, or to the kitchen banging pans, or the waitresses ringing bells and filling refills, but rather she is focused on the task at present, the task across from her, her friend with whom she talks to slow and steady. She has the attention of a performer. I like to think maybe in another life or time before the cold and colder-every-year winters that she was perhaps a singer. If she were she most definitely would have been a jazz singer. She looks the role, at a surprising late hour in the diner, all dolled up in a short fur coat, a close knit hat, her hands animated to the talking. I can see her younger, her face smoother, hair colored, in a strong spotlight at the Green Mill, with maybe Bushmills close at hand. A silly image I know. But it is very late as I’ve already said. Her pipes now are most probable long gone, but still there must remain the songs in her head, being rocked to sleep by her steady peddling, rolling around with her all day, nestled somewhere deep in her belly waiting for a way to get out. And there has to be a way for it still to leave, even if it’s just a whimper, a wispy cry, scratchy and bereft. I wonder if it still has the same effect, the songs and singing, the same release, when you hear it. In the very least she is at home here in the increasing din and extra heat of the smoking section.

I wonder as well how long she has been here in general, in the neighborhood, the apartment even. From the odor it must be immeasurable, a forgetful date, too far back to remember. The grated scaffold of the EL bisects the square streets close by with a certainty that can only come from years of planning the course like a chess game. How much has its grinding metal rumble worked itself into the songs lolling around in her head? In the summer, with the whiny wheels setting off blue sparks the next block over, she has the habit of hanging all her rugs on the back wooden staircase to dry, all dripping and newly washed—or at least wettened. This practice of hers lasts all summer, from the first heat arriving to the first chill, and it always sends me back sixty years to a place I’ve never been, a place found only in movies and old photos with laundry strung up between the row houses trailing in the wind (there are always teams and teams of people, and children are playing weird games with sticks, loops, and hard balls). It’s a place of image. Her rugs are ever rotating, and too numerous to count or to recognize any particular one that would signify the cycle starting again. They just roll on all summer, all the same thick corded bath mats, and they are all drenched with the smell of her dog. The same smell is belted out her kitchen window by a square fan where it is laced and mixed with the unmistakable smell of a low cooking pot filled with cabbage turning slowly to sauerkraut. I usually have to hold my breath for the last flight down; it becomes a humid, slug jungle on the hottest days. But it’s never a bother, never fully unpleasant. The bulk and sheer number of her rugs is a testament to her. She must be brutal to her floors, scuffling and scratching about. Her whole place must be carpeted with the bath-mat rugs, layered thick to combat the trampling work of her feet, and that of her dog.

How wearing and traversed this woman is, this character study of isolation. She is so secure and serene in the culmination of her life’s work, capping it off the way she is in her worn corner of the universe. She is a driving force of history, the very mode of operation for age and effects, and after all the daydreaming has passed and you find yourself on the edge of her presence once again she is still a marker and an anchor to anyone who sees her. If anything she gives me a sense, an impression of what all these things truly are.

Eighty-seven sounds right; it’s just a guess really, just a number that fits the image well.

Detroit

When Mike mentioned lunch at the Onion Roll Deli I was pretty much up for it. It had been a long day so far and it wasn’t even noon yet. Critiques in graduate art school can be brutal affairs, the equivalent to a doctor’s full examination with an audience. You put up your work, which on this day being my critique meant three months of investigation, and then you let everyone tell you what they think. As if after three months of doing it you even want to know what anybody thinks, yourself included. And it’s not the kind of work that can be detached from you, like say working on a lawnmower engine. No, this work is supposed to be from your gut—that is, if it’s any good.

Lunches after these mental marathons that all of us had to attend twice weekly usually became a well supported idea drawing anywhere from four to seven tagalongs. We could all fit in Mike’s van and with no seats in the back it was even easier. But today, after my critique, it only attracted three. Mike, myself, and Sumi.

I had known Mike for years but Sumi was a first-year student. So was Mike for that matter but he was older and had been making art for a longer period and he, as well as most of us, seemed to have a little life experience on Sumi as well. She was only twenty-one, an unusually young age for graduate art school. I was in my last year and becoming, as far as I could tell, something most people would recognize as a working artist.

“So where are we going anyway?” Sumi said. She tilted her head when she talked to you. This was said to both of us but when that head tilted it felt like what she said was directed only at you.

“The Onion Roll Deli,” Mike answered, stating the name like he was reading it off a marquee.

“Oh, that’s right, you’ve never been there.” I said, Mike starting to nod his head agreeing ahead of time with where my line of talk will go in a moment or two. “Oh, yeah, it’s great. You’re gonna love it. Just a small diner run by two Russian guys. They’re starting to recognize us now. What do they call us? Cran ...”

“Cranberries,” Mike said.

“Yeah, Cranberries, after Cranbrook,” I finished.

Cranbrook Academy of Art was where we all were attending graduate school at the time. In fact, that’s all they had there, no other degrees or courses were offered. No undergraduate program, or science degrees, business, etcetera. Just art. All the time. All for us. Needless to say, that much saturation in a discipline all about self exploration can be exhausting in the smallest amounts, and today we had had a full dose. The nearest thing to anything detached or scientific at the school was the architecture department, which for its part had a very right brain reputation in its own field, yet they were still thought by the greater portion of art students at Cranbrook to have somewhat of an alternate allegiance than the rest of us. Sumi was an architecture student.

We drove our way down Woodward Avenue to Royal Oak, just before the city line of Detroit and made the impossible u-turn into the narrow and short parking lot of the Onion Roll. The van’s ass hanged out into the street a little. Mike wouldn’t have cared if he had noticed. “They’ve got three other lanes to use,” I’d heard him say on other occasions.

As we sat down in a booth by the window I said to Sumi, “Now you have to order a Rueben here,” Mike again nodding in agreement not even looking at the menu. “They are really, really good. I don’t care if you usually don’t like Ruebens, you’ll like this one.”

“I don’t want a Rueben,” Sumi said as she glanced over the other choices. “What makes them so good anyway?” There’s that tilt again. They always came with a question.

“Well, they’re just, ... you know ...” Mike said as he put his hands into a shape where a sandwich outline could be seen, “... just so good.”

The words were hard coming. It was, after all, only a half-hour ago that the three of us were languishing in the middle of a critique that would have put the best orators at a loss for words. That was my fault. My art work had lately been putting everyone, including myself, at a loss. As one professor put it, “I wouldn’t buy it.” I still can’t figure out if she was speaking metaphorically or was actually saying she wouldn’t put out the money. I hope it was the money.

Our sandwiches came, Mike and I had ordered Ruebens and Sumi the turkey club. Now the turkey club was nothing to put down, it was a good sandwich on its own, but the Rueben of the Onion Roll had a special place in our hearts. Its proportions of corned beef to rye to Russian dressing to sauerkraut was nothing short of perfect.

“Here you go Cranberries, I’ll bring you more Russian dressing,” our Russian said in a slight accent as he went back behind the counter to his grill.

“Really, why is it as good as you say?” Sumi asked.

I went on to explain the importance of the proportions, Russian versus Thousand Island dressing, the theory of bread slippage. Mike elaborated and demonstrated his patented “round the edges” technique of getting optimum crust per bite. We went through our takes on thinning out the mound of corned beef from the middle to make a more level bread-top, my view being the excess beef should be redistributed along the sides and Mike rallied the more radical camp that it can be enjoyed separately by dipping in the extra dressing on the side (it never occurred to us not to use the excess). Sumi listened and laughed. She enjoyed the show so to speak. We were a couple of charming guys after all, once you got to know us, and our conviction seemed to be working on her. At one point, she almost appeared sad that she hadn’t ordered one herself and she probably would have taken a bite of ours had we offered and then insisted. But we still didn’t know her that well. And there was still something that didn’t sit quite right with me.

“I don’t know. It’s just a sandwich,” she said.

I had been flirting with her pretty hard up until then, she reciprocating on most levels. Along with that head tilt she had a stare I found impossible not to return. I was nursing a crush, and the flights of fancy that come from an infatuation with someone you don’t fully know occupied the bulk of my thoughts at the time. But there was always something I couldn’t figure out that made me stop from taking it any further. She was young to be sure, even naive, and at times it was apparent that she had been a little spoiled along the way. She came from a well-off family and a home life she herself described as “Perfect. Just perfect.” Her parents had done a good job protecting her from the uncertainty of life. And yet even with this relative inexperience she was so opinionated. She had it all figured out. All things accounted for, all slots filled. Everything that had to do with why I even went back to school in the first place she had an answer for. Of course it made sense how her worldview could be so concrete at such a young age with the kind of help she had received, and of course I never completely agreed with any of the answers she had. I knew life could be full of questions and hardships, and it boggled me to think that some of her views could even be entertained for something so subjective as art, so open. During the meal she had spouted off such grand, sweeping statements on art, beauty, and life it made my head spin. For myself, I had never understood why I felt that need to make things, why in my spare time I thought almost non-stop of where meaning comes from. The reasons for my own artistic motivations were obscure to me. Questions just led to more questions, investigation to more problems. Connection, beauty, meaning, I knew these things existed for me and I sensed my own attachment to them, but I didn’t see how they came to be, how it all happened. But, sitting there at the Onion Roll Deli I did feel a certain connection slip away, and along with it beauty and meaning. Whatever I thought I was feeling for Sumi had been whisked away with her finished plate. We had all of a sudden become simply classmates, and I knew nothing more serious and long lasting would come of us. And in the wake of our fading, potential relationship I saw clearly for perhaps the first time how a simple thing can become a life’s passion for a person. A strong feeling of gratitude came over me as I sat and enjoyed the last of my sandwich, and I felt a vivid connection emerge to the Russian behind the counter.

Sumi looked smaller somehow, sunken down in the booth leaning back after her meal. I suppose I was still attracted to her in a way, but it wasn’t so much her anymore. I felt a tie not to anything she was, but rather to that moment of understanding her stubborn opinions had brought on.

Mike looked out to the ever-grey Detroit air. He was already rolling a cigarette for the ride back to school. I felt anxious to get going myself. I wanted to ask him how he thought my critique had gone.

Potsdam

The season was summer, a beautiful kind of summer, hot around the edges, but cool in its relief due to a breeze that felt almost designed.

George and Kirsten had a reason to be there. They were the ones who had got the scholarship for study abroad. I was just their American friend who was passing through and had decided to stay for a while and bask in the fine company of my friends and the kind graces of their more than hospitable hosts, whose good measures continued without end. In fact, the whole time I stayed in East Germany, I never came across one unmeant smile, not one disparaging look. No, it was very clear that I was more than welcome. From the first words that came from my mouth as I fumbled with my few awkward German phrases, all a variation on how to order food, every local smiled the widest they could and inevitably guess what I wanted, ina bratwurst an ina cola bitter, the sausage topped with sauerkraut and mustard set down next to a coke before I even finished the sentence.

It starts to wear on you after a while, all the niceness, though not in a bad way. You get broken in a sense, the way a horse does, and I found it harder and harder as the days went on to even think about when I might continue on my own and leave these people, not to mention my friends. But I knew I’d have to eventually. After all, I hadn’t come to Germany to study the language like George and Kirsten, only to visit. And I never knew what to say exactly when I was invited every time on their school organized tours of the surrounding areas. Yet the director always saved a seat for me on the bus even though I had paid no tuition and had not signed up for anything.

So this was how I found myself, and my state of mind, calm and collected, well fed and well rested, feeling confident in everything I was or thought to be, when we went on our tour of Sanssouci, the summer palace of Frederick the Great. The term sans souci means without worries. And that epitomized mine and in fact all our feelings at the time. The group numbered at about twenty or so, from many countries, English speaking mainly, and about five native Leipzigers who acted as our guides and teachers (well not mine of course, I was along for the ride).

Frederick the Great of Prussia, the Electorate turned King turned Kaiser, a flowing transition when put so succinctly, built the palace around 1750 as a summer retreat. Outside Potsdam, it has many buildings including a Chinese teahouse, something called the Friendship Temple, an equally obscure Antiquity Temple, a massive orangery, and even a replica of a Dutch windmill. Its grounds with numerous gardens and paths rolls its way over many acres of low hills. The place in total resembles a sort of model of what a palace and grounds should look like, almost a caricature, like a carnival amusement park, which actually isn’t too far off the mark. Frederick was known as the ‘Romantic on the Throne’ and it’s said that he wanted the palace and grounds to look like music.

When our group toured the gardens Kirsten had kept her walkman headphones on for most of the way. She, George, and I knew each other from college where, when the summer finished, we would return to complete our last year. There we were all part of the same small circle of friends and it was odd and exciting to find our friendships intact and flavored now with the accent of a foreign country.

Out of the three, Kirsten was the active one. She was in every club and organization George and I could name. She always had a purpose. At Sanssouci she walked ahead of me and George until we got to the palace, graciously spending time with her new German acquaintances. Looking at her from behind she blended into the landscape. The sun was bright overhead and it made her blonde hair even more intense than usual.

When given the tour of the palace itself, with its grand halls, gilded everythings, its decoration beyond understanding, we were made to take off our shoes and put on large, oversized, fuzzy slippers. Pink, blue, and yellow. Mine, the closest I could get to my size, came almost to my knee when set on end. These were to protect the floors of course, and their effect came off as not only comical—with all the people in small groups flopping around, shuffling, not raising their feet so as to not lose their loose slippers (when our group stopped in a room we heard in the other chambers, other groups swishing by as their feet polished the floor, no voices, just the silent whisper of their slippers like grasses being swept)—but it was also sweet and engaging in a very intimate way. As I found myself surrounded by all the past decadence, scooting along close to the ground, the image of myself with my friends was fond and fair and in the moment. I was quite undaunted by the saturation of history going on around me (we were told earlier some buildings still had bullet holes from World War II, their round divots almost indistinguishable from years of wear).

I think, in a way, we were a little naive to be walking around in such a place. Our reaction should have leaned towards the awestruck. But as the tour progressed we found ourselves tied more and more to each other, to the people around us, taking comfort in the company. It was like we were all guests in each others’ living rooms. And then, quite simply, almost as if by an act of will, the palace became ours. We inherited it just by being there.

Kirsten was more earthly present to me than ever before. She had always been a little higher, a little out of reach, if you get the meaning. Neither I nor George had any serious romantic intentions—I was pretty timid and unsure about most things, most of the time—but she was the kind of girl who could make your mind wander and say if only. From the onset of our friendship I never had the courage necessary to bridge the gap between us—partly due to my own shyness and partly to her lofty placement—but there, in the palace of Frederick the Great of Prussia, we were both weighted down together. The history of the place melted away and became nothing more than a backdrop to our own personal record. Sanssouci seeped into our group and its atmosphere filled us all. Everyone was smiling. None of us heard the voice of the tour guide. Kirsten found she could fit both feet into one slipper. George couldn’t walk by a sculpture without mimicking its pose, and then beg for a photo of him and his twin. And I was probably the most satisfied and content that I had been in a long time.

After the tour, we passed out of the palace and waited in one of the back courtyards while putting on our regular shoes. The terrace overlooked a long stretching garden planted to mimic a forest meadow. The guide assured us everything had been planted. The effect was convincing. At the far end of this garden on the crest of a hill we saw what looked like Roman ruins, a few Doric columns, the remnants of an arched aqueduct. It wasn’t until later after finishing a brochure about Sanssouci on the bus ride back and while eating yet another bratwurst that I learned the ruins actually had been built at the same time as the palace in order to hide a water tower. And it was with this news of a 250-year-old faux finish that I felt madly impulsive, as if the slow decay of that old place, the outmoded decadence had passed a sense of urgency onto me. Looking from the bus window I saw how history, so saturated in Sanssouci, permeated everything, the landscape, the people standing at the sides of the road, myself and my companions, even the sauerkraut and bratwurst in my hands. And I also felt that the urgency the palace had released was given not only to me but to all of us, and that it existed for us to use wildly and when we needed.

I leaned over across the seats and started to talk with George and Kirsten. I don’t remember now what our conversation entailed precisely or what things later in life it led to. But I do remember that it was long and involved and, as George dozed off on the way home and Kirsten scooted over to the seat next to mine, that I seemed to be saying all the right things, and the words were coming to me as easily as walking.