Knock on A Door

Last night, I wore a festive dress with a starched bow at the neck for my zoom class and welcomed my students by saying, "Happy Guilty-on-34-Counts day for those who celebrate."

As I've checked social media and read news reports for the last twenty-four hours, I've found myself remembering my early days in Chicago. 

In the first year I was there for school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the trees along the side of the Art Institute and leading up to the school building at the back of the museum on Jackson Drive had been cut down and someone had come in the night and spray-painted the first line of the Joyce Kilmer poem, "I think that I shall never see..."

And later in my time at the school, a student named David K. Nelson, Jr. painted a portrait of the Chicago mayor, Harold Washington, wearing lingerie for a student exhibition which caused a group of city aldermen to come into the private exhibition to remove the painting, igniting a wave of protests.

Now when I think about that time, it seems quaint compared to what is happening today in the world.

But when I went to look up the incident to remind myself of the details, I found a video where an old friend, Jon Schnepp, was front and center in the first seconds of the footage. It was painful to see him so young, so alive, so animated, because he died of a massive stroke six years ago. 

Jon Schnepp and I went to the same art high school in New Haven and although we weren't close friends in high school, we crossed paths later when we both moved to Chicago and went to the same college. He was always hugely energetic and talented and surrounded by people at school. I was the opposite. I was already in trouble my freshman year, deeply depressed and drinking too much, basically dysfunctional and alone. 

In the first six months of college, I lived in the Herman Crown dorms on Wabash Avenue and one day, Schnepp knocked on my door and asked me to go for a walk. I was ridiculously underweight and a shell of a person. He walked me around the block, telling me if I needed someone, he was there. I could talk to him. He wanted to tell me he was concerned. 

I never took him up on that kind offer but I knew he meant it. When I saw on facebook that he was gravely ill and then saw that he'd passed a week later, I was bereft in the way we sometimes are over people we didn't know especially well but had once been young with, people who had shown us a kindness maybe. 

I'm constantly picking my past apart, trying to discover what it all means, both as a writer and as a person in a certain chapter of my life. 

All I know for sure is that when the world is particularly ugly, the best thing you can do is maybe go knock on someone's door and tell them that if they need someone, you're there. 

Thank you for reading.