128: Four Corners

When you're at the Statue of Liberty or standing under the retunda, the U.S. Capitol, when

“you're at the Alamau, it is clear what they mean.”

But why? Do thousands of tourists go every day of the summer to four corners that spot in the wilderness where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, four different states, meet at one point. I went on summer, drawn, inexorably, magnetically, without quite knowing why, just like every other wandering tourist who strays within 250 miles of the place.

Changes are you have done this yourself. You've driven three or four hours out of your way, and you show up, and there's a marker on the ground, bring by dozens, literally dozens of t-shirt stands, and families come, and

they stand on the supposed spot with the four states meet.

What? They hold hands, they sit on the ground, and then mom or dad or sis stands a little platform to have their built, especially for this purpose, and takes a snapshot. And then, off it, there's this kind of aftermath moment where everybody stands around happily, like, what was that all about?

You know, we came for this, and then the next group comes in.

“The arbitrariness of it all, I think, is lost on no one.”

I saw one family with young kids who simply placed a teddy bear. On the spot with the four states meet, that's not to picture that.

Couldn't any four corners hold just as much meaning as this place?

Am I friend? The answer, of course, is yes. And today on our program, we offer our own little national monument here on the radio, our own picture of life in America, our own four corners. And W.V. E. Chicago, this American life from our glass.

Today on our program, four corners, we tell the story of life in America through portraits of life on four different corners and four different states across this great nation. That one, history, that two, love, act three, neighbors, that four. How to become an American. Stay with us.

Just American life, today shows a rerun from 1999, a very memorable rerun. But I mentioned this just in case you noticed some outdated language. Act one, let's begin with the most epic of our four stories today. Back when we made this episode, writer Sarah Val had a theory that she could tell the entire history of America by describing what happened on and around one single street corner, specifically.

The corner of Michigan Avenue in W.V. here in Chicago. She thought she could just swivel around and point at the whole dark and inspiring tale. Here then, her story. When I started, I had only a few things to go on. A couple of French explorers, a plaque on the bridge said passed by in 1673.

An Indian massacre in 1812 right there in front of the Burger King. Bake notions of Abe Lincoln's debt to the Chicago Tribune, whose quaint gothic tower looms over the bridges north side. I thought that's enough American history, and I just make up the rest. Turns out my theory was only two right.

The intersection of Michigan and Wacker I found out isn't just a corner, it's a vortex. The deeper I dug into the history of Chicago and its relationship to the history of the country, the more crowded the ghost traffic jam clogging up the Michigan Avenue bridge got. Okay, I'm standing here right now on the Michigan Avenue bridge. In the Chicago River is right underneath me, there are some ducks floating under there and a boat

just went by, and here's another one coming. Out there is where the river meets Lake Michigan to the east. I'm looking south, the place where the bridge hits land is the corner of Michigan Avenue

“and Wacker Drive, where you can get your vision checked or by a nice per coat, should you desire?”

I'm swiveling around, and the view from the bridge is just picture postcard pretty, especially at night when the riggly building is just lit up so soft it glows. Supposedly the building so delighted Joseph Stalin that he had the University of Moscow designed in its image, and who can blame him. The American National Mythology revolves around the idea that the promise of America is best

seen in the west, home, home, on the range, et cetera. Existentially that might be true, but economically the real place to witness the promise of America is the Midwest, where for most of this country's history the products of the range were manipulated for fun and profit.

is railroaded to Chicago to be slaughtered by some underpaid overworked immigrant on route

“to its manifest destiny as a New Yorker suffer.”

The first person to grasp the significance of this place where the Chicago River meets

Lake Michigan was Louis Sholier, or as he's known around here, Jolier. Back when his name was still said with a French accent, Jolier was a 27-year-old fur trader who accompanied a Jesuit missionary named Jacques Marquet on a canoe expedition from Quebec in 1673. They were to map the Mississippi in the name of France, unaware that Spain had already claimed

the river some 130 years before. On the return trip, at the suggestion of their Indian guide, they traveled from the Mississippi into the Illinois River and then the Displanes. They got out and carried their canoes a few dozen miles to the Chicago River, where they got back in their canoes and paddled to this very spot, right where the river meets the

Great Lakes, just below the corner at Michigan and Wacker. And Jolier then had a vision. His map of North America and oddly pretty delicate ink drawing he made in 1674 is concerned with one thing and one thing only, water. His America is all Great Lakes and Mississippi.

Look close and you can see what he saw. Just like Michigan and at only one spot, the future side of Chicago, does it connect

“to a river that connects to a couple of other rivers that could connect it to the Mississippi?”

This is what Jolier saw, that this place is a continental hub, the missing link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi and thus the Atlantic and the Gulf. All that was needed was a short canal spanning the miles of prairie between rivers. When he wrote, "We could go with facility to Florida in a park and by very easy navigation." Thus Jolier's map isn't so much a map as a prophecy.

Stick your ear up against it and you can practically hear cash registers ring. Surprisingly, they only built a bridge here in 1920. Engineers also strained out the Chicago River and put in massive landfills over there, so the lake is further from the corner than it was in Jolier's day. And I like to picture Jolier sometimes, walking up or down Michigan Avenue to the bridge,

a go-up in his hand for me that the Starbucks over there from the north side of the river

“are the Starbucks over there on the south side of the river, spinning coffee lace to”

live it into the Chicago River, knowing it'll float with facility all the way past New Orleans into the ocean from there.

The first person to get cracking on Jolier's dream was Chicago's first permanent settler,

Jean Baptiste planned to sobble. A trader who built a cabin here on the north side of the river in 1779, a century after Jolier paddled by. New sobble's mother was an African slave and his father was French. He lived here on what is now the side of a 35-story office tower called the Equitable Building.

With his pot of water-me-wife Katherine, DuSauble's marriage bed was itself a map of America, the mixing of European, African, and Indian blood to make a son and a daughter, true American children with three continents in their dark eyes. Chicago's school teachers like to impress upon their students that Chicago's first resident DuSauble was a black man, and just think it only took 204 years for the town to elect

its first black mayor. In 1803, the United States established Fort Dearborn at what would become the corner of Michigan and Wacker to protect the portage of the Chicago River. During the war of 1812, hundreds of Potawatomi Indians descended upon the soldiers and their families and killed them burning down the fort.

The side of Chicago was then abandoned for four years.

When soldiers arrived to rebuild the fort, they first had to bury the scout human remains

which still lay there. Today the side of the fort is weirdly commemorated here with these little bronze markers embedded in the sidewalk at Michigan and Wacker, so that tourists can dance around its former perimeter as if learning to chop, chop, chop. And over here, there's a wildly racist relief sculpture commemorating the defense of Fort

Dearborn where a soldier from the fort is kind of battling off the savage Indian brave while a mother and child are kind of cowering behind him basically waiting to die.

by the Indians, they will be cherished as martyrs in our early history.

“But it doesn't say that those Indians technically hadn't given over their rights to this”

land, but it looks like they ran out of room to put that on the plaque. Now I'm going to walk around here, back onto the bridge. And I'm looking west across the Chicago River, and if you look down river at the turn in the river a few blocks west, you can see the site of the old Saganash Hotel right over there.

During the first half of the 19th century at the Saganash Hotel, Chicago and seem to

be play acting the juiciest bits of the country's spanking new constitution every night. Historian Donald L. Miller writes, "At the Saganash and its neighbouring hotels, men and women of every color in class were welcome, and whiskey, song, and dance were the great democratizers."

“Visitors from more civilized parts were shocked to see Indian graves spinning the white”

wives of fort officers around the dance floor of the Saganash to the frenzied, fiddling, and totaping of hotel owner Mark Bobian, or white and Indian women drinking home distilled liquor straight from the bottle.

To add an edge to the evening's local white traders would put on feathered headdresses and

spring into the crowded tavern with war loops and raised tomahocks, scaring the wits out of tight buttoned easterners. I cannot overemphasize how much I love that story. Not just the metaphor of it, but it is the best ideal of America I can think of. The picture of liquored up ladies and dancing Indians, the strangeness of reenacting the

fort deerborn massacre to scare the queasy easterners, turning what must have still been an open wound into a practical joke.

“I love that story as proof of the theorem that then as today in Chicago, the mysterious”

equation of whiskey plus music equals what can only be called happiness.

The ladies of Chicago wouldn't be dancing with Indians much longer because there wouldn't be any Indians left to dance with. The city of Chicago was officially incorporated in 1833. The year the Potawatomi chief stood near the old do sobble home and signed away their land in Illinois to the administration of Andrew Jackson.

Who found time in his busy schedule of relocating the Cherokee, Crete, Choctaw, Seminole and Chickasaw to have the Potawatomi removed West to what U.S. government surveyors had called land two poor for snakes to live upon. Three years after the Potawatomi signed away their land in the city was incorporated, construction began on that canal that Joliet had envisioned to connect Lake Michigan to the Mississippi.

The canal worked pretty much exactly as Joliet had imagined. So much trade moved past this corner that Chicago expanded from a muddy little hamlet of a few hundred people to a city of over 100,000 in just 25 years. Cyrus McCormick built his McCormick Reaper works right here on the river in 1847. His machine, the Reaper, turned out to be one of the most significant inventions in the

history of history. Before McCormick took three hours to gather a bushel of wheat and with the Reaper it took ten minutes. Because McCormick helped mechanize agriculture, farms could take up more space and use less labor in less time.

By speeding up and emptying out the country, McCormick populated the city. Not that the Marcher Progress is necessarily benign, especially if you're one of those urban workers. Just ask the dead of the hay market, right, who laid down their lives just 15 blocks from here for the eight-hour workday.

A readuped in St. Clairs, the jungle about what the stockyard employees went through on the south side. By the Civil War, most of America's grain from the west and the vast prairie around Chicago was unloaded from trains here, traded on the Commodities Exchange and then sent east on ships from Lake Michigan.

All within a five-minute walk of the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive. It could have been this very spot, the poet Carl Sandberg was thinking of in his famous

He called the city, "Toolmaker Stecker of wheat, player with railroads and the nation's

“great handler, stormy, husky, brawling city of the big shoulders."”

He's all over here, "Toolmaker," that was the re-perfectory on the north side of the river. And over there, Stecker of wheat on the south side, that was where these giant grain silo stood where now is standing a giant, high at hotel. The player with railroads and nation's great handler, that's over there behind the high at where the train tracks were and, um, I'm looking right there, the guy in the leather

jacket, big shoulders. It is my project to tell the whole history of America from this corner and there's no telling of that history without the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president here in Chicago at the Republican National Convention in 1860, on the very site, by the way, of the Old Saganash Hotel, where the Indians

and drunken ladies used to dance.

“On the Chicago Tribune, standing on north Michigan Avenue, a stone's throw from the bridge,”

not only campaign for Lincoln, it's editors talk to him into running for president in the first place. Lincoln was considering going for vice president, maybe. The Tribes' great editor, Joseph Medell, helped found the Republican party to advance the anti-slavery cause.

Medell was such a passionate abolitionist that he wrote in a Tribune editorial in 1856. We are not unfrequently told that we crowd the Tribune with anti-slavery matter to the exclusion of other topics.

Medell and companies access to the president wasn't necessarily always in their favor.

At the height of the Civil War, they went to the White House and pleaded to get out of the president's new request for 6,000 more union draftees from Cook County and Chicago.

“This after the area had already given up some 22,000 men.”

According to writer Lloyd Went, after Medell asked for mercy, Lincoln turned on him with that Lincoln asked biblical wrath scolding. "It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until we had it. You called for emancipation and I have given it to you.

Whatever you have asked for, you have had. Now you come here begging to be let off from the call from men which I have made to carry out the war you have demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I have a right to expect better things of you.

Go home and raise your 6,000 extra men." Needless to say, Lincoln got his Chicago soldiers and reporting the news of the president's assassination on April 15, 1865, the headline of the Chicago Tribune simply reads, "Terrible news." Not long after the Civil War, the whole city burned to the ground and Chicago became the

place where every major architect in the country from Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright on down to Meese Bandarrow worked on reinventing what a city's guideline is supposed to look like. Montgomery Ward and Susan Rowbuck revolutionized consumer merchandising with mail-order catalog sales.

Montgomery Ward was just two blocks from Michigan and Wacker. In 1920, Al Capone came to town, the same near prohibition went into effect. When you're after that, Vincent the Schemerd Brucci, a member of the Dehono Band in Gang, chased by police drove onto the Michigan Avenue Bridge just as it was opening to let a boat pass.

He jumped the gap, only to crash straight into the other side. That gates pass, manufacturing at the corner gives way to the service economy. Now it's all banks and advertising agencies and law firms, skyscrapers instead of warehouses. Railroads give way to the world's busiest airport on the north side of town. If I may skip ahead in the interest of finishing this story before tomorrow morning's

paper arrives, for me by the way, the Tribune chalkful of those anti-slavery screeds as usual.

Only an eight-minute walk from the corner is the side of the first Kennedy Nixon debate.

The place you could argue where modern televised democracy begins, since that's the debate Nixon was said to lose not because of the issues but because he looked so ghastly, sweating

And just a short walk from there is the building where Hugh Hefner ran playboy magazine during his heyday.

“As long as we're on the subject of the decline of western civilization, if you look over”

there to the second story of the NBC Tower tucked between the equitable and the Tribune,

that's where they taped the Jerry Springer Show. The Jerry Springer Show. It just wouldn't be the haunted landscape around the Michigan Avenue Bridge of some symbolic television apocalypse did not happen here each day. Booking guests who's near constant profanity makes the show into an unintelligible barrage

of bleeps. Watching it is like listening to a constant storm warning, which is exactly what it is. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but one way you can measure the importance of this corner to our national psyche is the number of times it shows up in motion pictures, specifically the action adventure kind.

“Bruce Willis Samuel Jackson, Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Tommy Lee Jones, Wesley Snipes”

Harrison Ford, Kevin Spacey. There's barely an actor worth the cover of entertainment weekly who hasn't been in a film with a scene shot right at the corner. Why? Because these films are about the motion of planes, trains, automobiles, boats, helicopters, motorcycles, every modern means of transportation.

And so we're better to film them than the place that three centuries ago was spotted as our country's leading transportation hub by Hollywood's favorite unintentional locations out Louis, Sholiette and one typical offering, Chain Reaction, Keanu Reeves plays a fugitive motorcycle riding University of Chicago, Machina, being framed for murder, trees, and terrorism, being framed as usually a big part of all these movies.

Attempting to allude the police, he's chased down Michigan Avenue to the Michigan Avenue Bridge. The bridge starts opening and Keanu scurries up a cop not far behind. He does a little better than Vincent the Scheme or Drucci did in the 20s, but then Keanu's a movie star has a stunt double and can do retakes. As the angle of the race bridge gets steeper, the cop slides to the bottom. Keanu's at the top. What should he do? He looks

up. A police helicopter. He looks down. A police boat. He crawls into the bottom of the bridge as it's lowered and ducks into a garbage truck to safety. When he meets his fellow shapeally fugitive who nervously awaits him at the train station, the conductor asks, "What took you so long?" to which Keanu dead pants. Bridge Resort.

What? Up, down, north, south, whatever. The point is that the bridge was. Right at the center of attention in the middle of the action at the hub. We used to ship grain from this corner.

Now that entertainment is America's second biggest export, the product we ship is...

And I don't know what you're talking about. Jesus. Our program today, about four different visions of America told it four different street corners across the country. We've arrived at Act 2 of... for Scott Richer and Julie Riggs at the corner where south, fourth street in Louisville, Kentucky meets the alley behind the West End Baptist Church, things between them changed forever and irrevocably.

“I think it built and built continually until it got to the point that brought us to the”

corner where everything was so outrageous are emotions were so carreening wildly out of control. That we all we had to do was stand there and look at each other for it to be a monumental event in our lives.

The situation was, Scott and I had been madly obsessed with each other for years, but we had always

just been friends. And I was in a relationship at the time. So on this summer day, in this time in our relationship, in our friendship, when we were just friends, I stopped by his apartment or his house over on Broadway to visit him. Yeah, and we had a really nice afternoon. I think we hadn't seen each other for a few weeks, but we saw each other. We always laughed and always had fun and always made each other happy.

it was fun, but it was bitter sweet. She's always able to go away from it being happy.

I mean, that was so much fun. And meanwhile, I'm sitting there going, this is horrible. How, how can she be happy about what's happening here? It was almost like twisting the knife. It was like, uh-huh. So then I got in my little red Volkswagen and left and said, goodbye. I was sitting on the back porch of our house. This is a very Kentucky setting.

A steamy hot summer afternoon and my roommate Jason came out and sat down and could tell that I was affected by emotion. And he said something to the effect of sometimes you would rather have a feast or famine.

“I think it was something about a drought or a flood. A drought or a flood, right? So I decided, well,”

enough of this then, and I decided to take the gamble and I got in my car and raced down Broadway in afternoon traffic, weaving in and out of cars, trying to catch her. And I'm just cruising along. I'd left like 15 minutes before that, I think. Yeah, I had promised myself, well, if I catch up to her before we get the central park, then I'll pull her over and I'm going to kiss her. And I did catch her like right at central park. Right at central park. I'm driving in my car and I look

over and there he is. And he's like, pull over, pull over. I'm like, let's go in on completely confused. So I pull over into this parking lot right on the corner, into this Southland Baptist church parking lot.

“And we both got out of our cars and we just kind of stood, leaning against our respective cars,”

just kind of making, not even small talk. It was just like, everything around us kind of stopped, and nothing moved, and it was impossible to describe. Everything around you stopped and nothing moved. It was like, you know, like, in a movie or in a dream, if you're having a dream and everything spinning really quickly, and then all of a sudden, just the one spot where you're standing stays still.

I have no idea what happened there. We both felt something tremendously powerful.

Our hearts were racing so fast and all the background noise just kind of drops out and all the colors get really saturated. So then you kissed her? No. No, nothing happened. It just stood there. Well, something must have happened because we're here talking about it now.

“So what exactly did happen next? I think what, God, I don't know. There was something”

something happened, but it just seemed to me, it seemed like being there, that was my confirmation that there was something definitely still going on inside Julie that involved me. Everything wasn't hopeless. And every time I drive by the parking lot, and I actually went there at least twice, that I'm sure Scott doesn't know about. Just sitting in the parking lot, thinking God.

So here are our story ends. Julie's old boyfriend lived a block from the corner, so she passed it every time she went to see him and thought about that moment was Scott.

And finally, ditched the boyfriend. She and Scott have been together for three years,

and I've lived together. The funny thing about the situation was it wasn't the first time that we were destined to have our first kiss and missed it. Really? Because we were in Paris together, eight months earlier, and we're having a really great time and stayed up really late one night in the quarter of a youth hostel in Paris talking and we should have kissed then, but we didn't.

still took so long. Who really? Yes. How come? I wanted it to be perfect.

“I wanted it to be something. I wanted to wait till springtime upon a beautiful cliff somewhere.”

And you know, I thought, well, when we were in Paris, I thought, well, there's the other guy and we're in Paris, and you're supposed to fall in love in Paris, so we can't do it here. It's

so typical to be in Paris. Our first kiss was in Paris. I didn't want to be a hallmark card.

You can only have one opportunity to have your first kiss with someone. And you missed so many. They finally had the first kiss in Scott's living room. She had to make the first move. Coming up, dogs, dead people in a mystery, and what it takes to become an American, that's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. It's an American life from our class. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme,

bring you a variety of stories on that theme today's program as a re-run. Four corners.

“We attempt to bring you a portrait of life in America by telling four different stories,”

a four different street corners, and four different parts of the country. So far on our program, we've heard about the past, we've heard about matters of the heart, and now we have arrived at three neighbors. My patternedity has this story of what makes a community in a cemetery in Portland, Maine, whose entrance stands at the corner of Vaughan and Clifford. The West End Cemetery is full of old Dead Sea captains and soldiers from the War of 1812. Kids that died of

cholera and wives who after six or eight or ten children just gave up. There are rich people under monuments, the long fellow family and evolved, and poppers without so much as a wooden marker. No one's been buried here since the middle of this century, and so the place is fallen into disrepair. You see a lot of the marble and shell headstones and puzzle pieces on the ground, or standing at crooked attention. About 10 years ago, the cemetery was a popular hangout

for prostitutes and junkies, but now it's just dogs and their owners. When I first moved to

town a couple years ago with my girlfriend Sarah, we walked our dog in the cemetery. There was a sky there named Jeff, a big, brawny American Indian, from the Duckwater Tribe I think, who sort of qualified as my first friend in Portland. He told me how he grew up in Nevada and was adopted by white parents and then raised in a little redneck town where people didn't really like Indians. He'd moved around a lot and I pictured him as I was now. The stranger in a strange place.

He walked with me in the cemetery, sometimes twice a day, whatever the weather, or rather we were both being walked by our dogs. His was a wolf mixed named Kiana with a vacant slightly menacing glint in her eye, who liked to rough up young puppies. In mine is a simple mutton named Trout, whose passion for chasing squirrels follows her lifelong commitment to rolling in poop.

It seemed like Jeff was always at the cemetery, sometimes up to eight hours in a row.

“He said he worked at night, supposedly for a local scuba diving outfit, and that's why he had so much”

free time during the day. He told stories and the stories about his high school football exploits in the blown out knee that ended his college career at safety. He talked about fishing, how he gilded at it in the rivers of southeastern Alaska, and then how he and his girlfriend had bought a house, and now they weren't together anymore. And she had the house, and he was here, a country away, walking his dog with people like me. He didn't seem angry at all.

No, in fact, he seemed happy. Like every day, he was as happy as he'd been the day before, and because of it, he was good at drawing people out. It connecting the various factions inside the cemetery so that everyone stood around, nodding dumbly, listening to Jeff, our oblivious mare, holding forth on Kiana's new collar, or perfect shampoo, while Kiana took her pound of flesh out of some hapless pup. This was not the way things usually worked in the cemetery. The

mere fact that I knew Jeff's name was unusual. Usually people didn't interact that much. Instead, we knew each other by handles. There was delmation man, father of three speckled dogs, one to whom he spoke in sign language. There was Greyhound lady, regally walking her trio of Greyhounds until the day that lightning, her beloved, dove through a plate glass window during a thunderstorm and died. There was the man who walks and reads and frisbee-dude in the

the cemetery gate, and the pickup artist around whom no one was safe. And there was crazy shouting

“man, owner of three rag tag muts in an elder statesman of the cemetery, who when I finally talked to”

him, wasn't crazy shouting man at all. His name was out. There were loads of people up there that I see all the time. Some of them I've been seeing for years, and I don't know their names.

I recognize them, they recognize me. We talk about all sorts of things, and it just never really

occurs to you to ask their name because you know their dogs name. I mean, as a matter of fact, I've always had these funny occasions where you run into people that you've talked to a lot at the cemetery and you meet them somewhere. We were down at Granny Killam's when it was open one night. This woman came over and said, "El, how are you? How's the dogs? How's all this?" And I was with a bunch of friends and I thought, "And this is...

And I realized I had... It wasn't that I had forgotten her name, it was that I never known her name. I knew her dog. I mean, I had no idea." And I mean, this was not somebody that I just knew very casually. This is somebody I probably would walk with three or four mornings a week.

“But you always find, you know, a lot more dogs than, you know, people, which I think says something”

about who's worth knowing anyway.

Even today, what strikes me as amazing about the cemetery is that there are people here.

People who show up twice a day and see other people here twice a day for years, and many of them just don't know each other's real name. Let alone what the other does for a living, or dreams of at night, or loves, or hates. They just know each other's dogs name. So when they refer to one another, they might say, "Surci's mom said, "Moke bones are full of preservatives, which is why she cooks around."

Or when they bump into each other downtown, Christmas shopping, they'll say, "Elrew is mom." And then when nothing left to say, "Ah, how goes it?" Was this intimacy or a complete lack of intimacy? Sometimes it felt like both at once. You had the warmth of intimacy and the comfort of hiding behind your dog. And yet every day you saw people at their most naked, talking baby talk to their hounds,

kneeling to pick up poop. I asked my friend Julie Rubin's mother about this. Thank you, really, get a window into people's, I don't want to say well into people's souls. Like, you watch people very contentedly walking around, throwing the ball, interacting with their dogs or totally ignoring their dogs. And going through their own pace and everyone's smiling, yelling for their dog and, you know, I mean, I really judge people by how they behave to the toward their dog. Here's all again.

I mean, when I see people hit a dog, you know, I'm really sort of appalled and amazed that you would do that. I mean, I know who really, really likes their dogs and who doesn't. I know people who've got trophy dogs and people who've got, you know, the scruffiest ugly is dog, but, you know, they really, really love that dog.

“I think it was a love part that kept me going back to the cemetery and then it became my social”

hour, my escape, where more often than not, I'd find Jeff and Keanna. The minute Jeff realized that I was a writer, he went to the library and over the course of a week, read everything I'd ever written. And then to my horror, I wanted to talk about it. And he did this kind of thing with others too.

When the leaves began to change during my first October in the West End cemetery, Jeff was

already talking about a Christmas card he was planning. A photograph of Keanna and himself. He brought it up obsessively. About how Keanna was going to have a haircut and shampoo and have her nails clipped and how he had arranged for a photographer and how they were scouting locations. There were ups and downs in the saga as it played out over weeks. A good location that might not work out the day of the shoot if an or Easter hit. The need to time everything just perfectly so that Keanna

would leave the beauty parlor and then immediately sit for her picture before she could come back to the cemetery and get muddy. In retrospect, there were little clues even then that something strange was going on with Jeff. While he said he owned a truck, I only ever saw him at bus stops around town.

In the end, he had the photograph taken at seers. He and Keanna and the stiff unsmiling pose of a civil

“war era has been in life. He and his familiar blue sweatshirt, hooking behind Keanna, who was perfectly”

clothed. He was beaming when he handed the Christmas card to me, literally beaming. After Christmas, I left the country for several weeks and when I came back some time after a massive ice storm he was nowhere to be found. The cemetery glittered with glazed headstones. It took days to unravel the story because people didn't seem to want to talk about it, didn't seem to want to talk about anything. Everyone just bundled into themselves.

In Jeff, he was a very touchy subject, one that suddenly made us all feel defensive.

What I learned was this, he'd had health problems and infection of some kind. He went to the hospital

at the same time that he was apparently forced out of his apartment. Money was tight.

“He'd asked someone from the cemetery to put him up. Another line crossed, but that hadn't”

worked out. Keanna was taken to a kennel by megan, Maddie's mom. And now she was calling the kennel regularly to see if Jeff had picked her up, but he hadn't. Week after week, she called until it was clear that Jeff couldn't or wouldn't pick up Keanna that he was gone. That's when Keanna was adopted by someone else. Here's megan. You start talking about this stuff with somebody and then you realize I didn't even know this person. Like with Jeff, I mean, it was like you knew

everything about his life. But in the end, how much of that was actually true. And, you know, you didn't even know this person. It was like August to December and he was gone. But it seemed like forever. There were completely unsubstantiated rumors that he'd robbed a bank. Someone knew someone

“who's cousin had seen his photo on a Boston newscast, maybe. But then most people were quick”

to accept this as fact. In a weird way, I wonder if we felt betrayed. Betrayed because Jeff had broken the simple rules of the cemetery. He'd become too intimate. Now he was gone and it was hard to say hi, let alone catch someone else's eye. During those dark winter months, the cemetery became a kind of haunted, trustless place. In one of the endless conversations we had about him later, some people worried that he knew where we lived. Someone threatened to track him down.

But what for? So that he might never again bamboozle other hapless dog owners and other

seaside towns into chatting about doggy shampoo. Sarah and I kept the Christmas card on our refrigerator. Right up until a couple months ago actually, when it quietly fell to a new rotation of refrigerator photos. We kept it there in hopes I think that he would come back and explain where he'd been. For us pretty certain he couldn't have robbed a bank. And if he had, I told myself, maybe it was because he had to. Maybe he'd been

inches from a life he'd imagined for himself. With a dog that gave unconditional love, with friends he was guaranteed to see every day and he'd had a couple of bad breaks. Got sick, ran out of money, lost his dog and then panicked. Now time is past. People come and go and every six months the galaxy inside these gates breaks apart and reconfigures. Dogs die. People leave for nursing homes. Others move more arrive.

In every day, today even people are here walking and spectral circles like they're in Mecca circling the Kabaa. In general, I'd say things are back to the way they were. Intimate but not intimate. We stand around and dumbfounded joy with 10, 20, 30 other gaping grown adults, reveling in the simplicity of stupidly entertaining dog play. Dalmatian man still flashes sign language at his death Dalmatian. The pickup artist still works as magic.

The lawn chair family still sets up by the cemetery gate each day and cover their legs with low blankets. Fact is even without somebody like Jeff pulling people together. If you stand on a corner with a bunch of strangers for long enough, eventually something happens that brings you together. Sometimes something small. The other night I went to the cemetery at sunset.

There were the same broken headstones, the same sea captains and poppers. And there were all these living people too who only know me as trout's dad, or as the guy who

not wanting any of it to end. And a gigantic moon came up, came up, Tangerine.

“It was the kind of moon that stills everything and we stood in the circle watching it rise.”

For a minute or two, we just stood there, glowing orange. The dogs didn't exist at all. Mike Pattern and Iglesan Portland man. Since we first broadcasts the show, dogs are no longer allowed to roam the West End cemetery with the runners, but all seen as migrated south to a book beach. Echoer had to become an American. We have this story about a few of the things that are hard

to understand, standing on a corner when you come to this country, is from Ochoe Bejas. It was exactly noon, and the last of the weekend breakfast crowd filtered out of the diner. From the booth line back wall, a young woman made her way to the front to pay her check. She was tall, with reddish brown hair to her shoulders. She had a tattoo on her left wrist,

“a delicately etched silver and green double-headed axe. All around her the bus boys and waitresses”

kept moving, the dish is clattering on the large trays. Lupi, a voice called from behind her, she turned around, then frowned. Standing next to her was a dark, stocky young man, a few black hairs poking sharply out of his chin. He smiled sheepishly. He carried a tray of improbably balanced plates and glasses. "Hello, Raul," she said, resigned to his recognition. "I didn't realize you worked here." "Yes," he said. His English too formal, crackling with

Spanish underneath. He glanced at the axe on her wrist. Beather got a job here, then he brought me. I've been here a few months already, so I should be a waiter soon. My English is much better now don't you think he asked? The dishes on the tray rattled as he struggled to keep them from crashing to the floor. "Yes," she said, starting out the door of the diner. "It's all heard to get rid of the tray and follow it her out to the corner." She pulled on her sunglasses. "I haven't seen you in a

long time," he said, now in Spanish. She noticed him studying her hands and made a fist, which caused the axe to expand. "I haven't seen you since well, you know, you said some very

cruel things," he continued. "But I always look for you anyway, out in the streets,

wondering how you are?" "You could have called," "what for?" Just in a pair of young men walked around them, one carrying a sheet of flyers, the other a roll of tape in a stapler. They stopped and put up some of the papers on the telephone pole next to them. The two men, young and girl-ish, left after they'd layered the pole with announcements about an upcoming dance contest at a local club. Loop it lowered her glasses enough to read and register the information.

"Roll and watchter." "Well, you could call sometime it's just a call, not for anything in particular, but to let me know how you are." "I worry about you," he said. "I'm sorry I didn't call," Loop is said. She pushed the glasses back up her nose. "It's just that," "Roll said, "powding." "I mean, we're married after all," Loop is laughed. "No role, you're married," she said. "You knew damn well, this was just a convenience for me, a business deal. I can help

it that you've spun all these stories for your family." "But it's not right," Roald said.

"I thought we would live together." "I never agreed to that, if it had been a condition,

I never would have married you," she was squinting, her mouth was dry. "You paid me for something," all I'm doing is keep me in my end of the bargain, and that doesn't include

“hanging around with you, your friends, or your family. "Well, I think you need me," he said.”

His lower lip jutting out like a fleshy ledge. "I'm a good man, I can help you." "You don't get it," Roald, Loop is said, shifting her weight from one hip to the other. She stood at an angle, scratched her hand. "I don't know that you'll ever get it, but suffice it to say that I don't need you. We're not family, no matter how many justices of the piece we stand in front of. But of course we are. No Roald, you have your people and I have mine.

But yours, that's not your family. You need me to help you stay in touch with your family, with your Latin self," he said angrily. "He shoved one hand than his pants pocket and used the other to poke at the air." In Mexico, this wouldn't happen, and you'd have to do as I say. There are laws,

you know. Loop it left again. In Mexico, we'd never have married Roald. In Mexico,

you wouldn't need to marry a nice American girl. That your American is an accident of geography.

and I know who you think you are. I'm a man who's seen a little bit of the world. I

may not have gone to college like you, but I know people, and I know you." Oh, please, she said, and started to walk away from the corner. He shook his head sadly and looked down at the tips of his grime-covered shoes. Then he took off, following a few steps behind her. I didn't want to do this, he said. But you've given me no choice. Suddenly, he grabbed her, and threw her against the flyer-covered telephone pole. What the f*ck do you think you're doing? She demanded,

kicking and scratching at him. "I didn't want to hurt you," he said in a voice that cracked. "I tried to carry this around with me all by myself, but now you give me no choice." He yanked her up, pressing his body to hers, and forcing her face to face with him. She could see his pores. He held her like that for a moment. Then, seeing the men with the flyers across the street, he let go. Hit me, and I'll kill you, mother f*cker. Lupa tried to step away,

readying her hands, martial art style for him. "Hey, she yelled in English to the two men across the street. This guy's trying to kill me. Can you call the cops?" The two looked at each other, where are they? Then, back across the street to Lupa in her battle stance. Roul was crying. "The things that you accused me of, they're all the things that you do," he said,

wiping his eyes with the back of his fists. "Well, I finally went and did one of them.

It hurt me to do it, but I'm a man. I couldn't put up with this any longer." "Hey, leave her alone." One of the men yelled from across the street, but it was lackluster. The second man walked slowly back to the dining where a blue metal flag

“advertised the public telephone inside. "Roul, I don't want you near me. Do you understand?”

Lupa said switching back to Spanish? I don't know what the f*ck you're talking about, but I'll tell you this much. If you keep this up, I'll file a police report. And the government will figure out what we're doing. And you will be shipped back. Do you understand?" He didn't react to what she said. Instead, he took a deep breath and looked

up at the sky. "I did it, you know," he finally said. "Tid what?" she asked, confused.

"I cheated on you," he said. She stared at him. "Her fighting posture loosened as she struggled for comprehension." "I was with another woman," he said. "Since you wouldn't act like a wife, I just couldn't take it anymore. And I had an affair behind your back. Lupa wanted to laugh, but didn't. She was stunned by the hopeless and serity of his unnecessary confession.

“"I think that's good, Roul," she finally said. "I think it's good that you get out and get involved."”

After all, we're not really married. We're only legally married. She smiled a little as she talked, trying desperately to be supportive. Roul closed his eyes, tears escaping from under the lids. "Oh, you are a cold, cold woman," he cried. His voice cracking again as he threw his hands in the air. "Why did I have to marry such a cold woman?"

"Roul?" "You didn't marry a cold woman. You married a lesbian." He covered his ears of the palms of his hands. "I don't want to hear that," he shouted. "No, no, no." Lupa sighed and shook her head. "God, this is absolutely not worth it," she said. "Mort her herself and to him." The cops were on their way, said the man who'd gone back to the diner.

He stroked back across the street to his partner, who'd been serving as witness to Roul and Lupa's argument. "Roul," she said, "her voice softer now. If the cops get here and we're still fighting, you'll probably be in trouble. So let's just go our separate ways, okay?" "Don't you care?" he pleaded. "Yeah, I care," she said. "That's why I'm telling you this. Please go back to the restaurant. I'll just leave. And when the

cops get here, they won't be anybody to file charges." "We're still married," he insisted, as if nothing else mattered. "For just one more year, Roul. So don't blow it for yourself," she said.

“"And please don't bother me anymore. You're trying my patience. Remember that I can put you right”

back on the wrong side of the river." They fell silent again. "What's that?" he asked, nodding at her wrist and axe, she said. He smiled a little, but he'd already given up. The cut off men's balls, I suppose. "Yes," she said, "if necessary," they both laughed lightly, a little embarrassed. Roul shoved his hands in his pockets. "I hear you bought a house with Kate,

with my money," he said, not meeting her eyes. She nodded. "It was my money. I earned it."

"You should get back to work," she said, flatly. The cops will be here any moment, and I have to go.

"Will you come by, see my mother, or maybe just call some time he asked?"

“"You never give up, do you?" "No." "Well, you should," Lupa said then walked away.”

Her sharp strides put her across the street in seconds. Roul watched as she talked to the two men. After a moment, the men turned and left. Roul turned too, then quietly wandered back to the

diner. By the time the squad car arrived at the corner, nobody was there.

At Choe Bayhouse, the story is from her collection of short fiction, and we came all the way from Cuba, so you could dress like this, who had his collection of poems as the boy kingdom, L-Aino de los fotones. While Roul was introduced today by Joey Snyder and myself with a least-speaker on Nancy Appdike,

a dribbling editor's pot-tough jacket, Margueraclan, and Consolieri, Sarah Valle,

production up from Jorge Jess, Todd Bachman, and Sylvia Weamus, help one today's rerun. A major ingluelly, Marley, Marcello, Catherine Ray Mando, and Stony Nelson.

“This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.”

Thanks today to our this American Life Partners, Nisha Guladi, David Vanderpool, and Rebecca Reed. Please consider joining them as a Life Partner. I'm becoming one of the people who help us keep making the show. To thank you, we're going to give you dozens and dozens of bonus episodes we've made. I just started experimenting this week with a little email newsletter. We'll see if that keeps going. Join at this AmericanLife.org/lifepartners that link is also in the show notes.

“Thanks as always Joe Brugham's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia, who describes our program this way.”

We're booking guests whose near-constant profanity makes the show into an unintelligible barrage of bleeps. I'm Eric Glass, back next week with more stories of this American Life. Thanks for the podcast of this American Life. Stories for this year's July 4th semi-quincentennial, and yes, I had to look up that word that means 250th. We have giant fan. On the moment, she realized what the most American question is. If you go to Cornfield on some very funny and

very American signs posted in a Michigan sand dunes, Pablo Tori, on our very American love of yelling at refs and empires. So much of what going to a baseball game is like, is sitting in the stands. And effectively using the airspace around you as this sort of pillow you can scream into. That's next week on the podcast for a new local public radio station.