beans from merrillville

this is known as the "beans from merrillville" story.  enjoy.

kim and i watch a lot of white sox games (though, not recently, as the white sox seem to be focusing on something other than baseball - possibly spitting, or maybe juggling).
  a frequent advertiser during these games was a car dealership, that would advertise "lexus of orland and merrillville".  i will mention at this point that everyone i know refers to merrillville as MERR-I-VILLE.  the "ll"s go stubbornly unpronounced.

  this car dealership has two distinctive qualities in this jingle:
1) the jingle was clearly written for "lexus of orland".  the melody cadences down, and only recently had they dubbed in "and merrillville".  it clearly seemed like a post-script, and yet
2) they pronounced it MERR-ILL-VILLE, and relatively slowly.  i understand that this is the way it is spelled, but i have never heard it pronounced that way other than that commercial.
this commercial indicated to me that this dealership had recently opened a new branch, but hadn't actually visited the town it was located in.

so here i've laid the groundwork; this brings me to the dream.

i normally never remember my dreams, or if i do, i remember oddities (like, why did my 4th grade teacher play tennis with a rubic's cube, why was i fleeing zombies, and when did i become a fire-man known only as "charlie"?)

every once in awhile i remember my dream with precision.  this is one of those dreams, where every detail is razor-sharp, and etched in my mind.


i saw a sign posted in the window of a shop in central IL.  the sign said "affordable lease-please call".  at the urging of LRG44 (kim's dad), i called.  the lease was affordable (hence the sign), and so i went to the bank and signed the appropriate papers to be able to open a coffee-shop. LRG44, helen, kim, and i immediately started working to set up shop; from my recollection, this process only took a few hours. (because really, a few hours is all it takes to establish a coffee-shop in an abandoned storefront!)
  i set up all of my coffee-makers, and kim and helen made menus and hung them in the shop.  i had a fair amount of business on the first day - people coming in and buying cups of drip, french press, vac pot, chemex, etc.

at the end of the day, we closed up shop.  at no point did i know what the shop was called - though kim and helen were responsible for putting up the sign above the door.

as i locked the door for the evening, snow had started to fall.  there was maybe an inch on the ground already.  i looked down the street, and was immensely satisfied.  all i had done all day was brew coffee and talk to people, but i remember feeling better than ever before.  i stepped into the street, and looked at the coffee-shop one last time.  and as i did, i saw in large letters the name of my shop above the door.

the sign read "BEANS FROM MERRILLVILLE".

open grids and open windows: or how i learned to stop whining and embrace the midwest

"The people I know from outside it distill the Midwest into blank flatness, black land and fields of green fronds or five-o'clock stubble, gentle swells and declivities that make the topology a sadistic exercise in plotting quadrics, highway vistas so same and dead they drive motorists mad. Those from IN/WI/Northern IL think of their own Midwest as agronomics and commodity futures and corn-detasseling and bean-walking and seed-company caps, apple-checked Nordic types, cider and slaughter and football games with white fogbanks of breath exiting helmets."
-David Foster Wallace, from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Kim and I have lived together in Illinois seven years. Kim is from central IL, and so she has breathed the communities deeply from a very young age, but for me this was a significant change from the mid-Atlantic cities and suburbs that were familiar.

The first thing I had to get used to was the long stretches of flat land, surrounded by other long stretches of flat land. At first, I could view them only as an "outsider" but as time went on, I grew to embrace these communities. There was a stillness to it that spoke to me.

There are some things about Illinois I'm still not used to:
being buffetted by wind on beautiful sunny days,
being buffetted by wind on rainy days,
being buffetted by wind all winter as the snow piles up outside our front window.

But when it is time to take to the road, I roll down the windows, breathe in the air, crank up the music, and enjoy the serenity of flat grids of fields repeating against each other.

I have learned to embrace the sameness of it. It has the same effect on me that I imagine zen-gardens have on buddhist priests, where familiarity of pattern is its own reward.


At least that's what I'm keep telling myself as I pay 9.75% sales tax.