08.04.2003 - 2:34 p.m.

There was lightning over the city lights when I flew in to Chicago, rain on the horizon. My mother and I were there for a wedding, and for whatever else followed; my meeting the great uncle I didn�t remember, a tour downtown, a post-reception party, a tense argument over each restaurant bill. We were there for a mass, where all of my mother�s brothers and sisters and their children echoed the same motions down the length of a pew, and I remembered why people use churches.

My aunt and uncle picked us up from the airport and drove us through the old neighborhoods. They showed me the house they grew up in, a three-bed next to the convent where they�d gone to school. Twelve people once slept in that house, the eight kids, my grandparents, and their parents, too. There was a park the city flooded in winter as an ice rink, a playground where my mother fell and gave herself a concussion, the street she used to walk down towards my dad�s house by the tracks.

I hadn�t known any of it before this weekend.

At my aunt�s house we looked at pictures of my grandparents. My grandfather�s jaw is the same as my brother�s. My mother has my grandmother�s name, the same mouth, and the same face structure, all cheekbones and smile and large, light eyes. At the wedding we compared everyone�s eyes and noses and ears, looking for pieces of them.

There was lightning outside the terminal windows while we waited three hours for a plane that never came. I filled pages of my sketchbook with the other waiting travelers, faces and figures, backpacks and headphones and laptops. Last time I came to Chicago I�d done the same at my uncle�s house, drawn their pets, his family, and most of mine. I hadn�t gotten around to my mother when we�d left to do something else.

There was the flash of lightning outside the plane we made on standby. We were stuck in the emergency row seats, so I was facing the back of the plane, too upright and with nowhere to put my legs. The fat guy in the seat next to me kept jostling my book. My mother fell asleep in the seat across from me, and I thought about pulling out my sketchbook again, the artist�s eye in me beginning to weigh the position of her eyelashes on those cheekbones, the hollows around her eyelids, the line of loose skin along her throat.

But I never want to draw her face. I would have to pay too much attention.

This morning I have to drive the two hours from my parent�s house to work, but I'm forced to stop forty minutes in for a nap in a parking lot. I can�t keep the road in enough focus. I am still thousands of feet above myself, the sky silently cracking in my head.

-stonebridge

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