Metropolis is a small town in Southern Illinois whose inhabitants once believed it would grow into a big town, a proper city, a metropolis, given its location on the banks of the Ohio River.  There was something ironic and sad about this grandiose dream and the current reality of Metropolis: houses in need of repair, signs that had scare quotes around them—Welcome to the “Metropolis” Chamber of Commerce (or something like that)— and a casino that the Metropolis website claimed was “no more than three miles” from the center of the city. But there was also something hopeful and quirky and fun about the place. In the early 1970’s, a resident of Metropolis had a great idea. I imagine him tossing and turning at night after too many fried mushrooms at Bob’s Bowling Alley: “I wonder if there are other towns named Metropolis in the United States. If there are no other towns named Metropolis, maybe we can build a huge Superman statue and rename our newspaper The Metropolis Planet and our main street The American Way. We can tell the public that Metropolis is the Hometown of Superman.”

And that’s exactly what happened. A small nothing town in the middle of nowhere is now attracting tourists by the thousands and has been featured on the Travel Channel. None of the shops “downtown” were boarded up, and we saw some nice houses.

“God bless America,” said our driver.

I thought it would be real funny if we pestered the townspeople with questions such as “Can you lead us to the grave of Superman?” and comments such as “Wait. You mean to say that Superman was a fictional character?”  My fellow travelers did not agree, and I was too chicken to undertake this on my own, so I had to settle for a lascivious pose at the legs of the huge Superman statue in the town square. (I would post the picture here but there are decency laws relating to superheroes in Illinois.)

We visited the Superman Museum where I was able to expand my Superman lore. There was so much I didn’t know!  I had grown up in a Superman-free zone. My Lithuanian immigrant parents thought Superman might give my sister and me some bad ideas—that we could fly, for instance. In any case, our television viewing was pretty much restricted to educational programs. (“Birds can fly because of a variety of specialized adaptations that allow them…..” ) The nuns at grade school were no big fans of superheroes, either. They’d say things like “Jesus Christ is Superman,” which really confused things for me. In any case, I hadn’t known that kryptonite was a bad thing.

The museum had old typewriters and telephones from the original Superman television show and a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles worn by Clark Kent (or George Reeves playing Clark Kent) that looked fashionably retro.  There were lots of photographs and chunks of “kryptonite” and Superman wigs that had seen better days. A more elegantly curated museum (one with more money) would have found a way to preserve the toupees so that they didn’t look like underfed black cats who’d spent the night out in the rain.  The woman who managed the museum/store looked a bit sulky.  She reminded me of a slightly plumper Rooney Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.              Because the bathroom in the museum did not meet our high standards for hygiene, our only option was to drive to the casino, a large modern building (ship, I guess) with free valet parking and good-looking parking attendants. We were disappointed that despite the clearly marked sign—“IDs required to enter casino”— nobody asked for ours. “No way I’m gambling here,” I grumbled. We used the bathroom (very clean!) and then lied to the parking attendant that we’d be back soon.

The trip back to Charleston went by very quickly in part because that’s the nature of return trips and in part because our drive went above the speed limit. Once back home, we felt we needed more excitement, so we drove out in search of the tallest Abraham Lincoln statue in the world, somewhere in nearby Ashmore. There was a barbed wire fence surrounding the former resort that housed Abe, so we saw him only from a far distance. That was okay because, really, how many super-heroes can you take in a day?

Vocabulary expands with age.  Or should, if we read anything at all. A few years back, a student asked the meaning of ambivalent.  Another student piped up: “Isn’t ambivalent something like ambiguous?” We spent the entire class coming up with examples, using ambiguous and ambivalent in sentences: “The professor felt ambivalent about giving the student a B, but the otherwise well-written paper had an ambiguous ending” and “The student felt ambivalent about the grade he was given because the teacher’s instructions were ambiguous.”

My vocabulary has increased over the years.  Definitely. (Or, as my students mistakenly write, defiantly.)  In addition to habitual reading and writing, I also study lists of words for Scrabble competitions, high probability combinations of seven and eight letters: nidates, oolites, arsenite, antrorse. I try to use these in conversation in goofy ways so that I remember them: “Excuse me, honey, can you pass me the arsenite?” and “Ooh, I like your new oolites!”

One of the problems with aging, however, is that at some point we begin to forget the words it’s taken a lifetime to acquire.

This happened to me over the weekend at the Dallas Open Scrabble tournament. I had ADELMRS on my rack. I knew there was something in that combination of letters because I know the mnemonic for ALDERS—FIRS THORNS PRICKLED TWO BUMS.  I sat there shuffling my tiles until my head hurt. I consoled myself that it was Game 18 out of 20 and that MEDLARS is not a common word. A medlar, according to Dictionary.com, is “a small tree, the fruit of which resembles a crab apple and is not edible until the early stages of decay.”

I felt very crabby at the moment and was probably in the early stages of a precipitous mental decay, but maybe I was still “edible.”

I didn’t have a great tournament, but it was nothing compared to what my husband experienced.  I lose at Scrabble all the time, but Marty, well, Marty does not.  He’s come in second at the Dallas Open twice. Last year he scored 702 points in a game, a feat that got him into the 700 Club for the third time. (Note: This 700 Club is not to be confused with Pat Robertson’s evangelic dog and pony show that explains phenomena such as Hurricane Katrina as God’s punishment for decadent life styles.)

Anything can happen in an open tournament. The highest rated Scrabblers play the lower seeds in the first three games. It’s kind of like March Madness. There can be upsets. There can be Scrabble Cinderellas.

For example, at the first New Orleans Open just two months ago Scott Hawkins beat Joel Sherman, winner of both the World Scrabble Championship and the National Scrabble Championship. Joel is known as G.I. Joel in Scrabble circles; the G.I. stands for gastrointestinal and refers to Sherman’s tendency to burp (and make other sounds) during games. Scott Hawkins sometimes burps, though it’s usually when he’s had too much beer. He’s a good-looking scalawag who sometimes plays at our club in Charleston. I once gave him valuable advice about dating women who didn’t have whiskey for breakfast, counsel he ignored for the most part.

Anyway, according to witnesses, Scott crawled into the hotel at six am, took a two hour nap, then got up, still hung-over, and gulped down some coffee before staggering over to the table where he was to play Sherman. Where he was to play and to beat Joel Sherman.  Of course, he picked great tiles. “I got everything,” Scott told me.

Nothing quite that dramatic happened to Marty. No intoxicated hussy got all the tiles. He lost his first three games.  He forgot some words. He didn’t see GELATING/LEGATING in his first match. He forgot that PAVIN, a variant of pavane, an old-fashioned dance, takes an –s front hook to form SPAVIN, a bone growth in the hooves of horses. (Spavin comes from the Old French espavain, which means swelling.) I knew that PAVIN takes an –s.  Marty taught me that years ago, and so I played it in Game Number 15, the last game of the second day. I won by hooking a seventy-six point bingo ending with an –s onto PAVIN.

The word that best describes my feelings about beating my husband at the Dallas Open is ambivalent.  I was elated at first, ready to jump out of my chair and do a series of fist pumps. Ninety five percent of the time when we play at home or at the club, Marty wins. Then I felt guilty, as if I had done something terribly wrong, had upset the natural order of the universe. Then I felt sad because Scrabble means so much more to Marty than it does to me and he was having a bad tournament. And then I was worried because Marty forgetting SPAVIN is so unlike him.

Perhaps he was tired. Our mattress at home is too soft for his hard, sports-ravaged body.  Perhaps he was worried about his father, who’s recently been diagnosed with cancer. Although the prognosis is good, doctors will have to remove a kidney.  Perhaps the fact that Marty is also playing international Scrabble, which uses another, bigger dictionary, threw him off his game.  There are 90,000 words in the North American dictionary; international Scrabble adds another 30,000.

I decided to treat Marty to dinner at the Crazy Buffet. We sat there and ate egg rolls and sweet and sour chicken and won ton soup and analyzed our games and then when the waitress brought the fortune cookies Marty broke open his and began to laugh.

His fortune read: “Perhaps you should take up another hobby.”

Speaking of my husband, it’s his sixtieth birthday. Because he’s a Leap Year baby, he’s only fifteen.  He is the light of my life, the fire of my….oops, the wind beneath my wings, the moon beneath my sun, the water above my head, etc. etc.

I’m grateful for /to Rachel Panepinto, who gave me the idea of writing about someone you like during the month of February.  Rachel was a student of mine years ago when I was director of the Writing Center and she was a graduate assistant. She was the kind of student every teacher dreams of having: very smart, inquisitive, hard-working, and polite. Today she is one of our best teachers here at her own alma mater—Eastern Illinois University.

At the top of my list would be Terri and Tim. They are two of the calmest, most logical and most hard working people I know. They’re not married to each other or otherwise related, but they do share similarities (other than being calm and hard working and logical.) Both have exceptionally smart and good-looking children who say and do funny things. Both have an admirable knowledge of sports, Terri of pro football and baseball, especially the Rams and the Cardinals (she’s from St. Louis), and Tim of college football, especially University of Alabama football (one of his alma maters), and baseball (he cheers for that other Chicago team.)  Both are funny. Not ha-ha funny—you’re not likely to hear them tell fart jokes or do Daffy Duck imitations—but dry, insightful, often sarcastic funny.

Terri and Tim would stay calm and focused. They would draw up plans, including Venn diagrams and detailed instructions, as to how to get out of the above-mentioned crises. They would provide necessary humor and perhaps even baked goods. We could all watch sports together.

Another person I’d want to have with me in a crisis is Bonnie.  Bonnie has been a friend and a mentor since I’ve been here at Eastern.  She is calm, logical, and hard working. She knows a thing or two about diplomacy and a lot about politics of all kinds. She and her husband host a monthly game night.  Compared to some other people who shall remain nameless, she is a good sport.  Although she is competitive, she doesn’t need to win. She doesn’t get into extended arguments about the rules. And she provides really good food: grape leaves, fancy cheese, chocolate.

Yes, this would be my emergency trinity. I’d have other people on board the crisis ark as well: my husband, for Scrabble and sex (honey, you are more than a Scrabble sex god, but I don’t have room or time to write about the other things); my writing group, so I wouldn’t be focused completely on the crisis (or could write about the dire predicament); the people I’ve mentioned previously in Daiva’s Month of Friendly Love (which include my husband and writing group.) I’d throw in the three people who read my blog.

It would be a pretty big and entertaining ship.

Marty is always in a good mood when Scott drives up from Memphis to play Scrabble.  One reason is that Scott is an excellent player—his rating is over 1700—so he gives Marty serious competition, and there’s nothing Marty likes better than serious competition.  Also, Scott is what Marty calls “low maintenance,” which means he’ll eat at Subway and let Marty do most of the talking.  Marty mentored Scott up through the Scrabble ranks and sometimes refers to him as his protégé. He is very proud when Scott does well at a tournament.  Scott gives Marty his props, so everyone is happy (unless they play each other in the same division in a tournament.)

The house was filled with Scrabblers today. We celebrated Marty’s 60^th birthday, or, as he likes to tell people, his fifteenth birthday since he’s a Leap Year baby. To honor the event, we had a little tournament. I ordered a Scrabble cake, and there were prizes for best words played that describe Marty. Of course, Marty got to choose. I told a player to put down wud, which means crazy.  Marty didn’t think that was very funny.  Sterling was one of the words he chose. Usually the club ends at five, but this being a special occasion we played beyond that. Now everyone is gone, except for Scott, who is spending the night.

I don’t mind being by myself, listening to music, reading, knitting, writing in my blog, especially when I know my husband is happy. And I like Scott, although he regularly beats me at Scrabble.

Sometimes, however, friendships can be resurrected.  I was in therapy this past year, dealing with the grief caused by the death of a good friend as well as my failed relationship with my only sister.  Therapy caused me to examine my relationships more closely. One of the insights gleaned from talking to my counselor was that we often dislike certain traits in other people because we share these very same traits. We might find annoying those people who feel the need to be good in everything because we ourselves feel the need to be good in everything. We might frown at the individual trying to capture the limelight because it’s what we ourselves feel compelled to do.  (Of course, we often dislike people who are very different from our BEST selves. I will probably never be close friends with a right-wing Republican.)

This past fall I examined a friendship with a woman with whom I’ve had some issues in the past. She can be bossy, like me. She likes attention, like me.  Perhaps one reason she likes attention is that somewhere in her past she didn’t get enough, or, more likely, of the right kind. I thought of all the things I like and admire about her. We have enough in common. We’re both smart and ambitious. We like to read. We like to knit. We’re both feminists.

I’ve decided to forgive her for being like me.

I admired her from afar for many years, as she was ten years older, listened attentively as she read her poetry at literary evenings at the Lithuanian Youth Center. She was also a film-maker; she and her husband filmed the neo-Nazis as they marched in Marquette Park in the 1970s, capturing all that hate. They filmed the Pope as he waved genially to the South Side crowds from his Popemobile. They archived the Lithuanian past in a series of talks with individuals who remembered the Russian revolution of 1917, among them my grandfather.

It seems as if we’ve been friends forever, yet I don’t remember how we actually got to know one another. She was from Cicero, but had not gone to St. Anthony’s School. Perhaps she became friends first with my parents, both of whom loved literature and liked to encourage young talent.  My mother called Teresa her third daughter. Teresa would phone my mom, or come over, and they’d drink tea and talk about gardening or poetry. Teresa would sometimes tell my mom her problems. When my mom was sick with cancer, Teresa brought blueberry soup and dumplings and prayers.

She remains my strongest connection to the Lithuanian community in Chicago. It was from Teresa that I learned about the death of Arvid, a childhood friend and character in my memoir. We sometimes make fun of Lithuanians we know, she more gently than I.

I love her linguistic quirks. “Let’s go for some Thai food,” she’ll say, pronouncing Thai like thigh. “I’ve always wanted to visit Thighland,” she told me once. She pronounces chic like cheek: “That woman looks so cheek with that scarf.”

Teresa’s Lithuanian is way better than mine.

Teresa and I share a love of baroque music, long nature walks, comfort food, and vintage stores. She owns a lot of hats, old and new.  She looks great in hats. She can wear a beret like nobody’s business.

Fern’s office is a room away from mine.  It is painted a sunny yellow and filled with books, depictions of ferns, and plaques commemorating numerous awards that Fern has received for service to the university.  Insider her desk is a little cache of chocolate.  Fern is a moderate person, so it’s possible for her to have a big chocolate bar in her office for more than a day. (Speaking of chocolate caches, I found one my husband had hidden in a seldom-used drawer in our guest bathroom.  The sneaky bastard!) Fern shares good things with others: chocolate, comic strips, funny stories.  Fern’s husband Mike is a wonderful cook and baker.  When I worked in the Writing Center with Fern, she’d often bring in his famous chocolate chip cookies. She never passed them off as hers, which is what I would do.

Although Fern and I are the same age, she seems (is) so much wiser and more mature. I suspect she was a wise, mature sort when she was seven.

I think I’m only now entering my mature period. I went through a bad spell last year—change of life, loss of a very good friend, the publication of my book (mostly a good thing, but also some stress with touring, expectations, etc.)—and I think I was bitchy. Fern is never bitchy.

If I need advice, Fern is only a door away. She is a good listener, and always says something nice: “Oh, I like that,” she’ll say, about a scarf or some earrings. “I like that.”

It is a sad, sad thing, but I think the bullies will stay away from Noel.  She is tall and confident and doing very well in school.  Straight A’s.  But she is also a normal kid.  She likes Pet Society on Facebook and is very fond of the neighbor’s cat.  She’s read the first three volumes of the Harry Potter series, but then the action started getting scary so she’s taking a little break.

Her mother Jenny is a brilliant painter who teaches at Eastern. Last summer she was commissioned to paint portraits of two saints for Hedwig House, the Catholic community’s house of hospitality here in Charleston. She asked me whether I’d be willing to pose as St. Hedwig, who was Eastern European. I was thrilled and went around telling people that the reason Jenny asked me was because of my saintly, pious nature. She drew very quickly, asking me to tilt my head to the side, then down. Mozart’s Requiem Mass played on the stereo as rain tapped on the windows.

“Should I try to show any emotion?” I asked. “Should I look mournful?”

“Just relax your face.”

It’s a great portrait, although Hedwig looks mighty well fed for a saint.

Linda and I are proof that people of all backgrounds, races, genders, nationalities, etc. can get along. She is a Cubs fan, while I root for the White Sox. Before I met Linda, I hated the Cubs. I made fun of the Cubs. Constantly. I’d go into gift stores in Chicago where Cubby teddy bears were sitting next to Cubby coffee mugs, and I’d stuff the little bears head first into the mugs.  But Linda is not a baseball hater. She cheers for the Cubs, but sometimes also for the Cardinals (yes, I KNOW—in some circles this is heresy.) And she likes the White Sox. I think she saves her hate for more important targets, like bigots.  Because of Linda, I’ve become a more reasonable fan.

Linda and I both understand the importance of mid-February—pitchers and catchers report to work.  This means that spring is near. Somewhere, in Arizona or Florida, it is already spring! And with spring comes Opening Day and with Opening Day comes hope and the promise of a new beginning.