I Still Have That Dress

Midlife in Your Hometown

Tuesday I was walking my dog and we passed a house. We passed a lot of houses, of course, but some houses signify more than others.

In 1996 a young woman was found dead on a highway in Missouri. I did not know her, although, as I once told a friend who did, she was a person I aspired to know. We overlapped for a year in high school, but her entire existence in my life consists of two sentences in my journal from 1990-1991. Last year some people who did know her made a podcast about her life and death. A small moment describes a house where she once lived for a time. For a brief time before I knew him, my kid’s father also lived in that house. That was, of course, the house I passed with my dog.

Some years ago a friend was telling me about an apartment he was looking at. “The bathroom is big enough that I could host a dinner party in it,” he said. “Wait,” I said, “is that the basement apartment in that blue house on ___ Street?” It was. I knew it because another friend had once lived there. I never attended a dinner party in the bathroom, but once I went to someone’s bachelor party¹ there and tried to help get charcoal going.

The past seems realer than the present to me now
I've got memories to last me
When the sky is gray
The way it is today
I remember the times when I was happy

“The Indifference of Heaven,” Warren Zevon

In April 2011 Robert Pinsky gave a reading in the Old Capitol Senate Chamber as part of the city’s celebration of World Book and Copyright Day.² He read “Shirt,” I think by request (there are, apparently, poets famous enough they can read poems by request³). He told us about the odd construction of the sinks in the fancy hotel where he was staying. And he said that he’d realized recently that he knew more people who were dead than he did people who were alive. It’s one of those statements that is both a joke and not a joke at all. It has haunted me ever since. At what point will that be true of me?

Don’t tell me when you get another girl, baby
Just tell me when you get another car

“The Jeep Song,” Dresden Dolls

When I walk or drive or bike around my town, as I’ve noted before, I often feel like every house I pass is the Jeep Amanda Palmer sings about. There’s the house where I went to that party hosted by our student teacher, only I’d been friends with her for years before she became my student teacher, so I didn’t realize there’d be other students there. There’s the house where I learned to play poker (the only time I’ve ever played poker, really). That’s where X lived before Y lived there, and that’s where Z’s apartment was when I figured he and Y must be dating. (They were. Later they married and moved into an apartment in a house that I’d once lived in. They lived in the top floor apartment. The people in the basement apartment—the one I lived in—are now my neighbors. Our kids go to school together. The house showed up on the front page of the NYT after a series of tornadoes hit my town. All the people in this story were living there at the time; I’d just moved to Wyoming. The landlady when I lived there was still the landlady when my friends lived there. She was in medical school when I lived there. Later she joined a private practice where my therapist worked. Sometimes we met in my former landlady’s office.)

I am surrounded by the dwellings and former dwellings of ex-boyfriends, old friends, ex-friends, passing acquaintances, professionals I’m connected to in some way, and people like the young woman who was murdered, whom I did not know at all.

The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know.

Speak, Memory, Vladamir Nabokov

I am also surrounded by ghosts. The other day I wrote “Sometimes I think about the places that I never knew has ceilings (the Deadwood, Gabe’s, Colonial Lanes) and how there is an entire world of people out there who will never experience dim lights, thick smoke, and loud loud music except secondhand, via old people like me who wax bizarrely sentimental about the days when we were all exposed to carcinogens every time we went out.” and was pleasantly surprised by how many people responded in kind. For while I am surrounded by places in my past, I am also surrounded by the ghosts of places that are now gone, places that few remember.

One of the places that the young woman who was murdered shows up in my journals is a coffee shop called the Blue Moon Café. It existed for less than a year. It does not appear in phone books from that era—I once looked through the directories my old workplace has fortunately held on to for all these years, for they contain information not readily available online. It does appear in a story in the university student newspaper, which I was able to find because it is online and searchable. A good number of people remember when the Deadwood had no ceiling. Very few, I think, remember the Blue Moon Café, or the very particular world it inhabited, and even fewer are people whom I knew back then.

A few weeks ago a conversation with a coworker led me down a rabbit hole that ended with a photo from 2006. I sent it to my coworker and said, “I still have that dress.” I do. I bought it in 2003 at the Goodwill a mile from where I now live and it hangs in my closet now, many miles and years since I bought it. That year I left town for what I thought was for good, so I had a going away party at a bar before I left, and I wore that dress. A few of the people in the pictures I still know. A few I’ve lost touch with. One is dead. That spring we thought the bar was closing, and they had a big last night bash.⁴ I started going there in utero—my mother had lunch there once a week while she was working on her dissertation and pregnant with me. The last time I was there was, I think, during a staff pub crawl in 2018.

The dress in 2003 with a friend who died some years later; at the American Library Association conference in 2006; and en route to my 25th high school reunion in 2019.

On what we thought was the last night at the bar, the last song the band played was “St. James Infirmary,” and we all sang drunkenly along. Let her go, let her go, God bless her. As with the story of that song, it’s hard to say what the story of this piece is, except that for all that I have lost, I still have that dress.⁵

1. They were trying to go against gendered gatherings, so some women were invited.

2. Yes, that is really a thing. We’ll get into the problematic nature of celebrating books and (largely misunderstood) copyright on the same day later—or you can just go read Jonathan Lethem. It’ll take awhile, but probably less time than it will take me to get around to writing about books and copyright outside my day job.

3. I would have requested “The Garden.” It’s not online in a good format or I’d link to it.

4. It ended up not closing and instead hung on until just a few years ago—I’ve forgotten just when. Now it’s another pricey apartment tower.

5. Image credits: Center photo at ALA by Chad, CC BY-NC-SA. Other photos courtesy of the author.