Lill’s on 17th
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
Face-high wrought iron fencing blocked the stairwell from the sidewalk. Bold letters as black as the spires announced on a sign that the restaraunt was closed. Lill’s on 17th is perched high on the street – an overlook on the crumbling sidewalk and the trendy-dressed urban dwellers who seem to pass casually by but actually frequent these streets and search them out as a diversion from the real lives they feign interest in suddenly along these housefronts. Lill’s is housed in a 19th Century Victorian, among the first built on what was then the city’s west side but is now the city itself, a few blocks from the high rise skyscrapers and corporate cubicles stacked layer after layer upon each other. But with a gentle push, the gate gave way and I held it open for another guest so that we could attend another Urban Times creative meeting.
Around a corner, just inside the old house’s front door, we stood in space cut diagonally by an intruding stairwell. Tables were set perpendicular to one another, filling the long hall and the dining room. Glasses were filled with water and wine, and napkins were set across laps leaving the silver ware bare but not exactly catching the light. Gray skies had dulled what came in the window and it had been pushed open to fill the room with fresh air and cooler breeze to warm the room hot with body temperatures. I sat with my legs buckled under and my stomach pushed against the table. I talked to anyone close about how things were going and not being honest about it. No one wants to know the truth. The truth is only spoken in cafes among couples sitting across from one another, and lies are spken then too, no matter how clean or well-lighted the place. These are writers and designers, photographers and salespeople, and I’ve written about our gatherings before.
My objective is not to dissappoint them, that the compassionate person who authors what they see in print is not discouraging in the flesh, that the words are not clumsy. And they weren’t. They flowed as cleanly as the wine, bottle after bottle brought from the kitchen in slender steel cylinders. And it’s only a few who don’t make the connection bretween me and the words, and I was one of them, once. There is no disassociation, no incumberance. One is the other, and in some ways, I am the words, and I’ve been set free to find them and bring them back to the ones I love most.
I was living life as I always had, and it felt good to come from people who don’t have to care, but do. We ate orderves, bread with olives sliced and poured in the plates center, some croissaints stuffed with warm red sauce. The real feast was the comraderie. After a bit, I stood at the bar and spoke with Brynn, the bartender, and another woman at the bar who was gathering underwear donations for chasrity, and somehow it all made sense in the urban environment. The regular patrons had come in off the street and been greeted in the old two-story house by the proprietors, the walls next door close enough to touch by reaching out a side window, the sort of house where music spills out and intermixes on the back porches and is amplified by the wood panelling. And it’s always guitar music, electric, from another era the houses haven’t left, a time they weren’t built in but a time they adopted.
Some conversations were had about writing and my advice sought and I gave it, as usual, but I know that the less you know is as good in discovering brillance, in describing the world freshly with nuance not heard before. A younger writer said he compared his work to mine and that mine was better when in actuality, he was light years ahead of me at his right out of college age. There were mostly romantics among us and that is what I love about them. Love is hard to come by and when you find it, harder to believe it still. Love is a letdown as is the search for words, sometimes. Meaning can be found and made to sound complete, but descriptions can be fiction, and there is no explanation for it no matter how much these people look for it. The world is still filled predominantly with people who overlook its beauty, that never stop to see it for what it’s worth, and it is worth more than the time it takes to observe.
I had a few drinks to little effect though they almost came on strong. Consistency in craft and in being. Everyone was in good spirits and there was a different feeling in the air. We were passing it on, to one another, and the words just wrote themselves.
