A year and fifteen days I lived in my little two-bedroom nook on the sixteenth floor of the Continental Life Building, and I never did see Superman leap it with a single bound.  What I experienced in that year of living in the heart of downtown St. Louis was far more exciting!

 With all of my furniture and belongings  stripped from the interior, I couldn’t help but flash back to the first few weeks I’d lived there.  This was a pre-Encore era; I didn’t find myself laboring at the club until a month and a half after I’d set out on my own.  What I experienced was six weeks of complete isolation, save a few hours during the day to visit campus.  Thoreau would have been proud.

 Without my candles, potpourri, and lavender-scented Pine Sol, the apartment smelled like my first sense of freedom.  The air is different up on the sixteenth floor - it draws you out, toward the enormous windows that nearly reached from the ceiling to the floor.  I spent many nights sitting on those windowpanes, watching the lights of the city, before I’d been able to afford furniture and television.  I had made my escape from my past life with my leaky Sleep Number bed and little more than what could fit into three large boxes.  Though the paper-thin carpeting and heavy cement floors and walls were uncomfortable, I felt like a survivor.  I had the confidence of a child; and I was living in my tree fort.

 The first thing I noticed was the church bells.  My building sat in the center of a triangle of two large Catholic churches and a cathedral.  The bells rang at midnight.  The first few nights I found Ave Mariato be fuel for my insomnia; once those nights had passed, however, the song was a lullaby.

And then the bombs began raining down on St. Louis.  We were under attack.  I could hear the explosions over my nearly warn-out Luther Vandross CD, and the flashes lit up the western sky.  Panicked, I took the old elevator down to the street and ran out to see the commotion.  It was fireworks.  Saint Louis University was hosting their homecoming celebration.  It was my homecoming.  My first ever.

Some nights were just awful.  I was lonely and frightened.  I had nightmares of being torn against my will from everything I’d created.  All I wanted was a warm body beside me, and my cats were too small.  I wanted somebody to wish me a “good night,” and Stephen Colbert just wasn’t enough.
I documented those times religiously in my journal and soon realized that though my nights were full of solitude, my days were running over with love.  From the homeless man at the corner of Grand and 44 who always knew that I looked forward to buying his Famous Amos, to the maintenance man who helped furnish my apartment with the discarded furniture of former tenants, I learned that when I wasn’t focused on the lack of compassion from an unwilling source, I found that the world was more full of love than I’d ever imagined.  I used that love as a blanket to keep me comfortable during long nights alone.

Eventually I came to look forward to coming home to an empty apartment.  There was no drama but that which I brought.  There was no mess but that which I made (and, neurotically, cleaned).  I invited only love and joy into my home, and was rewarded with some of the most blissful nights of my life (which continue on today).  I enjoyed writing my checks on the first of every month that would afford me thirty more days in my beautiful art-deco tower, thirty more days in my CRV chariot.  I learned the joy of going to a movie by myself, having a meal at a restaurant by myself.  I was delighted to be in the heart of the theatre district, and took quickly to seeing Broadway plays at the Fox and Shakespeare at the Grandel, all by myself.  I saw “Shakespeare’s R & J” the night the Cards won the World Series.  I got to walk home through the streets of a city in wild celebration.

I loved that there was still much demanded of me; from my students to my professors to my talent agency to my creditors.  But when I got to my home, there was nothing but peace and time to get things done.

This summer the Continental Life building was preparing for a huge dance celebration which would span three blocks.  There were ropes and bungee cords strapped to its face, and I watched a portion of a rehearsal by a dance group who specialized in dancing on heights a la Cirque du Soleil.  It was a beautiful event.

 I’ve begun a new and exciting chapter in my life now, and I couldn’t be happier for it.  I have a dog and a yard.  I get to decorate for trick-or-treaters, and bake pumpkin pies for my neighbors.  I have the love and companionship of an amazing individual, and get to play with four children almost as much as I would like to.  I am strong, I am independent, I am savvy and I am safe.  No longer do I feel the threat of captivity, or the fear of abandonment.  No matter where I am or what my circumstances, I can survive.  To my new life, I bring the love of the world that I wouldn’t have experienced unless I’d been alone.  And sometimes at night, I can still hear church bells.

Sitting in my 16th Century Literature class this past week, I heard a classmate of mine say something that rather disturbed me.  I may have seen an identity crisis climaxing before my eyes!  (Or, perhaps, this English Lit grad student simply didn’t understand pronouns).

 We were discussing the attitude toward women in the late Medieval/early modern periods, and this student said, “Women were not respected back then.  They were thought of as promiscuous and manipulative, they were subordinate to their men, and thus emasculation was a real threat to society.”
They?
The woman who spoke this was a Ph.D candidate new to our department.  She is blonde and very beautiful, well spoken, remarkably intelligent, and has a wonderfully friendly demeanor.  Her hair is styled with care, and I have never seen her on a day when her earrings did not match her shirt.
Doesn’t she know that she, too, is woman?

I can’t say that I have noticed this particular faux pas before, but it did not seem unfamiliar to me.  In other cultures, there seems to be more of an embracing of a troubled past.  African Americans revere their brothers and sisters who suffered under slavery.  Jewish men and women still fight over the proper way to commemorate their families who perished in Auschwitz.
Yet we women, as a collective, multicolored whole - whether discussing early modern oppression or the Salem witchhunts in our own backyard - seem to have a detachment from our sisters who have struggled.  Certainly, the stories and statistics move us (often, speaking for myself, to tears), but they seem to be examined as a cultural oddity, something to be poked at in a peetree dish, something from which we are disconnected, to which we never were connected - something abject.
Those women suffered so.  They were mistreated.  I am glad I am not one of them.

I wonder how black women, Jewish women, Asian, Native American, Latina women respond.

Indeed!  We live in a different world.  What was once the “rule of thumb” is gone; replaced by a powerful, assertive (albeit bald) woman demanding, “Hit me, baby, one more time!”  I do consider myself feminist, though I can make an amazing apple pie from scratch and find nothing more pleasurable than to rub my man’s feet at the end of the day.  I don’t want to lose my connection with the women around me, whose ancestors are my ancesters - who have made sacrifices so that I can share my scholarship with the greatest minds of the world by day, and shake my humps with Fergie by night.

So here’s to all my girls.  Our past has made us strong.  Our future will make us stronger.  And yes, I absolutely believe that Queen Elizabeth I of England is of the same mold as Angelina Jolie.