I found myself one evening in Chicago, on a former mayor’s 40th floor personal library which had since been transformed into a private bar for rich tenants. It was dripping with modern chandeliers and heavy couches, layers of leather-bound law books. The ceiling-high arched windows made you feel as if you were floating in metropolis, cruising on a magic carpet destined for the Sears tower, Navy Pier ferris wheels, or maybe Evanston. Everywhere were small, twinkling lights.

Not everyone, we were told, got the key to this bar. Only a strictly monitored percentage.

My public radio cohorts and I sank nervously into thick cushions, eying the group several stacks down who had an actual right to be here, and slowly biting into honey roasted walnuts. For a fee, we’d been assured, you could do whatever you like here. For a fee they will move the pool table out of your sight. For a fee they will rearrange the stacks, lock the doors and serve you and your chosen companions an elaborate seven course meal complete with your selection of flower arrangements. You never need to hand them a credit card: they have it on file. They understand you’ve had a long day and would not like to be bothered with trivialities. They know your drink, your habits, when you would like to be addressed. I have no idea how we got into this place: connections are a strange thing.

“I . . . think,” I said slowly “I’d rather be poor. Is that weird?”

“No, I totally agree.”

“I could not handle this,” another agreed. We began talking Pro Tools tricks, alternative audio editing software, the cop-out of music fades. As usual with radio conferences, I was beginning to like this group of strangers very much.

Our platinum barrista tiptoed on the plush carpeting to our table and asked us if we’d like the music turned down, if it was a little loud over here. And I knew I was with my people: nerdy, determined, poor and good-humored, when she tiptoed away and one of them chuckled slyly “yeah, could you crossfade when he starts talking, and then bring it back up during the silence? Because that’d be great.”

1. Every morning and evening, on my way to work and back, I walk past e.e. cummings’ childhood home. I would say the house is beautiful, but I can hardly see it over the twelve-foot tall wooden fence outlining its property, bearing on one wall a small, nondescript sign: “Former home of e.e. cummings.” I’m guessing it’s beautiful. I can tell you that the top of it, near its mossy shingled roof, is a cloudy grey-blue: it’s the kind of house, I think, that looks natural in its environment, camouflaged like another tree or piece of sky.

I like picturing little e.e. cummings in this wooden house with its crumbling brick sidewalks. I know next to nothing about his life, but I generally prefer it this way with dead people with whom I have fallen in love. Now every day that I pass that house, I envision him taking out the trash and staring at the moon. That’s what I used to do. e.e. cummings was exactly like me as a child.

2. One block from our apartment, there is a house that is a circle. I have no idea how they got the wood to do that, but it would seem that no one is properly appreciating it: the house is abandoned. The windows are boarded up precisely, with wood painted the same color the house once was. The pillars in front of the door are undamaged, and there appears to be a complex doorbell system wired outside: a black box with tiny buttons, completely untouched. A chain link fence surrounds the property, weakly outlining a wildly overgrown lawn that is massive for Boston (how is it that no one has created parking spaces out of this?), and translucent periwinkle paint peels weakly off the bleached wood planks, like strips of sunburned skin.

Approximately nine feet up the house and at equal intervals, someone has nailed “Beware of Dog” signs.

“Do you think there’s really a dog in there?” I asked Jurvis tonight breathlessly, holding his arm. I meant, of course, a ghost dog. Clearly nothing’s been alive in this building for a very long time, but the spirit of a pitbull seemed likely.

“Nah,” he responded. “Now, how did they get those signs way up there?”

Someday I will own this house and live in it. Just you wait and see. The fourth floor is its own observation room, a circle of windows that open onto a barren roof (which could be a kind of balcony if it were more properly guard-railed, made safer for drunk people and children). I will sit in this room with my dusty overstuffed chair, beady eyes and binoculars, and I will watch you point and stare at my strange circle house.

3. There is a large yellow house in Cambridge with two front doors and pink trim. It is absurdly massive in an old money way: it’s not trying to be big, it just happens to take up a lot of space. Undoubtedly it is lovely inside, because their garden is wild and heartbreaking.

I don’t know who lives there, but I’ve decided that I want to be the governess of their children and discover the insane woman in their attic.

The first boy who ever liked me would pinch his forearm when he talked to me. Pinch, pinch, pinch, over and over as if he were in a dream. I’d watch it out of the corner of my eye, curious and kind of terrified. His hair was the color of new car headlights. His eyes were blue like mine. It was ninth grade, and we’d been friends since the fifth grade, when we were part of a trio: James, Annie, and Jenny.

Now, at the age of eleven, it would never have occurred to me to befriend a boy: but Jenny said he was cool, and I was nothing if not a devotee of Jenny. Jenny burned incense. Jenny liked Pearl Jam. Logically, therefore, when Jenny remarked one day “you know, James is kind of cool” I eagerly welcomed him in, and after that the three of us made an occasional team. Mostly recess and lunch — Jenny and I would pretend to smoke invisible joints behind the swing set, or I would draw cats with hard chalk rocks on the black asphalt. None of us were particularly interested in the athletics going on around us.

At the end of the year, our sixth grade class had a picnic, and the three of us abandoned the noisy playground to lay in the grass under the trees, hidden in the long gauze of grey weeping willows. No one noticed our absence, and so it all felt secret somehow: magical and tucked away with the smell of sunshine and dirt. The day had the preemptive glow of nostalgia to it, as though we were already looking back on it, committing it to memory and remembering at the same time. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I do remember it feeling important.