Chicago

postcard-chicago-wrigley-building-new-michigan-ave-bridge-aerial-1923

111-wacker

It feels so odd to say it now, but I once lived in Chicago. I moved there in 1971 to be with the medical student who was my first husband, and although I left repeatedly, it was something of a home base for about three or four years. Most of my memories of Chicago are filtered through the lens of my own troubled soul, but even so, I have a residual fondness for that boisterous, busy and definitively Midwestern city.

The first view above is from a 1923 postcard, which obviously pre-dates me, but it's familiar nonetheless. I worked in what was then a spanking new skyscraper, all glass and chrome, at Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue, right along the river. When I stepped outside, I saw that very bridge and the white Wrigley Building, lit up in the evening like a place of enchantment a world apart from the mundane bustle of office life. I could see the Tribune building also, and the colored lights of passing traffic, and I always paused to take it all in before hurrying to the el to catch my train, braced against the chilly winds.

In the second picture, you see the scene from a different angle (that's the Wrigley Building to the left), and as it is today. More precisely, as it was yesterday, which is when my brother took the picture. He happens to be in Chicago on business, and he took a few shots for me of places I might remember. He was about four years old when I moved to Chicago, but I carried thoughts of him with me always, and I still have a few of the notes and drawings he sent. I was terribly homesick, far too immature to be anybody's wife, and worked downtown as a receptionist and Girl Friday. (Girl Friday...it used to be a thing.)  My pay was $425 a month, which I did not consider unreasonable, but it all felt pretty empty to me.

There was refuge in the Art Institute.  I walked there on lunch breaks and warmed myself in the 19th century sunlight of the Renoirs. I stood in front of a painting whose color plate in the "Paintings" section of the encyclopedia I had loved as a child. It was A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat. I had never realized it was so big in real life, and composed so meticulously of little dabs and dots, and could somehow make me feel as though time had stopped in a calm and carefree moment. Despite its color and brightness it seemed that everything within was waiting and still, frozen...something mysterious and compelling about it, something pending.  And this was a welcome elsewhere.

I liked walks to the Loop too, with my buddy Rosie, who said I strode like a farmer, and she meant it as a compliment, or with my newly discovered best friend Cydnie, who shared the sense that the two of us had been rudely detoured from the lives we were meant to live. But there was a magnificent domed interior in the public library building, parks to cut across, and busy streets lined with tall impressive buildings where important things must be happening. We might peek into Marshall Field's, the grand old dame of department stores, and admire the handsome clock that adorned its building at the corner of State and Washington. I remember a travel agency with glossy brochures about places I was certain I'd never see. I remember the rumble of the trains, and stores that smelled of candy.

And now my brother, all grown up, was in a hotel room in Chicago, and I, practically an old lady, haven't been there in years, but it was fun to chat with him, knowing he was there. I was touched that he had asked about my old haunts and sent me pictures.

Naturally he had the the World Series on the television. And I don't really pay much attention to sports, but I was sort of rooting for the Cubs, mostly out of Chicago nostalgia and sympathy for that 108-year drought, and also because I thought it would be fun for my brother to be there in the city if they won. So it turned out to be quite an exciting game, and a wonderful respite from...you know what.

But my brother also told me a poignant little story about our father that I'd never heard. Apparently, on the last night of his life, our father, not usually a baseball fan, was watching the 1978 World Series...the New York Yankees were playing the L.A. Dodgers. He called my brother, then eleven years old, into the living room to watch with him. It was a school night, and normally, my brother would have been in bed, but he came and sat with our dad for a while, and they watched a few innings together. I don't even know who won. (I guess I can check that pretty easily.) Who could have imagined that this would be our father's final night?

Oh, when my brother told me this, I felt again the old familiar ache and yearning that never seem to fade. But fact is fact, and nothing had changed with this new information. And as I assimilated the story, I saw that it only highlights the consistency of my father's loving nature, and his capacity for exuberance even when he surely wasn't feeling very well. Isn't it better to know that he enjoyed a brief escape into baseball on that fateful night, and a moment shared with his son?

It was nice to be revisiting Chicago with my little brother on this night and watching the World Series across the miles with him. And now the rain came, and the game was delayed and then continued, and finally....the Cubs had won.