Three days ago, my house in middle Tennessee was, as far as people around here are concerned, snowed in. My kid made a two-foot tall snowman she called Fred, using my socks as mittens since we haven’t actually needed winter clothes since we moved here and we couldn’t find the mitten bin. It is January and we still haven’t broken out the winter clothes. The kids gleefully announced that it was a snow day for the rest of the school week. Enough branches came down during the storm that all the grownups came out of our houses to survey the damage and we all nodded at each other like middle-aged neighbors do, marveling politely at whose yard contained the biggest branches and deciding who should call “their tree guys,” which is the sort of thing one says when one is of a certain age. I was sitting trying to make a joke out of the fact that you age out of having a weed guy into having a full-blown tree guy and I still think I could workshop that into a bon mot but instead I looked at the snow and my phone with its usual creepy ability to play something perfect played me some Waits and now I miss Chicago.
So here is a journal entry of one long day there, back when I didn’t know the city very well and I would spend whole days wandering the place listening to music and writing and reading books and generally exploring the (incredibly robust) bar culture.
***
Having wandered miles yesterday, I stayed in and played video games this morning which was nice. Today was a lazy slow start, a morning where you repack and relax and leave whenever that happens. I meant to walk to the bus station but I needed the bathroom so here I am at this place, sipping a cheeky mimosa before I move on. This joint is always jarring; outside is Chicago but inside is I’m not sure what. The bathroom is sleek European, the bar itself is Brooklyn but not quite. The place has every element that should soothe my soul, but excepting that drinks aren’t quite fuck-you expensive the only thing I love about this place is that the bar is the perfect height from the stools for my torso to be at perfect slouch-writing height, which is different in notebooks than on a keyboard. This bar, the physical wood and stools, was built for longhand. This is a spot I can curl into the page. At the table behind me everyone is Instagramming their food. All conversation stops midsentence for this ritual. Approximately 60 seconds later, the chatter picks back up as though time had merely frozen for a moment. I wonder what I must look like to them, hunched over the bar scribbling furiously. But the food here must be okay, because the table behind me settles back into silence.
I’m not quite sure why I love trains so much. It might be that they’re the great equalizer and it might be that trains mean adventures. If I am on one, it means that I am the adventurous, curious me. I am going a place to do a thing. I’m familiar enough with Chicago now that I don’t have to have my phone out. I know what stop I’m going to, my music is just low enough to hear the announcements. It’ll be months yet before I can just hop a train, but I am only here on weekends mostly so that’s not embarrassing. I’ve been here a week this visit and I’ve clocked a four mile radius from home base or so. If I did my usual when I fall in love with a city, I’d live here for the summer. Conduct a torrid affair or two, spend hours in the gardens writing. I can’t this year, there’s too much work. There is a child of maybe four sitting a few seats down the carriage from me that has already perfected the “I’m looking at nothing” look but she is looking at me and when I smile at her she waves before remembering her train rules. It’s my pink hair that gets her.
I pop out downtown and set off in the right direction to pick up the green line. My gut feel is adjusting to this place. On the platform I see a low-budget film crew reviewing footage and I want to ask them about their rigging but I’m not there yet. I’ll stick to writing and looking about me strangely for now.
Downtown Chicago reminds me strangely of Sydney’s CBD from a train. It’s all old weather-beaten stonework next to a large body of water. But in Australia the light is bold and full of color and here it’s overcast and makes the same masonry look Gothic instead of fae. But there are so many rooftop gardens and I wonder how any humans might agree to a life where green spaces were the private domain of rich people. The CBD disappears in a blink and I am staring at a suburban panorama of one and two story houses.
I get off in Chinatown for no particular reason and from the first instant it reminds me of all of my city-homes. The domed shelter is DC, the empty space next to it looks like Virginia. The trash on the train fence line is Cincinnati, the curved apartment blocks are like Paramatta and something of the design overall is like Oval in London. The industrial block is Tottenham Hale, and it all comes together in west Philly somehow. If I lived in Chicago, I think this would be the place I felt most at home. It’s lit like the Brown Derby even if it feels more like Wetherspoons.
This bar is playing funk and blues, though I’m writing by a red light. It’s the sort of place that’s promoting Anvil, and though I don’t know precisely what’s happening next door it can most accurately be described as sounding like Black joy in vivid color. The place I’m at is all white people, though at least there’s some diversity in personality or maybe class. It doesn’t seem so far like there’s many places where you might find people mixing races, but maybe that’s just because I haven’t found the right places yet. There’s a man in road worker yellow and one in a suit chatting amiably. Lovebirds two decades my senior watch the game. When I look up, I see a lamp that’s exactly like the one at the Darby at the wicker seats across from the fairy table. It’s a dreamy sort of place and I wonder why it isn’t the first place I was sent in Chicago.
“So we went to Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea,” which strikes my ears as well out of my range until I realize that at this point I might as easily be found in some random dive comparing customs entry in various far-flung locales. To my immediate right is the woman I could have been if I’d stayed at minimum wage until I was her age; she’s loud and kind and obnoxious and gregarious and it makes me glad I have cultivated this quiet scribbler instead. I am still all those things but I think I’m happiest watching people rather than being one. It’s less a performance, because I don’t think she would be any of those things either if she didn’t have to be to survive. There’s something sad in her eyes when she laughs and maybe that’s just daily misery that won’t end and maybe her favorite pet has cancer or something but whatever it is, she’s the life of the party. I buy her drinks tonight in honor of the woman I would have been. There is such a miracle in refusing to submit to the bleakness.
I think that’s why I have fallen in love with Chicago. It’s a city that is meant to force joy, because for all its beauty it is as harsh and rugged a landscape as any high desert or mountain pass. If one survives this place, one knows that one can. There’s a self-determination in refusing to be sad, in leaning over the bar at your own local and giving everyone some good-natured shit and everyone groans but it’s all in love and comradeship.
Jeebus lady. You sure can write. Would make me fall in love with Chicago if I weren’t already.
love it, thank you. my two years in Chicagoland came roaring right back at me...