Chicago was one of the first big things I knew. I had flown before, to a different state and a different country, so I had a bit of knowledge about different places, as in, enough to know they existed. But I really knew nothing beyond Lincoln, NE, which was just the right size to run into people I knew in the grocery stores and to always have people recommend the same places for dinner. (It really eliminated a lot of the stress.)
But when I came to college in the south part of Chicago (back before there were shootings on what seems like every corner), The City was the biggest thing I’d seen. And the Metra and L were the first transit systems I learned to navigate, which I did by standing in front of the giant subway maps for what felt like hours, picking out the main stations, where there were transfer stations, if they were the right ones, and if I was going in the right direction or if I was headed to the opposite end of town and would only figure that out after I was an hour out of my way, and if I was on an express train and would end up zooming past my station with no stop in the near future.
On the weekends with my roommates, we would head downtown, to a Broadway musical (Wicked), to a Sox game (it was the south side, after all), to the lakefront in the summer, the skyline of the city reaching up behind the highway, which was behind the waves.
And Lake Michigan was the biggest body of water where I first spent a significant amount of time. I’d seen the Atlantic, but only once, on a trip to see family where I almost single-handedly herded a family of 6 to the ocean because no one had the desire that I did to get to the water. And I’d seen the Amazon River, with its wooden boats floating over the muddy waters, but aside from a few boat rides and a few dark whispers about how I needed to watch out for the piranhas, there was no knowledge of those muddy waters. I merely floated over top in silent amazement., a 16 year old who barely knew any different.
But Lake Michigan, I had been there before, even if it had been farther north and farther east, and that summer in Chicago we went enough to get a little tan, enough to know our favorite spot on the crowded beaches.
But then I left, back to Nebraska, and then across the world. But to me, Chicago is always a little bit like coming back home. And this time, I know a bit more, I can compare it to other big places where I have been. And it holds up. It has not shrunk like many other things have, it is not beyond other things that I have seen, not diminished in my absence like so many other things can be.
And this time, as if to embrace the bigness, we climbed up into the Ferris wheel compartment, and went up, up, up, water on two sides and the city on the third, with its familiar skyline that I had seen so often from the beach in college.
So coming back was a bit like home, but also a bit like coming back to something that I had almost known once, but that was too big to ever really understand. For Chicago has gone on without me, of course, as it is wont to do even when you live here. I don’t know the new strains of violence, and I never knew the old long standing ones of corruption. I don’t know why the man on the street thought it would be better to dress up as a gorilla to get money then to start a band, or where the conductor was on the train ride back, as we never actually paid our fare.
But I am glad to have known it for a while, and even gladder to come back to it; to see its familiar skyline again with all its vastness, all its change, and all its sameness.
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