Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
— Carl Sandburg, Chicago
Sandburg also called Chicago the City of Big Shoulders. We climbed into those arms and clambered onto those shoulders this past week to take a look round at the marvelous views, sample the tastes of comfort and home, and walk among the canyons of glass and brick.
For me, this was a tour with two hats — three if you count the actual purpose of the visit, an excellent writer’s conference run by the good folks at GCLS. (I returned with a suitcase full of editing tips and bursting with new Facebook friends, cheers, all!) I went both as tourist and former Chicago resident. I went to school at the University of Chicago, as my bio notes. Like everything else with Chicago, it was a time of cognitive dissonance. I hated the experience; yet, it was highly necessary and garnered me more money and better jobs throughout my career. I appreciated the city’s architecture and art, but I loathed the weather and the B-School atmosphere. I reveled in the local food but gained 25 of the 100 pounds that I would later battle to lose and gain, over and over. As we toured the city, enjoying every nuance and cranny until we were repeatedly exhausted, I was resurrecting buried memories and trying to give the town a proper send-off in contrast to the grab-diploma-and-get-out-of-town that was my June 1985.
So this is a “travel” post, and I do recommend visiting Chicago if you have not done so. But it was also a pilgrimage for me. I did find pleasure in the echoes of my youth (or yout’ as Joe Pesci says in My Cousin Vinny). I also found that even the most unpleasant memories are now funny rather than painful. Mostly, I found a lot of feelings of home. Continue reading “Pilgrimage through Chicago”
