Sweet Former-Home Chicago

Tessa, 

I'm all growed up.  I know this because I was sent to a conference, with business cards.  I think the idea is that I'm to hand them out to other grown ups.  The thing is, it's the Covenant Church; having business cards at that convention was like having oars in desert.  It's cool you've got them, but you certainly don't need them.  Everyone's related, or you graduated with them, or their parents went to North Park and made a sacred pact to get pregnant at the same time and then send their children to North Park, where they would fall in love and continue the cycle.  Business cards?  Please.  

 The staircase at the Chicago Cultural Center.  Marble mosaics on everything.  It's easy to see why they don't make 'em like this anymore, but I kind of wonder how they made them like this in the first place.  I remember coming to this place on our class trip in the eighth grade.  A trillion chips of stone and tile, spelling out all the great authors and thinkers.  I recognized some of them.  Defoe, he wrote Robinson Crusoe.  Kipling wrote the Jungle Book, which was remarkably free of talking animals.  Disney lied to me.  But maybe that's why Kipling was up there and Walt Disney wasn't. 

It always impressed me that even the places people couldn't see with the naked eye were gilded little masterpieces.  Pretty sure this place predates the zoom lens, so why go out of the way to make the mural reach to the ceiling?  Must have been an excess of Tiffany's glass laying around.  "Might as well use it all, Lou."

Ah, the hotdish-laden feast of Sällskapet.  Everyone said "Hi."  You were missed.  All the kids are so big.  It's only been six months, but they keep growing like we can just move the ceiling or something.  Jackie hugged me, Christopher punched me.  People were glad to hear we're doing well, which is what I told them. I suppose we'll have to make sure and do well now, or I'll be a liar.  I don't think doing well is out of the realm of possibility.  Doing adequately makes me happy enough most days, but adequate never changed the world.  

Harriette sends her greetings.  She hasn't grown at all since we left; still the same canon-ball-with-legs.  Our friends are great.  Some of them fed me, others let me sleep on their floor.  It was good to see them all, but it made me realize how great it was to have all of us in the same place for those years.  It was a hard stretch; everyone poor, carving next month's rent out of bad jobs.  But we won't look back on it like that.  We'll look back at all of us, younger and healthy and able to stay up till all hours of the night eating and drinking wine and cracking jokes.  No mortgage or kids or out-of-town conferences.  Just a bright flash of unburdened revelry that came before all of the things that will come after this. 

I Heart You.

Not Crioceris Asparagi, Anything but Crioceris Asparagi

Tessa, 

Geez, what is this, like the 50th cloudy day in a row?  You know what I hate about cloudy days?  It's that the sun's doing it's job; the problem is the clouds.  It's not like there just weren't enough golden rays to go around.  I could understand that, the sun deciding to take a day off.  But that sun is up there, burning.  And we'd all be down here, soaking up photons, maybe converting some Vitamin D, if not for the big, stupid, lazy clouds.

Today started badly.  I opened up the 'ol web browser, up popped the homepage, and I started skimming headlines while the water boiled.  The Dow is down, T-bills are up, the Euro is down, the Dollar is up.  It's a roller coaster.  A big, painfully-boring roller coaster made of numbers and high-blood-pressure medication.  Then to the news headlines, where I see the front page of the Chicago Tribune announcing, "3 Bodies Found In Car."

The bodies were all bound, gagged, and shot to death, the article noted, and should not be confused with the "3 Bodies Found In Car" article from last month, where the 3 Bodies had been bound, gagged and beaten to death.

What?  Are you kidding me?  We live in a city where -- for all its genuine wonder and worth -- we run the risk of confusing one ghastly, grisly situation with another?  Because, sorry, but as gruesome and atypically horrific as a crime scene might be, that chalk outline is a dead ringer, if you'll pardon the pun, for a chalk outline we drew yesterday.  If they'd have just died in the same place, we could have saved on white chalk.  Ridiculous.

In my righteous anger, I pulled up the Minneapolis Star Tribune, wondering how the Twin Cities' beastly crime-du-jour compared.  With the population difference, I figured they maybe had "1.2 Bodies Found In Car" or something like that. 1.3 at the most.  But they didn't.  It's worse than that.  Dear, sweet, Tessa, it was so much worse than that.

"Darned Asparagus Beetles" screamed the headline.  I swear; you couldn't make this stuff up.  Not even a  farm report on the spread of pestilence.  Just "Darned Asparagus Beetles" followed by an article about, well, beetles.  To the delight of children everywhere, Crioceris Asparagi, as they're known to smart people, apparently spent most of this month feasting on the helpless stalks of local asparagus.  C. Asparagi also holds the record for "Insect With the Stinkiest Pee".  Front page.  

Minnesota, the land of ten thousand lakes and zero cars full of dead bodies.  A land where every chalk outline is as different as the crime that led to it.  A land of where even the biggest headlines are of questionable importance.  And should you miss the headlines, you can go about your day with the relative certainty that your car will likely not become your casket, and that the greatest threat to your way of life is quietly eating vegetables in your garden.  

I Heart You