Six years later, I still remember my last month in Chicago.
I’d gotten tired. The endless circles I’d run between friends’ parties, book readings, free music, neighborhood food fests, and the demands of my one-year-old daughter had — yes — ravaged my body with sleepless and almost sleepless nights.
There’s the time I put Mary in the stroller and walked two miles to try out an Indonesian restaurant in West Ridge, but I timed it wrong and got there just a few minutes after it had closed. I didn’t mind, though; the street lights were so gorgeous shining through the autumn haze — trees glowing every luminescent shade of orange, green, yellow, and red — and there were dozens of cheap, amazing taquerias the length of Clark Street anyway.
Or the time my brother and my best friend took me out on a Blues crawl to celebrate my bachelor party. I hope it won’t seem “sex negative” for me to confide that there weren’t any strippers that night, but amazing drinks, better music, and even better conversation with the best friends. We hit a divine hole-in-the-wall called Rosa’s, then over to Kingston Mines and wrapped up at the inimitable Green Mill, but this is just scratching the surface of the scene in the city that drove this music out into the wide wide world. (If you only have time for two, I recommend Rosa’s and the Checkerboard.)
It took me a week to recover.
In the twelve years I lived in Chicago (separated by a two year stint in New York, which was lovely but expensive, including the beer…) I had so much fun, so many friends, so much frisson and connection and excitement that it actually wreaked havoc on my mind and body.
But it didn’t start out that way. I moved to Chicago from a small suburb of Flint, Michigan, where I grew up. Growing up in a crumbling automotive town, Chicago looked, smelled, and sounded like the real deal. It was a towering, bright, dense, noisy huge-citything, and when I got into college at the University of Chicago, there was no looking back. I was lucky, young, and full of energy.
Fourteen years later, poised to return to Michigan — to Flint — Chicago had exhausted me, body and soul.
And that exhaustion felt good.
Now don’t get me wrong. There is plenty to complain about Chicago (and most Chicagoans, for all their earnest civic pride, will freely admit this). Its has vicious legacies of discrimination and segregation, many of which persist today in the neighborhoods, the schools, access to public transit, and so on. The city is balkanized — politically, racially, and ethnically — and to a newcomer these barriers can seem intimidating. I might note that some open-mindedness about what is culturally “valuable” and a willingness to meet people on their own terms will go a long way in a city where communities — be they literary, LGBTQ, neighborhood, church, what-have-you — aspire to the tenacious loyalty of the blood-bonded.
With that in mind, I’m not going to attempt a complete rebuttal to any recent articles picking apart Chicago. Anyone who argues that Chicago doesn’t offer good, healthy, cheap food, or that it isn’t filled with opportunities for adventurous singles, or that it lacks the activist spirit of its coastal brethren, simply isn’t looking very hard.
But I do want to respond to one recent claim, and that is that Chicago is “polite” instead of being “warm,” because I have never lived anywhere more spontaneously welcoming. Chicago is cosmopolitan and diverse, but it is still a Midwestern city, and Midwesterners at their best are generous, warm, and good listeners. So: If you’re moving to Chicago, the best way to make a home there is to be generous, warm, and a good listener.
It’s 1999. I push open the door to the theater. It was the coldest of November nights… the kind of night when the air is hovering right around freezing, but it feels so much colder because the wind is howling and the clouds are thick overhead and you know that you’re staring down the barrel of five months of ice and snow.
I am taking a playwriting class and the teacher has assigned us to go out into the city and review a play. This assignment is due in class on Tuesday, and it’s Monday night and I haven’t done anything yet. There are dozens of plays around town, but I’m out of time to plan and I only have ten dollars. Fortunately, this play, by a blackbox troupe called O.C.Y.C. is only charging $5 for admission. Another $4 gives me enough to take public transit to the show: a bus to the Red Line L (with a transfer to spare!) will whisk me sixteen miles across the city.
When I arrive, I learn that my admission comes with free beer. It isn’t anything fancy (though you can find just about anything in Chicago), but it’s free and offered with a smile. I sit in one of the back rows, notebook on my lap, scribbling as the troupe turns out the lights and fires up their show. Within five minutes I’ve stopped writing, I’m so engrossed by the spectacle. It isn’t flawless by any stretch. It was clearly written in a hurry. These are young, ambitious actors, but they are too loud for the small space. And yet there is something so earnest about the performance — a Scooby Doo-style takedown of Mayor Daley’s TIF districts, complete with interspersed music videos and a false ending that leads to a confrontation with the villain on the roof of the theater, that I can’t look away. I’m into it. I’m rooting for these guys. I want them to succeed. I like it. And when the show is over, I grab another beer, approach the group and ask them about themselves. How did their group get their name? (“How do you think we got our name?”) Are they from Chicago? (Mostly, but a few of them are from Missouri.) Is anyone with the city going to be upset about their activist show? (Laughter. “No. No, they don’t know we exist and they wouldn’t care if they did.”)
And just like that, I’ve made some friends. In fact, I’m still friends with the man who directed that show 19 years ago. We aren’t close; neither of us lives in Chicago anymore. But he was someone I met in Chicago, one among hundreds of friends I’ve made in that towering, bright, dense, noisy huge-citything on a moon-blue lake just by being present, and curious, and open.
I moved to Chicago looking for a better life. For adventure, for opportunity, for a sense of my place in the world. And Chicago supplied all of these things, but only when I was ready to encounter the city on its own terms.
This isn’t what makes Chicago unique, by the way. There’s a lot that does, from Rosa’s Lounge to O.C.Y.C. but any city can be a place to find connection and community. Because that’s what cities are: densities of people. A place to find common cause and experience with those who are, in some ways, unlike yourself. A place to encounter the breadth and depth of humanity in all is discordant splendor.
I still remember when I left Chicago for the last time:
It’s 2011. My wife and daughter have moved ahead of me and I spend one last day clearing out the last of the apartment. The lease is up at midnight, but I’m on good terms with the landlady so she doesn’t mind that I’m loading out at two in the morning. When I finally get on the road, it’s past three. Broadway is silent, its ubiquitous yellow lights firing off against the Uptown, the Riviera, the Vietnamese restaurants on Argyle Street, the high-rises of Edgewater Beach.
As I drive, I’m excited about moving back to Michigan. To Flint. To planting roots in my hometown. To having my own backyard with generous space for a garden, a respite from the noise and congestion and hassle, and a short drive from the starry wilderness. My own washing machine. These are things it can be hard for many to have in Chicago…
But I also know that Chicago has given me a gift I cannot repay: years in which I walked its streets, met its people, and became an adult. Chicago, like all cities, challenges us to grow.
Home or not, such opportunities should be answered with gratitude.