Chicago Is

I decided a few months back to “celebrate” my 70th birthday with my son in Chicago. I have no idea what 70 is except it is vexing, annoying, troublesome and has arrived as predicted on the wings of tempus fugit. I humorously detest even saying the age out loud, as if to do so would immediately lead to my being Miranda-ized. One thing for sure is that internally I live the cliche that I am really 40 or so; yes, that is true; the character remains the same. The body decays, the spirit is alive and well. The curmudgeon still lives. The greatest sadness of my life is the estrangement between my daughter and myself; I have not seen nor spoken to her in 7 years. The reasons are too complex to go into here and quite frankly none of the reader’s business. I state the fact because it would have been significant for me as a father to be surrounded by my son and daughter at a family gathering, and such a small family we are. I will deal with that anguish as I have dealt with anguish all my life, by the ways and means each of us deal with individual pain. My pain, reader, and how I deal with it, I will not share here, either. It is only a blog. I can only say as I schlep off this mortal coil it would be of meaning to me to have hearth and kin about. My daughter’s ungrounded rage for me  will not abate, for change itself frightens her. I move on.

We spent four days in Chicago, visiting my son’s apartment, seeing his workplace, a digital production studio which is highly complex and varied — we played ping pong, Jane and I, as Jordan finished up a task, staying in the oldtime but very well situated Palmer House (Monroe Street), a block’s throw from The Art Institute of Chicago (splendiferous); the Adler Planetarium which is on a spit of land jutting out into Lake Michigan, affording a striking view of Chicago, although the show itself was a bore, alas; the Rookery, a small gem designed by Frank Lloyd Wright which is an entranceway and staircase to a granite made skyscraper encrusted like a Tiffany stone in a Tiffany setting within one of the oldest skyscrapers of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art which had a spanking new exhibit of stabiles and mobiles by Alexander Calder all  spritely, refreshing and not at all somber and beautifully set out in a large exhibition hall; much of modern art turns me off as I feel it is pretentious, showy, consumed in the artist’s narcissism and not pleasurable, joyous or giving to the beholder; we have a six-foot mobile hanging from our living room ceiling which gives us pleasure and is called “Archeopteryx” named after that transitional bird-mammal fossil. When I was 17 or18 I fashioned  a mobile out of wire hangers for a school project and so even then Calder had entranced.

Walking Chicago’s streets within the first or second day made me very aware of the panhandlers and the disabled if not deformed trying to cadge money from pedestrians. One man in a wheel chair had legs so thin that they looked like my wrists were attached to his groin; he skittered along the street and I returned and gave him a dollar as it was too much for me. I will not go into a rant that speaks to begging or the helpless in our streets and the failure of this society to deal with that; more than that, I was trying to imagine what he ate for lunch, if he had money for lunch, where did he “live,” and what were his  quarters like. I imagined all kinds of things but what I didn’t do was dismiss him out of mind. One man came up to Jane and I while we waited for a downpour to subside and gave us a complicated spiel in well-articulated Americanisms from which we extracted ouselves; one young man asked us and others to give him money to buy a hamburger at the McDonalds behind where we were sitting on a street bench; some woman took him up on that and escorted him to the store. It rolled about in mind to what degree I would beg or panhandle for food and I came up with no good answer except the feeling that I would not like being so pressed  and so destitute in a country so abundant in food. I just had a virulent association: I Hate Republicans, for they represent to me the callousness, the indifference, the coldness, the lack of charity as a group; and the second association had to do with good old capitalism, that of Adam Smith and Charles Dickens; and then I associated to people in general and that association I share not.

So, architecture, sights, street people, imprinted themselves on my mind’s eye. On the last day of the trip we had lunch together in an Italian restraurant (not bad) and we all talked for an hour or so, my hearing Jordan slightly open up and discuss his life, his art, his movie in progress, sharing his self, humoring me at times (all fathers are apparently dodos), revealing his worries, and so on, all for my knowing and not yours, reader. We left hours later for the airport out of Midway and it was delayed by two hours and finally we arrived in Vegas in that supercharged heated and very grumpy air, flopping into our beds about 3 A.M. As I flip back through the new memories I see jane and I videotaping our responses in the hotel room which we now do as a new  marital tradition, our sense of place, restaurants, people we encounter, our overall impressions of events. We will complete that half hour tape today; it is a surprisingly good technique for we unburden ourselves of all things fleeting and memorable — such as losing our luggage for a an hour or so until it arrived in another plane and how I was suprised by Jane’s having put her camera and best earrings from a trip to Portugal in her luggage rather than in the carryall for the plane itself; no, I did not have a fit (or did I?) but I am 70 and I should behave and act my age — fuck that!

All is well, all is safe, and the trip was very, very good; if you have a child, it is always poignant to see them do so well — apartment, income, spiffy new car, goals, ambitions, desires as you know you are in maximum fade. Children cannot abide thinking about their parents having great sex — and they cannot abide thinking about the increasing mortailty of a parent as he ages (but they must). Love and death, the great carousel of life. Stretch up and out on the stirrup as the horse moves up and down gracefully and go for the brass ring!