Some friends rode in from the ‘burbs on Friday to meet up. After our dinner of fancy grilled cheese and tomato soup, we found ourselves in a light drizzle by the brick facades of the Moody Bible Institute buildings. If not for Moody, I wouldn’t have been born, I told my friends.
That’s a funny thought.
Our lives are tall towers of tiny events and choices, each relying upon another in sometimes mysterious ways. It’s kind of like that old poem about how for want of a nail a kingdom was lost. Having grown up on a miniature pony farm, my mom actually has a humorous story from her childhood about a moral crisis and a real horseshoe nail. Who knows, perhaps if she didn’t, she never would have traveled a thousand miles to study comparative literature at a Christian college in the Midwest. And then she never would have met a sandy-haired young man with thick glasses.
Saturday morning, I sloshed through flooded sidewalks to visit the Northwest-side home where my family lived in the late 1980s. It’s where I learned to read, where I first went online (anyone recall Prodigy?) to make pen pals with other little kids, where my parents separated. I previously had tried to look up the building on Google Street View, but there was a gap in the imagery at that exact address. I kept clicking forward and back, forward and back, but the picture just wasn’t there. The Google van must have driven through again in the last few months because the house is on Street View now. You can’t stop progress, I guess.
I found the church around the corner where I was dedicated in the Christian faith. Remember what I just said about progress? Yeah, that.
When I noticed it was food pantry day at the church, I tucked away my camera. The lens had fogged up from the moisture in the air, anyway. Ten minutes later, I decided to head north to the Bohemian National Cemetery, but there was no sign where the bus stop was supposed to be. Half the street was under construction, fenced in by orange plastic and drowning in muddy puddles. I asked a thin man in Islamic dress if I was at the right place.
“There was a bus stop here, but it looks like it’s gone now. Maybe try a block up?”
The street was still a mess in the next block. I waited twenty minutes past the scheduled arrival time before giving up. Maybe the bus was rerouted because of construction? Delayed due to rain? Regardless, it was too late.
I departed the city on Sunday, along with my friend who had been working through the weekend. I left a few things behind in Chicago. I left an umbrella in a café, a book in a falafel joint, a wadded-up handful of expired train tickets in a recycling can.
The late-afternoon sun was bright back in Madison. I picked my way along another torn-up street to the terrace at the Memorial Union, packed with laughing people in tank tops and sandals sitting on the steps, and on the benches by the piers, and on the hundreds and hundreds of colorful chairs with their iconic sunburst backs. The breeze sailed in from the lake, taking with it the music from the PA system for just a moment. I ordered some nachos, gooey with cheese and dotted with pickled jalapenos, and then walked back to the main road where I waited again. The bus came right on time to carry me home.