I, Chicagoan
I am always and forever a Chicagoan. The city is my foundation and it remains in me to my very core. The attachment is binding and thicker than blood.
Of course I am also a New Yorker. Another page in this journal will explain the meaning of that statement.
But Chicago is deep inside of me in a unique way. It resurfaces when it pleases. It is there for me when I time travel and call upon it. It comes to me with special intensity in nighttime dreams. It visits me in daytime recollections of important people in my life who are not known to my East Coast friends and co-workers.
Chicago contains the most loving memories of sharing the city with my mother as a child when she would take me downtown on the "L" and again as an adult when I would take her downtown for pleasure drives in a car. No other place possesses those particular emotions combined with such a span of time.
Other places were not the scenes of major family events. Chicago alone knew me during my first steps as a baby, a kid, a teenager and at my entrance into adulthood. It saw me attend elementary school and high school as well as two of its higher education institutions, and it was where I obtained the first of several jobs, where I lived in a dormitory and where I moved into my first apartment. It was where my essays and especially my photographs were first published. The city's neighborhoods were the locations of youthful hurts, triumphs, experiments and lessons that were the first, crucial episodes in the tale of my life as well as the lives of those closest to me.
All of it happened against a soaring, magnificent skyline in one direction and waves that glistened with dancing light in the other direction, separated by expansive, splendid parks which I experienced countless times at dawn in the summer, on fall and spring days and during snowy winter evenings. I readily and constantly immersed myself in the extraordinary physical assemblage of the City of Chicago which gave so much to me in return. I was born in the city, I learned on its rich soil and I grew in its shining light.
I know this strong, warm city and its special ways as a native: riding its elevated trains and subways, laying on a towel at North Avenue Beach, watching the July 4th fireworks in Grant Park, window shopping on Michigan Avenue but buying in the suburban malls, knowing the difference between Oak Park and Forest Park, driving down Stony Island Avenue or Western Avenue or Cicero Avenue, visiting Evanston one day and Hyde Park the next, walking the galleries of the Art Institute or through the canyons of LaSalle Street, hanging out on Clark Street and Belmont, traveling the Eisenhower vs. the Kennedy vs. the Dan Ryan Expressways and all of them vs. Lake Shore Drive and Sheridan Road, riding a bike east down Lake Street or Jackson Boulevard and turning north to eventually arrive in Lincoln Park, and recognizing which commuter trains go exactly where. I know the food of the city and how it is cooked, its language and sayings, its values and mentality, its seasons and its structures, its problems and its sheer beauty.
All of this and more is part of me and of Chicagoans, only. Visitors don't have the slightest idea. This page won't really have explained these things or come close to offering a full and thorough view of any of what I am talking about. It only provides a glimpse of this remarkable place and tells just a tiny bit of My Chicago Story.