Chicago, IL - Thursday, June 6, 2013
“Chicago is like a cleaner New York City.”
“Chicago is the best big city in the U.S.”
“You HAVE to go to Chicago.”
While we’ve heard many things from friends, neighbors, and colleagues, neither of us have ever been to the Windy City. After our peaceful time in Iowa we are a blank slate ready to receive it.
One thing that isn’t blank, and that’s the sky. It’s all cloudy and there’s rain. Not a lot, just a little.
A warning.
Don’t get comfortable.
So we don’t, we’re not, as we ease our car into the all day parking space we rented the night before. That was kind of an ordeal because after paying $14 online I went down to the front desk to print the voucher only to discover it printed as a solid block of ink, like a barcode with one bar that takes up the whole rectangle. I fiddled with it and eventually got a text version to print, on which I wrote a scrawling note explaining what happened. Now I put it on the dashboard and hope.
We walk in the drizzle for a few blocks before I realize we’re heading the wrong direction. We turn around. We’re looking for an area known as Printer’s Row. A friend who is local to Chicago told us there’s a good bookstore there, and that the district was once responsible for most of the printing done in America. Searching for history and collectible books, we make a few more wrong turns and finally emerge from the buildingbrush into what seems to be the right place.
Except it’s not. It’s the right district, but the only bookstore we can find is a little independent that won’t be open for another fifteen minutes. We turn to leave but the owner sees us and unlocks the door. “You can come in,” she says. As we browse we notice the place feels kind of lifeless. Sterile. The owner keeps eying us with something like caution (suspicion?) as she putters back and forth to the register. We finally ask about the area. She informs us, yes, this is Printer’s Row. Yes, it is a place of historical significance.
Long pause.
When we realize she isn’t going to elaborate we ask if there is a used section.
Her lips tighten. "We only sell new books."
“So, no signed or first editions?”
She walks over to a volume on civil rights in Chicago and holds it out. “We have some book signings. This one’s signed.”
How can Lorenzen’s in Little Rock, A Real Bookstore in Fairview, and Davis-Kidd in Memphis be closed with this place still marching on, customers firmly underfoot?
Back into the windy, overcast day we walk and I am walking fast, looking up other bookstores on my phone, realizing they’re too far away. Then I’m checking good places to have lunch and forming a mental map that will take us everywhere we want to visit. I walk, I think, I stare at my phone, but I forget to speak. To an outside observer, perhaps especially the one I am married to, I'm wandering in circles like I have a divining app.
The rain, cold, lack of food and lack of direction is wearing on Leighann but I fail to notice. When I finally look up long enough to see, it interrupts the perfect plans I was making and rather than be sympathetic I am annoyed. The flint strikes the iron, and in seconds we are having our first real fight of the trip. Later I will not remember what is said, just that I spoke with offended pride rather than with patience or love, and that it ends with us sitting in a marble hallway near a deli, staring at each other with nothing more to say. Resentment can be dangerously long-burning, but somehow we are able to step out of the moment, or more accurately back into it, and see that this is not a good way to experience Chicago. We form a peace plan of heading to Millennium Park, and when we hit the air outside it is full of sunshine.
We'll take it for grace.
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