f r e s h s t a r t
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Here. A place.
I’ve taken to wandering around downtown during my lunch break, because well, I get a little stir-crazy being surrounded by grey cabinets, cream walls, off-white desks, etc. all day. I need the visual relief that the streets provide, as well as the physical wake-up of walking briskly in the cold. Earlier this week I checked out the demolition of the Sun-Times building (up close, and got some Sun-Times dust in my eye), and today I watched iceskaters at Millennium Park. Since I only have an hour for lunch the idea isn’t so much dwelling at the destination as it is to keep moving, and to put together mental pictures of the city that are currently in pieces in my mind. Although I first came to the Chicagoland area in the fall of 1998, and have been here more than I’ve been away, I feel like I’ve only just started to get a sense for the character of different neighborhoods, and an idea of where things are. I feel like the four years I spent in Evanston don’t really count, although experiences I had then do still anchor my sense of where some things in Chicago are (Grant Park—Blues Fest, Greektown—that time Kat took us to her favorite restaurant, Chinatown—where my little sisters did not have much fun, Daley Plaza—Critical Mass with Greg). Then I was gone for year, and now I’m back, and have been back for a year and a half. Older? Yes. Wiser? That’s questionable. Able to give coherent directions using words like north and south, rather than just landmarks? Yup. Finally have some idea how to benefit from the whole street numbering thing? Yes. Small victories, but they help give me a sense of place, and they tighten my adopted home’s grip on my heart.
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