Chicago

When I was a high school freshman, an English teacher talked me into entering a poetry reading contest sponsored by the state forensics league.  That teacher provided me Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” to prepare and present.  At the conclusion of my reading at the first round of the state series, and gifting me with a poor but passing grade, the judge who observed my performance said, “That poem should be recited by a man, not a mere boy.”

That tells you something about me, but even more about the city of Chicago.  It IS “Stormy, huskey, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders,” And it DOES demand a more masculine voice than I was capable of then, and perhaps even now.

Chicago is by far my favorite Midwest metropolis, and perhaps the choicest city in the entire USA.  There is much to recommend it…..for example, its music, art,  neighborhoods, restaurants, bars and pro sports teams which can both steal and break your heart…..but it’s the lakeshore which grabs me most.  No city has made its waterfront more available to greater masses of people than Chicago, stringing for 20 miles along its lakefront, from its southern border to its northern, a variety of parks, paths, sports fields, fountains, beaches, harbors, museums and performance venues.  Adjacent Lake Michigan is a sweet water sea, on the scale of an ocean, which provides fresh breezes in summer and frigid blasts in winter.

Brian Doyle — who actually lived in a gorgeous area of the USA’s Pacific Northwest — wrote a novel, “Chicago,” which is like a love letter to the city.  Doyle employed magnificent meandering run-on sentences which never lose the reader, and with paragraphs which can start you laughing when they begin and have you crying when they end, much like a day in the life of a resident of Chicago. Here is one of Doyle’s  cadent, heart-gripping passages about my favorite city:

”A city of burning energies on the shore of a huge northern sea.  An American city, with all the violence and humor and grace and greed of this particular powerful adolescent country.  Perhaps the American city — no other city in the nation is as big and central and grown up from the very soil.  Chicago was never ruled by Spain or England or France or Russia or Texas, it shares no ocean with other countries, it is no mere regional captain, like Cincinnati or Nashville; it is itself, all brawn and greed and song, brilliant and venal, almost a small nation, sprawling and vulgar and foul and beautiful, cold and cruel and wonderful.  Its music is the blues, of course.  Sad and uplifting at once, elevating and haunting at the same time.  You sing so that you do not weep.  You have no choice but to sing.  So you raise up your voice and sing of love and woe, and soon another voice joins in, and you sing together…..”

JER