Coming Home

Everyone comes home again, but at the risk of sounding exceptionalist, my last trip home is pretty unique.

I took the train from a small Wisconsin town nearby the other small Wisconsin town where I live to Union Station in Chicago, where I grew up.  Strictly speaking, I didn't grow up in Chicago, but rather a western suburb.  There are a lot of us, those who claim the city as our own though it was never ours to begin with....forgive us our fascination with it.

It is this fascination that first begat my affection for Chicago.  On a clear day, I could see the mighty skyscrapers, jagged fingers thrusting up from the horizon, from the main drag in my hometown, or from the backseat on the way to my grandmother's house.  It drew and repulsed me at the same time; there was a den of vipers that we suburbanites dreaded; there we could get mugged or shot or worse.  There was a labyrinth of the fascinating and the frightening.  And yet at the same time, looking at the city was like looking at The Land of Oz.

My father and I drove down to the museums, zoos, and stadiums on a regularly basis during my childhood summers, and it never got old.  For a few short hours, I was counted among the city dwellers.  During my senior years of high school, a teacher of mine invited a number of us to her apartment in Lincoln Park, a hip neighborhood near the campus of DePaul University.  As my friends and I walked past this brownstone and that cafe on our way to Ms. Olsen's Bohemian flat, I vowed that I would one day live there.

Fast forward to now.  My trip into the city is a cocktail of nostalgia and familiarity.  As the train rolls through the city's northwest side, I see the CTA stop where froze my toes waiting for a train home, and the delapidated storefront that my wife and I ducked into one night, only to find what had to be the best Indian cuisine this side of Mumbai.  I see the Church steps where I proposed, and the hospital where I first met my son, who is my travel companion today.  I see an apartment like any other, like the one where my wife and I sat when we decided it was time to leave the city.

Chicago is, for me, the place of dreams imagined and dreams fulfilled.  I lived my childhood dream and took up residence in the city, and yet I still find myself longing for it.