north-side, south-side

I had to see this tiny town of Bay View,  Closed up for the winter?  I had visions of Jack Nicholson chasing his goofy kid up and down the snow encrusted empty streets, maybe waving around that axe he broke down Shelly Duval's door with. 

I went to google maps, maybe they would have had their google car taking street views in the winter.  But unfortunately it was summer.  The houses were small and a bit shabby, which I guess makes sense if they are just summer homes.  I wonder why people would want to spend their summers there.  The opposite of snowbirds (beachbirds?) I guess.  The south can get sweltering during its long summers and a cool lake breeze would hit the spot.  Besides that breeze though what is there to do.  Well I'm guessing they are outdoorsmen who like that northwoods lite feel and want to fish and hunt and cross country ski and maybe rev up their snow machines (thank you Sarah Palin for the correct nomenclature) and blast across some empty field.

There is not exactly nothing to do, there is a small shopping center, a McDonalds, a place called Don's Bar.  It doesn't seem likely that you would run a business in a place that shuts down in the winter, but maybe things have changed, or maybe this Methodist Manor is like a small community within the wide-open sin-drenched city of Bay View.

There is a place like that not far from Chicago.  We Elsdoners did a day trip there one day.  All those tiny houses and the word going around that you couldn't just buy a house there even if you wanted to.  I couldn't see why anybody would want to live there, but maybe they wanted to Methodist it up among their own kind.  They didn't want people to look at them funny when they said something like, That Ezekiel he sure can write. 

I guess I know a little bit what that is like.  As the lone Cub fan in Gage Park I was thrilled to go to Wrigley and see that blue-hatted horde, all Cub fans, just like me, among my own people.  It's like that in watercolor class now where I can speak of how well burnt sienna and ultramarine work together and not get a funny look, or improv where I can slip into a character and not have people think I'm nuts.

But I don't think I'd like to be around people like me all the time.  What's the point of talking to someone who thinks the same things I do?  That's one of the things I like about the city, all different kinds of people.

When I was writing about going up to Wrigley Field, I remember one of the most exotic (besides riding on the el, which in my memory was so tall that cars looked like toys, people looked like ants, was being on the North Side, that strange part of the city that had the same north-south streets, but instead of numbers their east-west streets had names.  Exotic names like  Montrose and Belmont, whatever could they mean?  Perhaps the next topic for the Institute could be how the other side of the city seemed to us when we were kids.