GREATEST CITY INNA WORLD!!!

 Well I suppose there are worse things than living under the wise leadership of Gutsy Gretch.  

As a child I had occasion to visit the wolverine state.  My youngest aunt lived in Grand Rapids.  It was a long road trip but those tiny wooden shoes we bought in Holland kept the peace in the backseat.  One year the Michiganders moved into a new development and it was the oddest thing I ever saw in my life.  The houses were tiny by bungalow standards, and far apart, and the streets were curvy, and the only trees to speak of were tiny saplings not much taller than I was.  Who lives like that?

Many years later when I went down to Champaign I was amazed that all the houses along a block were different, and many of them were built of wood instead of obviously superior brick.  Also if you didn't count the dorm towers there was nothing taller than three or four stories, what a hick town.

But after a few years of hanging around with my beer drinking hippie friends I never wanted to go back to Chicago again.  People were too cold and rude, all that hurly burly, and that awful racism of Gage Park, who needed it?  Not me.

Later down the road I did a couple years in southern Illinois, and there was definitely no hurly burly down there.  Maybe a little too sleepy for me and I was glad to get back to the moderate hurly burly of Champaign.  But in the middle of the eighties the hurly burly had died down so much that I could not get a job and I was off to Austin.

Not only did it have all those hills and all that music and all that Mexican and bbq food, after Champaign it was like a big city, half a million people then.  But going back to Chicago to visit the folks I noticed that it was not that big compared to Chicago.  Not that that mattered because I was never going back there.  

Except when hard times hit Texas and I was broke and without prospects.  I really didn't want to go back to Chicago, I wanted to see the world.  All those years in Champaign I had been thinking that life was pretty much the same no matter where you were, but Austin had opened my mind to how different things were in different places. 

But like I said, I had no money.  I had to depend on the folks and it seemed awfully rude to ask them for dough to say, move to Seattle when that big old attic was just sitting there.

All those years that I had been away I had been reading Chicago newspapers and I thought it was a land of unbridled mayhem, and my thought when I moved back was would I ever get out of there alive?

Last night I was sitting on the balcony of an Italian restaurant eating artisan sausages and sauteed peppers while my sister had some kind of risotto.  Below us the hurly burly of State Street burlied along.  The nighttime lights of the building twinkled and way down on the other side of the river was the marquee of the Chicago Theater.

I will not ever get out of here alive.

I rode a bike everywhere in Champaign, often back from the bar which, well, I am lucky to have gotten out of Champaign alive.  Austin though was too damn hilly to be riding a bike, and in Chicago the ride would not be the peaceful glide like in Champaign.

State Street is about a half mile from the Chicago part of that Marquette trail.  I've walked it as far as maybe 31street.  I don't think I will ever go much further, even if there are tiny wooden shoes at the end.