Tuesday night I was in Chicago with Marshall to attend the Lyric Opera. We saw a new opera called “Doctor Atomic” and it was quite a yawner. . . a $55 nap, all told. . . but at least I had a great meal at the Berghoff Restaurant and it just felt good to be back in downtown Chicago again, even though I somehow brought two right gloves along. (It was so windy and cold that I had to make do, so I managed to shove one of those gloves on to my left hand – not the easiest thing to do, but I found a way. I hope nobody looked very closely.)
On my way to the opera house, I passed something which brought back such fond memories of when I first moved to Chicago in 1985 to be part of the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists. I would typically commute from my apt. to the opera house by taking the LaSalle Street bus, and I would disembark at the corner of LaSalle and Washington, which was about four blocks from the Lyric. I can still remember getting off at that intersection my first morning there and being rather amazed to see right in front of me something called Bank Leumi – an Israeli bank whose lovely facilitiy was graced with a clock that had Hebrew characters on it.
Obviously to be standing amidst all of these huge skyscrapers should have been enough to make me realize that I was a long way from Decorah or Atlantic or Orfordville or any of the other small hamlets that I had called home. But far more than the John Hancock Building or Water Tower Place or the Wrigley Building or the Art Institute of Chicago, it was this rather unassuming-looking bank that made me feel like I was in the big city and in the middle of something very exciting. I guess it was a powerful symbol of the melting pot that is Chicago and the fact that living there meant living near and around people of dramatically different backgrounds, ethnic and otherwise.
I suppose in the neighborhood where I lived, one of the first and most forceful indicators of different this was from Orfordville is the fact that right around the corner from my apartment, about a block and a half from my door, right on Belmont, there was a woman who read palms and tarot cards. Until I walked past her window, I thought that this was something that only happened in the movies- – – but there I was standing in front of such an establishment, realizing that there are people who actually shell out good money for such nonsense, and some of those people lived in and around my neighborhood in Chicago. A tiny part of me was overwhelmed by it all, feeling like I was in way over my head and wondering what in the world a shy Iowa guy was doing in complicated big city like this.
But in fact Chicago really felt amazingly like home almost from the very first day. I tell people that before that, when I was visiting Chicago as a tourist or even when i was there in ’84 to audition for the Lyric or later when it was time to find an apartment, the city scared me to death and I walked around even in broad daylight with my hand on my wallet every second (lest someone leap out from an alley and rob me.) But when I actually lived there, it’s as though I threw a switch inside myself which said “this is my home.” It wasn’t that I had grown accustomed to it- this is already on my very first day living there, when I still didn’t know what the heck I was doing or where anything was. But somehow it wasn’t so scary because now I lived there; I was no longer a visitor. And the little touches of the exotic like the Bank Leumi was enough to make me so thankful that I was there – and I didn’t want to miss a thing!
When I go back to Chicago in 2007, I’m so glad that Bank Leumi is still there. . . and so is that old lady palm reader in my neighborhood. Lots of other things are now gone – it’s incredible how much is transitory in a big city like that – but I’m glad these two touchstones from 23 years ago are still there to remind me of those heady days when I was so wet behind the ears and so excited to call Chicago my new hometown.