Two hours in Chicago

We are silent when we leave Chicago. We altered the course of our lives by jumping off the interstate and exploring millennium park in downtown Chicago, filled with people and dancers and art and architecture. For two hours, we felt part of something so big and brilliant and stunning and challenging. I’ve never been to Chicago before.

At last, I fill the silence with Mavis Staples. Only a voice that big would fill the silence in the car. Answer the breathless awe we let linger.

We drive and drive and drive and end up in a cheap motel in Marengo, a town we don’t recognize. Dropping off our suitcases we head to the bar for a drink, and that’s when we start talking.

We have to live in a big city. There are too many ideas to explore and too many people to meet and things to know and worlds to be part of.

We head back to the hotel with a slight buzz and, in the still and quiet parking lot, listen to the symphony of crickets howling under the full moon. The lot is full of u-hauls, people leaving someplace for someplace else.

Going home

We’re going home now.

We’ve eaten the meal, we raved over the flavors, took one last bite even though we were already full and leaned back in our chairs, satisfied. We are lethargic with satisfaction, and easing ourselves onto the highway into a kind of dream like state, where the scenery shifts like moods, not geographies.

At the border, there is a long wait. We fidget, pull out books, snacks, songs-but-not-albums, ready to tell them we’re only staying for a night, a deep night in some undetermined location, a cheap hotel which is not a stop, but a dream (not even, perhaps a reverie only). We learned the lesson from the last border crossing. Answer: vacation, not “working”-vacation. No room for accuracy and hyphenated answers. Keep it straight.

Home still seems very far away. There is no urgency in this return other than a need to see my family. My grandpa is in the hospital and those half-answers over the phone keep me far removed from understanding his condition. I think about playing guitar to him while he lies in his hospital bed.

It is a beautiful journey. Peaceful. We’re bringing home a car full of treasures after all—stories enough to last the winter, I’ll think.

Running in Toronto

I am running. Running an aimless path. Running into words that overcome me on my morning ritual. I am conscious of the scrutinizing gaze of Osho who tells me my head should be empty of words when I run, according to the Buddhist meditation book I’m currently a student of. Yes, empty of words when I run…on.

But I assure him (him? Her? My studies of meditation obviously incomplete at this point) that the words are heart words, not head. Would he believe me? Do I believe myself?

On Fulton, the city’s water pipes need repair, fixing, surgical attention. So temporary veins of the city’s lifeblood lie exposed on the sidewalk. At intersections of pipe, the water escapes, frantically spurting and coughing up blood that sprays my leg as my sneakers disturb its puddles.

What caused this fatal rupture in your heart, I ask the underground network of steel and rubber that winds beneath a thin skin of grass and pavement. (Not grass, I correct myself as I run. Lawn.) Lawn and pavement.

Perhaps the roots of one of these grand trees is trying to assert its territory. It could have just been trying to network with the veins, commune, meld, mold, love them without realizing its own brute strength. Haven’t we all heard that one before? And yet we remain confused on the boundaries between tenderness and violence.

Whatever it’s intentions, I honor the trees as I run, my steps beating out a prayer against the sidewalk as my path meanders to catch every bit of their sacred shade.

Give me oxygen, I pray, I pant, breathing heavily, rhythmically. Give me oxygen, and I’ll give you…

What? Everything I have to give seems so small in comparison.

“That’s your own issue,” says the tree. Give me a song.