Windy City Wishing

The hunger was something she had always known, ever since her earliest real memory, and she figured that was round about the spring she turned four. It was a hunger for beauty and truth and knowledge, and it gnawed at her insides the way, from the iron bridge at Michigan and Wacker, she had seen the rabbit-sized rats down by the Chicago River tear and claw at flotsam that daily washed up on the concrete banks. The tourists who had already boarded the Wendella boats and who bobbed serenely beneath the pale thousand-eyed Wrigley Building as the craft filled to capacity, never noticed the rats because their eyes were trained straight ahead, towards the lake and the spectacular views of the City of Broad Shoulders that would be their reward once they reached the farthest point offshore that their $8 ticket price would take them (this was in the early '60s; those same tickets are $26 now). She often wondered if any of the multitudes who tromped behind her on the pedestrian walkway of that bridge had a cavernous crater inside of them, a gaping maw that could easily fit the Tribune Tower and the Union Carbide Building with room left over for at least part of Navy Pier, just dying to be filled up with beauty and truth and knowledge the way the boats filled every two hours with camera-festooned out-of-towners clad in windbreakers and baggy madras shorts. Positive that there were a few like her among them, she searched faces as Mama and Daddy pulled her along the streets where the cold wind caused tumbling trash to flirt with her ankles and gritty particles to assail her watchful eyes. Twice she thought she recognized one who might be simpatico, a fellow hankerer for truth and beauty and knowledge, but their passage on the sidewalk to her right was swift, and to this day she cannot be sure.

Comments

[June]

Niiiiice piece...