by Brian Doyle
I found, after many hours in dark corners nursing my whiskey and swimming inside the music, that I didn’t care much about the singer or the song—it was all the same to me whether the singer was male or female, mumbling or shouting, whispering or roaring, charismatic or wooden, and it was all the same to me what song was being played, old standard or gleaming new original, updated classic or obscure nugget unearthed from a scratchy record or handed down from guru to apprentice. It was the music that I liked, and sometimes loved; the way you always knew the form, but were always surprised and sometimes delighted by the delivery and the passion and the skill, and even, occasionally, moved by something—the sharp sneer of a guitar commenting acidly on the tumult of the other instruments, the bar extended twice or three times by a band delighted by its flow that night, the rare haunting saxophone (saxes are uncommon in blues trios and quartets), the way a singer sometimes would stop singing words altogether and just hum or growl what was in his or her heart, beneath the words.
I know it sounds fanciful to speculate how a city’s music might reflect something deep and true and real about the place; and also Chicago, of course, is filled with all sorts of other music, much of it certainly characteristic of some of the city—I mean, there’s a lot of polka music in Chicago, understandably so, with such large Polish and Czech and Slovenian and Latvian and Slovakian populations. But with total respect for jazz and polka and rap and opera and rock and pop, I still think Chicago sounds like the electric blues, and the electric blues sounds like Chicago, and even if you hear a good blues band in Dublin or Dunedin, as I have, you are immediately in Chicago, in a dark corner, nursing a whiskey, hoping that the roof will not fall in, and being amazed by the mastery of the bass player, who is somehow playing chugging lines that sound eerily exactly like a night train through rustling fields of corn.
You might not also hear, in that electric blues, wherever it is being played, poorly or well, the faintest hints and intimations of traffic along the lake, and jackhammers and piledrivers pummeling the Loop early in the afternoon, and the thrum and rattle of elevated trains, and the bellow of tankers and barges far out on the lake, and the grim clang of descending winter, and the jungled sound of millions of people in one particular place in America arguing and laughing and singing; but you might. I do.
23.
SOMETIME THAT MONTH I remember taking my worn shiny basketball and crossing Lake Shore Drive at rush hour, to do my hour of dribbling up and down the lakefront, when I realized with a start that I had not driven a car in months—a whole year, come to think of it. This was an amazing thing. It wasn’t that I was a gearhead, particularly—unlike many of my friends and peers I had no interest in tinkering with cars, and racing them along the beach highway where I grew up, and puttering around in their innards, and proudly changing the oil myself with great ceremony and leakage, and knowledgeably discussing fan belts and gear ratios—but I had driven a good deal in college, back and forth across much of America to campus and back, and to realize that I had not been behind the wheel, whirring down highways and byways, stuck in traffic cursing gently and praying for something glorious on the radio, was … startling.
Thereafter for a while I found myself yearning to drive a car again, and I finally got the chance when a friend at work lent me her battered Pinto for a weekend; she was going away on a romantic adventure with her boyfriend, to a remote cabin in Wisconsin, to see once and for all if they could make it as a couple, which it turned out they couldn’t, for all sorts of reasons, she told me later, some of them having to do with someone preferring to hunt deer rather than make love to his girlfriend, and someone preferring to drink copious shots of whiskey rather than discuss serious matters with his girlfriend, and someone blubbering about a hangover instead of snuggling with his girlfriend, who by the time they got back to Chicago was most definitely his former girlfriend.
All this was not my concern, however; I spent the weekend with the Pinto, which cured me thoroughly of my yearning for cars. The Pinto was a tinny rattling moist smoking roaring garish lurid rusting foul-tempered wreck which started only when it wanted to and lurched from one gear to another with an audible moan. It yawed terribly to the left, so much so that my arms were sore after driving it for ten minutes; the left rear tire was congenitally flat, and had to be refilled every hour or so; the license plates hung by a whim, and rattled ferociously in the wind when the car, coughing desperately, achieved twenty miles an hour; the right taillight was long gone, the hole covered by years of layers of duct tape; something had clearly expired in the trunk, possibly a horse, from the persistence and volume of the stench; there were something like a thousand sandwich wrappers and paper coffee cups and cigarette butts and tampon boxes strewn around the interior; there was a crack the size of Venezuela across the front windshield, and a hole as big as my fist in a side window; the only music was a cassette of a woman being stung by a thousand hornets, and shrieking about the experience; the gear shift was missing its knob altogether, so that when you shifted gears you lost skin on the palm of your hand; and there was a huge bumper sticker reading HONK IF YOU ARE HORNY TOO! on the rear fender, which caused no end of cacophony and gestures from other drivers. Also it was, no kidding, painted in orange and white stripes, apparently in a tiger motif, perhaps by the boyfriend as some kind of unconscious scream of passive protest about their affair.
I drove it anyway, of course, wincing as I shifted gears, and returning lewd gestures here and there to other drivers. For the first hour or so the experience was not unpleasant—I drove north along the lake all the way to Zion, almost the Wisconsin border, and it was a gentle afternoon, cloudy but warm, with ducks and geese whizzing past, and vast armadas of cloudbanks over the lake, and pretty girls bicycling and running along the shore, their lithe loveliness not yet completely hidden by parkas and hats. But then the car started sputtering and cursing, and I had to buy gas, and refill the declining tire, which entailed rooting in the trunk for a valve cap (missing from the tire, of course), which entailed breathing in the toxic fumes from the dead horse, which caused my eyes to water terribly. By the time I got the car back to Chicago it was amazingly out of gas again, and the tire was, of course, flat. I put another twenty dollars in the tank, filled the tire, parked it in the church lot with a note on the dashboard pleading a spiritual emergency (as per instructions from my friend, who used this dodge to park in church and temple lots all over the west side), and walked home. I don’t think I was ever quite so happy to be on foot as I was that day. It was twilight and I saw an owl, too, near Clark Street, which made it, all in all, a good day.
* * *
By pure chance one day late in October I discovered where Miss Elminides went all day and what she did for work; she was a second-grade teacher at, unbelievably, Saint Demetrios Greek Orthodox School, where the festival had been held. I had spent the morning at Saint Matthias Catholic Church on Claremont and at the Catholic Worker House on Kenwood, working on my series of articles about spiritual practice, and at lunchtime I was strolling past the schoolyard at Saint Demetrios, looking for a gyro shop, when a fusillade of small bright children poured out of the school doors into the playground, followed by, to my astonishment, Miss Elminides, looking as calm and elegant as always.
For an instant I thought about not calling out to her, and respecting her privacy—she never had actually told me or anyone else what she did all day, and I suspect only Edward and maybe Mr Pawlowsky knew she was a teacher—but she saw me first, and smiled, and gestured for me to come through the gate. We shook hands gravely and she introduced me to the four or five children leaping around her eagerly like brilliant birds; clearly they worshipped her, and they regarded me with fascination, as someone who knew Miss Elminides well enough to be welcomed with a smile, and invited into The Presence!
She told me she had been a teacher there for nine years, and that her first day as a teacher was her thirtieth birthday, and that the very first poem she read aloud to her students wa
s a poet’s lovely poem about his thirtieth birthday:
The day that I turned thirty was a wintry
Day with summer and apples and hawks
In it and I realized that every day was an
Epic birthday if you think about it so I’m
Thirty today and ten and ninety and love
Finds me and there is a mink in the creek
And everything is happening all the time
Including backwards and we had best be
Attentive which I will try to be every hour
Henceforth and you too and let us burble
To each other about what we see, cousins
And sisters and brothers as we all are yes
I think I will always remember the way she essentially sang these lines, there in the jumbled schoolyard, with children bounding and leaping around her, two of them holding her hands and jealous of the others who wanted to touch her also; and the banks of vibrant green bushes and hedges behind her, against which her indescribably blue clothing also almost sang; and the way when the bell rang she said a word or two quietly and dozens of children instantly came to her as if summoned by a magician; and the way they walked before her, proud of their queen, and opened the door for her and her guest; for I was invited into the classroom also, to speak to the children for a moment about my work, Miss Elminides’ conviction being that all manners of things and people were potentially lessons, and a brief visit from a working journalist might perhaps spark a child or two in directions unexpected and remarkable.
I did talk for a few minutes about stories, and why they were nutritious and even holy, and how we took them for granted, which we ought not to, because good stories were absolutely crucial to a good life and a good family and a good city and a good country, not to mention a good classroom. I talked about how my job was really to be a storycatcher, to wander around inviting people to tell me stories that mattered, whether they were funny or sad or sweet or confusing. My job, I said, was to catch and share as many good stories as I could, because stories are what we are, what we are made of, and if we don’t share good stories, then we will drown in poor stories, thin and shallow ones, stories told by people who only want power or money, and there is so much more in life than power or money. The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life, I said, are the ones who are not very interested in power or money, but who are very interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially dogs and birds, and of course children, who are the coolest beings of all, and of course children in second grade are the coolest of the cool, especially if they have a teacher as cool as Miss Elminides, am I right?
In mid-sermon they had sat there staring politely at me (one boy gaping vacantly like a trout) but my last lines got them roaring, as I knew they would, and they shouted and danced between their desks for a moment until Miss Elminides gently said all right and back they flew into their tiny chairs, their feathers rustling and their faces glowing. Miss Elminides saw me out of the classroom and to the doors to the playground, and we shook hands gravely again, smiling, and she said one of her lesson plans in spring was to invite Edward into the classroom, to give her children a chance to meet an illuminated being. I said I thought that was a terrific idea and I would love to be there to watch what would surely be an amazing hour and she said she would consider it although it might be better to have the children encounter Edward wholly on their own, without the distraction of such an accomplished older man as myself. She said she would ponder this matter further, and meanwhile her most sincere thanks for sharing myself with the children, and what a fortuitous coincidence that I had happened by, and that indeed there was a wonderful gyro shop nearby, over on Washtenaw Avenue, I should ask for keftethes, which were tiny savory meatballs, the perfect thing for a light repast. The keftethes there were nearly the best in the city, topped only by those made by a grandmother on Green Street. Those meatballs made you a better person, that’s how good they were. Edward, of course, knew the shop, which had no name or address, but he would lead me there sometime before Christmas, if I asked.
* * *
I had written to the Wyoming girl, at her new address in Boston, to tell her of my decision, and she had written back thrilled, using many exclamation points!!, and I had also called her twice on the phone, once briefly from the booth at the gyro shop (with Leah smiling at me from the counter; somehow she knew I was calling a girl), and she said she hoped I would be able to get to Boston as soon as possible, and she was waiting anxiously, but that I should take my time, as she understood my attachments in Chicago, and would be loath to influence my timetable, given the depth of my friendships there, Edward in particular.
But I found that once the decision was made, I began to leave Chicago, piece by piece, somehow; and while I savored every hour of my last weeks, and felt a deeper appreciation of Mr Mahoney’s sinewy courage against the blowhard Cardinal Archbishop, and Leah’s alluring smile as she sliced roast lamb for gyros, and Donald B. Morris’s abiding love for the Bears in the morning on the bus, and Mr Pawlowsky’s calm wry wit, I could for the first time since my arrival see where I could not belong to this small unusual lively community; for community it was to me, and all these years later I think that community is the best word for all the riveting beings who remain somewhere inside me, and who prompted this account, and who come back to me sometimes, set in their places and stories in that riveting city, when I see a swirl of snow, or hear foghorns out on the water, or hear baseball games murmuring on the radio, or see a kid dribbling a basketball so shiny with wear that it seems to almost glow.
It was as if once I made the decision, then doors and windows opened to what was going to happen next; and it doesn’t finally matter to this account that what did happen next was that the girl from Wyoming and I broke up a year later, though I came to love Boston, and spent ten years there, before eventually moving on again, this time west toward the sunset, toward the mother of all oceans, toward another girl who did entrance and overwhelm and utterly confuse me, and who said yes when I asked her to marry me one bright day by the sea, and who gave birth to our children, and who to this day rivets and puzzles and delights and astounds me in more ways than I could articulate in a dozen books. Sometimes now I think we will move one more time, even further west, out into the islands scattered deep in the bluest of oceans; but even if that comes to pass, and I end my days like Robert Louis Stevenson, bathed by sunlight through thickets of palm trees, under the eyes of albatrosses and frigatebirds, I will carry my Chicago with me, and think of Mr Pawlowsky when I see constellations, and of Miss Elminides when I hear a mandolin, and of Edward when I encounter an illuminated being of any size and species; for there are many more of those than we know, and perhaps we brush past them all day long, and would be wise to look for them, and ask, here and there, for their quiet blessings.
24.
EDWARD’S OBSERVED BIRTHDAY, I discovered, was in November; this year, said Mr Pawlowsky, it would be November 19, the day that Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. Apparently not even Edward knew his actual birthday, let alone his true age, and over the years the tradition had grown up between Edward and Mr Pawlowsky that Edward’s birthday be celebrated generally in November. In their first years as roommates it had occasionally been celebrated on November 6 (Lincoln elected president for the first time), November 8 (re-elected president), but for the past few years it had been celebrated on November 19, as Edward was lately more interested in brief piercing speeches than in the electoral process—thus his absorption in the speech Lincoln made from the train as he was leaving his beloved Springfield, Illinois, to go to Washington to assume the presidency in February of 1861: “My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.… I now leave, not knowing
when, or whether ever, I may return.…”
I had no idea what to give Edward as a present. For a while I thought of wheedling a bone from the butcher at the grocery store, or getting him a new blanket, or a radio of his own, or even a cassette player, perhaps, but none of these seemed quite dignified enough for Edward. Finally I settled on a beautiful sturdy copy of the collected poems of Walt Whitman, on the theory that anyone who so enjoyed Lincoln’s writings would enjoy the sprawl and roar and tenderness of Whitman, the greatest of American poets, along with Emily Dickinson; but old Emily is a poet you have to pore over for years before you get the brilliance under the gnomic brevity and idiosyncratic capitalization; that poor woman never met a capital letter she didn’t like, and threw them all over the page willy nilly, as if ink did not cost a penny.
Rather than a formal party for his birthday, Edward had something like a slow celebration all day long, with some visitors wandering into the apartment to convey their regards, and others making much of him on his social rambles through the neighborhood. It was a Saturday, and on Saturdays Edward ranged widely, as a rule, on errands for Mr Pawlowsky and on mysterious agendas of his own. Twice that day I saw him enter apartment buildings far from our own—once up on the north side, as I was dribbling up Broadway to play ball, and once on the west side, as I was coming back late that afternoon from a baptism at Our Lady of Good Counsel. When I popped in before dusk to convey my own regards and present the Walt Whitman, Mr Pawlowsky showed me the hilarious pile of gifts Edward had accumulated during the day—betting slips from Mr McGinty, honey from Miss Elminides, various bones of various hues and origins (including one from a cheetah), empanadas, a lovely winter vest from the dapper businessmen, a poster detailing all the edible fish found in the lake, two new brushes, and a set of four small waterproof boots, for ferocious days; these were from the two young women from Arkansas who had lived in 4E, who had much admired Edward. Also there was a bright new blanket with ROYAL SCOTS NAVY stenciled on it, and “In My Defence God Me Defend” printed in smaller letters below, a gift from the Scottish tailor and the detective in 2B.