Big Shoulders

Big Shoulders

The drive from St. Louis to Chicago is a highway named 55. It’s the superhighway that bypasses every little Illinois town that made it’s living from drivers taking the cue from King Cole to get their kicks on 66. The footprint of a once prosperous beltway is still visible in the tombstone billboards and rusty neon barely visible to a generation more familiar with broadband than the Sunday drive. It was still alive when my 8 year old eyes met the landscape for the first time. Well, maybe alive isn’t the right word – maybe just unaware that it had died. The green vinyl seats that were sticking to my legs exposed by a pair of late-70’s terrycloth shorts matched the paint job of the Plymouth Satellite that was taking our family on our first family vacation. We were heading to Chicago.

I grew up a pastor’s kid in what William Burroughs described as the “life-stealing” walls of suburban St. Louis. My world was school and my room. Really – my room was a vast sanctuary of ideas – red shag carpeting aside. That’s where I met Captain Nemo, The Sugar Creek Gang, and the scurvy pirates who fought over Treasure Island. Yes…I was a big, ole’ nerd. There wasn’t much else to do.

This was the time when good women weren’t liberated and men came home whenever they pleased – expecting dinner on the table. My father wasn’t a chauvinist in the sense that he was who he was raised to be. He brought home the bacon – and then retreated to his basement room where he prepared for his sermons – which he delivered with a fire that made him a sought over guest preacher all over the city. Sneaking downstairs and venturing past the paneled walls of his study was like getting an audience in the Vatican. Being close to the Father I never saw was pure joy – one I would learn that I should have savored.

I think that’s why this trip to Chicago was so great. Dad was excited. This was more than the couple of days mom could convince him to take us to Six Flags or Lake of the Ozarks – a hillbilly themed resort town in southern Missouri. We were going to a real place. We might as well have been going to Paris. Chicago represented to me the peak of big city action and life. I couldn’t even picture it in my mind – but I knew on some level that I would never be the same.

1979 Chicago wasn’t exactly a shining metropolis approaching from the infamous housing projects and urban decay that was the South Side. Having immigrant grandparents that lived in a self-described “bake oven” brick row house in the Tower Grove section of St. Louis made me no stranger to rough neighborhoods – but Chicago seemed to me an industrial war zone. Graffiti, high-rise projects, and the tattered and tattooed “L” train made me a little nervous about our family’s big-city adventure. Soon we were pulling onto the grandeur that is Lake Shore Drive and I saw the city by the lake. It seemed the whole city screamed in blinding sunlight from glass towers and white stone buildings. We were staying at the famous Congress Hotel – directly across from the Buckingham Fountain. We went up to the room – I had never been that high up before. I felt like I was looking out at Lake Michigan from space. I was a president – a king – in the city of Big Shoulders.

My Father was a good man – but family exhausted him. He had paid his dues in a hot car for seven hours with his wife, myself, and my four year old sister – whom I was skilled like a renaissance master at torturing. He opted for a walk – alone.

I stayed by the window the whole time drinking in the lake, the wind, and the noise of sheer power. People were going places in this town. Granted, I had no idea where they were going since the hotel room was my only tourist attraction. Soon the sky grew dark and the fountain transformed into a burst of color. My mother sat on the edge of the bed waiting for my Father’s return. She did that a lot – wait for my Father that is. She was ready to go have dinner the second he arrived. The look on her face wasn’t really impatience but veiled terror. Something that is true about my mother is that she is terrified that she will be left somewhere. Women like her didn’t drive or have maps. She knew she was in Chicago – but had no idea where that was. If he never came home – she was sitting on her death bed. I didn’t mind. The window allowed me to travel to every place I could see – all the way across the lake, far away to something new. Maybe I was aging in that window. Maybe I was being born.

Eventually my father returned and we had dinner and went to bed; the noise of a 24 hour city cradling me to sleep. The next day was probably the most fun we have ever had as a family. We walked through submarines and giant hearts, saw great works of art – both in museums and right out on the street. Giant bronze statues were around the city – seemingly for the pleasure of kids and pigeons. We rode the train, went to the top of the Sears tower and went to the planetarium. It was amazing. My Dad laughed a lot that trip. He didn’t laugh often – but it was a good laugh.

Less than a year later I sat with my grandfather at my Father’s funeral. When you are the first-born son people say stupid, well meaning stuff like “You’re the man of the house now – better take care of your mother”. My father died of cancer. I hate cancer.

I guess I was the man of the house. We sold our house, moved in with my grandparents and I started a new life – a lifetime away from the endless shore of Lake Michigan and the city that seemed like life to me. I now lived in a world I had only visited on holidays. This is who I am going to be for the next decade of my life.

It’s amazing how one man’s life means so much to another life’s whole identity. I was no longer a “preachers kid” who sat in awe as his father captured his audience. I was a kid who shared a bedroom with his mom and his sister. I learned to be a man from my grandfather. He took me fishing, taught me how to do “house” stuff, and taught me to drive. I never wanted another dad.

When I was 18 I went back to Chicago. It wasn’t a nostalgic trip – I was going to college. I didn’t put my last vacation with my father together with my new home – until I took a planned freshman walk with my new dorm floor. We walked to the Buckingham Fountain. There I was – with a group of strangers staring at the fountain that was the last symbol of a life that was. This time the Congress Hotel was the object of my vantage point. I could see the window that I stared out of 10 years ago. Chicago was with me again as I started a new life. Here I would wrestle with God, myself, and cry for the first time about my father’s death. Carl Sandburg was right – this city had big shoulders.

I needed a good pair.