Chicago

Chicago was where I was born and raised. I lived there until I was 25 years old. Then, after great effort and several setbacks, I moved to New York City where I restarted my life from the ground up.

But Chicago had a tremendous impact upon me. It was the location of all the intense family events that occurred in those years, as well as the setting for many other milestones and influences that one normally has when growing up. It was where I experienced glorious days and where, for a long time period, I was also deeply unhappy.

I loved the city itself. The marvelous architecture and the fantastic waterfront were the sparkling jewels that beckoned to me constantly. I went to school, worked and played in its great spaces, and I studied downtown structures with attention to detail. I spent hours bicycle riding along the lakefront as a youth with my best friend, and later I rode my bike alone at different times of day and night even when I also had a car to drive. I knew the city's buildings, food and people. But in the end, it was not nearly enough.

For several reasons, I had to leave Chicago or my life would never have taken its correct trajectory and I would have been profoundly dissatisfied as more time passed. I sensed this before I could put it into words. My future was elsewhere, no matter how much I later learned I would always be tied in certain special ways to the city and to my family who lived on its urban blocks or eventually in its suburbs. I moved to New York, a city to which I was attracted beyond words, almost in desperation as well as destiny.

I never want to live in Chicago again. I never want to be under the care of any family member. I have many difficult memories from my life in Chicago that will never leave me and from which I must always have great physical distance. There were awful times involving my father, older brother, sister and others. I never want to revisit the emotions even if I sometimes want to revisit the neighborhoods and buildings that were a deep part of my history.

But Chicago is also a major part of my foundation. It is a place of memories including the most special times spent with my mother who was the person I missed the most when I was away. It is now a place that I travel to every few years, although my mind's eye sometimes revisits it in strong dreams. Chicago is a city to which I have returned sometimes reluctantly but unavoidably. Yet whenever I am there, it is one of my most intense experiences as I recall so much that happened nowhere else.

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The Memory

Time and time again I felt those sidewalks
the streets of the old neighborhood
I was just a small kid still in grade school
much too young to have understood

why does my soul’s eye return to that place
far from the now and the today?
here through dreams I am pulled deep down inside
to childhood, but I’ve moved away…

I smile in blue sky summer afternoons
brown city blocks, green trees and grass
or cold nights, from my window to the world
warm smells of suppers unsurpassed

that vision, that life finished years ago
and thousands of miles disconnect
against my will I see long ago light
blurred mirror stubbornly reflects…

I’m not an adult on my bicycle
I’m riding where it all began
I carry my bag and pass the playground
but my body’s that of a man

strange, out of sync, warped and mysterious
this journey to nonexistence
imagined breaths and ephemeral sounds
trying to speak with persistence…

I stand in front of the sunlit schoolyard
but it isn’t there anymore
my eyes cry hard in unexplained anguish
my past and present are at war.

Copyright © 2002 Marc P. Anderson