Where I’m Thawing From

A couple blocks over from our place is a Brown Line station, close enough to make out the soft clatter of every approaching train, and across the street from us there is an elementary school, and when the weather starts to turn, when the kids come outside again for recess their hooting frenzies will mix with the train rumble in a way that sounds almost like people hitting curves on a rollercoaster. It sounds like vacation, like victory, and when you hear it you will wonder if maybe winter in Chicago has finally done its worst to you for the year.  

It's a despicable kind of cold, it’s true what they say, merciless and without any of that jingling Christmas glee, a crooked old judge slamming the gavel as the bailiff drags you off sobbing. I had a theory at first that the wind was more severe on streets that connected directly to the lake, but I don’t know if I believe that anymore. I don’t really care, I should say; that’s the thing, it’s the kind of cold that pummels theories right out of you. The wind is on every street, stupid! It will find you, ambush you, strip you naked and stampede over you like medieval cavalry. 

There have been times, on some tyrannical January night walking back from picking up Thai food, when I have held the steaming bundle against my chest like it was my family. It is a dim and narrow and steamy little place, Pho’s Thai Cuisine, with Mild, Mild Plus, and Medium as crucially different spice options to decipher and navigate at your own peril. But you’ve got an order you can rely on now and isn’t that something, a place to call The Thai Place. 

I moved to Chicago almost three years ago and still have so few opinions that feel earned; like they are a privilege of the city veterans. When people ask me what Chicago is like I tell them that I love it here but that I’m still figuring it out. I tell them about walking to the lake past a baseball stadium and the particular sound of a flyball stalling out, the swell of euphoria in the crowd quickly punctured by the warning track, everyone falling silent again. That a city of mostly above ground trains gives a place a different mood than a city of underground trains like New York, irritated and impatient and everyone’s faces lit up miserable by artificial light. 

A place by us serves their Bloody Marys with a plastic-sealed string cheese bobbing in the glass, and peeling them open each time feels like a kind of communion. There are beefy old guys who get there around 11:00 a.m. on December Sundays, peninsulas of matted hair and cheeks flash-frozen into purple blotches, watching the Bears in a sedated heap with their whole selves splayed out in a way that conveys permanent ownership of their bar stool.

Part of me though still feels like a visitor. In these cash-only cheeseburger places, the wood-paneled bars and their mounted deer heads, their bathrooms that smell gloriously of liquid hand soap and stale piss, places with cardboard boxes of Slim Jims between the cash register and an inexplicably-still-chugging microwave. And then, too, am I a fraud for even worrying about this, here in the land of the bold and burly and unpretentious, a place untroubled by the idea of having exhausting takes at all, something for the preening dilettantes in other cities who haven’t yet had all their arrogance wrung out of them. 

I think you might officially say that you belong to a city once you have first passingly mourned a boarded-up bike shop that has now become a Sweetgreen. But I think too that you only can arrive there from elapsed time, all the plain life that’s happened to you. I broke a finger here last April, got engaged here in January, took a new passport photo here in March, hungover and a little in need of a shave. I bought and wore through a new pair of shoes, lost work and found work, turned 38, learned the bleak nuances of three different Jewel-Oscos. Those months belong to Chicago and so now Chicago belongs a little bit to me.

I believe I can say a few things now about the cold, the thaw, and then the vigor and gratitude in a Chicago summer, the clockless casino feeling all week long, light out till 8:30, everyone savoring the patios and porches that we have been deprived of for months, the days and weeks not all arranged and pointing toward either football or the holidays or both. 

Not yet, though. For now we have this sacred interlude, the cozy old grannies by the lake in mid-April and early May, inching their chair forward every 20 minutes to reclaim a dwindling triangle of sunlight; days when the lakeshore is still sparse enough that you can make out individual sounds, the rubbery patter of sneakers on concrete, girls with their airpods in, having Alone In Your Apartment volume phone conversations, people holding the pale translucence of winter up to the mercy of Spring.