Chicago: Silver Kidney Bean

Got to O’Hare about five. Weather was nice. For dinner we raided the happy hour whore’s ovaries or however you spell that at the hotel bar. College basketball was on the flatscreen and my margarita kept giving me brain freeze. Almost made me nauseous, it hurt so much. We beat feet about seven so we could check this place out.

The traveling businessman’s dive near the airport where we’re staying has a twenty-four hour shuttle service. We took that back to the airport and walked down and around and caught the train, the L, or El, or Elevated, whatever, except it’s not elevated, not much. The first half hour was every bit as interesting as riding BART out to Walnut Creek, all noisy swaying down the center of the freeway, cars going about twice as fast as us. Tomorrow when I have to be downtown to meet clients I’m taking a taxi, screw this going slow shit.

But I love trains and looking out in the dark and seeing countless brick buildings in the 19th Century style roll by, some of them decrepit, most of them multiply repainted and housing families that live on real hardwood flooring and leave the curtains up on the side by the train tracks. Those old brick buildings pepper the old Gold Rush towns of my home and crop up here and there in the City, San Francisco, which we call the City because it’s the only city, every other settlement in California being a dusty trading stop that grew on oil and war money into a vast suburb without a soul. But back here halfway to the east, the old buildings are real and form actual cities all their own, and it’s strangely cool somehow to see suburbs a century older than my own, and to see them at night from a train, passing by in the dark at twenty five miles an hour. Imagination fills in the blanks and lends them a personality they possibly don’t really have, but maybe they do, I wouldn’t know, I’m a total stranger, riding the Blue Line downtown from the airport.

I grabbed my wife by the lapels and banged my forehead into hers and said, “I’m excided!” and she said, “Me too!” We realized we hadn't traveled out of state together, without children, since we were married: eighteen years ago.

We got out at the Washington St. station and wandered past a crowd of brightly lit red and white striped tents serving German food under a great big fake Christmas tree and gawked like hayseeds at the big tall buildings. The air was clean and cold and the lights were bright. State Street was awash in holiday shoppers herding this way and that with bags and children and gathering around the display windows at Macys. We did that too but they really weren’t worth the look. I wanted to see the silver kidney bean.

Just across Michigan Ave. an outdoor ice skating rink was in full swing under white lights, crowded with people going round and round the wrong way: you’re supposed to go counter-clockwise. But this was probably a Chicago thing. Most of them couldn’t really skate either. I’m no expert, I couldn’t skate if the entire Iroquois nation were after me, but I take it as given that shuffling along the ice like an old man getting used to his new colostomy bag is not an indication of skating skill, nor is flipping over onto your backside and yelling at your wife to quit with the gaw damn camera already. But it was a cool scene altogether, and hovering over it on the upper promenade was the silver kidney bean. Score!

I learned about it when Jenny left a link in comments to her pictures. We walked around and under it for ourselves. The reflections were awesome. People cavorted and office buildings were distorted. Underneath where there is concavity we found three reflections of people that looked just like us and laughed at us and pointed at us, but they weren’t us because they were acting like dorks. Tomorrow I’ll take a camera and prove it.