Skip to main content

December in Chicago

The sun wanders like a lazy eye across the sky. The wind is blowing hard as steel, abrasive to the skin as steel wool scraping the cheeks. It is Chicago, winter is coming quick, and the evening waits impatient as the shadows consume full floors of the skyscrapers downtown. Pretty soon, darkness will eat the shadows, too, and the wind will threaten night’s prominence with its wheezing and squealing across the sky. Only not quite as indirect as the wandering sun.
I ponder these things from seven stories up, looking out across the Chicago River and letting my sightline be distracted by the Wrigley Building and the yellow "Chicago Sun - Times" sign pointing at the white tower and gothic connecting bridge of that landmark set of buildings on Michigan Avenue. At least, it is warm inside my office. At least, it is not yet winter.
But soon, snow will brush between these buildings, pushed around by the vicious winds, and Chicagoans will bundle themselves in heaps of coats and scarves and snug hats and gloves. I can see it coming, as I stay for just a week at this office, mesmerized by the whipping flag that sorely flaps at the corner of Michigan Avenue that I can see, on top of one of the Wrigley buildings. Perhaps, I reconsider, winter has already come.
December in Chicago holds reminder of many colder days to come and the hybernation of a city that retreats into buildings.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Sunny Day Bay

There is a certain energy that winds through the office near happy hour on Friday late afternoon, like the feeling of the last few minutes of school before summer break. The work is done for the week, the bags start to pack with computers and pens and notebooks, and people start to smile again. Sometimes, there is actual laughter in the office. Outside, the sun is shining in San Francisco today. The bay sparkles something special, if one can avoid the snarled traffic painting the bridges. For me, this is no worry - I walk home, through the Financial District and down Columbus Street through the middle of North Beach. I know I am close to home when I hear the Powell-Taylor cable car clanking down the hill, last stop headed for Fisherman's Wharf at the base of Bay Street. Now, it is Friday late afternoon; my bag is packing with its own pens and notebooks (soon, computer too). I am smiling as well. I can feel happiness soon to think of the sun at my back walking past Vesuvio ...

Spring Cleaning (better late than never)

Memorial Day weekend came and went like the thunderstorms that rumbled on Sunday evening here in the DC area. I thought that a three-day weekend would be just the cure for a crazy-busy schedule the past month (work projects blowing up all over the mainstream news, wedding planning, homeownership nicks & nacks, getting my personal affairs in order, travels, and stealing a moment for reflection), but it turned out that the only salvation was that the next weekend was now only 4 days away. Oh yeah, and a great friend was going to be in town in the upcoming week but that is the topic of another post. Still, I tried to make the best of the extra out-of-work time - which got funneled right back into homeowner activities (and what else does a homeowner do except spend free time keeping up with whatever is going on around and inside the home?). To be more specific, I took to cleaning up the "jungle", Wendy's vividly wonderful description of our backyard's overgrowth. I...

Musical Nostalgia

I had a bout of musical nostalgia this afternoon as I was listening to Rufus Wainwright and compiling a powerpoint presentation for work. Two years ago, I remember the CD's of this self-styled (and modish) modern-day troubador. He was (and, I presume, continues to be) an "inside" kind of star with celebrities and hipsters (they like what is "hot" before us mortals do) for classical and dramatically-infused pop melodies. Those style-makers viewed him as "getting" pop like not many other contemporaries did; I just happened to like the songs, even if some were adopted as funkified dance anthems in gay clubs (convenient that Rufus is also gay, so he did not mind the mixing). Anyhow, I remember Rufus for his musical companionship in some turbulent NYC days, dealing as he did in his album "Want One" with regrettably lost loves and solemnness for the life he led on the road; I felt the same in those days as a consultant traversing the US between NYC...