The Chicago "L" Trains: Friend or Foe? :)

Waiting on a train in Elkhart today (what else is new?), my thoughts wandered back to my college years when I lived in downtown Chicago.

The "L."

What a love-hate relationship I had with this form of public transportation in Chicago.  I was awed by it because it seemed almost a living being at times, with pulse, breath . . . and attitude.  I never saw any indication of a driver, though surely there was one.  It seemed to go by its own will, acquiescing to stop at the designated places with a barely discernible air of tolerance.  "OK. Here I am.  I will open my doors for a moment, and if you're quick enough to enter before they close, I'll get you to your destination this time around.  If not, you'll have to try again later."  It was a challenge I perceived, whether or not it was actually there.

I'm not even going to start in about some of the "weird" (scary) people hanging around on the trains and at the stations.   Actually, there are scary and/or eccentric people all over Chicago.  I was narrowly missed more than once while walking, as "the driver" swerved passed me on his merry way to somewhere.  Who's "the driver," you may ask.  I don't know if he's still around, but back then, he buzzed around Downtown (on foot) steering his imaginary steering wheel and "honking" at you if you were in his way.

Anyway, back to the L.  I did have some love for it, for a more practical reason.  It got me to the too-far-away-to-walk places I needed to go!

Photo credit here

I remember having to ride from Downtown to the end of the Howard line every Sunday.  I played the piano (so to speak) for a zany (but heart-felt) church service at a decrepit little nursing home (another story for another day lol) within walking distance of the Howard station.  It seemed like a long L ride, though I don't remember now how long it actually was.  The most vivid mental picture frozen in time is that of sitting by the window on those quiet Sunday mornings, rickety-racking past windows of people's homes, so close that, if I could have reached out my train window, I would have been able to high-five any window-sitters in those homes.  It was kinda surreal.

One time, two of my friends and I boarded a train and took off for Pacific Garden Mission.  One of these friends, in her work at the mission, had met a prostitute who wanted to change her ways. 
At least that's what she had said the night before.  I don't recall precisely why we were going--probably just to offer encouragement and support to a hurting soul.  I don't know what the area surrounding PGM is like now, but back in the later 1980s, it was a scary place to walk through!  In daylight, walking from the L station to the mission was uncomfortable (the whole stepping over passed-out men on the sidewalk thing was new to me), and taking a stroll with the young lady and witnessing her subtle-but-not-so-subtle drug deal in our presence was scandalous to our young, naive minds.

The worst part, though, was when we walked, in the dark, back to the L station to return to our dorm, only to find out the trains had stopped running for the day.  Talk about naive!  Try looking at a schedule to make sure you have a ride home! Duh!  But, no.  We had simply assumed that line ran around the clock, I guess.  This was well before the cell phone era, and, though I remember making some calls from a pay phone, there was no one with a car available to pick us up.

The trek back seemed eternal.  We tried not to talk too much about how we were going to be murdered and never heard from again.  We prayed.  We sang.  We laughed (nervously).  We talked badly about the guys who hadn't been able to pick us up (not reasonable, I know, but we were a little out of our minds)--anything to get our minds off leering eyes and smelly alleys.

We made it safely. :)

The L could be fun, too, like when a group of friends took it to somewhere fun, or just rode around looking at the city lights at night. We didn't care about time or scary people.  We were young, lighthearted and together, and that's all that mattered.

A Romantic Cry/"By the Way, I Love You." (A post with two titles)

While writing yesterday's A Cry in the Kitchen post, my thoughts went off on a tangent for a few minutes.  Here are the contents of that tangent . . . :)

© Photography by Cathleen Tarawhiti 2007 - 2012

Why can't I have a romantic cry once in awhile?  You know, like in the movies or in books, where a girl can wade on a sandy shore while she cries, or lie on a lofty tree branch, or stroll a grassy meadow, surrounded by sweet-smelling wildflowers?

I'd settle for escaping to the shade of the apple trees in our "back 40" on a sunny spring day, apple blossoms showering their fragrant petals over my face to wipe away my tears . . .

. . . or whatever.

But, no.  When I have a chance to cry at all, it's usually at the most inopportune times, when some straw or another has broken the camel's back, and there's no time or opportunity to choose a location.  While washing dishes, while sorting laundry, while teaching my son long division or sentence diagramming.  It's never "right."  It's never dramatic in a good way.

I did have a perfectly romantic cry once in my life.  And it wasn't just romantic in the sense of imaginative or impractical, but it involved a boy-girl romance-romance!

Yes, I was in college and spending lots of time with Kevin (my now-husband for anyone who didn't know!).  We sat on a bench or a ledge somewhere on/near a beach in Chicago, the waters of Lake Michigan meeting the sky in the distance, the wind blowing through my hair (um, I had an asymmetrical hairstyle at the time, and the only part long enough to move around with the wind was the front--no full head of shiny locks to float on the breeze, but still!).  On the other side of me, the city lights twinkled and winked, and their beauty seemed to exist just for our sake.

I don't remember the small talk that preceded these words, but I remember the important part.

"I love you," said he.

And then I cried.  It was like we were the only two people in the world, and it was the first time I cried in front of him.  It wasn't that I didn't love him.  I did very much.  But, for some weird reason, I couldn't bring myself to say it out loud.  I had misused that word "love" too many times.  I knew Kevin was the real thing and that scared me senseless for awhile!  I was afraid of true love, afraid I would fail.  I didn't know how to deal with true love.  I knew I had to treat it differently than the game-playing and attempts to control others that I had been guilty of before.

I loved him, but I just couldn't bring myself to say so.

I'll never forget how he swung down from the bench, got down on one knee so he could see me face-to-face, and kindly asked, "What's wrong?" in the quietest, most tender of voices.  He took my hand and just waited patiently for me to finish crying (like he has so many times since).  If he was unsettled by my tears, he never showed it.  He brushed my hair from my eyes a time or two and whispered a compassionate encouragement every now and then.

I cried mainly because I didn't know what was wrong with me.  Why could I not verbalize what was in my heart to the only one those words had ever truly applied?  I had easily said them before when I only thought they meant something.  Now they really did, and I couldn't utter them.

I wonder how he felt that night.  I haven't asked him if he even remembers it.  I think of it every few years or so, but I never remember to ask him that question.  I'll bet I will now, though. :)

Obviously, the story doesn't end there.

A few days later, he called me right before being wheeled to the health center because of a dangerously high fever and severe abdominal pain.  It turned out he had food poisoning and would be fine, but I didn't know that at the time.  I met him there as he arrived and was shocked at the green tint to his face.  I hadn't realized people could really look green!  I so wanted to say, "I love you!" as the nurse pushed his wheelchair toward the mysterious, unseen back rooms.  I wondered if he was going to die without knowing how I felt.

The "mean" nurse wouldn't let me back to see him, so I wrote a note, which she agreed to take to him.  I wrote all kinds of things about how I hoped he would feel better quickly and that I would be praying for him.  Then, as if an afterthought, on the bottom of the paper I wrote, "By the way, I love you."  We laugh about that all these years later (that was 24 years ago!!).

So, yeah, it was kind of a back-handed way, but it was a start!  After that, I had no trouble saying those words, except, over the next several years of our engagement and new marriage, when I would withhold those words out of anger, to "make a point."

Now, I still become angry sometimes, but I can't ever withhold those words.  In fact, though I say them to him several times every day, I make an extra effort to make sure I say them when I'm angry.  I've learned that love certainly doesn't end because of a disagreement.  The only thing that causes love to end is when one or both people allow it to.  Period.

So, anyway, I should be grateful I've had a romantic cry in my lifetime:  romantic setting, romantic circumstances, romantic outcome.  I'll remember that the next time I'm blubbering as I'm cleaning the toilet or folding laundry, and wishing I could escape to the apple trees. ;)

The Vanity Couch

 I was remembering this time when I was 20 years old, home from college for the summer, and all of my sisters and I came down with the chicken pox.  I don't recommend having chicken pox at an older age like that, if you have a choice. ;)  Oh, how painful and nasty that was!  My sister Mary and I, being the oldest and having the worst cases, would be awake through the night together, crying at times and wishing we could get some sleep!  Anyway, I had not yet grown out of (not sure I have to this day!) the "I can't have anyone see me without every hair in place and makeup on" phase.  So, of course, I could not have anyone see me with chicken pox!

Well, one day the doorbell rang, just as I was walking past the front door.  I knew I wouldn't be able to quickly talk my parents into not opening the door (!) so I dove behind the couch, planning to stay a minute or two, until the paper boy was paid or the UPS package delivered, or whatever.  You have no idea how mortified I was when my parents ushered in the guy who lived behind us, probably 2 or 3 years older than me, and urged him to sit down on the couch I was hiding behind!  I crouched down as low as I could get and pretty much wanted to die right then and there.  I can't begin to recall what he was doing there, but my parents didn't even know I was behind the couch!  I wasn't the slightest bit interested in him or his reasons for paying us a visit for the first time ever, but still I had my pride, and I was not about to make my presence known. He stayed 30 minutes or so, and I remained behind the couch, trying to cross my legs, as I really needed to use the bathroom! 

After the door closed behind him, I sheepishly raised myself up to a standing position and my parents looked at me with that, "Laurie, we love you but sometimes you're a bit puzzling" expression on their faces.  When I explained what happened, they laughed almost forever!

You would think I would have learned my lesson several years before, behind that same couch.  When I was probably 17 and a senior in high school, my sister and I went to a costume party that some friends were having.  I dressed up like a "nerd," which was kind of a popular thing in the mid-80s.  Not particularly creative, you know?  I greased down my hair, parted it in the middle, found some dorky clothes and sported my dad's old black horn-rimmed glasses, with the lenses popped out and embellished with a piece of tape I put on the center part.  I drove my sisters and some of our friends in the family station wagon.  Lots of fun was had by all, and after driving everyone else home (I have a faint recollection of someone wearing fuzzy bedroom slippers and sticking their feet out the window of the car on the way home), Mary and I went home to our house. 

We pulled up to the house and I froze in panic.  There were tons of cars in our driveway and at the curb in front of our house.  Oh, no!  We forgot Mom and Dad had some kind of meeting at our house!  I sat there and tried to keep my breathing under control.  No way could I have actual parents of prospective future boyfriends see me like this!  Suddenly, my sister, Mary, started laughing.  She's like, "Oh, that was a good addition to your costume!  I hadn't even noticed it!"  I looked down at my shirt, where she was pointing.  There I noticed a major dribbling of toothpaste, dried and crusty on the spot it had apparently landed hours before..  I had never done that before and I haven't done it since, and, though I was dressed like a nerd, I was still completely humiliated because I had NOT meant to do this!

I so wished I had my house key so I could go in the front door, and avoid all the people in the family room, which is where the other door was.  Finally, Mary agreed to go in the back door, and then open the front door so I could sneak in and go straight to the safety of my room.

I waited and waited.  She never came!  Ugh!!  I knew I had no choice but to go in the back door so I did what I had to do.  I couldn't look anyone in the eye, except to glare at my sister who was talking up a storm with all our company.  Suddenly, I heard a high-pitched voice say, "Oh, Laurie!  Stand still so I can see your costume!  I want to see what a nerd looks like!"  It was one of the ladies attending the meeting.

Oh my word!  Complete and utter mortification!  I did what any self-respecting "nerd" would do--I ran!  I kid you not, this lady chased me around my house, calling, "I want to see what a nerd looks like!"  Did someone dare her to do this?  I'll probably never know.  But anyway, I found myself in the living room and flew behind the couch.  Yes, the same couch that would come in handy a few years later!  But this time, there was no hiding!  She stood there looking over the couch until I finally relented and stood up.

"Ohhh!  You look so pretty!" said she.

It was sooooo weird!

I can just hear my dad saying, "See where your vanity gets you?"  ;)