The jury is still technically out, but I may not live here for the rest of my life. It’s hard to buy a house, hard to find a good school, hard to dodge the winter wind here. And while I sense the truth in the irony that such hardships make Chicago a great place to live, I can’t help but think that this registers more with natives, people whose very urbanity seems hardwired into their traffic-manoeuvering hips, those celebrated shoulders.
Not so with me. At a mere five years and counting, I’m still a newbie. This means that I’m more easily swayed in BOTH directions, pro and con. Desensitization has yet to sink it. Damn it–and thank God. On the one hand, I’m still quick to recoil from booming cars and shrieking neighbors. But on the other, I can still be made to feel dizzyingly, ecstatically small by the city’s scope.
The pro-Chicago feeling most frequently happens for me at the L station. You see, whenever you’re waiting on that platform, there’s this period of involuntary stillness lodged between the few blocks you just walked to get there, and the few stops you’re about to ride. For the moment, you’re technically in transit, yet suspended. And if in this moment you walk over to rail and look down at the street, you’ll notice that most everyone else is still moving. So the vertigo blooms in your chest: you’re an infinitesimal part of a city housing millions of paths, some hot with friction, others dead-ending, plus all gradations between.
Canasta has written the giddy soundtrack to this sudden awareness, and it gives you something to shout at those people milling down there: “Chicago slow down!” (On the record, the band actually does shout it, by the way.) Because it really is, as the hippies say, all good. Just that there’s so much of it, it can feel overwhelming. How else to explain but with a love song measured in city blocks? “This town breathes on its own,” Matt sings. I borrowed that lyric to title a mix CD I gave out last Christmas. Because my friends know it’s true, and the best of them try–sometimes against their own instincts–to let that humbling feeling do its work. It keeps us in check, but we don’t let it stop us altogether.
I guess the feeling and the song are both arguments to stay. But the jury is still technically out.
