Chicago Is My Hometown

I recently uncovered this love letter to Chicago that I wrote back in 2003. It was “published” in an internal book titled “Creativity at Work, Foote Cone & Belding” – an advertising agency, I worked at but no longer exists as the amazing place it once was. I thought my fellow Chicagoans, (born and bred) might get a kick out of it.

Illinois is sometimes described as the land of hometowns like the quirky small places featured in TV shows like Gilmore Girls, Everwood and Ed. I want to live in these imaginary places of refuge away from all the trials of the big city. I want to live in a place where seasons changing are celebrated with time-tested rituals, long abandoned by those of us with urban tribes instead of blood relatives living under our roofs.

Yet I grew up in Chicago within city limits, not a small town so how do I long for something I’ve never experienced? Ah, but I have. Although I grew up in a neighborhood where I could look out of my kitchen window and stare into the sheer-curtained bedroom next door, I recollect a childhood that had many small town elements as did many of us who grew up in Chicago proper.

We caroled and treated, and looked for Easter eggs, sometimes in the snow. I made the likeness of turkeys with my handprint and cotton-ball ghosts. I played “Red Rover” and swung on swings in the corner play lot until the street lights came on. My mom hollered down the street in her distinct German/Lithuanian-accented call, encouraging me to come home for a hasty dinner. I wrote Valentines cards to everyone in class, not because my mom made me but because I felt everyone deserved to feel special at least for one day. I baked, bought, brought and sold treats for various clubs and occasions. I danced with the cutest boy in school at Homecoming. I know the distinct smell of fresh varnish on an old wooden school desk.

So how does a big city girl grow up with such small town experiences? Well, when you’re from here, you don’t realize how vast the city is and how ordinary it can be. Plus, I think it’s the weather. You cannot help but notice the seasons; Mother Nature will slap you sideways if you’re not paying attention. Layering is not an option; it’s as mandatory as childhood immunizations. It snows sideways in the wintertime but just as I curse every cold-weather day that my temperature sensitive body must endure, I rejoice with equal measure at the first warm days of springtime when I and about half a million other Chicagoans venture outside grinning like idiots. I swear on a holy stack of dictionaries every winter that I’m going to leave this damn city…but I don’t, springtime returns and Chicago reclaims it’s spot in my heart once again. After a stretch of being “too cool” for the rituals that accompany the seasons’ changes, my urban tribe and I spent an entire Saturday carving pumpkins, eating candy corn and talking about simpler times.

In my heart and mind, I did grow up in a small town. It just happens to have big shoulders, too.