Category: Chicago Centric

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My Lake Shore Drive

When you choose to live in the place where you grew up, history accrues. Kid history mixes with adult history and family history gets tossed in there, too.  Chicago is my home by birth and by choice and I don’t imagine ever leaving this place.  I am grateful for the immigrant grandparents that chose it and my parents, my Dad especially, who taught me to love it.  Living here is a privilege and yes, sometimes a challenge, but more often than not I feel immense gratitude for being able to call Chicago home.

Lake Shore Drive, for those of you not lucky enough to live here, is the mythic main artery that runs along the eastern edge of the City along Lake Michigan’s shores.  If you live anywhere near it, as I do, it is most likely your preferred means of going north or south.  I have been driving ‘The Drive’ as it’s called for all of my 45 years.

When I was a kid, Lake Shore Drive carried me to museums and the zoo and Grant Park symphonies and air shows and ChicagoFest concerts at Navy Pier.  As a teen I drove along it with my girlfriends, not yet quite understanding that the Lake is always east, so having no idea if we were traveling north or south, but just young and happy and dumb and free, as teens can be, so not really caring either.  As a young adult, Lake Shore Drive brought me to swanky parties and my preferred shopping destinations.

Life was always good when it involved Lake Shore Drive.  It meant an event of some sort, a special day, a destination that would involve fun or adventure.  Good times, always.

As an adult, like many things in adulthood, Lake Shore Drive has become more complicated.  Lake Shore Drive brought me to the apartment where my Mom was slowly dying of cancer.  Lake Shore Drive brought me to the doctor’s office where I learned of four miscarriages.  Lake Shore Drive brought me to the hospital that treated my daughter for the brain tumor that would take her life.  Lake Shore Drive brings me to the hospital where I have been visiting my Dad the past month.

Oy.

It takes me about 15 minutes to get from my back door to the northern tip of Lake Shore Drive at Hollywood.  It’s like a worn path, instinctive, comforting, an old friend in ashphalt that understands me.  Driving south with the Lake at my left and greenery and high rises on my right brings me peace, always.  Day or night, not a single trip passes that I don’t think to myself how lucky I am that I get to live in such a place.  This despite cursing Mayor Rahm Emanuel every time I drive under the North Avenue overpass that the previous Mayor Daley took the time and dollars to decorate with flowers.  Beauty is important, Rahm.  Daley knew that and I appreciated that about him.

See? I'm not the only one who thinks this. There is a whole book about it!
See? I’m not the only one who thinks this. There is a whole book about it!

I have so many comforting memories, too, that are called to mind every time I whiz by.  When my daughter worried about the winter trees being lonely and cold without their leaves, we were driving down Lake Shore Drive.  When she fed the ducks bread, it was while visiting a friend who lives at Diversy and Lake Shore.  She, too, logged a lot of miles going up and down the Drive that brought her back and forth to the hospital her life depended on.  Making that exit off Fullerton, I feel her there, still, despite my daughter and that hospital now both being gone.

And there is that sweet, sweet spot, just south of North, when you are close to the skyline and you know that that same skyline will swallow you up whole if you stay south on Michigan Avenue.  The city that you get closer and closer to as you travel south just envelops you and embraces you and you become a part of it just by staying the course of a southern path.  I’ve tried to capture this sensation in photos a hundred times, at least, and failed each and every attempt.  You just need to see it, to drive it, to feel it.

Lake Shore Drive is more than a road.  It is memory and history and tragedy and joy and strength and beauty and so, so much of my life.

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Hot Doug Before He Was Hot

For anyone living in or around Chicago and not under a rock, it’s hard to escape the fact that the most famous hot dog stand in America, Hot Doug’s, is closing today.  BOOM.  Just like that, Doug Sohn is walking away from a sure thing.  He is the Michael Jordan of purveyors of encased meat, the standard bearer of leave ’em wanting more.

More power to him.  I wish him well.  I like Doug.

We first met in my 20s when I was head over heels in love with a close friend of his.  It was embarrassing, really, but that’s a different story for a different blog post.  Word to the wise, never date a musician.  Like ever. You’re welcome, young women of America!

But way back when, our mutual friend organized a road trip to all things Elvis in Memphis and Tupelo, Mississippi.  I was way out of my league with these folks, who were super hip and grungy and lived in Wicker Park when it was still full of tenements, but love is blind, right?  And so, I went.  It was awesome, actually.  And despite my social awkwardness and insecurities, I had a great time.

Elvis was introduced to me on that trip and I’ve been a fan ever since.  How did I not appreciate Elvis before that?!

Me trying to pass with some folks who are much more cool than I, Hot Doug being one of them.
Me trying to pass with some folks who are much more cool than I, Hot Doug being one of them.

Doug and I were in a group of eight or ten.  Some of them were established musicians — Cath Carroll and Santiago Durango, anyone?  I didn’t know them either, but they both exuded cool.  Like serious cool.  I was this dork drunk on unrequited love who lived in a studio apartment with a twin bed.

Doug was always kind and approachable when I saw him.  He was cool without being oppressive about it, you know?  He was easy to talk to and didn’t get that bored expression on his face if we found ourselves sitting next to one another.  I like cool and easy and Doug was both those things. He still is.

This was the 90s, pre-cell phone and digital cameras.  At the time, Doug was in culinary school.  A few weeks after the trip, he hosted the road trip crew at his apartment so that we could all trade copies of the photos we had taken.  Can you even imagine that today?!  Oy, the technology.

Anyway.  Doug made a feast for us, featuring a buffet of Elvis’ favorite foods — and yes, fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches are that delicious.

Me and Hot Doug hanging out on Elvis' front porch in Tupelo, Mississippi, looking like an old married couple.
Me and Doug hanging out on Elvis’ front porch in Tupelo, Mississippi, looking like an old married couple.

That was almost twenty years ago now.  Good God.

In that time, I got over my unhealthy and counterproductive infatuation with unavailable musicians and headed to grad school, marriage, motherhood, and Cancerville.  Doug graduated culinary school and created the phenomenon that is Hot Doug’s.  You’ve got to hand it to him, he has cultivated the reputation of the humble hot dog to never seen before heights.  Restaurant ownership is a tough, tough gig, and Doug has done it with smarts and a fine balance of gravitas and joie de vivre.  All while closing at 4pm.

I missed the Hot Doug’s frenzy since he announced he would be shuttering last May.  My husband’s office window looks over Hot Doug’s and after the spring announcement, he would come home and report on the length of the lines.  We always meant to go one last time when things calmed down, but things haven’t calmed down.

Inevitably, when I did make it in to Hot Doug’s, I was always met with the same cool and easy Doug that was so kind to me on that Elvis road trip so long ago.  He never failed to ask about the family, the kids, the husband.

When he learned our daughter had died of cancer, he somehow managed to show compassion and sincerity while still taking my order and moving that line along.  And he never ever charged me full price.  Or raised an eyebrow when I ordered, as I always did, ketchup on my char dog.

As my Dad would say, Doug Sohn is a gentleman and a scholar.

Doug taking a moment to pose with my son, long lines be damned. A true mensch.
Doug taking a moment to pose with my son, long lines be damned. A true mensch.

 

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Closing Lake Shore Drive: When the Threat of Terrorism Is Close to Home

The reason terrorism works, and make no bones about it, it does work, is that it creates fear and chaos in day-to-day life.  Things that should be normal, routine, easy are majorly impacted by terrorism.  Subways in London, cafes in Israel, finish lines in Boston, office towers in New York City.  These are all places that average normal citizens populate, which is what makes them attractive targets for terrorists.  Fiddling with routine, replacing the hum drum with fear is a terrorists’ trade.

Just about an hour ago, driving north on Lake Shore Drive, I came upon, quite suddenly, a veritable parking lot of traffic.  No one was moving.  The south bound lanes were empty and the north bound lanes were stopped.  At first I thought it was Cubs’ traffic, but that didn’t make any sense.  This was only the bottom of the 7th and the game was still in progress.  In New York.  I flipped on the AM radio to see what was happening, but only after complaining about baseball and traffic on Facebook.

Watching news develop outside my car window.
Watching news develop outside my car window.

Well, something was happening.  Suspicious packages had been found strewn about Lake Shore Drive, Chicago’s pristine north/south thoroughfare.

We now live in a culture that not only fears suspicious packages, but drops everything, and I mean everything, to investigate them.  This is our world now, thanks to terrorism.  Those terrorists must be proud of themselves.

As I sat in my car, originally just frustrated by the idea of traffic, I soon became all too aware of how close we all live to terrorism these days.  The radio reports informed me of those suspicious packages, Lake Shore Drive’s closure, and that robots had been brought in to handle the packages before humans were put in harm’s way.

This is the stuff I watch in movies or on news clips, but here it all was unfolding literally outside my car window.  Robots to deal with IEDs are a strategy used in Iraq, not my beloved Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.

I was afraid, even for a moment, I was afraid.  My baby was in the back seat.  My husband and older son were in two different places.  We were separated and I was afraid.

That is how terrorism works.  Fear is its currency.

Right now I am back in my living room, typing away at my writing table, reflecting about the potential for something scary that could have happened, but didn’t.  In the end, those suspicious packages turned out to be a homeless person’s belongings that had flown into traffic on a windy day.  What folks would complain about and mutter about under their breath as they drove around a few years ago is now cause to halt traffic on Chicago’s main north/south thoroughfare.

So why am I writing about terrorism when this was clearly a mistake — a collision of Mother Nature’s wind and homelessness?

Because in those moments sitting in my car I didn’t know that.  Because as someone somewhere in Chicago’s public safety department made the decision to close down Lake Shore Drive, they didn’t know that.  Because as those first responders sent in a robot to investigate a possible explosive device, they didn’t know that.  In those moments, it could have been terrorism and it was treated as such.

This is the world we live in now, folks.  Yesterday a blogging friend in Boston wrote about how she watched some yahoo carry another backpack to the Boston Marathon finish line — the guy walked right past she and her family.  Today I get caught in a parking lot on Lake Shore Drive.

This is because of the threat of terrorism.  In America.  Today.

It is real and it is now the life we live.  Today it looked like this.

What the threat of terrorism looked like in Chicago today.
What the threat of terrorism looked like in Chicago today.