Chicago all of a sudden

A family emergency finds me in Chicago on New Year’s Eve for the first time in many decades since I permanently moved to New York City in ’73. Of course, in this situation, there is no inclination to rousing celebration. Just trying to get through each day and evening.

Learning how to use Uber to get to a nursing home and back in the Uptown area. And of course, marveling at all the architecture; although I am a New Yorker since my early twenties, I have always said and believed Chicago is a far more beautiful town with its amazing buildings, with tiny memorable details even on “ordinary” structures. In fact, when I took a walk near my hotel, I saw so many things of which to take pictures that I didn’t. Overwhelmed. Another time. Too much beauty.

How well I remember, from growing up in Chicago, this skyscraper with what looks like a church on top, and Picasso’s famous Chicago sculpture below

At night, to wind down, reading my first Ross Macdonald novel (The Blue Hammer) and watching online a forgotten but interesting late ’50s movie The Pusher with a screenplay by Harold (The Carpetbaggers) Robbins based on an Ed McBain novel.

Anyway, since I do have to eat, I went to a famous restaurant I’d actually never been to before, the Italian Village, and had a chianti and sausage parmigiana sandwich. And managed to snap a picture of a goddess type of statue, standing behind the bar, when I was there.

I don’t know if this is a goddess or a nymph or just a Dionysian muse of wine, but of course I had to take a picture of it.

I have a kind of a noirish hotel room with a good desk for writing; I have tweets to do for one of my clients, as well as this end-of-the-year blog post–the writing of which seems to have broken the incredible tiredness I’ve felt since waking this morning. My room’s single window faces the back wall of a famous building called The Rookery.

Don’t be fooled by the sunlight coming in through the curtain–there is a brick wall opposite my window. Which I don’t mind.

It’s been snowing for a little while this December 31st Sunday morning.

Happy New Year to us all, and a lucky one too–please.

I’d like to meet with a couple of Chicago friends, old and new, while I’m here, but for the moment I can just focus my mind primarily on this family situation. There’s that brick wall opposite my window…