I spotted the Mike Royko book “One More Time” on my parent’s bookshelf when I was packing up to leave after Christmas. I always loved his columns and it felt like a way to bring a little Chicago back to Seattle. While reading the Introduction on the plane home, the book referred to a passage in Nelson Algren’s “City on the Make”.
“Once you’ve become a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies, but never a lovely so real.”
It summed up my feelings of this great city after being gone from it for a year (the longest I have ever been away). Just two weeks earlier I watched Orca whales pass by my home, found a Snowy Owl perched in a tree outside my door, and hiked through some of the most beautiful country I have ever seen. I love Seattle, but she is the lovelier lovely.
While I was in Chicago I took just about every train and bus to get to family and friends. I missed the grit, the cold, and the friendly, outspoken characters you can only meet on the CTA or in a Chicago watering hole. In one bar I complimented a guy on his hat with a Chicago flag on it and he handed it over to me when I came back from the restroom. A toothless man with a Jamaican hat struck up a conversation with me on the bus and by the end made me feel so good about life that I was able to drag my suitcase in the snow for 3 blocks without complaining. I even missed the “rougher”, less exotic birds of Chicago as I watched my friend Tamara and her son feed the pigeons and grackles outside of her Humbolt Park Home.
It seems fit that the final part of my trip was in Algren’s old stomping ground in the Polish Neighborhoods on North Milwaukee Avenue. I had the privilege of photographing 4 generations of my friend’s family from Poland. My last image is of her daughter Madeleine smiling at her 89 year old great grandmother “Babka”.
How fortunate I am to have a second home so real.