Roger Wright – Chicago

I am Rich Christian. I drive the runaway train.

Down the tracks, sliced through time. Every year in October, when you hear some story of a ghost train rumbling with no one at the helm? When someone mentions an unexplainable journey? One that makes no sense at all? Then you can know I am up and traveling again.  

Once again trying to make my way back to Laura. Grabbing ahold and firing up any old unexplainable journey. Always to get back to Laura.

It always starts just before an autumn sunrise. The train lurches to life. A gravel voiced songwriter of the centuries, man named John Stewart, tosses out a line that sparks the train engine silver orange and rolling. He sings that the ‘curves around midnight, aren’t easy to see.’ And the train starts to roll.

This year, 2013, east down the middle of a highway in the god forsaken town of Chicago Illinois. They call this road of dizzying speed the Eisenhower Expressway. My ghost train on a track between 8 lanes of zooming cars. A driver sitting at the wheel of every car. But no one sees a driver of my runaway train.

The speeds of these cars make my head spin. My last time walking the earth was long ago. Laura was my wife. I was a soldier. A Private. In the army of the Confederate States of America.

And that bleached white bone scraped by the workman’s shovel in six inches of soil at a construction site this autumn of 2013? That was my left leg.

To get to where I am now, time follows no order and respects no boundaries. So, I can only say listen hard. Hear shovel scraping bone and a ghost train rumbling, picking up speed that generates a rhythm for John Stewart singing

I’m worried about you

I’m worried about me.

Then watch the workman who just scraped my leg. Watch his eyes go wide as he scoops a rib from the soil. And if that sets off a choral hum rising from the earth first faintly and then growing stronger; you will be in the presence of the 10,000 souls left here in shallow graves like mine. Resting fitfully under what they now call The Gold Coast and South Lincoln Park areas of this city, Chicago, Illinois.

There were 4,000 of us Confederate  prisoners of war held at Camp Douglas, in the southern part of this city.But the main grave site for this muscular mushroom of a town was here. About two miles north of the mouth of the Chicago River.  Why are so many of us prisoners buried here? Why not at Camp Douglas?

Well, I will tell you. But first, remember. This is a town where men actually decided to make their river flow backward! So it was no surprise to any of us spirits, when our remains were moved up north of the river to join the Catholics, the Jews, and the Protestants. Yankees all. Money changed hands. Property was valuable. So the graves were moved from south to north. Then when the mushroom of people started bloating up again, that giant gravesite of the north was emptied. The remains taken even further from the heart of the town. Land cleared for living.

And that would have been the end of it. There used to be a cemetery here, but now there are homes for the living. That would be the story. But not in Chicago. In Chicago, there were winks, nods, contracts and unspoken deals made. Money changed hands. And not all the bodies got moved. They built the homes on our graves. And they remain that way today.

 So ten thousand of us remained. Houses of rich men were built right on top of our earthly remains. Ten thousand of us trapped underneath the mansions of power.

 Which of course made most or us wander. Made most of us go searching for something. Searching for home.

 And in the red, brown and golden crinkled leaves that shivered across my body’s resting place, when I once again know autumn, I can begin again my unfinished work of finding her.

As the train lurches forward, I am again amazed at just how anyone could live here in Chicago. Even as the centuries pass, I never understood. My only clue was autumn. Especially October, when there would be a rustle of a breeze that brought the smell of tomorrow. An evergreen instant taking me back. To our home in the mountains. Back to our quiet diamond of a town.  Asheville, North Carolina. I’d catch the smell of Asheville and home  just as the leaves, even here in cruel Chicago lit up in colors so achingly alive that even we wandering dead just had to smile for a moment.

Just how did I get so far from Laura Christian? What led me to the shore of this terrifying inland sea?  It was the Great War between the states. The blue coats had money. They had arms and horses and beans and sizzling grilled meat on their campfires at dusk. My regiment fought hard. Most of us fighting like mountain lions. But we were captured and tamed.

Surrounded we were till our white flag waved. Then put in chains, given the first meat we’d had for weeks. And shipped by rail to Chicago. To Camp Douglas. Prisoners of war. We simply lost the battle for our way of life.

 I would often think, before the pounding guns of fire would go quiet for the day, that if we had Laura fighting alongside us men, that the battles would have taken such different turns. A snarling Mama Bear gone wild if you crossed her. Worse yet, if you ever dared hurt someone or even something she loved? Then you could only count on your next breath being your last.

Why was it then that this towering fury of a fighting woman could cry as if the floods of ancient times had just unleashed raging waters of sorrow? What was it that made that river of pain flow into her unfathomable curiosity and musical laughter? Ignorant questions all. Like asking ‘why did I love her?’ If you could answer that question, there would be no answer.

 Stubborn? Like a tree stump stubborn. Still, when she would laugh? The world would applaud.

I saw her last on the front porch of our cabin in the green forest just outside of Asheville. She was smiling. No one knew how long before we’d win this war. But it had to be soon. Laura crying out “Write me!”

And for a year, as our battalion fended off Yankee horror, I did. But then the war took some turns and something buried deep in me seemed to fade. I no longer could believe in our cause.

 And when belief fades and distance grows, love is tested.

Laura knew the cause. She was sure. But my faith was built on doubt. Forgiveness came so much easier to me than it did to her. So I got quiet. My only writing was scribbles in the dirt.  Laura stopped listening. My quiet like a knife gone slashing her heart. And in that pain of her pain, deep in the winter wind off that icy terror of the inland sea, I passed from this world to the next. To the runaway train. There being no worse pain than causing Laura pain.

Then as the years passed, I saw Laura moving on. Loving deep and alive someone else. I even saw her forgetting our tiny home looking out, as the writer once said, at the ‘soft stone smile of an angel’ in the green hills that circled Ashville. Fading from the thought of the two rocking chairs on the front porch we once shared. Simply not caring anymore, she went on and rocked happily with the love of her life.

I remember all this as my runaway train builds up speed. It happens like this every year. Faster and harder and miles and miles of gleaming rail track rumbling, tumbling to what could have been or should have been. This love like a runaway train. Then just when the speed hits a peak, when the wind is whipping along side, just when you think the train can go no faster, harder or deeper . . .

The crunching shamble of sheet metal. The train stops cold by another train. The journey ended. Autumn into winter.

November’s bare trees. I will rest now. But only till next October.

Next October. When you will see another runaway train. Trying again to find Laura. Just so I can say that I remember every golden moment.

Every autumn breeze.

 

 

 

 

On Sept 9^th, 2013, Reuters published “The Child Exchange,” a devastatingly powerful piece of reporting on how Americans are using the internet to abandon children adopted from overseas. The practice is called “re-homing.” It was once confined to pets, but is now conducted in chat rooms and done to children in what Reuters called “a largely lawless marketplace.” Soon after the piece was published, at one case within hours, the internet providers acted to close down the chat rooms.

********************************* 

Re-homing. I see the word and feel a knife blade tingle at my throat. Then a cousin or an uncle or a father says, “ Be still now little darlin’ cause you gonna like the way this feels.”

 

But where I am now, there is no re-homing. Where I am now, I have something new to do. And every October I come back and do it. And it never gets old.

 

You’ll never see me. Not on this visit. Not on any. When you are re-homed, you practice being invisible. I guess that’s so you can be invisible when you get to where I am now.

 

Re-homing like being yanked, tossed and locked into pitch black and musty root cellar darkness, cold dirt floor and scurrying sounds just inches from my ear.

 

Re-homing was a word I never heard when I walked this world. But I guess that’s what they call it when the people you’re supposed to call “Mommy” or “Daddy” decide to drop you off with some other people, turn to give you one last look, saying something like, “If you hadn’t been so difficult, maybe minded your manners just a little bit better” then shuffle off to the car, with doors slamming shut goodbye, and the engine starts up while your heart slows to dust.

 

In my eighteen years, I was re-homed three times. But I remember only one of them. Even now. I remember one of them.

I remember Daddy said, “C’mon now little darlin, we are going for a ride.” Our farm was just outside of DeKalb Illinois. The corn fields rolling straight to the horizon. As if there were no more people. Just the quivering corn fields and the wind. It was late afternoon and the sun would be setting early because winter was coming. We headed west. Towards Galena and the Big River. It was just me and my Daddy. Not Mama. But I didn’t think too much of that. I was the big girl. I was eight years old now. And Daddy always showed me that he loved me. Sometimes he showed me so much that Mama’s face would get all red and I’d see her neck start throbbing. Then she’d get really, really quiet. But Daddy always showed me that he loved me.

 

That day in the car, I asked where we were going, and my Daddy answered “Chrissie, I got something to tell you. Your Mama and I, we adopted you. Now, you know what that means?”

 

“No Daddy.”

 

“It means I ain’t your real Daddy.”

 

“You ain’t my real Daddy?”

 

“Well, you see, it’s complicated Chrissie. You are such a beautiful big girl and now it won’t be too long to you’re all grown It’s just complicated. And your Mama just feels like. . .”

 

“Daddy, I don’t understand why Mama gets so quiet sometimes. . .”

 

“You see, I. . . .”

 

“Is Mama my real Mama?”

 

“We don’t know who your real Mama is. You were five years old when you came to stay with us.” It was getting darker now. The rhythm of the car going gliding through the corn fields. Like a feather soft pillow had come to fill the car and make me want to close my eyes and sleep.

 

“Well Chrissie, I don’t understand it all either. But like the man says, ‘It is what it is.”

 

“Daddy, what does that mean?”

 

“I gotta do what’s best for Mama and me and you too Chrissie. This way is better. I know it will be better,”

 

I looked out the window of the car and we had turned into some sort of trailer park. We pulled down this little trainer park street to the last one on the left. There was a tire on a rope hung from a tree branch. Two lawn chairs to the side of the trailer’s screen door. A beer cooler being used for a table, empties and ash trays smudging up the cooler top in a hopeless kind of gray.

 

Two big old fat people came rumbling out of the screen door just as we drove up. My Daddy got out of the car, slammed the door. I stayed put.

 

“C’mon now Chrissie,” Daddy never sounded like he meant it when he wanted me to something I didn’t want to do. But the three of them were staring back at me so hard.

 

“Chrissie, this is Rupert and Michelle. You’ll be staying with them now.”

 

I heard him say the words. And you know what was funny? I wasn’t surprised. I just got quiet. Like my Mama.”

 

“We can get your things sent over to you tomorrow. We all figured it was best to do this quick. So you’ll be staying here tonight.”

 

Daddy handed the fat people some papers. They wrote their names. Gave him back some of the papers. The fat people still hadn’t said a word. Daddy started to come towards me, his shoulders kind of shaking like they did when he showed me that he loved me. But then I saw his shoulders slump down. He stopped, put his hand to his waist and he gave me this little side to side wave. Like he was polishing a tiny window clean.

 

Then the fat lady lifted up her hand and told me with her finger that she wanted me to follow her. So I turned away from my Daddy, put my head down, and followed the fat lady into the trailer.

 

The screen door slammed behind me. Then I was re-homed.

 

 

But every year, in October, I come back.

 

So, if you can’t see me, how do you know I’ve returned?  Here’s how: If you can breathe in that one sugar maple moment when October’s weary smile turns the crinkled red and golden leaves up to face the sun, I’ll be here.

 

When October arrives, there is no more re-home. In October I am always home.

I come back for the folks who tell the stories like my story of re-homing, I come back to make sure that those story tellers write. That they keep speaking.

 

I’m the autumn breeze at the back of the writer, recorder, story teller, journalist. I’m what starts the healing just before that groaning last paragraph, image, smell, sound rhythm tap on the keyboard that makes the fingers start to bleed. I’m what prompts that one last question. The one that barreled straight out of the blue. I’m the shivering delight when the writer lifts hands and says, “Done.”

 

I come back to make sure the that the story gets told.

 

I come back in October for the story tellers. I bring along the message from the Book of Amos, “ Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

 

In the loving, clean breezes of autumn, where there is no more re-homing . . .

 

I come back to make sure that the stories get told.

**************************************************************

This story is for all those who try with their stories to make a better world. And specifically for the Reuters Team who did “The Child Exchange.” In memory of the late Allan Dowd, my cousin and Reuters reporter.

 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSXYu-3r1S8]

December 2050. As he punched in the security code that snowy night at the armed entrance of the gated community, Ricketts Glen, at the corner of Clark and Addison in Chicago, the wind was so cold that his hands felt as if he had plunged them in fire.

The vacant, snow flake stares of the street people cowering in front of the Hyatt and Best Buy across the street were making her nervous, so he hurried to punch in the code. And he kept chattering to keep her attention. “You know there used to be a baseball stadium here. They called it Wrigley Field.”

 “No way!” she said, shaking her long blonde hair back from her face and shivering all in one move. Her blue eyes wide. “I had heard there was like a church or something here?”

 He loved how most everything she said sounded like a question. Questions he pretty much knew the answers to. Maybe tonight would turn out better than he thought.

 “Actually. . .” be began. He was being extra careful to try and sound smart. She had told him in the bar that she liked guys with big ah. . .brains; was the way she put it. That’s when she tossed off that killer smile. And he pretty much forgot everything after that. Except to try and sound smart. So he was trying to get the, wise college professor persona thing going. Starting sentences with words like “actually” seemed to fit.

 What he did not see was how her eyes zeroed in on his black and silver embossed Ricketts Glen ID card when he pulled it out and signaled for another round of drinks. “Actually,” he said, “There was a church here. That was a really long time ago. A seminary. They trained ministers here. But the Clark Street bars got a little wild. That’s when they built the baseball park. Wrigley Field they called it. It was here until they tore it down to build Ricketts Glen.”

 Inside Ricketts Glen

The security code finally clicked all clear, he heard the buzzer, the green iron door whooshed open and he saw the man in the glass booth holding the Chinese manufactured automatic weapon nod.  He nodded back and then watched as she immediately unbuttoned her coat in the climate-controlled air. “Oh my God. It is like what, 69 in here or something?”

 “To be precise, it’s kept at a constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit.” He said authoritatively. “So you like our little corner of the world?”

 “I had like seen stories about places like this, but I’d never actually like been in one? So like, who is Ricketts?”

 “Oh they were the family that owned the stadium and the baseball team.”

 “So what happened? I mean look at this place,” she said, taking in the sweeping green grass lawns lit by artificial light designed to lower blood pressure, each of the homes with their own green space, gardens, streams sprinkling through the community all encased inside a translucent bubble thin as a microchip yet capable of deflecting a nuclear attack. “I mean this place is like heaven! These Ricketts people, they must have been like geniuses or something, right?”

 “Well, depends on how you read history I guess,” he said like someone who should be smoking a pipe and wearing a faded corduroy blazer with patches on the elbow.

 “The Ricketts kids bought the baseball team and the stadium for the same reason any of us would have. It was a toy. And their Daddy had the money, so why not?”

 “Mmm,” she said, as we walked through the artificial summer air to his house.

 “They wanted to fix up the stadium. So they did what any of the wealthy folks of that era would do. They went looking for other people’s money to pay for it.”

 “So they like really did that back then?”

 “Oh but of course my dear,” he said punching in the security code for his front door. As they walked in, the size of the rooms, the décor, maybe the music, he wasn’t sure, made her eyes go wide again. “This place is something!” she whispered as she tossed her coat on a chair and begin to take it all in.

 What People Used to Believe

“C’mon” he said, the elevator is this way. I’ll show you my Tower Room.” Or, as some people called it, he thought, my bedroom.

“OK,’ she said, for some reason now a bit meekly. She then got a quizzical look on her face, “But wait, she said, these Ricketts people? Did they get other people’s money? Or did they use their own?”

 “Oh, that’s the interesting part. I mean they really tried. The first place they went was of course to the government. That was back when the way the government worked was that if the politicians and the business people who owned them said something the right way, they could make anybody believe anything.”

 “Huh?”

 “Well the Ricketts tried to get tax money, bonds, to pay to fix up their stadium. And in those days people actually believed that the more money flowed to the rich people, the better life would be for poor people.”

 “What? People like believed that? No way!”

 “Oh yeah,” I said. Back in those days, people voted against their own self interest all the time. Why I remember reading about when all this in the history books. The Ricketts kids said they wanted tax money that would have gone to schools or firemen to pay for their baseball team. It didn’t work. They ended up paying for their “stadium improvements” themselves. Giant scoreboards, walkways, hotels, retailers. And then over the years, the baseball part just kind of faded away and Ricketts Glen was built. A new standard in luxury. For the right people of course.

 

“But . . . I mean I know maybe I don’t like understand this stuff, but that makes no sense at all! How did they like pull that off?” she said as the elevator door swooshed open unto the tower room. A 360 degree view of the twinkling Chicago night, the stars blending in with the city lights.

 Kicking off her heels, she ran past the bed to the window, “Oh. My. God! This is like beautiful! No wonder they wanted to like tear down the baseball stadium! So explain to me again how they got from the crummy old baseball stadium to all this wonderful luxury? Because, like, I am really having trouble getting this.”

 “They were rich people. There was a club. They were in it.”  

“Well I’ll tell you one thing,” she said, dancing over to the bed and leaping into the middle then motioning him over with her finger.

 “What’s that?” he said as she grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him down beside her.”

 “I’m sure glad that I didn’t live back when there was a yucky old baseball stadium here.”

 “Me too. he said. Me too.”

 Then no words. Only the snow.

Falling on the bubble where there used to be a baseball park.

*****

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

James Joyce.

     The Dead

Marian McPartland, 95, died last night at her home in Port Washington, Long Island. The news brought a beat of silence. As if there were no music. Then came the sound of a coronet singing out a golden brass smiling invitation, “Now won’t you come along with me?” Husband Jimmy McPartland calling her up to heaven’s stage where those who made music that lasts forever and a day are all waiting for young Margaret Marian Turner McPartland. She’ll be on piano.

Like the portrait above, Art Kane’s iconic “Great Day In Harlem,” it’s hard at first to make out the faces up there on heaven’s stage. But it’s not hard to see Marian McPartland. In this family portrait of jazz royalty taken in 1958, Marian is the front row. Wearing the white dress. 57 musicians in that picture. 3 of them are women.

“Sometimes,” Marian would quietly reflect in those British tones that somehow wove together amusement, elegance and a towering inner strength, “sometimes I’d hear people say with wonder, ‘Why you play just like a man!’

Then she’d chuckle rip into something like John Coltrane’s ‘Red Planet,’ and there would be no questions about things like men or women. Marian McPartland had spoken. And there was just the music.

She had a connection to Chicago because husband Jimmy was as Chicago as could be. So there were friends and family here. The McPartland’s back yard being the site of some roaring good music with whoever was coming through town. Lots of stories there.

Then for years she’d spend the winter holidays with a gig at Chicago’s Jazz Showcase.

Those snowy December nights made warm inside as she would gather a bunch of friends inside that tiny room and make music that could make even the most frozen soul sing with the joy of being right here, right now. Music that told stories explaining pretty much everything without ever using words.

Once, finding myself standing next to her at the bar, not wanting to gush, and knowing I only got one question, I asked her, “So what was it like playing at The Hickory House when Duke Ellington would walk in?” She stopped for a moment, and I could see in her eyes, that she really gave the question some thought. Then her eyes got huge and she said, “I was terrified.”

With her “Piano Jazz” program on NPR, Marian McPartland, like Studs Terkel, made conversation into art. Her music will last forever.

And when the show starts up tonight in heaven, it will be like a tiny, warm bar in Chicago as the snow came down outside. Marian McPartland will be on piano. And everyone will be there.

Because Marian McPartland has a whole lot of friends.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/Mgmy9t6Qlac]

We have a dead body. This is not a whodunit. We know who done it. There’s a known offender and yet no charges.” Judge Michael P. Toomin. April 6, 2012.
The facts of the story are clear. And now, eight years after the punch was thrown and the boy went down on the street in front of the bar, hit his head on the curb and died, there is no argument about who threw that punch.

The relentless reporting on the story by Chris Fusco and Tim Novak of the Chicago Sun Times, the legal team and support from the Northwestern University MacArthur Justice Center have kept the facts clear. Kept the story front and center in the public eye.

And peaking out between every single line of fact is the glinting steel rhythm of Nanci Koschman’s foolish heart.

Nanci Koschman is the mother of the 21 year old man who was killed that night. She’s the one with the foolish heart.

Perhaps you know someone who has a foolish heart like she does. Foolish hearts are rare. But once you’ve seen one, you don’t forget. Because the foolish heart is marked by the absolute iron clad refusal to stop. In the face of odds that leave the word insurmountable in the dust. Against all notions of what’s fair or rational or moral or immoral or any label you want to slap on the situation. The foolish heart never quits. That beat never stops. That reverberation rings on forever. The smart money would give up. But the foolish heart keeps on.

Nanci Koschman needed that foolish heart. After her husband died in 1994, it was just she and David. She was not a wealthy woman. Like a lot of us, she worked a lot of jobs to get by.

Then came that April night in 2004. There was a confrontation. It’s still being debated who hit who first. But the much smaller Koschman went down, hit his head and died 11 days later as a result of the blow.

The other man in the fight left the scene. And in the initial records of the case was never identified.

That’s when what Judge Toomin called “lost file syndrome” kicked in. The judge also cited “procedural irregularities, the absence of recorded police activity, lapses, delays, failures of the identification process and false reports.”

In other words, the kind of massive chain of events unfolding exactly as they should NOT unfold that would wear down and stop so many of us.

But not Nanci Koschman and her foolish heart.

Now, eight years later, the previously unidentified man in the fight has been identified as R.J. Vanecko. The nephew of former Mayor Richard Daley.

So the speculation can of course come easy. The cries of power, and foul are of course even easier.

Mr. Vanecko has not been charged with anything. The only uncontested fact being that he did throw the punch.

So Nanci Koschman’s foolish heart keeps going. The story isn’t over yet.

But it took a gigantic turn in Nanci Koschman’s favor last Friday. The biggest single event since that heart of hers went into overdrive. Judge Toomin called for a Special Prosecutor. A request that had previously been blocked by States Attorney Anita Alverez.

Alverez did not contest the judge’s ruling. Now the case can be shepherded along outside the confines of a traditional justice system that by any known measure has failed.

Now the decision makers will be making room for Nanci Koschman too. Inviting her inside the tent where the golden rich piano chords sing out in shades of spring time hope, the music of a song just for her. A song they call—

My Foolish Heart.