Roger Wright – Chicago

It’s in history books now. And my Mom was there.

A young preacher from South Carolina named Jesse Jackson arriving in Chicago, to see blocks and blocks of brutally burned out buildings on the west and south sides of the city. You could still smell the smoke. It was the aftermath of the killings that ripped hope from the heart of the nation, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy’s kids lost their fathers.

Long before there was any kind of Rainbow Coalition, or Operation PUSH, there was “Operation Breadbasket.” Formed by Reverend Jackson to get food to starving people; not people starving in a far off place, but right here.

There weren’t a whole lot of volunteers – much less women – from the northern suburbs of Chicago who raised their hands to offer their help. And by help, I don’t mean donations; I mean being there. Filling those boxes. Loading those trucks. Handing out the canned goods. Stocking the shelves of the grocery stores where the Black owned businesses had previously found their products hidden in the back.

My Mom was one of those volunteers. The kind of volunteer that treated the work like a job, not a hobby.

Child of the last depression, as soon as she was old enough to talk, she asked her Mother “what are heaven and hell?”

Her Mother answered, “Heaven is where we go when we die.”
“But what about hell?” she asked her Mother.
“We don’t believe in hell.”

Mom was not too many generations removed from the red-faced Irish on her Dad’s side and the stand up straight and tall Germans on her Mother’s side. Those who made the long, gut-wrenching trip from the old country; those who enjoyed the drink that came most times at the end of a long working day.

Her father was a lawyer, in years of both feast and famine. I can remember sitting on his lap, white hair, red face grin and I was snapping his suspenders. His rollicking laughter. His dream of being the guy who repealed Prohibition. Lawyer for the Bowman Dairy Company.

The Cheryl Wheeler lyric floats in here:

“Child of changing times

Growing up between the wars

The Fords rolled off the lines

And bars all closed their doors”

I can remember another kind of drink. From a silver thermos with a plastic red top for a cup. A golden dawn breaking over Lake Michigan. I’m sitting in the front passenger seat of our family’s VW bus. Mom’s driving. My brother and two sisters are in the back and we’ll be meeting my Dad down south in Virginia for a family vacation. Mom unscrews the top of the thermos, pours some of its contents into the cup and says, “Have some of this.” Coffee with sugar and cream stirred in, that to this day – some 40 years later – still tastes like wonder, like possibility, like…now that you are just about grown up and healthy, you can do anything you want to do.

It wasn’t always like that cup of coffee. My parents tried for five years to have children of their own; they had adoption papers signed at one point.
Then I came along, but from my first breath I was always tired. Low blood cell count. Couldn’t do a sit-up in gym class to save my life.

My Mom was there for that, too.

For the next twelve years she took me to every kind of doctor imaginable, trying to somehow figure out what the heck was wrong with her first kid – and having three more kids in the meantime. All that, and working at jobs that women of that time simply didn’t have. Not many women, especially women with four children, started their own businesses then.

But my Mom did.

My Mom picked up a guitar, partnered up with a woman originally from Louisville, Kentucky, and started performing an historical retrospective of Civil War songs at local gatherings. After her “Women of the Civil War” show came the aptly named “Chicago, Your Bustle Is Showing,” songs from the city’s really early days.

She became the musical director for the local Reform Jewish Temple. The fact that we were not Jewish might have given many women pause.

Not my Mom.

What religion we actually were, was always a pretty interesting question. Because the answer was always “all of them.”

My Mom, raised a Catholic, enrolled us in pretty much every mainstream denomination as well as Christian Science. Then when all of us grew up and left home, she got her Doctorate in Religion from Drew University.

Oh…and the career as a therapist? That came before the doctorate. Her Masters degree in Social Work. The doctorate, she said, “was for fun.”

As was her book Jewish Renewal in America Then the second book, An Awakening Heart. An historical novel on Moravian women.

Today, on her birthday, she’s working on a third book.

Like her beloved JS Bach, she was born in March. Most mothers don’t offer advice to their sons like “never listen to anything written after 1800 in the mornings.”

But my Mom did.

So again, I’m twelve years old. Breakfast time. And a Brandenburg Concerto fills the house. There is a time shift and that Brandenburg segues into another piece of my musical memory.

It’s New Year’s Eve. Everyone’s asleep except my Mom and me. Staying up to listen to the Midnight Special on radio station WFMT. Pete Seeger sings:
My land is a good land
It’s a good land so they say.

On her Birthday today, I hear all that musical memory and recall that I know lots of songs like the Bach, the Pete Seeger or even just the other day when she told me how much she was liking Miles Davis’s “Sketches of Spain.”

And did I mention how she now likes Stevie Ray Vaughn?

Mom’s music. Still in tune.

A tired grey morning rain, boarding the elevated train in Chicago, reaching up to grab the strap, standing shoulder to shoulder. She shoots a fast glance as the train lurches forward and our shoulders touch. Decides I’m safe. Leans down to keep scrolling her phone, shakes the red hair from her face. The train slows, a seat opens, I invite her to sit down with my eyes and a nod. She does. And from the packed aisle of the train, no one moves to sit next to her. She looks up at me and with a tiny smile of amusement and with a shake of the head asks the world, “Was it something I said?”

So I sit down next to her. Shoulder to shoulder. Lightly grazing thighs with the rumble and clank of the train on down to the center of the city. She looks up from the phone. I am remembering your smile. Perhaps, she sees me and wonders about a grandfather she never knew as we touch shoulders. What’s the old man smiling about?

Then the train doors swish open and I hear the rain, I’m back in Paris with the water washing down the gutters of the ancient stone streets that flow, like time, down the hill from the gleaming white Basilica Sacre Coeur. I smell coffee that lights up the morning and like Holly Near once sang, “frees my soul and I ain’t ready to grow that old.”

Once again, I am six hours or so from sitting down next to you on the steps of the Basilica, gazing out together over Paris in the mid day sunlight and saying the absolute most profound thing I could come up with at the time, which was, “Didn’t I see you in the Monet museum this morning?”

At which point, you looked over with only enough interest to smirk, “That was deep.”

A few seconds passed, you got up, paused to look at the rippling city in the sunlight below, stretched, and I almost believed, like McMurtry once said, that it really was possible to fall in love with someone while they were stretching.

Being pretty good with the more primal of life’s needs, I remember saying something about being hungry. Probably something dumb like, “Know where you can get any good French food around here?” Then, and this is a mystery I still never have and never will, till my very last breath, figure out, somehow we were in a café, there was wine that amazed, and cheese and fruit and sausage and the afternoon shadows were falling in a way that marked our Paris as the one of centuries past.

We never stopped talking.

My new book had just come out. I remember reading you stories out loud. I remember telling you instantly the truth in the story about how the Blonde had come back with coffee and croissants one spring morning and announced, “Roger? I’m a Princess. I just thought you should know.”

The Princess was soon gone. Vanished except for the way she hovered over so many stories. And now you’re gone too.

Which is why it’s so strange that you keep coming back and filling in what’s between the lines of all these new stories.

But back then? I thought that loving someone enough meant that eventually they’d change.

And of course that doesn’t happen.

So the city lights dimmed. And you stayed, until it was time, for both of us to go.

And as much as I sang and wrote and wrote about all those mysteries you never believed in, I never imagined you’d come back. I never imagined a sequel.

Till right this very second.

The Chicago train swishes into the Grand Station, the red haired woman gets up and wonder of wonders, leaves a smile for her imagined Grandfather, me. She smiles at me and there you are. That smile like a sequel. That smile brings you back.

From the smoky mists that rise from the fires you lit, in a story called “Pale Grey For Guilt” John McDonald’s timeless hero Travis McGee writes a letter to his future,

“ . . . and now and again, when she is asleep and you are awake, and your arms are around her and you are sleeping like spoons, with her head tucked under your ugly chin, pretend it is ‘me’, who loved you.”

Even right here in this story today, the young girl leaves the train. And you come back as she tosses me a smile.

And that will have to do.

“How did it end? Make your own damn ending. I don’t remember. And if this picture fades to black, does the ending even matter?”

Inside a no name neighborhood tavern of smoke and memories. An empty Chicago Street in a February wind. The old man whispers to last years calendar hung crooked behind the bar. The bartender hovers in the background quiet because it’s not the first time he’s heard this story. The old man’s whispers are like muted thunder that had forgotten how to roar.

The old man whispers to the calendar, “Course it was winter back then. Winter, all those years ago when we woke up in that Montana cabin surrounded by the snow.”

Winter when we walked out into the sunlight for the trip back down the mountain to Stapleton Airport. I never really thought I’d see her again. We didn’t talk much. No music played.

The old man takes a breath and dreams up a wavering shadow of a face. A much younger man. When he first told the story. Back when folks would read what he wrote. Sometimes even want to talk to him about the story. That was the best. When someone else, maybe even a stranger, would want to talk to him about the story. But the best of all? When that stranger’s load got even just a little bit lighter because they recognized something in the music of the story that made them nod their head and say “Me too.”

He called the first part of the story. “Like Love.” That was the one about how they met in Chicago. Part Two was “Like Music.” A trip through a musical snowstorm. The storm that lit the way to that cabin in Montana.

Course every now and then he’d get a question that he never really figured out how to answer. Somebody would say something like, “hey wait a minute. Are these stories true? I find it hard to believe those stories really happened. I mean, c’mon. Look at you. Look at her. You see what I’m saying? You just made all this up, right?”

“Hah!” the old man pounded his fist on the bar. “Are these stories true!” he shouted at the old calendar. The bartender glanced over. Went back to polishing the glass. You want to find the truth in a story? Well, how about this. How about finding out the ending of the story first. Let’s see how it ends. Because if you know how a story ends, maybe the part about the truth doesn’t matter anymore.

So what’s the ending of this story? Of course it started with a song, just like everything else between us did.

Why right after we got to Denver, checked in the car, walking to our flights, and it was Muzak we heard. That’s right. Muzak. More like a machine than a song. Piped in drivel that they used to play in airports. But she picked it up. She could hear things like nobody else could. The mere hint of a song was all she needed. So just as this song started, we stepped on an escalator. She was a step above me. The song started, she turned around and she lip-synched it right in my face. Those sparkling eyes telling me it was just the two of us who got the joke. That blonde hair sailing, flying, she sang just for me to hear. She sang the old Dusty Springfield song,

You stopped and smiled at me
Asked if I care to dance.
I stepped into your open arms
And I didn’t stand a chance

Right that second, hearing that song, that’s when I said it. As the escalator steps folded up, I said, “Come to Chicago. Make a new home with me. Let’s try.”

“But it’s only been four days!” She stopped at the top of the escalator. Crowds swirling all around us. “And I’m under contract. I have a job! It’s what I’ve been talking about! The new TV series. Where I can almost be myself!”

“And you can’t . . ..”

“You wouldn’t want me to . . ..”

“Well they have airplanes between Chicago and LA . . .”

“So we’d see each other on weekends?”

“Yeah,” I said. And then in the airport throng walking towards our gates, “But we’d be married.”

Which stopped her cold. Blue eyes wide as the Rocky Mountain skies.

I saw her turn to look out the window at the giant planes on the tarmac framed by the mountains, and I heard Bob Segar sing,

She looked out the window a long, long moment
Then she looked into my eyes
She didn’t have to say a thing
I knew what she was thinking

“What’s the name of the town we’d live in? The one where you grew up?”

“Evanston.”

“Is there a McDonalds or a Carl’s Junior in Evanston?”

“There’s a Burger King”

And as John Hiatt’s song rushed through my head . . . . .

I thought I had a line on something
Maybe no one else could say
And they couldn’t find it in their hearts
To just get out of my way
Then out of nowhere, and from nothing
You came into my life
I’d seen an angel or two before
But I’d never asked one to be my wife

“You know I’ve never lived anywhere but LA?” she said.

“Mmm”

“And you know I’m nutso crazy. Kind of competitive.”

“Do I ever.”

“OK then yes!”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“She said yes!” I shouted out to a group of 6 sailors.” One gave me a thumbs up. Another said “Awesome” and the other four just stared.

The February winds outside the tavern shook the building. The old man drew a breath.

And that calendar behind the bar answered, “Nice. But too cute. I’m not buying. If this had a happy ending, then why are you here? Where is she? At home in the kitchen making brownies?”

“Too sweet?” said the old man, now answering himself, “OK. How about this. How about you pick the ending? Harder than it looks, ain’t it? Want some help?” he asked the calendar. And when there was only silence, he went on. “Here, let me help you with a song. Another John Hiatt lyric. Maybe this will prompt your ending.”

Well now the babies are all sleeping
And the twilight’s givin’ in
She looks like you, he looks like her
And we all look like him
Well maybe it’s just the little thing
The way I feel tonight
A little joy
A little peace
And a whole lot of . . .

That give you an ending? Nice song like that. Or does that make the ending even more cloudy?

Then in amidst the dialogue with himself, The old man stands up, nods to the bartender, pulls the collar up on his coat and heads up and out into the wind.

Is that the ending?

Alone now on the empty street. Calendar gone. He remembers that today was the day was the day he was finally going to throw away that thick, yellowed folder full of medical tests, plastered with his name. The one he had stashed behind the books on the bottom row of the shelf. All those tests. All that money. All that time.

An ending stuffed in that folder. The proof that there would be no babies. Not now. Not ever. Nobody would be looking like anybody. Not if he was to be the Dad

Not if he was to be the Dad.

Oh he had an ending alright. Just like Bob Dylan’s song. She didn’t even like Bob Dylan. But he still heard . . .

He woke up.
The room was bare.
He didn’t see her anywhere.
The neon sign above the bar on the deserted street beat out a rhythm so faint, he had to strain to hear it. A rhythm like an ending.

Stumbling through the darkness. Now the only light is a memory of her sparkling eyes that time he said, “Let’s try.”

And she answered him, “Yes.”

Once he said, “Let’s try.”

And she answered him “Yes.”

It was back when we all had plenty of time.
A late night call. I was up. Scribbling something unmemorable in a spiral notebook under the circular pool of light cast by a metal gooseneck lamp.

The caller ID said Los Angeles. I remembered the number. Even after two years of never seeing it at all. So I picked up the phone. And then as if the conversation had never stopped, you said, “So come to Denver tomorrow.”

“Peachface?”

Your laugh. Like a bubbling fountain lit with the colors of a soul born wise. “So I’m still just fruit to you, huh?”

“Fruit, famous bimbo, circus clown . . . “ I heard background noise, a piano, cranked up a notch. Somebody was singing something. There was a crowd. “Where are you, Melon?”

“I’m at Warren Zevon’s house.”

“What’s he like?”
“Intense.”

“I’ll bet. So, I gotta tell you. This is a surprise. How’s work going?”

“I got another TV series.”

“That’s wonderful! Congratulations!” She filled me in on the production deal. The premise. The characters. “That is really great.”

And then she said it again. “Come to Denver.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Listen Lemon-Lime, I can’t just go flying off to Denver! I gotta work. Tomorrow there’s a meeting on the IPO and I . .”

“Oh yeah. I forgot. You’re like Mr. Software Executive, can I get you some coffee sir, oh of course I’ll sit down and sir, why are you touching me there . . . . .”

“Yeah that’s a normal day.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s okay. We’re going public soon and I’m cashing out. So there will be a little bit of money if a rainy day ever comes. A rainy month, not so much. But a few good days.”

“Okay, then you really gotta come to Denver.”

“ Kiwi, it’s been two years since that one weekend in Chicago. And you really want me to come to Denver. Why Denver?’

“Cause there’s this cabin. Way north. But we start driving at Denver. Cabin belongs to a friend of a friend. I’m gonna start work on the new series soon. So I thought. . . .okay, I know I didn’t return a call or two, but then I remembered how weirdly normal you are. . . .and if we went out cross country skiing and met a bear? I’d need somebody there who could out-talk the bear.”

Denver was a regular stop in my travels for work. I knew the flights. While we talked, I reached for a book people used to have that listed airline flights.

“So you really want me to come to Denver? You’d risk a whole, TV and movie star seen with a nobody thing?”

“Roger, are you gonna go all ‘star is born’ on my ass? Walk into Lake Michigan and take the big drink” Force me into playing Barbara Streisand? You know I don’t want to be Barbara Streisand.”

“I know. You want to be Lucy. I remember. So you’re sure you want me to come?”

“Why are you asking me that question? You’re still a guy, right? That same batshit crazy cocktail of macho and sensitive I remember? That time in the Four Seasons in Chicago? You remember I was the loud one? And how much more fun showers were when you had company? You are still a guy, right?”

I answered, “6:00 arrival. Denver International. United Flight 545. Tomorrow night.”

And I hung up the phone.

This was back when we all had plenty of time. Everything seemed so easy. And no one knew it wouldn’t always be that way.

Barreling down the runway the next afternoon, strapped in wheels up. A straight shot through the sky to Denver amazed at how easy it was to just go. The one thing I always did was make sure to have people who could be in charge around me at work. So now they were. Back then there was no Black Berry, on or off the grid, 24×7.

So the world faded as the plane climbed, and the songs in my head started up.

The Isely Brothers. “If you leave me a hundred times. A hundred times I’ll take you back.”

Then, landing in the snowstorm, so the music stopped for a moment. She was in the corner of the gate by herself. Not looking like a movie star; just looking bright-eyed happy. One open palm wave. Then a slow motion walk, holding back a magnetic pull. She sticks out her hand as if to shake and then busts loose; jumping up to wrap her legs around my waist and the only word I remember after that was “Hi.”

The car was in her name. I remember the look on the rental car guys face when he handed me the keys. A look that said, “Damn I wish I was you.”

Then out to the starry Rocky Mountain night. “As soon as you got here it stopped snowing,” she said. She put the mix tape she had made into the slot as we began the winding road up to the pine trees, and Bob Dylan sang as we talked. We missed not a beat of the silent two years. Everything was easy when we talked. Dylan sang

“If you go where the snowflakes storm, when the rivers freeze and summer ends”

And the pines sang a private melody all our own.

Her Dad had been a DJ, and she had been making mix tapes since she was five years old. Driving up further into the mountains, it was as if her music let us own the road. Lowell George sang

“All, all that you dream, comes through shining, silver lining”

As we glided up into that starlit night, the song flowed into Frank Sinatra singing

“You are the promised kiss of springtime, that makes the lonely winter seem long.”

Then Bonnie Raitt…

“You made me leave my happy home, you took my love and now you’re gone”

And just for one instant, looking at a giant boulder that had tumbled down the side of the mountain and feeling the rush of the Big Thompson stream cascading in the darkness to the side of the highway, just for one second, I could see a time when it wouldn’t always be this easy. But that faded fast, as Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds bopped along, asking
“Heart, why are you pounding like a hammer? 
Heart, why are you beating like a drum?

We talked some more about the premise of her show. How much she was going to able to be herself. A lot more than last time. But not as much as the next time. Back when we all had plenty of time, the conversation always stopped at any talk of future.

On into the mountains and the night. The talk and the music so easy, the rhythm we had together was so warm, that she fell asleep, leaving me with directions to the cabin. We pulled in at the dawn, having been up all night. A private little jewel of luxury nestled in a circle of pine trees. Not a neighbor in site. Five miles from the nearest town. A view past the circle of pines out across the tops of the mountains, the golden light of coming day rising with the sun.

“Wake up little TV girl,” I leaned over and kissed her forehead. “We’re here.”

As her eyes opened to the first light of the sun, the knowing wisdom in the old Kris Kristofferson song ended her mix,

“I have seen the morning
Burning golden on the mountains in the skies.
Aching’ with the feelin’
Of the freedom of an eagle when she flies. . .

I don’t know the answer to the easy way
She opened every door in my mind.
But dreamin’ was as easy as believin’
It was never gonna end.
And lovin her was easier than anything I’ll ever do again.”

Back when we all had plenty of time.

Back when we had time.

*********
Photo Credit: Paws Up Montana

Because when you smiled like spun golden daybreak, planted your palms on your hips and said “I play a bimbo on TV!” there had to be a place to tell the story.

It was July. Blisteringly hot on the Chicago Lakefront. This was a couple of summers after “The Blues Brothers” was shot, reviving Chicago as a movie making location. Even movies that would someday be “put on the shelf.”

I nodded and said “Mmm” when you used that phrase. Pretending I knew what it meant. This was an hour or so after you had swung your leg up above your head, slipped it into the stirrup, and with a grace that looked as if you had the whole move planned, sailed over the horse and back down splat into the just watered-down mud on the other side.

And I was the only one in the beehive of people and cables and cameras and 3rd assistant directors and people—like me—who had just stopped to watch; I was the only one who didn’t laugh.

Which wasn’t easy. Because you were born funny. Funny falling from the horse. Funny when you grabbed the soap from me in the shower later that night and started singing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” Funny was something that was in your blood.

The really funny part, though, was that every time you said “you really don’t know who I am?” – and I would answer with a different name each time – I really, truly did not know who you were.

I believe my first guess was “Gandhi?” To which you answered. “How did you figure it out?”

“Blondie’s hot sister” came next. Later it was “Gidget with the Truck Stop Mouth.”

You thought it was both wonderful and disappointing that I had never seen your TV show.

After I handed you my beach towel to get the mud off and said, “Guess you don’t ride horses much, huh?” You smiled hesitantly. Then gave me a top to bottom look as if you were an x-ray machine and said, “What?”

And I said, “So do you want to do what TV people do or do you want some Italian Food where the real people eat?”
“Where I come from, there are no real people.”

“Oh, so you’re some kind of surfer chick huh? How does a surfer chick come to make a movie about medieval knights. . .”

“In white satin.” It was as if we’d always finished each other’s sentences.
“That dress looks like it weighs as much as a small car,” I said.

“Pretty close. But I got a tank top and cut off shorts and flip-flops in that trailer over there. If I go put them on, will you wait?” she looked up at me.

“Don’t you have to ask someone permission to just leave?”
And again that smile of yours. “I play a Bimbo on TV. I can do what I want!”

So we walked over the North Avenue bridge and onto where the water met shore and started heading south towards the giant DRAKE HOTEL sign and the Four Seasons where you kept saying you were staying and every time you did I said, “Yeah, right.”

About half way to the Drake Hotel you said, “OK. Let’s just say I’m not staying there. Let’s just say I DON’T play a bimbo on TV. Let’s say I live right here on this piece of cement.” And you sat down, swinging your legs over the side, above the water. I sat down next to you. And we started talking. About Los Angeles. About your Dad. Your TV show. The talk came like some sort of thousand mile river. Winding and flowing, wild and raging, then soft like a hidden forest pond.

The sun started going down behind the buildings. And in the early easy darkness I took your hand as we got up. Your long blond hair tumbling out as your red baseball cap came off. You reached down and snatched up the cap. “I don’t want to be recognized, not now.”

“Yeah, me neither.” And you stuck your tongue out looking like Lucy trying to stare down Desi and I remember thinking, this is what a star looks like.

At the Four Seasons you walked into the lobby and people started bowing and scraping like some sort of Queen just showed up and you whispered, “Just look down till we get to the elevator.” And when the elevator door glided shut with a whoosh, you looked at me and said “Whoosh!” and you kissed like sunlight.

Up in the silence of the big suite I opened drawers and tapped on walls and played with electronic stuff I didn’t understand while you got ready to go out.

There was a Linda Ronstadt song playing. “You and I travel to the beat of a different drum.” You came out of the bathroom just as thunder crackled across the city sky. We went to the window and the rain was coming down on Lake Michigan in sheets. Linda Ronstadt sang, “Don’t get me wrong, its not that I knock it. . .” We started dancing.

And we didn’t leave that room for two straight days.

Ernie Banks died tonight. And in the summer green fields of heaven, they are playing baseball. Later on, I’ll go listen to Steve Goodman sing “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.” But not right now.

Tonight I hear the crack of the bat and the rumbling roar of the crowd in the sunshine. Mr. Cub has just hit his 500th home run and when you watch him lope around the bases, head down grace in motion, you’ll run those bases with him and it will be a trip that will last your whole life through.

Tomorrow there will be a news conference. There will be tributes. Tributes galore. But not right now. Right now there is a still, grey pallor that hangs over the city on this cold winter night. It’s like the opposite of baseball. The night Ernie Banks died.

6 blocks east, Wrigley Field lies in tatters. A renovation that won’t be done in time for the start of the season. A construction site that hurt my very soul when I first saw it. Place looks like someone took a giant cleat and stomped it into bits of broken toy.

So Ernie’s gone to greener fields to finish out his double header.

Here, we’ll still be expecting him on TV for just one more interview. I remember not too long ago he had an idea about ending hunger. That was Ernie. He made no small plans.

Here in this big shoulder city, as the years go on, if you look real hard when you’re walking down a street or a path through a park, and if you catch a glimpse of a smile like summer, or if you hear somebody talking happy, or if you see a gleam in someone’s eye like a warm day in June with the sun sprinkled soul of a giant; if you see any of that, you’ll be seeing Ernie Banks.

The best of us. That smile.

Everybody now, “Let’s Play Two!”

Here’s to Ernie. God bless him. Playing baseball in the sunshine.

“Let’s Play Two.”

Fritz died on Christmas Day . . . and I remember . . .

Years ago. I’m stepping off the curb, about to cross Damen Avenue one spring Sunday when this car creeps up behind me slow and rolls on to the grass and sidewalk. Lumbering like some chrome and blue sheet metal monster, Fritz is wide eyed and grinning at the wheel pretending like he’s going to hit me. I start laughing and don’t stop till he’s parked. We cross together and walk into the church.

Ever visit Chicago’s famed Berghoff Restaurant? Back when the elegant wood paneled center of the action was operating in full German efficiency mode, the smell of the sausage, pot roast, potatoes and always the famous creamed spinach was like a culinary bridge back to the old world. Service that was quick and elegance that was for everyone. That famous creamed spinach recipe that Herman Berghoff always kept a secret. That was Fritz’s recipe.

Stop and Shop was another Chicago institution, now gone. But when it thrived, it too was a bridge back to the most joyous and bustling European marketplace. Old world marketplaces that reached across the centuries. The smells of spices and the meats and cheeses and freshly baked bread.

Stories of Stop and Shop. Stories of catering for the wealthy clientele, the elite on Lake Shore Drive? Stories of another time brought alive and made real for right now. Right this very second.
Stories that showed the eternal hope in hard work, generosity, spectacular food, good friends, church family and most of all love.

If you wanted stories like that, you could listen to Fritz.

You could look in his wise and knowing eyes and understand that he’d lived those stories.

Generosity? I remember more than once, agonizingly long meetings in the basement of the church, trying to somehow find the money to keep the lights on, keep the music going. And Fritz would sit, on one of the brown metal folding chairs, off to the side. Legs crossed. He would watch. Say nothing. Up until we got to the point of saying just how much money we were short. Often no small sum. There would be a second of silence as we took in the number. There would be that doubt that always comes with true faith. And then as that doubt would sink in, Fritz would raise his hand and say. “I’ll take care of it.” And he did.

Fritz, for all the stories and the laughter, commanded respect. I remember watching one of Chicago’s premier chefs first meet Fritz. And when she was introduced, when she realized who he was, I saw her nod in respect and simply say to him, “Chef.”

Fritz could communicate by his presence. Simply by the way he walked into a room.

Like when he would walk into the church. His beloved Sylvia on his arm. The way he looked at her. The way his eyes would shine. These two wise souls.

The way they showed the world love.

Fritz. We will remember you.

Alone on an empty sidewalk in an arctic blast of Chicago winter wind that could easily crush a soul. He looks up from his phone. Normally there would be hundreds walking this slight rise in front of the Prudential Building, across the street from Millennium Park. But the cold is here now. So it’s just the two of us. And he says, “Can you please help me?”

“Sure. What are looking for?”

“Giordano Chicago deep dish pizza. Is somewhere near here?”

“It’s in this building. C’mon. I’m walking that way. Good day for hot pizza.”

“Oh yes! Chicago pizza!”

“Where are you from?

“I come from South Korea. From Seoul?”

“Really! I have a niece from South Korea now. She and my nephew and their daughter live in Wales. But she is from South Korea. And at their wedding I had the Korean food made by her mother and I loved it! Today would be a great day for Kimchi!”

“You like,” his face showing true surprise, “Kimchi?”

“I love it!”

“You know, every family has their own. Every family makes it different.”

“I did not know that.”

He nods. I point at the Giordano sign at the corner just as a blast of wind almost blows us both off our feet. “Well, time for you to eat some pizza and I’ll go find some Kimchi.”

“Kimchi! You like Kimchi!” He nods his head vigorously, thanks me, turns and walks off into the wind and his pizza.

And somehow the world gets just a tiny bit warmer.

That actually happened. . .

At my neighborhood grocery store.

Looking up at two skyscraper mountains of sweet potatoes when the woman walks up, stands right next to me and asks the exact same question rippling silently through my mind.

“What’s the difference between a garnet and a jewel sweet potato?”

“That,” I answer back as if answering this stranger’s questions came as natural as breathing, “is a really good question. Let me find out.”

So I ask the produce guy walking by. I’m not even looking at the woman. And in the time it takes the produce guy to answer, “no real difference at all,” I notice the guy standing behind the woman.

And the fact that the woman is now staring wide eyed at me.

A second passes and she says, “Roger?”

It takes me at least 5 seconds. She’s got to be at least 10 years younger than I (boy, was that wrong…we’re the same age).

That same sparkle in her eyes as if she knows the joke and also thinks it’s hilarious. A musical laugh that resonates every rainbow color. She looks at me. Laughing. Knowing something I don’t know.

I do not know who she . . . . .

“No,” I finally blurt out.

Nodding her head smiling she says “Yes!”

All I can manage, because any attempt to say something clever or even intelligible would end up a verbal puddle on the floor in front of the sweet potato mountains, is a hoarse “No!”

Then she turns to the grim-faced guy behind her and says, “This is my husband Jack. . . Jack, meet my ex-husband Roger.”

I shake hands with Grim-Faced. I smile and say something stupid to him like, “Well, you sure have good taste!” So much for the whole “I’m a writer” thing; I can’t even speak.

She asks, a catch in her voice that probably no one else can hear, (except for maybe Mr. Grim-Faced) “Well, how is Rachel?” And my stock line of “that ended before I even sobered up from the wedding” is nowhere in sight. All I can mumble is a “that didn’t last very long.”

I grab for a fact, any fact, as if it were a sweet potato from the pile behind us. Something solid to hold onto. I say, “But I’ve been with the same person for 14 years now.” The “fact” label shattering like a cracked mirror beneath the weight of the true message of “Hey, I don’t mess things up anymore. Not like I used to. Not like I did with you.”

“How are your parents?” she asks.

“Oh. they’re great. Just great. They live in a senior community outside of Princeton and. . . . how long has it been? It must be almost 20 years now? Do you even live in Chicago? I lost you so long ago.”

“Well,” she points a shoulder back at her husband, “He found me! We’re on the east coast. We’re just here to see my Mom. Haven’t been in Chicago in years and years.”

“Is your Mom OK? Is she still in . . .”

“Yep. She’s doing great. Same place! We just stopped in here by chance to pick up some stuff to take out to the suburbs. What are the odds?”

“What are the odds!” I repeat.

“This would be too unbelievable for a movie,” she laughs. “Unless it was a Woody Allen movie! How are Ben and Sarah?” Ben and Sarah are my niece and nephew.

“Oh, Ben just got married!”

She puts her hand over her mouth. Then down to her knee. “He was this tall the last time I saw him! And Sarah?”

“She lives in London. Managing a bake shop last I heard.”

The capacity for asking questions was starting to return along with the feeling of blood in my extremities. The Husband was clearly not enjoying this little scene. It could not have been easy.

We chatted for maybe a minute or two. Mostly about the coincidence. “It was really good to see you again,” I said to her.

That’s when it happened.

She opened her arms to give me a hug. And here’s what rushed back.

Just for a moment we had parked the car barely within the sounds of the rock and roll band streaming out from the stage of a big outdoor arena called Poplar Creek that used to be on the outskirts of Chicago. Traffic was bad. We were late. But in the distance we could hear the band Dire Straits skating over their song “Romeo and Juliet.” And we started running. Zigging and zagging around the cars as if they were stones in the rushing river of our life.

We had to step on one slippery clean river rock before stepping on to the other. Get to that next rock or fall in to the river. We had to get to our seats before the song ended. Before we heard that one line.

Then the river rushed in fast forward motion. Another scene. This one very different.

Me and 2 pals moving my stuff out of that deathly sad house she and I had bought on Carmen Street while she sat quiet on the basement stairs.

That house like a gothic dungeon. After I was gone, she told me about the time the squirrel chewed its way inside.

Looking in her eyes in the grocery store I thought:

You were alone. I was gone. And I start repeating to myself. “I am sorry, I am sorry, I am so, so sorry. I tried so hard to never let you down.”

From the sorrow of that dark and empty house where none of the walls ever got painted. That house where no one breathed. Back to that parking lot at Poplar Creek.

We are still holding hands running though that parking lot. The river’s wild. We don’t have much time.

Then another time shift.

This one to the future. The day after I saw her at the base of Sweet Potato Mountain.

Talking with my wife about the shock of this encounter. How it turned into an answer to a prayer I never knew I made.

And my wife says, “You couldn’t really see the full picture back then. All you could see was all the ways you disappointed her. All you couldn’t do for her. That’s all that you could see. You couldn’t see the rest of it. You couldn’t see she loved you. You couldn’t see she really loved you.”

Then it is back to that river of that parking lot running towards that music. We toss our tickets to the gatekeepers. We keep running. And scrambling down the aisle. The song is still playing. Mark Knopfler is still singing. We get a firm footing on one more slippery rock together, jump as hard and as far as we can and land in our seats, just as Knopfler sings her name and says, “I’d do the stars with you, any old time. . . . . .”

How true that was.

And we are back at the foot of the Sweet Potato Mountains.

A long hug goodbye. A short wave. A nod to the husband.

And the circle is closed.