I was in Chicago for only four short days, the trip a blur, a weird dream with technicolor sand in my eyes.
Was it jet lag or had everything in Wrigleyville changed that much?
I’m not just talking about the two middle-aged women whom I haven’t seen since they were young men. Or the guy with the gnome-like beard wearing a flower-girl hippie dress. He just didn’t rock it the way Janis Joplin could. Or the New Age Drink aisle at Jewel, whatever a New Age drink is. What happened to Kool-Aid, Tang and Hawaiin Punch?
There were Godzilla-like shadows lurking on Broadway thanks to vintage brownstones replaced with monster high-rises. Street names have been changed, the honorary aliases confusing the heck out of the GPS lady, like Beth Murphy Way.
I looked at the price of donuts at Stans donut shop and almost had a coronary. One donut was more than an entire box of Entenmanns!
Maybe it isn’t Chicago’s Wrigleyville that has changed, but me.
I was in Chicago only for an extended layover with two missions, other than to eat a chocolate covered old-fashioned. The first was to get my winter coat. Winter is July in South America, and I wanted to be prepared for the blistering sixty-degree weather. I’ll spare you the comments I got at O’Hare as I boarded my Latam flight to Lima.
But the second reason and real reason I was in Chicago was to line up some ducks to sell my condo.
Yes, sell.
I purchased the nine hundred square feet thirty years ago when my dad was still alive, disco was dead, and shoulder pads were the rage. My pops gave the place two thumbs up, especially with the view over Brompton, as he enjoyed watching folks trying to parallel park on the side streets.
The condo holds more memories than it has space. It’s like that abandoned suitcase on the luggage carousel that’s bleeding underwear, memories poking out of broken zippers, tears and laughter escaping.
I brought my realtor into the unit for a quick tour. For me it was a trip down memory lane, for him it was a panic situation, where he’s calling everyone he knows. The painter. The floor guy. The apartment stager, to make sure the nine-hundred square feet shows well on a pocket sized cell phone.
But we were looking at things through different lens. Where he saw not-so-stainless appliances in the kitchen, I saw thirty teen girls of various skin pigment sleeping on every inch of the floor. Where he saw a scratch on the wooden floors, I saw my feet dancing to the Bulls repeat win, watching it on a black and white TV about the size of a microwave oven. I’m not even going to tell you his comments regarding the huge antique mirror in the bedroom, one that a ghost lives in, according to the grandmothers of two tenants.
Yes, two.
I saw the bookshelf where my wasband and I kept the globe, the one we spun like a Roullet wheel when deciding where to move abroad, deciding to say no to any country that rhymed with diarrhea because it most likely would give us diarrhea. Deciding on Bangkok, until we saw the city catch on fire in 2010 on CNN, our dreams going up in flames too, until I received an email about a school in China that needed a team of teachers. A quaint village of six million with a new Walmart that sold cheese.
“Are you sure you want to sell?” the realtor asks.
“You would too if you had to deal with a broken toilet seal during a blizzard in Chicago while you are living in China.”
It’s hell being a landlord abroad.
After being persuaded that I needed to hire stagers for my apartment (this better keep the ghost at bay, I told myself as I looked at the price), I squeezed in a q visit to the temple of me, aka my storage unit. I wanted to nab some items I’ve been dreaming about, or let’s say, items that have been stalking my thoughts, hiding somewhere in the boxes that didn’t arrive from China until after I settled in Lima. That is why my school wardrobe consisted of piecemeal items from village discount, as much as I could shove into a brown bag for twenty bucks. But more than my work dresses, I wanted those assorted things dripping with memory and emotion, things without price tags, but tugging strings of my heart.
While Sotheby’s wouldn’t appraise these items as sunken treasure from a Spanish trip, to me, they are priceless booty. They include a shotput-sized paperweight from a sixth-grade student. The swirling blue dolphins will forever look like frozen tears. A pressed flower thingy from a teacher who survived a terrible divorce. A swingline stapler from my late Uncle Charles, who survived POW camps of WW2 only to end up an ELD teacher, both harrowing feats. Then my dad’s small sketch of a pin-up girl that resembles a woman hanging on a cross, and a cool tree-thingy made by my high school friends.
And my mom. Got to rescue mom from my storage unit.
On the flight back to Lima, maybe because of my parka, I got a good seat. It was just like George Jetson’s briefcase and folded out into a bed with enough movies to watch on a round trip to Mars. The flight attendant even insisted I called her by her first name. Seriously? I ate my first-class meal at one am, some ravioli with a fancy name, as if that’s a normal time for anyone other than college students stumbling out of bars, I wanted to see if the ravioli was better than frozen Stouffers.
I arrived in Lima being escorted to the city by a sky of stars. The memories of Spain and Portugal are now packed in the storage locker of my mind, my socks need to be surgically removed, and my apartment to seemingly have shrunk while I was away. I live in the hip Barranco area of Lima, but not in the hip part, but under the “R” in the Pepsi Sabor sign on the Republica de Panama. The outdoor balcony is barely wide enough for a yoga mat, the traffic noise louder than if I lived on Lake Shore Drive, not like the place I am selling, but actually living on the black and white stripe.
While I had to say goodbye to Entenmann’s donuts, I got to say Buenos Dias to a favorite bakery.
I also said hello to the Chorrillos Fish Market for some sardines to remake a fabulous meal I had in Lisbon. I saw a fisherman haul in the fresh catch. This guy had the physique of Sponge Bob: a compact body and short legs. He waded through water colder than a James Bond Martini.
As I walked home along the ocean thinking about the whirlwind past three weeks, I saw this boat in the sand, or the skeleton of a boat that once was. Like a layover in Chicago, or a pilgrimage down the El Camino Santiago, or a vanishing boat on the shores of a Peruvian fishing village, life will soon be gone.
Enjoy it while you can.
But leave the winter parka at home.
