Perspective

Time. Experience. Happenings. Mingling with strangers. Watching strangers. Traveling streets and neighborhoods once familiar, but now distant by decades.


I had moments – hours really! – last week that encompassed all of the above.  Monday we visited Chicago Northwestern Hospital to meet with Rocky’s surgeon. Sister in law Sharon paid for limo service; the trip into the city, the driver waiting for our consult to happen, then the ride home. Riding and not worrying about traffic or driving, I observed the world of morning rush hour as a passenger. Been a long time since that has happened. I commuted by train and car for more than 20 years. Saw many of my old work neighborhoods.


One was a reminder of my first days in the Loop as a fresh, 22 year-old fresh college grad. Finding my way in the Loop as a complete stranger. Jostling along the sidewalk with hundreds of others on the way to the office. Wondering about lunch time and where I would be. Wondering about the commute home, too. Absorbed with how I would become familiar with all this strangeness - of scale, of new, of thousands of strangers everywhere I glanced.


I watch others who were near my age back then. I sensed their newness to this experience, their wonder.


Later as we exited the limo and found our way around the large complex of buildings – people everywhere – the encounters with this new reality reminded me of how we are introduced to the new experiences of life. Startling, scary, foreboding. Yet exciting.


Still later, the ride home offered yet more vistas of the past; and perspective. The mind did not nap. Thoughts coursed through memories old and new. Until we arrived in our current world of familiar rhythms and shapes.  


On Friday, we repeated the experience. This time neighbor Pam generously arranged and paid for the limo service. The route was different than Monday’s; still more vistas of old familiar places. City vignettes. Pop-up views of yesteryear. But oh, so different. Now there are buildings where blank spaces once were. New apartment complexes with daring architecture and memorable angles of expanses of glass. New life and rhythms in this arena once solely the province of work spaces; dead space on weekends and evenings; now lively with 24/7 living of people.


People everywhere. Walking, driving, scurrying, going places with strident intent; some lolling gently in place enjoying a breeze, a cup of coffee, an idle chat with a stranger.


And still another route home with fresh views of times long ago. Fifty-four years ago my young self was planted in this place. So much has happened in those years. What was then fresh is now new again – familiar yet strange – and perspective provides meaning and weight.


Each person has a story. Like mine, the story is ever-unfolding. It has an indistinct start and no end. These stories are always unfinished. Works in progress. We don’t know them, so don’t know their story. They don’t know us, either. And yet we co-exist. It is a willing by-play of our stories. Mingled, yet not.


A writer senses the story without knowing it. Yet more perspective beckons us.


Old. New. Memory. Fresh story. Life.


June 18, 2019