I can cry only if I let myself cry, which comes perilously close to saying I cry only if I make myself do it. So when I woke up in the dead of last night crying, I felt shame.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
As if this weren’t bad enough, I soon discovered I couldn’t make the adding machine work. Our store had one of those old-fashioned mechanical adding machines that very reliably totaled things on a roll, but now, in the way of dreams, the paper somehow twisted up and got stuck. In despair I tried to total the bill with a pencil and paper. And of course soon discovered I’d forgotten how to add.
The general feeling of such a night’s sleep was still with me when I sat at the kitchen table sipping my morning tea, wondering if I should attend the weekly free concert at the Cultural Center or simply stay home, pretending I had something more important to do. That was when the phone rang. I spoke briefly to my son, who had some computer talk to get out of his system. “Go to the concert,” he concluded. “Go.” He is a good son who seems to know what’s actually in my heart.
I had no real business at the library, no books or records to return, no material to research, and no time to research it in, but for reasons too complicated to include here, I decided to see what they had on World War I and Big Bertha, the German gun that shelled Paris in 1918. I went straight to the computer, which promptly informed me that the Chicago Public Library, one of the largest in the nation, has no books on World War I. So much for the great information superhighway. By the time I had this straightened out–with the aid of a librarian who seemed only slightly less befuddled than I was–most of my hour was gone, and the uneasy mood that had begun with my nocturnal depression had darkened. It suddenly seemed imperative that I succeed at something, if only at finding a book I hadn’t wanted until today.
It was the sun that was making this young woman’s hair beautiful, and it was the sun that was making her companion’s hair beautiful. The sky had cleared unexpectedly, and the sun was straight overhead, turning the light on State Street into the kind of light artists travel far to find and treasure when they do find it. And this light was here, if only for this moment and if only for me, in the darkest, weariest month of our big-city winter on this busy, dirty downtown street. When I looked around I saw that it had touched everyone and everything, not just the hair of women but of men, and the clothes they wore, and the packages they carried in their hands, and the shoes they walked in–every fiber, every fabric, every color, every person, man and woman, young and old, rich and poor, beggar and banker and for all I know thief, silently, softly, mysteriously illuminated.
