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On August 20 I was scheduled for outpatient surgery at the University of Illinois Hospital on Taylor. My mother and I arrived early, but since I was the last patient scheduled for the operating room I had to wait for several hours. As the time crept by I became more and more apprehensive, and I frequently went outside to smoke. On one trip, a guy in his early 20s dressed in dirty shorts and T-shirt asked me for a cigarette. My growing anxiety and my weariness of forking over spare change and cigarettes must have registered in my face even as I was tapping a Kool out of my pack to give him.”I lost my baby,” he said. “Huh?” I responded. “I lost my baby,” he repeated. He put out his palm, on which rested a snapshot of an obviously injured infant, bruised and raw, comprehensively hurt. Its mouth gaped open unnaturally wide, and a tube ran from its nose to somewhere beyond the edge of the picture. Beside the picture lay a plastic hospital ID bracelet. “I’m sorry for you,” I said. I gave him an extra cigarette. I looked for him the next time I went out, and every time after that, but he was gone, and I wondered if he was just another hustler who had gotten his hands on a couple of props.
But come some freezing, gray January day, as another crowd huddles on the platform, the Oak Street Beach Express will be pressed into service.
