second city, first time

Last week I went to Chicago. Yes, at the tail end of what Seattle news was selling as a snowpocalypse marauding the eastern half of the country. But I had plane, hotel and meals paid for by professional development funds, and plans to develop quite professionally via literary sessions at the Modern Language Association conference, so I was not to be deterred by wind chill nor ice pellets. Plus, I had an escort.

Walter and I arrived at SeaTac with time to spare before the delayed flight out, and we started things on a high note. I had missed the memo about revised security protocol and so was elated at the surprise of not having to remove my shoes or laptop. Also delightful was the twittering live bird the woman behind me in line was traveling with. A Bloody Mary topped with a prawn skewer completed my flight prep, and we finally boarded to find the plane only 2/3rds full. The empty middle seat seemed lavish; the four-hour ride was a breeze.

Descending over "the city of big shoulders" in the dark was a powerful way to discover just how big it is -- from the south side of the plane I had no view of the great black mass of the lake; the lights just went on and on and on. The biggest city I ever beheld, it took my breath away a little bit. If that sounds weird coming from someone raised in Los Angeles, it's not, because LA just sprawls around the hills in patches, while the flatness of Chicago lets it collect in a single potent core. Arriving at O'Hare confirmed my awe. We taxied the tarmac for so long I thought the pilot was driving us to the hotel.

It was seven degrees Fahrenheit outside when we reached baggage claim, and time to find out just how intolerable such a temperature was going to be. It was not at all. Wearing three layers under a puffy jacket, wool hat, scarf and mittens, it didn't feel any different to me than 17 in Seattle a month prior had. And the true, high-packed white snow on the ground was lovely.

We thought it was the dinner hour when we checked into the Sheraton, but it was almost 10pm there, and on Wednesday night that meant almost closing time for the pool and the restaurant. We quickly appointed our rooms (happily next door to each other), confirmed our WiFi, and took our go-green-by-eschewing-maid-service coupons to the steak house in the lobby. Prosecco, Stella, a few rich side dish tapas, and we were feeling pretty smooth. Smoother for sure than the conference attendee down the bar from us, a living caricature in her long dark skirt and cardigan, with a novel open on the bar next to her glass, haggling with the bartender over just how much merlot her go-green coupons could buy her. There would be hundreds of such colleagues here soon for us to look down our catty noses at, we who were tenured yet unpretentious, those hip English teachers who value the simple savoring of a text over jargon-heavy maceration; we who could afford this attitude since we were not desperately seeking employment or beholden to publication. Thank you, community college.

My Sheraton room was cozy as could be, but I only managed about six hours of sleep. I spent the next morning in my pajamas perusing the tourist guides, noting a few key spots for deep-dish and other cultural immersions. Walter fetched me at 11 and out we ventured into the snow. It had warmed to 20ish degrees and was honestly invigorating. We began at a sushi place across the street which the concierge had recommended and given us another coupon for. My miso and maki were just fine but Walter's curry tofu did not work. He shrugged it off with an eye toward dinner, and onward we strove to The Miracle Mile. The buildings were astounding: the height, the breadth, and of course the architecture. The Michigan Avenue shops themselves were nothing new, but I was so captivated by the way the structures dwarfed me, their medieval lines and curves... I moved down the powder-flecked blocks light on my feet in the crisp dry air.

I flipped out for the news stand, which seemed to me like a movie prop. We turned back at the Hershey shore (Hershey cookies in hand), in order to make our afternoon set of conference sessions.

Yes, I went to sessions at this conference, gladly. First there was Melville, Cooper and Stowe blurring romanticism and realism; then Nabokov and Morrison making readers vulnerable; then dear Emily Dickinson enclosing dried flowers and dead crickets in her epistolary poems, showing us what presence and absence may also be. By 6:30 I was a satiated lit fan, but my stomach was growling for pizza. I was also excited to meet Bill, Walter's friend from the halcyon days in New York. He had been a lawyer in Chicago for long enough to know what for, and he had directed us to meet him at Gino's. Brick walls and wood slat booths covered with graffiti, the joint seemed legit. Bill definitely was. He settled right into the disparaging banter and ordered one bottle of Chianti after another. It was a terrific meal full of sweet nostalgia and increasingly off-color jokes, and yeah, the pizza -- West Coast friends, the sauce was on the top! I liked it.

Such fun was had at dinner that we began walking back to the hotel, now in falling feathers of snow, with the intent of buying Bill at least one shot. He played along for a few blocks, conducting our attention to cool bits of politico and history embedded in the architecture, but at the river he came to his senses and headed for the train back to his house and wife in the LBO (I learned a local acronym -- the suburbs known as the Land Beyond O'Hare). So Walter and I decided to catch up on the day's work email over nightcaps in the lobby. The lobby that was now overrun with MLA attendees.

There were all kinds of attendees, men and women of all adult ages from all over the country with all kinds of stories, but at base they were all academic zealot nerds. We went upstairs to fetch our laptops, and plenty of people were weaving in and out of their rooms, including one young fellow with a glass of whiskey in hand. On the way back downstairs we shared the elevator with a dude who'd come from the penthouse. "There was a reception," he told us, "good cookies and stuff." "Yeah, I want to go up there," said I, "I was thinking it was the party spot, like with strippers even." Dude's reply: "Yeah, they have a laser printer." Completely serious.

We found couches in the bar and ordered hot chocolate with Baileys. Walter observed that many of the pairs of people hunched over coffee tables surrounding us were in the midst of interviews. "At 9:30 at night?" The search for viable employment in this racket never stops. The kid with his own whiskey sat down and presented his card to us within seconds. PhD in Spanish at Johns Hopkins. A business card for that. Banking on his Clemson interview tomorrow and assuring me that he and his wife would be psyched in South Carolina, telling me all about their year of service in the inner city public school trenches. I tried to plug a community college job, but he wasn't listening to anyone but himself. He friend showed up and was more interested in a wide range of options, and in the "progressive" image of Seattle. This got Walter talking a little, but ultimately we left these ABDs (All But Dissertation), as they kept calling themselves, after a half hour. Bed seemed better.    

It was, until about four in the morning. That's when all the Chianti and red sauce caught up with me and I couldn't go back to sleep from the heartburn. At 5:30 I returned to the work emails I'd been unable to process in the lobby thanks to the chatty ABDs. Around 7 I went back to rough to sleep for a couple hours and then determined to rally. I had a lunch date with an old friend of my own. He had lived in Chicago for twenty years, and though I hadn't seen him in almost that long, thanks to the magic of Facebook I had a pretty good idea of how successfully he was connected here. Via texts that morning, he said he was wearing jeans so lunch would be casual, meet him at the Chicago Cut steakhouse. It was only a mile or so away, but I took cab as I was still recovering. I got to the restaurant first and quickly recalibrated my definition of "casual." Four waiters in silk ties stood ready to receive their guests. No one who came through the door was wearing a shirt without a collar, except of course me. I went to the bar. "But we have a very nice table reserved in the dining room," the hostess implored. I insisted on the bar, and on keeping my coat with me to camouflage my sorry academic conference attire as long as possible.

When my friend John showed up he knew everyone in the place -- and this was definitely a place where big deals were done -- but he ordered an Arnold Palmer and fish tacos and was gracious enough to put me at ease. We had a good time, in spite of the waiter's fanatical  attention to every detail down to the size of the blue cheese crumbles in my Cobb salad. It was such a pleasure catching up with John, gossiping about the old gang, and basking in his devotion to the city and its good guys, I felt fully recovered from the rough night as we left the restaurant. He walked me to Wacker Drive and pointed me toward my hotel. The streets were vibrant with citizenry. The temperature had climbed into the 30's and it was beautiful walking along the river, the frozen sheets clogging its surface, the stones and steel of the old bridges at every intersection. Walter, coming out of his own lunch date with Bill, spied me across State Street and we continued back to the conference together, ready to call the trip a win.

The academic highlight of my day was a session on Poe -- the young prankster Edgar, insecure in his own station, taking it out on a low class friend in a genius ruse; the shady facade of the prototype detective Dupin from the Rue Morgue -- superb story-telling and inspiringly straightforward analysis. Lounging in the break area afterwards, Walter and I mocked a few more of the labyrinthine deconstructions that flooded the building, sharing our collected notes on the best gobbledygook uttered in each session. I told the story of a portly guy in a suit who sat next to me, typing away at his CV and belching up his lunch throughout the lecture. I finally understood how completely the surface of this conference was about getting a job, and that made me kind of sorry for the world. But the second tier, the space where members of literary societies could gather to revel in their mutual caring in such deep detail about such frivolous subjects, was a kind of sunshine.

Unfortunately on the way to our home base hotel, it began to rain. Not a misty Seattle rain, of course, but a cold wind-borne rain that slushed the snow through the gutters in torrents. It was a long six blocks. Back at the Sheraton, we tried to attend a session about whatever "Big Data" was, but the room was steaming and the PowerPoint slides full of indecipherable graphs from our perch in the back. As more soaking boorish people crammed in, we snuck out. Back in Walter's room we did the email check, and then searched online for an another authentic dinner. Rudy's had a garden burger on a pretzel bun so we picked it, opting for another cab though it was only a mile away. The cab line was twenty groups long. But we still beat the dinner crowd at Rudy's and had great burgers. I surprised Walter by not drinking any alcohol -- "saving up for our last night tomorrow." Cheers.  

Next to Rudy's was comic store, a pretty rad one according to my expert, and it distracted us for a minute from the rough circumstance that there was no sanctioned cab line in front of Rudy's, and no open cabs cruising by. The rain was still coming down, and of course, we had no umbrellas. The trek home was downright unpleasant, but we thought drying off over dessert would redeem us. And there in our bulging buzzing lobby full of scholars was a table set with decadent pastries, fresh cocoa and artisan marshmallows. After our éclair and cupcake it was still early enough to finally check out the hot tub. Or what we assumed would be the hot tub, by the pool. There were three people in the pool; there was no hot tub. Plucky Walter waded gingerly into the pool for a few minutes and talked up Seattle with some more easterners while I pouted. But I was glad to be going to bed early again.

Until I lay down. That's when the nausea slunk in. Slunk closer and closer until I succumbed and heaved Rudy's wonderful patty melt into the commode. Twice. I crawled back to bed and texted next door: "Still up?"

"Yeah, what'r you doing?"

"I'm sick. I barfed twice."

Of course Walter came padding right on over. I asked him to give me a Benadryl. "You got the 24 hour bug. I had it last week."

"Okay. Or I'm exhausted or ate too much rich food or don't have the constitution to travel or..."

"Nope, you have the bug."

"In any case, I'm going to barf again." And I did, two more times. Still plenty of patty melt to make a good show. I brushed my teeth to will it to be over and let Walter go back to his room. He tucked me in and took my extra room key with him. A half hour later I barfed one more time and then believed I was done. I pulled the ten dollar bottle of Gatorade off its weighted shelf in the mini-fridge, gulped half of it, and fell into a fitful sleep of five to twenty minute intervals until Walter brought me a banana in the morning and told me not to leave the room. I was jealous as he left for more conference sessions, dejected thinking of the ones I would miss. But I had that terrible all-over body ache so I stayed put and did schoolwork, happy for the shelter of the comfy room.

After ibuprofen and a nap I felt half human so I got sort of dressed, grabbed my name tag, and went down the elevator to find the closest session room I could. As soon as I hit the lobby I knew it was a bad idea. Back to bed. At five o'clock Walter returned with chamomile tea and a thermometer. "See, no fever. Just a quick bug." We ordered room service soup and salad which was pretty good considering how stupid the price was. We ate strawberry ice cream and watched a few old BBC shows. I was grateful for the good company, and happy to take a pill and sleep soundly til 8am. Even happier to wake up not sore, not nauseous, and with actual sunshine sifting through the window.

Cleaned up, packed, luggage checked with the bellhop, room receipts in hand, we stepped into the blue 40 degree day with several hours to kill before our flight out. The gutter slush was gone and the lesser-used sidewalks were sheathed with ice between the piles of dirty snow, but we slipped and slid our way down to the lake. It was terrific to be out for one more touristy turn. We wandered through the Navy Pier, and along the lake back to Michigan Ave, admiring the stately lake-side condos. Lots of Sunday joggers passed by, but the lines of rental bikes stood mostly untouched. We went inside the John Hancock building but decided against the ride to the observatory on top. We went into the little library branch and a little gallery in a tiny old church building. Rounding our way back to the hotel, we found a really good Thai place and some regional differences regarding Thai food -- mainly, no spice stars; Chicago Pad Thai is not hot. Nevertheless, we were wrapping up back on a high note. We even hit a souvenir shop and Walter bought me a shot glass. The security at O'Hare was not up to speed and we had to remove shoes and laptops, but we were not in a rush, and there was a Duncan Donuts for Walter. Lucky guy even got the one empty seat on the plane between him and his row mate. My row was full, and the ride was a little bumpy, but I didn't feel like barfing until we started our final descent. I didn't get sick then, of course, or since. Even from a great trip, it's great to come home.