Misery and Survival

Misery and Survival

Here's the thing about the city, it's just too big. I spent eleven years in Iowa. I was a farmer's daughter, and just because my parents couldn't get along I was brought to Chicago. I hated the move, hated the smell, hated the brick buildings all around me. I was miserable.

Every morning my Mother took me to my Aunt's apartment on Kedzie ave. She lived in the Logan Square neighborhood. She lived in a stuffy one bedroom apartment . She had the bedroom, her daughter and son shared the dinning room. Two twin beds under the dinning room windows, The windows that faced a brick wall of the adjoining building. The light into the windows was always dim and depressing. The sun never shined directly into the windows. Basically, it reflected off that dirty brick wall next door. I spent a lot of time in that room. I guess you could say I have a vivid imprint of that room. I spent hours and hours in that room. It was like a prison to me.

Before my imprisonment, I had been a child who grew up unused to any of my surroundings. I loved to ride my blue Schwinn bike that my dad had given me for my birthday. I rode it to forget the city, and rode it to explore areas around my aunts neighborhood. But my favorite place to ride was Logan Square. A strip of grass situated between Milwaukee Ave on the north, Logan Square Boulevard on the east, a frontage street on the west and Fullerton Ave on the south end of the park. The park was my only comfort. It had green grass, dandelions, tall trees and dirt. The kind of black dirt I had grown up with in Iowa.

Just east of the grassy park,sat a train station,This stop was as far as the train would go. The train was suspended on tall poles and rails, the train would travel like 20 feet in the air. The people would rush out of the station, or into the station every 15 minutes, The train carried them from Logan Square to the main part of Chicago, that is known as the Loop.

I would sit on the grass,watch the people and wish to be anywhere but the city. I think I identified with that strip of land. It was the only area not ruined by all the tall buildings, the sun could shine down on the park without being interrupted by a brick walls, or some object placed in it's way from bringing warm rays of hope to the people.

I had a particular time to be back at the apartment , but I didn't own a watch, so I was late again. My internal clock said the park was still light, so it must still be early. My Aunt didn't see it the same way. The city is huge, anything could happen. I was still very new to the city, still wired to farm ideas of space and safety. She was furious that I wasn't aware of any basic city issues. She pulled me home to her apartment, I had to abandon my shiny blue bike. I was never the same after that day.

First I lost my bike that was the only connection to my past life in Iowa. Then I was spanked until I was bruised from my waist to my ankles. But the worst part was being forced to spend everyday for the rest of that summer in my cousins bed, in that darkly lit dining room. If I got up I faced another whipping. I hated Chicago. Mostly I hated that room. The punishment didn't fit the crime.

When school started, I no longer had to go to my Aunt's. I lived near the south edge of Logan Square park with my mother. The park still drew me to it . I was a latch-key kid, so before my Mother would come home in the evening I would walk to the park, to breath in the grassy scent, and dream of my open fields, farmyard and family who still lived in Iowa. I couldn't adjust to the loud dirty city. My only coping skill was to find a strip of grass and pretend it was home.

That was nearly fifty years ago. I still remember it as if it occurred yesterday. My Aunt moved away, my Mother passed away and I have returned to the city. Now I visit Logan square occasionally . But sadly it has changed. The train no longer travels above ground. The old train station has been torn down. All the rails and poles have been removed. The clack clack clack of the wheels no longer echos through the neighborhood. The new station has been built across the busy street and west of Logan Square. All glass and shiny metal pillars. Escalators to transport passengers up and down . The stop is only one of several stops going from downtown Chicago, to the end of the line inside of O hare airport, miles and miles from downtown Chicago.

Where a few people went to the old elevated train, now hundreds of people crowd the subway station, going into and out of the city.

The strip of land that was my safe haven often serves as a stop off for vagrant homeless men and women, begging for money to eat, do drugs or drink their life away. The green grass has lost its beauty, No longer green or clean. The dirt it grows in has turned gray and littered with city dust, human waste and scraps of paper from people too lazy to put the trash into the wire trash cans. The trees that still grow in the park,have grown so tall they can not provide shade to anyone who walks along the park. Of the trees there now, many have been cut down , nothing has been replaced, One day this strip of land will just be an empty vacant strip of useless land. No beauty to give, only lonely, heart ache and waste.

In someways, I think that the isolation in that dingy dinning-room bedroom is just like the strip of land we call Logan Square today. Void of beauty and fresh wild life. The keeper of heartaches and misery. The area surrounding the park holds a new set of residents, a new set of problems. Drug deals arranged at night, hunger pressing the hopeless to do anything to get a meal and a place to weather out their nightmares. Some who have money, live around the edge of the park. Some who have nothing left must seek refuge on the strip of land. I once sought refuge in that same little strip of land. How many like me, can say that Logan square was an oasis and not the eyesore of today?

I will always remember the life preserver that Logan Square was for me. The scent of green grass and the respite of breezes that strip of land gave me as a child. The very thing I needed to survive a city full of buildings and stale air. Despite the disadvantages I endured, Logan Square was my little slice of heaven here in Chicago.