Like a distant adolescent memory, I awaken to muffled conversation. High pitched muted voices come from behind the double lined curtain hanging from ceiling to floor against a full wall of the Chicago Marriott Miracle Mile hotel. Little bare feet poke out from under the fabric. Four little munchkins observe what is happening twenty-four stories down, on the streets of Chicago; another ambulance whines its musical lament, that homeless man is still on the corner, and that lady down there has the coolest big hair. My mind struggles to focus on what they are saying as my eyes scan the room, trying to figure out if that lump under the blankets on the floor is just more blankets or Calvin. The buzz in the bathroom tells me Dave is still here, shaving before his meetings. I roll my body over on this relatively small bed, flinging my leg onto Dave’s side and relishing a bit of space in this cozy downtown hotel room stuffed with two old people and five children. I tense my weary legs, beckoning them to be still from their restlessness so I can get up and pack. “Guys,“ I say, “if you want breakfast have it now. We have to be on the road in an hour. Joe and Calvin, you both need to shower.“ Joe grabs his clothes and responds without pleading, which frankly represents how cooperative he has been this whole trip. Tess, knowing it might be a while, scurries past him to use the toilet first. She giggles as she squishes under his arm. Joe is sweet toward Tess. Yesterday, when she was so exhausted at the Museum of Art, he amused and comforted her as she occasionally tried to recover on the museum benches.
Five days ago, on a July Monday morning, we embarked on this trip in our grey Toyota Sienna van. We planned this journey a little loosely, because we have found that too tight a schedule sometimes facilitates disappointment. Dave, as part of a national ABA committee overseeing State Court Judges, travels twice a year to various meeting destinations. Nine years ago, when he had just started his work with this team of judges from across the USA, we brought the eldest four of our grandchildren on this same trip to Chicago. We had made such great memories them, when those kids were these ages, that we decided to try it again. Besides the fact that I personally feel the additional nine years in my joints, and weariness comes on much more quickly these days, it really has been a perfect opportunity to seal ourselves to the ones we love. When you spend all day every day in tight quarters for a thousand miles and a lot of hours, you get to know the ins and outs of each other. Fortunately, because we live close enough to these kids to understand the multiple dimensions of each other, so there hasn’t been much disappointment or unrealistic expectation. As familiar as I am with their personalities, weaknesses and strengths, I really had not expected them to travel as pleasantly as they have. Three girls in the back, two little ones and one on the verge of adolescence. Two preteen boys take the middle bucket seats. Dave has driven the whole way. I don’t know how he does it because I get in the driver’s seat and immediately want to fall asleep. I have no problem with him zoning out from the freneticism of the people in this car and listens to his yearly Lectures from Yale.
Day 1: The car is clean. Washed, vacuumed, and filled with gas. We’ve brushed and braided the girls’ hair. Everyone is showered and rested and ready to go. I expect it to be downhill from here. But I’m wrong. Hair gets messy, things get spilled, candy wrappers find their way into crevices. But the kids are happy and cooperative and surprise us with their relative good humor. We stop , as is tradition, less than two hours in, for 75 cent ice cream cones at Little America. That’s how we know we are really on a road trip. Beth shimmies next to me in line and asks if she can buy a jack knife for Calvin. I remind her he already has someth8ing like seven pocket knives. We stop at Arbys’s for dinner, ordering online to get their special online only combo deals. My phone has reminded me the past three days that our order is ready. Everyone but Grace gobbles theirs up. We spend the night in a hotel suite in Kearney Nebraska. The next three days the kids the kids will remind me that they prefer the other hotel, where there was a couch that pulled out into a bed.
Day 2: The van is no longer clean. But it still runs, and we are happy. The day goes by with the lumbering slowness of 75 miles per hour. We stop for dinner at the World’s Largest Truck Stop. The kids peruse the unlimited supply of random truck stop items. Beth asks, as Beth is prone to do, if I would mind if she buys a little pineapple with eyes that pop out for Tessa. Mind you, she is not asking me to buy it. She will use her own money. So we get the pineapple and then order dinner, gourmet style, at Wendy’s, there in the center between a giant red truck and an eighteen wheeler parked inside the truck stop. Everyone but Gracie gobbles theirs up.
Back on the road, I decide, from my place in the passenger seat, to search Facebook Marketplace around Chicago for a new guitar for the cottage. The one we have there is hard to play. It’s action is too high and neck not right. I find a sweet little Martin LX1 for a good price. We meet the owner in a Starbucks parking lot near the turnoff from I80. We enter Chicago singing.
Gumpa drops us off in front of the hotel, the bellmen standing as sentinels and the doorways rimmed with polished brass. We shift from the car to the hot, humid Illinois summer air, then spin our gear through the rotating doors and into the chilled air and polished echoing floors of the hotel. The kids wait with the luggage while I check in and Gumpa drives to an affordable parking garage where its only 58 dollars a day. Finally reunited, we drag our luggage like a pair of ducks and their ducklings over to the elevator and up to the 24thfloor. Though there are only two queen beds and seven people, the room is actually larger than expected. We assessed the situation, called for more bedding and pillows. We’re all tired, but not sleepy, which can be a problem. Beth, who has been flawlessly sweet the past two days, is suddenly massively homesick for her mom. She sees the glass wall of our room, overlooking the Legolike stand of buildings along the river, and decides she doesn’t like heights either. I close the curtains. The sadness pours from her eyes and groans up from her belly past her vocal cords. We call Annie, who tries to be chipper and encouraging, but it only makes Beth miss her more. And now she misses Daddy, too. So, then we call Jordon, who is sweetly comforting. Beth needs some alone time. Actually, everyone does, but right now it’s Bethy. She takes a pillow out to the hall. I let her. Minutes later she is back, snuggled next to me, hugging Bobo and sniffling. I have brought books. I have a guitar. I read from the flashlight on my phone to the field of children surrounding our beds. The kids in the book are from Chicago, which helps. They visit their crusty oversized grandma, which humors. And when we’ve finished a couple chapters I tuck that little ¾ sized guitar against my chest and play until the breathing of the whole regiment is slow and steady. Including Gumpa.
When my restless legs finally let me sleep Grace awakens, unable to sleep because of the snoring. I take turns gently shaking humans so they will roll over and breather differently for a while. The nights are long on this one-room adventure.
Day 3: Gumpa rises early enough to find a Trader Joes nearby where he purchases cereal, muffins, milk, bananas, and yogurt. This will be breakfast for the next three days. This saves not only money, but time. Gumpa drives us to Millennium Park. There, two tall brick columns overflow with water. Between them children splash and play. We watch for a minute before the girls have their shoes off and are dancing in the virtual rain. Occasionally enormous human faces appear projected on the brick walls. Their lips pucker, and out flows a rainbow of water splashing down on the laughing children. Shortly the pillars turn once again to faceless brick walls. Calvin and Joe, not wanting to partake of the levity of youth, watch soberly from the benches surrounding the fountain. They don’t whine. They just wait. Finally I tell them they can explore the park behind us, and they’re off like a pair of twelve and thirteen year old boys. The girls, initially happy to get their toes wet, have immersed themselves in the fountain. The only way I could finally convince them to leave was by telling them we were going to see the Bean. It has an official name, some sort of gate or something… but I only know it as The Bean. It looks like an enormous shiny silver bean resting in the middle of a beautifully kept park tucked into a concrete city. We find the boys and walk over among the sea of people taking selfies in the reflection of the big mirrored surface of the structure. We pause to watch a few minutes of a symphony rehearsing on an outdoor stage. They’re playing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Soon Gumpa meets us with the car. We head across town to the Color Factory while Gump heads to meetings.
Uncle John has purchased tickets for us. His fingerprints are in the exhibit, and we enter the colorful space in the lower level of the Willis Tower knowing his creative energy is there. We go from room to radiant room, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching the aesthetic of color all afternoon. A sacred spot inside of me glowed in the process, knowing this kind of experiential art is what my boy had thrown his heart and career into, and realizing that he has made himself a facilitator of joyful awareness. The final room of the museum is a giant ball pit. The kids dive in like it’s the Farmington pool, and spend at least a good hour and a half swimming in plastic balls. One of the workers tells us there are a few little four-inch squishy musical quarter notes buried in the pit. A few of the kids fixate on finding them, knowing they will get a swag bag if they do. I try to convince them that they should just enjoy the pit and forget the competition, but it’s no use. Finally, an hour in, they give up and take the fun route. They never did find the golden note. It reminded me, as I watched them, that competition and challenges are not always good things.
In the end they left happy and tired. We stopped on the upper-level marketplace and they ate sushi. Even Grace. I drank water, having never acquired a taste for sushi.
Back at the hotel I taught Joe his first chord on the guitar, a C chord. He played it clearly and cleanly and I already feel happy about randomly purchasing a guitar in the middle of our trip across the country. We walk across the street to the AMC Theaters, purchase two large buckets of popcorn, place our 3D glasses over our eyes and watch Inside Out 2. Nine years ago, when we made this same trip with the oldest grandkids, we watched Inside Out 1 at this same theater. I was so tired then I slept through it. This time I only sleep through part of it. Afterwards, the kids watch Disney in the hotel room while Dave and I go to Portillos for Chicago dogs and fries. While Dave waits for our order I duck into Walgreens for drinks. At the checkout I see a stack of Chicago ball caps for a dollar each. I buy seven of them, one for each kid and two take home to Walter and Ruby. After our late dinner in the hotel room we hunker down and I read again from our book.
Day 4: Seeing a need for a bit of separation, I take Tess and Grace with me, leaving Beth, Joe and Calvin with a little adolescent down time. I need a semi-dressy top for our judges dinner, which I forgot to pack. I give in and buy grace a pair of plastic cell phone walkie talkie toys, which as far as I know never worked. Tess gets a squishy axolotl, that she swears will stay at the cottage so she won’t have to bring one to hug every year. I buy Beth pajamas she forgot to pack, a Chicago sweatshirt for Joe and a plain black top for me. When Gumpa comes back from his meetings we load into the van and head to the Art Institute of Chicago. Its slow going. S L O W. The streets between us and the river are streaming with post adolescent, pre fully-adulting Lollapalooza Concert goers. Mostly the female sort, with glittered skin and lots of it. Skin, that is. More flesh than fabric. I watch two young women hold their nearly naked breasts to keep them from flapping as they run through the intersection to beat the traffic light. I find myself more curious than judgmental. Eventually, unable to find any parking, Gumpa drops us off at the corner of the bridge. We walk to the point where they separate the concert goers from the museum patrons. It was quite predictable to tell which way a person would go. We take the right fork in the road and make a visit to the masters: VanGough, Monet, Manet, Rodin, Chagall, Gauguin, Cassatt… they are all there, immortalized on the walls and pedestals. We capture scenes in front of Wood’s American Gothic, with brother on the right and sister on the left. Saurrat’s A Sunday Afternoon is large enough to capture all five kids, shoulder to shoulder, gazing upon the pixilated scene.
I’m grateful for having bought those Chicago hats. I’m able to glance and count heads amid the crowds in the museum and along the streets of Chicago.Tess is tired. So tired and frankly bored. He little legs hurt, and she’s thirsty. I am grateful to be this old, and more flexible than I used to be. I say this is enough. We have seen enough to feel the art. They’ve chosen pieces that speak to them. We’ve discussed in brief sentences the way this artist represented light streaming through a window, and that artist used the thickness of paint to create texture. How some lines are blurred for effect, and others are stark and plainly defined. Right when we are ready to be done Gumpa calls to say he ended up driving back to our original parking lot and walking. I tell him to save the $35 cuz we’ve reached the limit of our seven-year-old. We meet him at the exit and swim upstream in the river of Lallapalooza. A stop at Shake Shack revives the seven-year-old and everyone else. Everyone, except Grace, gobbled it up. But she did have two chicken nuggets and a wad of fries. We walk what feels like 20 miles in humid heat back to the air-conditioned hotel. I thank the Lord as we pass through those rotating doors, for cool clean air. I collapse onf the bed and the kids watch Disney while Dave scans his phone. My electric legs will not let me sleep the rest of the trip so far. A couple hours later I am wearing the new blouse I bought at Marshalls that morning and Dave and I walk by faith out into the hot Chicago air to a swank Italian restaurant where the judges are gathering for dinner. We shimmy into the two remaining seats in the corner, where we spend a pleasant couple hours chatting with Peter Killaugh, who was had just yesterday been sworn-in as the newest Justice of a state Supreme Court. He shows us a photo of him in the red robes of the Maryland Supreme Court. He looks so regal, and is so down to earth. One of the dearest things I’ve learned, having lived this long and been married to an accomplished man, is that people are people, no matter how big.
On the way home we stop at Walgreens to get earplugs to help Gracie sleep (they end up not helping). We phone in an order for Chicago Deep Dish Pizza for the kids. Dave walks a block from the hotel to pick it up.
Another night of getting everyone to settle down, each of them taking turns teasing each other to no end. I sense Gumpa losing it, for maybe the third time in his seven-decade existence. We finally start the next chapter of our book, followed by some quiet guitar, and I think everyone is finally asleep. That’s when Grace’s voice cuts through the dark; “I’m hungry!”
Currently I am back in the passenger seat, working our way to the Michigan cottage. Little Tessa has been telling stories in a British accent for the last two hours. Cal is asleep between gaming sessions, and Joe is engaging with the girls and their back seat storytelling. We have stopped in Flint to pick up spare guitar strings and a capo for the new guitar. We are just about to exit onto Route 23, which will take us right to the cottage. The energy in the back seats is rising. “Can we go to the beach as soon as we get there?”
“We’ll see, if it’s not dark.” Says Gumpa.
Frankly, even if it’s dark, it’s our beach. It’s our sacred space and they are anxious to be baptized in holy waters. Dark or not, five little pair of feet are bound to get wet before they snuggle down in our familiar well-loved cottage.
