This is an ongoing musical memoir. If you are just wandering onto this page and didn’t see the first four chapters of “Blues, Preludes & Feuds,” please read those first:
Prelude
4’33”..
…of SilencePart 1:
Chapter 1: Middle C is Not
Chapter 2: Prepare to Wing It
Chapter 3: Drugstore at the End of the World
Chapter 4: The Myth of the Electric Organ
Chapter 5: Pax Chicagoa
Chapter 6: Terrorist Recess
Chatper 7: Asymmetrical Warfare
Chapter 8: The Stiff-Necked Son
Maybe we should just head east and explore Sheridan Road instead. There aren’t any parental warnings about the dangers of that street. No grime, gangs, or dilapidated storefronts with broken windows and closed-for-business signs. Nothing but prewar, brick high-rises, along with a few modern interlopers—a set of Mies van der Rohe steel-and-glass high-rises, two blocks north—that bullied their way into the stately quiescence.
But we’re not allowed to cross major boulevards by ourselves—and with four lanes of fairly heavy traffic, Sheridan Road is a veritable highway. Scary in a different way. And since we’re still under strict orders to limit our explorations to one square block, there’s nothing to do on Sheridan but watch the cars go by.
And so we do. But across the street on the opposite corner of Sheridan and Wellington is something more promising—a two-story complex of cheap, but modish-looking townhouses. Each one is a slightly different color than the other, as if the builder couldn’t decide. They look completely out of place among the high-rises. The people hanging around in front of the homes look interesting too. Young 1960s types, incipient hippies with beards and acoustic guitars. They look like they should be camping out by a river in Colorado or like time travelers who couldn’t quite figure out how to fit into the conservative look of the block.
* * *
If we’d been allowed to cross the street, we might have found some different kinds of trouble to explore over there. Had we been allowed to cross the street and continue walking one block east, we would have been in Lincoln Park with its oak trees, grassy fields, and bike paths.
It’s not like we never went to the park or down Broadway—or even beyond our authorized one square block. It’s just that we always went to those places with our parents. The world can be a completely different place when you’re not under the watchful eye of a protective parent.
Broadway at least, its name notwithstanding, didn’t require breaking the rule of crossing a major boulevard. So we went there . . .