This August I attended the wedding of my first college roommate.  It was in Itasca, a Chicago suburb, and on a Sunday.  That morning I stopped to see a classmate, her spouse, and their two little girls at our hotel.

It had been a couple of years.  We hugged.  I said hello to her husband and shook his hand.  And then I looked down into the gaze of their oldest daughter, a third grader named Willa, who was holding her hand out for mine.

“Come here,” she said.  “I have something to show you.”

She led my cumbersome self across the hotel room to the window making up the opposite wall.  We sat on the heat register and looked down from seven stories to the pond behind the Westin and a family of geese and an assortment of ducks whom called it home.

“Do you see them down there?”

“I do,” I said.

“I’ve been watching them all morning.  They’re really something.”

I was watching them from seven stories.  Willa, I would bet, was right down there with them.

The next morning I was in the middle of downtown Chicago walking sidewalks crowded with a few early tourists and those headed to work.  I was waiting for the Chicago Institute of Art to open, and my killing time on Michigan Avenue placed me in front of my favorite building there.  On the sidewalk beneath it was a lowly pigeon, colored nearly the same as the structure was.

The building was crowned in gold, however.  Gold seems to be the color nature keeps out of nearly anything touchable.  As a consequence Man applies it liberally, and the Carbon and Carbide Building is crowned with the laurel God denied the pigeon.

I was looking down on yet another bird who rightly should have been looking down on me.

I reached downtown via a commuter train, where I had taken a perch on the upper level.  That Monday morning it was loaded with those who seemed to already carry the anxiety of the week ahead.  I had momentarily traded my mine in for a map.

Summer was drawing to a close.  School was around the corner.  I thought I could see the apprehension of these commuters’ children stretched out over the dwindling blue, still waters at the city pool we passed in Franklin Park.  I thought I could feel the family’s in the pent up, crowded houses of the living.

It was only broken by a green and open field, boasting acre after spacious acre and housing the dead insulated from all of it, still lying in the rows their loved ones had placed them in.

When the museum opened, amongst American Gothic, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jette, and Nighthawks, was one painting seemingly out of sight in a corner, as the mostly black attendants were from the mostly white portraits and the mostly white audience.

It was Aert de Gelder’s “Portrait of a Young Woman.”  The hook was the glassy, penetrating stare of her 325 year old eyes.  She looked neither up nor down to her observer.

I suppose Willa wouldn’t have either, were she taller.  Perhaps, were she 317 years older, Aert would have painted her picture instead.

Headed out from downtown, occasionally we would pass a train headed in.  On that train were people just like us, and I would try to catch a glimpse of them as we passed.  It was as though they were invisible.  I could only see through the other cars’ windows to the same cityscape I had seen before, crowned in untouchable golden sunlight, which rained down on the cheap, showy, and selective gold of man.

God, I do love Chicago.