off on an erudite and endless commentary on religion, politics, history, the Chicago transit system, music, natural history, plumbing, and most of all football, especially his beloved Chicago Bears. It was a near thing, I discovered, between religion and the Bears for which thing he loved most in life, and I learned to switch him back and forth between them with a question if he got too monomaniacal about one or the other. His speeches about the Bears were often hilarious, and featured every sort of scandal and crime and peccadillo and misdemeanorâit turns out that bus drivers, like policemen, know everything about everyone, especially their vicesâbut his religious talks were even more interesting because they would occasionally soar up and away in the most amazing fashion. Some combination of the early hour, and the sleeping passengers, and the slow rising of the sun from the lake, and Donald B. Morrisâs indisputable imaginative gifts, sometimes led him to say things that bubbled up from somewhere deep inside him, and caught him as unawares as me; for example one morning he told me he had been in the war, and had been saved from death by a horse where no one had ever seen a horse before, and that this horse was, he was absolutely sure, sent to him by the woman some people call the mother of God, although he himself was of the opinion that She was herself in some way also God, because to put gender on God is just silly, gender is a human being thing, and God is no human being, total respect to the Jesus people. Now young Jesus, who was an Arabic boy, we forget, may well have been sent by God, and he may well have been some part of God also, or infused by God, or was God wearing human being skin for a while, but to say, well, Jesus the only form of God, all the other possible forms of God no way could they be God, well, that is just silly, and arrogant too. How the hell we know what shape God taken over the millions of years since universe was sneezed into being? Hey? Who knows the shapes and songs of God? Not one of us, and that is for sure. Better to pay attention and see if you can see some of the fingerprints where God was or is. Like for me that island with the horse. But here we are at Dearborn Street. Watch your step. God bless. Go Bears.
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8.
THERE WERE SO VERY MANY THINGS that were riveting and amazing about Chicago to me that yearâremarkable people, the deep sad joyous thrum of the blues, my first serious excursions into dark wondrous jazz clubs, the vast muscle of the lake, the mountainous snowfall, the cheerful rough rude immediacy of the bustle and thunder of the city at full cry, the latticework of the elevated train tracks, the deep happy mania of Bears fans, the thrill of being paid for work rather than paying for ostensible education, and so much else; but I suppose what absorbed me most, in those first few months, was the sheer geometry of the city, its squares and rectangles, its vaulting perpendicularity, its congested arithmetic; I took to roofs and fire escapes more and more that winter, climbing up not only on my apartment building roof but on the roof of my office building (nine storeys) and the occasional hotel, given the chance while sentenced to meetings for this and that. I summited the Blackstone, on Michigan Avenue (twenty-one storeys), and the Palmer House, on Monroe Street (twenty-five storeys), and the Burnham, on Washington Street (fourteen storeys); I very nearly climbed atop the Chicago Stadium, the huge old boxy castle where the Bulls played, but chickened out due to ice on the roof; and I got as high as I could in the Hancock building, which was a thousand feet high, by slipping out onto the roof through a service door and briefly contemplating the meticulous jumble of the city far below.
All my life I will remember those few minutes a thousand feet in the air over Chicago; I could see where the city ended to the west, and turned to fields of snow and stubble; I
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8.
THERE WERE SO VERY MANY THINGS that were riveting and amazing about Chicago to me that yearâremarkable people, the deep sad joyous thrum of the blues, my first serious excursions into dark wondrous jazz clubs, the vast muscle of the lake, the mountainous snowfall, the cheerful rough rude immediacy of the bustle and thunder of the city at full cry, the latticework of the elevated train tracks, the deep happy mania of Bears fans, the thrill of being paid for work rather than paying for ostensible education, and so much else; but I suppose what absorbed me most, in those first few months, was the sheer geometry of the city, its squares and rectangles, its vaulting perpendicularity, its congested arithmetic; I took to roofs and fire escapes more and more that winter, climbing up not only on my apartment building roof but on the roof of my office building (nine storeys) and the occasional hotel, given the chance while sentenced to meetings for this and that. I summited the Blackstone, on Michigan Avenue (twenty-one storeys), and the Palmer House, on Monroe Street (twenty-five storeys), and the Burnham, on Washington Street (fourteen storeys); I very nearly climbed atop the Chicago Stadium, the huge old boxy castle where the Bulls played, but chickened out due to ice on the roof; and I got as high as I could in the Hancock building, which was a thousand feet high, by slipping out onto the roof through a service door and briefly contemplating the meticulous jumble of the city far below.
All my life I will remember those few minutes a thousand feet in the air over Chicago; I could see where the city ended to the west, and turned to fields of snow and stubble; I
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