No, nothing to do with Mrs. O'Leary's cow. How old do you think I am? But I do have two memories of Chicago blazes, each seen from my car while driving city streets or highways. The first was late at night, in Cabrini-Green, notorious breeding ground for all of America's urban housing-project woes. This was in the mid-1990s. I had just moved back to Chicago, alone, and I still had a car, although I lived in the downtown Streeterville neighborhood and really did not need one. I will mention the make of the car, only because it really does make a difference to the story: imagine a single, young, white woman driving through the projects in the middle of the night . . . in a Saab. What the hell? you might well ask. Well, I was returning home from a late-night excursion in Bucktown or Wicker Park, probably the latter. I really wasn't thinking about where I was, only about where I wanted to go, which was back to my apartment to crash. I was tired. But not too tired to be completely oblivious to my surroundings. Crossing the Chicago River, on West Chicago Avenue I believe it was, and suddenly I was stopped at a red light. To my left, I remember seeing blighted housing, hearing a sudden chaos of noise in the cross-street about a block and a half away, or its equivalent. The streets did something strange around there, didn't go through, so it was hard to judge a block—these were the literal and metaphorical dead-end streets of the city. Suddenly, more shouting, and flames shooting up into the night sky. A blaze of orange heat. Not a building on fire; this was in the street. Did someone ignite the contents of a trash can, or was it a car on fire? Worse, I imagined, a person? I saw shadow-cloaked figures running, and although the traffic light was still red, I stepped on the gas. I needed to shake the feeling of being a sitting duck for who knows what violations. And really, what did the red light matter? I remember, more than anything, thinking that if a patrol car wanted to pull me over for running the light, I'd be more than happy to pay a ticket in exchange for a police escort out of the neighborhood. Without incident, I made it home. It was not the first and not the last time I'd find myself in the "wrong" section of a city; this was not even a close shave, not really. Only in the realm of the hypothetical, perhaps. I have never considered myself a skittish person, but call it intuition—on that night, sitting in my luxury car at a red signal, a guiding voice told me to "Gun it!" and I did, before someone else could work their own gun magic in the middle of this agitated night.
Here is an early music memory: I am very young. If not still a toddler, then not much older. I am running around the living room, squealing with unrestrained delight, while my dad chases me to the tune of "I Am the Lion" by Neil Diamond (Ba-pa-la ding-ga!). He's reached deep down and pulled out his big baritone voice—the one he also used for "Old Man River" on occasion; the one that always awed me. It's the early 1970s, and although hopelessly pop and showy, there is no shame in liking Neil Diamond. Not at this time. Later, I'd go through nearly two decades of keeping this (admittedly) often schmaltzy artist at more than arm's length. When I bothered to remember Neil Diamond, which generally I didn't, I thought of him more like a skeleton in my musical closet; a dirty little secret that, if exposed, would set me up for some heavy razzing from friends. I don't remember when it was that I recovered my dad's Tap Root Manuscript album. It wa...
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