David Michael Burrow

In 1998 my sister Margaret and I spent the holidays in Chicago. We had a wonderful time then, so when another year came around with the rest of the family spending Christmas with their in-laws, we decided it would be fun to return to the Windy City. We made the original plans nearly a year in advance, and we kept adding different things to do as we heard about them. It turned out to be a wonderful little trip and a great way to spend the holidays.

FRIDAY, December 22

While global warming and El Niño had made this the mildest December on record in northern Iowa, today’s weather was questionable. It was incredibly foggy in the morning, with mist predicted to turn to freezing rain by late afternoon. I was more than a little worried about the drive over to Margaret’s this afternoon.

We had a short day of school during which I can’t say I accomplished much that was truly educational. I left almost immediately after the 2:15 dismissal and set off eastward. Fortunately the temperature was slightly above freezing, so the mist just made the pavement wet as I drove along highway 18. By the time I turned north toward Forest City the precipitation had stopped, and soon the road was essentially dry.

As I drove I couldn’t help but recall the last holiday drive I’d made along these roads—two years ago when Margaret and I went out to Portland. It was cold and snowy at Christmas 2004. My worry then was not whether the roads would be slippery, but whether my car would even start in well below zero weather. My car normally heats well, but that was a very chilly drive. Today, on the other hand, it was almost unpleasantly hot in the car because I had to keep the defroster on to prevent the windshield from fogging up.

The road continued to be dry until I reached Cresco, where it started raining fairly steadily. It was still above freezing, but the wind and rain made driving less than ideal. I made it on to Decorah, where I was pleased to make it through the town’s two new traffic lights without having to stop. I headed east on Old Stage Road (the old way between Decorah and Waukon) and eventually turned off on the gravel road that leads to my sister’s home. The side road was absolutely ghastly. There seemed to be no gravel at all, just a sea of mud covering a hard washboard surface. Margaret tells me this is typical in spring, and it’s the main reason she drives a four-wheel-drive vehicle. It was certainly unexpected in December, and the balding tires on my tiny car didn’t like it one bit. I drove slowly and did manage to make it to Margaret’s OK. It was fully dark (shortly after 5:00) by the time I reached her place, and the lights of a Christmas tree in her window greeted me as I made my way down the hill.

* * * * *

We chatted for a while over coffee, and I admired Margaret’s Christmas decorations. Like pretty much everyone in our family, she tapes up the Christmas cards she gets so they’re on display. She lamented how few cards she’d gotten this year and how many people don’t seem to send cards at all these days. That’s something I’ve noticed, too. Some people send Christmas letters, but don’t put them in a card. Many others just don’t bother with holiday greetings at all. As we all get busier, I can certainly understand that, but it is a little sad to have so few cards sent these days. I love Christmas, and I enjoy the process of selecting, addressing, and sending cards. It makes me think of the people who receive them. Some of them I only communicate with once a year, but I still like to send those seasonal greetings. I guess a lot of people find the process more of a chore than a pleasure, though.

I had been given a $10 gift card to Pizza Hut as a thank-you for my help with the Garrigan scrip program. Had they asked me, I’d have selected almost any other card, since I pretty much never go to Pizza Hut. In fact the last time I’d been in one of their restaurants was when I was in New York City, and the only reason I’d gone there then was because the place was located in a historic building. I figured I’d never get a chance to use the card otherwise, so I suggested to Margaret that we go to the Decorah Pizza Hut for dinner.

The place looked incredibly busy when we got there. Indeed we weren’t sure if we’d be able to find a place to park in their lot. We did find a spot, and when we went inside there were surprisingly many vacant tables. It was as if everyone in the place had arrived in a separate car but then sat together.

After looking through the Pizza Hut menu, we both settled on one of their cheapest items, baked spaghetti. This turned out to be an outstanding dish, one I’d recommend to anyone. We got enormous crocks full of pasta, covered with a tasty marinara sauce and melted cheese and topped with the meat of our choice, plus garlic bread on the side. It was definitely a full meal and cost quite a bit less than actual pizza would have. In fact, it cost less than what had been printed on the menu (I think we were charged the lunch price, rather than what it costs at dinner). I was expecting to all but use up the card, but I ended up with more than $1.50 left on it. That’s too much to throw away, and I have no idea when I’ll ever be at a Pizza Hut again. … Oh well.

It had stopped raining by the time we left Pizza Hut, and it had gotten quite windy. Both of those things were basically good. We had an hour’s drive up to the town of Lanesboro, Minnesota, but the roads were dry and clear, so Margaret was able to drive there with no problem.

We had an uneventful drive back to Margaret’s, arriving home well after 11:00. We sat up talking for quite a while, and it was into the wee hours when we finally went off to bed.

SATURDAY, December 23

I was awake around 7:00 this morning and was surprised that it was still pitch black down in the valley where Margaret lives. I showered and had a bit of coffee while Margaret finished packing for our trip. We had decided to take Margaret’s [vehicle], mostly because it had relatively new tires, while my car’s tires had seen their better days. While that turned out not to be an issue on this trip, it just seemed prudent. We packed up the Tracker and set off shortly after 8:00.

We stopped briefly at the Kwik Star in Waukon, where we got gas and I bought a bit of breakfast. We then went down the Great River Road past Effigy Mounds and crossed into Wisconsin at Prairie du Chien. ...

We stopped to use the restroom at the McDonalds in Dodgeville and then continued across southern Wisconsin. Around noon we stopped for gas at Road Ranger truck stop in South Beloit, Illinois. The good Democrat in me was secretly pleased that Road Ranger was actually a Citgo station. Citgo is owned by the Venezuelan national oil company, and conservative Republicans have been urging a boycott of them because the Venezuelan government strongly disagrees with President Bush’s policies. Since I’m also mostly opposed to our President, it felt good buying gas from Citgo.

After filling up we headed south and east on the Northwest Tollway toward Chicago. Illinois has done a major re-design of the toll plazas on their expressways just this past year. It used to be that the toll plazas were far too frequent, and stopping for them caused major traffic jams all through the network. They’ve gone a long ways toward solving that problem. Today most of the traffic doesn’t stop at all at toll plazas. Cars equipped with I-Pass transponders (or equivalent electronic devices from other states) completely bypass the tollbooths. They stay on the main highway driving at their normal speed. Overhead devices are triggered as they pass, and the toll is automatically deducted from their account. Meanwhile, those of us without the automatic gizmos exited to the right for each toll plaza. Because there were a lot fewer cars, though, the plazas were much less backed up, and traffic moved right along. They’ve also decreased the number of plazas while raising the toll at each one. The total bill is basically the same (a little over $4 to go from Beloit to Chicago), but the number of stops has gone down. While I’d personally prefer that they just eliminated the toll all together, this was definitely an improvement.

The overhead warning signs implied that traffic was good all the way to O’Hare, and for the most part they were right. Unfortunately, we got delayed by a horrific accident near the Elgin toll plaza. I’m still not completely sure what happened, but one car was pretty much completely destroyed (squashed to about half its normal size), and at least two others were badly wrecked. Between the accident and the emergency vehicles that were attending to it, there was only one lane available for traffic to pass. The bottleneck delayed us about half an hour, but eventually we made our way past. While I can’t imagine anyone in the squashed car lived, I never did see or hear a thing about the accident in the news. I suppose it’s just the sort of thing people take for granted in an urban area—though definitely not what the relatives of the victims would want so close to Christmas.

We exited onto I-290 by Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg and followed signs for “West Suburbs”. We soon joined I-355, the North-South Tollway. After paying a buck we drove just a short ways south and exited at Roosevelt Road, the same exit Margaret and I had taken the very first time we went to Chicago a decade ago. We fought heavy traffic down the tacky strip that is the main drag of Lombard and Villa Park. It was sort of fun to pass the Villa Park Motel 6 where we stayed that first time we were in Chicago and see other landmarks that looked surprisingly familiar.

Eventually we reached our destination, the Comfort Suites—Oakbrook Terrace. Margaret pulled into their awkward little parking lot, and she waited while I checked in. The process took longer than it otherwise might, because I was using scrip to pay the bill. The woman at the desk had no problem with that. What was a problem, though, was that the scrip cards were only available in $25 increments. That meant I needed to redeem fifteen of them to cover the cost of our stay. It took more than a little time for her to scan fifteen cards and get them all properly recorded. She was pleasant, though, and eventually we were checked in.

The Comfort Suites is about half a mile east of the Motel 6 I referred to earlier. While it’s a much better hotel, it really didn’t cost that much more. We paid about $80 a night, for which we got a true suite with separate sitting and bed rooms with two cable-equipped TV sets, a large wardrobe to hang our clothes in, a microwave and refrigerator, and a large work desk. We also had complimentary wireless internet access, and Margaret had brought along her laptop so we could take advantage of it. A free adequate breakfast was served daily (and we could have paid to have bacon and eggs), and we could have taken advantage of a pool, a fitness room, laundry facilities, and a bar that served complimentary “welcome” drinks in the evening. While we used none of those, we did enjoy the beautifully decorated lobby, which featured an enormous, elegant Christmas tree topped by brass trumpet. Particularly for a longer stay, this place made an ideal home away from home.

* * * * *

Once we got settled into the room, I went across the street to a Walgreens, where I bought some drinks and snacks to avoid patronizing the hotel machines (which were actually surprisingly cheap). Like many Chicagoland stores, this had a large collection of foods geared toward Hispanic customers. I patronized their aisle buying some Mexican apple soda and a bag of “Galletas Dulces de Noche Buena” (sweet Christmas Eve cookies) made by a company in Colombia that is essentially called “the Christmas company”. For $1 a got what amounted to a big bag of animal crackers, but in holiday shapes like Santa, reindeer, and candy canes. I’m not sure I knew Santa was big in South America, but his smiling face graced the bag and his image adorned many of the cookies. In addition to the Mexican items I bought some cranberry juice and also some sea salt and cracked pepper flavored potato chips, which were excellent.

Around 4:00 we set off eastward down Roosevelt Road. This was also a familiar drive, as we made our way through a variety of old suburbs, each dumpier than the one before. After about twenty minutes we came to a K-Mart plaza with a Portillo’s hot dog restaurant on its outskirts. This was also familiar, and it was our landmark to turn on Desplaines Avenue where the Forest Park ‘L’ terminal is located.

While I’d never used it other than by myself, I thought it might simplify things if Margaret and I used a single card for our travels. Today that seemed to work well. I tapped my way into the station, handed the card back to Margaret, and she quickly followed—so far, so good.

We quickly boarded a train and almost immediately left the station. This is another improvement in service. It used to be that Forest Park was at the end of a branch of the blue line, and only every other train served the station. That meant that except at rush hour there could be a twenty minute wait for a train. They’ve revised service by splitting up the branches of the blue line, so now virtually every train that goes to O’Hare starts at Forest Park. That means service is rarely worse than every ten minutes, and at rush hour it can be as frequent as every five. Even with the weekend and the holiday, we never had a significant wait to leave Forest Park.

Yet another change is that the announcements on the trains are now all electronic. A pleasant, but nondescript male voice welcomed us aboard, gave assorted safety information, and announced that doors opened on the left at every blue line station we encountered. (By contrast, many of the stations themselves have a rather nasty female voice that announces that trains are about to arrive.) They no longer have conductors on any of the trains. A single driver (most often a black woman) operates the train, punches buttons to play the recorded announcements, and opens and closes the doors.

We took the blue line downtown (about a half-hour ride) to the big mixmaster at Clark and Lake. We walked outside to Washington and Wells, an elevated stop just west of the Clark/Lake subway station. While it cost $.25 to transfer to Washington, because of the direction that the train we wanted went around the Loop, it saved a lot of time to walk there rather than doing the free transfer at Clark and Lake.

We made our way upstairs and soon caught a pink line train. The pink line was just opened last spring, and it mostly consists of what used to be the other branch of the west side blue line. Instead of entering downtown via the Dearborn Street subway and continuing to O’Hare, though, pink line trains circle downtown on the Loop and head back out to the west side. A lot of the people who live along the pink line don’t like the change at all (mostly because it now requires them to transfer to get to their jobs in the O’Hare area). It provides better service to both former branches, though, and it really seems to make the whole network move more efficiently.

The pink line route is the part of the ‘L’ that has improved most since the first time we were here. One of the oldest parts of the system, the so-called “Douglas branch” in the ‘90s ran on a decrepit metal structure that was basically one big slow zone. It took a full hour to go about eight miles from downtown to Cicero, which in most cases was significantly slower than street traffic. They completely renovated the line about five years ago, and now it’s the newest part of CTA’s infrastructure and one of the most efficient transit lines anywhere.

We took the pink line about two-thirds of the way out, and after about twenty minutes we got off at the newly renovated Kedzie/Cermak station. We descended to street level and began a long walk southward. The walk (probably about half a mile) would have gone more quickly, except for the fact that about a week earlier I had somehow injured my leg. To this day I have no idea exactly what I did, but my calf hurt horribly. I’d been limping around school for a week, and I was limping all the way down Kedzie Avenue, too. I usually don’t complain a lot about pain, but frankly my leg hurt like hell. Most of the time I tend to walk quite quickly, and if anything Margaret struggles a bit to keep up. Tonight, though, it was very much the opposite. Several times I had to ask her to slow down so I could keep up as I hobbled along.

Our destination was a place not many tourists have been, but a place that was very familiar to both Margaret and me. Mi Tierra is a very authentic Mexican restaurant in an almost exclusively Hispanic neighborhood on Chicago’s west side. (They have two other locations, too, but this is the original.) We had dinner at Mi Tierra on Christmas Eve when we were in Chicago in 1998, and it was fun to return here for another holiday meal. The place advertises itself as “Mexico in Chicago”, and that’s almost literally true. I could easily imagine the tile-covered building decorated with frilly paper lace being in Mexico City or Mérida.

We were just about the only Anglos here, but we were certainly welcome. The hostess greeted us in English and ushered us to a pleasant table by the window. We were asked if we were celebrating a special event (like an anniversary), and they seemed a bit disappointed that we weren’t. Before we could even look at the menu we were presented with a heaping bowl of chips accompanied by salsa and pico de gallo. The chips were excellent (less greasy than tortilla chips often are), and the dinner was outstanding. I had “Pollo Mi Tierra”, which was chicken breast in a dark mole sauce. Margaret had “tinga poblana suiza”, which was shredded beef in a pepper sauce with Swiss cheese melted on top. Both were accompanied by numerous Mexican side dishes, as well as tortillas with which we could make our own little tacos.

An unexpected bonus for eating at Mi Tierra was live entertainment. I’m not sure if they have entertainment every night or if this was something special for the holidays, but we were entertained by a bleached blonde bimbo lounge singer who sang Christmas carols in Spanish while accompanying herself on a synthesizer with electronic drums. Typing that, it sounds as if the music must have been dreadful, but she was really quite good. It was also most unique. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen people dance to Christmas carols before, but with rousing drum accompaniment, even “Silent Night” makes an upbeat dance tune.

Most memorable among the carols was the traditional Spanish song “Campana Sobre Campana” (Bell Upon Bell). This is often a rather sappy children’s song, but she sang it as an uplifting number:

Campana sobre campana,
Y sobre campana una,
Asómate a la ventana,
Verás al Niño en la cuna.
Belén, Belén, campanas de Belén,
Que los ángeles tocan
¿Qué nueva me traéis?

(Bell upon bell;
and one above all bells;
Find your way to the window,
and you will see the Child in the manger.
Bethlehem, Bethlehem, bells of Bethlehem
which the angels played:
What news do you bring to me?)

Margaret and I joined in with the other diners in singing the choruses of the carols, and we clapped our hands a bit in celebration. It certainly made a fun way to start the holiday.

Resting at dinner made my leg feel a bit better, so we were able to return to the station a bit more quickly. We took the pink line back downtown and got off at State and Lake, right next to the landmark Chicago Theatre. We walked a block southward and then spent about fifteen minutes nudging past the crowds to see the windows at the State Street Macy’s, the store formerly known as Marshall Field’s.

I was not at all happy when Macy’s bought Marshall Field’s from Target and chose to discontinue the historic name. I was even more disappointed to see what they had done with the store. The historic building (often called “the cathedral of commerce” is still there), and it even still carries the brass Marshall Field’s nameplates—thanks to a judge’s ruling that they were historic landmarks. The interior, though, looks much less glamorous than it once did. Most conspicuous were the lovely columns which used to have gilded capitals that complemented Marshall Field’s dark green color scheme. Macy’s colors are red and white (indeed the plastic bags they use look remarkably like K-Mart bags). Apparently they felt gold didn’t fit with that color scheme, so now the tops of the columns are covered in tacky silver paint. I suppose it’s better to have the building occupied than empty, but I really don’t care for what the new owners have done with the place.

I didn’t care much for the Christmas windows, either. I don’t know that I can really blame Macy’s for that, though. Marshall Field’s sometimes did good windows, while other times the designs were nothing special. The theme for the windows this year was Mary Poppins (though what that has to do with the holidays, I really don’t know). Margaret tells me the hideous artwork was based on the original designs used in the old Mary Poppins books. I never read those books and grew up thinking Mary Poppins was Julie Andrews, so the cartoonish designs seemed just ugly to me. It also struck me as odd that they only animated about half the windows on the building. Marshall Field’s never did all of them (it would be close to impossible to animate every window in the block-square edifice), but it struck me as significantly more than Macy’s did.

After seeing Macy’s we headed down to the subway. We took the red line north past downtown to the North and Clybourn stop. We went up an incredibly narrow escalator and exited to a rather disorienting intersection where three major streets (the two for which the station is named, and also Halsted) came together. Eventually we found our destination for the evening, the Royal George Theatre.

The Royal George is one of several small theatre companies that are part of the lively nightlife on Chicago’s near north side. (You may have heard of the better-known Steppenwolf Theatre across the street or the Second City Comedy Club around the corner.) Located in a dumpy old building, the Royal George has three different performance spaces, each of which does two shows a night Thursday through Sunday. We were going to the late performance in the Cabaret Theatre. When I hear “cabaret”, my mind envisions circular drink tables and can-can girls, but this was just a standard “black box” theatre with padded metal folding chairs for seats.

I had seen the show we were here to see last spring in Des Moines (at the Temple for the Performing Arts, another black box with folding chairs, but one that happens to be in a historic building). The show, Leaving Iowa, premiered in Des Moines and now the same cast is doing an open run in Chicago. It is a well-written modern play that uses comedy to tell a surprisingly serious story. The main plot revolves around a writer who had grown up in Winterset, Iowa, but then moved to Boston. His busy life there had caused him to miss his father’s funeral. In the play he returns to Iowa, where he agrees to fulfill his father’s wishes to have his ashes scattered around his boyhood home in southeast Iowa. Unfortunately, when the son gets to the site where dad grew up, he finds the place is now a supermarket. The rest of the show is spent with the son searching for a fitting place that dad can spend eternity.

The main plot is interspersed with flashbacks that recall the less than ideal vacations the family spent when the son was growing up in the ‘60s—family trips that bore some amazing similarities to those our family took, right down to the father (who was a teacher) keeping careful track of gas mileage and driving out of his way to avoid toll roads or save a couple of cents on gas. Also like us, the family in the play stopped at numerous less than well-known “attractions”, which dad obviously liked, but the son (which Margaret likened to our brother John) didn’t care for. That prompted the son to eventually decide to scatter the ashes at the geographic center of America near Lebanon, Kansas, a place that the father in the show always wanted to see but was never able to get to. (I drove past there, but didn’t actually stop, years ago when I was in college...)

I liked the show last spring, and I very much enjoyed it again. It was interesting to see things that had changed (like more elaborate costuming), and some Iowa-oriented jokes that played differently in Des Moines (where they came across as inside jokes) than in Chicago (where they came across as making fun of the hicks. Margaret seemed to notice every inconsistency and error in the show (like saying it was a two hour drive from Winterset to Mt. Union or implying Mt. Union was large enough to have a supermarket). Still, I think she liked the show a lot too.

We took the ‘L’ back downtown, where we found out about another renovation CTA is doing. The Washington subway station on the red line (probably the busiest in the system) is closed for the next two and a half years as part of a major construction project. Among other things, the project will allow express trains to run from O’Hare to downtown and on to Midway. For now, though, that means the only place you can transfer between the red and blue lines is at the south end of the Loop at Jackson. They’ve already renovated Jackson station. In particular they’ve increased the lighting incredibly. The pedestrian tunnel between the blue and red lines there used to be downright scary, but now it’s really quite a pleasant, easy transfer.

The blue line runs down the middle of the Eisenhower Expressway on the west side, passing some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. It was interesting to see that nearly everyone had some sort of Christmas lights up, and some of them were really very nice displays. In an urban setting, almost all the lights are limited to windows and sometimes a few lights on the eaves. I must say I like that better than the garish lawn displays people often have at home. The lights in Chicago came across as pretty without being pretentious.

We had parked in the north lot at Forest Park, a lot neither Margaret nor I had parked in before. The other lots exit directly to Desplaines Avenue and/or the Eisenhower Expressway, but the north lot had numerous signs forbidding us from exiting in that direction. Instead we went into the town of Forest Park itself. Indeed we got a grand tour of the place. Eventually we did loop around to Desplaines Avenue, but it was definitely a longer exit than we had planned.

It was nearly midnight when we got back to the hotel. I soaked a while in the bathtub, which helped my leg a lot. Then we both headed off to bed.\

SUNDAY, December 24

We slept in fairly late and went down to the breakfast room around 9:00. While there were a number of choices in the complimentary breakfast, I can’t say it was the best feature of this hotel. I had a do-it-yourself waffle and the world’s tiniest cup of yogurt (half the normal “single serving” size). They certainly broke my fast, but I can’t say either was exactly tempting to the taste buds.

We drove today to the most remote of the three parking lots at Forest Park, because we figured it might be more convenient when we returned at night (and it was certainly more convenient than the north lot where we’d parked last night). Unfortunately the parking machine in the remote lot was broken. It had taken the money of the person before us, but it hadn’t issued a receipt. Another person who was parking implied that this was something that happened all the time and suggested we just write a note and leave it in the window of the car. Since we were from out of town and the person who had lost money didn’t speak much English, both he and we decided it would be a better bet to go to the main lot instead. The machine there was tricky (like a pop machine that only takes perfectly crisp bills), but we did eventually get it to work. I hope the Hispanic man didn’t end up paying twice.

Whenever and wherever I travel, I invariably pick up all the free papers they have in plastic boxes on the street. Chicago is overrun with such papers, and I had a plethora of them to occupy my time on this morning’s ‘L’ ride. Most interesting was a newspaper geared to the black community that featured an ad for a place called Moo and Oink. What this turned out to be was a chain of ethnic grocery stores. In Hispanic neighborhoods, they’d call them carnecerías. While Jewel and Dominick’s (Chicago’s real supermarkets) were advertising ham and cranberries and Supermercados Cuautémoc touted their enchiladas and mango juice, Moo and Oink was extolling the virtues of black-eyed peas, collard greens, barbecue, and assorted meats that are probably best described as “pork byproducts” (chitlins, fritters, and lard). I’ve patronized Hispanic grocers all over the country, as well as Greek, Italian, and Jewish food stores. I’m not sure I could bring myself to actually step inside Moo and Oink, though, in spite of the funny name.

We exited the ‘L’ at the blue line’s Washington stop, which leads right to Daley Plaza in the heart of downtown. Daley Plaza is home to the city’s Christmas tree, which is actually about a dozen trees that are wired together to make a single enormous green cone. In addition to the tree there’s a lovely Nativity scene, a gigantic silver menorah, and a small green column topped by a crescent moon representing the five pillars of Islam. In addition to the religious displays, there’s also a completely secular area that includes a huge model train set and a little hut where children can visit Santa Claus. All this looks rather out of place in a plaza that is normally dominated by an enormous brown Picasso sculpture.

• NEXT - Christmas 2006, Page 2
• RETURN - Original Travelogues
• HOME

(c) 2007 davidmburrow@yahoo.com

The background music on this page is the Spanish carol "Campana Sobre Campana".