Last Saturday, the family piled into the car at 6 AM to drive my sister back to Evanston for her senior year at Northwestern. Approximately 13 hours later, after braving Chicago's lovely Dan Ryan Expressway and a mess of Chicagoans who apparently learned to drive by watching monster truck rallies, we drove through Skokie - probably home to more bagel shops than anywhere else outside of New York - and into scenic Evanston, which is much less ghetto than either New Haven or the south side of Edinburgh. That said, the drive into Evanston is pretty miserable, as Illinois, like Indiana, is basically one large cornfield. I swear, if I never see a mile-long field of brown corn stalks again, it'll be too soon.
Illinois is the self-proclaimed "Land of Lincoln", and the guy's everywhere, along with the names of Chicago's versions of New Haven's Harkness family - Jen recognized several names at the Field Museum from buildings around campus. There seemed to be only one name being tossed about this weekend, however, and that belonged to O. J. Simpson. The Juice is back for another round of celebrity justice. I can hardly wait, but just so I don't get too excited and have a heart attack in the interim, Fox News has been filling me in on his every move since this little story broke. If O. J. visits the bathroom, Fox will probably run an update on the ticker. This is news, people.
After we managed to tear ourselves away from the updates coming out of Las Vegas, the move-in was largely uneventful, aside from the necessary schlepping of bags, purchasing of bins and cleaning supplies, and cleaning of the results of the summer's sloppiness, like the dried food down the front of the dishwasher. Evanston even cooperated on the weather front, and we were blessed with sunny, relatively cool days. The poor frosh moving in today, by contrast, were greeted with temperatures in the mid-eighties. Have fun, kids.
As we had a free day on Monday, we took the El into Chicago, a process made more arduous than necessary because of the improvements being made to the red line, and took in the Field Museum and Sue, the most complete T. Rex skeleton found to date. Let's just say she had a killer smile. The Field was lovely, and afterwards, we hopped back on the train for a trip to the other end of Michigan Avenue, where they keep all the shops. Unexpectedly, we made it out of Neiman Marcus without dropping a dime, which pleased my father to no end - I'm sorry, but $450 corduroy pants are beyond ridiculous - and having seen our fill, we descended to the red line once again.
This was when the fun started.
The train, for unknown reasons, came only after a 25-minute wait, and when it arrived, we were packed in and grateful for deodorant. One by one, we managed to find seats, and gradually the car cleared enough for us to really notice the other passengers, like the loud wino. One guy, who sported a baseball cap with a large '$', had burned fingers and kept rubbing his nose as he talked and gesticulated to his companion a few seats up, and my father quickly pegged him as a crackhead. He called for his friend to join him, and, trying to ignore this guy, I gave his friend only a passing glance.
On second look, I realized she was male. His biceps, prominent under his green knit shrug, gave him away.
The crackhead and the cross-dresser began a loud, profanity-laced conversation that made my mother cringe, and after discussing their various acquaintances, like a guy named Rat and some other guy who was still in prison, the crackhead mentioned a Kim.
"Oh, I know all the Kims around," the cross-dresser informed him. "My boyfriend's wife's name is Kim. He has her name tattooed all over his body."
It was at this point that I, as well as half the car, nearly lost it. As we approached a stop, however, they stood to leave, and the crackhead announced to the people in front of him, "I'm getting off! Are you all getting off? I need to get off!" When the train stopped, they pushed their way through, shouting unnecessarily, and the rest of the car cracked up. We told the doctor who sat down in front of us about the spectacle we thought he had missed, and he nodded; this was nothing new to him.
"We're from out of town," we explained, "and this doesn't usually happen."
"You from Iowa?" he asked.
"Alabama.
He snorted. "Welcome to the real world."
Nothing quite topped Kim, the boyfriend's wife, but the fun only increased that evening, as our hotel, which hadn't been sure what was going on all weekend, had to move my parents and me into a new room for our final night. Unfortunately, this room only had a single king bed, and as the hotel has no cots - contrary to what one desk clerk told us - we were forced to share. The last time I shared a bed with my parents, I was about seven and we three all fit on a standard full-sized mattress. Three adults on a king is something else entirely - my mother likened us to the Three Stooges - but as we rose at 4 AM to leave Chicago, at least the night was short.
Back on the Dan Ryan by 5:30, I realized why my parents had insisted on leaving at an ungodly hour: Chicago traffic never stops, and the rush was already beginning as we heading around the city. Once past the worst of it, my mother and I slept, waking in time for breakfast at a McDonald's somewhere in corn country, and from then on I could only sleep sporadically on the 12-hour trip home. During periods of consciousness, I was treated to some of I-57 and I-24's great roadside attractions: the largest cross in the country, the Quilting Museum, a restaurant that still advertised a "hicken sandwich" three days after we saw it for the first time, a Shell station-cum-Christmas shop, and a little place called Joe Bob's Flower Farm. I got to hear Paul Harvey not once, but twice today; of special note were the man who robbed a bank but left his resume behind, and the married couple who were talking to each other under pseudonyms online and only realized the other was cheating when they arranged to meet (they're now seeking a divorce). Still, nothing today was quite as funny as the sign we passed as we entered Kentucky, which informed us that Kentucky is the "Birthplace of Abraham Lincoln".
A bit of snarkiness, perhaps, but take that, Illinois.
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