Chicago

Wednesday morning we are getting up very, very early and driving to Chicago, where Warren will spend the rest of the week attending the national conference of the League of American Orchestras and I will spend the rest of the week enjoying Chicago.

"Enjoying Chicago" means I am in for lots and lots of walking, as the number one thing I love to do in Chicago is look at the architecture. And there is no better city in the world than Chicago in which to look at architecture.

On Friday, I am being joined by Lindsay, who is the same age as my older son (23) and who I have known since she was five. Lindsay also loves architecture.

Both of us are fascinated with the Columbian Exposition of 1893, which was the first true world's fair and which took place in Jackson Park on the south side of Chicago. The Columbian Exposition featured the White City, a fanciful collection of Beaux Arts buildings that ringed the Grand Basin. With the exception of the Fine Arts building, which was built of brick to protect the works within, the buildings were built of staff, a plaster and straw mix, overlaid onto metal frames. They were only temporary.

After the Exposition closed, most of the buildings either burned down and were razed. The Fine Arts Building quietly rotted for a number of years before being restored and transformed into the Museum of Science and Industry, which has just celebrated its 75th anniversary. Other than that and the Midway, there are only traces of the Exposition left. Some of what we plan for Friday is looking for those traces.

I first saw Chicago when I was 18½. I had been admitted to the University of Chicago, which was built of the north edge of the Midway, and my parents drove me to college. I had never seen the campus, only studied the college brochures and catalogues. (This was long before internet, websites, and virtual tours.) I navigated my father off the Dan Ryan, down Garfield to Cottage Grove, then south on Cottage Grove until we turned onto the Midway and I first saw that magnificent wall of Gothic architecture.

Although I didn't realize it back then, Warren has a lot of Chicago roots. His mother was born and raised in Evanston, and until Warren was well into high school, his grandmother lived in the greater Chicago area. As a result, he and his siblings made frequent trips to Chicago. When Warren was 20, he spent the summer in La Grange, working at the Musser plant. He was leaving Chicago and returning to Delaware to start his junior year at Ohio State just as I was arriving on the Midway. In looking back, I figured we missed each other by one week.

Warren and I talk about everything, but one discussion we tend not to visit is "what if?" We chose other paths back then. Life happened. We'd both rather celebrate we have now than wring our hands over what never was.

We do a great job of celebrating the here and the now.

In the past, I had always felt as if pieces of me were scattered all over the country and I could never quite gather them all up. That sense of being scattered was something I'd carried with me from childhood, for lots of reasons. There were times, more than there should have been, when I felt my life was built of staff - an impermanent façade much like the 1893 Exposition buildings.

It took me awhile to figure it out, but it turns out I wasn't made of staff after all. I was made of something more resilient and lasting. Thanks to a great therapist, great friends, a not so great illness that taught me great things, and the incomparable love of Warren, I have been restored, not unlike the transformation of the wreck of the Fine Arts building.

The beauty of my life now is that all of the pieces are gathered. I am no longer torn between here and somewhere or something else. I am finally home, literally and figuratively.

Friday Lindsay and I will be looking for the remains of an amazing event, the first world's fair ever. We will look at the outside of the Museum of Science and Industry and compare it to the photos from the fair to see the phoenix that rose from the ashes of the Columbian Exposition.

I know just how it feels.