A quiet noisy day—and where did you grow up

Today was one of those quiet days when I enjoyed my own company—Sophie and I were alone all day. I was proofreading pages for the reprint of my 1990s novel, Jessie—more about that another day, but I will say proofreading is intensive tiring work.

So as per my habit, I took an afternoon nap. And suddenly the world burst forth in sound. Sophie barked as though she wanted to go out, and I told her it was too early. But then I heard the cause of her agitation—a lawnmower. The yard guys were here for their regular Monday visit. Soph tolerates the mower but the blowers drive her to frantic barking. I have learned to kind of tune it out and hope they will be gone soon. But now  the same crew does the house next door—so instead of doing our yard in one quick job, they do a bit of ours and then a bit of the neighbors. Then they come back to blow the yard, and, when I think they’ve left, they come back to blow the driveway. So the whole event takes between thirty and forty-five minutes, during which Soph is either barking, poised to bark, or protectively taking one of her chews everywhere with her.

But today there was another sound. I heard it dimly and thought it awfully rhythmic. Finally dawned on me a marching band was practicing in the schoolyard across the street. And practicing … and practicing. When the yard guys had finally closed all the gates and left, I let Sophie out, but she came right back and for a long while was reluctant to go out. I think the marching music scared her.

Jordan broke my solitude, as she usually does, by coming out to watch the news and have a glass of wine with me. It was to be a leftovers night, and we decided we wanted a huge salad. She made her trademark blue cheese salad with hearts of palm, cherry tomatoes, and avocado. Wonderful dinner.

But the highlight of the day came when I zoomed in to the Hyde Park (Chicago) Book Club for a discussion by Carlo Rotella, author of The World is Always Coming Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood. No, the neighborhood is not Hyde Park but South Shore, to the south on the lakefront. I have two clear memories of South Shore—the Country Club on the lake, with a magnificent clubhouse and extensive stables. Neighbors took me there for special dinners—“You don’t have to eat fish, it’s not Friday”—and a beloved aunt and uncle who lived in a three-story apartment building on Jeffrey Boulevard (my uncle owned the building and had his medical office in the ground floor). In my young years, South Shore was a sophisticated, upper class neighborhood.

Rotella made many points tonight, among them that South Shore, once considered occupied by Irish and Jews, transitioned to a Black neighborhood in the sixties—upper middle-class Blacks. Today it is symptomatic of the disappearance of the middle class and has evolved into a two-class neighborhood: the haves and the have-nots. When it makes the news, it’s usually because of a shooting. It’s a neighborhood that, because of its lakeshore location, lives in fear of being gentrified again.

More important to me were his ideas about neighborhood. The neighborhood you grew up in, he said, always lives within you. It shapes who you are. He cited his own example of locking front doors and cars, a by-product of growing up in South Shore in the seventies. It could as easily apply to me growing up in Hyde Park in the fifties.

I found all this fascinating because of the increasing turn of my thoughts to Hyde Park. I’m wondering if that’s a function of age. Once when someone in Austin asked me where I was from, meaning where did I live, I said Chicago, and my daughter quickly said, “Mom.” So I corrected it to Fort Worth. But in truth I am always from Chicago—Rotella just made me realize how it has shaped me, from locking doors to loving old houses and eclectic neighborhoods.

I’ve now set two books in Chicago—The Gilded Cage, which is Chicago history (1847 to 1895) and could not be set anywhere else, and Saving Irene, in which I deliberately chose Hyde Park as the setting. And I’m contemplating a third, set in Hyde Park. Rotella is right—he calls it the container, but I call it the home/ neighborhood you grew up in—it never leaves you.