I can see the chain of choices
that forged my present. This post is about the long chain of choices that tows a person through life.
A couple of weeks ago I walked east on Loyola Avenue in Chicago, east of Sheridan, towards the lake. A beach I remember liking is now a lengthy pile of Army Corps boulders behind a retaining wall, protecting the Loyola University buildings at lake’s edge from the high water level.
When that spot was a sandy beach, my friend and her brother and I went swimming there with two inflatable rafts. We picked that spot because it was not lifeguarded, therefore the rule about no flotation toys did not apply. That was in 1983, a year after we had graduated from high school. Did we inflate the rafts in their family’s big apartment, several blocks away, and carry them, or did we blow them up at the beach? I don’t know. We floated out and enjoyed the hot, golden setting sun, the cold lake water, and the freedom of goofing off. Afterward, we ordered pizza, as we did every week, calling J.B’s on the phone. I wrote in my journal, “summer is so beautiful that how do we ever even make it through winter?”
Soon after, that beach was gone forever. Wall; boulders; No Swimming.
The 1980s feel recent-ish. The perspective of age changes the size of a year or a decade. I like that perspective. What I don’t like is my perception that knowledge from 30, 40, 50 years ago is considered irrelevant to today’s world. Where does that perception come from? I may be projecting it (onto the zeitgeist?), because “irrelevant” is a matter of opinion. Maybe it’s my opinion. But I want my experiences to be relevant.
Two years after that summer of floating, only a block away from Loyola at the lake where I now walked, I lived with my girlfriend. She was from another part of Chicago. I was thankful that she was willing to move to my area, Rogers Park, so that we could be close to the lake and still get low rent. We rented a top-floor apartment in a four-plus-one, a perforated-looking, generic block of 1960s brick. To live a block or less from the beach had been a wish of mine forever. On humid summer nights, we floated crossways together in a giant inner tube, drifting in the cool water and later running our air conditioner. I was proud of our life there.
Back to November 3, 2024. I followed the sidewalk and listened to Loyola University’s chapel bells sounding the hour of eleven A.M. The chiming bells unfurled, in memory, a chain of decisions that brought me far from Rogers Park, and to be walking as a visitor to this oh so familiar place.
The chain started at age 20—nine years after my mother died. At age eleven I’d believed that I could not grow up, but in early 1985 I was nonetheless halfway through college and ready to leave home. At my age today, 60, nine years is not a long time. But the changes in that specific nine years, from age eleven to age twenty, amount to a metamorphosis.
Changes involve choices, or seem to—but change is inevitable even if choices are abdicated. At twelve I decided I would not drink or smoke or go to parties. Without a mother or siblings, I had to protect myself, and I did. Other than that, by the time I was twenty I felt I’d passively abdicated almost all decision-making so far.
But then I started to want things. To go to college, to leave home safely. The menu of choices always felt small, and I chose among experiences that were easy to reach.
I decided to go to college downtown at Columbia College Chicago and live at home for a while. I decided what classes to take and what to major in. And I decided to change my major from drawing and painting to creative writing.
I decided when to move out of the house and, with my girlfriend’s input, where to live. My moving out at age 21 was a bigger deal to my dad than it was to me. I had a job, a budget, a lease, and a roommate. He tried to alarm me about the consequences of either of us losing our job, or my friend proving untrustworthy, or our changing our minds after signing the contract. But my choice was firm. My girlfriend and her brother showed up in his pickup truck to load my belongings, and off I went to live… eight blocks away. I never moved back, no matter how broke/stressed/panicked I was in the next several years.
I felt free.
I decided with little help how to manage my friendships and my “love life,” in which curiosity drove me as it does in most things. Curiosity and affection led me to choose to act on my attraction to a girlfriend and also (within safe limits, as I still was always protective) to accept the pursuit of a man.
At 22 I decided I wouldn’t pursue marriage any time soon. I knew that my late mother had had a career, working as a payroll clerk in four different cities, until she married my father in 1963. She was almost 37 then. She had told her sister—given their rural Depression-era upbringing—”I didn’t want to marry a farmer.” She knew the right man when she saw him, when she met my dad in Chicago.
I admired my mom for not marrying young as all of my friends’ moms had. I thought she was the wisest person who ever lived. And like her I didn’t want to jump into committed interdependence too soon even though I didn’t make much money. I wanted to see what life was like on my own. I guess I hadn’t yet had enough solo decision-making.
I decided when and how to change jobs three times by myself. I decided which of my work friends would be my social friends and my lasting friends.
Six times, I decided mostly alone when to move to a new apartment, and where. I decided when to buy a beater car and when to sell it, and when to buy a better one.
I decided at 23 and at 29, both times when love relationships were ending, to find a therapist. I decided when and how to end a relationship that had stagnated. By that time, I wanted to make joint decisions, but that wasn’t possible.
I decided in 1994 to try blind dating by running a personal ad in the free weekly newspaper. All I remember is that some guy with red hair spent a whole first-date dinner making a long speech on where he had gone camping. I had already decided on my destination (North Shore of Lake Superior) and how to get there (reserve a cabin, take a map and drive from Chicago in my used Camry).
I decided to take group guitar classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music. I walked into the place, just curious, when I was on an errand. I picked up a catalog of classes and I knew instantly, “this place will change my life.” And I had the most fun there I’d ever had in my life so far.
I decided to be open to meeting and dating Tom, to tell him I hoped to move to Seattle, and to tell him I wanted to do fun stuff instead of having children.
WHOOOooosssSSHHH
It’s thirty years later. I get to go to Chicago and walk around and let the buildings, trees, and lake be the backdrop for my memories. Memories of scenes, but mostly, memories of mental work in creating the decisions and choices I made. I forged, inside my mind, the chain from there to here.
Are memories real? Are they real if I’m the only one who remembers? Did we really go floating in Lake Michigan with no lifeguard and (at least for me) no swim skills? Did I really take eight-week guitar classes for two whole years? Talking to old friends, I’m always hoping for a shared memory, so we can agree “that was real” while we are still alive to share in it.
Lovely!
So beautiful as always, Fran!!