Ode to O'Hare

Much has been written about Chicago's O'Hare International Airport--that massive, amalgamation of seemingly never ending concourses and populated by, at any given point, 18 guys named "Brent" talking into a Bluetooth about "closing the loop" or "resynergizing back with the team". Plenty of internet space is dedicated to grumbling about its size, missed connections, and of course, lost baggage.

I won't take such a tact--because, for me, well, I came of age in O'Hare. As I slouched around the F concourse yesterday, sniffing out the few working power outlets in there (there are very few), I recounted the memories I have throughout this massive, often derided-place: the times I've dashed through here with big expectations and the times I've chased the inebriation of such imagination with the hour and a half ride back on the Blue Line to my home on the South Side. It's where I went to go see about a girl, to pursue my dream of being a Shakespeare camp counselor, and of course, where I went when my first real job sent me out to the Heartland: there I was--on the B/C Connector, with my itinerary: I was now much like those yappity-yap Bluetooth bedecked guys I was once so scornful of. With a ring of sweat around my neck, a suit unnaturally draped on my body, I was now charged to "close the loop" and expense report--in places like Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, places I never thought I would be.

O'Hare is at once Chicago an still not--it is a hermetically sealed world of fantasy--if, like me, your idea of fantasy is choosing between Fargo and Frankfort. There is plenty of Cubs (and to a greater extent now, thankfully) Sox kitsch, and there are plenty of those Chicago cops, and even things that claim Mayor Daley king. In the way that one look down the Terminal One Helmut Jahn-designed concourses and you think, "I can do anything today", such is so elementally true about every street of Chicago--brimming, for me at least, with big ideas. But, really, it isn't Chicago. It's at best sometimes, a helpful proxy for Chicago. And while I think of the nooks and crannies of the concourses as little neighborhoods, they do not do justice to a walk about in the real thing. Few things beat the realization in Chicago that the snow has relented and summer, complete with festivals and paloozas and of course, the noise of neighbors sitting outside and enjoying the warm evenings.

So, to this often loathed place--a place that people dash through, I find solace. I find a place that has watched me grow from the early days of college, through trips for human rights, study abroad meltdowns, and escapades in personal 'discovery'. Next time you find yourself passing through these parts, stop and take in all the excitement and expectation this massive space has to share--skip the Starbucks, and look for me, staring at the departures board, wondering where to dream myself to next.