On Bad Days and Wednesdays

There's this point on the horizon that the sky meets the water that is so pitch black that I can't tell the difference between the two. If they wanted to play a practical joke and switch themselves around for the evening, I would be none the wiser.

I can't help but keep staring at this dark spot and it's neighbors: a horseshoe of orange light that is in reality, cities in the distance. There, that's the city that I live in. It looks so tiny from here. I can make out the blinking lights of the Sears Tower, the Hospital, and maybe the Hancock building. Somewhere in that mix of faint glow is my building. Where I was only hours ago. In a different state.

This is by far the craziest thing I've done on a school night. We left Chicago to drive to Lake Station, Indiana.  More specifically, a Denny's in a Flying J truck stop in Lake Station, Indiana. Although, at the time I didn't know that. I didn't know anything. I kept shaking my head until we reached the "Welcome to Indiana" sign and then I shook my head some more.

We ate breakfast for dinner and couldn't stop laughing about the absurdity of where we were. Did we really just drive an hour or so to eat at a Denny's?

And it got better.

Here was downtown Gary, Indiana, a place one of my professors had called "a hallway with leaves." There was a brightly lit pizza place in an old train station, a tiny Shakespeare company, and Green Day's Good Riddance on the radio between stations of bad rap cutting in and out and white noise. More importantly, there was Marquette Park.

There's a residential area, some park land, a cafe shut down for the season, and there, beyond the pavement? That's the dunes. And past that? Good old Lake Michigan.

Maybe it's my city-senses but I couldn't help but be on high alert. Here we were on a beach that is not only closed after dusk but closed after Labor Day. Strike one and two in a single step. I kept expecting a security guard to pop out of the beach grass and yell at us "pesky kids" but no one appeared and Lake Michigan, I've never loved you more.

It's late October on the waterfront and the air smells like that one New Year's Eve on Good Harbor Beach and I'm sitting on top of a lifeguard tower. At that point I'm crying a little. Sort of because it's freezing out but mostly because I'm happy.

I'm so damn happy.

"You know, from here, I'm taller than the Sears tower."

"Yeah, it doesn't look so scary this way."

And on the way back, on Lake Shore Drive as we rounded a corner and you could see the skyline stretched out in all it's glory, "Closing Time" is on the radio. I swear I'm not making that up. I don't know, I think sometimes on bad days and Wednesdays, the universe listens.