Posted on 06/16/08 at 03:24 AM
Since I caught some flack from readers in May when I published old letters claiming that Ramen Noodles was better then my mother’s soup on Mother’s day. How embarrassing. In order to remedy that blunder in some small way, I’m dedicating this blog to my dad. He brought me up to think of bicycling as the norm. Without him I probably would have took the trian this afternoon and missed this whole adventure.
For the last two months I’ve been commuting to work using the Chicago lakefront path, one of the very special treasures of Chicago. As it’s name suggests, it runs for 20 miles along the lake, starting about a mile south of my apartment all the way to 71st street, south of the loop.
This evening I decided to slow down and enjoy my ride down the lakefront path. Summer has finally arrived and it felt like the whole city had come out to play. The path runs past what feels dozens of playing fields for soccer, baseball, hockey and even dodge ball. Last week I stopped to watch a game one evening. It was delightfully entertaining to watch grown adults scampering across the court earnestly ducking and weaving multicolored gym balls.
This evening the southernmost point on my route was the chess pavilion, which according to one player has been around since “the ’30s or ’50s”. As soon as I sat down a guy came up and offered to play me a game for two dollars. Though I declined the invitation, I eventually ended up losing five games (and $5) to a guy named Isaac who confessed, after the first game, that he was an expert rated over 2,000. I never made it past a 1,000 back in high school. But it was still fun to sit there for a while playing five minute games with the moon rising over the lake beside the Chicago skyline. I figure I did my duty to support the Chicago’s chess community for the week.
After I had my fill of chess, I headed back north along the lake shore as the sun went down. On the one side, the setting sun etched the edges of the clouds gold behind the towers at the edge of the city. Out over the lake there was a spectacular thunderhead hanging silently above the water. As the sund set, the cloud’s hues became richer and richer. Every couple miles I stopped to snap a shot till all that was left was a bright pink glow:
This is the first post in a new category I’m calling Why I Love Chicago.
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