Arrival in Chicago, Thursday

10 a.m., Thursday, Hilton Hotel, the Loop, Chicago:

You feel it first in your ears. I forgot that. I lived in the Chicago Area in 1967; North Chicago; the US Naval Training Station, on the lake, north of here on the Chicago and Northwestern Railway.

I’ve visited a few times since but this is the first time in 44 years that I’ve experienced the wind coming off the lake, carrying that freezing air into your bones, and, especially, into your earlobes and fingertips. It didn’t help that I lost my coat at SFO. I slung it over a chair while I checked my email, and then discovered it was missing as I was boarding the plane. So I’ve been walking around with just a sweater. I’m convinced I’ll leave here with a cold. I can just feel the viruses celebrating. “The fool has left his piddly California defenses at home. We can take over now!”

I’m staying at a hostel on the North Side. If you’ve seen the movie, “The Fugitive”, you know the neighborhood, where the one-armed guy lived; brick multi-story structures on tree-lined streets. Chicago, more so than most American cities, is starkly and definitively segregated. A broad east-west avenue divides the city in half, black and Hispanic to the south, white in the north; Comiskey Park vs. Wrigley Field; the old meat packing plants vs. the new technology companies; drug crime vs. quiet, somewhat dull streets.

They are playing Christmas music in the Hilton, already; and in the downtown malls. The convention is at the Hilton Hotel in a somewhat seedy part of the Loop. You don’t need statistics to see the difference between the sclerotic American economy and the dynamic Chinese. Just walk the downtown streets of Chicago (or San Francisco) and Guangzhou (or Hong Kong). The streets here are nearly empty at 9 a.m. The central business district is populated by chain stores, furniture stores, fast food, the high-margin, high-fat, high-interest rate businesses that prey on the urban poor. “Nothing down, pay for that sofa for the next three years.” In a Chinese city you navigate your way gingerly through the teeming masses who fill the wide sidewalks from wall to avenue; you feel the energy. In Chicago the proverbial cannon ball sent down Lake Street would go unnoticed.

I rode the el into downtown. I’m always curious if reading is dying out so I typically count the number of people texting or listening to music vs. the number who are reading. In my train car I saw approximately 75 people; ten were using electronics, ten were reading, 55 were staring off into space trying to avoid interacting with the odd person they assumed was sitting or standing next to them.

I was also struck by how few people wore hats. I’d guess about 20 of the 75 passengers had something covering their heads, mostly ski caps. Women had their natural defense against the cold—long hair. There was not one hoody in the car. And most of the ski caps were set high on the heads, either not covering the ears at all or protecting the top half of the ear. But, of course, most of those people would only be on the street for a minute or two till they got to their office building; hence the empty boulevards.

I have a feeling I’m not going to like the setup of this convention. It’s split between two hotels (about ten blocks apart) and spread out vertically within the hotels so it will be hard to feel a sense of camaraderie with other teachers because I won’t see most of them. When the convention is splayed out horizontally you meet more people, and have more chance conversations.