Fang Island

I had been living in Chicago for about a year when my friend Aaron came out to visit me. Well, to visit Kim and I. I don’t remember exactly how long I’d been in the city or how long she and I had been married, but we still lived in our first apartment, so I know it was our first year of marriage, that tiny apartment on the third floor on the corner of Throop and 21st. Where did Aaron sleep in that little place? How did our life ever fit into a 1-bedroom apartment? How did we fit an extra person there? I remember we had this little Weber grill that had short stubby legs and one night when Aaron was visiting we grilled hamburgers on the fire escape, which was probably illegal. (I do remember that sometimes Kim and I would haul our couch cushions and pillows and sleeping bags up that fire escape and sleep on the roof, which was also illegal or at least thoroughly frowned upon by management. But I’m certain we didn’t make Aaron sleep on the roof while he visited. So I’m still not sure where we put him.)

On the night we grilled the burgers, Aaron and I decided to go for a drive. It was a deliciously warm summer night—Kim says it’s like bathwater when the air outside feels more or less like nothing, just the right temperature so that it’s neither hotter or colder than your skin, "like perfect bathwater". And as I remember it was too hot when we were making the burgers—grilling on your fire escape is a windows open, no screen, bugs inside, too hot in your third floor apartment kind of affair—but perfect bathwater air was the temperature that night as Aaron and I headed out. We weren’t really going anywhere in particular; I think I had a sense that I wanted to show him the city. Except what I wanted wasn’t so much to show him Chicago as it was to show him MY Chicago. I had the sense, as he visited, of the city through his eyes, and from that perspective I could see, could recognize, a person seeing the city as an outsider, and that meant I could see myself, in a way I hadn't before, as someone who lived here, who belonged here; I had a purpose and a role in the city and I knew it well enough to show someone else something about it.

I’d moved away from Lincoln without a clear plan for what, exactly, I was doing there. For that matter I didn’t really know what I was doing with my life, or what I was going to do with it. I had returned from living abroad with a plan to go to medical school but I didn’t in that moment have a school that had indicated that their plans, too, involved me going to their medical school. And now I’d moved to this city and found a community, met my wife and married her, and had even found a medical school to attend in the fall. I was flush, as Aaron and I got into my car, our bellies full of burgers, with a sense of having accomplished, of having earned, a kind of ownership of the city. I was showing him my Chicago.

As we drove through the city, we put on Fang Island. And this is the memory I have, the image in mind: racing through the city, the buildings out the lowered windows a little blurry with the speed of our movement, wind rushing through the car, the warm quiet air, the pavement yellow under mercury lights. And Aaron and I singing along to Fang Island, to every word and, much more often, every guitar part, exuberantly shouting each “diddly doo doo DOO” and “reer reeeeeer” and “djun djun djun”, a little duet of ridiculous sounds accompanied by that album’s ebullient “everyone high fiving everyone” energy. And through all of that, inside those moments, inside of me, that sense of having made it, here, to this moment.