Not Quite In Defense of Big Cities

In my wild and misspent youth, I imagined traveling the great cities. Growing up in the big vibe of 70’s San Francisco, my dreams of adventure stood upon the classics like New York, Paris, London, and Berlin, as well as the more romantic, exotic sounding destinations like Casablanca, Beijing, Rio, or Nairobi.

But as I’ve gotten older and more understanding of how the world works, the big city doesn’t charm me as it once did. For me now, the essence of a culture and most of what I want to meet in people isn’t magically concentrated in the big city. Sometimes they have been enjoyable and sometimes just unavoidable. San Francisco will probably always feel like at least a warm shadow of a home long lost and I have a big, batard-sized, Saint-Nectaire smeared and pastis-scented soft spot for Paris. Nevertheless, I have found the adventures to be found in small to middling towns, countryside, jungle, and beach to be the ones that make me smile more or wonder more or change my perspective or change my life.

All that aside, I found myself recently in Chicago for the first time. The little time I had to myself was spent at the Art Institute of Chicago (go go go!) and the adjacent parks, goggling with all the other tourists, happily lost among the elevated trains and iconic skyscrapers and bustles and sounds of a thousand fellow humans around me. While I never turn down an opportunity for a good selfie, given my last post about rejoining the post- or nearly post-Covid world, I can’t think of a better self portrait than this one at the Cloud Gate. In spite of the political and social turmoil of now, it’s good to join in the world again.