I had grand plans for this evening. Yesterday I wrote half of a post responding to Chip McGrath’s New York Times piece on class in American fiction, but I couldn’t finish it before bedtime arrived. Tonight was the night I was going to unearth my copy of “In the Cage” and wrap that up. Also, it’s developed over just the last week that I am going to be moving in six weeks, and I need to make my apartment showable ASAP. So I was going to drag the laptop into the bedroom, where both the window unit and the critical mass of clutter are, bask in the coolth, and alternately write my post and put things away. Two birds with one air conditioner. Now here it is 10:07 and I’ve neither written a word nor stashed a sock. I’m also in the hot and sticky living room for some reason, feeling like I’m going to drop off two hours ahead of schedule. So something, perhaps both things, are going to give.
My mistake? Taking to the bike path as soon as I got home from work, out of my modified pantsuit, and into some workout clothes. After a year of inexplicably neglecting my bike and the glorious lakefront bike path just steps from my door, I got around to having the poor creaky thing tuned up last week. (South Siders: patronize this establishment. Yuvie’s your man.) I’ve now had three outings, tonight being the longest and possibly the most breathtaking, in more ways than one. Nowhere else I’ve ever lived has brought exercise in such close and easy proximity with gorgeousness. Chicago has pretty much spoiled me for working out in gyms, other than lifting weights, an activity that seems to be actually enhanced by an ugly, grubby, smelly setting.
Anyway. Despite the many possible moods of Lake Michigan, which I have been known to find inspiring, some days it’s not moody or interesting or sublime but perfectly, insipidly pretty, torn straight from a travel brochure. That was the deal tonight, the water merrily rippling and vacationland-blue–and what’s more, the path was amazingly free of jackasses. Somebody actually apologized for getting in my way at one point, an unheard-of nicety that practically made me fall off my bike and crack my skull.
I rode from 57th Street to the boat launch just north of the museum campus. They keep improving the bike path, and one of the best developments, dating back maybe five or six years, was to route it around the back of the Shedd Aquarium in a half-circle. Biking this stretch, you’ve got the oceanarium on one side of you–though you can’t, alas, see the belugas–and the lake on the other. You have to slow way down, though–it’s as narrow as possible, and a popular stretch of the path for pedestrians of the sightseeing variety: leisurely, benignly clueless, disinclined to stay on their side of the yellow line. That in itself doesn’t bother me, except that the racer boys–and yes, they’re nearly always boys–don’t believe in slowing down even in the interest of life and limb, their own or anyone else’s. So they bully their way through, frightening small children and benefiting from the forbearance of those around them; in the event of a crash, their speed and height make them odds-on favorites to scramble their brains on the pavement, helmets or no. But they survive by the good graces of those they weave around perilously, and they don’t entirely manage to spoil a good thing.
The whole ride long I was thinking how sad it was that I don’t have a camera in my phone and that we don’t have images on the blog, and so I couldn’t share the glories of the lakefront with all of you. But I knew, too, that this was a kind of beauty that wouldn’t translate well, being so bland. You’ve seen a thousand pretty pictures of a sparkling body of water on a brilliantly sunny day–even one dotted with white sails, I daresay–and another one would have made your eyes glaze over, or roll. There wasn’t anything all that remarkable about it. In fact, had I not been sweating and thirsting and fighting the wind, I may not even have found it so beautiful. I did, and it was, but it didn’t matter or last. In 24 hours or less, I’ll have forgotten all about it. Sometimes, though, it strikes me as completely insane that I can forget with impunity, that there’s essentially an endless supply of this. I like the lake best when it surprises me, which it does, often. But even when it doesn’t–or especially when it doesn’t–it’s pretty reliably stunning. Less beautiful, more interesting. Less interesting, more beautiful. You never lose with this lake.
To stop making a short story tremendously long, I’ll fast-forward and say that I got home and gave in to watching the premiere of TNT’s The Closer, which the network has been hyping for what seems like six months and I think actually is. It wasn’t bad. I liked how Kyra Sedgwick was constantly eating doughnuts and such. One scene had her deliberating carefully among ice-cream confections, a tad too easy a way of investing a tough-as-nails character with girlish vulnerability, but still and all, one that winningly features ice-cream confections. Although the obvious precursor for the show is Prime Suspect, to which it will never live up, the opening scene was ripped straight out of Silence of the Lambs (and then tweaked). I’ll probably watch again, but then, my TV standards are not “high.”
Aside from the couch potato routine, I spent the evening downing a lot of my own personal summertime nectar and eating a crudely constructed, you might say jerry-rigged, dinner, then sat down to excuse myself from blogging, and here we are. I probably won’t get to the McGrath thing until Wednesday now, and I’ll have to live with the mortification of imagining strangers tracking through here tomorrow getting an eyeful of clothes out of drawers and books off of shelves as far as the eye can see. But hey, I posted!