11.07.06

Grace in the Streets of the City

Posted in Uncategorized at 10:32 am by Ray Fleming

by Ray Fleming

This past weekend, my wife Gale, my son Joe and I traveled to Chicago to celebrate Joe’s tenth birthday.

After a week of indecision and some budgetary wrangling, everything fell together and we left Friday afternoon right after school got out. We drove four hours and then putted through the construction on the Dan Ryan expressway. My son, Joe’s, first view of Chicago was from the west, at night. I know the sight impressed me even though it wasn’t my first viewing and, above it all, I was driving. It is difficult and dangerous to both drive and gawk in Chicago.

We skirted by the city and drove to our hotel out by O’Hare airport.

Next morning, rather than dealing with city traffic and parking hassles, we boarded the Blue Line train at Rosemont to go downtown. According to the clerk at the hotel, we were to get off the train at the Jackson stop. No problem. Then we were to catch a bus on State Street that would take us to the Shedd Aquarium. But the stairs to the street on Jackson were under construction. We needed to emerge from the subway using a different exit. After winding our way through a tunnel—guided by little handwritten cardboard signs with arrows saying “this way”—we found another exit and came up somewhere on Dearborn Street. I was immediately disoriented. All of the information I had gleaned from staring at the map while on the train was completely drained out of my head.

“Where are we?” asked Gale.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s walk this way.”

We started walking—I wasn’t sure where—and came to a street corner. A train screeched by on the “El.” Joe’s head was bent straight back trying to see through the buildings to the sky. Gale held Joe’s hand so tightly—as she mentioned later—that Joe had “claw marks” in his palm. We passed a beggar holding a paper cup half-filled with coins, mostly pennies. He mumbled something I couldn’t quite hear over the noise of the street. I stopped. He looked up and caught my eye. I smiled at him. He smiled, nodded, winked and then turned towards some other people coming down the street. We continued around the corner looking at street signs trying to get our bearings.

I should say at this point that I spent my childhood growing up on Detroit’s east side. Gale grew up on Detroit’s west side. We learned, at a very young age, to be suspicious, cautious because the city was dangerous, and downtown in any city was the locus of danger. We transferred this hermeneutic of suspicion from the streets of Detroit to the streets of Chicago. That there are major differences between the two cities was of little concern.

But are the differences that starkly drawn?

I remember once, a couple of years ago, after taking Joe to a Tiger’s baseball game at Comerica Park, leaving the stadium from a different gate than where we entered. I got turned around, disoriented and started walking, trying to find something that looked familiar. I passed a street corner where a young man approached me and asked, “Is everything all right?” I lied to him and said everything was fine because I didn’t want him to know that I was temporarily lost. I was suspicious and scared and drawing upon all I learned about danger that lurked in darkened street corners on downtown streets. Forget that the young man’s voice was kind. Forget that we were standing in front of a church. Forget that we looked like outsiders—Joe was holding his big foam finger—not used to walking the streets of downtown Detroit at night. I walked a few more blocks, my heart in my throat, and finally found my way back to where I needed to be.

This day in Chicago was a bit different. There were lots of people everywhere. As we walked by the downtown campus of DePaul University and a law school and passed under the elevated train tracks and listened to the noise and confusion and watched the hustle and bustle of people walking briskly to wherever they were going, our pace slowed again. We stopped to look around. And there on that same street corner stood that same beggar we had passed only five minutes earlier.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“State Street,” answered Gale.

He pointed. “It’s just over there, by that light.”

“Thank you,” we said, but he was already arranging his pack, acting as though he would move on.

We walked to State Street and Gale found the bus stop where we waited for the bus that would take us to the museum campus.

It was a little thing, just one point of the hand and a nod of the head. The elapsed time of the interchange was probably less than 30 seconds. He would not remember us, at all, ever. But I will never forget him.

As I sat on the bus I thought that street people know how to live by grace. They live by grace day-in and day-out. We’re no different. I’m sure that the suspicion we were taught as kids was well warranted. The dangers of the streets are real; we read about people every day who are struck down by dangers that well up from the street. But there, in the middle of it, amidst the noise, confusion and suspicion, are people placed and guided by the same spirit, who ask a simple question, point their hand, nod their head, and give the same grace they live to receive.

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