someplace

I visited New York and Philadelphia this past weekend, places that are "destinations", and I saw things that people "know about" - Little Italy, SoHo, the Brooklyn Bridge, the LOVE statue in Philadelphia, boathouse row - and I felt like I was somewhere.

It's funny, from the North Lawndale neighborhood (where I teach creative writing at a GED Learning Center) you can see the skyline of Chicago. Standing at the Central Park platform this morning, then passing through the Kedzie, Western, and Damen stops, I noticed the angle is just perfect. The Sears Tower is in the forefront, the Hancock off in the distance to the left, the AON jutting up between them. This is what people travel to see, and for us it is just part of the usual landscape.

But what struck me most about these sights - this weekend, and this morning - was what people are not there to see, what they avoid on their vacations. Between Philadelphia and New York, the landscape stretching on either side of the train route is filled with trash, rundown buildings, desolate towns, junkyards. In the "greater" part of Chicago - that which is not the museum campus, the Loop, Michigan Avenue - lie the neighborhoods, millions of people, homes, lives, stories. And a lot of the Chicagoans' stories I know, never come close to the top floor of the Sears Tower. One woman in my class has lived on the same street, Fillmore, for her entire life.

I wondered, where is somewhere and where is nowhere, and how do we get there and how do we leave?