I miss the place. Now and then an image like this winter scene appears and I'm right there. Yet, when I think back to my childhood in Chicago in the 1930s and 40s, and compare that with the present, it is as if that earlier time were like... not only another lifetime, but (life) on another planet. Yet the pang... homesickness... and, oddly, living in Toronto (1979 - 1985), a city that in many ways reminded me of our old Albany Park / Lawrence Avenue neighborhood in Chicago... never quite satisfied that feeling, that sense of what was missing. I longed for home.
So the Dr. Sward's Cure for Melancholia postings (Dr. Sward being my father, not me), they're like love letters, is that a joke? love letters to... Chicago... 'cause that's home, that's where it started, mother, father, podiatry, Jewishness and all the rest. Melancholia included...
And the most real thing from the 40s and 50s was what? The dogs. Fluffy the spaniel and the sickly pathetic mutts we'd rescue from the Chicago Dog Pound. "The Pound..." as in impounded. We're impounding your dog. And the truck the Dog Catcher would use to carry 'em away... and the gas you'd see escaping when the door swung open... and the dogs and what I felt for them. Sentimental slop, but it hasn't gone away. So something about that time may be "another lifetime... life on another planet..." but I haven't forgotten the dogs and my feelings for the city are constant, my feelings for the dogs are constant... if there's a NOW, it's dogs, city and heart. And family, too.
