Spiders in the Sky

It is the fourth of July. The Declaration of Independence, the groundbreaking document that I have never read in entirety, is two hundred, thirty two years old. The good folks at the cable television head-quarters have decided to celebrate by broadcasting some professional wrestling “Smack-down.” I imagine some beefy, steroid laden thug growling “Happy birthday Uncle Sam –get ready for a spanking” before launching himself off the ring’s corner post.

“Choke hold! Get him in a choke hold!” God bless America.

I am in down-town Chicago. My father acquired a condominium from a friend of a friend for his study break and we have joined in the good fortune for the weekend.

We are on the top and seventh floor, and I write this while sitting on the balcony with my sister’s boyfriend. Though our lodgings are for all purposes affluent, we overlook a section of tenements. Two blocks to the north we can see two green grass vacant lots –all that remains of the infamous Cabrini Green projects, where for years gangs ruled and the police themselves were afraid to go. For the present, many blocked row houses are below, to the east, and well lit. Seven stories and one street removes you one whole world. Fireworks and rockets shoot skyward between the buildings, exploding at our eye level some couple-hundred yards away. M-80’s go off with enough force to trigger car alarms and flinches from my father. Hip Hop and R&B is playing loudly, though we cannot tell from where, giving us a soundtrack to read and write to.

The magnificent mile looms over all of this; so well lit in against the black night behind it that it resembles some form of cardboard cut-out or computer generated image too perfect to be real. On the way home from Navy Pier’s fireworks, we passed several nightclubs, complete with red carpets, ropes, and bouncers. We imagined what enclaves of the social elite were permitted inside, and what forms of bizarre, ritualistic, Hellenistic hedonism they engaged it.

The two worlds, filled with two peoples celebrating the same event in their own fashions, did not escape me. Two nations, on either sides of the same fence. First and third worlds, juxtaposed, both seemingly empty, with hardly an individual to be seen inhabiting either. Where did the sea of people we flowed from the docks with disperse to? The flood of people crashed upon the rocks of the city, falling through its cracks. All that remains of them is their noise and their lights in the night sky. The horizon to the west is filled for miles with the ignition of the fireworks of many towns and villages and suburbs. The mass of humanity, sprawled out in this tide pool, seen from above.

Fireworks always remind me of the collected images my brain has stored of war time. Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome taught me that no kingdom can last forever. How will ours end, and how soon? How long will it be until the explosions in the sky mark something horribly different, and people flee at the sight of them? How long will it be until the lights of Chicago are dimmed, and the forests overtake its sidewalks and rooftops –and we all resemble the ruins of Cabrini Green?

p.s. Four Friends, the coffee shop that is a mainstay and institution of Downtown Grand Rapids is closing on THURSDAY. Sadly I will be in Denver, and cannot be at its side when it breaths its last. Remember me to it –I have loved it so. Order a 007, and think of me fondly as you sip its goodness.