Embracing Life

I am in Chicago, the place Carl Sandburg called “Stormy, husky, brawling . . . city of the big shoulders.” November 11 marked my daughter Sarah’s 21st birthday. She is a student of dance at Columbia College here. It is a pleasure to see Sarah so eagerly embracing life, confident and happy in her surroundings. Now that she celebrates another birthday, she admits to being especially happy because she can go to any nightclub she wants. Indeed, she and two friends marked the occasion by making merry until 4 AM, dancing in a downtown club formerly off-limits.
Chicago is the place of my birth, and whenever I arrive, it is as if I hear a familiar echo of a long forgotten song. As I walk the streets, something comes up through the earth, and reminds me of the matrix from where I came into the world. I like the strength of this city. The skyscrapers are enormous; world renowned feats of architecture.
By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul. Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys. It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories. From Skyscraper, by Carl Sandburg