Photo credit: John Roll
...I think it was the...uh, 29th of October, the day of an utterly charmed visit to Chicago. We get a parking space next to the elevators in the Museum Park garage, early enough for the early-bird parking rate, and, as we head out of the garage, remember to shield our eyes to avoid looking back at (what have they done to my) Soldier Field, in its renovation the architectural equivalent of Vogon poetry. We're greeted by a helpful and cheery ticket seller at the Field Museum admissions counter, and have free run of the museum, including the Chinese dinosaurs (Szechuanosaurus? Tsintaosaurus? Suddenly I'm hungry. And thirsty.) and the Herculaneum excavations. The girls revisit their favorite Egyptian galleries, and our son snaps shots of his favorite animal tableaux in the vintage natural history exhibits. Then the whole family walks for an hour without complaint across Columbus Drive and Michigan Avenue and up State Street to (gaze on it for the last time, kids) Marshall Field's, where our party of five is seated within minutes in the Walnut Room at high noon, fussed over by a bevy of servers, for a great lunch capped off with his-'n-her Frango mint pies. We walk over to Millennium Park for the first time. I'm blown away by Cloud Gate (pictured above). It's warm and sunny on an uncrowded path as we take the long walk back to the car past a shimmering Buckingham Fountain, the great lake glinting blue-green. Can you dig it? Yes I can.
At long last, the hummingbird fails in her attempt to elude the lens of the garden paparazzi. She's in and about the garden several times a day, even without any sugar-watered feeders to lure her. She favors the pink-orange agastache (Agastache x 'Desert Sunrise') most of all, but also appreciates the bright red dwarf cannas (Canna x generalis 'President'), and even the ink-blue Pitcher's Sage (Salvia pitcheri). She's gotten so comfortable that I've seen her perch upon the golden hops vine that drapes through the rungs of the arbor like a rope swing, and upon the arch of a swaying kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate. We startled each other one day as I stood up from turning on the hose faucet near the agastache patch to find her not more than two feet away. She zoomed toward and past my ear before disappearing, leaving the faint echo of a whirring helicopter rotor blade.
We returned to the Mall of America this past weekend, almost two years after our first visit. If you weren't among the, oh, three regular readers of this blog during its first month, you might have missed this earlier post about the first trip. It's reposted here, with a postscript.
He said: You must be joking, son--where did you get those shoes?
(first posted November 1, 2003)
Motley notes from our Halloween Eve jaunt to Mall of America. It's an easy (interstate with hardly any metro area traffic snarls) and pleasant (mostly unspoiled scenery of trees, rivers and geologic formations) four-hour drive away. We're not really shoppers, but thought the mall's indoor amusement park would be an economical (read: cheap) Disneyland-substitute for our three kids. We called it right.
Even after adjusting our price-point sensitivity to captive-audience levels, we couldn't see the, uh, logic of paying three bucks for a pretzel from Pretzel Logic, but were pleased to find that we could settle for the alternative of a Tazo iced tea in Starbucks' largest size (...in the land where "tall" means "small", large is called, what..."Gargantua?" "Brobdignagian?"), for under two bucks.
Junk food nirvana: Krispy Kremes, fresh from the in-store bakery. The "plain" dozen we got were almost hot to the touch, and melted in the mouth. (When you fall off Atkins, this best be the first thing in your mouth.) Background music in this shopping mall donut shop: a compilation of vaguely-familiar/vaguely-obscure British invasion tunes. (I'd buy that soundtrack!) Muzak is dead, and not a moment too soon.
The mall's shuttle bus driver passed along the stat that it would take 88 hours to pay a ten-minute visit to each of the mall's 525 stores. However, the mall is just a mall, and it turned out that the subset of stores that (a) were of any interest to me and (b) didn't already have locations in our area, totaled only two: the M-A-C counter at Nordstrom, and the Aerosoles store. At the former, refreshed my makeup collection with the help of an extraordinarily competent, and tattooed, sales clerk; at the latter, found two pairs of winter shoes embodying the oxymoronic: stylish, and rubber-soled.
Weird epiphany: I see an adult-sized Darth Vader costume in the display window of the mall's novelty/costume shop, and, in an admission that surely qualifies me for lifetime membership in the "slow on the uptake" club, realize that it's taken me only a quarter-century to figure out that (in the ersatz mythologizing of Star Wars) Darth is Don Giovanni's Il Commandatore, no?
Around dinnertime, our 4- and 6-year old were back for their Nth round on the merry-go-round and, since the crowds had thinned, had their pick of carousel animal. My 4-year-old climbed aboard the white rabbit she'd had her eye on all day. We had a deep philosophical discussion:
Daughter: --I like the white rabbit. Me: --You know Mommy doesn't like rabbits, don't you? Daughter: --Why don't you like rabbits? Me: --Because they eat Mommy's plants. Daughter: --You know what I think you should do? You should just scare them away.
Followed by a most happy ride (proving that even rabbit-lovers and rabbit-haters can coexist amicably).
On the other side of the carousel, her older brother had chosen this beauty, which harkens back to the days when carousel animals were more art than kitsch:
But not all of us were lucky that day. My husband (whom we shall affectionately refer to herein as ".mac"-head) regarded this trip, in no small part, as the opportunity for a pilgrimage to "The Apple Store", and his first chance to see, feel, touch (and be healed by) the new G5 and Panther. "Honey," I said, "I heard that eight hundred people were lined up in Minneapolis for Panther last week." And "Honey," I said, "I heard that even Microsoft is using G5s--though the guy who spilled the beans on them got canned." Appetite whetted, location on mall map circled, my husband made the trek...only to be greeted by a construction barricade. "It's getting better all the time" the slogan on the barricade chirped. The store was closed for renovations until mid-November.
When life presents these little setbacks, sometimes we try to cope by looking for some deeper meaning, some higher purpose. "It's a Sign," my husband said. A message that it was time to go over to the Dark Side. By day's end, though, he was just plain dejected: "Five hundred twenty-five f[ill in the blan]kin' stores in this mall, and the only one I want to go to is closed." Apropos of the site and the occasion, this was Charlie Brown finding a rock in his trick-or-treat bag.
I'm so sorry, sweetie.
Postscript, September 12, 2005: We listened to the Steely Dan compilation Citizen Dan ("Is there gas in the car? Yes, there's gas in the car...") on the drive up to Minnesota. As soon as we hit Camp Snoopy, my six-year-old looked at me with a glint in her eye and said, "I'm going to ride the rabbit, Mom." My husband and I pressed our noses against the window at the Apple store; or, actually, we did go in, and I got to hear Tom Jones' "She's A Lady" on the new iPod Nano. (We did not become Pod People this weekend, although if the new new thing pushes down prices of earlier models low enough, maybe I'll pick up a Shuffle on the aftermarket one of these days.) I replaced my down-in-the-heels shoes with new ones from the Aerosoles store, and picked up a complete line of facial beauty enhancers (including the lipstick "Dark Side") at the new M-A-C store. Our children were all tall enough this time around not to be barred from any of the rides, and as they wore themselves out, I sat on a bench, in the first opportunity I've had in weeks for uninterrupted recreational reading, with William Gass's impressionistic, subjective, dead-on, and marvelous Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. Later, I took a break to stop in for an iced tea at the Starbucks. I was just in time to hear Wayne Shorter's saxophone solo from "Aja".
This year's models.
Feed your head.
Our Happy Campers.
