Bundled Up Against the Cold

In Chicago, it always looks it’s about to snow. I don’t care the time of year or the temperature or whether people are windsurfing out on Lake Michigan. In my mind’s eye, the trees are always bare and the skies are always gray in Chicago. I’m here now, in Chicago, the city of my birth.

My mother’s side of the family came here in the early part of the 20^th century, Russian-Jewish refugees fleeing the oppressive May Laws, which restricted Jews’ ability to own land, conduct business, etc. etc. The usual shit. They started out selling produce, some brothers, and made enough to get by. Eventually they settled on the city’s South Side. My grandfather, the youngest child in the family, built a successful fried chicken business. Towards the end of his life, he did well enough to move his family to ritzy Michigan Avenue. Then he went into the hospital for a stomach problem and never came out. Cancer.

I’m named for my great-aunt’s husband. In the Jewish tradition, children are often given a name with the first initial of a recently deceased loved one. Forgive me, but I can’t remember this great-uncle’s name – maybe Morris? Regardless, he owned a string of laundromats. One can only make so much from coin-operated washing machines. Most of his fortune came through his ties to the Chicago Mob. He was a literal money launderer. Dirty money arrived at his laundromats and came out the other end clean.

I don’t know much more about the mob connections other than the FBI once showed up at my grandparent’s home to inquire about a large, inactive bank account held in my great-grandmother’s name. It was something like $50,000 in 1960’s money. Suffice to say, my great-grandmother had plenty of dementia, but very little money. It wasn’t her account but everybody in the family knew whose it was. My grandfather confronted my great-uncle about the money, who told him to leave the account alone; I guess he’d set up similar accounts all over town under various relatives’ names, none of whom knew anything about them. In my mother’s telling of the story, the money eventually reverted back to the state of Illinois. My uncle preferred losing the 50k than tipping off the Feds that the money was his.

My wife and I just finished watching The Bear, the show about a talented Chicago chef trying to set up his own restaurant. His benefactor on that show is his uncle, played by Oliver Platt with much benevolence and an undercurrent of mayhem. That’s how I imagine my own uncle, a scamp and a terror and a benefactor. When my sister was born with Down Syndrome a couple years after I arrived, I think it was his money that paid for her early medical care, and I think he was similarly generous to other people in the family in their hours of need. Chicago kind of feels like that to me in general – tough but big-hearted.

His wife, my great-aunt Mimi, was a tiny, quiet woman who lived in a fancy apartment high above the city sidewalks. My most distinct memory of that place was an intricate wind-up bird she kept in a gold cage. Hard to imagine anything more magical to a four-year-old than a toy like that. She also kept chocolate nonpareils in small bowls on her coffee table. In my mind, the chocolates and the bird indicated a level of unimaginable wealth. Aunt Mimi didn’t get out much, I don’t think, but she plenty of plumage to keep her company in her own gilded cage. She was like a second mother to my mom – or maybe more of a first mother since her relationship with my grandma was fraught.

Grandma Cece (short for Cecile) had a lot of anger. Maybe it was losing her husband young. Maybe it was losing her own father young; I don’t know the whole story, but Jack Abrams was a saloon owner and one day Jack Abrams just kind of disappeared. Grandma never had a kind word for anyone. When my father died, my brother and I left New Jersey to come stay here with her for a couple weeks. I was twelve, and what I remember most about that time is sitting in her cramped apartment living room day after day watching Days of Our Lives with her and my brother. About halfway into our stay, she started screaming at us about not doing enough to help around the place. I remember how shocked I felt – I didn’t know I was supposed to help out. Also, my dad just died. I thought that gave me carte blanche to do absolutely nothing for at least a year. Perhaps to make it up to us, she offered to take us to the movies. Whatever we wanted to see. We picked Purple Rain. I have never been as uncomfortable before or since as I was sitting beside my grandma watching The Purple One get freaky with Apollonia.

We left Chicago when I was four but I’ve always felt a strong connection to the city. My people come from here. There used to be so many of us, eight or nine brothers and sisters on my grandma’s side. They used to get together all the time, the women hanging out in the kitchen trading stories, which my mother tried to pass down to her uninterested boys. I regret not paying attention. Now the family – what I even know of it - is scattered across the country. This city, this tough and big-hearted city, welcomed my people and gave them a chance.

I’m looking out my hotel window now. The trees are bare, the sky gray. It looks like it might snow. It’s the Chicago of my imagination. Bad streets, bad traffic. Crooked cops and crooked politicians. Meat and booze and guys with big bellies asking how the hell are ya. I love coming here. It’s not my town, exactly, but maybe it feels a little bit like it is. Chicago is America, I think. More than New York or DC or LA or whatever other city you can name. It’s smoke and grit and people scraping ice off car windows. It’s trains and the old stockyard and the mighty steel color of Lake Michigan and it’s tumbledown row houses and soaring skyscrapers and people bundled up against a cold they know is coming. The cold doesn’t stop them. Nothing does.