My parents never took me to Chicago claiming their VW bug

would only ever get as far from Cedar Rapids, Iowa as Winneconne,

Wisconsin, on Lake Winnebago, near Oshkosh where my dad’s Uncle

lived, so the biggest city I ever visited before 1975 was Madison. We always left on a summer

Saturday before dawn, highway reflectors casting ghostly images.

I would lie on the hard gray backseat breathing second hand cigarette smoke

listening to my parents murmur and rattle road maps

One time the battery exploded right under my seat,

splattering my pinafore with acid.

(Now I know Chicago is closer, but they didn’t want to go there.

My dad thought only losers lived in cities.)

So I’d never been to Chicago before the ninth grade field trip

that took four hours and cost forty dollars. My mother was born in Chicago

but moved to Iowa as a baby and remembered nothing

and was likely fearing for my life, as when she thought Chicago

she thought crime and poverty and stranger danger

She had won $500 in a bingo game at St Pius

and spent it on two maxi dresses, one a gauzy cotton

in light green, the other ticked in blue and white, and platform sandals

for height. The music that month was all Philadelphia Freedom

and He Don’t Love You. My two best friends and I met the bus

in the parking lot of a strip mall on First Avenue. My mother

made me a Swiss cheese and peanut butter sandwich

though we also got a $2 voucher for McDonald’s along the way

We stayed at the Palmer House, boys on one floor and girls

two floors below. We went to the Ivanhoe Dinner Theater,

to the Shedd Aquarium, to the Adler Planetarium to Grant Park,

to Lincoln Park Zoo to Old Town and New Town.

The best part for me: Chicago kids in Lincoln Park yelling

are you from Iowa, you must be from Iowa, your pants are too short!

to the despair of my wannabe fashion maven classmates.

On the way back the chaperones asked for a vote: Who would rather

live here than Cedar Rapids? No one but one or two of us. The thing is,

at that very moment they asked we were riding past my future,

literally my current home high (23 stories) on LSD (Lake Shore Drive)

I not even noticing its unprepossessing cinder block façade–

like some kind of metaphor—blowing past my years-to-be in St. Louis,

Champaign, Naperville, the marriage that took up my 20s, getting closer,

closer to the shelter of a roofless sky, an endless horizon where at dusk

I cross the Drive with my ninth grade self to catch fireflies on our tongue.

Le temps passe. The Lake, big and old as the universe

will laugh and love us forever, and ever, outliving us all:

the Ivanhoe long turned into a Binnie’s Beverage Depot,

New Town reverted to mere East Lakeview, the Palmer House

in receivership, my parent’s VW sold for scrap,

mother gone since 1986, father since 2004, amen.