Kristen Visits Chicago

Or, the Night We Adopted a Young Female Vagabond, Introduced Unborn Wrigley to His Namesake Landmarks, and I Threw Out My Back for the Sake of a Perfect Photo.

October 2011

Chicago, IL

PANCAKES! All Keri wanted for lunch before she started her new job as a shop girl at a roller derby supply store was PANCAKES! The plan was for the three of us (Becky, Keri and me) to load up on pancakes and coffee before Becky and I dropped Keri at work on the way to O’Hare to collect our fellow California girlfriend Kristen.

            The first hiccup came in the form of an ill-timed stop at the Golden Nugget 24-hour pancake house near our apartment. That’s right, the time when we needed PANCAKES was the time when they decided to close for their quarterly 3-hour range cleaning. This place is literally only closed for 12 hours a YEAR and we happened to come during one of those times.

With no time to find another pancake place before work, Keri settled for a tunafish sandwich. Rather unsatisfying when you’re hankering for pancakes. Yech. After dropping Keri at her new gig, Becky and I continued our mission for delicious discs of pan-fried batter and were not disappointed by the International House of Pancakes-- USA Branch, Chicago Chapter.

Hiccup #2 appeared in the form of torrential rains that began as soon as we set out on what is usually a 40 minute drive to O’Hare. Today, it was two hours of soggy stop-and-go traffic before we reached our pregnant friend and another two hours until we were home. Oh, did I not mention that Kristen was pregnant? You may have heard that pregnancy is rather uncomfortable and can cause nausea as well as frequent urination. So after a five-hour flight, our beloved but acutely anxiety-prone friend had to spend another two hours cramped in a moving vehicle without even a tiny, awkward airplane bathroom in which to relieve herself.

Kristen, me and Wrigleyfetus on the Blue Line

Kristen is a trooper and that night she and I decided to hop on the “El” and go wherever the night took us (limited to stops on the Blue Line towards Forest Park.) We came upon a young woman studying the CTA map and being the (sometimes awkwardly so) friendly Californians that we are, we asked her if she needed help getting to wherever she was going? She graciously accepted our help, the extent of which was confirming that yes, this was in fact the Blue Line (I had only been in Chicago for two months and I only knew two lines--Red and Blue.) On our ride to Downtown Chicago we chatted with Maddie and found that she was only in Chicago for the night and that she had taken the wrong bus from Indiana.

Our unassuming victim

Maddie had just graduated college and her graduation gift from her parents was a 40-day unlimited Greyhound pass. Can you say “cool parents”? She was trekking solo across the country, couch-surfing and hostel-staying, hoping that at least one of the stops along the way would grab her enough for her to want to make it her first post-college home. Chicago was, in fact, on her itinerary, but she wasn’t supposed to be there for another couple of nights. She did manage to find a hostel rather last minute but she needed to kill some time and we were delighted to take her along on our sightseeing adventure

We ended up in Millenium Park at the famed “bean” sculpture, a perfect photo-op spot. Kristen has a way of getting her companions to do some crazy shit, and, caught up in her Earth-mama, die-hard Cubs fan (did I mention her then-fetus was already named Wrigley?), photographer spirit, we ended up with this:

Chicago L O V E

Indeed, as a former cheerleader I gleefully posed my friends into their line-based letters and cheerfully volunteered to be the “O.”

“O” shit!!! My already temperamental back did not appreciate being painfully contorted, on the cement, in the cold. I paid for that for a few days, but that photo: four old friends in a city they all love. That photo--and the memories of that night--will be with me forever.