Street-walking...um..wandering....Street-wandering

I remember myself from age 5 or so, walking through woodsy areas with my father who took great delight in pointing out the cascading shades of green pouring down the mountainside. The vast spectrum of autumn colors, the varied shapes of different leaves, ants walking single-file across a fallen log, how to stay silent until deer, quail, or jackrabbits might display themselves for our benefit. These are the things I learned from him; I learned to look for details, hidden things, oddities. I've carried it through my life. And the older I get and the more I experience life; the more I travel and see that the world is kind of like cascading greens down a mountainside, the more that I see that life is in the details. I've read that exact phrase somewhere (I don't know where), and it's true.

I've been away from a long time. Seven years in China - it changes you. You step out of everything you know, your known operating system - to some degree, you even step outside of yourself - and it makes you different. You don't see things the same anymore and you see new things you didn't see before. You look the same on the outside but you're profoundly different inside. Unfortunately, no one knows that you're different. They see only the shell and expect you to pick up where you left off. You don't know how to tell them that you can't and that you don't even want to. So you smile through awkward silences, refusing to settle into the old mold and go about restarting a life in a home that is now as strange as the orient is in many ways.

And you explain, for the umpteenth time, that "Konichiwa" is Japanese (not Chinese). And you smile painfully when they say, "right" and wait for a response anyway, blissfully unaware that there is even a difference between the two.

I take long walks through the streets of Berwyn. I look at the details and take joy in them. I notice where the best houses are (1. Between Oak Park and Harlem, from 15th to Cermak 2. Anywhere along Riverside Drive 3. Around the West and South sides of Proksa Park 4. Between Oak Park and Harlem, from the Amtrak tracks to Ogden Ave 5. Along much of East Ave 6. Along much of Oak Park Ave). I look at the endless rows of Bungalows noting the beauty in the brick patterns. Sometimes the brick is yellow, sometimes red or brown. Sometimes the bricks themselves were laid down horizontally, but sometimes the builder took time to make patterns, setting the bricks vertically or diagonally or in sunshine flairs around the rounded edges of the doorframe. The builder may have used the bricks to encase large pieces of stone along the corners of the house or even fashioning the entire fire chimney out of stone. Some houses even have the original copper edging and the raised tile roofing.

These are the best bungalows - the ones that were made in the 1920's/1930's by someone who loved beauty and who had a little extra cash to add into the details. They have the original stained glass windows (Each one is unique. I rarely see the same pattern. I always wonder who the glass maker was. I picture a Polish family, led by an elderly patriarch for whom glass-making was passed down for generations). I prefer the geometric designs over the flowered ones and wouldn't even consider purchasing a bungalow without the original windows.

There are hideous monstrosities, obviously laid out en masse by a building company during Berwyn's heyday. They are uniform, functional, and in coordinating colors, plunked down as cheaply as possible with no thought to beauty or the surrounding environs. They remind me of the blighted modern tract housing going up all over Arizona. In Berwyn, I can think of a row of these beauties on 14th and Clinton (or Home Ave or so) - little squat Brown Wilmas - nine identical homes with no redeeming loveliness of any kind that I can tell. But I shouldn't judge. Perhaps they offer a home to someone who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it. But I still don't understand why someone would make something ugly when they could take an extra minute to make it beautiful. It wouldn't have cost more for the cheapskates to have set out a pattern....something!

So this is what I do on my walks, currently. I've never thought to notice the details in the bungalows. They were always just - there. So I'm pleased to find that they vary considerably and are genuinely beautiful.