Andersonville (Chicago)

Our friend, Bill surprised us tonight with a trip to Andersonville to have dinner at a French crepe restaurant. We lived there on Farragut Street for a year when we first arrived in Chicago some 33 years ago. Our home was the top floor of a two flat owned by an older widower named Mr. Schaefer. I've written about him earlier. He befriended and made us part of his family. The home was within walking distance of shops, supermarkets, antique stores and bakeries. Our daughter, Tiffany was born there. Mr. Schaefer couldn't understand such a name and called her "Stefani" with the accent on the middle syllable. When we moved north to Skokie, Mr. Schaefer came to visit just to make sure we had made a good enough choice to buy a home a whole 20 minutes away. We visited him until he passed away a few years later. We didn't go back after that.

Tonight, we walked the streets of Andersonville again and it was a strange feeling. We're moving back to Hawaii in a couple of months and Bill has somehow unknowingly taken us back to where we started.

I could picture myself before our son was born, before our children went to school, got married, moved away to their own homes, traveled the world, and became wonderful adults. This was before we enlarged our own family of friends, before I started teaching and retired, before my husband and I began our travels, before...

We were so much younger and the future stretched out ahead of us. We walked about the streets tonight and I felt some tears blurring my eyes. We're moving on now and Bill helped us to say goodbye.