The year I turned thirty was a tough one for me. I had been back from the Peace Corps for several months and had a job teaching at a high school in a small town not far from the one I attended. My re-entry into the US was not going well. My old friends were taken up with their new lives; all social activity seemed to revolve around the unit of the married couple. People seemed more interested in fixing me up than in getting to know me.

The germ of an idea that had been planted in the Peace Corps–that teaching was not the right career for me, despite the fact that it seemed to be my only natural talent—began to flower in earnest in this rural school. I found myself constantly at odds with the students, the other teachers, and the administration. The kids, isolated as they were, had the usual hard lives and poor exemplars; white supremecist groups were rampant there, and one prominent skinhead was even on a School Board committee. Most of the staff felt it was more important to be a friendly, steady adult presence than to enforce standards of behavior and academic achievement. This approach felt wrong to me then and still does now, but who knows? I didn’t stick around long enough to examine the results of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

I desperately wanted to move to a big city and change careers, but I held back. It wasn’t that I lacked the initiative or confidence to make a change; after all, my twenties had been marked by dramatic upheavals. Back to grad school! Change careers! Back to grad school again! Move to Florida! Join the Peace Corps! It seemed too late for another change. I felt that doing so would be an admission of failure, both as a teacher and a grown-up. A real adult would have stuck it out, made a success of it, settled down, accepted the suburban life that the majority of other Americans lived happily. But I was utterly miserable. I finally gave in to failure and started job hunting.

It was the beginning of the dot-com boom, and I was lucky enough to find a decently-paid job as a consultant. My new company sent me on a business trip to Chicago for a three-month gig. (I knew of Chicago, of course, but had never even considered visiting; I’m embarrassed to admit that I had to look up its precise location on a map.) I listened in amazement as my new boss explained that my client had rented me a corporate apartment downtown, and I could expense a rental car, parking, gas, food, taxis, flights home, even flights elsewhere if I needed to be somewhere else for the weekend. After the financial poverty of grad school and the Peace Corps, and the cultural poverty of the previous year, this was Nirvana. Theaters, restaurants, great architecture, beautiful parks, bars with atmosphere, and people who did not think a thirty-year-old single woman was an aberration were within walking distance of my apartment. My new job was challenging and interesting, yet much less stressful than teaching. It was like Chicago had given me a new lease on life.

Three months stretched into three years. I eventually met Husband and made the move official. Two more years went by in a blur. We eventually decided to move to Boston — why? We still can’t remember. Of all the places I’ve lived, though, Chicago will always be home.

Husband and I took Aitch back for a little vacation last weekend, to visit old haunts and mourn our urban past. My mother joined us for two days so we could go out at night. The trip was a big success, at least from Aitch’s perspective. He got to ride in a taxi, a bus, a swan boat, several toy trains, and the El (also, incredibly, my mother’s first subway ride ever). Admittedly, all of this could have been accomplished in downtown Boston, but we enjoyed it, too.

The city has changed a lot, but its essence is still there. Millennium Park, with its new Frank Gehry pavilion, is one of the big changes. I visited with trepidation; I like modern art, but Gehry is beginning to feel a little derivative of himself, and I was afraid the pavilion would make a monstrosity out of the park. See what you think:

I’m still not so crazy about the silver Gehry-thing. It reminds me of a particularly bad hairstyle I had in the ’70s, with rolled bangs. The whole concert lawn, though, is terrific; the fretwork criss-crossing overhead unites the space wonderfully. There is also a huge water fountain made of two giant towers planted on a promenade. Faces (of prominent Chicagoans, perhaps?) are superimposed on the towers, occasionally appearing to be spitting water.

The piece de resistance, though, is a garden of wildflowers and grasses situated on a rise in the middle of the park. In the center of the garden, the flora frames the skyline but obscures the street traffic, a very pleasing effect, and practically the only thing in Chicago I didn’t photograph.

All in all, it was a stupendous trip down memory lane and a great kiddie vacation to boot. There was only one minor fly in the ointment: the weather. Silly me, I had remembered Chicago as a chilly, even blustery town, particularly in the non-summer months. Obviously my memory was faulty; as it happens, Chicago is now sub-tropical, with temps near 90 even in early October. I either wilted in my fashionable fall clothes or sulked around Michigan Avenue in comfortable but un-chic running shorts and a t-shirt. Here we are, reflected in all our sartorial glory in the giant silver bean in the park.