Today as we shopped and did errands pertaining to the Thanksgiving holiday, I somehow (later on in the evening) started to reminisce about my 'old neighborhood', Chicago. Even tho Christmas is a solid month away, I couldn't help but think back to the days when it was cold and bone chilling in Chicago, and dragging my family out into the weather to take a drive through one of the most well known areas in the neighborhood for Christmas decorations.
Edgebrook, Illinois, is for all intense purposes, a place where I dreamed of living. It was the upper middle class, and I always suspected doctors, lawyers and business people alike lived there. The houses were well do to, but not like the stately mansions and huge luxury homes of Evanston and the "Gold Coast" suburban area north of Chicago. Edgebrook was a place that I drove past and through on my way to work when I was a supervisor at the bank in Lincolnwood. Even when I was driving 20-25 min to get home (Mom and Dad carpooled everywhere, only had one family car and I was still in my late teens/early 20's and couldn't afford my own car... okay, that wasn't true. I was too cheap to buy a car) I would find that my drive home was something that held a certain exhausted charm to it. Maybe it was the delusion of being run 8+ hours ragged for slave wages with a crazy amount of responsibility and got paid as much (or less) that a fry cook at McD's. Somehow the toiling made whole by the thoughts of maybe, one day, living in one of those homes I drove past and that what I was doing was going to get me there.
Silly girl.
A .10 cent raise back in the 90's must be equivalent to $1.00 raise to todays standards... Nah. The bank was just filthy rich and a bunch of greedy corporate [blankity blanks] who knew how to squeeze every ounce of energy out of you. And when you looked at that .10 raise, looked at them, it was pure astonishment to see them react as if it was such a hardhsip for them to give you that .10 raise - yes, it must be difficult for them to squeeze more than a dime out of their butt cheeks.
*coughs* Sorry, that rears up it's ugly head from time to time. Stellar performance from an employee= craptastic wages i.e. = more money for them, not for you.
Back to the 'good' part of reminscing.
Anyways, Edgebrook was the place to go for seeing the best of the best in Christmas decorations. I'm not kidding. It seemed like all of Chicago would go around the holiday and there were a good 3-4 blocks of people decking the halls with more than boughs of holly. As far as I understood it, people would rent out decorations from somewhere and they were on a waiting list for years. Things included animated santas, mrs. santa, elves, reindeer, life sized wise men and the manger with lifesized everything (from animals to baby Jesus). Lights everywhere, a three tier christmas tree (it was famous for one house always having it: first floor bay window = bottom of tree, second floor picture window= middle part of tree, rootop = tip of tree). This place was always jam packed with cars that crawled at less than 2 miles per hour. People walked in subzero temps to see everything. I had once brought a carafe of hot chocolate, found a radio station that played holiday music and gathered Mom and Dad in the car to go for a drive.
I've been searching Utube (hehe spelling) to see if I could actually find some video on the area because that's all I've been talking about with Hubby. I wish he could have seen it.
Then I googled a few places and found that one of the churches I drove past (for the 7 years I worked at the bank) had burned down to the ground this year due to arson. I had a "OMG" moment. How sad!
Then I google mapped the street and took a virtual drive down this roadway and was just floored at how things have changed (I haven't been back in Chicago in 8 years). I know Mom and Dad take a drive into the "old neighborhood" now and again and they rattle off things that have changed to me. My mind really doesn't seem to get it unless I see it so I say a lot of, "Mmmhmm" s.
Mostly it's a shock to the system to see how something that was ingrained in me seems so foreign right now. Today I'm all about the sustainability, wanting to raise my own chickens and garden in my dream home's backyard. The old me was very much a Frasier Crane kind of girl: books, working my tail off for crap wages even tho I looked business-like and professional, dreaming of of expensive cars and manicured houses. If the old me took a look at the new me, she'd pause and say, "You want to raise chickens... really?"
City vs Country.
Old vs New.
It's just funny how things progress, slow down, reconsider and change. It's just so wierd when I look at Chicago now through the eyes of what I am now. It feels foreign, unreal, as if it was just a dream. And it's completely different than the world I live in now. This seems more substantial, more meaningful than the Chicago-girl I once was. I guess I'd have to appreciate the old me to in turn appreciate the new me. Can't see where you're going unless you know where you've been, kind of thing.
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