The Trip: Day Six

Thank you Chicago, I’m done being dumb

After dropping my dad off and spending time reading in Café Mozart I drove

out to the House of Worship. The trip stretched and bent when I looked at the inboard clock on the dash and realized it was still set an hour ahead. I drove between Evanston and Wilmette several times, finding new streets leading from downtown Evanston to nearby the House of Worship. Lost, in some capacity, I started listening to and signing along to the Doves “Some Cities.” The bass grooves like shifts of the tires on the brick streets and vocal melodies like the sound of kids from Northwestern walking from class to class. Everything seemed more normal, as if I remembered it from somewhere even though I didn’t. I watched red and yellow leaves drop from hundred-fifty year old oak trees lining Sheridan road to be rushed away by car tires or men and women in jogging suits, headphones connecting to the iPods wrapped around their arms.

It all seemed so natural (Nature is natural? Go on.), normal, realistic and

static that I just stopped looking at the scene as a scene but as a suggestion of what is going wrong. I’ve spent years looking at what I do, trying to resolve the wrong things and increase the right yielding nothing but more bad. The whole of my trip rippled past me: watching Game 4 of the World Series with my dad; praying in the House of Worship for hours for friends, family and myself; meeting Lindsey; sitting in Jon’s car listening to Mastodon as he drove from Chicago to my house in the middle of the night; looking at how all of my high school and Bahá’í friends had changed, or not changed; playing Mario Kart with Shirin in the newly finished basement; riding the train out to Chicago to watch Extreme Makeover Home Edition; looking like a complete fool for Halloween; seeing Ryan’s Hope play before a huge crowd as Nick played dressed as a Viking, his sword leaned up against the back wall; sitting in the lot of Budget Rental Car near O’Hare explaining and divulging things that don’t need to be repeated; the downpour that surrounded Millikin; and the most important things that happened took place within the most beautiful building on the planet.

I parked in the lot to the side, said some prayers for my aunt, for clarity, for

betterment, and walked around the building twice. It all just stopped. No more clutter, no more falling leaves, just a garden that at the start of November still looks beautiful. So, I change now. I should specify, but I have yet to decide to what magnitude it all will change. I haven’t decided. But it will happen. I’m tired of looking at myself as a screw up, a new guy who helps others but can’t pick himself up to save his life. I’m done. I may have said it before, but before I didn’t have a goal and that all changed in the Visitor’s Center of the House of Worship when I realized more about myself by looking at someone else’s heart.