"You Can't Get There From Here"

When I asked the old-timer walking along the roadway for directions, he replied, “ you can’t get there from here.” Then he added, “you can, but it will take a long, long time.” Then he walked away.

Early this morning, with the sounds of a major city outside my window, I found myself looking through a small photo album that my sister gave me many years ago. She assembled it from memories found in a drawer in my parent’s home. It is devoted to my birth in Mississippi and my growing up in the small town in Central Alabama. The first photo is a stolen kiss between the two people who would become my parents. In the last of the photos, I am still in my mid-teens.

As I glanced at the pictures, I had vivid memories for many of them. A trip to some new place with my family was often the reason behind the snapshot. But others, when I was a toddler, I depended upon recalled stories from my parents for their meaning.

There is an emergency vehicle screaming down the street about two blocks away. The city is waking up and growling the sounds that cities make. There are noises from people walking their dogs usually trapped in highrises.

How did I get here from there – the places in the photographs?

The first time I saw Chicago was from the window seat of a Delta Airlines jet. It was a cold clear night in November of 1963. I had flown alone to visit Northwestern on my quest to discover where I would do graduate study following the completion of my undergraduate degree the coming spring. Northwestern had “courted” my ego in the form of a visit from the Dean earlier that year and I was repaying the favor.

On the table for consideration at that point were UCLA, the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, Boston University, and after George Howerton’s visit, Northwestern. Did I mention that I had the ego that “ate the world?”

The trip to Chicago was a bribe from a deacon of the church where I worked as a choral director during my undergraduate years. In the summers, I free-lanced as an architect/designer to earn additional money for college. It was the deacon’s company that hired me, during the summers, to re-design their corporate offices in several southern states. In one such locale, I shared the company suite with the deacon/CEO and inadvertently discovered his penchant for the comfort of Jack Daniel's and local “ladies of the evening.” (One "lady" made a wrong turn. Jack was in evidence everywhere.)

Weeks later I was summoned to his office – one which I had artfully designed - and handed a first-class ticket to Chicago with an open date. His words, “I know you are interested in a great school up there in the big city. I hope you will see fit to forget my indiscretions.” He probably did not use those exact words, but I will portray him far more literate than he actually was in the interest of good taste.

So, on that cold November night as the plane descended, I looked out at on a vast sea of lights which illuminated streets totally unknown to me. I remember saying to myself, “when you are in Birmingham, you can only see about two blocks at a time. It is the same here. Just take it two blocks at a time.” Two blocks became 200, and you can do the math. While I don’t regret the choice of Northwestern over the others, Berlin would have been an interesting challenge.

It is now 7 degrees on a January morning in Chicago, many years removed. What the deacon didn’t realize was that everyone was aware he was a philanderer – even his wife - so my information would have been “no great shakes.”

However, I needed a way to get here from there.