Evanston always seemed like a city to me. I guess, when you think about it, it's rather silly to refer to roughly categorize places into rural, suburban, and urban areas. Even though Evanston is a suburb of Chicago, it's like a city into itself. It was founded a year before Chicago, in 1836, and has a population of 75,000. It has skyscrapers equivalent in size to the ones found in Wichita, Kansas (which isn't saying much if you've ever been to that god-awful, desolate town*).
I don't remember much about my childhood, but I do remember swimming. At least three times a week, my mom would drive me through downtown Wilmette along Lake Avenue and Green Bay Road into Evanston. I belonged to the Northwestern Aquatic Swimming Association by age five, and because of this, I had the privilege of swimming at Northwestern University's gigantic, Olympic sized pool. At the far end were diving platforms, reaching up to the ceiling at 30 feet. The windows were that high, and in the mornings you could watch the sunrise over Lake Michigan, literally within a hundred feet to the east. There really wasn't much of a beach, which annoyed me as a child, because all large bodies of water should have luxurious beaches, or at least they did in Hawaii. Really there were just huge rocks, cut into nearly perfect giant squares. There must've been a quarry there or something, because there's no way nature could have done something so planned.
On the third of July, my family would always drive over to that same parking lot, and walk across onto the coast of Lake Michigan, if you could call it that. We always packed the necessities. A couple of towels to sit on, a folding chair for mom's sensitivity, bug spray, popcorn, and a lot of diet coke in a small, tattered blue cooler. Wilmette, my home town, always did fireworks on the third of July, and was the only of the large towns to do such. We could have gone directly to the Wilmette beach, but with a population of over 30,000, trying to squeeze onto the beach would have proved chaotic at best, especially with a family consisting of three hyperactive and curious daughters. I don't know how my parents found such a remote spot, but there weren't too many other people that came to Northwestern to watch the fireworks over Lake Michigan. It always seemed to take forever to traverse the five miles to the coast, because we had to drive through brightly blinking police barriers, to try and "direct" traffic (if only to make things worse). Large groups of people dragged towards the lake, always, carrying blankets and chairs, over pretentious brick roads (the closer you got to the lake, the richer everything appeared). Every once in a while in the twilight a rogue firework would resound through the suburb houses.
We'd talk about whatever was happening in July. Usually nothing. No school work to be harassed about. No school friends to gossip about. The only thing left were our own internal shallow feelings, and of course, swimming. Every once in a while I'd ask my parents about what they did at work. I knew they were surgeons, but that didn't mean anything to me. There was a time I realized I didn't know what the difference was that separated doctors from surgeons, and this increased my interest. I spent my days at home or at the pool. What did my parents do? Was work anything like school? They'd always respond with answers that didn't help much, or that were helplessly jargon-filled for the comprehension of a child. "Work was good, honey. Performed an appendectomy-"
"Mom, what's that?"
"It's when you remove an appendix-"
"What's that?"
"It's an organ-"
"Like the heart?"
And they were always talking about cases. Cases held things. How could they have cases at work? What were they holding onto?
Regardless when we got to the field that spread out and then crashed into a cliff composed of those square quarry rocks there were always things to capture attention. Fireflies were always fun to look for, and I could spend an unhealthy amount of time just looking for them, sitting quietly. Bug spray was administered in seemingly dangerous amounts. It burned the parts of my skin that had broken, and it smelled wrong. And yet the mosquitoes still persisted. Large clouds of gnats stationed themselves between the crowds of people, as though they also wanted to watch a patriotic display, but were operating on another plane.
If mom and dad had gotten into a fight on the way over, we would escape onto the rocks and try to get close to the lake as possible without falling in. We stretched out our short legs over the gray slabs, and descended to the lake. Our parents would always express concern, but my sisters and I communicated in high, nasaly voices, quite aware of each other and the apparent danger of falling in the lake. I could swim, I knew, and I'd be fine, physically. But mentally, sinking into the indigo lake, would be too much for me to handle rationally. Lake Michigan, at least when I was growing up, was infamous for lines of dead fish washed up on shore during summer beach excursions. I didn't know exactly how they died, but I knew the culprit was something called Bacteria. I thought they were little bugs, and I didn't want them attacking me, especially at night, when I'd have to swim at least 100 yards to shore.
If mom and dad hadn't gotten into a fight, which was always a possibility, we stayed together, spread out on towels and a singular chair for mom. There were lamp posts nearby, and of course, ten miles away was the greatest city in the world, so you couldn't watch stars. But if you were lucky, there would be a lot of planes and boats over the lake, with flashing red pinpoints of light. The popcorn would be gone in a hurry, and I'd stomach diet coke out of boredom or maybe genuine thirst (or to wash the bug spray out of my mouth). I'd always be itchy, messing around in the grass too much. But once the fireworks started, it was hard to pay attention to much else.
They were being launched at least a mile away, and the muffled noise dragged far behind the actual scene. But the explosions would reflect off the lake, and lighten up the coast over in our hometown. It was always pleasantly quiet, not nearly as loud as the next night when Winnetka, our rich neighbors, would let off their fireworks in a field. Every year we would always complain about them, as if we weren't expecting them, yet it wasn't until I was much older when I'd actually go to see them. They were literally shot into the air less than a mile from our house, and my sisters and I would always walk around, pretending to get shout, or yelling in annoyance.
As with any firework performance, the grand finale was always the best part. There really was no other good part to a firework show, unless they managed to put in a star, or a heart, or a smiley face. We'd always point out our favorite kind, but this was not something we'd remember the next day. If we were in Wilmette, maybe we'd hear the music playing on the beach. Something patriotic or some form of popular light rock. Unfortunately, we were miles away, watching silently. Other families were ominously quiet, too, as if they came out of a deep respect for fireworks alone. Indeed, the whole scene was so devoid of humanly noise, that you could hear the waves crash against the quarry rocks if you sat on the edge of the grassy cliff.
Once the finale finished, we'd always clap a little bit, then hustle back into our minivan to get home, but as always, we'd run into the same traffic going as coming. We'd talk about swimming and work, and family gossip, and we'd talk about the fireworks. We'd talk about what we wanted to eat for tomorrow's dinner, and we'd talk about, or perhaps the better verb would be, beg for sparklers so that we could run around our pool the next day with little fireworks of our own.
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