OLA memorial, Chicago- click image for original blogThere is nothing bleaker than a mid-winter day in Chicago. And it seems that even though it's getting pretty close to Christmas the streets and buildings and backyards dusted with snow evoke the hardness of the season. Think about the opening of 'Good Times', which was filmed in Chicago; the sun filtering through the cold air seems to mock you as you make your way from one place to another.
Another particular about living in Chicago is that every resident is a student of history. The city literally unfolds his past from the lakeshore outward. From the suburbs backward to the lake the buildings get older, the streets & alleys narrower and garages modified to fit cars newer than a Model A. The older buildings, especially those still heated with steam, bring up their past in the form of odors; like the memories themselves, they are heavy and unyielding. The smell of old varnish. Paint. Wallpaper paste. A variety of pest controls. Floor tile adhesive. These raise the familiar ghosts of memory whenever a renovation is undertaken that exposes multiple coats of paint, numerous layers of wallpaper, even 3 or 4 recoverings of linoleum.
This was my experience while watching the WTTW production of 'Angels Too Soon' a documentary of the beyond tragic parochial school fire that claimed lives, devastated families and communities and ushered in a whole new wave of fire safety reforms.
The topic of the Our Lady of the Angels fire of December 1st, 1958 is so well covered in print and on line that I won't attempt to rework the issue here. You can find some helpful links at the bottom of this page if you want to research it.
One can't help watching a documentary like that, although your keener sense tells you to look away. The images are so pregnant with memory: the period styles of hair and dress; the lumbering round cars loping through the streets; familiar Chicago intersections and of course the children. When it comes to children, there is no 'us' and 'them'; all children are our children. That's the way it is in a community and I don't suggest that it's exclusive of Chicago. But here is where this happened; the tragedy and the aftermath are our own.
Pictures now faded and grainy remind us of the promise of possibilities. Film footage reveals accents and neighborhood dialects that indicate an inner-city substructure of solid working-class families. More was devastated than people, than families; a community and a parish were drastically altered.
But beyond all that, remembrance of the infamous fire of OLA brings something more to me than the sheer horror of the event. Because I know a survivor of that school fire, it brings me a personal sense of gratitude.
I have looked over at my friend worshiping at our church; I know her mother, her brother and husband. Her family has been like family to me, and it is because of this that I cannot waste too much time contemplating the why's of life; I simply respond in gratitude. I choose a simple, almost childlike response.
When I was a child and my own sister would come home for a visit, it was in the cold of midwinter that I remember best the hugs; that's because you could take in this embrace with all your senses, but particularly your nose, which reported to you a heady and complex wonderful elixer of cologne, of coffee and cigarette smoke and the cold itself. The cold, for lack of a more graphic description, smells like cream to me. That was my sister, more than in name or face or activity; it was her in essence, as though you could smell the love, the peace and lack of conflict.
In an inate sort of way I am embracing a family in thought today. We are all Chicagoans, although I have transplanted a little ways north of town. We have roots here, memories. Our common experiences celebrated the joys of life and mourned the reality of loss. But there is one thing among us, more often unspoken than spoken, and every Christmas season it arrives like the early winter snow- it's gratitude that our friend, our daughter, sister and wife came home on that day and is with us still.
I don't know why tragedies happen or why one family is touched and another is not. Frankly, that begins to matter very little. Life and living become less a matter of what could have been, less a gradation of shades and more black and white. What could have happened, didn't.
Click on the pic above to go to OLA memorial/information website
Click on the book to order from Amazon.Com
http://www.chipublib.org/004chicago/disasters/text/code.html
Read the Chicago City Council Amendment to Chapter 78 of the Municipal Code, 1959
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