I Drove to the Mothership

Our First Week Back in Chicago

A few years back my dear friend, Heather (I’ll be seeing her and her nine-year-old daughter this weekend as they’ll be visiting from L.A.) sent me a care package from Dark Matter Coffee in Chicago. I loved the beans and even alternated with my other coffee love, Beacon in Ventura until I ran out of the Chicago beans. I managed to squirrel away a final bag of Beacon and they traveled with us in the car from Ojai to Chicago.

“You brought your own coffee with you?” Theresa laughed after bringing me down a French Press and a coffee grinder.

“Don’t buy anything before asking me because I probably have it,” she had told me earlier. I wished I would have listened before buying ice cube trays, I found them the next day in a kitchen cupboard.

I enjoyed my Beacon coffee for the first few days we were here, but alas the bag was starting to empty and I needed some beans, so off to Dark Matter Coffee’s roasting plant and cafe, called The Mothership, I went on Tuesday. The vibe was about as Chicago as you can get, grounded and out there, all at once.

On Monday, Jon and I took the dogs for a walk at Indian Boundary Park (named for the Treaty of 1816 between the Pottawattomie and the US Government, a treaty which only lasted for seventeen years when white people stole the area and the Pottawattomie had to flee). Then we drove Lake Shore Drive down to North Ave and back, looping through Lincoln Park along the way. It was a beautiful day with rain predicted for later.

We were ahead of the storm, dark clouds gathering behind us. As we made our way out here from New Mexico, we had been following a series of major storms, witnessing the remnants in each place while the skies were blue above. Something about the shift from following to being ahead of the storm is trying to work itself out in my head right now.

As we were loading the pack up on Oakley Ave. I noticed a man on a bicycle riding towards us. “Hey, Nora!” he said as he rode by as if he’d just seen me yesterday.

Not getting a good look at him I immediately swiveled my head and said, “Who are you?”

“It’s Joe Faust!” he replied over his shoulder as I started laughing and yelled, “We just moved back here on Friday!”

The last time I’d seen Joe in person was in December of 2005 when we had returned to Chicago at Christmastime due to Jon’s mother’s declining health. Joe was in a one-man show based on David Sedaris’s story about his job as a Christmas elf at Macy’s called “Santaland Diaries”. The play was hilarious and Joe was fabulous. It was a welcome respite at the time. Jon’s mother died a few days later, minutes after we returned from having dinner with Theresa, Vasken, Helena, and Paul in the dining room I am typing from.

“Was that Joe Faust?” a woman named Linda asked me. She was standing across the street with her two dogs and we had just finished introducing ourselves to her as Joe rode by.

Already Chicago is reminding me how small it can be.

On the way back from Dark Matter, located miles south of where we now live, I drove through every neighborhood I have ever lived in and past the locations of each apartment. Some of the buildings remain and some are long gone.

I felt the most emotion in Bucktown/Wicker Park since that is where I spent the most time in my twenties and thirties after my college apartments, a one-year stint in Rogers Park, and three years in Lakeview. Tears came to the surface as almost two decades’ worth of memories flooded my heart and mind - college, acting, waitressing, so many late nights, so much laughter, so much angst, channeling and tarot and crystals and candles, loves now lost to me, and finally meeting Jon and first living in Bucktown with him. The 450-square-foot apartment we used to live in is now gone and replaced by a two-car garage.

Today I still love everyone I ever loved. I used to believe you could only be in love with one person at a time. At some point, I began to play with allowing myself to be in love with as many beings as I could at once and the expansion this brought to my heart was huge.

At the corner of Belmont and Clark, I was suddenly twenty years old on a cold winter’s morning seeing the boy I secretly loved crossing the street with another girl. This could only mean one thing, they had spent the night together. They did not see me as I watched them in the icy cold morning dance their way across the street. They did not know the heartbreak I felt upon seeing their joy.

Two blocks away, I was twenty-seven years old and sitting at a table at Ann Sather’s with the girl I had just kissed, holding her hand, my entire identity crashing down around me as I suddenly discovered something about myself I had never known before.

Here I am on Southport and Lincoln, thirty-five years old and directing a play for the last time, as my career as a channel began to take center stage. Back in Bucktown, I am twenty-three and treading the boards in my favorite comedy performance, “Suffering Fools”.

As I continued on Lincoln Ave I wondered where exactly Blanche Blacke’s The Chakra Shoppe was located. She opened it not long after we left Chicago. I asked Siri and was told it was just blocks from where I was. I found some free street parking (all of my Chicago driving and parking skills are coming back online as if I’ve never left) and headed in.

I was not surprised to see my friend Lillian standing in the aisle talking with a couple of people, one of whom was interested in a healing session with her. The woman with him was translating for him. Her eyes got big and her face cracked into a huge smile as she saw me. I’d seen her face pop into my head as I was parking.

“Excuse me for one second,” she said to her clients, “but I must greet this old friend.”

Hugs followed by, “Are you visiting?” she asked.

“Nope, I’m back.”

We chatted for a bit and then she disappeared into the space behind the store to get to work as I wandered around. I know Blanche and Lillian from my Healing Earth Resources days. They both had worked there teaching and offering healing sessions. More memories flooded me as I looked at the crystals and tarot cards on the shelves, remembering my very first days as a dollar-a-minute tarot card reader. I bought some incense and a new incense burner to bring home.

Our movers arrived the next day, and Jon, the dogs, and I began making this space ours while appreciating all that was already here for us. Just about every single thing we’d given away/sold/or gotten rid of in Ojai was waiting here for us in one form or another, down to the statue of Bast (this is literal, we let go of a Bast statue in Ojai and there is one here). The magic is huge and continues to unfold.

I walked around Andersonville on Thursday, and it’s official, I have fallen back in love with Chicago, or maybe it’s just that I’ve remembered how in love with Chicago I always have been. It’s not just the place, it’s the people and their friendliness. It’s the kind of place where when you ask someone how they are they tell you the truth. There is a grounded energy here that I’d been missing in California, even as up and out and expanded as California encouraged me to be.

I am so enjoying bringing all of that home and back into my body here in the Windy City, called this not for the wind off of the lake, which can be something, but for the talkative nature of the people here and the politics in the late nineteenth century, “Politicians from Chicago are full of hot air”.

The Democratic National Convention is happening here this summer and the winds will certainly be blowing up a storm.

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