jacob's ladder

This Saturday, I continued my weekend bike tours of Chicago series. The latest leg of the tour swung through the nonexistent Maxwell Street Market (now moved, for the second time, to a street not named Maxwell), the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen, the Garfield Sanctuary in Garfield Park. There were little beautiful things all around me, most of which I appreciated and forgot. The things I did not forget are: Juan Carlos Macias, a local artist who paints cramped domestic scenes of people with abnormally large heads on canvases embedded with glass beads; Los Patricios, or Saint Patrick's Battalion, a group of Irish- and other-Americans who defected from the U.S. during the Mexican-American war in order to - what? Support fellow Catholics? Betray a country that hated them?; the banana flower, or banana heart, which is an armadillo-sized bulb that grows at the base of the banana infructescence;the century plant, an agave that looks more or less like any other agave except that at about twenty or so years it sends up a single twenty-five foot "flower" (it looks like a cypress, folks) which expends so much of the plant's resources it dies after flowering; Stern telling me late at night ("I'm drrrrunk") about "Man On A Wire," which seemed similar to the century plant, except that the guy didn't actually die after achieving his beautiful life purpose; Jens Jenssen, the Frederick Law Olmstead of the Garfield Sanctuary, telling the waterfall maker to undo and remake his waterfall in the Fern Room three times, before finally forcing him to sit down and listen to Mendelssohn's "Spring Song" to understand what a waterfall on the Illinois prairie would sound like; you'll remember it from the days you spent practicing and crying in front of your family's upright piano when you were seven years old;

a roomful of astounding succulents and a palm tree room with three-foot diameter leaves that make you feel small as a wriggler cutting through the humus for the first time ever; and a Jacob's ladder toy that I was too cheap to spend $4 on in the museum gift shop. I decided to make one myself, and spent a few minutes scribbling notes on a postcard and drew a schematic which I have replicated below:


If you follow directions, you too can build a Jacob's ladder. I was apparently the most interesting exhibit in the entire museum because a bald little child kept shouting, "Mommy, look! A Chinese person!" as I sighed Al Gore sighs and focused instead on a colorful Day of the Dead display.

Lila's name, I learned yesterday, is not "Lila" at all, but "Shaw." It was as if I told you my name was not what I've told it you it was, but was actually Bingo. And I said to you, please call me Bingo. It would be hard for you to do. So I have a hard time calling her by her true and proper name. I did learn all about the different parts of Texas from her, and napped from 8-11pm and watched "3:10 to Yuma" until 3:10 a.m., and I am convinced that my soul lies in the desert.

Misspelling. In the dessert.