A beautiful morning

I ventured forth to obtain a sandwich from an enormous corporation to serve as my breakfast. The storms of the night were gone, and the remaining clouds were as rich, creamy and textured as a watercolor. This made the Hancock Building and the other spikes of steel which line the eastern sky seem much closer than normal, like they had been pulled inland because of the rain.

The birds were out in force, doing whatever they do in the mornings. One tiny black one with a yellow beak hopped across the hood of my car as I waited at a light, stopping only to chirp at me as it passed. A congregation of gulls had come in from the lake to murmur at one another on the signs and rooftop of the Burger King on Chicago Avenue.

There's a bakery I'd never seen before just before Damen Avenue. The Bleeding Heart, which appeals both to my fondness for ghastly things and my political orientation. I wish I'd seen it before I'd purchased a sack of food at McDonald's. Each letter of the name is laid out on its own wooden circle, painted an unfortunate pink. I plan to wander back there in the next couple of days, to see what it is like.

Last summer, the combination music store/cheap diner (boasting the "Best Sloppy Joes in town," served under a wall of used guitars) experimented with having a curbside coffee cart. I pulled over out of curiosity and they gave me a free cup in honor of being a new customer. The cart is no longer something they do. My guess is that they were handicapped from the start simply by being situated on the north side of the road. The cars who can pull over most easily are pointing at poorer neighborhoods. Had they crossed the street and picked up some of the traffic headed east, toward the financial and business hub of the city, they might still be there.

Or maybe they just gave out too many free introductory cups to folks like me, who are not generally up and about during the morning hours. At any rate, I never returned to buy a cup.

The rain seems to have cleaned the air, washing away the recent rash of heat in the process. I looked at the glow in the east, slightly to the left of the Hancock Building, so easily mistaken for the Sears Tower even by lifelong residents with a poor sense of geography. I looked at the layers of clouds and the birds and the buildings.

It was a beautiful morning in Chicago.