On Labor Day yesterday, appropriately enough, I labored. Got a little fresh air and sunshine from a morning jog around Midway Plaisance, then spent a little over six hours writing yesterday's post. Saturday and Sunday, on the other hand, were spent in long walks, one planned, the other not. I can say with confidence, though, that my familiarity with my new neighborhood has never been greater.
Saturday I embarked on a long, long journey to run errands…deposit checks which needed depositing, acquire my first set of schoolbooks (which I did three minutes before the campus Barnes & Noble closed), and visit all the local bookstores. What I learned: the Illinois branches of the Bank of America apparently do not trust those who come with out-of-state accounts, and according to their brochures, I should have 96% of my money in the stock market…alright.
People at the University are refreshingly normal-looking. No giant ear piercings, no weird hairstyles, mostly very sober-on-the-surface, sensible. And since I aspire to stay like that…
I've already sung the praises of the Seminary Co-Op, but Powell's Books by the 57th Street Metra is equally amazing in terms of used books: thousands of volumes at the cheapest prices I've seen since Boston…now on Saturday night I studied until past midnight and came up with a significant revelation regarding Trollope, and I acquired three major volumes (including the Glendinning biography and the Penguin Companion) for a total of $16. Between this moment of deep thought and yesterday's discipline, I feel like a scholar more than ever. On the other hand, 57th Street Books down the street was not worth my time: the Seminary Co-Op but smaller. However, all of these places paled in comparison to the Regenstein Library, where the bookstacks are like the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, only with volume after volume instead of crate after crate.
The Quadrangle is a nice place to eat a tuna salad lunch.
And it's always nice to come home after a day like that to have dinner waiting for you.
Sunday was different…my intention was to take the bus to the Church of St. Paul the Redeemer, my one-time substitute for Brent House until it opens, but my urge to put my new thoughts on Trollope to paper left me unsure if I could make the bus on time, so I walked over to 50th and Dorchester instead. The service was nice, but it made me miss St. James's, where Father Paul's sense of Anglican tradition fused beautifully with his commitment to social justice. St. Paul the Redeemer modernizes the Eucharistic Rite even worse than St. James's did when I started going there. Music was lovely though.
I had decided to take the bus back to campus, but then, after the service, God smiled on me, as I finally met and had really good conversations with three other graduate students at Chicago! First came two very nice girls who share an apartment nearby, Kathleen, a divinity major, and Heather, who studies at the Harris School for Public Policy. We chatted about our work and talked with some other very friendly parishioners (I truly believe it is almost impossible to find an unfriendly Episcopalian, with the possible exception of those who seceded over gay and women's rights), when another man joined in: one of the acolytes, who turned out to be a philosophy Ph. D. candidate with an Oxford degree. (Call me jaw-dropped.) The girls left to go grocery shopping, but Mark asked me to join him for a cup of tea and we spent an hour at a café on 55th Street. And thus I made my first ties to people since I got here…the loneliness of my week by myself vanished, and I'm tempted to say it fueled my writing for the days ahead.
Of course, having reached campus again, there was little point in taking the bus, so I finished my day with a walk to the Crerar Library, where I killed a giant bug and wrote for three hours.
Life is good, and the fun hasn't even started yet…
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