Nov. 4, 2008

     Friday's column ends with a quick gloss on a scene at Grant Park, 15 years ago tonight. A number of readers mentioned it, and I thought I'd share the full passage, from my memoir, "You Were Never in Chicago," published by the University of Chicago Press in 2012:

    The mass of people at Grant Park the night Obama was elected — I almost didn't go downtown to be part of that. My tendency is to shy away from crowds and, besides, the paper had it covered. There was also a concern — what would happen if he lost? It might get ugly.

     But Ross wanted to be there on the historic election night, and I understand that impulse. A kid doesn't want to miss anything. So we drove downtown, left the car by the Sun-Times Building and walked over to Grant Park. A calm, pleasant night in early November. I've never seen the park so crowded. Big searchlights threw shafts of white light into the night sky. We had passes to a crowded press area. Barack Obama was across the park, on a distant stage — most people were watching him on giant TVs, but I figured we were here, we should see him, not just on a screen, but directly, at least once, with our own eyes, his image reflected against our retinas.  
     All the vantage points were taken, so I went up to a group crowding around a gap in the fencing, pushed Ross ahead, and said, to no one in particular, "Could this boy take a look, just for a moment?" A large black woman turned, regarded him, and then commanded those in front of her, "Let the baby through!" and they parted, affording Ross and me a momentary glimpse of the future president, a tiny figure, far away. I thought of that famous photo of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address, a distant, barely recognizable speck in a multitude.
     But that wasn't the moment that lodged in my heart. That came afterward, when a quarter of a million people flowed from the park to Michigan Avenue, buoyant with victory, intoxicated with promise and possibility and hope, filling the street from curb to curb, from Roosevelt Road to the Wrigley Building. They were in their new Obama t-shirts and in church clothes, whole families, including wide-eyed toddlers, some cheering, some walking in quiet, careful formality.
    It seemed so strange, so fantastical — this famous street, empty of cars but crowded with Chicagoans, waving flags in the brightly lit midnight.
     "Take a good look around," I said to Ross, then thirteen, as we walked up the middle of Michigan Avenue. "Because you are never going to see this again." People whooped and hugged, beat cowbells, and chanted.
    We were walking north, toward the brightly lit Wrigley Building in the distance. We passed in front of the Hilton and I stopped, actually bending down to pat my hand against the asphalt. "This was the Conrad Hilton," I told my boy, in my pedantic dad fashion, choking up a little. "This was the spot where the protesters sat down and were beaten by the cops in 1968. It was right here."
     The contrast was stunning, between the long-ago violent night, so seared in public memory for so many years, and now this harmonious scene, not to replace it but to soothe it, finally, another cool layer of dirt spread atop the burning memory, adding to the 1996 Democratic Convention another strata of forgetfulness, the police this time watching from the medians, some steely-eyed, some scowling, some beamng, some bemused. Maybe it was finally time to put the 1960s away. Maybe the party was happening right now and we were in the middle of it.
    I usually never smoke a cigar in front of the boys — I have an example to set —but this was a special night, and I pulled out a celebratory stogie, brushed off Ross's protests, and fired it up as we walked, taking in the commotion around us.

    Did they dance in the street? Yes, they danced in the street. Were people really singing? Yes, I can report on good authority, that at least one prematurely cynical teenage boy, a born skeptic, by genetics and by upbringing, who earlier that evening compared Chicago to a wormy apple, "addled with corruption," spontaneously broke into song as he walked up Michigan Avenue at midnight.
    "O beautiful, for spacious skies..." he began.
    "For amber waves of grain," his father, no small cynic himself, joined in.
    "For purple mountains majesty ..." the continued together, loudly and off-key, really murdering the high notes, linked arm in arm. "Above the fruited plain. America, America, God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good, with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea!"