BY THE TIME I first visited Chicago, at 18, I already knew I would love it.
I was raised in Northern California, which, despite all the Olympic swimmers it bred, was not exactly a place of broad shoulders. Chicago’s tough counterimage lured me right in.
A favorite song was Lou Rawls’s novelistic “Dead End Street.” “They call it the Windy City,” Rawls recounted, a blues bass dramatizing his memories of winter. “Because of the Hawk … the almighty Hawk, Mr. Wind.”
By fate, my best friend at college was a Chicagoan, so I began visiting often. That Hawk was something, all right. I can still recall the knife-edged terror as John and I braved 20-below windchill before ducking into one of the city’s warm bars.
Then I fell for a…
