The diner

The streets are lit with tea lights, neon or some areas the paper lantern. The dining choices exuberant with culture appropriate music blasting from each room across the city. The aromas of fresh bread to wake you in the morning, chocolate from the factories or meats from the local smoking houses if you’re in just the right neighborhood. The aromas of fresh garlic and oregano on a hot summer’s night wafting down the streets and into ones open windows engulfing the senses and a whole room, pasta, pizza and pastry from the most competitive culinary pizza and pasta crafters in the nation. Thin crust, stuffed crust and pizza baked upside down only landing upright once it hits the plate. Crusty pastry topping this true form of an authentic pizza pie. On a cool summer night one can stroll down the corridors of the savory excellence to engage in a tasting experience than surpasses no other. Chicago is a city designed to expand the waist band of even the strictest dieter.

Having taken for granted that which provided such a diverse culture to our city that has a great reputation for a diverse selection of dining opportunities and shopping. Both have been abruptly halted due to Covid 19. The local eateries closing one after the next. Some due to violations of code policy others due to staff illness and an infection of Covid 19 .While others simply took this pandemic as an opportunity to close the doors for good, either because of economic necessity, perhaps, and others as a chance at retirement, a word that would have formerly never crossed their lips. The greasy corner spoon, a family operated business, has served the community for nearly one hundred years twenty-four hours a day serving both breakfast and beer at two am on a Tuesday morning with poker machines that pay real cash in the backroom, a gem, a hideout, a piece of authentic old Chicago. Known well to generations, it is a place where the walls are decorated with the artwork created by local children who frequent the place any Saturday morning with their family and friends. This place is the all-American corner fixture, with coffee that’s stale and bread that’s a day old but friends are there to greet you with a smile. That place where the server knows your name and prefers to be called a waitress. I took that place for granted just as I have some family member, some friend, I have taken for granted these blessings of heart and soul as if they would immorally survive all that is ahead.

I slept on the floor for several years and I told myself it was because I could not afford to buy a bed. After digesting this falsity, it occurred to me that the reason was a deeper design, I was so wounded that the commitment of a new bed was more difficult to accept than the pain of years of sleeping on the cold wooden floors. Midway into the commitment of time spent on self-deprivation, I allowed myself to build a loft by hand, piece by piece. Later, I also completed the demolition with sheer pleasure and some sense of confidence. A process of transition. Of course, a time arrived where sleeping in a semi traditional piece of furniture was the logical next step. It pained me soon, a college sleeper. A couch, if one could call it that, by day and a hard-faux leather cover over wood and foam as I certainly discover two years into sleeping upon such an inconceivable piece of faux furniture made for the disposable lifestyle. Fast food in wrappers at twenty-four hours fast food establishments serving consumables devised of fat, sugar, preservatives and pink foam. Faux furniture, fake food, fast and disposable designed for the immediate consumption and subsequent elimination. The new and disposable world creeps into the veins of the souls of a nation, across its highway rest stops and delivers devastation, destruction and demolition of an American way, a dream, a life style of slower times when culture and connection were celebrated and the twenty four hour diner served those blue collar workers going on or coming off of a shift anywhere USA, twenty four hours a day. First responders recovered from the night and collected their thoughts in silence. The diner might be found near a truck stop or a local factory, but factories have closed, and Truckers have fewer routes to sustain. While, emergency responders recover from fourteen hours shifts of saving lives and stopping riots in hotels away from their loved ones and with freeze dried coffee creamers.

As a child, and a new German American immigrant in Chicago, we rarely engaged in dining events outside of the family home so when as a young teenager, I finally discovered other cuisines, I, of course, became hooked. I made food a staple in my otherwise uneventful life. I worked in the finest dining establishments and discovered not only food but culture too. The act of sharing a good meal with pleasant conversation as a method with which people communicate and develop long lasting trust, bonds and friendship. I soon worked my way through the ranks and as culinary development director for the Midwest region, we initiated a campaign of the tapas walk. It is a taste of culture, one bite at a time, one block, one shop. It is as much a culinary project as it is a community organization development platform. Building on the theory that people tend to be agreeable to receiving a message on a full stomach, the project is launched. It became my hook. It was how I evolved outside of my otherwise introverted personality. Food became the tool with which I would calm the natives in the high-powered business meetings I was charged to facilitate. The projected built connections and grew economic opportunities for the future of communities and those generations who will occupy the area for decades. It is an investment into cultural opportunities embedded in the connections of community and their overall development. A project with great visions and no boundaries.

It was late in the 1990’s, we were invited to a birthday party for my niece. I had only just returned to Chicago. I had been travelling for a work assignment. My daughter had been with my mother and I had missed her terribly. Talking with her each night and then reading her a bedtime story was satisfying but I still had missed her dearly, today we had plans for a party with family and a real mommy daughter day. We went to our favorite twenty-four-hour corner restaurant early in the morning for a plate of pancakes with all the trimmings. We had a nice visit with our waitress, or as my daughter calls her, auntie. My own sister, estranged by marriage and so we have been adopted by auntie waitress as a family member and it is a mutual connection, she serves us an amazing and decadent plate complemented with a collection of breakfast meats, we are contented, fat and full. After breakfast, my daughter and I shopped for a birthday celebration. Later in the day and very soon after our arrival at the birthday celebration, my daughter came running toward me with a charming handsome man attached to her hand, she was dragging him toward me. He made a grand introduction and I will never forget how my daughter lit up in his presence, he had told her that she was a sweet as Pumpkin pie. She was smitten. I was in love at second sight. He gave me a son.

We were children in the mid-seventies. The days were spent on the streets of Chicago on the hot concrete and tar streets chasing boys across the rooftops of garages in the alleys of the city streets and into the abandoned buildings that scattered the landscape of the city. Days were spent in ballparks near diners with the Fran cheezie hotdog wrapped generously with bacon and filled with the creamiest American cheese, refreshed by the local open fire hydrant, we spent our days in the sun. At night after chasing fireflies, the makeshift open pit barbeques were provided the roasted marshmallows, chocolate bars and Graham crackers to assemble a s’more and more and more. One particularly hot summer day we sought refuge inside and found the corner greasy spoon which was always open twenty-four hours a day and seven days every week, certain to be good for a grilled cheese sandwich with French fires and a chocolate shake. We, he and I, had found refuge here in this place so many years ago, just a boy and Tom girl who had not recognized her true love despite the shared shake. He later gave me our son.

It was here at the grill that I sought advice from her my best girlfriend in life. Forged in the pains of loss, her mother as a child and at a tender age, my mother, her sister taken suddenly by the drunken driver one rainy night, my sister estranged by marriage, her son, to senseless violence on the streets of Chicago, and her father who had developed many health conditions in his elder years, she had advice, knowledge, empathy unsurpassed, and she was always there in her corner diner open twenty four hours a day and three hundred sixty five days each year. She shared her coffee freely and dished advise openly. We shared common experiences and there that evening, she and I shared a shake that day that I had to say good bye to my partner in life, my first love, my second love, a father to my daughter, the father of my son and the love of my life while I sucked through a straw devouring a chocolate shake and French fries drenched in tears, the city had taken his life too.

I had a bittersweet feeling when Covid 19 caused the diner to close because with the old-fashioned counter service and few tables to practice social distancing, safe customer service would be impossible. That place held the stories of joy and of pain within its breathing walls. In the seventies, I ate with the dirt off the ground alleys and garage tops on my hands as I devoured French fries and a chocolate shake. Today, the lights have faded away from the streets that once held celebrations and parties for sleepy Midwesterners who came to visit the big city for a weekend. The town is barren, empty, abandoned, a dusty relic of days passed. The sounds and smells that made this town, Chicago, one of the best restaurant towns in the nation are absent as are the people who congregated happily from spot to spot just to grab a bite. I am sadden at the possibility of never being able to get up at some hour before dawn so that I can gather my senses over a chocolate shake, tear drenched French fries and some rock solid advice at any local diner USA on Christmas day that once adorned anywhere Main Street USA.

Today, as I sit upon this new mattress seated upon a frame that I simply assembled while eating French fries that I cut up from fresh potatoes soaked in sea salt, fried in my own pans and washed down with a milkshake that I melted from my very own pint of chocolate ice cream, it occurs to me that Chicago resembles a town that I no longer recognize as evidenced by my ride home from the local grocery store darning a mask, with ice cream and potatoes in a paper bag, I cruised on the abandoned streets where boarded up restaurants and stores litter the landscape. I passed my local diner that is now absent of patrons, life, soul and I shed a tear upon my raw potato, a seasoning for change in an uncertain landscape.