West Chicago is not my hometown.  It does remind me however of the place where I was born, where I grew to adulthood, Durham, North Carolina.  Do I bear the traces of where I grew up, in my DNA?  Sometimes I think so.  I would visit there more often, if we lived closer.  I miss the place.

We pass through West Chicago on our way to spend a day with our grand children.  Yesterday was a divinely beautiful day, autumnal sunshine, warm.  As planned, I left the house in early morning, camera in hand to walk around West Chicago.  After finding a place to park on downtown Main Street, I began my walk about toward the old homes along East Washington Street.  A old home restored, continuing to afford shelter in the 21st century is impressive.  The dwellings are a tangible link to generations that have come before.  How satisfying to admire the beauty and proportion that our grandparents, perhaps great grandparents surely admired when they were alive.

Another feature of any hometown that has not been completely effaced by redevelopment are old churches.  Religion has been a universal feature of all communities.  I feel compelled to use the past tense, as our 21st century way of life is vacuously  secular.  We search for meaning in entertainment, instead of the traditional forms of communal ritual.  I digress, as that would be another extended conversation.

I found St Mary’s Catholic Church just a short walk from East Washington Street.  Photo’s were taken of the architecture, and several of the iconic statuary placed within convenient view.  The statue of Joseph and the boy Jesus struck me as meaningful. We know something of the bond between a father and son, — most fathers honestly desire to make such bonds stronger and richer.

A parishioner departing the church noticed  my contemplation of the statue.  Passing close she spoke in a tone of voice, indicative of a bond between us.  “That’s so beautiful,” she said as she genuflected in direction of the statue.  A figure with substance, yes.  Beautiful does not leap to mind though.  Then again, I am not Catholic.

Across the street from St.Mary’s church is an old burial ground.  I derive great pleasure to visit an old cemetery.  I remember visiting a similar old cemetery in Oxford North Carolina, where the path to the center of the graveyard was still crowned with the ruts of the horse drawn carriages which conveyed the coffins to a final resting place.  We are all connected by religion and by death.  Could it be that religion is nothing more and nothing less than ritual that allows us to accept the loss that always comes?   No one escapes the attrition.

I walked around the old West Chicago graveyard reading inscriptions on tombstones many dating to the early and mid 1800s.  This country was in the throes of settlement, suffering a War Between the States, and finally the first World War fought in the trenches of Belgium and France.  The great Chicago fire happened in 1871.  My imagination caught fire while close to the graves reading the dates associated with spouses and their children, — all gone.  They are gone but the impress of their lives continue as if an expanding wave of energy from a stone tossed into  the quiet surface of a pond.  Yes, this is a sacred place, precisely because I am connected to everyone who has lived.  I am the crest of that advancing wave.

I was especially moved by the markers for children aged from a few months old, to just two or three years.  In that day medicine offered no antibiotics.  Contagious childhood disease was often deadly.  Even for adults there were few painkillers to aid in treatment of injuries.  Morphine was discovered in 1806 fifty years before the invention of the hypodermic syringe.

Walking around taking photos of what caught my eye, this is the last image that I captured.  It is a sculpture situated prominently outside of the West Chicago Public Library.

Love Even More.

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What about a tune, a ballad as requiem to the dead, and an anthem to celebrate the living ?!

My Little Town

By Simon and Garfunkel

In my little town
I grew up believing
God keeps his eye on us all
And He used to lean upon me
As I pledged allegiance to the wall
Lord, I recall
My little town
Coming home after school
Flying my bike past the gates
Of the factories
My mom doing the laundry
Hanging our shirts
In the dirty breeze

And after it rains
There’s a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
It’s not that the colors aren’t there
It’s just imagination they lack
Everything’s the same
Back in my little town

Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town

In my little town
I never meant nothin’
I was just my father’s son
Saving my money
Dreaming of glory
Twitching like a finger
On the trigger of a gun
Leaving nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town

Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town